The Mimic Men (22 page)

Our relationship ended. It had been unproductive; it left no rancour. Yet its poison remained with me. It was with me at school. Eden said he wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting. He elaborated the idea crudely and often; it ceased to be a joke. He recognized this; in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel. Deschampsneufs said: ‘To see, or to be seen?’ He drew a grotesque picture of Eden with cloth cap, dark glasses, camera and white suit leaning over the rails of a ship, while sarong-clad Asiatics and Polynesians, abandoning their dances, rushed to the water’s edge to look at the strange tourist. For Eden had fixed on Asia as the continent he wished to travel in; he had been stirred by
Lord Jim.
His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden. Poor Eden. But, also, poor Browne. How could anyone, wishing only to abolish himself, go beyond a statement of distress?

At every reminder of our wide world I returned to that front room, his security, which he yet hated, where his
shop-assistant sister brought in her young man, from the Police, and for a minute or so – unease later defining itself – were like cartoon characters, exaggerating their roles: Browne the younger brother, someone to be bribed and handled flatteringly, the young man modest and aggressive and slightly ridiculous, the sister herself brisk and decisive and standing no nonsense in her home. Perhaps I exaggerated. It was my tendency at the time, part of my anxiety to put myself in the place of those I thought were distressed; and perhaps, like those misguided reformers who believe that for rich and poor there is no reality but money, I failed to see much. I minimized the innocence; I minimized the quality of personality. But so it is when we seek to forget ourselves by taking on the burden of others. Was it only for Browne that I was concerned?

I had begun to spend much time in the cinema. It was my own refuge. On weekdays I went either to the late afternoon show or the evening show. On Saturdays I went to the one-thirty afternoon show which some of the cheaper cinemas put on. It was the hottest time of day, but these shows were packed out by the young, attracted like myself by the atmosphere of holiday and licence. It was shockingly bright when we came out at about four; this was as dramatic and pleasing as the shock of true heat after an air-conditioned room.

I was at a one-thirty show one Saturday. It was very hot. Some of the rowdier college boys, mainly white and brown, took off their shirts. It began to rain. One or two groups continued shirtless, but they were noticeably quieter. The rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roof: that sound, comforting to us in the tropics, which people from other zones detest. Above the rain and the drumming came the sound of thunder, obliterating the soundtrack. The heavy
curtains over the open exits flapped and the rain spattered in. The rain went on, gust upon heavy gust crashing from one end of the roof to the other. Soon the floor of the cinema was running wet. We willingly gave up the film. Our tropical days were even; we enjoyed it when they were dramatized. But then I thought of our house and the dangers of rain. On the screen the film ran on, but the exit curtains had been pulled back by those who preferred to watch the rain, and the picture was faint. The soundtrack was inaudible. The diminished, pointless gestures of the actors gave pleasure to a rowdy few.

I went out and stood in the tiled lobby among the boards which displayed the posters, tacky in the damp, for the afternoon and the evening shows. It thundered; lightning was fluorescent; the trees in the park before us rocked in the wind, which fell and rose. The gutters were already full and, even as I watched, the pavements were covered. A cyclist went by. He was going nowhere in particular. He was simply cycling in water for the fun. More boys and girls came out and stood in the lobby to watch. We loved our bad weather. I thought of our house again, more urgently now; and, above drama, I felt alarm. A tree in the park groaned in a series of accelerating snaps and then slowly collapsed, rocking to rest on its branches. It was a great tree, one of those with a history. Its leaves were green and shining with wet, its shallow, lateral roots shaggy with earth.

I went out into the rain. The flooded pavement was indistinguishable from the road. Rain obscured our eastern hills and blurred all nearer outlines. Under shop eaves there were damp contemplative little groups. My mind played with images of disaster. It created a house reduced to rubble, embedded in rippled mud, like those tree trunks washed up on our coast. It created wet, isolated planks, crusted with old paint on one side, raw where newly exposed, twisted corrugated-iron sheets, death, the discovery later of
little intimate things. Walking in the rain, I knew the panic I sometimes felt when I lay down to sleep.

The rain slackened. I felt the wetness of my clothes and the coldness of the coins in my pockets. And when I got to our street I found only calm. Through some engineer’s skill this section of our city, though below sea-level, was especially well drained. There was no flooding here. The gutters were racing, but everything still stood, washed and shining with that newness which came to our roofs and roads and vegetation after rain. My mother was sewing. For her the rain had only been a Saturday afternoon drama, a cause for pleasant little shiverings in the cool. I was relieved. At least the discomfort and ridicule of disaster had been spared us. But, equally, I could not keep down disappointment: the disappointment of someone who had been denied the chance of making a fresh start, alone.

T
HE
house of my mother’s family was solid. I tested it whenever I went there for the week-end. I jumped on the floors when I thought no one was looking; and sometimes I lay flat on them to gauge their level. I leaned against walls to assess their straightness. These precautions made me feel safe and sent me to bed without fear. I did not like returning to the physical dangers of my own house, about which I could talk to no one, and I longed for the time when I would not have to make that particular journey. I thought that this absurd disorder, of placelessness, was part of youth and my general unease and that it would go as soon as I left Isabella. But certain emotions bridge the years. It was unease of just this sort which came to me when I began this book. There was then no fear of the collapse of either the hotel or the public house between which I divided my time – as I still divide it – but I sickeningly recognized that sense of captivity and lurking external threat, that pain of a rich world destroyed and rendered null. Perhaps it was the effort of writing. The houses by which I was surrounded – like those in a photograph I had studied in a Kensington High Street attic during a snowfall and sought in imagination to enter, to re-create that order which, as I thought, expressed its sweetness in young girls and especially in one in a jumper in a sunny back garden – the red brick houses became interchangeable with those others in our tropical street, of
corrugated iron and fretted white gables, which I had also once hoped never to see again. Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places. Sometimes by this linking the sense of place is destroyed, and we are ourselves alone: the young man, the boy, the child. The physical world, which we yet continue to prove, is then like a private fabrication we have always known.

A solid house, however. It also offered freedom from the island of Browne and Deschampsneufs. My early attempt at simplification had failed; it had ended in this switching back and forth between one world and another, one set of relationships and another. My grandparents’ house had changed. It had become a house of the young, mainly Cecil’s friends, the sons and daughters of business families like his own. The community they formed was small and new. It took me by surprise. I have said I was not interested in the credentials of Deschampsneufs’s family. But then I was not interested in the credentials of any family except my own. Outside school this had been my world, with Bella Bella and Coca-Cola its peaks. It had not occurred to me that there might be other families like mine with equal cause for self-love, people who made shirts or built roads and thought they were doing quite nicely. And it was disappointing, I must confess, to see the splendour of Bella Bella fade a little. These young people were like Cecil. They were not as extravagant, but they had the same capacity for talk about occasions they had just staged and occasions that were about to be staged. I could not feel for them the affection I felt for Cecil, who was my flesh and blood; and I could not feel I was part of their group. My sisters, though, fitted in easily. But if I was no longer completely at ease in the house, at least I found there no talk of past injury, no talk even of the past. These young people were of the new world. They made the photographs of Indian actors in the back veranda appear quaint and old; the prints, of gods and maidens and swings in the flower
spangled lawns of white palaces outlined in splayed perspective, were of an antiquated piety.

The house had another attraction. Sally had become my partner, Sally the stamper in a seersucker housecoat. Enemies as children, and bound by that special relationship, we had inevitably drawn closer in the changed house. No word was spoken. We simply came together; and nothing again was to equal that sudden understanding, that shared feeling of self-violation, which was for me security and purity. I could not conceive of myself with a girl or woman of another community or even of families like my own. Here for me was security, understanding, the relationship based on perfect knowledge, in which body of one flesh joined to body of the same flesh, and all external threat was diminished. Later I would have the reputation of a lecher and whoremaster. But in every relationship I would be aware of taint; I would recognize triumph or humiliation. There would be nothing again like this mutual acceptance, without words or declarations, without posturings or deceptions; and no flesh was to be as sweet as this, almost my own. I began to think of the world, which I had longed to enter, as the violation that awaited us both, inevitable but not the less painful; it was like growing old or dying. I felt I was losing the courage to enter that world. My longing to escape had turned sour; the island had become my past. My world had narrowed. And at the same time I felt I was like the older people in this house now of the young. I was like my mother and her parents, who found themselves waiting for the end in a house that had grown strange.

I had left school. The war was still on, and it was impossible to travel. I took a job. So did we all. Eden, fulfilling Major Grant’s prophecy about those boys who failed English, was snapped up by one of our newspapers. Hok – ‘the exception that proves the rule’: Major Grant’s reported words, when he heard the news – joined the
Inquirer
as a
feature-writer. His name presently began appearing above stylishly written articles, whose cleverness could still give me a twinge of jealousy, that jealousy – so easily converted into open admiration – which is the tribute we pay to the naturally brilliant. Browne worked as a clerk of some sort on the American army base. I heard he was writing a novel about a slave. Many people knew the plot: the slave leads a revolt, which is betrayed and brutally crushed; he escapes to the forest, reflects, arrives at self-disgust, and returns willingly to slavery and death. I saw a carbon of an early chapter, the second, I believe. The slaves arrive from Africa; they are happy to be on land again; they dance and sing; they beg to be bought quickly. The scene was all done in mime, as it were, and from a distance. It was brutal and disagreeable; I didn’t want to read more. I don’t believe more was written.

Deschampsneufs got a job in one of the banks. Those jobs in the banks! The resentment they aroused! They were reserved, quite sensibly, for those whose families had had some secure – rather than lustful and distant – experience of money; and these jobs had as a result acquired the glamour of whiteness and privilege. Eden met me one day on the street and told me enviously about Deschampsneufs’s duties. It seemed that Deschampsneufs had
already
been put on to weighing coins. To Eden this casual, wholesaler approach to the coin of the realm – as though it was just another commodity like flour or peas – was maddeningly luxurious. This was the level of our island innocence. And I could see, too, that Deschampsneufs was still up to his usual mischief: consciously exciting envy by revealing what he thought were secrets to people who, he rightly judged, longed to know them from the inside. He had succeeded with Eden, who was delighted to know that coins were weighed, and infuriated that he wasn’t allowed to do a little weighing himself.

I couldn’t give Eden the sympathy he needed. I wasn’t weighing coins. But I was doing an equally dreary job. I was working in a government department as an acting second-class clerk and writing out certificates of one sort and another by hand. The early months of any job are the longest, and I began to feel that I would never leave the department, that some disaster would occur and I would be compelled to stay there for the rest of my life. Pay-day was especially painful. Everybody came in frowning, in a simulated temper; no one spoke; and all morning subordinates and superiors applied themselves with every sign of pain to their duties, which on that day seemed especially onerous. At about ten the first-class clerk, like a man choking down rage, went off with a money sack to the Treasury; he came back an hour later and, losing nothing of his hangman’s grimness, sat down at his desk and distributed the money he had brought into various envelopes. No one looked at him; everyone was furiously at work. Then he made the rounds, offering envelopes and a sheet for signature. Everyone signed; no one checked his envelope. The older men handled their envelopes most casually of all, tossing them to one corner of their crowded tables or into a drawer, and just letting them lie there. Half an hour later the trips to the lavatory started; one by one the envelopes passed out of sight, their contents checked. After lunch it was like a holiday. The men were red-eyed and high, giving satisfied little belches; the girls giggled in the vault, showing one another the purchases, usually of underwear, they had made during the lunch hour.