Meredith stood up, rising on his toes. “No, thank you, Adela. I’ve got to be going.”
Adela was approving. The look on her face suggested that her deference, and the polite words she had used, had been rewarded.
For some seconds Meredith rocked on his toes. “You must come back, Jane. Come back as a tourist. For a holiday.”
She looked at him with moist eyes and nodded. She appeared to hesitate, but then she said, “Good-by, Meredith.”
Roche didn’t move to interfere.
The light had gone. The hibiscus flowers were lost in the darkness. The sky in the east was a very dark blue. The mood of sunset was on Roche, the sense of the fragility of all their worlds. The studio manager, secure in the respectability of his clothes and his radio job; the policeman with the rifle in the lobby of the radio building; the woman at the desk, so deferential to Meredith; Meredith, Jane, himself. For all of them the world was fragile. And there had been a calamity.
Meredith, acting out his exit, his leather heels rapping on terrazzo and parquet, said loudly, as Roche walked with him to the front door, “You must listen tomorrow, Peter. It’s better than you think.”
14
ROCHE SAID, “It was awful.”
They were still sitting on the porch.
Jane said, “But why did you do it? There was nothing to make you stay there.”
“Vanity. The terrible vanity that makes you behave so stupidly on these occasions. And there was a third person there. A big black man from the country. He was in the cubicle. That’s always fataclass="underline" a third person. You start acting for this third person. You can’t let yourself down. You slip into a kind of lunacy, and it’s all of your own making. You think it’s all very logical and that you’re acting sensibly. But that man in the cubicle wasn’t even listening. Meredith called him the studio manager. Those people only hear sound and level. I don’t think he noticed anything.”
“Do you think they were in it together?”
“I don’t know. I thought at first that Meredith had had the air conditioning turned off deliberately. Then I thought I was wrong. Then again I thought he had done it deliberately. And then, you see, I wasn’t really surprised. I was half expecting something like that.”
“You didn’t ask them to check to see whether the thing was working?”
“No. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to mention it.”
“You didn’t even say This room’s very hot,’ or something like that?”
“I said that. I said the room needed vacuuming. But I didn’t want to mention the air conditioning. It’s one of those things that gets fixed in your mind. Vanity. Exasperation. Rage, contempt. I was half expecting something like that — I thought they had prepared something for me — but I was amazed that Meredith should want to try it on. And I can’t tell you how quickly on these occasions you begin to feel you have nothing to defend.”
Jane said with decision, “He did it deliberately. You made it very easy for him. And after that he wants to come to your house?”
“They like doing that. I could see so clearly what he was doing. That made it much worse. This nervous little man. Being anti-imperialist, antiwhite. Mopping up after the riots. The government man doing the black populist thing, laying all the enemies low. And so nervous. I could see him believing and not believing in what he was doing and saying — just like a lawyer. I found it so stupid, I can’t tell you. I was exasperated. Because Harry is right, you know. They’re just fattening up Meredith to throw him to the crowd at some future date.”
On the porch it was already cold. The fluorescent light from the kitchen fell on the back garden.
Jane said, “The water’s on. Go and have a good shower. You’ll feel much better.”
She spoke briskly, and she got up after she had spoken, picking up her lighter and cigarettes. But the tone of command in her voice went with a tenderness he hadn’t expected. He was comforted; he rose to obey her.
She surprised him like this sometimes, when she appeared to be natural and easy, another person, obeying instincts that had suddenly risen within her. The occasions were rare and abrupt, and remained separate from the rest of their life together; he remembered them. About a month after she had arrived, Jane had said to him one evening, “Your hair’s absolutely filthy. Come and I’ll wash it for you.” In his bathroom she stripped to her pants and brassiere; he took off his shirt and sat on a stool before the wash basin. Washing his hair seriously, speaking only about its filthiness, she had pressed against his shoulder; he felt her hairs and the bone beneath the pad of flesh. But there had been no overt sexual play; no sex had followed; they had been like children playing house.
THEY HAD dinner at the white table in the kitchen. Adela was in her room.
Roche said, “I didn’t say anything bad. Nothing that wasn’t true or I didn’t feel. In fact, nothing I said would have been bad last week, when publicly everybody was on Jimmy’s side. It would have been good publicity. Jimmy would have regarded it as good publicity: controversial figure and so on. But with Meredith today I should have acknowledged that Jimmy was washed up. That would have given the whole thing a different slant. But I didn’t. And that was the trouble. When Meredith picked me up outside Sablich’s I just felt I didn’t want to refer to anything that had happened since Sunday. I didn’t even talk to him about being a minister. And so in the studio I was still pretending that Jimmy hadn’t fallen. You do get these ideas in your head on these occasions, and you never let them go.”
Jane said, “Perhaps Jimmy won’t hear the broadcast.”
“Meredith will make sure that he does. But I didn’t say anything bad. I said that Jimmy was easily bored and that you had to bring him down to earth. It’s the kind of thing I’ve said to him on many occasions. I said I didn’t think the commune was a good idea. I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. And of course Meredith made it all much worse. He made us out to be frauds.”
“Which is what he is. Did he talk about the woman in Wimbledon?”
“He brought her in.”
“Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Do you know what I think you’ve done? You’ve left Jimmy out there for Meredith and those other people to kill.”
“Yes, it will get to that. I don’t think those people know how close they’re getting to that situation. It’s so frightening when you begin to feel the sands shifting under you and there’s nothing to cling to. There’s no law.”
“You’re getting out, though. That man’s got to stay in that house and wait for them to do whatever they’re going to do.”
“Yes. One day there’s going to be an accident. I hope it doesn’t get to that. It’s so odd. When you’re out in the country, in the old estates, and you see the country people walking to church or rocking in their hammocks or drinking in their little bars, you don’t think it’s that kind of country. But every country is that kind of country. People would be frightened if they know how easily it comes. Meredith wanted to know about torture. I should have told him. You only have to start. It’s the first kick in the groin that matters. It takes a lot to do that. After that you can do anything. You can find yourself kicking a man in the groin until he bleeds. Then you find you’ve stopped tormenting. You’ve destroyed a human being. You can’t put him together again, and all you can do is throw the bleeding meat out of the window. At that stage it’s so easy.”
Jane said, “But you’re getting out.”
Roche said, with irony, “Yes. I suppose I will just go back to London and forget it all.”
The mood in which he had left the porch, the mood in which he had sat down at the kitchen table, had vanished. For some time they said nothing.