Guerrillas Read Free Page B

arched over the field. It was cool in the shade of the bamboo, and the ground was soft and padded with dead bamboo leaves. The bamboo stalks, of all the colors from bright green to chrome yellow to straw, swayed under their own weight and rubbed creaking against one another. One clump had ignited; but green shoots were already sprouting from its blackened, ashy heart.
    In that part of the field shaded by the bamboo, weeds hadgrown almost to bush. Through this they walked to what Jimmy said was the vegetable garden; the vegetables grown there were intended only for Thrushcross Grange. The vegetable garden was knee-deep in weeds, with no sign of furrow or ridge. Neither Jimmy nor Roche appeared surprised. Jimmy, suddenly energetic, pulled back weeds, looking for what had been planted, and showing what had grown: deformed, pale eggplants, stunted okras. He was excited; he was like a man discovering the simplicity of nature, its unchanging laws, the processes that worked for him as they did for others.
    JIMMY DIDN’T live at Thrushcross Grange. His house was a little distance away, separated by a block of forest from the commune hut. There was a path through the forest, but there was also a way through the side roads of the former industrial park, and they went in the car.
    The invitation was unexpected; Roche had always found Jimmy secretive about his house. But Jane was not surprised. She had already begun to feel that Jimmy’s initial coldness had only been a form of anxiety; that he had considered the visit important and had prepared for it, had prepared his entrance, his set blank face; and that gradually he had unwound, had become more and more a man anxious to make an impression, to display himself. There had come a moment in the vegetable garden when, as Jimmy had bent down to separate weeds from vegetable plants, Jane had thought: He is a candidate. And her irritability, which until then had been the irritability of heat and disgust, had altered, had become the irritability of the woman who knew she was being courted. She had become more at ease.
    Even before they had got as far as the striped sentry box, Roche, shut in behind this dark glasses, had recognized her new mood. It was something he had remembered from their early days in London: that irritability, mixed with an abrupt coyness, which was her special style. The sea anemone, he thought, waving its strands at the bottom of the ocean. Rooted and secure, and indifferent to what it attracted. The dragon lady, infinitely casual,infinitely unconsciously calculating, so indifferent to the body, so apparently willing to abuse it, and yet so careful of the body, so careful of complexion and teeth and hair.
    The house stood by itself at the end of a narrow road that stopped some distance away from the forest wall. During the days of the industrial park it had been the house of an American factory manager. The enterprise had, within its period of grace, withdrawn its capital and its machinery; the factory buildings, shells of corrugated iron or timber, had been auctioned off as building materials and dismantled; and all that remained now of the factory was the dead-end road, the flatness on either side of the road, and the house at the end of the road.
    Pink and white oleanders had grown tall around the house, and bougainvillaea had run wild: sudden bright color in the brownness. The house, which stood on low concrete pillars and had ocher-washed concrete walls, looked simple in plan; but the corrugated-iron roof was complicated: an attempt at what was known locally as the California style.
    As they arrived, a small blue van came out of the yard:
CHEN BROS The Quality Grocery
. Roche pulled aside to let the van pass, and then drove in, past the white glare of the front porch, to the shelter and cool of the car port at the side of the house. On the concrete steps at the far end were cardboard boxes, full of parcels and packages.
    Jane said, “They deliver here?”
    “And