But the house on the Ridge remained empty, dead. Adela, reappearing in the morning, moved without her thumping strides. Her flesh seemed to have grown softer; she moved as though not wishing to draw attention to herself. The tension seemed to have gone out of her body. Her nostrils no longer quivered, and there was a little smile in her round eyes. No one asked her about her absence, but she said, “My godmother was very sick.”
13
“HELP DE poor! I am very grateful. Help de blind! I am very t’ankful.” The blind and legless beggar was back, red blank eyes in an upturned face, his chant steady and loud, gliding about his stretch of pavement on his little low cart.
Friday afternoon, and the city center had filled up again: the vendors of sweets and cigarettes and Turf Club sweepstakes; the middle-aged women with “belly-full” cakes and currant rolls in glass cases; the bicycles and the route taxis, the drivers from time to time putting out an arm and making an involved gesture, like a dancer’s gesture, to indicate their route; the coconut carts and vans. Water from a thousand waste pipes ran in the open gutters. But there were no school uniforms among the pavement crowds, and, though there were few policemen, no loitering groups. People looked about them as they walked, and some people walked as if on broken glass. They were rediscovering their city: the arrow daubed and scrawled everywhere, some shop windows still shuttered, some boarded up. One or two shops, smashed open and exposed, seemed to have been abandoned by their owners: the walkers moved away from those, as though part of the pavement had been roped off.
Roche stood outside Sablich’s parking lot and waited for Meredith.
Meredith was on time. He was driving his little blue car. Roche had expected something more official. He wasn’t sure how he should greet the friend who had become the minister. For a minute, though, greeting Meredith, opening the car door, getting in, looking with Meredith for traffic before they drove off, it seemed that nothing had changed since Sunday. But as soon as they were in the stream of traffic, and the time had come to speak, Roche felt ill at ease. The words he had been hoping would come to him didn’t come. He was unwilling to say anything about the events of the week, remembering what he had heard from Harry, and from people in the Sablich’s office, about Meredith’s part in those events. He was silent a little too long; and then he saw that it was also too late to say anything about Meredith’s appointment as a minister.
Meredith said, “I’m glad we were able to do something, Peter. I’m sorry it was such short notice.”
The friend, the minister, the radio journalist.
They were driving to the radio station to record the interview for Meredith’s Encounter program. Meredith had mentioned it on Sunday; and Roche hadn’t forgotten. He had speculated about it; he had run through various kinds of interviews in his head; he had prepared. The recording had been arranged the previous day, and apparently in something of a hurry. And it had been arranged rather officially. Meredith’s secretary in the ministry, and not Meredith, had telephoned.
Roche said, “It may be our last chance.”
As he spoke, Roche remembered what Jane had said on Sunday. She had said that Meredith didn’t like Roche being on the island; but that when Roche had said he was leaving, Meredith’s face had fallen. Roche glanced now at Meredith. But Meredith’s expression hadn’t changed.
Meredith said, “Why?”
“I feel there’s nothing for me to do here.”
“Don’t say any more. We’ll save it for the studio. Otherwise we’ll lose it. When I spoke to you at Harry’s on Sunday I was thinking we might do something philosophical and offbeat. But it’s all become highly topical. That happens a lot of the time. If you chase the topical too hard you can end up being stale.”
Everywhere walls and windows were scrawled and daubed with the arrow. But the city showed little damage. Not many buildings had been totally destroyed by fire; and often, even in the streets of the Chinese wholesale food shops and the Syrian cloth shops, though a shop had been blackened at pavement level, its upper floors still looked whole.
Meredith said, “Miraculously, it still works.”
And for a moment he was like a friend again, like the man Roche had known in the earliest days. But the alertness was new: the small hunched figure at the wheel, the small gripping hands, child’s hands. The wounded, determined smile, hinting now at secrets, was new, and belonged to a new man — the man receiving looks from people in the streets, and acknowledging the looks with a slight movement of the head: a nod to someone who was looking for a nod, but, to someone who might resent a nod, nothing, just an involuntary movement of the head. He had been confirmed in his power; he was a minister in a government that had survived. But Roche thought that Meredith was still uncertain; he was still a man who thought he was presuming.
Roche had been embarrassed. Now he began to feel sickened.
Meredith said, “Jimmy sprang a surprise on us.”
Roche thought, but without anxiety: He’s prepared something for me.
Meredith said, “How is Jane?”
“Jane has very much withdrawn into herself.”
“I imagine we’ve sunk even lower in her estimation.”
“She’s leaving us, you know.”
“One day, I suppose, we’ll go over the brink. It was a close thing, Peter.”
“Were the helicopters necessary?”
“I don’t know. The soldiers didn’t leave the airport. But I don’t know.”
The radio building, a new building on three floors, was set far back from the road. The in-gates and out-gates, on either side of a brick wall, were open. Inside, policemen with rifles stood behind a wooden barrier; they were the first armed policemen Roche had seen that day. Between the whitewashed curbstones of the in-lane and the out-lane there was a garden: the ornamental blue-tiled pool empty; shrubs and plants dusty, growing out of dusty earth, but their flowers bright; clumps of the small gri-gri palm with their curving, notched trunks. The lane was black, freshly surfaced, the asphalt tacky in the heat. The parking lot, marked with new white lines, was in the shadow of the building. Meredith parked carefully, avoiding the white lines.
When they had got out of the car and were together again, walking to the entrance, which was at the side of the building, out of the sun, Roche said, “What about Jimmy?”
“He’s not present.”
“Not present? What do you mean? He’s been arrested?”
“That would be excessive. There are other people who will settle accounts with Jimmy. He’s in retirement. But you know more about Jimmy than I do.”
It was cool behind the glass doors. Meredith had lost his uncertainty. Here he was the journalist and the minister; he had stopped smiling and his manner was businesslike and official. The big brown woman at the desk stood up and was introduced to Roche. The policeman with the rifle stiffened and stared.
Meredith said to the woman, “We’ll use E studio.” He said to Roche, with a smile, “It has a nice view.”
They took the elevator and went up two floors. Meredith turned on a light in a dark corridor. They went a little way down this corridor, and Meredith pushed open double doors and turned on another dim light. The small room ahead was in darkness, the larger room to the left was bright.
Meredith said, “The studio manager’s not here. But I think we can go in. As you can see, it isn’t exactly BBC.”
He led Roche, through double doors, into the larger room. And when they were there he said, “Peter, do you mind waiting here for a little? I’ll go and see what’s happening to the SM.”