V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

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 adopted. After this I begin to be aware of the attention of studied inattention. The talk is a bit too loud, too hearty, too aggressive or too defensive; these people are acting, overdoing domesticity and the small details, over-stressing the fullness of their own lives. Sandra’s feet no longer tap as lightly as they did. And it occurs to me that we are straining these people whose welcome meant so much, whose friendship we value, whose pleasures we share. Sandra appears all naturalness, all delight. And perhaps she is. But she is so young! Her husband is so young! Can this naturalness be trusted? Away from this gathering, they are not just earning a living; they are making a fortune; how this must consume them! There, in the making of a fortune, in the management of Crippleville, in the dealings with contractors and banks and solicitors and accountants lies their true interest. It is the bigger and more important side of their life. They are making a fortune and working at it with a dedication that must obsess them. Here they can be natural and relax; but isn’t this an exploitation of their friends? All this I can see. I can see how every attempt at friendliness must appear false and insincere and must arouse the instinct to snub, how even my laughter at the fiction just discovered in the Society Page must irritate. This youth, this placidity, this coldness concealing the passion, the money passion, that is truly nameless. All this I see but do not know how to communicate to Sandra. She is still my luck. I leave her as always to fight her own battles; I know that she will win. I still delight in the bite of her phrase-choked speech, that thrust of chin and lower lip.

So we were set apart. And a little above. It is the human instinct for order; and those who so willingly ranged themselves below us required us to display extraordinary qualities. We were required to be kinder, more considerate, less impatient, and above all never to pay attention to the one thing — in our case money — which in the minds of others set us apart. We were constantly challenged, provoked, tested. The extra strength that was attributed to us encouraged our friends to a display of proportionate weakness. And we responded wrongly. It is difficult to be a lord! I sought accommodation where I ought to have imposed authority. And there was Sandra with her gift of the phrase, her North London tongue, battling where she should have succoured and consoled. I encouraged her, I am afraid, by being amused. She often spoke damaging words in public for my benefit alone.

We went one Sunday to see the house which one of our couples had built in the central hills of our island. Everyone else was mad about beach-houses — a house in the hills was original. We had heard a lot about this house; but its details had been kept secret, and were to be a surprise. The road to the house was bad and dangerous and slow; it was raining. Sandra did the driving; she was not in a good mood when we arrived. Almost the first thing she said to our hostess, in response to some light though too self-depreciating query about the house, was: ‘I wish you would make up your minds whether it is a country cottage or a country house.’ There was an instant chill in the air, more than the chill deriving from the altitude for the sake of which the house had allegedly been built. The thermometer might have dropped to sixty just before sunrise, and the most you might have said was that with a log fire you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Much varnished pine, I remember; an abundance of knots; very Scandinavian, as we agreed. We were led to the enormous fireplace, brass-and-leather belts or some such studded thing hanging irregularly on either side. We stood stunned and hushed; the moment for exclamation and congratulations passed, missing us; we moved away. We stood before an open window which looked out on to lush, dripping greenery; it was sunny now, and steaming after the rain. Sandra said: ‘It must get damned cold up here.’ Our hostess, who was Swedish, lost control of her English accent. Sandra, though recognizing she had gone too far without being in any way amusing — and perhaps because she recognized this — made no effort to repair the damage, not even when, to exclamations in many accents from the other girls, our hostess brought out open sandwiches, the pronunciation of whose native name had, on so many occasions in the years gone by, served me as the subject of hollow jests. Our hostess’s English sounded like Swedish when she said goodbye. Sandra, driving me away, down the damp, dangerous bends, and acting now for me, lost nothing of her self-induced temper or hostility. ‘Common little Lapp!’ A bitter little explosion, climaxing intermittent speech. I laughed; Sandra smiled, frowning, concentrating on the road. I kissed my finger and pressed it on her lips. The gift of the phrase! Yet pure fantasy on this occasion; for the Swede was splendidly built, and had an impeccable Stockholm background, with a father in publishing.

The gift of the phrase: she relied on this more and more, letting simple words harden into settled judgements and attitudes. She used the gift to render grotesque the girls whose company she had once sought and whose way of life had delighted her. She turned them into a kind of comic chorus, evolving for each a pejorative racial description. A bulky girl from Amsterdam, married to a man from Surinam who had migrated to Isabella, became a ‘subkraut’; the Latvian became, rather tellingly, the ‘sub-Asiatic’. I accepted these phrases; and in our household, which had of course its own racial contradictions, I might hear myself saying quite naturally, ‘Shall we have the subkraut over to genever on Sunday morning?’ Or: ‘It looks as though the Lapp has forgiven you. She wants you to go to a party she is giving for a bearded fellow-countryman. He is over here collecting voodoo songs to play on the Swedish radio.’

An invitation like the last was reconciliation indeed. Among us, cosmopolitan though we were, nothing was prized so much as the visitor from countries reasonably far away. Over such a visitor our women would fight, practising exclusions to indicate disfavour or offering invitations to announce reconciliation. This was the basis of the hospitality on which we prided ourselves, this pampering of the visitor while he remained a visitor, while his foreign cigarettes and shirts and foreign shoes lasted, before he became one of us. Invariably, with such a visitor, there would occur a moment, unplanned, of collective sadness, each girl then seeming to see at the same time the landscape from which she had broken; and in a darkened veranda, from which we offered our visitor the tropical night, there would be soft criticism, anticipating the visitor’s judgement, of the narrowness of island life: the absence of good conversation or proper society, the impossibility of going to the theatre or hearing a good symphony concert. Why the quality of the symphony concerts we were being denied should have been stressed I don’t know. It always was; it was as though on Isabella we were subjected, as a condition of residence, to an endless series of bad symphony concerts. And it was at one such session of soft criticism — at the Indian Commissioner’s, Indian Republic Day, such diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic corps as we had on Isabella all assembled, our women in saris, light glinting on silk from Banaras and jewellery from Guiana — it was then that Sandra, in a sari herself, succeeded in antagonizing the entire group, by saying loudly, in the middle of their music complaint, ‘The one thing I’ve learnt to recognize since I’ve come to this place is a bad symphony concert.’