that were locked in the heads of those we met. She spoke increasingly of her childhood, of school, of walks, and of one friend whose wish it was to own a motorcar of pure white. One morning – we had for some time been sleeping in separate rooms – she told me she had awakened in the night with a feeling of fear, a simple fear of place, of the absent world. That she shared a fear I knew so well strengthened me; and subtly my attitude towards her changed. The very things I had once admired in her – confidence, ambition, rightness – were what I now pitied her for; I felt we had come together for self-defence. But there was always morning, always the healing phrase – what a comforting, deceptive thing it is, the gift of words. ‘I suppose this must be the most inferior place in the world,’ she said. ‘Inferior natives, inferior expats. Frightfully inferior and frightfully happy. The two must go together.’ I suggested a trip to England. But she was not interested; it remained the country she had wished to get away from. No family or group awaited her; and she was no tourist; she didn’t want to see the Tower or do the galleries or go to the theatre; she didn’t even need to close her eyes to see what two weeks or a month in London would be like. She said, ‘I can take that as read.’ She spent more time in the house; in the hot, airless afternoons she often walked about barefooted in her white cotton petticoat and a brassiere supporting breasts she no longer painted. A man came in two or three mornings a week to look after the garden; we had a Grenadian woman cleaner. Apart from these we employed no servants, Sandra having grown to resent them, sometimes hysterically, as intruders. There would have been little for anyone to do anyway. The well-equipped kitchen of our rented house was cold for much of the time. Little came out of it: coffee and toast, hot milk, scrambled eggs, some simple bit of frying. On the shelves were musty, once-used tins and drums of herbs; at night, as soon as the fluorescent tube jumped into dazzle, cockroaches scattered lightly in all directions over bare white surfaces. The women of our group were outraged. On my behalf then; later, of course, it would be different.
But to me as well as to Sandra our house was something to get out of whenever we could. Into that most inferior place in the world. Where could we go? The beaches? We knew them all; we could take them ‘as read’. The mountain villages, Negro or mulatto, with their slave history and slave customs? They were more exciting to read about in the Sunday edition of the Inquirer than to see: rundown villages of concrete and corrugated iron, set in green, always shining green, like a dozen others elsewhere. At nights we would go out driving, just for the sake of motion. We drove to the airport and sat drinking in the lounge with intransit passengers, listening to the names of foreign cities. We hunted out every new bar or restaurant or nightclub: Isabella was the sort of place where such establishments regularly opened and closed under new management. We were at our happiest outside; it was outside, in a crowd, late at night, the champagne working, that we communed. The sight of Sandra across a room could stir me to a degree that was sometimes disgraceful. Those ill-tempered eyes! That bony face with its jut of jaw. Those feet, as nervous and expressive as hands, but so much more subtle and complex, so much more beautifully made! Those breasts she was always ready to offer me, as to a child. I liked to go across to her and detach her from the man – usually American now – whom those breasts had attracted. And so, in public, we would commune. It was the word we used. I would say, ‘Shall we commune?’ ‘Let’s,’ she might reply. ‘Let me get a drink first.’ On a high settee she might then sit, her head and shoulders jammed against the wall, her feet hanging loose over my shoulders as I sat on the floor below the settee; and I would be content, kissing and stroking those feet and legs which twitched and squeezed in answer. As much as by Sandra’s cold kitchen the