“The man vomiting up his guts. He is a dying man, and you know all he could think of? He want people to save his vomit — all his vomit — and take it to the police. That is the only thing he is talking about. And that is how he spent his last hours on earth: thinking about Negroes and the police and punishment. As though on the last day of his life he went back a hundred and fifty years and was a slave owner again. I don’t want to die with thoughts like that in my head, man. And that was just in 1938, you know. You know how they catch the poisoner? A month later, Christmas week, a crazy old black woman start parading through the town, shouting and crying, ‘I see Jesus! I see Mary!’ She was the poisoner. And she nearly cause a riot, eh, before they put her away in the madhouse. She had nothing to do with the estate. She’d just seen old Grandlieu in the morning, that’s all. When I hear people shouting about Jesus and Mary, and I see candles on the beach, I feel funny.”
Jane said, “Mrs. Grandlieu never told me that story.”
“People prefer to forget certain things. But if that happened to Mrs. Grandlieu today, she would behave in exactly the same way. These people are different from you and me, Jane. This is their place. When that black feller with the box cart point at me and say ‘You is a Jew,’ he didn’t point to Sebastien and say ‘You is a white man.’ He knew it was Mr. Sebastien.”
The sun was edging toward that side of the porch where Roche’s hammock was hung. The black shadow of the porch roof was moving at an angle to the south. The cigarette that Jane had thrown on the lawn had burnt itself out; the wind was eroding the ashy little cylinder. Sky and sea were white; the sea, splashing out of its basin, grated on the coarse sand below the cliff. Ice floated in water in the bowl on the table. The Honduras pines bent in the light breeze; the almond trees, with their big flat leaves and solid lateral branches, hardly swayed at all. The morning was over; it would soon be time for lunch: the quick climax of these Sundays at the beach house. After lunch there would be drowsiness, no talk, relaxation, rest; and then the drive back through the forest and the coconut estates and the bush to the late-afternoon dust and heat of the city.
Faintly at first, and then with growing distinctness against the breeze and the waves, there was the sound of chatter below the cliff. It was hard to ignore; they all three listened. It was not easy to tell from which direction the chatter came. To Jane it was like the sound of chatter in the gully at the foot of their garden on the Ridge. It was a group, clearly, walking fast. Soon the voices were immediately below the house; and then the unseen walkers passed on and their voices were lost.
Jane said, “I wouldn’t call Mrs. Grandlieu white.”
Roche said, “Not as white as you.”
Harry, coming out of his abstraction, the rings below his eyes very dark, said, “That’s another question. Here she is Mrs. Grandlieu. And she is not a stranger.” He began again to swing in the hammock. “And still, you know, as I look up at that hook and the rust running down, I know I will get the place repainted. You can’t do anything else. But it’s a damn funny way to live. Listen, I think that’s Meredith.” He jumped out of the hammock, and left it swinging slackly.
They heard the car come into the yard. Harry went through the living room to the kitchen; and, as the engine cut out, just behind the kitchen, it seemed, and as a door banged, they heard him say, in a tone which was at first like a continuation of the tone he had been using with them, but which then became more emphatic, brisker, a performance: “Eh-eh, Merry-boy! I was just saying that you weren’t coming for spite. Where is Pamela? She couldn’t make it. But this is beginning to look to me like a boycott, man. Well, come in, nuh. Peter and Jane here since morning. They nearly drink out all the damn rum punch.”
MEREDITH HERBERT was the first man Roche had got to know on the island, outside his work; and for some time they had remained close. They had met at dinner at Mrs. Grandlieu’s; and even if they hadn’t spoken at length then Meredith would have stood out. Meredith didn’t pretend, as one or two of the older, and more jauntily dressed, black men did, that he was at home with Mrs. Grandlieu. His comprehension of the situation was complete. He didn’t laugh at Mrs. Grandlieu’s racialist jokes; he didn’t respond to her provocations. Mrs. Grandlieu was reserved with him; and in Meredith’s courtesy toward this middle-aged woman with the pale brown skin, who spoke deliberately badly and with an exaggerated local accent, Roche detected something like compassion for a woman whose position in the island was no longer what she thought it was.
Meredith was about forty. He had been in politics and had briefly even been a minister; but then he had fallen out with the party and resigned. He spoke of himself, and was spoken of, not as a rejected politician but as a political dropout; and this made him unusual, because politics here was often a man’s only livelihood, and political failure was a kind of extinction. More than once a new minister, rising too high too fast, had come to live on the Ridge, chauffeured and guarded, embarrassing everyone, his children isolated and subdued in a large garden, carrying the slum on their faces and in their manner, until, as suddenly as they had been called up, the family had been returned to the darkness below, broken by their taste of luxury. But Meredith had other resources. He was a solicitor; and he enjoyed some celebrity for his weekly radio interview program called Encounter, in which he exploited his position as a political dropout and showed himself tough and cynical and no respecter of persons.
He was happily married, with a baby daughter; and he seemed able to separate his political anxieties from his private life, where he gave the impression of being at peace. In the hysteria of the Ridge — and against what Roche had first seen as the loudness and gush of Harry de Tunja — Meredith had been a restful man to be with. It was odd: Meredith, in his lucid analysis of most situations, striking off damning points on his stubby fingers, could be gloomier than anyone. But whereas other people were enervated or made restless by their anxieties, Meredith seemed untouched by his own vision of imminent chaos. Roche had once heard him say, speaking of the breakdown of institutions on the island, “We are living in a house without walls.” Yet Meredith lived as though the opposite were true. In his delight in the practice of the law, which he said exercised him totally, extended all his gifts, in his delight in his radio work, in his pleasure in his family (his wife came from an established mulatto family), in his housebuilding and homemaking, there seemed to be a certainty that the world would continue, and the place he had made for himself in it. And to Roche, new to the island, this combination of political concern and private calm had been restful.
But the relationship had not survived Jane’s coming. To Jane, not looking in those early days for what was restful, and even then having no taste for the political or economic complexities that Meredith liked to analyze, Meredith was “suburban.” And Meredith, holding a doll in one hand, and leading his infant daughter to the garden gate to wave good-by to Jane after her first visit, did appear too domesticated and settled: Roche could see that. Jane also decided that Meredith was boring; and then she decided that he was ugly. Roche said she was being trivial. She knew it; but, noticing the effect she had made, she insisted. “I can’t get over his looks.” And what had only been one of her offhand, unconsidered judgments — that Meredith was suburban — she had, perversely, cherished into a settled attitude. Between Jane and Meredith there had quickly grown up a muted mutual antagonism; and Roche, although he knew the antagonism to be artificial, issuing from Jane’s casual, instinctive cruelty toward people with whom she was not concerned, this cruelty part of her laziness, her refusal to be bothered, Roche was affected.