The Mimic Men (26 page)

‘He was all right.’

‘He told you about his ancestress?’

‘I heard about her.’

‘Poor Deschampsneufs.’

‘I don’t see how anybody can call Deschampsneufs poor.’

‘It’s pathetic, really. He’s got this French thing.’

‘I know.’

‘But of course, as you know, the Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’

The phrase came out whole: it had been used before. I felt choked. I wanted fresh air. I wished to be among people of greater fears.

‘Des told me you were going abroad to further your studies.’ He used the newspaper words. His thin hair fell crinkly and wet over his sallow forehead, above eyes hollow from glasses. ‘You know, it’s an odd thing. But I’ve never been abroad. All my friends they go abroad and come back and say what a wonderful time they had. But I note they all come back. I tell you, boy, this place is a paradise.’ That word again. ‘I suppose you going to do like all the others and come back with a whitey-pokey.’ Again that word.

He lifted his hand to his forehead to push back the loose hair. I studied his veins. They were like the map of a river. Whitey-pokey: I had learned to read that word. The Niger was a tributary of that Seine, in paradise. Fresh air! Escape! To bigger fears, to bigger men, to bigger lands, to continents with mountains five miles high and rivers so wide you couldn’t see the other bank, to journeys that took two days and a night. Goodbye to this encircling, tainted sea!

My friends from Isabella Imperial planned a dinner for me. I was overwhelmed by the gesture. It was sweet to find that after all the fumbling with relationships I had friends who wished to mark my going. Too sweet; too disturbing. When Hok came to take me in his car to the restaurant I made some excuse. I couldn’t explain why at the last minute I no longer wanted to go. It was an impulse of childishness, no doubt: a fear of the big occasion, a fear of warmth and friendship, a poisoning feeling of inadequacy and the wish to be alone with that sudden, nameless hurt. I don’t know. I was ashamed and regretful a moment after he had left,
taking my excuse to the others. The next morning he brought the book they were going to give me. It carried all their stylish, evolving signatures.
Fête Champêtre: The Paintings of Watteau and Fragonard.
I felt that the choice of book had been left to Deschampsneufs.

It was only on the ship, well on my way, that I came upon a narrow strip of paper between the pages. It carried an unsigned typewritten message:
Some day we shall meet, and some day.
… I suspected Hok, because of the typing and because the paper was of the sort used for copy in newspaper offices. It was like that last family lunch my father had arranged. There is something after all in the staged occasion, the formal sentiment. It came to me on the ocean, this message ending in dots, telling me that all my notions of shipwreck were false, telling me this against my will, telling me I had created my past, that patterns of happiness or unhappiness had already been more or less decided.

I thought of Columbus as hour after hour, day after day – with no pause at night, as I had been half-expecting – we moved through that immense ocean. The wind whipped the crests of the waves into rainbow-shot spray. The sunlight grew paler and faded; the rainbows disappeared. I thought of that world which, as I was steadily separated from it, became less and less discovered, less and less real. No more foolish fears: I was never to return.

And witness me then, just four months later, standing in the attic of a boarding-house called a private hotel in the Kensington High Street area, holding a photograph of a girl and praying for a little bit of immortality, a prophylactic against the greater disorder, the greater shipwreck that had come to me already.

I
WISHED
then to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time. I was in London, awaiting health, Sandra my luck, when I heard that my father was dead. The news came in a guarded letter from my sister. I went to the British Council reading room, to which I had been long a stranger, to look at our local newspapers. What was not even a paragraph in a London paper had made headlines in the
Inquirer,
with photographs of the camp I had seen once, now unfamiliar and oddly exposed with officials and policemen standing about. My father had been shot dead, and a woman with him. The weapon was a Luger. The news required a response. It required sentiment and the opposite of sentiment. I walked about the streets. Later I went with a prostitute. I was full of my news. But I saved it for the end. Her shallow whorish reaction, of sentiment and reproof, was all I could have asked for. Later, in the blankness of night, I cried on Sandra’s breasts. And suddenly I discovered I was ready to leave. We left from Avon-mouth. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed south and sailed for thirteen days.

A
S
I write, my own view of my actions alters. I have said that my marriage and the political career which succeeded it and seemed to flow from it, all that active part of my life, occurred in a sort of parenthesis. I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts which in some way got out of control. But now, with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical or dishonest. I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others. The personality hangs together. It is one and indivisible.

Sandra saw in me a husband. She was right. She saw what was there. I think of the day she left. It was officially on a shopping trip to Miami. This was a pilgrimage our group was beginning to establish as fashionable. From these trips our women returned with large light parcels in unfamiliar wrappings and that day’s edition of the
Miami Herald:
dramatic sunglassed figures as they stepped out of the Pan-American aeroplane. For me it was a moment of another type of drama: the aeroplane the cinematic symbol: Bogart in
Casablanca,
macintoshed, alone on the tarmac, the Dakota taking off into the night.

Afterwards I drove back to the Roman house. I walked around the central swimming-pool, the fountains splashing
noisily into the blue water, no one now, I thought, to listen to them. I went to her room and looked through her cupboards. There was no sign that she intended to return. Some shoes she had left behind, abandoned for good, some dresses she hadn’t worn for some time. I held a shoe and studied the worn heel, the minute cracks in the leather. I touched the dresses. I was light with whisky; the gestures seemed suitable for a moment of private theatre.

It was only later, minutes later, when the ceaseless splash of the fountains became unbearable and the feeling of relief I was stimulating suddenly vanished, that I knew that the gesture, however self-regarding and theatrical, of handling Sandra’s abandoned shoes and dresses, yet held something of truth: as that other gesture, in London of the magical light, on the day of my first snow, of holding the creased photograph of an unknown girl and wishing for an instant to preserve it from further indignity.

It is with my political career as with that gesture. I used to say, with sincerity, that nothing in my life had prepared me for it. To the end I behaved as though it was to be judged as just another aspect of my dandyism. Criminal error! I exaggerated my frivolity, even to myself. For I find I have indeed been describing the youth and early manhood of a leader of some sort, a politician, or at least a disturber. I have established his isolation, his complex hurt and particular frenzy. And I believe I have also established, perhaps in this proclaimed frivolity, this lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion, his unsuitability for the role into which he was drawn, and his inevitable failure. From playacting to disorder: it is the pattern.

A name of peculiar power had been prepared for me. It was a name I had sought to deny. It was the one thing I kept
secret from Sandra, feeling the name like a deformity to which anyone might at any time refer. Now the name claimed me. And with the name there came again that uneasy relationship with Browne which I thought I had left behind for good when I went to London.

We were in London at the same time. But our interests never coincided – Browne, I imagine, was ferociously political and public-meeting and
New Statesman –
and I had met him only once. It was near Earl’s Court Station. He was in a great hurry, the macintosh flying behind him, and he shouted out to me without stopping as we crossed, ‘How, how, man? You know what happen just now? A bitch spit on me, man.’

‘Spit on you?’

‘Yes, man. Spit on me.’

We crossed; he was on his busy way; and that was all. It was as if he had seen me a few hours before and was going to see me again soon. He was very cheerful, considering the nature of his news. I wasn’t sure whether he had made up the story; whether he had heard of my way of life and was intending some irony; whether he had mistaken me for someone else; or whether the story was true and when he saw me he was still in a state of shock. He was in a hurry, as I have said. But I thought, even from that slight encounter, that London had had an effect on him, as it had had on me. He was lighter and freer than he had been in the sixth form.

Later, on the island, he had become something of a character; and that glimpse of him in London fitted. His character was of a special type. People like Browne were the nearest things we had to poets, renegades, interesting failures; they were people we cherished. He was a good example of the type: a man of the people, a scholarship boy who had not quite made good and was running to seed. He had given up his teaching job and had become a pamphleteer.
He wrote articles for the
Inquirer,
had rows with the editor, and made these rows the subject of further pamphlets. He was an occasional publisher, an occasional editor, and a tireless talker in the middle-class bars.

He talked better than he wrote. He was always intense but always, oddly, negative. He analysed situations acutely and with relish. But he gave equal weight to everything. He was content with a feverish analysis of each succeeding episode. He was saved by his ambivalent attitude towards the subject he most exploited: the distress of his race. He had written a venomous little pamphlet, anti-everybody, about the Negro skull, working out in this way some of the anger he had felt about an article in an American journal. Yet one of his favourite bar stories – he liked doing the upper-class English accent – was of the bewildered but honest English cricket captain who had cabled back to London in the 1880s:
Beaten by local team whereof six were black.
And it was Browne again who, while campaigning for the employment of Negroes in the firm of Cable and Wireless, supported their exclusion from the banks. He used to say: ‘If I thought black people were handling my few cents I wouldn’t sleep too well.’

On the subject of distress he was serious, without a doubt. But he was bitter only in his writings. He did not give the impression, which many others gave, of regarding a secreted and growing bitterness as a source of strength to come. Perhaps in his conversation he was trying unconsciously to flatter his hearers; for Browne, more noticeably now than at school, preferred the company of other races. It might be that he required alien witness to prove his own reality and make valid the distress he anatomized. Or perhaps it was that he feared to be alone with his distress, and could exercise his wit only with others. His frenzy seemed such a private thing. It was what we expected of our poets and, it might be, our clowns. It was attractive. There were
always people to support his most outrageous enterprises. I myself had taken the back cover of his pamphlet on the Negro skull for an understating advertisement:
Crippleville is a suburb.

When he came to the Roman house to urge me to proclaim my father’s name he had grown a small beard and was editing a paper called
The Socialist.
The beard went well with his thin face and slender body. It hid the wart on his chin and made him look less of a comedian. That was its sole motive. It had nothing to do with the paper which, after the first issue in which the policy was stated at length, contained little of socialism. Browne always stated the policy of each of his papers at length. He was a pamphleteer. Having stated the policy of his paper, he became bored with the paper; and most of his energies seemed to go in getting advertisements. What he wrote became increasingly bitty, gossipy and even disheartened; the reader got the impression that the editor was having trouble not only in getting advertisements but in getting things to put between them.

The Socialist
was at this stage when Browne came to see me. He said he had a plan and an idea. The plan was that I should put money in the paper, or in some other paper we might start together. The idea was that
The Socialist
should celebrate the anniversary of the dockworkers’ exodus from the city, and that I myself should write the main article about my father.

Certain ideas overwhelm us by their simplicity. It was the proclaiming of the name first of all that appealed to me; then the idea of the magazine. My excitement astonished, then excited, him. He made those gestures I knew so well – the washing of the hands, the whipping of the right index finger, the great swivel in the chair as he made some telling point. His interest in his own paper revived; he seemed almost ripe for another lengthy statement of editorial policy. His vision widened. He saw
The Socialist
as an international
paper, and he talked about the need for a ‘nationalist’ publishing house in the region. This was one of the schemes he often spoke about, and I knew it was just the sort of thing he might jump into. Even in my excitement, though, I could see a pointless business proposition. I steered him back to
The Socialist
and the anniversary number.