The double doors closed behind Meredith as he went out, and there was silence in the studio. The sealed picture window gave Roche a view of the city such as he had never had. In the city center there was nothing to be seen except other buildings. But, here, in what had once been a good residential area, no tall buildings blocked the view, and Roche looked over roofs, silver or red, dramatized by the tall pillars and the dark-green fronds of the royal palm, to the sea, and to the hills that ran down, ridge after ridge, to the sea. The hills were bare and fire-marked, smoking in patches, but the sun was going down behind them, and the sea glittered. In the deep water behind those hills, doubtless, the American warships lay. But Roche, imagining the sunset soon to come, the hills and the royal palms against the evening sky, thought: It is, after all, very beautiful. It is a pity I’ve never seen it like this, and have never enjoyed it. And some time later he thought: But perhaps one never enjoys these things.
He was reducing his thoughts to words, formulating whole sentences. It was almost as if, in the silent room, waiting for Meredith, who seemed a long time, he had begun to talk to himself.
A silent room, a silent view: the picture window was made up of two panes of heavy glass, separated by a gap the width of the wall. The glass was radiating heat. Discovering this, Roche soon discovered that the room had a warm, stale, furry smell, as though dust and fluff were rising from the carpet.
The double doors were pushed open, and Meredith came in.
Meredith said, “The SM’s coming.”
“This studio’s stuffy.”
“The air conditioning can take a little time.”
They sat down at the round table with the microphone, the green bulb, the heavy glass ash tray.
Meredith said, “I have no notes. Let’s keep it like a conversation. What always matters is what you are saying or what I am saying, and not what you think you’re going to say next. Don’t worry about repeating or going back. Don’t worry about referring to things we’ve talked about in the past. Let’s keep it conversational, and let’s not pretend we don’t know one another. I’ll call you Peter and you’ll call me Meredith, if you want to call me anything at all. It’s going to be rough, you know, Peter.”
Roche said, “I’ve nothing to hide.” It was a line he had prepared.
A weak light came on in the adjoining cubicle and through the glass window a very tall man wearing a white shirt and a tie could be seen. He smiled at Roche and Meredith and sat down before his instruments.
Meredith said, “The SM.”
Roche was perspiring. He said, “I’m smelling dust everywhere. It’s the kind of thing that would give Harry asthma in a second.”
The voice of the studio manager came through the speaker: “Can we have something for voice level, please?” For such a big man, his voice was curiously soft, even effeminate.
Meredith, lifting his head slightly, smiled, for the studio manager, for Roche; and Roche noticed that Meredith was perspiring all over the wide gap between his everted nostrils and his mouth. Meredith said to the microphone, “Every day in every day I grow better and better.”
The studio manager gave a thumbs-up sign, and Meredith said, “Peter?”
Roche said to the microphone, “You need to do some vacuuming here.”
The green light on the table came on.
Meredith said, “We’ll go into it straight away.” He said to the microphone, “This is the Peter Roche interview for Encounter.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was lighter and more relaxed than it had been so far. “Peter, you were saying as we were driving here to the studio that you didn’t think you had anything more to do here. Would you like to go into that a little?”
“I’ve begun to feel like a stranger. Recent events have made me feel like a stranger.”
“Do you feel more like a stranger now than when you came — seven, eight months ago?”
“I never thought about it then. I was very happy to be here.”
“But didn’t you think, when you were coming here, a place you’d never been, that you were going to be a stranger?”
“A stranger in that way, yes. But I thought that there was work for me to do. I thought that certain problems had been settled here, and there was work I could do.”
“You mean racial problems?”
“Yes, racial problems, and all the things that go with it. I mean not carrying that burden, not wasting one’s time and one’s life carrying that burden. I thought there was work I could do here. Work.”
“I see you gesturing with your hands. I suppose by work you mean constructive work.”
“It’s a human need. I suppose one realizes that late.”
“Creativity. An escape into creativity.”
“If you want to put it like that.”
“But some people will find it odd, Peter, people who know your background — and now you tell us of your need for creative work — that you should look for this with a firm like the one you chose.”
“Sablich’s.”
“You’ve mentioned the name.”
“It wasn’t what I chose. I would say it was what offered itself. And I liked what they offered. I didn’t know much about them when I took the job.”
“But you know now.”
“It doesn’t alter my attitude. I know they have a past here, and that people think about them in a certain way. But I also know they have done a lot to change. The fact that they should want to employ me is a sign of that change, I think.”
“Some people might say public relations.”
“There is that. I always knew that. But isn’t that enough? I was more concerned with the work they offered, and what they offered seemed pretty fair to me. In a situation like that I believe one can only go by people’s professed intentions and attitudes. If you start probing too much and you look for absolute purity, you can end up doing nothing at all.”
“I can see how some of our attitudes can irritate you, Peter. And we’re all guilty. We have a special attitude to people who take up our cause. It is unfair, but we tend to look up to them.”
“But I didn’t think I had to keep to a straiter path than anybody else. I’m not on display. I don’t know why people here should think that.”
Roche’s temper had suddenly risen. He was sweating; his shirt was wet. He turned away from the microphone and said, “The air here is absolutely foul.”
“The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working efficiently,” Meredith said. He too was sweating. He looked about him, perfunctorily, and then he spoke to the microphone again.
“Peter, you say you came here for the opportunity of doing creative work, unhampered by other pressures. And you’ve done quite a lot. But in the public mind you have become associated with the idea of the agricultural commune. You know, back to the land, the revolution based on land. I don’t believe it’s a secret that it hasn’t been a success. Are you very disappointed?”
“It would have been nice if it had worked.”
“Did you think it would work?”
“I had my doubts. I thought it was antihistorical. All over the world people are leaving the land to go to the cities. And they know what they want. They want more excitement, more lights. They want to be richer. They also want to be brighter. They don’t want to feel they’re missing out. And most of them are missing out, of course.”
“You didn’t think the process could be reversed here?”
“Not after I’d been here. You can’t just go back to the land as a gesture. You can’t pretend. The land is a way of life.”
“And perhaps also a way of work. Not a way of dropping out. But I believe you’ve used the key word, Peter: pretend.”
“Only very rich people in very rich countries drop out. You can’t drop out if you’re poor.”