The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [85]
‘A car,’ Cecil’s valet said.
I heard the wheels on coconut husks and sand. A door slammed. There were voices.
Cecil laughed and said loudly, ‘But what the hell is wrong with this man on the sand?’
On a bank, just a few feet high, above the brackish freshwater stream from the cocoteraie, I saw a white family. I got up. Dalip got up. He didn’t laugh like Cecil and the Negro. He was still angry, still complaining about his thirty dollars. He still made attempts to fight. He was very drunk. Cecil and his valet kept on laughing, acting for the newcomers. I was forced to struggle with Dalip. The newcomers watched.
‘Swim!’ Cecil said.
The Negro ran to the water. Cecil chased him as if in sport. I threw off Dalip and followed them. He fell and remained where he fell. The family went walking on the beach, some in ordinary clothes, some in swimming costume. Dalip raised himself after a little and staggered to the car. He opened the door and appeared to collapse on the back seat among the clothes and the towels. I was at last out of the shallows. The water broke over me, the great breakers – the faded white board on the beach said in red Danger – and with every breaker I felt closer to myself. It was a coming back from far, as the hill people said. Whence had that mood of the previous minutes come? The sea and the sand. Oh, never again.
Later we found Dalip asleep and totally naked. He had tried to dress but had only got as far as taking off his swimming pants. He had tried to drink some more. The rum bottle was on its side and uncorked and almost empty; rum soaked and scented our clothes. He had apparently also tried to walk home. We followed his tracks through the dry hot sand below the coconut trees to the road. The asphalt was lumpy and rutted and full of holes, green at the base, in which water had collected. About fifty feet up the road he had collapsed. Soft, pale flesh, innocent abused face, genitals foolish and slack. We lifted him back into the car and put some clothes on him.
We drove back at a rate. The car was damp and gritty with sand and smelled of rum. We put Dalip down at his house. It was a large, clumsy, two-storeyed concrete dwelling, painted in vivid colours. I could see pictures of Hindu deities and Mahatma Gandhi in the top veranda. When we got back to the house they were only reading newspapers. Lunch was to come. It was still morning; the adventure had been brief. The story Cecil told was the story of Dalip’s drunkenness. He referred to nothing else.
Some doubt remained in my mind. Some doubt remains now. Dalip telephoned the next day and apologized. His voice was soft and winning. I told him not to worry. But I took care not to meet him. We met again years later, after we had both gone abroad and come back. By then the issue was dead; accounts had been settled, down to the thirty dollars.
I never went back to Cecil’s house. I never saw Sally again. They sent her off some months later to a girl’s college in the the United States. I knew she would never come back to Isabella. So she went out into the contamination of the wider world and was absorbed in it. And I was free to do the same. I was as blank as I had been at the moment we were discovered. I went to my office and wrote out my certificates and what grief I felt sank into the emptiness that had been with me for some time. That did not lift.
I heard more about the Luger, though.
Cecil’s father bought a cinema in the country. It was the last thing he bought. It was not much of an investment from his point of view, and I believe that at the back of his mind there was the idea, of a perverted asceticism, that what was frivolity to the rest of the world was to him business. At the end of his career he was back, in a way, and now from perfect security, to ‘fulling