“Perhaps I don’t have a point of view.”
“I wish you wouldn’t pretend you had. You remember how you stopped the conversation at the Grandlieus’? You thought you were being so concerned, talking about the shantytowns and the horrible little black animals crawling about in the rubbish. You thought you were talking about things no one had seen before you. You thought you were being so much more concerned than everybody else. But you were saying nothing. It was just a cheap way of showing off.”
“Well, I’ve stopped seeing the shantytowns now.”
They were on the highway. The sun was slanting into their faces. The hills smoked; but, in spite of the continuing still heat, the light on the hills had altered, had turned from the light of midday to the light of afternoon. The yellowing smoke haze above the hills held hints of the sunset to come; already, high in the sky, the end-of-day clouds had begun to form.
They came to the factory area: traffic, blackened verges, factory buildings still looking impermanent in the flat landscape of the old plantations, ornamental trees and smooth-trunked young royal palms standing on browned factory lawns like things rescued from the forest. Here and there, deep in the fields behind the factories, were automobiles in the trunks of which men were loading bundles of cut grass, fodder for the cows and other animals they still kept, the pens sometimes to be seen at the back of the huts and houses on the highway.
There was a man running steadily on the road ahead of them, indifferent to the traffic and the fumes: an elderly Negro, long-necked, lean-faced, in black running shorts and a soaked white vest. He was a well-known figure, a disordered man, who at odd times of day and night took to the roads and ran for miles. And Jane thought that that was something else she had stopped seeing: people like the runner, people like the wild men who lived in the hills, among the new developments, or down in the city, in the back yards of certain thoroughfares: derelicts, a whole parallel society.
She said, “Is the government really afraid of Jimmy?”
“The government’s’ afraid of everybody. And Jimmy is right. They’ve got to build him up and pretend they are supporting him. The doer. And Jimmy has this English reputation. He can’t just be got out of the way.”
“What a strange idea he must have of England.”
“I suppose he understood it well enough for his purpose.”
Jane said, “You don’t sound as though you like him.”
“It isn’t a matter of liking. And I don’t mind Jimmy. He’s like the others. He’s looking for someone to lead.”
“Of course, he’s having everybody on, isn’t he? And everybody’s having him on. Everybody is pretending that something exists that doesn’t exist.”
Roche said: “You have to work with what’s there.”
“But he must know those fields are in an appalling state. Doesn’t he know that? Or is he just mad like everybody else?”
Slowly in the thickening traffic, and always with the sun in their eyes, they came, through the suburbs, to the city: to the burning rubbish dump, with its mounds of fresh garbage; to the new housing estate, with its long red avenues now full of men and women and children; to the market, where refrigerated trailers stood in the unpaved forecourt; to the sea road, where there had once been talk of a waterfront cultural center, of walks and restaurants, a theater and a marina, but where now red dust from the bauxite loading station settled on everything. The road was bumpy here, irregular at the edges; on the unmade sidewalks, tufted with hardy grass, there were sections of concrete pipes on which slogans had been daubed, and old flattened heaps of gravel and other road-mending material, mingled now with bauxite dust, yellowed scraps of newspaper, and bleached cigarette packs.
Jane said, “What’s a succubus?”
Fine red dust powdered Roche’s dark glasses, so that he looked unsighted. He said, “It sounds like an incubus. But that must be wrong.”
“That was what Harry de Tunja said, when I told him we were going to Jimmy Ahmed’s. He said that Jimmy was a succubus.”
“It sounds like a grub of some sort. Something you have to carry. A kind of leech.”
They turned off at last into the city proper. This was the area of the merchants’ warehouses, and there were many rum shops. From each rum shop came a din. This was once part of the city center. But the city no longer had a center. With the coming of the motorcar, in numbers, the hills had been opened up and developed as self-contained suburbs, with their own shopping and entertainment plazas; and the peasants who had cultivated and impoverished the hillsides had sold out and moved down to the flat land. To go up to the Ridge was to go up to a more temperate air; it was to lose the feel of the city and see it as part of a larger view of sea and mangrove and great plain. It was to see it, as it could be seen now, as part of the colors of the late afternoon, smoke haze and pink cloud rising from the edge of the sea to blend with the glory of gray and red and orange clouds.
An amber light fell on the brown vegetation of the hills. But in that vegetation, which to Jane when she had first arrived had only seemed part of the view, there was strangeness and danger: the wild disordered men, tramping along old paths, across gardens, between houses, and through what remained of woodland, like aborigines recognizing only an ancestral landscape and insisting on some ancient right of way. Wild men in rags, with long, matted hair; wild men with unseeing red eyes. And bandits. Police cars patrolled these hillside suburbs. Sometimes at night and in the early morning there was the sound of gunfire. The newspapers, the radio, and the television spoke of guerrillas.
The house was set on a large bare lawn, cut out flat from a piece of irregular hillside, with a natural wall of earth on one side. Tawny where it remained grassed, and almost bald near the earth wall, the lawn was now gold where the low sun touched it; every bit of grass and every little clod of clay cast a shadow, so that the whole surface was dramatized. The house was nearly as wide as the lawn; it was low, on one floor, and the wood-tile roof projected far over the rough-rendered concrete wall, on which a kind of ivy grew. From the open porch at the back the land sloped down to a dry gully and woodland. The city lay far below, a small part of the flatness. The rim of the sea still glimmered, but elsewhere sea and swamp were darkening to the color of the great plain.
“So bogus,” Jane said. “So hidden away. The High Command. All the publicity. All that food. Of course, it’s a perfect cover for the guerrillas, isn’t it?”
2
THE SKY went smoky and the evening chill fell on the hills. The hidden city roared and hummed, with ten thousand radios playing the reggae, as they so often seemed to do. As though somewhere the same party had been going on, with the same music, month after month. The same party, the same music, at the foot of the hills, in the thoroughfares across the city, the redevelopment project, the suburbs beyond the rubbish dump. The same concentration of sound, the same steady beat of people and traffic and radio music which, dulled during the day, at night became audible. As the fire on the roadsides, invisible in daylight, could now be seen, little smoking flares beside the highways.
At Thrushcross Grange it was dark and quiet. The sky had darkened to the deepest blue and then had gone as black as the forest walls. Every footstep and every shuffle resounded in the hollow hut; every sound, bouncing off concrete and corrugated iron, was sharp, reminding the boys of the emptiness and the night outside; and they, who in the towns never spoke without raising their voices, here spoke quietly, almost in whispers. The two oil lamps threw shadows everywhere.