We went one Sunday to see the house which one of our couples had built in the central hills of our island. Everyone else was mad about beach-houses — a house in the hills was original. We had heard a lot about this house; but its details had been kept secret, and were to be a surprise. The road to the house was bad and dangerous and slow; it was raining. Sandra did the driving; she was not in a good mood when we arrived. Almost the first thing she said to our hostess, in response to some light though too self-depreciating query about the house, was: ‘I wish you would make up your minds whether it is a country cottage or a country house.’ There was an instant chill in the air, more than the chill deriving from the altitude for the sake of which the house had allegedly been built. The thermometer might have dropped to sixty just before sunrise, and the most you might have said was that with a log fire you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Much varnished pine, I remember; an abundance of knots; very Scandinavian, as we agreed. We were led to the enormous fireplace, brass-and-leather belts or some such studded thing hanging irregularly on either side. We stood stunned and hushed; the moment for exclamation and congratulations passed, missing us; we moved away. We stood before an open window which looked out on to lush, dripping greenery; it was sunny now, and steaming after the rain. Sandra said: ‘It must get damned cold up here.’ Our hostess, who was Swedish, lost control of her English accent. Sandra, though recognizing she had gone too far without being in any way amusing — and perhaps because she recognized this — made no effort to repair the damage, not even when, to exclamations in many accents from the other girls, our hostess brought out open sandwiches, the pronunciation of whose native name had, on so many occasions in the years gone by, served me as the subject of hollow jests. Our hostess’s English sounded like Swedish when she said goodbye. Sandra, driving me away, down the damp, dangerous bends, and acting now for me, lost nothing of her self-induced temper or hostility. ‘Common little Lapp!’ A bitter little explosion, climaxing intermittent speech. I laughed; Sandra smiled, frowning, concentrating on the road. I kissed my finger and pressed it on her lips. The gift of the phrase! Yet pure fantasy on this occasion; for the Swede was splendidly built, and had an impeccable Stockholm background, with a father in publishing.
The gift of the phrase: she relied on this more and more, letting simple words harden into settled judgements and attitudes. She used the gift to render grotesque the girls whose company she had once sought and whose way of life had delighted her. She turned them into a kind of comic chorus, evolving for each a pejorative racial description. A bulky girl from Amsterdam, married to a man from Surinam who had migrated to Isabella, became a ‘subkraut’; the Latvian became, rather tellingly, the ‘sub-Asiatic’. I accepted these phrases; and in our household, which had of course its own racial contradictions, I might hear myself saying quite naturally, ‘Shall we have the subkraut over to genever on Sunday morning?’ Or: ‘It looks as though the Lapp has forgiven you. She wants you to go to a party she is giving for a bearded fellow-countryman. He is over here collecting voodoo songs to play on the Swedish radio.’
An invitation like the last was reconciliation indeed. Among us, cosmopolitan though we were, nothing was prized so much as the visitor from countries reasonably far away. Over such a visitor our women would fight, practising exclusions to indicate disfavour or offering invitations to announce reconciliation. This was the basis of the hospitality on which we prided ourselves, this pampering of the visitor while he remained a visitor, while his foreign cigarettes and shirts and foreign shoes lasted, before he became one of us. Invariably, with such a visitor, there would occur a moment, unplanned, of collective sadness, each girl then seeming to see at the same time the landscape from which she had broken; and in a darkened veranda, from which we offered our visitor the tropical night, there would be soft criticism, anticipating the visitor’s judgement, of the narrowness of island life: the absence of good conversation or proper society, the impossibility of going to the theatre or hearing a good symphony concert. Why the quality of the symphony concerts we were being denied should have been stressed I don’t know. It always was; it was as though on Isabella we were subjected, as a condition of residence, to an endless series of bad symphony concerts. And it was at one such session of soft criticism — at the Indian Commissioner’s, Indian Republic Day, such diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic corps as we had on Isabella all assembled, our women in saris, light glinting on silk from Banaras and jewellery from Guiana — it was then that Sandra, in a sari herself, succeeded in antagonizing the entire group, by saying loudly, in the middle of their music complaint, ‘The one thing I’ve learnt to recognize since I’ve come to this place is a bad symphony concert.’
So Sandra battled on with her North London tongue, responding openly to hostility which was not hostility but only that type of provocation which I have described. Until at last an undeclared state of war existed between the others and ourselves. We continued to meet and to offer and receive hospitality; but it was now accepted that no holds were to be barred. It was our final setting apart. For all this I was to pay later; but then it was Sandra who suffered. Common: it was the word Sandra had given us, and it was the word to which she was now herself pinned. She became a girl from the East End of London, without breeding or education, who had been rescued by myself, besotted by the glamour of her race. But money was the subject of greater fantasies. I don’t suppose we could have made anyone believe that to Sandra money had come as no surprise, it being no more than what she had considered her element; that about money she had always been vague, not knowing even as a student what her grant was or how much she had in the bank; that in money matters she lacked the neurotic precision of myself, who was uneasy unless he knew how much he had and how much he could resonably expect to have in a year’s time; and that to me it had come as no surprise that the very girl who before her marriage would have considered fifty pounds wealth should be talking calmly three years later of our overdraft of a hundred thousand dollars. Her feeling for the luxurious, her readiness to create the occasion with very little, never altered from the time I met her; her demands, even during the days of riches, remained small; and when she left me she left more or less as she had come. Not only from pride; nor yet from that sense of tainted fairy money which the money-gift brings; but, I feel certain, from the conviction that money had ceased to be an issue. It is the peculiar madness that comes with the gift; it makes so many unlikely people — to the wonderment of the world — throw away all.
The simplicities! The distortions! The incident at the Indian Commissioner’s, for instance, was more than modified in the retelling. The talk, it was said, had turned to music. The Canadian Trade Commissioner had said to Sandra, ‘Do you care for music?’ To which, the story would have it, Sandra replied in a low-class London accent: ‘What do you think I am? I would have you know that I like a good symphony concert.’ Then there was the bookshop story, in which I figured. Was it the assistant who spread the hilarious exchange in which he had said to me, ‘Oh, your wife likes reading!’ and I had angrily replied, ‘Look here, I would have you know that my wife reads good books’? This was the dialogue style of these stories: Sandra and I were always ‘having people know’ things. To these stories and to others, of lasciviousness, betrayal and even sexual quaintness, I reacted not at all; and I thought that Sandra shared that placidity, partly her gift, which had come to me with our marriage. But she suffered more than I knew. It did not occur to me that she was not always able to handle a situation which she had provoked; it did not occur to me that, with the gift of the phrase, she could also be vulnerable to the phrase; and that against a low level of distortion she was helpless, as some children remain helpless against the taunts of their fellows, for all the philosophizing of their elders.