Excitement grew on her, studying these things as though she had never seen them before, taking them in detail by detail. And now, as they began to race along the highway, past the shacks on the hillside and the long red avenues of the redevelopment project, every little house casting an identical angled shadow, as they raced, the hot air and the noise of the car, the sense of speed, were like the things she was surrendering to: the little delirium, of which she thought she remained in perfect control, knowing that it would soon be over, that the world would become solid again, and her own vision clear.
Jimmy spoke occasionally, making little comments on what they passed. His words were indistinct and she didn’t concentrate on what he said. The little delirium became the adventure; this was what she wanted to stay close to and be contained within, this dizzying mood, of which, curiously, his presence formed no part: the exaltation produced by the heat, the drive that was coming to climax, and that vision of decay piled on decay, putrefaction on putrefaction.
She fixed her gaze on the driver’s neck, on the black roll of almost hairless flesh within the collar of the transparent shiny blue shirt, and on the subsidiary roll above, lost in little kinky springs of hair, as black as the skin.
“Where did those come from?”
Jimmy was speaking to her directly. They were now well out of the city, in the factory area, driving beside the charred verges and the sunken fields in which lay the wrecks of motor vehicles.
She fingered the silver necklaces he was pointing to. “Morocco.” She was going to say: Someone gave them to me. But she didn’t say that. She said, “They cost about sixpence. They were given me by a lover.”
He was still sitting erect at the end of the seat, formal and buttoned up, embarrassed by the drive and her silence, and giving little licks at his lips. As buttoned up as he had been when he had first presented himself to her at Thrushcross Grange, but now distinctly absurd.
She added, “He didn’t believe in gifts of great value. He didn’t want money to come between us.”
He caught her tone. He said, “Something for the girl who has everything.”
Yet when they turned off the highway into the abandoned industrial park, and there was only bush and foundations of buildings among bush, her excitement began to quicken into something like uncertainty. And when the car stopped in Jimmy’s yard, and there was only silence in the heat, with the bush bounding every view, and she noticed the short squat driver with his powerful fleshy arms, she began to feel dismay.
Excitement was dying; she could exercise clear judgment again. The house was as she had remembered it: the horrible blue carpet with the meaningless black and yellow splashes, the books on the shelves, the photographs, including that one with the girl or woman—with the father in Intelligence?—torn out. It had happened so often to her, who had known so many men, who had found so many men to be candidates: this altering of the character of a room or a house which, at first seen and judged in a detached way, then all at once became another kind of room, full of a man’s intimate attributes. And this room now repelled her; and from her new lucidity she tried, swiftly, seeking to reestablish her balance, to re-create the chain of happenings that had brought her here, that had so altered the nature of the day for her.
Jimmy said, “Your eyes look half screaming.”
She turned to him almost with irritation, her eyes moist, as if with tears.
He put his hands on her shoulders, and he was astonished at her response. She fixed her mouth on his, her lips opened wide. He was taken by surprise and couldn’t react immediately; and as her tobacco-tasting tongue and her lips—that healed wound—did what they thought they had to do (no secrets here, and words no longer helped, no bravado about lovers who brought gifts from Morocco), as the action of her mouth became insipid to him and then meaningless, he thought, first of all, and without surprise: But she is starved. And then: But she is like a girl, she knows nothing, she is looking for everything in the kiss, she believes she has to be violent to show that she knows.
Her blouse was wet below the arms; he had not noticed that before. Her breasts were pressed against him, so that he was hardly aware of them as breasts, only as flesh. She had given him so little time. He would have liked, as it were, to witness the moment, but now he felt he was losing it. He edged his mouth away from hers at last and, holding her tight against him, drew breath. He felt that the moment had gone and was irrecoverable.
He said, with odd formality, still holding her, “Shall we go into the next room?”
She said quickly, in a whisper that held nothing of intimacy, “Don’t ask stupid questions.” And immediately she disengaged herself from him.
Coolly, with that slightly dragging step he had noticed as she had walked across the lobby of the Prince Albert, and still with her shoulder bag, she went into the bedroom, ahead of Jimmy, as though she knew the way. A maroon carpet with a large bright flowered pattern, a yellow candlewick bedspread on a double bed, bedside tables with imitation-wood graining, a lamp, a dressing table, a telephone on a chest of drawers: it was like a bedroom display in the window of an English furniture shop, and it looked as artificial. The carpet lay loose on the terrazzo floor, the ocher-washed concrete walls were bare, and the light in the room was hard and even. The open windows gave a sense of stillness and heat: a hot pale-blue sky, limp bush, not even the tops of the spiky palms moving.
Very quickly, ignoring the hand he placed on her wet armpits, she put her bag on the dressing table, eased off her shoes, and undid and rolled down her trousers and pants together and, still with her blouse on, lay on the middle of the bed and turned her face to the wall, as though he were not in the room. Her speed alarmed him; he feared he was losing the moment again. He felt isolated by her indifference and began to fear that he might be losing her as well. He saw the white of her belly and the tan on her legs. She had very little hair on her groin; perhaps she shaved; and the cleft was like a dumb, stupid mouth.
Without undressing he lay down beside her and again he was swallowed up by her hard big kiss, her mouth opened wide. He put his hand on her groin, felt the thin hair and moved his fingers lower. She took her mouth from his, slapped his hand away, and said, with the irritation that now accompanied all her words, “Don’t tease me.” He sat up and undid his shoes. And already she was withdrawn; and again he felt alarm. He took off his trousers and pants. Then the telephone began to ring. He sat still. He heard it ring and ring.
Jane said, “Answer it, for God’s sake.”
He got up and she saw him black and barely tumescent, little springs of hair scattered down his legs; his hair was more Negroid down there. And now, only in his Mao shirt, and looking absurdly like one of the children of the shanty towns, who wore vests alone, their exposed little penises like little spigots, he walked to the chest of drawers and took up the telephone.
From somewhere in the house, in the sudden stillness after the ringing stopped, could be heard footsteps, the sound of rubber soles on concrete.
Jimmy shouted through the door, “It’s all right. All right.”
As soon as Jane heard the voice at the other end of the telephone she recognized it.
Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”
Jane turned over on her belly and shouted, whether with laughter or rage it was hard to tell, “Put that in your next classified communiqué.”
She sprawled face down on the bed, her blouse tight over her shoulders, her legs apart and graceless, her hips very wide, her pale buttocks flat and spreading, smoother than her tanned legs.
“I haven’t seen him, massa,” Jimmy said into the telephone.
Jane tucked her arms below her chest.
“I know, massa. I know. Massa, I’ll telephone you back.”
He put the telephone down and came back across the scatter of clothes to the bed. Jane, still face down and with her arms below her, was as if asleep. He put his hand on her hip. She didn’t respond. He lay down beside her and she didn’t move. He la
y on top of her, and again had only the feeling of flesh below him, again missed the sense of knowing the shape of her body. She remained still. Sudden anger swept over him. He seized her shoulders, lifted himself off her, and sought to enter her where she was smaller. She shouted: “No!” and turned over so violently that she threw him off, her elbow hitting him on the chin. He raised his hand to strike her; but then, with closed eyes, she said strange words. She said: “Love, love.” He lay upon her clumsily; he was swallowed by her wide kiss; he entered her and said, “I’m not good, I’m not good, you know.”
“All men say that.”
And then, just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over. And he raged inside.
He rested his head on her shoulder, on her blouse, smelling, too late now, her sweat.
She said, “Love, love.”
He shrank, and unwillingly he slipped out of her. He shifted off her and lay face down on her arm.
She said, “Do you always make love in your Mao shirt?”
There wasn’t even mockery in her voice. She was already quite remote. And when he opened his eyes to look at her, he saw that her right leg was drawn up, that the part of herself she had forbidden him to touch with his hand was displayed, as though she were alone. That drawn-up leg, so slender above the knee, and held slightly to one side: there was something masculine about the posture, something masculine about the hand that stroked that leg now. And she was looking at leg and hand. But how carefully she had tanned herself! With what care she had rendered that leg hairless! The skin looked abraded; but already there were the beginnings of new hairs.
She said, “What did Peter want?”
“Something about Stephens. That boy who used to be at the Grange.”
She said, twitching her arm below his head, “I’m getting up.”
He was close to the edge of the bed. He got up and stood beside the bed in his Mao shirt.
She got off the bed on her side, moving with quickness now, swinging both legs to the floor at the same time. And then, with one large gesture, she pulled the yellow candlewick bedspread off the bed, knocking the bedside lamp over; and, before he had time to consider her nakedness, she with her instinct to conceal herself after an act of casual sex, to reduce the man to a stranger again, she wrapped the spread about herself; and then, nimbly, in spite of the big bedspread, she moved about the room picking up everything that was hers, everything she had seemingly so casually discarded, almost as items that might be abandoned, her shoes, her bag, her trousers and her pants within the trousers; and, with everything that was hers, having cleared the room of her presence, she went into the adjoining bathroom, as though she had been there many times before, and slammed the door shut.
Half naked, Jimmy considered the room. He had lost the moment; he began to know again that emptiness he had lived with for so long; he began to feel that great pain in two places above his groin. He heard her using the lavatory, heard her flush the toilet. Later she tried to flush it again, but there was no water. He began to dress; and it was only then that he noticed, where Jane had lain on, the bed below him, a great damp patch on the white sheet, a great circular patch that had soaked through the candlewick spread. So that her body seemed independent of her manner, her words, her attitudes; and yet he had lost the moment.
And when, presently, she opened the bathroom door, she was dressed, her hair rearranged; and she was cool, almost a stranger again, someone who would have to be wooed all over again, someone who had surrendered nothing. Through the open bathroom door Jimmy saw the yellow candlewick spread hanging over the low tiled wall of the shower area, untidily tossed, wet. The starved woman had had many lovers, nevertheless; she was as inexperienced as a girl, yet she was spoiled; and, without knowing it, she had developed the bad temper, and the manners, of a prostitute, one of those prostitutes who after defeat and degradation celebrate a triumph, revenging themselves on the maid of a brothel hotel, creating work for that creature, the low punishing the lower. So cool she looked now; so triumphant. He was full of hate for her.
He said, “The car’s still here.”
She said nothing.
But he walked out with her. In the car port at the side of the house she saw the driver in the blue shirt and the boy with pigtails. She opened the door for herself, got into the car, and waited for the driver.
She said, “I hope you get what you wanted from the executives.” Almost without looking at him.
The pain in the two places above his groin grew and grew after she left. He longed for the feel of Bryant, for Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.
THE LITTLE delirium had gone; it had begun to die even before she had reached Jimmy’s house. Now, in the car, sitting again behind the driver, and studying the little roll of hairy flesh above the bigger roll of almost hairless flesh, hardly aware of the desolation through which she drove, aware only of the heat, she knew something like distress. Distress as a settled mood, bearable, not a pain. She had memories of sensations; but images of the house and the bedroom broke into those. Words began to go through her head, words addressed to no one in particular, yet words that she fancied herself speaking with tears, like a child: “I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve looked and looked.”
The internal storm passed. The words spoke themselves more calmly, became a statement. She looked at the driver’s mirror: his little red eyes were considering her, and they held her return stare. She looked out at the fields; the junked automobiles beside the road; the men far away, small and busy, stuffing grass into the trunks of cars to take home to their animals; the smoking hills, yellow in the mid-afternoon light. But she was aware of the driver’s intermittent stare; and whenever she looked at the mirror she saw his red, assessing eyes. A whole sentence ran through her head, at first meaningless, and then, as she examined it, alarming. She thought: I’ve been playing with fire. Strange words, to have come so suddenly and so completely to her: something given, unasked for, like an intimation of the truth, breaking into the sense of safety, of distance put between her and the desolation of that house.
They began to enter the town: safety. The rubbish dump was burning: unusually thick brown smoke, oily and acrid, which made her turn up her window: mounds of rubbish like confetti, trucks and men and women and children blurred in the smoke, lightening occasionally into yellow flame, the carrion corbeaux, nervous of men, restless and squawking near the wire fence. Fire: the smoking hills, the charred verges: it explained the words. But the explanation didn’t satisfy her, didn’t free her. All the way through the noisy afternoon city and then up to the Ridge, the air getting cooler, the plain dropping away behind her, lower and lower, she thought: I’ve been playing with fire.
At the end, the driver did not get out and open the door for her. When she got out she said, “Thank you.” He acknowledged that only by jerking his chin up and making a slight nasal sound. Immediately, lifting his squat, heavy body off the seat and twisting round to look back, one fat black arm embracing the shiny plastic cover of the front seat, he reversed at a great rate down the drive and through the gateway into the road, and was gone.
She was wet between the legs. The smell of the man was strong on her, tainting the perfume with which she had tried to cover it in the bathroom at that house. She fancied the smell was particularly strong on her fingers. She needed a bath. Through the redwood louvers the sun struck into the white-tiled bathroom, hot and dry. She closed the louvers and took her clothes off. But the taps didn’t run. Water was short and was turned off in the afternoons.
She was tired but she didn’t lie down on her bed; and when she had put on the trousers and blouse again she didn’t stay in her room. She walked about the bigger rooms of the empty house, and then she sat on one of the metal chairs on the back porch, waiting first for Adela, who started her evening duties at five, and then for Roche.
When he came she said to him, “There’s a man in that little house
in the garden.”
Her anxiety seemed to make him calmer. He said humorously, “Perhaps it’s one of Adela’s friends or relations. We must be careful.”
He walked down the sunlit concrete steps at the back, between the stunted cypresses. She watched him from the porch. He opened the door and then he looked up at her, the afternoon sun on his face, smiling, making gestures of puzzlement. She went down. The door swung open easily, the little house was empty. The wild man with the rags and the matted locks had taken up his tin and bundles and left. There remained only a vague warm smell of old clothes, dead animals, grease, and marijuana.
He said, “When did you see him?”
“Yesterday morning. But I was too frightened to tell you.”
“It looks as though he was much more frightened of you.”
At about six Adela called from the kitchen, “Water! Water!” and almost at the same time pipes and cisterns hissed all over the house. The light on the hills was golden and thin; the smoldering sky was growing dark; the evening haze covered the plain and the sea. She had a bath.
She said to Roche that evening, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
He said, “Wouldn’t it be better if I get used to sleeping alone?”
“This isn’t for your sake. It’s for mine.”
He said no more. She took her pillows to his bed.
THE SITUATION is desperate, Roy, the people here have been betrayed too often, it’s always a case of black faces white masks, you don’t know who your enemy is, the enemy infiltrates your ranks all the time. Massa Mister Roche he’s very importunate in his inquiries about one of the boys they sent here, Stephens, a little gang leader from the city, a big coup for them, they thought he was going to take over from me, as though I was going to let that boy draw me out on the streets for the police to shoot me down. No, Roy, I’m staying here in my unfortified castle, the time will come for me to move, the people will come of their own accord to their leader. But the situation is getting desperate now, in the still of the night I lose my courage, I feel it’s a losing battle, they’re sending other agents, I don’t know how to cope …