The Mimic Men: A Novel

  My obsession took an odd turn. I developed the fear that our old timber house was unsafe. It was not uncommon in our city for houses to tumble down; during the rainy season our newspapers were full of such tragedies. I began to look for these reports, and every report added to my fear. As soon as I lay down on my bed my heart beat faster, and I mistook its throbbing for the shaking of the house. At times my head swam; ceiling and walls seemed about to cave in on me; I felt my bed tilt and I held on in a cold sweat until the disturbance passed. I was safe and lucid only when I was out of the house. So more and more I found myself abroad in that island whose secrets Browne was bent on revealing to me.

  I had been able at certain moments to think of Isabella as deserted and awaiting discovery. Browne showed me that its tropical appearance was contrived; there was history in the vegetation we considered most natural and characteristic. About the bread-fruit and Captain Bligh we all knew. He told me about the coconut, which fringed our beaches, about the sugarcane, the bamboo and mango. He told me about our flowers, whose colours we saw afresh in the postcards which were beginning to appear in our shops. The war was bringing us visitors, who saw more clearly than we did; we learned to see with them, and we were seeing only like visitors. In the heart of the city he showed me a clump of old fruit trees: the site of a slave provision ground. From this point look above the roofs of the city, and imagine! Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the intestines of slaves.

  This was what Browne taught. This was the subject of his own secret reading. I thought his passion would resolve itself in a definition of a purpose or even an attitude. I was patient. But no definition came. He appeared to pursue the subject for its own sake. His friendship became a burden.

  He cycled up to our house one Saturday morning and rang his bicycle bell from the street. Neither he nor any other boy from the school, except Cecil, had come to our house before. The visit showed to what extent we had abolished the private hemisphere of school, and I feel sure it was intended as a gesture. I was not in. My mother had not seen Browne before. She saw only an urchin of the people sitting on his bicycle saddle, ringing his bell and smiling. It was an unfortunate characteristic of Browne’s – until in his thirties he grew a beard – that he always appeared to be smiling nervously. The skin from his lower lip to the tip of his chin was curiously taut and corrugated; it was as though he was holding back a laugh. At the very tip of this chin, accentuating the smile that wasn’t a smile, was a wart; from a distance this looked like a drop of water and suggested that Browne had just washed his face and not bothered to dry it. All this gave him the comedian’s appearance which his parents had exploited. My mother looked out from between the ferns on our veranda and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. But he used my last name. My mother thought he was another mocker of her husband and herself and drove him away as she would have driven away a street arab.

  I was appalled when I heard. I knew where he lived and I went straight there. His house was as old as ours and of similar style. But it was on one of the busy streets of the city; it had no veranda and rose almost directly from the pavement, with a jalousied top half. A genuine old-time Negro, grey-headed and pipe-smoking, was leaning out of a window and vacantly regarding the crowded street. He wore a grimy flannel vest. A flannel vest was proletarian wear – flannel the favoured material of Negroes enfeebled by illness or old age – and I wished I had not seen it on Browne’s father. Next to the house was a Negro barbershop called The Kremlin – Negro barber-shops liked to attach such remote drama to themselves – with a caged parrot in the doorway.

  I greeted the Negro in the flannel vest and, remembering Browne’s misadventure at my house, hurriedly identified myself as a colleague of Browne’s at Isabella Imperial. I also took care to ask whether ‘Ethelbert’ was at home. It embarrassed me to use the name. I never had before and as I spoke it I remembered what Browne himself had told me: that slaves were frequently given the names of Anglo-Saxon kings or Roman generals. Browne’s father, he who had dressed up his son years before and taught him the words of the coon song, was at once attention. He grunted through his pipe, hurried to open the front door, and then was anxious for me to sit down. It was an honour not to me but to Isabella Imperial, the famous school, where a poor boy who behaved well and was attentive to his books could win a scholarship: this meant studies abroad, a profession, independence, the past wiped out.

  There were two bentwood rockers in the front part of the room. He made me sit on one, called out ‘Bertie!’ and sat on the other, sucking at his pipe in old-time Negro fashion and staring at me while he rocked. Bertie! The home name! It was like opening a private letter. I felt that Browne wouldn’t care for this visit, for the revelation of his father in his flannel vest, which was grimy with little rolls of dirt. It was a narrow room, bounded by a maroon curtain whose reflection darkened the stained and polished floor. Beyond the rockers on which we sat four upright cane-bottomed chairs were arranged around a marble-topped centre table on three legs. The marble was covered with a white lacy material. On it was a brass tray with a stunted but still top-heavy palm in a tin wrapped around with crepe paper. At the top of the tin the crepe paper was finely fringed, almost minced, and fluffed out. On one wall, ochre-coloured with white facings, there were framed pictures of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Haile Selassie, and Jesus. Against the opposite wall was a glass-doored cabinet with coloured tumblers, cherubs and pink-and-white ladies in glazed clay, three drunk top-hatted men in battered evening dress under a lamp standard, and a bouquet of paper flowers. Above this cabinet was a large photograph of a Negro man and woman, a girl, and a much bedecked boy whose tight chin with water-drop wart revealed him as Browne the comic singer, all standing before a painted backdrop of a ruined Greek temple. Browne’s father followed my eyes. He was past pride; but in his look there was that satisfaction which comes to the old and foolish who feel they have done a lot by living long.

  He called out again in his strangled voice: ‘Bertie!’ And presently Browne pushed through the maroon curtain. He was wearing washed-out and frayed khaki shorts; he was barefooted; his eyes were red. He had been having a Saturday afternoon nap. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His father rocked, settling down to enjoy the dialogue between two scholars of Isabella Imperial. Browne barely greeted me and instantly pushed through the maroon curtain again. I had a glimpse of a small oval cyp dining table and some heavy polished chairs. I heard voices. Browne’s was raised in irritation; I heard him say something about that black jackass. Then to him who had shouted ‘Bertie!’ there came a female call, pretending to be less than a shout, of ‘Caesar!’ and ‘Caesar!’ again; and Caesar Browne got up and padded carefully over the polished floor in his slippers, cut-down canvas shoes, towards the maroon curtain, from behind which he was given an invisible tug, so that he appeared suddenly to have lost control of his limbs; and so, swiftly, he vanished.

  Browne himself, when he reappeared, had a shirt over his flannel vest. The tropics do impose on their inhabitants this recurring indignity of undress, which only above a certain level turns to style. He sat in the rocker left empty by his father and yawned and passed his hands over his legs. He aimed at casualness, but he was glum and less than welcoming. I said I had come to borrow his copy of Peñas Arriba. He wasn’t fooled. But it gave him something to do. He went and got the book. It was the book of the careful student. Its covers were wrapped in brown shop-paper and were dark, furred and almost worn through at the edges where the palm had closed over them on those sweaty journeys to school. I thought it had a peculiar smell. I had nothing more to say. Then Browne’s sister came in with her boy-friend, from the Police. The tiny room was suddenly alive. For a minute or so, with indefinable unease, I witnessed actions and listened to talk. Then I left.

  I ought not to have gone. I shoul
d have ignored Browne’s misadventure; I should never have let him know that I knew. We never forgive those who catch us in postures of indignity. That Saturday, with its two gestures, its two visits, its two failures, marked the end of the special intensity of our relationship. I cannot deny that I was relieved. I had been choked in that interior, and not only by its smallness. Joe Louis and Haile Selassie on the wall, the flannel vest, the family photograph, that black jackass: it was more than an interior I had entered. I felt I had had a glimpse of the prison of the spirit in which Browne lived, to which he awakened every day. In those rooms he collected his facts, out of which he could make no pattern. I doubted whether he knew why he passed on those facts to me. He wanted me to share distress. But, irritatingly, he stopped at distress. And as I left the house it occurred to me that distress was part of his reality, was nothing more, could lead to nothing. Into that private horror I did not want to be drawn again. Put Eden in those rooms, and it would have been fitting and comic. But Browne’s nerves denied comedy. In that interior all the attributes of his race and class were like secrets no friend ought to have gazed upon.

  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.

  5

  THE 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 emotio
ns 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.