Complicated: Sandra could not have been expected to make my swift assessment, nor could it be transmitted to her in a few whispered words. She came and stood next to the gathered luggage. She looked quite bad-tempered, and I thought that this meant she was in control of herself and the situation; I expected nothing less of her. I told her that I thought it would be unwise if we went to my mother’s house. She said snappishly, in university jargon, ‘That’s an interesting approach to the subject. You don’t happen to have such a thing as a hotel on this damned island?’ I misinterpreted her mood; I thought she was being decisive. It was only later, when regret was valueless, that I saw that the greater callousness of my placidity that day was to Sandra rather than my mother. I relied on her forthrightness and what I thought was her vision; but to her this reliance must have seemed like abandonment at a moment when she was most insecure. I don’t think she ever forgave me or the island. Yet I acted from the finest feelings towards her! I remember with what affection I contemplated her as, exhausted by more than the warmth of our Isabella afternoon, she lay stretched out on the bed in the hotel room, in her clean white brassiere and chaste white cotton petticoat, below the electric ceiling fan. She wore the cheap, white-rimmed and I believe damaging sunglasses she had bought in the Azores. She smoked a cigarette, smoking in the factory-girl way, lips bunched wetly over the cigarette set in the centre of her mouth, inhaling deeply as though drawing urgently needed nourishment. It was a mannerism she had picked up in a government agricultural camp in Dorset where she had spent a month and where she had learned to smoke; it was a mannerism that attracted me greatly. The smoke eddied and thinned in the draught from the fan. I was exhausted myself, on the verge of self-pity; and considering the comic, intense, sunglassed figure on the bed, her skin just beginning to be moist, I thought that she was courageous to have come so far to a life of which she knew nothing. Until this journey she had never travelled or stayed in a hotel; and I felt that, catch though I might have been on the island of Isabella, I could not have provided better for a return to the island than by marriage to Sandra.
About a fortnight later — a fortnight, I imagine, of scenes in various drawing-rooms up and down the island — the expected meeting with my mother was arranged through my married sisters. We all had tea at a chipped metal table in the hot, scantily shaded patio of the hotel, brown and green-brown almond leaves at our feet, and decided on a reconciliation. But the damage was done. Just as Sandra exaggerated the importance of the dockside scene, so now she exaggerated her victory. I thought it made her character more pronounced still; it foreshadowed all that was to come.
5
THE sanctions my mother had invoked on the docks were not important. We were a haphazard, disordered and mixed society in which there could be nothing like damaging exclusion; and before the end of that first fortnight we had found ourselves attached to the neutral, fluid group which was to remain ours for the next five or six years. The men were professional, young, mainly Indian, with a couple of local whites and coloured; they had all studied abroad and married abroad; on Isabella they were linked less by their background and professional standing than by their expatriate and fantastically cosmopolitan wives or girl friends. Americans, singly and in pairs, were an added element. It was a group to whom the island was a setting; its activities and interests were no more than they seemed. There were no complicating loyalties or depths; for everyone the past had been cut away. In that fortnight we got to know as much about the group as there was to know; all that followed was repetition and ageing. But at the beginning we were dazzled. We had come to the island expecting the meanness and constriction of island life; we were dazzled, as by the sunlight itself, by the freedom which everyone who welcomed us proclaimed by his behaviour. The clothes! So light, so fresh, so prodigally changed! We were dazzled to be among the rich, to be considered of their number; and to get, from this, the conviction that in such a setting a com parable wealth would soon be ours as well. Austerity and prudence were forgotten. In that fortnight we spent! We gave as much as we received. We consumed quantities of champagne and caviar. It was part of the simplicity of our group; we loved champagne and caviar for the sake of the words alone. And after the anguish of London, after the mean rooms, the shut door, the tight window, the tarnished ceiling, the over-used curtains, after the rigged shilling-in-the-slot gas and electric meters, the dreary journeys through terraces of brick, the life reduced to insipidity, I felt revived. And even before the fortnight was out Sandra could be heard disdaining demisec and expressing a preference for Mercier above all others. The splendid girl! Sprung so sincerely from her commonness! It was our happiest fortnight; she was at her most avid and most appreciative. We celebrated our unexpected freedom; we celebrated the island and our knowledge, already growing ambiguous, of the world beyond; we celebrated our cosmopolitanism, which had more meaning here than it ever had in the halls of the British Council.
Celebration; and within it a great placidity. Once, longing for the world, I had wished to say goodbye to the island for good. Now, at a picnic on the hot sand of a beach reticulated with succulent-looking green vines on which grew purple flowers, or at a barbecue around an illuminated swimming-pool, it was possible without fear or longing or the feeling of being denied the world to draw out from one of our group her adolescent secret of cycle rides along a dirt road to the red hills outside her town, in a state west of the Mississippi, to see the sun set; to get from another a picture, in grey and white, of snow and Germans in Prague; and from yet another an English Midland landscape at dusk, a walk among moon daisies on the bank of a stream, an endless summer walk beside water, into a night scene, with swans; these, on the island, becoming pictures of a world now totally comprehended, of which I had ceased to feel I could form part and from which we had all managed to withdraw. I loved to contemplate this fragmented world that we had put together again; and I did so with the feeling of my own imminent extinction. I belonged to a small community which in this part of the world was doomed. We were an intermediate race, the genes passive, capable of disappearing in two generations into any of the three races of men, with perhaps only a shape of eye or flexibility of slender wrist to speak of our intrusion. My mother’s sanctions were a pretence, no doubt; but they were also an act of piety towards the past, towards ancient unknown wanderings in another continent. It was a piety I shared. But what release to be the last of one’s line! Consider this as an underlying mood, occasionally coming to the surface in an alcoholic haze when, the music from bands or record-players grown distant, I considered our group as though for the first time, and Sandra and myself within it. It was a mood never examined beyond this point, never revealed. It was the mood of my placidity, the mood of my new life of activity. Within me, with that very placidity, with that departure from London and that total acceptance of a new, ready-made way of life, I felt that I had changed. I recognized that the change was involuntary, so that at last my ‘character’ became not what others took it to be but something personal and ordained. This placidity, at the heart of celebration, I felt to be my strength; I visualized it as existing within a walled, impregnable field. I lived neutrally; activity was real, but it was all on the surface; I felt I would never allow myself to be damaged again.