The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [40]
With Wendy Deschampsneufs, small and ugly and bright and gay, celebrating, as we had all once done, a return to the island – she had been to a school in Belgium or Switzerland – I could never feel at ease. I had seen her once, briefly, when she was a child; then she had climbed over me and my chair and done a little bit of showing-off. Not a pleasant memory for me, that afternoon tea at the Deschampsneufs’, when I thought I was saying goodbye to the island; and Wendy grown up revived all my embarrassment. I had never questioned the family’s credentials, but I had never felt they were of interest to me. The descendant of the slave-owner could soothe the descendant of the slave with a private patois. I was the late intruder, the picturesque Asiatic, linked to neither. Yet for so many years of my youth – for reasons to be described in their place – I had felt involved with the family of Deschampsneufs. At that tea party I had failed to make my position clear; by failing to do so I felt I had somehow continued to involve myself in the conflict between master and slave, and was as a result leaving the island with the taint which I had wished to avoid, and which was to draw me back. This defaulting, this weakness, was like a shame. If I put down a newspaper with a sense of something wrong, something naggingly undone, and then retraced the steps, I invariably found it was due to the appearance of this unsettling name of Deschampsneufs, whose unimportance to myself I deeply realized yet whose weight I could never shake off. I recognize in myself the attitude I have described in others. With Wendy I moved between the desire to crush and the desire not to hurt. So full she was of the name! What a shock it had been to see her for the first time at one of the houses we went to, to hear her name pronounced a little too casually!
Yet if I was embarrassed, in a way I couldn’t explain, Sandra was at once taken; and between the two women there instantly grew up an intense relationship. They saw each other for hours every day; they went out together, for the day, for week-ends; doubtless they arranged adventures. In those last days I often had the absurd feeling that I was responsible for two alien women. What was the basis of the attraction between them? Was it the attraction between the ugly woman and the attractive? It might have been; though in such a relationship Wendy would have had the counterweight of her name. Was it that Wendy recognized in Sandra someone who was about to leave and was therefore in no way a danger? Was it that, starting from opposite ends, they had come to share the same social attitudes? A little of all this, I feel sure. A little, too, of enthusiasm: for in these last days Sandra wonderfully revived. In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly different, it is true. I couldn’t believe the story, put about by the women of our group, that Sandra had begun, under Wendy’s influence, to frequent the Cercle. To these women, with their metropolitan backgrounds, their new money, their wine-basket pretensions, their talk of interior decoration and the books reviewed in the last issue of Time, the Cercle would have been shabby and a comedown; and I could not think of Sandra, with her gift of the phrase and her attitude to the common, lasting long among the salesmen and bank employees and estate overseers.
The end came, of course. The week-ends, the morning coffee with Wendy in our air-conditioned bars and cafés, the trips to the beach, and doubtless the adventures, they