A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [67]
Yvette continued to smile. No embarrassment or playing it down, though; no irony now. Her name in the book mattered to her.
I gave the book back to Indar, looked away from Yvette and him, and returned to the voice. Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die.
It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!
It was different outside, and Mahesh would have scoffed. He had said, “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” But Mahesh felt far away. The aridity of that life, which had also been mine! It was better to pretend, as I could pretend now. It was better to share the companionship of that pretence, to feel that in that room we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love. Even before the songs ended I felt I had found the kind of life I wanted; I never wanted to be ordinary again. I felt that by some piece of luck I had stumbled on the equivalent of what years before Nazruddin had found right here.
It was late when Raymond came in. I had, at Indar’s insistence, even danced with Yvette and felt her skin below the silk of her blouse; and when I saw Raymond my thoughts—leaping at this stage of the evening from possibility to possibility—were at first only about the difference in their ages. There must have been thirty years between Yvette and her husband; Raymond was a man in his late fifties.
But I felt possibilities fade, felt them as dreams, when I saw the immediate look of concern on Yvétte’s face—or rather in her eyes, for her smile was still on, a trick of her face; when I saw the security of Raymond’s manner, remembered his job and position, and took in the distinction of his appearance. It was the distinction of intelligence and intellectual labours. He looked as though he had just taken off his glasses, and his gentle eyes were attractively tired. He was wearing a long-sleeved safari jacket; and it came to me that the style—long sleeves rather than short—had been suggested to him by Yvette.
After that look of concern at her husband, Yvette relaxed again, with her fixed smile. Indar got up and began fetching a dining chair from against the opposite wall. Raymond motioned to us to stay where we were; he rejected the chance of sitting next to Yvette, and when Indar returned with the dining chair, sat on that.
Yvette said, without moving, “Would you like a drink, Raymond?”
He said, “It will spoil it for me, Evie. I’ll be going back to my room in a minute.”
Raymond’s presence in the room had been noted. A young man and a girl had begun to hover around our group. One or two other people came up. There were greetings.
Indar said, “I hope we haven’t disturbed you.”
Raymond said, “It made a pleasant background. If I look a little troubled, it is because just now, in that room, I became very dejected. I began to wonder, as I’ve often wondered, whether the truth ever gets known. The idea isn’t new, but there are times when it becomes especially painful. I feel that everything one does is