Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul Page B

like the Ridge; he was half colonial. He was less on the island than he had been in London, and she still wondered at the haste with which he had thrown up his life there. She doubted whether half a dozen people on the island had read his book. Of course he had a reputation, as someone who had suffered in South Africa. Without this reputation he would not have been employed by Sablich’s, and he certainly would not have been given a work permit. For this reputation there was respect, but there was also something else: a curious attitude of patronage.
    It was strange that there should be patronage for Roche, and regard, almost awe, for someone like Mrs. Grandlieu. Mrs. Grandlieu was of an old planter family. She was an elderly brown-skinned woman; and at her cocktail parties and dinners she always did or said something to remind black people of the oddity of their presence in her house, where until recently Negroes were admitted only as servants.
    Mrs. Grandlieu’s accent was exaggeratedly local. She spoke the English her servants spoke; it was part of her privilege, and her way of distancing herself from the important black men, some with English accents, whom she asked to her house. At these gatherings Mrs. Grandlieu always managed to say “nigger” once, as if only with a comic intention, using the word as part of some old idiom of the street or the plantations which she expected her guests to recognize. She might say, of something that was a perfect fit, that it fitted “like yam fit nigger mouth”; and the black men would laugh. Once Jane heard her say, of someone who talked too much, that his mouth ran “like a sick nigger’s arse.”
    Yet the people who considered it a privilege to be in Mrs.Grandlieu’s house, assumed an exaggerated ease there, laughed with her at her antique plantation idioms, and avoided the racial challenge that she always in some way threw down, these very people could be tense and combative with Roche. They knew his South African history; they felt safe with him. But it was as if they wished to test him further, as if each man, meeting Roche for the first time, wished to get some personal statement from him, some personal declaration of love. Such a man might begin by attributing racialist views to Roche or by appearing to hold Roche responsible for all the humiliations he, the islander, had endured in other countries. Jane had seen that happen more than once.
    There was this that was also strange. The very people who avoided the subject of race with Mrs. Grandlieu probed Roche about South Africa. They wished to find out more about the humiliations of black people there; and they reacted with embarrassment, unease, or resentment when they heard what they had expected to hear. Jane had seen the cold hatred one evening when Roche had spoken of the climate, of the passion for sport, of the fine physiques of the white people. Roche had seen it too. Even when pressed—the word had got around—he never talked of that again.
    Mrs. Grandlieu challenged the black men in her old and old-fashioned house; they challenged Roche. Far more was required of Roche than of Mrs. Grandlieu; and Jane saw, over the weeks, that in spite of the real respect for his past, Roche had become a kind of buffoon figure to many. He was not a professional man or businessman; he had none of the skills that were considered important. He was a doer of good works, with results that never showed, someone who went among the poor on behalf of his firm and tried to organize boys’ clubs and sporting events, gave this cup here and offered a gift of cricket equipment there. He worked with Jimmy Ahmed, whom he took seriously, more seriously than the people who gave Jimmy money; he bribed slum boys to go to Thrushcross Grange.
    On the Ridge and elsewhere it was the privilege of the local people, black and not black, to be cynical about the future, about the politicians and politics. Roche, because of his past, becauseof that book