A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [66]
Her left leg was drawn up; her right leg, bent at the knee, lay flat on the cushion on which she sat, so that her right heel lay almost against her left ankle. Beautiful feet, and their whiteness was wonderful against the black of her slacks. Her provocative posture, her smile—they became part of the mood of the song, too much to contemplate.
Indar said, “Salim comes from one of our old coast families. Their history is interesting.”
Yvette’s hand lay white on her right thigh.
Indar said, “Let me show you something.”
He leaned across my legs and reached up to the bookcase. He took out a book, opened it and showed me where I was to read. I held the book down to the floor, to catch the light from the reading lamp, and saw, among a list of names, the names of Yvette and Raymond, acknowledged by the writer of the book as “most generous of hosts” at some recent time in the capital.
Yvette continued to smile. No embarrassment or playing it down, though; no irony now. Her name in the book mattered to her.
I gave the book back to Indar, looked away from Yvette and him, and returned to the voice. Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die.
It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!
It was different outside, and Mahesh would have scoffed. He had said, “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” But Mahesh felt far away. The aridity of that life, which had also been mine! It was better to pretend, as I could pretend now. It was better to share the companionship of that pretence, to feel that in that room we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love. Even before the songs ended I felt I had found the kind of life I wanted; I never wanted to be ordinary again. I felt that by some piece of luck I had stumbled on the equivalent of what years before Nazruddin had found right here.
It was late when Raymond came in. I had, at Indar’s insistence, even danced with Yvette and felt her skin below the silk of her blouse; and when I saw Raymond my thoughts—leaping at this stage of the evening from possibility to possibility—were at first only about the difference in their ages. There must have been thirty years between Yvette and her husband; Raymond was a man in his late fifties.
But I felt possibilities fade, felt them as dreams, when I saw the immediate look of concern on Yvétte’s face—or rather in her eyes, for her smile was still on, a trick of her face; when I saw the security of Raymond’s manner, remembered his job and position, and took in the distinction of his appearance. It was the distinction of intelligence and intellectual labours. He looked as though he had just taken off his glasses, and his gentle eyes were attractively tired. He was wearing a long-sleeved safari jacket; and it came to me that the style—long sleeves rather than short—had been suggested to him by Yvette.
After that look of concern at her husband, Yvette relaxed again, with her fixed smile. Indar got up and began fetching a dining chair from against the opposite wall. Raymond motioned to us to stay where we were; he rejected the chance of sitting next to Yvette,