She stood in the doorway with Roche, who was sucking on the end of one temple of his dark glasses. Something of his excitement had gone.
He said, “He isn’t here. Shall we go across to the Grange?”
“Let’s go home.”
She followed him back to the living room. He stood for a while beside the tiger-striped couch, sucking on the glasses, looking. Jane studied the photographs. The room felt hotter now. The glare from the porch was fierce.
Jane said, “I hope the water’s on when we get back.”
He moved to the desk. He began to read a blue aerogramme letter.
Jane said, “I think we should go. This place is creepy.”
He said, throwing the letter down on the desk, “Another brush-off.”
She went to the desk and, not taking the letter up, leaving it on the desk, she began to read.
Dear Jimmy, We were vastly amused by your letter. That place certainly sounds ripe for something, from your description of it. You are certainly the right man in the light place. But Lord Thomson and the Sunday Times might be a better market for the series of thirteen you propose writing. We are not in that league, as you know, and the feeling here is that something more in the nature of hard news, offbeat but illuminating, might be of more use to us rather than the psychological analysis you propose, which I know is your forte and which I personally would find fascinating, as I need hardly remind you. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much longer we can go on. I am beginning to feel that we are an incurably frivolous people and as a nation we seem resigned to giggling our way to oblivion. The scene as we knew it is no longer what it was, and I personally feel that the time has come to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. But perhaps out of all your experiences might come some powerful and hard-hitting novel — how good, by the by, to hear that that progresses smoothly. It will certainly give a much needed fillip to the form which, like everything in this nook-shotten island, seems to be dying on its feet. You have no doubt heard of the staggering increase in property prices over here. We have managed, at enormous sacrifice, to become enfeoffed of a ruin in Dorset, which much occupies us these days, so at least we will be sheltered during the coming storm. The natives are so far friendly. At least no one has painted swastikas on our doors or dropped excreta through the letter slot. But that may come, when they get to know us better. Marcia sends her love. We will continue to scan the newspapers for news of you and your doings, which from this distance seem vastly exciting. Yours ever, Roy.
Roche stood beside her while she read.
She said, “Is he really writing a novel? Is that the novel, do you think?” She took out a writing pad from below some papers.
Somebody said, “Yes?”
And Jane turned to see the boy with the Medusa head, the boy with the pigtails of aggression, the boy with the twisted face, the tormented red eyes. He was standing in the doorway in his jeans, jersey, and canvas shoes. He moved aggressively toward them.
She was grateful for Roche’s coolness.
Roche said, “It’s Bryant, isn’t it? Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”
The boy didn’t answer. He came to the desk; he gathered the writing pad and letter and other papers together and put the blue-tinted glass ash tray on them. He went to the couch and began to refold the newspaper.
Roche said, “Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”
And when Bryant spoke, over his shoulder, it was almost with a shout. “Why you ask me?”
Roche said, “We’ve come to see Jimmy, Bryant.”
“He’s in town.” And then Bryant sat down on the couch and began to sob. “He’s in town, he’s in town.” His eyes were red: the red of aggression turned out to be the red of weeping.
Roche sat on the arm of the couch. “What’s happened?”
Bryant said, “They kill Stephens.”
Jane said, “Killed?”
“When?” Roche said. “I haven’t seen the papers today. Is it in the papers?”
Bryant leaned back on the couch, turned his head to one side, and looked up at the ceiling. He was sobbing; he was waiting to be comforted.
Roche said, “Is it in the papers?” Then he said to Jane, “Meredith didn’t say anything about it. He should have told me.”
“Not in the papers,” Bryant said, wiping his eyes with a long finger, a thin, crooked finger. “It happen early this morning. They was waiting for him. On the radio they say he draw first. They was waiting for him. Watching the mother house.”
“Meredith knew!” Roche said, standing up. “Meredith knew!” The fact seemed important to him; it was like the main shock, overriding all the rest of Bryant’s news. He said, “Is that where Jimmy has gone?”
“The police was giving up the body this afternoon. They taking it from the mortu’ry to the mother house. I didn’t want to go.”
Roche said to Jane, “I think I should go.”
Bryant rolled his head on the back of the couch and used his long finger to wipe the rim of his eyes. “I should go too. But I don’t think I can stand it.”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
Jane wanted to cry: No!
Bryant said, “Leave me here.”
Jane said, “I want to go home.”
“Leave me here,” Bryant said, looking up at the ceiling.
“Jane!” Roche ordered. “Let us go.”
She started at his tone. He was already walking, brisk, athletic, his pale khaki trousers seeming looser around his waist; and she hurried after him. Yet when they were in the car — the sweat instantly breaking out on their faces and backs: the air heated, though the windows had been left open, the seats blazing — he went still.
He put his hands on the wheel and said, addressing himself, “I must drive carefully. In times like this one must drive carefully.”
And very slowly, as though he was indifferent to Jane’s reaction, as though he was alone in the car, he began to drive along the narrow empty road, sitting tense at the wheel, studying the asphalt surface, sometimes broken at the edge, sometimes overgrown, loosened into gravel here and there by tufts of browned grass. Jane was silent; it was as though she too was alone. The sunlight was yellowing; it softened the wall of bush that bounded the flattened wasteland of stunted shrubs and collapsed long grass. Slowly, though not as slowly as when they started, they approached the highway. The scorched hills appeared, dark-red and brown, smoking in many places. The slanting sun picked out every dip on the hills, every fold and wrinkle. They turned onto the highway, black and smooth from traffic.
Roche said, “I think I should go. It must be terrible in that house now.”
There were not many cars on the road. The factories were closed. Far away, deep in the brown fields, there was a scattering of parked cars. The trunks of these cars were open, and the drivers could be seen, tiny, isolated, intent figures, cutting grass for the animals they kept at home. In open spaces in the little concrete-and-tin settlements children played, kicking up dust.
“Meredith knew,” Roche said. “They stopped me on Friday, you know, and they searched the car.”
He was half addressing Jane now, but she acknowledged nothing.
Past the junked cars in the sunken fields, past the factories, past more country settlements, the suburbs, they approached the city, the rubbish dump smoking yellow-gray, the smoke uncoiling slowly in the still afternoon, rising high and spreading far, becoming mingled with the pink pall from the bauxite loading station, the whole shot through with the rays of the declining sun. Sunlight gilded the stilted shacks that seemed to scaffold the red hillsides. The land began to feel choked. But the shantytown redevelopments were subdued; those repetitive avenues of red earth showed little of their usual human overspill. There were few trucks amid the smoke and the miniature multicolored hills and valleys of the rubbish dump, and not many scavengers. On each fence post a black carrion corbeau sat undisturbed; others on the ground hopped about awkwardly, two feet at a time.