Jane was unwilling to move about the house or to do anything that might make a noise. She was exhausted; she became more exhausted. She heard Roche moving lightly about: he too seemed affected by the silence. Before, she had always been reassured by his presence, had almost needed it, needed to feel him reacting to her. But now, though she listened for his noises — she heard him trying the taps, opening and closing the refrigerator door, rustling the newspaper — she began to hide from him; and he too seemed to be staying away from her. She went at last to the unlighted front room of the house, where it was still warm; and she stayed there until, out of exhaustion, darkness, silence, she became, to her surprise, quite calm.
They met later in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light fell hard on white formica surfaces. They ate sardines, cheese, bread; and drank lager and coffee. Roche’s manner was as light as his movements; he too was recovering from strain. But there was no connected conversation between them.
They heard Adela’s radio. It was nearly half past seven by the kitchen clock, nearly time for the Sunday evening program of hymns sponsored by one of the Southern American churches. And soon there came the tune that, for Jane, marked the deadest hour of Sunday on the Ridge, the deadest hour of the week. Adela turned the volume down, but the words were still distinct.
Oh come to the church in the wild wood.
Oh come to the church in the vale.
Roche said, “Adela isn’t worried. I wonder if she knows.”
Jane looked at him and didn’t reply. She thought: I should have left that day when he dreamt about being tortured, the day I saw the wild man in the children’s house.
Such a straight new road led to the airport. More than once, during her first few weeks on the island, they had driven in the late afternoon to the airport, for the sake of the drive, and to sit in the glass-walled lounge and drink rum punch and watch the planes, the flat expanse of asphalt and grass that seemed to stretch to the hills, the late sunlight on the hills. The hills had been green then; and the sugar cane fields through which the airport road ran had also been green, the sugar cane tall and in arrow, gray-blue plumes above the green; and sometimes on the way back they had stopped at the basketwork and raffiawork stands beside the airport road, tourist enticements. But then, almost as soon as she had got used to the sugar cane and the arrows, the fields had been fired, the canes reaped; and what had been green and enclosed had become charred and flat and open. Then the drought had set in, and those excursions had stopped. On the highway that afternoon they had passed the airport road; she hadn’t given it a thought.
For so long she had held herself ready to leave. She had her return air ticket; in London she had been told she needed one to enter the island. Her passport was in order. It was a new one and — she had been born in Ottawa during the war — it was endorsed Holder has right of abode in the United Kingdom. A virgin passport stilclass="underline" it had not been stamped when she had arrived. No official had asked to see her passport, or her return ticket, when the bauxite Americans had taken her past the immigration desk. She had eluded the controls; there was no record of her arrival. She remembered it as part of the dislocation of that first morning when, exhausted by the night-long journey, unslept, the airplane noise still in her head, the airplane smell still on her, she had, coming out of the customs hall and seeing Roche, had a feeling of disappointment and wrongness. She had always been ready to leave.
Looking at Roche in the hard light in the white kitchen, Jane thought: Now it’s out of my hands. I am in this house, with this man.
On Adela’s radio, between passages of grave, deep, indistinct speech, the hymns continued. The hymns held more than the melancholy of Sunday evening. For Jane now they held the melancholy, the incompleteness, of all her time here; and the Ridge felt far from everywhere.
In the dead fluorescent light she considered Roche’s face, which once had seemed to her so fine, so ascetic and full of depth. Now, seeing the face attempt easiness, even jollity, she saw it as worn and weak; and she wondered that she had ever been puzzled by him. She had, long ago, seen him as a man of action, a doer. Later, she had seen him as an intellectual, infinitely understanding, saint-like in the calm brought him by his knowledge. Now she saw that he was like herself, yielding and yielding, at the mercy of those events which he analyzed away into his system. His intellectualisaism was a sham, a misuse of the mind, a series of expedients. She understood now why, when he was at his most analytical and intelligent, he irritated her most. Ordinary: the word came to her as she watched him. It surprised her and she resisted it: it seemed vindictive and untrue. But she held onto the word. She looked at him and thought: In spite of everything he’s done he’s really quite ordinary.
A metallic hissing from somewhere in the house obliterated Adela’s hymns. Then there was a series of snaps and sighs and a prolonged rattling. The water had come on: open taps ran, tanks were filling up.
Roche said, “I’m glad they’ve remembered. I’m sure that’s all it was, you know. Somebody just forgot. I think I’ll give myself a proper bath. It may be the last one for a long time.”
The water pipes settled down. Adela’s hymn program ended and she turned off her radio. There was silence.
Later, in her room, as she was adjusting the redwood louvers, Jane thought: I am alone. And she was astonished at her calm.
She heard Roche running his bath. She lay in bed, longing for drowsiness and sleep and the morning, playing with images of the day: the brown bush around Jimmy Ahmed’s house, the specks of blood on the globules of sweat on the policeman’s too closely shaved top lip, his curiously dainty run across the empty square, the lost gray villages in the overgrown cocoa and coffee estates, the bright sea seen though the coconut plantation, the fast drive up to the Ridge, the estuary and the candles and the blindfolded stampers. She thought: I have always been alone since I’ve been here. With that the panic and the wakefulness came. And then the telephone began to ring.
The telephone rang in the sitting room with the nearly empty shelves on the concrete walls, the solid three-piece company suite; and the ringing bounced into the open hall and down the concrete walls and parquet floor of the passage to the plywood of her own door. Roche didn’t leave his bathroom to answer; and the telephone rang and rang. At last she put on her light and got out of bed. She left her bedroom door open, and the light from the bedroom went down the passage, reflected in the hall, and from there cast a diminished glimmer into the sitting room.
She stood beside the ringing telephone. She thought: I’ll let it ring ten times. She caught sight of herself, barely reflected in the picture window that looked out on the front lawn: so solid-looking with the dark outside, that sealed pane of glass, so vulnerable. She lifted the telephone.
“Hello.”
“Jane. Harry.” He pronounced it Hah-ree. “You were getting me worried, girl.” His musical voice was always a surprise. “You get through?”
“Yes.”
“I get through too. How you liking the little excitement?”
“There isn’t much up here.”
“Jane, I don’t know whether you and Peter have any plans for going out tonight. But they’re going to declare a state of emergency in a couple of hours. And I think they must know their own business.”
“Do you know what is happening?”
“Nobody knows what the hell is happening. Or what is going to happen. Is the police fault, nuh. They surrender the body of that boy they shoot, without asking anybody anything. They thought the body was going to the mother’s house. But you should know that man Jimmy Ahmed start walking round the town with the body, picking up one hell of a procession. Everybody washing their foot and jumping in. Everybody carrying a piece of palm branch or coconut branch. The Arrow of Peace. You ever hear of that before? I never hear of that before. Imagine a thing like that happening to your own body: people toting it round the town. Those people crazy like hell, man.”