A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [100]
But Raymond showed no uncertainty. And he was loyal—to the President, to himself, his ideas and his work, his past. My admiration for him grew. I studied the President’s speeches—the daily newspapers were flown up from the capital—for signs that Raymond might be called back to favour. And if I became Raymond’s encourager, after Yvette, if I became his champion and promoted him even at the Hellenic Club as the man who hadn’t published much but really knew, the man every intelligent visitor ought to see, it wasn’t only because I didn’t want to see him go away, and Yvette with him. I didn’t want to see him humiliated. I admired his code and wished that when my own time came I might be able to stick to something like it.
Life in our town was arbitrary enough. Yvette, seeing my life as settled, with everything waiting for me somewhere, had seen her own life as fluid. She felt she wasn’t as prepared as the rest of us; she had to look out for herself. That was how we all felt, though: we saw our own lives as fluid, we saw the other man or person as solider. But in the town, where all was arbitrary and the law was what it was, all our lives were fluid. We none of us had certainties of any kind. Without always knowing what we were doing, we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded. In the end we couldn’t say where we stood.
We stood for ourselves. We all had to survive. But because we felt our lives to be fluid we all felt isolated, and we no longer felt accountable to anyone or anything. That was what had happened to Mahesh. “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” That was what had happened to me.
It was the opposite of the life of our family and community on the coast. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life. Here I had stripped myself of all the rules. During the rebellion—such a long time ago—I had also discovered that I had stripped myself of the support the rules gave. To think of it like that was to feel myself floating and lost. And I preferred not to think about it: it was too much like the panic you could at any time make yourself feel if you thought hard enough about the physical position of the town in the continent, and your own place in that town.
To see Raymond answering arbitrariness with a code like the one he had worked out for himself seemed to me extraordinary.
When I said so to Yvette she said, “Do you think I would have married someone who was not extraordinary?”
Strange, after all the criticism, or what I had seen as criticism! But everything that was strange in my relationship with Yvette quickly stopped being strange. Everything about the relationship was new to me; I took everything as it came.
With Yvette—and with Yvette and Raymond together—I had acquired a kind of domestic life: the passion in the flat, the quiet family evening in the house in the Domain. The idea that it was my domestic life came to me when the life itself was disturbed. While it went on I simply lived it. And it was only when the life was disturbed that amazement came to me at the coolness with which I had accepted a way of living which, if it had been reported to me about someone else when I was younger, would have seemed awful. Adultery was horrible to me. I continued to think of it in the setting of family and community on the coast, and saw it as sly and dishonourable and weak-willed.
It was Yvette who had suggested, after an afternoon in the flat, that I should have dinner with them that evening in the house. She had done so out of affection, and a concern for my lonely evening;