The Mimic Men: A Novel

  Once before, as a young man, I had been in a situation where I would have had to laugh my way to death by a Luger on a sunless beach; to the end I would have had to pretend that it was a joke, because it might have been. So now I found myself imprisoned in pretence, when it was so clear what was being prepared. On both occasions I might have cried out: ‘No! You are not going to kill me!’ On both occasions the reply might have been: ‘But who is going to kill you?’ Better the pretence, the joke.

  Every day of drifting made withdrawal less easy. Every day of drifting weakened me. The strength was mine: control awaited me, awaited my plain statement. I do not exaggerate. In a confused situation my position was as clear as it always had been, and from the very falseness of this position I could have drawn together sufficient of the elements of our island to make my power certain and to restore calm. There were the ideologues to whom The Socialist had remained as an organ of internal opposition; there were those who had seen in the bauxite contract the only true achievement of our government; there was the middle class, of all races, whom my presence in the cabinet had always reassured; there were the workers on the estates, who sought only a spokesman for their strength. All these looked to me; all these I let down. Control, the challenge to kill, was the only alternative to pretence. But control, the prospect of power, and its corollary, the prospect of keeping power in a situation which would always turn to air in my hands, the prospect wearied me.

  My sense of drama failed. This to me was the true loss. For four years drama had supported me; now, abruptly, drama failed. It was a private loss; thoughts of irresponsibility or duty dwindled, became absurd. I struggled to keep drama alive, for its replacement was despair: the vision of a boy walking on an endless desolate beach, between vegetation living, rotting, collapsed, and a mindless, living sea. No calm then: that came later, fleetingly. Drama failing, I knew frenzy. Frenzy kept me silent. And silence committed me to pretence.

  Nationalization? I would go to London. The idea of a delegation had been accepted: much work had been done behind the scenes, by friend and enemy. In the fortnight I would be away I would be undermined. Violence would be sustained; I would have nothing to return to. I began to know relief, to tell the truth; I longed to leave.

  6

  RELIEF: I was astonished by the mood that settled on me. Departure had eluded me once before. Now at last, deviously, it was coming: fulfilment and truth. There would be a return, of course; but that would be in the nature of a visit, an ascertaining of what I knew would be there. The time before a departure is a splendid thing. I made my preparations slowly. My briefing was the least of my worries. I had the facts at my fingertips and knew our arguments by heart. And London had made its attitude clear. It would accept a delegation, but the delegation would not be received by the Minister. London was playing the game up to a point, doing us a favour.

  Crop-time in Isabella, of the burning sugar-cane fields: early spring in London. The overcoat, then, which it had always given me pleasure to hold over my arm in all the light and heat of our airport lounge: the mark of the man required to travel. On the road to the airport: houses of tin and timber, Mediterranean colours, fields, trees, shops, hoardings, the black face advertisements for toothpaste and stout: none of this would be seen with the eye of possession again. At the airport there was a demonstration. It surprised me, this thoroughness. It was of our movement, of course; it was favourable. I made a speech suited to the occasion; it came as easily as the others. My last speech: I kept my style to the end. Presently we were sealed off, and rising above fields, rivers, roads and settlements whose logic had never been clearer.

  Such a send-off; and an almost private arrival at London Airport. This might have made me sensible of the pathos of the politics of places like ours. But now it fitted my mood. A representative of our Commission; junior officials from the Ministry; no newspapermen. But there was a motorcar and a chauffeur; and, at the end of the journey, a first-class hotel. There are few things as fine as an arrival at a first-class hotel in a big city. One is luxuriously housed, with the responsibility only of paying the bill. About one there is a muted, urgent hum of activity: a score of services await one’s lightest call. Glamour touches everyone: the chambermaid, the telephone girl, whose accent and intonation remain with one, the men at the desk, the girl at the newspaper kiosk. They are part of the fairyland, which continues as fairyland until one catches sight of the telephonist at her winking board, the weary uniformed figures sitting slackly on chairs in the laundry rooms, and one sees the pale night-clerk arriving in his shabby macintosh, until the structure of fairyland becomes plain, and the hotel becomes a place of work, linked not to the glamour of airline timetables in racks but to houses such as those seen on the drive from the airport. This is the time to leave; this is when the days begin to race and grow tasteless. Until this time, though, the hotel is a place which radiates its magic to the city.

  I was free. Such talks with officials as we had planned were not to take place for a few days. I was alone. Many of my aides had disappeared into various corners of the city, seeking pleasure or looking up friends and relations, students or immigrants, for whom they had brought gifts of rum and cigarettes. How easily in this city they dwindled! A link, this, with my own past in the city. But this was the city which, exploring now from the hotel, I consciously tried to abolish. I had dissected and destroyed the glamour of this city; I had seen it as made up of individuals; I had ceased to see.

  Now I tried to re-create the city as show: that city of the magical light in which I could walk without shadow. I tried to rediscover the warm, sweetly pungent smell of tobacconists’ shops and the acrid smell of the sooty cold air at dusk. I tried to be a tourist in the city which once had taught me the impossibility of escape. And such was my mood, I succeeded. For three days I was completely happy. The days were not quite blank. Each day there was some event to which I could anchor myself: a lunch with some businessmen; a dinner with the London representatives of our Isabella newspapers; an interview for the B.B.C.’s Overseas Service, recorded in Bush House, in whose basement canteen Sandra, macintoshed, hysterical with a vision of the future she was afraid to read, had proposed to me.

  But there was the work of the delegation. The news from Isabella became worse; there was more violence; a paragraph appeared in the Daily Telegraph. We had our talks with the officials. They said what they had said many times before and what we expected them to say. They outlined clearly and concisely the consequences of nationalization. Our meetings need have lasted only a minute; we made them last three days and held daily press conferences which were ignored by the London newspapers. Was it my imagination, though, that detected a more than official hostility towards myself? I sensed that I was personally disapproved of, a racialist and a radical, a dangerous man, a troublemaker where there need only have been stability.

  So the hardening of attitudes in Isabella, during my three free days, was reflected in London. I could do nothing; I had committed myself to our game. And I could not help adding to the unfavourable impression. The talks with the officials ended in failure. I insisted on seeing the Minister: it was the only thing left for me to do. My request was twice refused. I was told the second time that I could be invited to a lunch at which the Minister would be present. I used the last manoeuvre that remained to me: I called the representatives of the Isabella press and told them of my request. Two days later I was told that the Minister would meet me, but without my delegation. It was better than nothing.

  It was a brief, humiliating meeting. This man, whom in other, humbler capacities I had met more than once before on various government trips to London and had thought affable and slightly foolish, now barely had time for the courtesies. His manner indicated clearly that our game had gone on long enough and he had other things to do than to assist the public relations of colonial politicians. In about forty-five seconds he painted so lively a picture of the consequences of any intemperate action by the government of Isabel
la that I felt personally rebuked.

  Then I spoke the sentence which tormented me almost as soon as I had said it. It was this which no doubt made the interview so painful in recollection. I said, ‘How can I take this message back to my people?’ ‘My people’: for that I deserved all I got. He said: ‘You can take back to your people any message you like.’ And that was the end.

  I was shattered. I had entered the game so lightly. I had walked as a tourist about the Minister’s city. Now I played, but helplessly, knowing my own isolation, with visions of destruction. But all about me were signs of growth and gaiety, reconstruction and colour. I felt the hopelessness of the wish for revenge for all that this city had inflicted on me. How easy it was to dwindle in this city! How easy to be the boy, the student that one had been! Where now the magical light? I walked about the terrible city. Wider roads than I had remembered, more cars, a sharper smell. It was too warm for an overcoat; I perspired. I got into quarrels with taxi-drivers, picked rows with waiters and saleswomen. Undignified, but I felt I was bleeding, with that second intimation of the forlornness of the city on which, twice, I had fixed so important a hope.

  Balm came from an unexpected source, from Lord Stock-well himself, whose estates were at issue. He wrote me a letter in his own difficult hand – each letter separate but barely decipherable – inviting me to dinner. I thought it politic to accept, though it was not pleasant to contemplate attending this celebratory dinner. So I thought it. I expected something vaguely official; I felt sure that the Minister had reported, with relish, our brief exchange. I began to secrete bitterness and found that it gave me strength of a sort. And it was in this mood, which had displeased me in others, that I went. The mood held drama; it supported me in the dark taxi-cab; I was prepared to assault the driver at the first sign of deviousness. I was ripe for a full public scene. It was a reaction of simplicity, based on an ignorance both of Lord Stockwell and of the behaviour of the secure. I ought to have known better; I knew better. I was astonished at myself, at this example of derangement and coarsening.

  The taxi-driver was not devious. We parted in silence. I rang at the door. It was opened by a Southern European of some sort, slum-faced, pallid, grave. I noticed little else just then. I felt I had spent my life in interiors like these. It wiped out, what at that moment it should have sharpened, memories of black mud and red-and-ochre overseers’ compounds. The man took my overcoat, folded it and put it on a chair, below a Kalighat painting, momentarily disturbing because so unexpected: Krishna, the blue god, upright, left leg crossed in front of right, flute at his lips, wooing a white milkmaid. A door opened, my name was announced. Women, from whose faces I averted my gaze: the sudden reassertion of childhood training; a small man; a very big man moving towards me, very tall, a large paunch emphasized by a buttoned jacket, a heavy curving lower lip. I had expected someone much smaller and neater.

  The introductions were made. A woman’s voice rumbled. Something about the weather, perhaps; a query about what I thought of London; something about the sunshine of Isabella. I couldn’t say. At the sound of the voice I closed my mind to what was being said; my mood tightened, dangerously, inside me. This time the enemy was going to be killed, and swiftly.

  Then Lord Stockwell said: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ And the room became real again. I was impressed; I was pleased; I was relieved. This balm I sorely needed. I was foolishly grateful. Then Lord Stockwell added: ‘Your father never did.’ And left me to ponder afresh the name I carried. For a long time after that he said nothing at all.

  The women took over. There were three women: Lady Stockwell, her daughter Stella, and a woman of about forty-five whose name I didn’t pick up throughout the evening. Much care had been expended on her characterless features; she was attached to the small man, whose name and functions equally eluded me. Mine, happily, also appeared to elude them. They intermittently showed me a courteous, incurious interest and sometimes asked a question – was I in London on business? – which in the circumstances was tactless; but generally they spoke to Lady Stockwell of common acquaintances and private interests.

  At dinner I sat next to Lady Stella. I put her in her early twenties. When her father went silent she appeared to regard it as her duty to entertain me. She was very bright. I must have been a strain. It took me some time to get used to her chirruping voice, so different from her mother’s, which was harsh but clear; so that, while looking earnestly at Stella and acknowledging the fact of her speech, I was in reajity, for relief rather than interest, listening to her mother. Stella seemed slightly frantic, but I did not feel I was in a position to assess anything; the evening was being conducted in a mode which was unfamiliar to me. I concentrated on her voice, trying to disentangle words from the ceaseless tinkling; and it was only when we were at the dinner table that I realized she was a beauty. Then I was disturbed and could no longer fix my eyes on her. It was a beauty of transparence, of transparent skin, colourless hair and transparent eyes. Perhaps it was her eyes that unsettled me; bright blue eyes are to me empty and unreadable; when I look at them I see only their colour. It might have been this, then, with the difficult voice, that suggested frenzy.

  She talked on. I picked up more and more of her words; exchange became possible. She was asking me about the books I had read as a child. I thought about The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations but suppressed it. She was interested in children’s books, and I had to confess that apart from some stories by Andersen I had read none.

  ‘No Henty or Enid Blyton or anything like that?’

  I had to shake my head.

  ‘No fairy stories or nursery rhymes?’

  ‘I believe we had “Pat-a-cake” in one of our readers.’

  She looked saddened and unbelieving. What she had read as a child was important to her, and it was her theory that understanding was impossible between people who had not read the same children’s books or heard the same nursery rhymes.

  Lady Stockwell said she disapproved of the cult of childhood and the cult of children’s books; it was something else that was being commercialized. She added that it was an exceedingly English thing and that societies like my own, if she could judge from what I had said, were wiser in encouraging children to become adults ‘with all due haste’.

  Stella’s forchead twitched. She said to me: ‘Do you know Goosey-goosey Gander?’

  I shook my head.

  She said, ‘Don’t you know Goosey-goosey Gander, whither shall I wander?’

  Lady Stockwell said, ‘I think it’s obscene, putting all those animals into clothes. I can’t bear those bears and bunnies in frills.’

  ‘Upstairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber? Don’t you know it?’

  ‘I can’t bear those menus,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said. ‘ “Mushrooms picked in morning dew” or some such thing. Why can’t they just say mushrooms?’

  ‘Milk from contented cows,’ her companion said.

  ‘Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk,’ Stella recited, ‘and I will give thee a gown of silk. Don’t you know that one?’

  ‘I don’t know that one,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘That must be something you got out of the Oxford book.’

  ‘You must make them your constant study,’ Stella said. ‘They’re frightfully sexual.’

  ‘I’ve often thought,’ the forty-five-year-old lady said, ‘that Jack and Jill are the most obscene couple in literature.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lady Stockwell said. ‘I’ve read that most of them were made up in the eighteenth century and were about real people.’

  ‘It’s the meaningless ones that are fascinating,’ Stella said.

  Throughout this I was aware of Lord Stockwell gazing at me. From time to time I looked at him: his big sallow face, small disturbed eyes below a large rectangular forehead. He didn’t react to my own gaze. He continued to stare at me, his left hand moving steadily from his side plate to his mouth. He was like a man eating nuts; he was in fact pick
ing up minute pieces of bread crust and carrying them to his mouth; but the gesture was large. I accepted his scrutiny, thought about my father and my childhood and all those books and rhymes I had missed. It was more than wine and my own sense of release. The evening, I say, was being conducted in an unfamiliar mode.

  He spoke again only when the women had left the room. Then at least he had something to do. He offered brandy, which he did not drink himself; he offered cigars, which no one smoked. He continued to eat bread crumbs.

  I said, ‘I never knew that you met my father.’

  ‘I met him twice.’

  I knew so little of my father; I had wished to know so little. Now there was something in Lord Stockwell’s voice which told me that a show of embarrassment on my part would be out of place.

  He said, ‘The second time I met him he had given up politics. He had a little hut by the sea. Crown land, oddly enough. He had given up politics, but there was a little queue of people waiting to see him. He asked me what I wanted. I couldn’t tell him. He said, “All right, you just sit yourself down there.” I sat myself down in a corner. It was very moving. These simple people came and told their troubles. The usual sort of thing. Job, sickness, death. While they were talking he was always doing something else. But at the end he would always speak a word or two, sometimes a sentence. It was marvellous. And sitting down, witnessing this, you felt immensely comforted. I couldn’t leave.’