The Worlds Within Her (23 page)

Did he know what he was doing? Of course he did. They all did. They were just playing the game as it was played back then — and still is. Stirring people's fears, pricking their sensitivities — and where there were none, creating them.

Yes, you heard what I said: creating them. And why should that make me cynical, my dear? Perhaps it's less a question of my cynicism than of your naïveté? I don't know the half of it, I assure you. I was hardly his confessor or his sounding board. He spoke to me only occasionally, you see, late at night in bed, when his brain would not stop.

Little incidents were best, he believed, because they were hard to verify and provided a basis of fact, which was all you needed or wanted, for that matter. He wasn't terribly interested in what you might call literal truth — but political truth, now that was another matter …

Once, I recall, an opportunity came to him to stir things up a bit. There had been a fight at a rum shop between a black man and one of our people over the correct interpretation of a cricket rule. It ended unhappily for the black fellow. There was some blood, some broken bones. The Indian fellow was arrested. My husband was looking for a cause to raise the political temperature a bit — he believed in keeping things at a low boil — and he seriously considered defending this man in what he called the court of public opinion …

What argument could he have made? My dear Mrs. Livingston, any argument he pleased. It was all in the presentation, don't you see?
The fellow was provoked. The fellow was humiliated. And there were those who say the fellow was called the vilest of racist names!
Nothing needed to be substantiated. As it turned out, he made a speech about the incident in which he said that, after having examined the facts, he could not bring himself — as many were urging him — to defend the fellow. He even wished the black fellow well. Hah! A simple artistry, really: he used them both to exonerate himself of the charge of racial politics. Oh, his politics were racial all right, but the perception was unhelpful. Better to deny it.

That was my husband's genius, you see. He could be reasonable and conciliatory, or he could be a rabble-rouser. He could ignite fires or extinguish them at will …

The truth? To people like my husband literal truth is interesting but not often useful. Political truth is far more valuable, the possible truths my husband was playing with, for instance. My husband, you see, Mrs. Livingston, put thought into everything. He took nothing for granted. Except me.

AN INVENTIVE MAN
. Adventurous.

And yet.

And yet there came the afternoon when Jim interrupted the sorting of his books to place the blanket, freshly laundered and wrapped in plastic, beside the sliding door.

She pretended not to see. The gesture was so calculated, so uninspired. The sight of the blanket lying there on the carpet, given purpose, no longer an object of spontaneity, left her with a hollow feeling, her body contracted, as if pulling, saddened, into itself.

Night fell. They had dinner and Jim cleaned up quickly, with a dispatch she found enervating. She remained at the table, sipping at the last of her wine and studying her reflection in the windowpane, herself and her world spectral against the darkness beyond.

He switched on the dishwasher and then took her hands in his, enfolding them in palms still damp, palms in which the pulse of his excitement was manifest. He pressed his lips to her knuckles, teeth nipping — with passion? — at the loose skin.

She shut her eyes, her hand distanced from herself, her arm as if disembodied.

And amidst the whirring and sloshing of the dishwasher, she found herself taken unawares by his hunger, by her own. Her reluctance softened. She slipped a finger into his mouth. Felt him, and then herself, shudder.

Once more followed him into the garden.

Once more engaged lust under the stars.

Afterwards, when they had crept back into the house from the night growing chilly, the hollow once more carved itself within her. She had opened herself to the pleasure. But this time
no soil had found its way under her fingernails, and the sky had seemed a brilliant canopy, distant and cold. And consciousness, too, had intervened: she had been aware all along of his — and her own — efforts at invention. Repetition had deprived them of effortlessness, and effort had moderated passion.

She left Jim to fold the blanket and went to prepare herself a bath. She poured a lengthy stream of bath foam into the water, tossed in a couple of oil beads, sat watching the water fall and the mirror steam up.

In the vaguely melancholic mood that came to her after lovemaking, she understood that Jim was a man of both passion and method, the one enlisted to the other. It showed in his photographs, in his designs — only, this evening, one part of his nature had been undone by the other. How easily, she reflected, was the extraordinary made pedestrian.

When, days later, Jim had the idea that the blanket could be turned into a throw cover for the old sofa in the basement, his suggestion came as a relief to her. It shored up her faith that if the extraordinary could be made pedestrian then the opposite, too, was possible. Jim's choice, then, renewed her faith in the possibility of redemption, and the memory of that first time on the lawn — when all her senses seemed suffused with the very energy of creation — still gave her hope.

YASMIN COMPOSES HER
knife and fork, conjoined exclamation marks on the plate she has cleaned through obligation.

When Amie offers another coffee, Yasmin accepts. And when
she brings it, Yasmin says, “Do you have any grandchildren, Amie?”

“Me? No, miss.”

“A husband, then.”

“No, miss. I never b'en married.”

As Yasmin sips at the coffee, she thinks: But you cannot just have been a slave all your life.

The gap between her thought and words is unbridgeable, and so all that remains is silence.

THE PREGNANCY WAS
unexpected and, at first, Yasmin did not know what to do with the news.

She called Jim. He was in a meeting. “Is it urgent? Would you like me to interrupt him?” She chose to be put on hold. After ten minutes of AM radio, she hung up.

She called her mother, but when she heard her voice she knew she had not chosen well: Just calling to see how you were doing, Mom …

She called Charlotte, her joy rising. Charlotte's reaction — “Oh, shit, Yas!” — evoked a sudden fury, forcing her to hang up: Someone at the door …

By the time Jim got home that evening, she was joyous, and jealous of it. They had dinner. They made love. He fell asleep and so, eventually, did she.

The next morning when she went down to the kitchen, he had already brewed a pot of coffee. He offered her a cup.

She waited a beat. Then: “No, thanks. Coffee isn't good for pregnant women.”

Another beat, followed by the shattering of Jim's coffee mug on the tiled floor.

Then he floated up to join her.

LONDON, MRS. LIVINGSTON!
London!

I hadn't expected to like it, you know, hadn't expected to like the English or their ways. England was a fantasy for us in the island. We loved it, loved belonging to the majesty of it — and we hated it, because that very majesty was what kept us, in their eyes and ours, childlike. England would always take care of us — but it would also always tell us what to do. My husband was among those who wished to put an end to this dependence. So I accompanied him to London wary — which may explain why I ended up falling in love with England and its ways.

Oh, my dear. I could run the names past you now — Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral, and on and on — but would they sound to you simply like a list of tourist sites or would they cause your pulse to quicken as they do mine? I could talk to you of afternoon tea in the grand style, of dinners and receptions in settings that …

Ambassador? No, no, there was no such thing at the time. He was named special advisor to the island's delegation. Talks on independence were about to get under way, you see, and there was a lot to do — not only meetings with British officials
but with diplomats from other newly created nations. He met a lot with the Indians, I recall, while the others spent their time with the Africans. Even there, our racial division persisted …

It was a big change for my husband — from opposing the government to a post in its diplomatic service — and it came about fairly quickly. My husband felt he was doing valuable work but, perhaps understandably, not everyone saw it that way. There were those who said he had sold out to the first minister, that he was just angling for a big job in the new administration. Even I wondered — feeling guilty, feeling disloyal …

No, he didn't speak to me about it. He simply told me one evening, after he had accepted. It wasn't our way, you see, to discuss his … He felt I knew nothing about such things, and I felt he knew everything.

But my doubts could not survive his passion. That is what I remember best about this period. His passion — a passion, my dear, that I knew to be incompatible with mere self-interest. I will admit it was not far-fetched to suggest that he dreamed of an important post, perhaps even deputy prime minister: my husband was human, after all. But he was also enough of an idealist to flirt with the idea of biracial government, reconciliation, racial harmony. I suspect he'd always wondered what co-operation might bring.

But, whatever the truth may be, this move was not well seen in certain circles back home. Not to put too fine a point on it, my husband was seen as akin to being a traitor for accepting an offer from the first minister — and those who judged him less harshly still viewed him with suspicion —

What do I think the truth was? Between you and me, Mrs. Livingston, I never really understood why he accepted. I'm not sure he did either, although being the kind of man he was he
must have believed that there were good reasons for doing so. Reconciliation and all the rest.