The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [80]
A solid house, however. It also offered freedom from the island of Browne and Deschampsneufs. My early attempt at simplification had failed; it had ended in this switching back and forth between one world and another, one set of relationships and another. My grandparents’ house had changed. It had become a house of the young, mainly Cecil’s friends, the sons and daughters of business families like his own. The community they formed was small and new. It took me by surprise. I have said I was not interested in the credentials of Deschampsneufs’s family. But then I was not interested in the credentials of any family except my own. Outside school this had been my world, with Bella Bella and Coca-Cola its peaks. It had not occurred to me that there might be other families like mine with equal cause for self-love, people who made shirts or built roads and thought they were doing quite nicely. And it was disappointing, I must confess, to see the splendour of Bella Bella fade a little. These young people were like Cecil. They were not as extravagant, but they had the same capacity for talk about occasions they had just staged and occasions that were about to be staged. I could not feel for them the affection I felt for Cecil, who was my flesh and blood; and I could not feel I was part of their group. My sisters, though, fitted in easily. But if I was no longer completely at ease in the house, at least I found there no talk of past injury, no talk even of the past. These young people were of the new world. They made the photographs of Indian actors in the back veranda appear quaint and old; the prints, of gods and maidens and swings in the flower spangled lawns of white palaces outlined in splayed perspective, were of an antiquated piety.
The house had another attraction. Sally had become my partner, Sally the stamper in a seersucker housecoat. Enemies as children, and bound by that special relationship, we had inevitably drawn closer in the changed house. No word was spoken. We simply came together; and nothing again was to equal that sudden understanding, that shared feeling of self-violation, which was for me security and purity. I could not conceive of myself with a girl or woman of another community or even of families like my own. Here for me was security, understanding, the relationship based on perfect knowledge, in which body of one flesh joined to body of the same flesh, and all external threat was diminished. Later I would have the reputation of a lecher and whoremaster. But in every relationship I would be aware of taint; I would recognize triumph or humiliation. There would be nothing again like this mutual acceptance, without words or declarations, without posturings or deceptions; and no flesh was to be as sweet as this, almost my own. I began to think of the world, which I had longed to enter, as the violation that awaited us both, inevitable but not the less painful; it was like growing old or dying. I felt I was losing the courage to enter that world. My longing to escape had turned sour; the island had become my past. My world had narrowed. And at the same time I felt I was like the older people in this house now of the young. I was like my mother and her parents, who found themselves waiting for the end in a house that had grown strange.
I had left school. The war was still on, and it was impossible to travel. I took a job. So did we all. Eden, fulfilling Major Grant’s prophecy about those boys who failed English, was snapped up by one of our newspapers. Hok – ‘the exception that proves the rule’: Major Grant’s reported words, when he heard the news – joined the Inquirer as a feature-writer. His name presently began appearing above stylishly written articles, whose cleverness could still give me a twinge of jealousy, that jealousy – so easily converted into open admiration – which