The bodies were laid out side by side on the sand in the sun, the bathing costumes still like living parts of them, wet as my own costume would have been if I had been swimming. Away from the group around the stretched-out bodies little arguments had started between the fishermen and some of the people who had helped to pull the seine. The people wanted the fish; the fishermen wanted money for the fish; the people said the fishermen had already been paid, and just for casting the seine. One toothless fisherman continually spoke obscenities. Eventually it was settled. I believe the fisherman got their money. The bodies were taken away; and on the low-tide beach, shining everywhere else, there remained matt marks where the bodies had lain, scrapings and scratchings and scuffed sand to show, just for a few more hours, what had happened. The beach was strewn with small fish, so recently whole and now so dull, so like garbage, silver turning to dark grey. The pariah dogs prowled nervously. The vultures watched from the coconut trees. The stingray, on its brown back, its underside bluish-white, showed a bloody stump where its tail had been hacked off.
The beach in this section of our island stretched for more than twenty miles, broken at intervals by the neat channels of streams, fresh but brackish, that flowed into the ocean from the cocoteraie. Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea. On the beach itself the banks of these channels, the tide now rising, were continually undermined, fell off in vertical sections; and then the process of rounding and undermining began again: a geography lesson in miniature, with time speeded up. Here lay the tree, fast in the sand which was deep and level around it; impossible now to shift, what once had floated lightly on the waters, coming to the end of its journey at a particular moment; the home now of scores of alien creatures, which scattered at my approach. Here the island was like a place still awaiting Columbus and discovery.
And what was an unmarked boy doing here, shipwrecked chieftain on an unknown shore, awaiting rescue, awaiting the arrival of ships of curious shape to take him back to his mountains? Poor boy, poor leader. But I was not unmarked. The camera was in the sky. It followed the boy, tiny from such a height, who walked at the edge of the sea beside the mangrove of a distant island, an island as lost and deserted as those which, in films like The Black Swan, to soft rippling music, to the bellying of sails of ancient ships, appeared in the clear morning light to the anxious man on deck. Not unmarked. Therefore there was to be no fear. Back through the late afternoon, already turning to night, along the empty beach with its immemorial noise, I walked without fear.
Pinpoints of light, winking, never still, appeared in the distance, like things imagined in the darkness. It was the day of the full moon, when female crabs came out of their holes and went to the waters to wash the eggs they carried on the underside of their bellies, and were surprised by electric torches and captured. I walked towards the dancing lights. I crossed the crab-catchers. They wore hats and were buttoned up against the night breeze. I had exhausted my mood when I came within sight of the beach house, its dim lights diffused more dimly through the tangled coconut gloom.
There was a small figure on the beach stamping on the sand. It was Cecil. He was stamping out his name in huge letters, really enormous letters. It was just the sort of idleness to which he devoted himself with energy. I stood and watched him as the moon came up. We didn’t speak. I knew he was expecting me either to help him stamp out his name or to begin my own. I made no move to do either. I left him there and walked towards the house. It didn’t surprise me that he abandoned his name and followed me. I heard When I Grow Too Old to Dream on the gramophone. Through an open window I saw that the girls were dancing. I went to the window and leaned on the ledge. It was gritty and sticky with sand and salt.
I said: ‘Sally, do you know what I think you are?’
She fell into the trap. She said, ‘No, what?’
‘I think you are a fool.’
I had the pleasure of seeing her stamp.
At school I never mentioned my seaside holiday. I let Deschampsneufs tell of the drownings and his effort with the seine and listened as one to whom it was all new.
So at last, in this matter of relationships at any rate, I began to eliminate and simplify. I concentrated on school and relationships within that private hemisphere. I did not take to my books or become a crammer: I still retained my pride. Cecil was prepared to admire a brilliant student; and his father often quietly gave money and other help to poor and promising boys of various races. But the feeling still existed among us that education was mainly for the lower classes. I did not go so far myself. My ideal was to be brilliant without appearing to try. But though I thought this was just what Hok brought off, I gave up competing with him in this business of being ‘nervous’.
I took up sport. I put my name down for cricket. I thought I would be a bowler and needless to say I wished to bowl very fast. I took a long run and not infrequently at the end lost control of both the run and the ball. I did not last on any side. But the effort was not wasted. I lost some of my selfconsciousness. It takes some doing, after all, to put on the absurd garb of the cricketer and to walk with a straight face to the middle! Hok and his supporters scoffed at my new character. I did not mind. I had my compensation in the astonishing number of boys who, in spite of my obvious failures, accepted me as a sportsman. While I was ‘nervous’ I was in fact unsure of myself. Seeing myself as weak and variable and clinging, I had looked for similar weaknesses in others. This was the cynicism I now arrested. The discovery that many were willing to take me for what I said I was was pure joy. It was like a revelation of wholeness.
I do not wish to claim too much for the playing fields of Isabella Imperial, or rather — to diminish the grandeur and destroy the comparison the plural unavoidably evokes — its somewhat ragged cricket pitch. But it was there that I acquired a certain composure and a certain attitude. I could not at the time formulate that attitude. But it was an attitude, I now see, towards the fact of an audience. And it was this. An audience is never important. An audience is made up of individuals most of whom are likely to be your inferiors. A disagreeable confession; but I have never believed the actor who says he ‘loves’ his audience. He loves his audience in the way he might love his dogs. The successful public performer in whatever field operates, not perhaps from contempt, but from a profound lack of regard for his audience. The actor is separate from those who applaud him; the leader, and particularly the popular leader, is separate from the led. My later career as a public speaker and handler of men surprised many and was seen by some as a violent breaking out of character. It did not appear so to me. The public speaker was only another version of the absurd schoolboy cricketer, selfconsciousness suppressed, the audience ignored, at the nets of Isabella Imperial.