She would cultivate a woman friend assiduously, jealously, someone newly arrived, someone new to the group; she would see this person every day and show her every sort of generosity and favour. In no time every aspect of the relationship would be exhausted; and there would occur the inevitable rupture, the anger that was really hurt. More and more I noticed she cultivated Americans; in our group they were a neutral and variable element; and they were as charmed by her accent as she by theirs. With every new encounter, every new friend, she fashioned a matching myth of racial niceness. She was never content with the individual as individual; she wished to go beyond; it was what remained of her avidity and enthusiasm, which could revive at so little. I wish I had seen then, as I see so clearly now, that she was sinking.
What makes a marriage? What makes a house with two people empty? Surely we were compatible, even complementary. Yet it was this very compatibility that drew her away from me. She had begun to get some of my geographical sense, that feeling of having been flung off the world, for all the landscapes and memories that were locked in the heads of those we met. She spoke increasingly of her childhood, of school, of walks, and of one friend whose wish it was to own a motorcar of pure white. One morning — we had for some time been sleeping in separate rooms — she told me she had awakened in the night with a feeling of fear, a simple fear of place, of the absent world. That she shared a fear I knew so well strengthened me; and subtly my attitude towards her changed. The very things I had once admired in her — confidence, ambition, rightness — were what I now pitied her for; I felt we had come together for self-defence. But there was always morning, always the healing phrase — what a comforting, deceptive thing it is, the gift of words. ‘I suppose this must be the most inferior place in the world,’ she said. ‘Inferior natives, inferior expats. Frightfully inferior and frightfully happy. The two must go together.’ I suggested a trip to England. But she was not interested; it remained the country she had wished to get away from. No family or group awaited her; and she was no tourist; she didn’t want to see the Tower or do the galleries or go to the theatre; she didn’t even need to close her eyes to see what two weeks or a month in London would be like. She said, ‘I can take that as read.’ She spent more time in the house; in the hot, airless afternoons she often walked about barefooted in her white cotton petticoat and a brassiere supporting breasts she no longer painted. A man came in two or three mornings a week to look after the garden; we had a Grenadian woman cleaner. Apart from these we employed no servants, Sandra having grown to resent them, sometimes hysterically, as intruders. There would have been little for anyone to do anyway. The well-equipped kitchen of our rented house was cold for much of the time. Little came out of it: coffee and toast, hot milk, scrambled eggs, some simple bit of frying. On the shelves were musty, once-used tins and drums of herbs; at night, as soon as the fluorescent tube jumped into dazzle, cockroaches scattered lightly in all directions over bare white surfaces. The women of our group were outraged. On my behalf then; later, of course, it would be different.
But to me as well as to Sandra our house was something to get out of whenever we could. Into that most inferior place in the world. Where could we go? The beaches? We knew them all; we could take them ‘as read’. The mountain villages, Negro or mulatto, with their slave history and slave customs? They were more exciting to read about in the Sunday edition of the Inquirer than to see: rundown villages of concrete and corrugated iron, set in green, always shining green, like a dozen others elsewhere. At nights we would go out driving, just for the sake of motion. We drove to the airport and sat drinking in the lounge with intransit passengers, listening to the names of foreign cities. We hunted out every new bar or restaurant or nightclub: Isabella was the sort of place where such establishments regularly opened and closed under new management. We were at our happiest outside; it was outside, in a crowd, late at night, the champagne working, that we communed. The sight of Sandra across a room could stir me to a degree that was sometimes disgraceful. Those ill-tempered eyes! That bony face with its jut of jaw. Those feet, as nervous and expressive as hands, but so much more subtle and complex, so much more beautifully made! Those breasts she was always ready to offer me, as to a child. I liked to go across to her and detach her from the man — usually American now — whom those breasts had attracted. And so, in public, we would commune. It was the word we used. I would say, ‘Shall we commune?’ ‘Let’s,’ she might reply. ‘Let me get a drink first.’ On a high settee she might then sit, her head and shoulders jammed against the wall, her feet hanging loose over my shoulders as I sat on the floor below the settee; and I would be content, kissing and stroking those feet and legs which twitched and squeezed in answer. As much as by Sandra’s cold kitchen the feminine instincts of Europe and Asia were outraged — and perhaps rightly — by these public displays.
But the mood that overcame us seldom came to any consummation. It might have done if we were willing to outrage all sensibility, to do in public what plebeian rumour attributed to our group. But our mood seldom carried us to our house; we could not obliterate the feeling of failure, the feeling of the house’s emptiness, the feeling that whatever solution we achieved would be only temporary, would not destroy the night or the morning to come. We had never slept on a double bed; it had always seemed to me unpleasant and, in the tropics, where the body oozes oil, unhealthy; and we had taken to sleeping in separate rooms so that the sleeplessness of the one might not disturb the other. And frequently, on returning, we had simply gone to our respective rooms.
Was it the house? It was one of those large timber town houses of the old colonial period, slightly decaying in spite of its modern kitchen. We both thought it attractive but for some reason we had never succeeded in colonizing it. Large areas of it remained empty; it felt like a rented house, which soon has to go back to its true owner. It had never seemed important to us to have a house of our own. I had no feeling for the house as home, as personal creation. I had no things, no treasures, no collection even of books, no household gods, as Sandra would have said; and apart from a few school prizes, neither had she. Still, to build a house seemed a thing to do; to continue living in an old rented house was beginning to appear ostentatious. I was looking through a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the simplicity of the Roman house, its outward austerity, its inner, private magnificence; I was struck by its suitability to our climate; I yielded to impulse.
But was it something more? Wasn’t it that cotton-clad body, with the cleanliness and freshness of the barren, a body without danger or mystery and forbidding for that reason? A body which was no more than what it was, holding no promise of growth, speaking only of flesh and futility and our own imminent extinction.
We violate no body so much as our own; towards it we display the perversity of the cat that constantly rips its wounds open. I saw that there was waste; and I felt, let there be waste. The habits of my student days, which had never altogether died, were now revived. On the island I had become acquainted with a number of women of various races, of the utmost discretion; what had been an occasional extravagance became, as before, an addiction, but now guiltless and clinical. Sometimes I had to stifle my own disgust; sometimes it went well. And it was after a good and successful afternoon — they speak of the sadness of the animal after coitus: but in my experience fulfilment was always followed by a mood of exceptional gentleness and optimism — it was after one good afternoon that I found myself about to say to Sandra as we were dressing to go out — the sentence was fully phrased: delight had been converting itself into reporting words all afternoon — ‘Darling, I’ve had a most marvellous afternoon. I’ve been in bed with a most skilled and delightful woman.’ It was only as I was, I repeat, on the point of saying this, that I realized that perhaps similar sentences had sometimes come to Sandra herself.