The Mimic Men: A Novel

  They would say later that I ‘worked hard and played hard’. These phrases that tabulate! I had no profession and no job. I needed money. I studied my resources and looked around for a way. On an island where, apart from the professions and agriculture, money could be made only through commission agencies, I must have appeared a little too coldly adventurous. But at least the School cannot say that the years I spent in it were wasted. A small part of the Bella Bella money had come to me; within five years that part had outgrown the whole. I was one of those who foresaw the postwar spread of cities, the destruction of the open spaces between settlements; and on Isabella I was the first. I cannot claim much credit. What I did was obvious, considering my resources. I had inherited a 120-acre block of wasteland just outside the city. It was part of a blighted citrus plantation which had been allowed to go derelict during the depression; had been sold to a racing man who had tried unsuccessfully to breed racehorses on it; and had then been bought by my grandfather for no other reason than that it was land and going cheap. It brought him no money; I doubt whether it paid the wages of the watchman-overseer and the upkeep of his mule. From time to time on a Sunday my grandfather would go and pick a few avocadoes and grapefruit, which he would pretend he was getting free. It was not much of a thing to inherit. A derelict citrus plantation is one of the slums of tropical nature. The soil is not rich; the barks of the trees are mildewed and mossy; the grey branches are thin and brittle-looking and almost bare; the leaves are yellow; and the fruit rots before it ripens, hanging soft and blanched like disease, in a pestilential smell. When it came to me my first thought was to sell. But even in 1945 I could find no buyers.

  The feeling still existed, aided no doubt by a poor transport system which had grown even worse during the war, that town was town, and country country; our city, too, had remained the same for so long that we had definite ideas, almost medieval and superstitious, about its limits. The last telegraph pole within what was considered the city was shaggy with posters; the one just two hundred yards away – in the country – was quite bare.

  This was the land which I now thought to develop. It was already to a large extent attractively landscaped, with dips and knolls; we were close enough to the city for water and electricity to be available. I divided the land into one hundred and fifty half-acre plots; built roads, laid down services; and offered the plots for sale: $2,000 a plot, a 25-year lease, the ground rent $500 a year. I deal, it must be remembered, in Isabella dollars, five of which at that time were worth three United States dollars. They were not excessive terms. Our city had been built on short leases and even in an unsavoury area you could pay five dollars a month ground rent for half-a-lot, one-sixteenth of an acre. My terms in fact were more than reasonable; my only difficult condition was that every house had to be approved by me and should cost not less than $15,000. Nothing nowadays, when teachers and civil servants buy houses for $20,000; but in the early fifties in Isabella it was accounted a great deal; and for Kripalville – such was the name I gave the development, speedily corrupted to Crippleville, which had its attractions – the residents selected themselves. The scheme required nothing but method, precision and time. I worked at it calmly for two years. My conviction of success was total; in my own mind it never was an issue, not even when I owed the bank $150,000. I handled men as I handled money, by instinct. When it came to employing someone I ignored advice and references and was never swayed by racial considerations. I employed a man, foreman, clerk, labourer, only if I took an instant liking to him; and I gave no one a second chance. The man who lets you down once will let you down again; this is especially true of the man whose dereliction occurs after a long period of satisfactory service. The dereliction of such a man means that his attitude to his duties and to his employer has changed for good; it is the failure of a relationship, and blame one way or the other is useless; the man needs a new employer, a new relationship; and it is better to let him go at once.

  And Crippleville worked. There is no drama to record. Within a year a hundred of the plots were taken. People bought but did not always build; and within two years plots were changing hands at five and six thousand dollars. It is simple and obvious now; it was simple and obvious to me then. But when the thing was done, so to say, I held my breath. Not at the risks I had taken, but at the neglect in my own mind of those very factors which made the scheme a success. The absence of mosquitoes was one such factor; two or three other developments, inspired by my own, ended as malarial slums. Then there were the hills around Crippleville. I had never thought of the hills except as landscape; but while other developments were swallowed up in further developments and all as a result speedily declined, the Crippleville hills limited the growth of the city in that direction and the development remained what it was. There was the further point that the road from the city centre to Crippleville led through reasonably pleasant areas; to get to almost every other suburb you had to drive through slums. I considered these factors, I say, only when it was all done; and I held my breath. I suppose it was my single-mindedness and conviction which made it possible for me to get credit so easily; though it was also my good fortune to deal with an American bank anxious to establish itself on the island. I don’t imagine any of the older British or Canadian banks would have been so accommodating; and I would not have blamed them.

  A man, passionate for security, works and saves for a lifetime and is lucky at the end to have ten thousand pounds. Another, placid with the knowledge of his own imminent extinction, makes half a million dollars in five years. Neither ambition nor design comes into it, I feel. The gift falls on us. When we are in the middle of success nothing seems so easy or natural; in failure, nothing seems so unlikely. Observe how my luck, my intuition served me. With my initial scheme beginning to prosper, I took the precaution of buying up as much of the surrounding land as I could. I was gambling – though it did not seem so to me then – with all that I might have comfortably earned. This land I did not develop in the same way. I left many open spaces, divided the rest into small lots, eight to the acre, which I offered at proportionately lower prices: $500 a lot, ground rent $125 a year, a house for $5,000. Amazing value; the rush might be imagined. Simple again; yet I might so easily have tried to repeat myself, and that would have landed me in trouble, as it landed some of my imitators. Our middle class was small; the number of people willing or able to spend a good deal on a house was limited. As it was, the less luxurious new development reinforced the smartness of the old; and the smartness of the old gave glamour to the new. Each development supported the other; Crippleville acquired an integrity which was to last. It wasn’t forethought; it was instinct, intuition.

  So success led to success; and it seemed that I could just go on. It was unsettling, this rightness, this sureness over what always later turned out to have been a knife’s edge. I did not feel responsible for what had befallen me; I always felt separate from what I did. Time alone has erased the feeling of unreality, violation and self-awe; it is only now that I feel I can truly lay claim to my achievement. I remember a trifling incident; it occurred almost at the beginning. The men were landscaping. In the afternoon the foreman told me that they had run into the stump and roots of a giant tree; three charges of dynamite had been necessary to get rid of it. He showed me the crater: a monstrous wound in the red earth. A giant tree, old perhaps when Columbus came: I would have liked to have seen it, I would have liked to have preserved it. I kept a piece of the wood on my desk, for the interest, as a reminder of violation, as a talisman. Success has its alarms! It was open to me to go on, I said. Soon I began to feel that I had to go on. Between this and inactivity, between the alarm of a world without end and a world without point, there was no middle way. And I was glad, to tell the truth, when the time for withdrawal came. It might seem perverse. But the gift which falls on us is also an intolerable burden. It sets us apart; it distorts us; it separates us from the self we recognize and to which we remain close. Every week in some part of the
world a man, starting from scratch, makes a hundred thousand pounds, which he will soon lose. The tragedy and even the chagrin lie only in the eyes of the beholder. The gift is Mephistophelean. It is, however unconsciously, willed away. But even then the taint remains.

  On the island, in our group, we were set apart. Jealousy or envy is not a sufficient explanation. See how disquieting we must have appeared on a Sunday morning at the house, say, of the girl from Latvia. Rum-punch time. I am in my dark glasses; the cuffs of my shirt, of Indian raw cotton, are buttoned at the wrist; I am leaning forward, the frosted rum-punch glass held in both hands. Sandra is sitting on a high black-draped settee – possibly a Latvian chest, now happily converted: the conversion of houses or articles of furniture constantly exercised the ingenuity of our women. Sandra is in white trousers. Her legs are apart and her hands, between her legs, are pressed on the edge of the settee; her very thin low-carat Willesden second-hand wedding ring is barely noticeable. Her feet are tapping in time to music from the gramophone; the heels of her gold Indian sandals flap loose, setting off her finely-veined, well-shaped ankles, part of the slender elegance of her feet, whose shape and colour are further heightened by the red paint on the nails of her long undeformed toes and by the gold straps of the sandals. The stockings and shoes of London had concealed those feet. They were nervous without being too bony; they were feet one could caress; I frequently did. But I concentrate on the moment. I am looking down through my dark glasses – no pockets to put them in: the recurring inconvenience of tropical dress – at the double spread of the Society Page of the Isabella Inquirer, open on the terrazzo floor which is cool here in the shade but which, when it runs into the concrete of the swimming-pool terrace, is glaring white. Things are changing. The society pages are full of pictures of pop-eyed clerks in over-big double-breasted suits, arm in arm with their frilly brides. The people are on the march and the Inquirer has latterly become your paper. But for us, to whom it is a point of honour never to be mentioned, the society pages still hold a certain interest. Word has got around that the person responsible for the pages offers us a weekly joke: one special, disguised hilarity: a dead-pan description it might be, to put it at its simplest, of the wedding festivities of a man ‘employed by the City Council’, this fact being mentioned last. This is the Sunday morning joke we look for and share. It is part of our self-cherishing, the necessary cruelty of a poor country; it is also part of our colonial simplicitly. This, of course, is the judgement of today; there is no such self-assessment as my dark-glassed eyes go through each item, trying to spot the week’s fiction. I am aware, besides, of Sandra’s clean white trousers and those feet which I feel I would like to handle. There is pleasure and avidity in those feet; and I feel that Sandra is working especially hard with the Latvian. The Latvian is new to our group. She is red-haired, mouse-faced, sharp-nosed, and wears glasses; she is really a woman of appalling ugliness, to whom everyone has as a result to be especially nice. There is going to be trouble here soon. The Latvian will take these attentions at their face value and, gaining in confidence, will one day overreach herself; and then people won’t be so nice any more. She already strains us by serving all wines from wicker baskets; her pleasure is matched by our embarrassment; this is something we don’t know how to handle; example has proved fruitless, for that wicker basket delights her husband as well, a man of simple origins, still exulting in his own emancipation and, like so many people of this type, gadget-mad.

  The others’ drift in. Pampered children, overacting the part, as I always feel when I hear their refined little voices, squeal about in the background; their special little rubber ducks and other inflated and totally unnecessary aids to swimming bob about in the pool. Their parents make their usual half-flippant remarks about Crippleville, which I barely acknowledge, not out of annoyance, but because it is my custom never to talk of business outside business hours. No principle is involved; it is merely part of my placidity, which in this respect Sandra, with her woman’s fear of ever being too open about anything, has adopted. After this I begin to be aware of the attention of studied inattention. The talk is a bit too loud, too hearty, too aggressive or too defensive; these people are acting, overdoing domesticity and the small details, over-stressing the fullness of their own lives. Sandra’s feet no longer tap as lightly as they did. And it occurs to me that we are straining these people whose welcome meant so much, whose friendship we value, whose pleasures we share. Sandra appears all naturalness, all delight. And perhaps she is. But she is so young! Her husband is so young! Can this naturalness be trusted? Away from this gathering, they are not just earning a living; they are making a fortune; how this must consume them! There, in the making of a fortune, in the management of Crippleville, in the dealings with contractors and banks and solicitors and accountants lies their true interest. It is the bigger and more important side of their life. They are making a fortune and working at it with a dedication that must obsess them. Here they can be natural and relax; but isn’t this an exploitation of their friends? All this I can see. I can see how every attempt at friendliness must appear false and insincere and must arouse the instinct to snub, how even my laughter at the fiction just discovered in the Society Page must irritate. This youth, this placidity, this coldness concealing the passion, the money passion, that is truly nameless. All this I see but do not know how to communicate to Sandra. She is still my luck. I leave her as always to fight her own battles; I know that she will win. I still delight in the bite of her phrase-choked speech, that thrust of chin and lower lip.

  So we were set apart. And a little above. It is the human instinct for order; and those who so willingly ranged themselves below us required us to display extraordinary qualities. We were required to be kinder, more considerate, less impatient, and above all never to pay attention to the one thing – in our case money – which in the minds of others set us apart. We were constantly challenged, provoked, tested. The extra strength that was attributed to us encouraged our friends to a display of proportionate weakness. And we responded wrongly. It is difficult to be a lord! I sought accommodation where I ought to have imposed authority. And there was Sandra with her gift of the phrase, her North London tongue, battling where she should have succoured and consoled. I encouraged her, I am afraid, by being amused. She often spoke damaging words in public for my benefit alone.

  We went one Sunday to see the house which one of our couples had built in the central hills of our island. Everyone else was mad about beach-houses – a house in the hills was original. We had heard a lot about this house; but its details had been kept secret, and were to be a surprise. The road to the house was bad and dangerous and slow; it was raining. Sandra did the driving; she was not in a good mood when we arrived. Almost the first thing she said to our hostess, in response to some light though too self-depreciating query about the house, was: ‘I wish you would make up your minds whether it is a country cottage or a country house.’ There was an instant chill in the air, more than the chill deriving from the altitude for the sake of which the house had allegedly been built. The thermometer might have dropped to sixty just before sunrise, and the most you might have said was that with a log fire you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Much varnished pine, I remember; an abundance of knots; very Scandinavian, as we agreed. We were led to the enormous fireplace, brass-and-leather belts or some such studded thing hanging irregularly on either side. We stood stunned and hushed; the moment for exclamation and congratulations passed, missing us; we moved away. We stood before an open window which looked out on to lush, dripping greenery; it was sunny now, and steaming after the rain. Sandra said: ‘It must get damned cold up here.’ Our hostess, who was Swedish, lost control of her English accent. Sandra, though recognizing she had gone too far without being in any way amusing – and perhaps because she recognized this – made no effort to repair the damage, not even when, to exclamations in many accents from the other girls, our hostess brought out open sandwiches, the pronunciation of whose na
tive name had, on so many occasions in the years gone by, served me as the subject of hollow jests. Our hostess’s English sounded like Swedish when she said goodbye. Sandra, driving me away, down the damp, dangerous bends, and acting now for me, lost nothing of her self-induced temper or hostility. ‘Common little Lapp!’ A bitter little explosion, climaxing intermittent speech. I laughed; Sandra smiled, frowning, concentrating on the road. I kissed my finger and pressed it on her lips. The gift of the phrase! Yet pure fantasy on this occasion; for the Swede was splendidly built, and had an impeccable Stockholm background, with a father in publishing.