SOURCE: "The Short Fiction," in Jean Rhys, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 32-66.

[In the following excerpt, Wolfe discusses the similarities between Rhys's short fiction of the 1960s and her later work.]

That Jean Rhys's uncollected fiction and the stories in the recently published collection Sleep It Off, Lady resemble her collected work of the 1960s shows clearly in the subjects, characters, and techniques of "I Spy a Stranger." This story, which came out in Art and Literature [Vol. 8, Spring 1966] returns to the British pastime of picking on underdogs; in "A Solid House," Jean Rhys called this practice "witch-hunting." The object of the witch-hunt in "Stranger" hasn't a chance; as a middle-aged intellectual spinster with a background in foreign travel, she is a natural victim of her neighbors' war hysteria. The harshness of her fellow boarders outdoes that described in both ["The Lotus"] and "House." The most embattled, "Stranger" could also be the best of the three tales. Its people react to the war more believably than those in "House," and the nonappearance of its main character calls forth a bolder technique than does "Lotus." The whole story consists of two women gossiping. One, Marion Hudson, takes charge of the conversation; her sister, Mrs. Trant, exists to break up the recitation by asking the right questions.

Mrs. Hudson is complaining about the hubbub caused in her neighborhood recently by her cousin Laura. One anonymous letter warned her to "get rid of that crazy old foreigner, that witch of Prague," who has been staying with her. (In 1969, Jean Rhys told the Sunday Observer [June 1, 1969] that one of her neighbors had called her a witch.) Concurring with the British wartime sport of baiting foreigners, Mrs. Hudson asks Laura, who has been away from England long enough to be mistaken for foreign, to go to London. "It's no use thinking you can ignore public opinion," she says, reminding Laura that, having only come back home as a last resort, she should not complain about being the butt of local gossip. This gossip, she admits to her sister, started with an ugly remark dropped by a Mr. Fluting, which Laura responded to in kind. The outcome of the incident could have been predicted: even though Fluting started the trouble, Laura, who is less able to defend herself, pays more dearly for it.

Mrs. Hudson takes this unfairness in stride, even though its victim is her cousin. The traditional British distrust of intellect expresses itself in her reference to Laura's "cracky ideas." Cracky ideas to Mrs. Hudson mean Laura's dismay over the war—its origin, meaning, and impact on friends trapped on the Continent. Laura has written letters, scoured newspapers, and ordered books from London to get information about these subjects. In the meantime, she has taken to her room and put together a war scrapbook consisting of "headlines and articles and advertisements and reports of cases in court and jokes." Though upset by the war, she has nonetheless tried to make sense of it. This courage marks her out for cruelty. After her neighbors drive her to her room, they resent her for keeping to herself. She can do no right:

She had some good clothes when she first came and she used to make the best of herself. "These refugees!" he'd say, "all dressed up and nowhere to go." Then she got that she didn't care a damn what she looked like and he grumbled about that. She aged a lot too. "Ricky," I said, "if you do your best to get people down you can't blame them when they look down, can you?" Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't a bit right.

The bitterness intensifies. The police confiscate her scrapbook, only to return it as harmless. But Ricky, Mrs. Hudson's querulous son or husband, wants it destroyed, anyway. Nor is he alone. Nobody understands the pressures Laura lives with. Nobody can afford to; it would mean suspending prejudice and challenging the majority. Mrs. Hudson admits that Laura is steady, helpful, and generous: "She paid well and she was good about helping me in the house, too. Yes, I was quite pleased to have her—at first." The qualification spells the difference between recognition and action: to like unpopular people is dangerous. Regardless of who is to blame, Laura has enemies. Anyone who sides with her will also invite enemies.

Trouble comes after the source of trouble has been removed—Laura having agreed to go away. The worst air-raid to hit the town has upset the townsfolk. Nobody wonders whether the air-raid has upset her, too. She is too valuable as a victim. Even though she is leaving, Mrs. Hudson's Ricky storms, "That's enough now. She's as mad as a hatter and I won't stand for it a day longer. She must get out." He is determined to hurt her. Under the pretext that her blackout curtain has been leaking light, he and Fluting try to have her arrested as a spy. (The cowardly Ricky also threatens to kick her door in until the door's sturdiness changes his mind.) Although their scheme fails, it does wound her heart. The only compassion she receives comes from a stranger, Dr. Pratt. A kindly local physician, he is nevertheless called "old-fashioned" and "obstinate as the devil" for saying that Laura should not be on her own. Seeing her whipped gladdens Ricky, who takes her to the cab waiting to cart her away. "Come along, old girl," he says cruelly, "It's moving day." When she protests, he responds with cheerful brutality—hitting and kicking her all the way out of the house.

The move to the sanitorium dooms her. "A large, ugly house with small windows," some of them barred, the sanitorium is ugly, Mrs. Hudson admits. But it costs far less than the one Dr. Pratt recommended. It also has a golf course, adds Mrs. Hudson with manufactured cheer, looking to clear herself for staying away from the rest home on visiting day. Avoiding Laura comes easily to her because it means avoiding guilt. It is also Mrs. Hudson's standard practice. So little has she cared about her cousin that she never bothered to know if Laura plays golf. In an indirect confession of guilt, she ends the story with the groundless hope that golf is, in fact, Laura's game.

The wartime setting of the first part of "Temps Perdi" (1967) recalls both "Stranger" and "A Solid House." The fragmented, imagistic story also recalls the early "Vienne" in its episodic structure and Japanese characters. In fact, it repeats some phrases and ideas nearly verbatim from the earlier work. The action does not begin in Vienna, though. At the start, the narrator is living alone in Rolvenden, a house belonging to an English school teacher who left the area in order to escape the Blitz. The war has insinuated itself into the daily lives of those who stayed behind. The two houses flanking Rolvenden in this "time of smash and grab" have been taken over by the army, and tanks rumble through the local streets. A snowfall cheers the lonely narrator, sending her mind back to a Cuban high-wire act she saw years before on her small Caribbean island. But the festive memory only comforts her briefly. Yanking her back to the dreary present is the fear that some villagers have been taking her coal. The gay, colorful tropics have yielded to the biting East Anglia winter, where neighbors steal and where everything—faces, clothes, furnishings—is colored beige.

But no confrontation with a whey-faced thief occurs. In a Proustian motif hinted at in the story's title, a smell wafts her back to Vienna. Part II, "The Sword Dance and the Love Dance," begins immediately. The officers of the Japanese commission from "Vienne" have come back with names and personalities. One, "the tallest, handsomest, and best-dressed" of the commission, likes to dance; another, who lost an eye in the Russo-Japanese War, hates all white people—except the Germans, whom he esteems as the future leaders of Europe. The narrator's husband has also gained definition; Pierre works as Hungarian interpreter to the Japanese. Neither he nor his wife makes much happen, though. Some political and military gossip promises to generate drama. But, instead, it flattens into an inventory of the narrator's wardrobe. A further train of associations leads to a reference to the Caribs, a mysterious West Indian tribe the narrator visits in Part III, "Carib Quarter."

"Carib Quarter" explains the Creole patois term, "Temps Perdi," as "wasted time, lost labor." The explanation reveals little. Right after it, the action, what little there is, takes over. Accompanied by a handsome black man named Nicholas, the narrator goes to Salybia, the Carib enclave.

As the story's title suggests, the visit falls short of her expectations—expectations created by books, illustrations, and hearsay. If the Caribs have a secret language and live off buried treasure, as legend claims, they keep the information to themselves. The day brings no uplift. The narrator reaches Salybia by riding through scrubland on a morose, bony horse. The most notable Carib she meets is the town's main attraction, a beautiful girl who cannot walk. Every visitor to the Quarter photographs this symbol of wingless beauty and gives her some coins. But the crippled girl never intended to become a tourist attraction. She tells the narrator that, though she enjoys the attention, she came back to Salybia to spend time with her dying mother.

The remark dumps the narrator where she was at the outset: "It is at night that you know old fears, old hopes, that you know unhappiness, turning from side to side under the mosquito-net, like a prisoner in a cell full of small peepholes." "Temps Perdi" is a looking-glass story. The West Indian who migrated to England returns to the tropics to find the same dreariness and dislocation that have always plagued her. Her travels have taught her that life everywhere is a prison. People are trapped behind mosquito nets, in remote outposts, or by crippling diseases. What looks like an escape is merely the substitution of one cage for another. The narrator has no more freedom at winter-swept Rolvenden than amid the glitter and glow of Vienna. But her entrapment does not include us. As in "Vienne," wayward plotting and dim character portraits keep us outside the narrator's psychological cage.

The narrative focus sharpens in "Sleep It Off, Lady" (1974), Jean Rhys's latest and perhaps best short story. The work embodies several familiar motifs: cruel neighbors whittling down a spinster who lives alone; old age as a crime; a sympathetic but ineffectual doctor. Jean Rhys distances this material with great skill; her Miss Verney, the aging woman broken by neglect and derision, tries people's patience as grievously as those two other tipplers, Lotus Heath and Selina Davis ["Let Them Call It Jazz"]. Miss Verney seems doomed from the start. Like "House" and "Stranger," the story begins with two women talking. Jean Rhys launches her theme by beginning, "One October afternoon Mrs. Baker was having tea with a Miss Verney." The indefinite article before her name calls Miss Verney's identity into question. This is intended: the younger Letty Baker has both a first name and a husband; by contrast, Miss Verney is cut off from life's best chances by being single, by her sex, and, finally, by her age, which is "well over seventy." But deprivation has not immobilized her. She has a project: to tear down an ugly old shed squatting on her property. The project makes sense: "It was an eyesore," we learn of the shed. "Most of the paint had worn off the once-black galvanised iron. . . . Part of the roof was loose and flapped noisily in windy weather and a small gate off its hinges leaned up against the entrance." But nobody will tear the shed down for her. The intimation that the hideous, sagging wreck will outlast her makes Miss Verney panic. The panic heightens when the shed acquires a totem—Super-rat, an imaginary or real rat she spots while emptying a small yellow dustbin. The fear symbolized by the color yellow (a constant in Jean Rhys) grips Miss Verney. Even after a local man mines the shed with rat poison, the rat mocks her with his presence; he thrives in the shed, intends to stay, and wants Miss Verney to know it.

Having committed us to Miss Verney imaginatively before telling us of her alcoholism, Jean Rhys can safely have the man who put out the poison attribute the rat to her heroine's tippling. This insult draws Miss Verney further into her obsession and further away from other people. As she withdraws from others, she understands less about the world around her and becomes more frightened. She shuts her windows; bolts the windows and doors of the shed; takes special pains storing and disposing of food, like cheese and pork products, that could attract a rat; cleans her house fanatically. Then she takes to eating less while drinking more. Naturally, her health declines along with her social image. A doctor who knows the dangers of loneliness as well as Dr. Pratt of "Stranger" advises her to get a telephone and to avoid heavy lifting. The visit to the doctor gives her hope. She feels younger, stronger, more relaxed; as soon as her phone is installed, she will invite Letty Baker to tea. Then she remembers to empty the little yellow dustbin. The chore does not faze her. The big bin that holds her rubbish is standing in its proper place near the shed, heavy stones on its lid to foil Superrat, who seems to have been outsmarted.

Heartened, Miss Verney makes the mistake of removing the rocks holding down the dustbin lid. Although she succeeds, the subsequent effort of lifting her small pailful of paper, bread scraps, and eggshells knocks her down and clamps her to the cold earth. She still cannot move by nightfall, and none of the passers-by hear her cries for help. Frozen against the freezing darkness, she watches the road empty of people. Then she spots a twelve-yearold neighbor looking at her from her parents' gate. But Undine, or Deena, dismisses her pleas with the words, "Sleep it off lady." The cold-hearted girl who loves cold weather and whose namesake in European folklore lacks a soul then turns soullessly away. The next morning Miss Verney is found by a postman bearing a package of books for her. But she profits as little from the communication and interchange the book-bearing postman symbolizes as from her undelivered telephone. That evening she dies.

In ascribing her death to heart failure, her doctor never discovers its meaning. But this insult to Miss Verney is only one of several. She cannot avoid waste, decay, and vermin. The trash that spills from her little yellow dustbin festoons her body like a funeral wreath. And why shouldn't it? Her neighbors see no moral difference between her and the trash she lies in. The woman who had planned to come out of her lonely shell sprawls in a litter of eggshells, symbolizing her maimed rebirth. Miss Verney spends her last waking moments awaiting the assault of Super-rat. The slow romantic decline suggested in a line from Tennyson's "Ulysses" she recites, "After many a summer dies the swan," does not apply to her any more than the various symbols of communication that call attention to her hopelessness. Degradation is her lot. Dismissed as trash, she is done in by the job of emptying trash, and she dies amid trash. She could have spilled out of her dustbin with the other debris.

A remarkable achievement for an eighty-year-old, "Sleep It Off, Lady" proves that, though basically a novelist, Jean Rhys can also do justice to the more exacting demands of the short story. Works like it, "Illusion," and "Petronilla" come often enough in her career to show that some of her best work belongs to the genre. Although she sometimes misfires, her voice in the short stones is usually strong and clear, and her grasp of femininity, extraordinary.

Sleep It Off, Lady (1976) brings back many of the characters, settings, and attitudes of Jean Rhys's other fiction. Just as note-worthy is her ability, in her latest book, to write freshly and gracefully about grubby, formless lives. The exiles, outcasts, and dropouts peopling the book would escape notice but for the careful attention Jean Rhys gives them, her honesty and accuracy of observation creating poetical effects out of prosaic materials. Plot, style, and mood fuse easily in these bleak little encounters; one of the most touching, skilfully pointed stories in the book is only a page and a half long.

Several of the others have appeared in the (London) Times, Mademoiselle, and the New Yorker. Many have titles that are either ironic ("Pioneers, Oh Pioneers," "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds") or flat ("Heat," "Night Out 1925"). Most include some item of autobiography—a young West Indian girl with a doctor for a father, a West Indian émigrée forced to drop out of London's Academy of Dramatic Art because her father dies, an elderly woman living alone in Devonshire. Then there is the book's careful organization. The stories look at Jean Rhys chronologically, from her island girlhood through her years in London and Paris; before providing a short parting glimpse at Dominica, the book inserts a group of stories about old people set in provincial England. But the stories trace a realistic curve from childhood to old age. A retired naval captain in "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" and an old nun who dies at the end of "The Bishop's Feast" make age a force in the West Indian group of tales opening the book. Similarly, childhood counter-weights age in the last two stories. Besides twelve-year-old Deena, old Miss Verney's horrible neighbor in "Sleep It Off, Lady," Jean Rhys includes two little white children in "I Used to Live Here Once," the last story in the book. The story merits discussion. In it, Jean Rhys returns in spirit, through her anonymous heroine, to the Caribbean home she had revisited physically in the third story of the book. "The Bishop's Feast," a description of her first homecoming in twenty-five years. She is standing by a river, symbolic of the border she has just crossed, and looking at the local landmarks. A car parked in front of her family's summer home is but one incongruity in a parade of familiar and unfamiliar things. Then the drama starts. Two children she speaks to on a "rough lawn" disregard her; at her third greeting, one of them complains of a sudden chill in the air. Then they both go home. Their turning from the heroine to go indoors makes her see that the chill that touched them came from her. Having brought a chill to the tropics, she must be dead. Jean Rhys's tactic of delaying this recognition till the story's last sentence, "That was the first time she knew," makes for a powerful climax; the "rough lawn" where the aged heroine's recognition takes place refers to the loss of innocence and the shedding of illusions marking the passage from one stage of being to the next. Though given less than 500 words of foreshadowing, this passage touches our hearts.

The first brace of stories, to which "I Used to Live Here" refers, all take place around the turn of the century. The date of "Pioneers" is November 1899; "Heat," the fourth story in the book, is set 8 May 1902, the day Mont Pelée erupted, razing the city of St. Pierre in Martinique; some letters in the next story, "Fishy Waters," date the action March 189—. The book's second story, "Goodbye Mareus, Goodbye Rose," varies the pattern subtly. Twelve-year-old Phoebe entices Captain Cardew, a handsome old battle veteran who has come to the West Indies to retire. Normally soft-spoken and reserved, the veteran officer slides his hand inside Phoebe's blouse, cupping her small breast, and soon starts telling her tales dealing with the violence and cruelty of sexual love. "The only way to get rid of a temptation was to yield to it," Cardew tells his wife. Phoebe is that temptation; she is gotten rid of. At twelve, she is already old enough to turn a man's head, even unintentionally. Her charms have made her a prey to danger. They have also cost Cardew his tropical idyll, his wife insisting that he take her promptly to England.

The Cardews' setback typifies the plight of English settlers in the Caribbean, be they planters, merchants, or retirees. As Edward Rochester shows in Wide Sargasso Sea, Europeans do not adapt easily to the tropics. The loneliness, the hanging heat, and the distrust of both the law and the police shared by the local blacks wreck the peace of white colonists. Often, trouble comes from other whites; British migrants to the West Indies have inherited the national disposition to hypocrisy evident in Quartet and Mr. Mackenzie while neglecting their nation's tradition of personal freedom. The title, "Pioneers, Oh Pioneers," refers ironically to the westering spirit—the wish to start anew in the new world. The story's chief character, Mr. Ramage, arrives in Dominica "a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee." Two years in the islands change him completely. Shedding his imperialist trappings, he lets his beard and hair grow, stops wearing clothes, and marries a local black girl, an act that frets his British counterparts. (The Socialist carpenter from England, Jimmy Longa, also forfeits the benefits of white society by moving into a black district in "Fishy Waters.") Then his wife leaves him under conditions mysterious enough to make the local, black-operated newspaper suspect that he killed her. A "fiery article" sends a mob of black vigilantes to his home. The morning after their raid he is found dead. Though his shotgun is nearby, his death remains a mystery, along with his wife's disappearance and the outcome of the vigilante raid itself:

A crowd of young men and boys, and a few women, had gone up to Ramage's house to throw stones. . . . A man had shouted "White zombi" and thrown a stone which hit him. He went into the house and came out with a shotgun. Then stories differed wildly. He had fired and hit a woman in the front of the crowd. . . . No, he'd hit a little boy at the back. .. . He hadn't fired at all, but had threatened them. It was agreed that in the rush to get away people had been knocked down and hurt, one woman seriously.

Jean Rhys's refusal to clear up the confusion extends an argument stated in "Temps Perdi" and Wide Sargasso Sea: Europeans cannot make sense of the tropics. If they veer from social norms, they cannot survive. His fellow whites snub Ramage because he does not attend church, dances, or tennis parties. Then the blacks savage him as soon as they see that his lack of white support will let them get away with it. As in her novels, the society that breaks the individual in Jean Rhys consists of broken individuals.

Displacement and homelessness also permeate "Overture and Beginners Please," the sixth tale in the book and the first one set in England. The nameless West Indian heroine is spending the Christmas holidays in a Cambridge boarding school emptied of its students; her only English relative, an aunt, whose mean, carping ways recall Anna Morgan's stepmother in Voyage in the Dark, has not invited her to spend the holidays. The story, which covers more time than any other in the book, then shows its heroine, a hit in a school play, joining the chorus line of a traveling musical comedy troupe. In the next story, "Before the Deluge," the heroine is an actress from the outset. Yet here, it is not she, but a colleague, an English soprano of twenty-four, who grieves (because her career falls flat). This stroke of misdirection imparts a lesson. Gloom can touch anybody in Sleep It Off, Lady, the unknown contents of an attic in "Who Knows What's Up in the Attic?" pointing up the possibility of the surprising amid the everyday. The commonplace houses danger in "Fishy Waters" and "The Insect World." The latter story features a London spinster of twenty-nine during the Blitz. No wonder she has hallucinations and nightmares: German bombs have flattened the street next to hers; the prospect of reaching her thirtieth birthday without a husband, at one time a vague worry, has become a real threat. Allowing herself to be talked into buying a dress whose color and size are both wrong and then not eating when hungry, she has lost her will. This shattering of her inner and outer defenses has made her see people as skin-burrowing insects.

"Fishy Waters," the longest work in the book, is one of several stories ending with a final and irreversible separation. (As has been seen, "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" recounts the events forcing Captain and Mrs. Cardew from Dominica.) The separation can come from a false start, a plan that miscarries, or a prospective friendship that never develops. "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds" makes the failed connection sexual. To please a London man on her first date with him, the heroine makes up a hunting story which she sets in the Dominican woods. The Londoner's riveting on a detail that means nothing to her causes a misunderstanding that spoils the evening. The date ends soon afterwards, both awkwardly and abruptly. Two Paris-based stories dealing with the failure to connect sexually after a sexual connection promises to develop are "Night Out 1925" and "The Chevalier of the Place Blanche," both of which end with would-be lovers exchanging final goodbyes.

Sex touches "Rapunzel, Rapunzel" more subtly. The irreversible farewell of this tender story involves the butchering of the long silky hair of an Australian patient in a convalescent home near London. Mrs. Peterson's beautiful hair conveys her womanly identity. Although Rapunzel's letting-down of her hair saved her in the fairy tale, the shearing of Mrs. Peterson's brings disaster. To the narrator's sympathetic, "Don't worry, you'll be surprised how quickly it'll grow again," she answers, with prophetic finality, "No, there isn't time." Then, to nobody in particular, she says, "Nobody will want me now." Life starts draining from her immediately. That night, after a violent spell of coughing and vomiting, she leaves the convalescent home. Was she taken away to die? Did her remark, "Nobody will want me now," mean that the promise of rousing male lust was all that kept her alive? Jean Rhys invites these questions with great compassion, the narrator noting of Mrs. Peterson, with whom she had quarreled earlier, "I can't say that we ever became friendly." The narrator does not reserve her heart for friends; that Mrs. Peterson has suffered entitles her to sympathy. A different sort of dead-end, freshened by an expansion of moral vision, comes in the West Indian story of a litigation, "Fishy Waters." The wife of the prosecution's star witness in a child abuse case believes her husband of many years guilty of having abused the child himself. Her belief is never confirmed or refuted. The story ends in darkness and estrangement as the English couple, the Penrices, agree to leave Roseau as soon as they can.

The story also blends different storytelling techniques. There are many ways to tell a story, and in "Fishy Waters" Jean Rhys moves smoothly between several of them. Some letters to the editor of a local newspaper about the upcoming trial yield to a letter Maggie Penrice writes to a friend in England about the defendant; next comes the trial, including both the give-and-take between lawyers and witnesses and the judge's summing-up and verdict; finally, a short passage of domestic realism describing Maggie's uneasiness over the trial and Matthew's determination to leave the island ends the story. Although broken into several sequences, each of which features a different voice and mood, the story holds solid. This unity comes not only from the strong central incident—the alleged beating and torture of little Jojo—but also from the plot-twist at the end, in which Jimmy Longa, the harddrinking working man, is replaced as Jojo's abductor by respectable Matthew Penrice. Jean Rhys maintains both unity and excitement, moreover, without introducing either Jojo or Longa, the story's two main characters for most of the way.

Other stories in Sleep It Off, Lady call for different strategies. For instance, "Night Out 1925" observes the unities of setting, time, and action. This tightly executed story recounts a visit to a private club in Paris featuring "a crowd of girls in varying stages of nakedness" who do sexual whirligigs with each other for a fee. Again, Jean Rhys refocuses her narrative elements in a marvelous stroke of misdirection, the scantily clad girls serving as plotting devices rather than as developed characters. As with Julia Martin's dreary visit to a London nightclub with Mr. Horsfield in Mr. Mackenzie, the barhopping couple in "1925" show that a man and a woman who cannot enjoy each other while out on the town do not belong together. The failure of the partying couple imparts a strong aura of futility. As has been said, they have no reason to spend any more time together.

Desolation of this kind runs through the book. The color yellow, symbolizing fear in Jean Rhys, appears often: describing a sun-stopped shopping street in Roseau in "Pioneers," the curtain of a boarding school dormitory in "Overture," some May grass in "Attic," and poor Miss Verney's dustpail in the title story; yellow-gray, the hue of an English sky in December in "Overture," is actually called the color of despair. This negativity, however, need not engulf or crush, thanks to Jean Rhys's balance, understanding, and sympathy. Though ending in confusion and bitterness, "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds" shows that setbacks can be shrugged off. Once again, Jean Rhys's conjury uncovers, at the end, the story's narrative focus in an unexpected place: reading the story prepares us to read it with the insight it deserves. Its main detail, apparently an incidental, is the pink underwear the West Indian heroine buys before her first date with a man she has found attractive. The failure of the dinner date disappoints, without saddening, the heroine. As the story's last paragraphs show, the letdown, though regrettable, does not trouble her sleep. Her new pink underwear, which is mentioned three times in the three-page story, keeps its romantic promise. What is more, as the word, "perhaps," shows, the heroine will acquiesce even if this promise fails to materialize straightaway. It might be argued, similarly, that Jimmy Longa learns from his West Indian troubles in "Fishy Waters" and that the Cardews stand a good chance for happiness after leaving the Caribbean in "Goodbye":

I felt regretful when it came to taking off my lovely pink chemise, but I could still think: Some other night perhaps, another sort of man.

I slept at once.