“He was aggressive today, man,” Harry said. “I’m sorry, Jane. I’m very sorry. But I’ve never heard Meredith use language like that before in company.”
Jane said, “I scarcely hear what he’s saying. I just sit and admire.”
Harry said, “Somebody’s given him a sniff of power. You notice he didn’t say too much about his perfect day? I was waiting to hear whether he was prime minister. But he didn’t mention politics at all.”
Roche said, “I can understand that.”
“No, man,” Harry said. “He wants power. Or what he thinks is power. I’ve been hearing stories. And he is a damn fool. They will chew him up again. And this time he will really mash up his life. I don’t know how he thinks he can go down to the beach and talk to those people. They don’t want to hear anyone like Meredith.”
Roche said, “That’s why he’s so worried. He knows he will be chewed up.”
“I don’t know how a man can change so much,” Harry said. “Jane, you wouldn’t believe what fun it used to be with Meredith. Terrible things would happen in this place, and then you would hear Meredith talk and he would put everything in place for you and your mind would be settled. You would feel that with people like that things couldn’t be so bad. But look today. You know, I’ve never heard Meredith talk so much about Jimmy Ahmed. To Meredith the man was a joke. Today he talk as though he want to kill the guy.”
“He’s jealous of that woman in Wimbledon,” Jane said. “I suppose he wants us to look in his eyes too and understand the meaning of hate.”
Roche said, with his laugh, “He doesn’t have to try. I was trying to work out that last game he made us play. It works, doesn’t it? I suppose the proposition is really very simple. I suppose it’s just a demonstration of the fact that we are what we are, and can’t imagine ourselves being anybody else. I don’t suppose it’s more than that.”
Harry said, “ ‘The life you will lead is the life you have led.’ That’s a damn depressing thing to tell people on a Sunday morning.”
Roche said, “It depends on how you look at it. It can be comforting as well.”
“ ‘Nobody will make a new life,’ ” Harry said. “No, man. He’s got me wrong.”
It was nearly the end of this Sunday at the beach house. They were heavy with rum punch and food, fatigued by the light. They fell silent. It was the time when Marie-Thérèse, in her long dress, would go round and whisper to her guests, proposing rest, or a game of draughts or chess, or a walk to the estuary, or a drive into the bush. Her soft presence then would keep the holiday alive. Without her the house went dead. Outside was white light, the repetitive beat of the sea on the steep and narrow shore rim, the faint ring of a bell, faint chatter borne on the wind. Open to wind and light, the house on the cliff felt empty and abandoned.
11
FOR A WHILE the road stayed close to the coast: the dazzle of the afternoon sea; rocky coves now half in shadow; little bays where no one bathed, where jagged rocks pushed out of smooth gray sand; white, sunlit spray on black-brown reefs. Then the sea noise was left behind, and they were in the high woods, where three or four kinds of a wild, spiny palm grew among tall white-trunked trees hung with creepers with giant shining heart-shaped leaves. The road was like a green tunnel. But the woods which looked so thick and old had been destroyed in many places. Patches of scorched openness, where secondary bush looked collapsed and brown, showed the drought; and the light there was hard and still. Sometimes, for stretches, the woods were only a screen beside the road, and the hard light and the openness behind showed through.
Jane was tired and strained. She was pale, and her eyes, as always at times of stress, were moist.
She said, “Do you think Marie-Thérèse will go back?”
Roche said, “I used to think so until today. Now I’m not so sure. Seeing Harry today makes you understand what she’s had to put up with.”
“Harry’s cosy little world is breaking up.” She spoke absently. “ ‘Man, you come to de beach house dis Sunday, man.’ ”
Roche said, “It looked cosy to us. I wonder whether it was ever cosy.”
Jane said, “Well.” And a little later she added, “Everything has its season.”
He recognized the sentence as one of his own. He said, “I suppose we must seem pretty cosy to them too. We’re just visitors.”
“I’m damn glad I’m a visitor.”
The high woods gradually gave way to secondary bush: overgrown old cocoa estates and coffee estates, with tall shade trees that here and there gave an impression of forest. They passed derelict old cocoa drying houses, with once movable roofs that ran on rails, some roofs now forever open. Occasionally, in dirt yards beside the road, there were little rotting shacks, hollow and flimsy-looking with doors and windows open, tin roofs eaten up with rust, old unpainted wood the color of ashes; and sometimes there were little shack villages, with a collapsing shop on stilts, tin advertisements bright on its open doors, a glass case of soft bread and cakes on the counter, and on the shelves, as gray and mottled as the outer walls, jars of cheap sweets and upright bottles of sweet carbonated drinks. Sometimes there was a small timber church or church hall. Sometimes a signboard, as bright as a shop sign, on what looked like a private house, announced a hall of a private sect. And on the road were groups walking to worship, dressed up in the heat of the afternoon, the men in dark suits and brown shoes, the women in flimsy pink or yellow dresses showing the satin chemise below, the shadows of the walkers falling black on the black asphalt road that wound through the hilly land.
Children played in some yards. Sometimes, on a veranda, a bare-backed man, face and hands blacker than his chest, as though scorched by a fire, sat in a hammock made of an old sugar sack and held a naked baby. Father and child: the tedium of Sunday in the bush. This was a busy road. The crowded city was just over two hours away. Yet these villages seemed insulated from the weekend holiday traffic: charmed villages, stranded in time, belonging to another era, an era that contained no possibility of a future.
Jane said, “It’s depressing, isn’t it? It’s so hard for me to remember that when I first came I was dazzled. That morning you drove me from the airport. I was very tired. I couldn’t take anything in. But I thought I was going to get to know it well, and I thought it was very beautiful. That was the best day. Now that I know I’m not going to stay I don’t see it any longer. I wouldn’t care if I never drove along this road again. Meredith was awful, wasn’t he? You see, I was right about him. You told me he was so very urbane.”
“He’s certainly been holding back on a few things.”
“I never thought the word could be applied to someone who looked like that. He was so crestfallen when you said you were leaving.”
Roche smiled.
Jane said, “His little frog’s face absolutely collapsed. He doesn’t like you being here, and he’s hurt when you say you’re going. He just wants you to stay so that he can play his little games with you.”
“He was very hostile. He didn’t make any secret of that.”
“His hostility doesn’t matter.”
Roche smiled: his satyr’s smile. “I don’t suppose it does. Not to you at any rate.”
“He’s the kind of man you have to slap down right from the start. If you don’t want to play there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“It isn’t a game, Jane. You just don’t make a hit and run back to base.”
“All that talk of fuck and cunt. I suppose he expected me to scream and jump on a chair. And I know it’s just that rich woman in Wimbledon he’s riled about.”
“I’d never heard of her before, I must say. I’d only heard about the interview. And I suppose that from a place like this she must look more and more goddesslike. To both of them.”