Every day of drifting made withdrawal less easy. Every day of drifting weakened me. The strength was mine: control awaited me, awaited my plain statement. I do not exaggerate. In a confused situation my position was as clear as it always had been, and from the very falseness of this position I could have drawn together sufficient of the elements of our island to make my power certain and to restore calm. There were the ideologues to whom The Socialist had remained as an organ of internal opposition; there were those who had seen in the bauxite contract the only true achievement of our government; there was the middle class, of all races, whom my presence in the cabinet had always reassured; there were the workers on the estates, who sought only a spokesman for their strength. All these looked to me; all these I let down. Control, the challenge to kill, was the only alternative to pretence. But control, the prospect of power, and its corollary, the prospect of keeping power in a situation which would always turn to air in my hands, the prospect wearied me.
My sense of drama failed. This to me was the true loss. For four years drama had supported me; now, abruptly, drama failed. It was a private loss; thoughts of irresponsibility or duty dwindled, became absurd. I struggled to keep drama alive, for its replacement was despair: the vision of a boy walking on an endless desolate beach, between vegetation living, rotting, collapsed, and a mindless, living sea. No calm then: that came later, fleetingly. Drama failing, I knew frenzy. Frenzy kept me silent. And silence committed me to pretence.
Nationalization? I would go to London. The idea of a delegation had been accepted: much work had been done behind the scenes, by friend and enemy. In the fortnight I would be away I would be undermined. Violence would be sustained; I would have nothing to return to. I began to know relief, to tell the truth; I longed to leave.
6
RELIEF: I was astonished by the mood that settled on me. Departure had eluded me once before. Now at last, deviously, it was coming: fulfilment and truth. There would be a return, of course; but that would be in the nature of a visit, an ascertaining of what I knew would be there. The time before a departure is a splendid thing. I made my preparations slowly. My briefing was the least of my worries. I had the facts at my fingertips and knew our arguments by heart. And London had made its attitude clear. It would accept a delegation, but the delegation would not be received by the Minister. London was playing the game up to a point, doing us a favour.
Crop-time in Isabella, of the burning sugar-cane fields: early spring in London. The overcoat, then, which it had always given me pleasure to hold over my arm in all the light and heat of our airport lounge: the mark of the man required to travel. On the road to the airport: houses of tin and timber, Mediterranean colours, fields, trees, shops, hoardings, the black face advertisements for toothpaste and stout: none of this would be seen with the eye of possession again. At the airport there was a demonstration. It surprised me, this thoroughness. It was of our movement, of course; it was favourable. I made a speech suited to the occasion; it came as easily as the others. My last speech: I kept my style to the end. Presently we were sealed off, and rising above fields, rivers, roads and settlements whose logic had never been clearer.
Such a send-off; and an almost private arrival at London Airport. This might have made me sensible of the pathos of the politics of places like ours. But now it fitted my mood. A representative of our Commission; junior officials from the Ministry; no newspapermen. But there was a motorcar and a chauffeur; and, at the end of the journey, a first-class hotel. There are few things as fine as an arrival at a first-class hotel in a big city. One is luxuriously housed, with the responsibility only of paying the bill. About one there is a muted, urgent hum of activity: a score of services await one’s lightest call. Glamour touches everyone: the chambermaid, the telephone girl, whose accent and intonation remain with one, the men at the desk, the girl at the newspaper kiosk. They are part of the fairyland, which continues as fairyland until one catches sight of the telephonist at her winking board, the weary uniformed figures sitting slackly on chairs in the laundry rooms, and one sees the pale night-clerk arriving in his shabby macintosh, until the structure of fairyland becomes plain, and the hotel becomes a place of work, linked not to the glamour of airline timetables in racks but to houses such as those seen on the drive from the airport. This is the time to leave; this is when the days begin to race and grow tasteless. Until this time, though, the hotel is a place which radiates its magic to the city.
I was free. Such talks with officials as we had planned were not to take place for a few days. I was alone. Many of my aides had disappeared into various corners of the city, seeking pleasure or looking up friends and relations, students or immigrants, for whom they had brought gifts of rum and cigarettes. How easily in this city they dwindled! A link, this, with my own past in the city. But this was the city which, exploring now from the hotel, I consciously tried to abolish. I had dissected and destroyed the glamour of this city; I had seen it as made up of individuals; I had ceased to see.
Now I tried to re-create the city as show: that city of the magical light in which I could walk without shadow. I tried to rediscover the warm, sweetly pungent smell of tobacconists’ shops and the acrid smell of the sooty cold air at dusk. I tried to be a tourist in the city which once had taught me the impossibility of escape. And such was my mood, I succeeded. For three days I was completely happy. The days were not quite blank. Each day there was some event to which I could anchor myself: a lunch with some businessmen; a dinner with the London representatives of our Isabella newspapers; an interview for the B.B.C.’s Overseas Service, recorded in Bush House, in whose basement canteen Sandra, macintoshed, hysterical with a vision of the future she was afraid to read, had proposed to me.
But there was the work of the delegation. The news from Isabella became worse; there was more violence; a paragraph appeared in the Daily Telegraph. We had our talks with the officials. They said what they had said many times before and what we expected them to say. They outlined clearly and concisely the consequences of nationalization. Our meetings need have lasted only a minute; we made them last three days and held daily press conferences which were ignored by the London newspapers. Was it my imagination, though, that detected a more than official hostility towards myself? I sensed that I was personally disapproved of, a racialist and a radical, a dangerous man, a troublemaker where there need only have been stability.
So the hardening of attitudes in Isabella, during my three free days, was reflected in London. I could do nothing; I had committed myself to our game. And I could not help adding to the unfavourable impression. The talks with the officials ended in failure. I insisted on seeing the Minister: it was the only thing left for me to do. My request was twice refused. I was told the second time that I could be invited to a lunch at which the Minister would be present. I used the last manœuvre that remained to me: I called the representatives of the Isabella press and told them of my request. Two days later I was told that the Minister would meet me, but without my delegation. It was better than nothing.
It was a brief, humiliating meeting. This man, whom in other, humbler capacities I had met more than once before on various government trips to London and had thought affable and slightly foolish, now barely had time for the courtesies. His manner indicated clearly that our game had gone on long enough and he had other things to do than to assist the public relations of colonial politicians. In about forty-five seconds he painted so lively a picture of the consequences of any intemperate action by the government of Isabella that I felt personally rebuked.