The internal storm passed. The words spoke themselves more calmly, became a statement. She looked at the driver’s mirror: his little red eyes were considering her, and they held her return stare. She looked out at the fields; the junked automobiles beside the road; the men far away, small and busy, stuffing grass into the trunks of cars to take home to their animals; the smoking hills, yellow in the mid-afternoon light. But she was aware of the driver’s intermittent stare; and whenever she looked at the mirror she saw his red, assessing eyes. A whole sentence ran through her head, at first meaningless, and then, as she examined it, alarming. She thought: I’ve been playing with fire. Strange words, to have come so suddenly and so completely to her: something given, unasked for, like an intimation of the truth, breaking into the sense of safety, of distance put between her and the desolation of that house.
They began to enter the town: safety. The rubbish dump was burning: unusually thick brown smoke, oily and acrid, which made her turn up her window: mounds of rubbish like confetti, trucks and men and women and children blurred in the smoke, lightening occasionally into yellow flame, the carrion corbeaux, nervous of men, restless and squawking near the wire fence. Fire: the smoking hills, the charred verges: it explained the words. But the explanation didn’t satisfy her, didn’t free her. All the way through the noisy afternoon city and then up to the Ridge, the air getting cooler, the plain dropping away behind her, lower and lower, she thought: I’ve been playing with fire.
At the end, the driver did not get out and open the door for her. When she got out she said, “Thank you.” He acknowledged that only by jerking his chin up and making a slight nasal sound. Immediately, lifting his squat, heavy body off the seat and twisting round to look back, one fat black arm embracing the shiny plastic cover of the front seat, he reversed at a great rate down the drive and through the gateway into the road, and was gone.
She was wet between the legs. The smell of the man was strong on her, tainting the perfume with which she had tried to cover it in the bathroom at that house. She fancied the smell was particularly strong on her fingers. She needed a bath. Through the redwood louvers the sun struck into the white-tiled bathroom, hot and dry. She closed the louvers and took her clothes off. But the taps didn’t run. Water was short and was turned off in the afternoons.
She was tired but she didn’t lie down on her bed; and when she had put on the trousers and blouse again she didn’t stay in her room. She walked about the bigger rooms of the empty house, and then she sat on one of the metal chairs on the back porch, waiting first for Adela, who started her evening duties at five, and then for Roche.
When he came she said to him, “There’s a man in that little house in the garden.”
Her anxiety seemed to make him calmer. He said humorously, “Perhaps it’s one of Adela’s friends or relations. We must be careful.”
He walked down the sunlit concrete steps at the back, between the stunted cypresses. She watched him from the porch. He opened the door and then he looked up at her, the afternoon sun on his face, smiling, making gestures of puzzlement. She went down. The door swung open easily, the little house was empty. The wild man with the rags and the matted locks had taken up his tin and bundles and left. There remained only a vague warm smell of old clothes, dead animals, grease, and marijuana.
He said, “When did you see him?”
“Yesterday morning. But I was too frightened to tell you.”
“It looks as though he was much more frightened of you.”
At about six Adela called from the kitchen, “Water! Water!” and almost at the same time pipes and cisterns hissed all over the house. The light on the hills was golden and thin; the smoldering sky was growing dark; the evening haze covered the plain and the sea. She had a bath.
She said to Roche that evening, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
He said, “Wouldn’t it be better if I get used to sleeping alone?”
“This isn’t for your sake. It’s for mine.”
He said no more. She took her pillows to his bed.
7
THE SITUATION is desperate, Roy, the people here have been betrayed too often, it’s always a case of black faces white masks, you don’t know who your enemy is, the enemy infiltrates your ranks all the time. Massa Mister Roche he’s very importunate in his inquiries about one of the boys they sent here, Stephens, a little gang leader from the city, a big coup for them, they thought he was going to take over from me, as though I was going to let that boy draw me out on the streets for the police to shoot me down. No, Roy, I’m staying here in my unfortified castle, the time will come for me to move, the people will come of their own accord to their leader. But the situation is getting desperate now, in the still of the night I lose my courage, I feel it’s a losing battle, they’re sending other agents, I don’t know how to cope …
He broke off. The words had circled in on the wound that was still fresh. He considered his violated room: the books, the photographs, the carpet, the upholstered chairs, everything so nicely put away. And there was the bedroom, with the stained bed, where he was still unwilling to go. The desolation! And where was Bryant? Bryant, with whom he could share the pain of the moment, in whose rejection he might annihilate his own. The night and the bush outside. The silence.
Here’s a laugh, let me tell you about it. The other day one of our church big shots, a bishop or something, he held a service not in Latin or English but in some fancy language for the niggers, he said it was an African language, Yoruba or something, of course nobody here understands “head nor tail,” and wait for it, the message was that despair was the great sin. What a laugh, it’s like those Harlem movies about interracial sex they’re feeding the people on now to keep them quiet. These people live in a world of dreams, I don’t know how they believe people can stomach that kind of talk still.
In my father’s house there are many mansions, I remember this from my schooldays, they’d “bust your tail” with licks if you didn’t go to church. But the house is full up now, Roy, there are no more mansions. I suppose like everybody else I fooled myself that there was a mansion waiting somewhere for me, but I didn’t really fool myself, you mustn’t believe that, even when I was a child going to school from the back room of my father’s grocery shop, knowing that back room as the only place I come from in this great wide world, it wasn’t mine, I always knew I was fooling myself, I didn’t believe there was or would ever be any mansion for me.
Other people had the mansions and they were full up, like the people in our so-called “exclusive” hotel the Prince Albert, they used to take us there some afternoons from school, to the park outside, to play, for the people to see us, to show us where we couldn’t go. And even in England when there was some talk of me in the world, everybody was jumping on the bandwagon then, I knew there was no mansion, it was all going to end in smoke.
Things are desperate, Roy, when the leader himself begins to yield to despair, things are bad. The whole place is going to blow up, I cannot see how I can control the revolution now. When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.