The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [31]
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