City of Spades (17 page)

‘Wash me, then. But I must sleep.’

She wiped the blood off from my face and fists, and gave me a cup of warm-up tea. ‘You’re back so late. Always back so late,’ she said, taking my clean hands.

‘But I am back, Muriel. Come, we go sleep.’

‘I have to go to work in a few hours.’

‘Before you go to work, Muriel, you sleep with me.’

For several weeks, my life in the flat had been transformed: Norbert and Moscow had made themselves at home. ‘It sure is Bohemian here,’ Norbert said, ‘and we’ll not be in your way.’ They hardly were, indeed; for so much did they overflow about the place, flinging heady articles of clothing everywhere, singing naked on the stairs down to the bath, entertaining, at all hours, their wide circle of acquaintances, that I became almost the interloper in my dwelling, and feared to inconvenience them, rather than they me. Yet though so entirely heartless, and so rigorously selfish, they radiated such
bonhomie
, were perpetually so high-spirited and so amiable, laughed, danced and chattered so abandonedly, that even Theodora was won over. ‘Of course, I prefer Africans,’ she said, ‘they’re more authentic. But these young Americans certainly have charm.’

Carrying her cat Tungi, she was paying me a morning visit (such as, in earlier days, she’d never made) while my lodgers were out at their rehearsal. ‘I only wish,’ I said, ‘they wouldn’t use the telephone quite so recklessly. I caught Norbert calling up Jackson, Mississippi, yesterday, and really had to put my foot down.’

‘“Put your foot down”!’ Theodora irritated me by repeating with superior disdain. ‘You’re quite unable to say no to them about anything.’

‘And you, my dear Theodora?’ I could not resist asking. ‘Have you not succumbed, despite your initial indifference, even hostility, to coloured people?’

‘My feeling for them is selective, just as it would be with one of us. I don’t admire coloured people in the mass, like you do.’

‘You mean you’ve fallen in love with one individually, and I haven’t.’

Theodora, touched on the raw, assumed her severe departmental manner. ‘For some time now, Montgomery,’ she told me, ‘I’ve been wanting to say just what I think. And it’s this. Your interest in these people is prompted by nothing more than a vulgar, irresponsible curiosity.’

‘Thank you, Theodora.’

‘You like to be the odd man out, and lord it over them.’

‘I’m happy with them. It’s as simple as that.’

‘If you call that happiness.’

‘I do.’

She shifted, woman-like, her ground.

‘It’s the crude animal type that attracts you most of all. It’s simply another form of
nostalgie de la boue
.
You’ve taken the easy way and are losing face, even with them. Do you see anything, for instance, of the intelligent types? The coloured intellectuals?’

I decided a dressing-down was due. ‘In the first place, I’d remind you, Theodora, that I see much of Mr Karl Marx Bo. I listened to him addressing a meeting only last Sunday in Hyde Park, and we had a long and angry conversation afterwards. As for you, my dear, and
your
predilections, would you really describe Johnny Fortune as an intellectual?’

‘He’s most intelligent.’

‘I don’t deny it; but not lacking, I would say, in animal attraction.’

‘He’s handsome, in the way they are – yes.’

‘Theodora, I don’t wish to be unkind, but you’re pathetic. Why not admit you love him?’

She looked at me long and hard. ‘Because I’m ashamed to,’ she said at last. ‘Not ashamed because he’s coloured, or, as you say, animal, or anything else, but because it’s a feeling so strong I can’t control it. I’m not used to that, and I can’t cope.’

I ventured to pat her on her unyielding shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps one should not be able to dominate every situation …’

She looked to be crying, so I considerately turned away. ‘They’re so appalling!’ she said at last, quite softly. ‘So tender and so heartless. So candid and so evil!’

It was my turn now, I felt – from the depths of what was, after all, a wider experience than her own and, so I thought, one more dearly won – to lecture her.

‘I don’t think you must take,’ I said, ‘a
moral
attitude towards these people: or rather, a moral attitude within the English terms of reference. I don’t think you must suppose, if they seem to you such charming sinners, beyond good and evil (or before it, rather), that the devil has therefore marked them for his own.’

‘Why not?’ she said, rather sulkily.

‘Use your historical sense, Theodora – one certainly far better documented than my own. Remember, for instance, that in parts of Africa not a soul had ever heard of Christianity less than a hundred years ago …’

‘Where hadn’t they, precisely?’

‘Don’t be pedantic. In Uganda, for example. May I go on?’

‘But Johnny doesn’t come from Uganda.’

‘Who said he did? Can’t we move, just for a second, from the particular to the general?’ I was quite exasperated.

‘Go on, then.’

‘I shall. You should therefore remember that if coloured men seem, to your eyes, more happily amoral than we are, they have other spiritual ties, quite unknown to us, and very different from our own, that are every bit as strong.’

‘Such as?’

‘Don’t interrupt. They have sacred tribal loyalties, for instance, of which we feel absolutely nothing that’s equivalent. If Johnny had been a Gambian like those boys who set on me that evening, and of the same tribe as they were, he certainly wouldn’t have helped me, however close our friendship.’

‘The more fool he.’

I restrained myself. ‘There’s another thing,’ I went on. ‘The family. We think our family ties are precious, or, at any rate, that we should feel so. But they’re nothing at all to theirs. Have you noticed, when an African makes a solemn promise, what he says to you?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘He says, “I swear it on my mother’s life.”’

‘And probably breaks his word.’

‘Oh, no doubt! Just as we do when we swear upon our gods, or on our sacred books. The point I’m trying to convey, though, to the frosty heights of your Everest intelligence, dearest Theodora, is that there are entirely different moral concepts among different races: a fact which leads to endless misunderstandings on the political and social planes, and makes right conduct in you, for instance, seem idiotic to Johnny Fortune, and some gesture of his which he believes necessary and honourable to seem foolish, or even wicked, in your eyes.’

‘Don’t bully me, Montgomery,’ she said. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘I’m sorry, Theodora. Let’s have some coffee in the kitchen, if I can find my way through the provocative underclothes my lodgers have hung there in festoons.’

She put Tungi down and came and helped me make it, turning thoughtfully over the gossamer vests and pants that rested on the lines.

‘Have you seen Johnny lately?’ I asked, as I handed her a cup.

‘Yes, several times, and he telephones. But I’m worried about him, Montgomery! If only he’d work!’

‘He’s a lazy lad, I fear.’

‘Like you. How is your freelancing going?’

‘It’s not.’

‘I thought it wasn’t. And Johnny does absolutely nothing – only stays with that squalid woman.’

‘If you knew Muriel better, you’d not call her so.’

‘At all events, her sister’s little friend is now in jail.’

‘Billy Whispers being sentenced has nothing to do with Muriel, Theodora. Do be consistent. And don’t gloat.’

‘Johnny said he got six months.’

‘For being an accessory to a wounding, yes. But the evidence against him was given by a Mr Cannibal – the sentence had nothing to do with Dorothy, even less with Muriel.’

She pondered and sipped her coffee. I saw her eyes become transfixed by a peculiar garment. ‘What on earth’s this?’ she said.

‘It’s what the French call a “slip” or, more accurately, a “zlip”. The boys wear it when they dance. Which reminds me. There’s a matinée this afternoon. Would you like to come?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be so ungracious, Theodora. You ought to see them. After all, my guests are courteous to you round about the house …’

‘Oh, very well, then. I could do with a day off – and the Corporation owe me plenty. I’ll call my secretary.’

For a matinée, the place was crowded, principally with males, and with a fair peppering of coloured admirers of the Isabel Cornwallis company. I noticed, and greeted in the foyer, Mr Lord Alexander, to whom Theodora, once she heard who he was, behaved most graciously – she had apparently become a collector of his records; and also Mr Cranium Cuthbertson, who did not please her possibly because, poking her in the ribs and bending double with amusement, he cried out in a familiar fashion, ‘You’s the hep-cat what stole Mr Vial’s puss-cat!’ Bells rang, and we went inside the auditorium to see how the Cornwallis company would achieve that most difficult of theatrical feats – the creation of illusion just one hour after the midday meal.

Although I’d seen the show so often before (almost nightly), I marvelled once again at the complete transformation of these bitter, battling egoists, with their cruel jealousies and bitchy gossip, their pitiless trampling ambition, and their dreadful fear of the day, some time so near in their late thirties, when they could dance no more – into the gracious, vigorous, sensual creatures I saw upon the stage. By Miss Cornwallis’s alchemy, the sweaty physical act of dancing became an efflorescence of the spirit! True, there were tricks theatrical innumerable, but Isabel Cornwallis was wiser than she knew: because her raw material, the dancers, possessed an inner dignity and nobility, of which even she could hardly be aware, but knew, by instinct, how to use. These boys and girls seemed incapable of a vulgar gesture! And as they danced, they were clothed in what seemed the antique innocence and
wisdom of humanity before the Fall – the ancient, simple splendour of the millennially distant days before thought began, and civilisations … before the glories of conscious creation, and the horrors of conscious debasement, came into the world! In the theatre, they were
savages
again: but the savage is no barbarian – he is an entire man of a complete, forgotten world, intense and mindless, for which we, with all our conquests, must feel a disturbing, deep nostalgia. These immensely adult children, who’d carried into a later age a precious vestige of our former life, could throw off their twentieth-century garments, and all their ruthlessness and avarice and spleen, and radiate, on the stage, an atmosphere of goodness! of happiness! of love! And I thought I saw at last what was the mystery of the deep attraction to us of the Spades – the fact that they were still a mystery to themselves.

‘I can’t take any more,’ said Theodora at the interval. ‘They’re too upsetting.’

‘Can’t you stick it out until the end? We could meet them at the stage door and have some tea.’

‘You stay: I’ll go back to the office.’

We went out in the foyer. ‘Be sure you say something nice to them back at the flat, Theodora,’ I said to her. ‘You’re so parsimonious with your praise.’

‘I won’t know what to say.’

‘Just praise them. It’s all they want.’

I saw her to a taxi. Hurrying back into the theatre, amid clanging bells, I was detained by the odious Alfy Bongo.

‘You again!’

‘Yes, it’s me. Ain’t they the tops?’

‘Of course. I want to see them, though, not you. Farewell.’

He plucked at my arm. ‘You heard Billy Whispers and Ronson Lighter have gone inside?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘They should have got a good lawyer. It’s hopeless without. I told them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

‘Look! I want to see the show.’

He followed me into the theatre, already dark. ‘They should have gone to Mr Zuss-Amor,’ he whispered. ‘Remember the name – it’s Zuss-Amor.’

Often I had tried for many weeks to visit Hamilton in his hospital, but they were not eager to allow me near him on account of his condition being critical. But on this present visit I was called in immediately to the Sister.

‘The patient is a relative of yours?’ she said.

‘No, he is my friend.’

‘Has he relatives in this country?’

‘I know of none. Why?’

‘In Africa, you know his family’s address?’

‘Hamilton did not tell it to you?’

‘He refused to …’

‘If he did not tell you this, I do not wish to. He has his reasons that his family should not know.’

This practical woman put on her kind face. ‘Your friend is very ill,’ she said. ‘He’s on what we call the
danger list. Surely he would wish his family to know?’

‘I may speak with him?’

‘Yes. But not for long.’

That Hamilton would soon die was certain by his waste-away appearance, and also by his special situation convenient to the door. My friend also knew that this was to be his fate, for his first words were to tell me of his understanding. He spoke without fear of this, as you would expect of Hamilton, but very sadly. I did not deny what he foretold, nor would I agree to it, but sat by him and held his bony hands.

‘Speak to me of your life, Johnny. Tell me what happens to you now.’

‘I must not tire you, Hamilton.’

He smiled a very little. ‘What is the difference, Johnny Fortune? Speak to me. How is Muriel?’

‘Muriel is gone. I also have left our house.’

‘Why?’

‘Dorothy has come to live there now.’

‘To stay with you?’

‘No, man, no – I will explain. Muriel have sickness with her coming baby, and could not work. We owed rents to the landlord, and had no loot. Dorothy, without asking us, go see the landlord, pay over our arrears, and get the rent-book for herself. Then she say to Muriel and me that we can stay there if she stay there too.’

‘And you say yes?’

‘No, we say no. But where could we go to? Even I began to work, Hamilton, at labouring. But before I get my first week wage, we had no other place to go, and
stayed on there with Dorothy. Even after that first week, we stay some while to make some little savings.’

‘And then?’

My friend’s eyes showed me he guess what happen then.

‘I keep away from Dorothy, Hamilton, like you would think. But one time when Muriel was out … well, this thing happen between me and she. Foolish, of course, I know, but a cold evening and we left alone together …’

‘And Dorothy tell Muriel of this happen?’

‘I think no: but Muriel she guessed. A woman can always tell it, Hamilton, when you betray her. How so, I do not know; but they can tell.’

My friend turned slowly in his bed. ‘And then Muriel leave you, Johnny?’

‘Yes. She go back to her horrible Mrs Macpherson mother, and will not see me. She say to me, “If is Dorothy you wish, not me, then you can take her.”’

‘But you do not wish for Dorothy?’

‘No. She ask me, of course, to stay and live off what she earn. But I wish for nothing of that woman. Though foolishly I stay in the house some weeks more for sleeping.’

‘For private sleeping, Johnny?’

‘Alone. Then we have quarrel, Dorothy and I, and I leave these rooms entirely. And now I stay this place, that place, with boys I know, till I can get my room.’

Hamilton thought about my story. ‘These Jumble friends of yours,’ he said. ‘You could not stay with them?’

‘Oh, you understand me, Hamilton! When Jumbles
do the favour, always they ask some price. For payment of their deeds, they wish to steal your private life in some way or another.’

‘And you will not return again with Muriel at any time?’

‘She say to me, Hamilton, that if I do not marry her, now that she soon has the child, she does not wish to stay with me at all. But how can I marry such a woman? What would they say back home?’

Hamilton, he understood this. ‘The best thing, Johnny Fortune, is certainly for you to sail to Africa. Do not leave this too late, as I do, or you will find yourself in misery like me.’

What could I say to my old friend – but that I hope the days of both of us would soon be rather brighter? I said goodbye to him, and still Hamilton would not let me tell his home address to the people in the hospital.

So I leave that sad place behind me, and walked out in the dark winter East End afternoon: no use to go back now to my labouring job, whose foreman would not give me time off to visit Hamilton, and now would certainly dismiss me for my absence. I thought of Mahomed and his café, and how a free meal of rice would give me strength, and there, playing dominoes, I meet the former weed-peddler, Peter Pay Paul.

‘Mr Ruby,’ he tell me, ‘ask why you come for no more business.’

‘I cut out that hustle too, man. I cut right out of peddling like you say is best to, when the months go by. And you, what do you do now, Peter?’

‘Good times have come to me, Johnny. I doorman now at the Tobagonian Free Occupation club, and this is a profitable business.’

‘Tell me now, Peter. I have no room at present. May I sleep in your cloakroom for this evening?’

‘What will you pay me, man?’

‘Skinned now, Peter Pay Paul. You do this for your friend.’

‘Just this one night, then, Johnny. Do not please ask me the next evening, or word will reach the ear of this Tobagonian owner and I lose my good job.’

Peter supplied me with one coffee. ‘Arthur is down East End,’ he said. ‘He asks for you from several people.’

‘I do not wish to see that relative of mine ever again.’

A great pleasure came to me now, which was the arrival in Mahomed’s of the seaman Laddy Boy, he who had brought the letter from my sister Peach. His ship had been sailing to the German ports, and he told us of the friendly action of the chicks he’d met in dockside streets of Hamburg.

‘I see some Lagos boy there, Johnny,’ he told me now. ‘In a ship coming out of Africa. He tell me some news about your family that you should hear.’

Almost I guessed what Laddy Boy would tell me. ‘Your sister Peach,’ he said, ‘has sailed to England now to train as nurse.’

‘This news is certain of her coming? I wish it was some other time she choose.’

Laddy Boy said to me: ‘Tomorrow, come meet my quartermaster, Johnny. Speak to him and see if you can
sign on our ship, to have some serious occupation for when your sister reaches England.’

‘I have no knowledge of a sailor – will he take me?’

‘We speak to him together, man. I know some secrets of his smuggling that have helped him raise his income to his benefit.’

When the half-past-five time came at last, Laddy Boy took me for some Baby Salt at the Apollo tavern. We sit there drinking quietly, I thinking of home and Lagos, and of Peach and Christmas and my mum and dad.

But what spoils these thoughts is Dorothy, when she come in the saloon bar with a tall GI. She send this man over and he say to me politely, ‘Your sister-in-law ask me, man, to ask if you will speak with her a minute.’

‘No, man, no. Tell her I busy with my friend.’

He went back to Dorothy, but come to me once more. ‘She says is important to you, what she have to tell.’

I went with Dorothy in one corner of the bar. ‘Now, Dorothy,’ I said. ‘Please understand I do not wish to mix my life with yours. Do not pester me, please, with your company, or I turn bad on you, and we regret it.’

She was high with her drink, I saw, but quieter and more ladylike than I know her ever before.

‘Look, man,’ she said. ‘I know the deal I offered you means nothing to you, but can’t we still be friends?’

‘I do not wish to be your enemy or your friend.’

‘Why are you so mean to me always, Johnny? You know how gone on you I am.’

‘Keep away from me, Dorothy, is all I ask you.’

I got up, but she called, ‘Just one thing more I want
to say to you.’ She got that far, then stopped, and when I waited, said, ‘Get me another drink.’

‘Is that it? More drink?’

I moved finally to leave her, making from now a rule that never would I answer her again. She grabbed my arm suddenly and pulled me down towards her, and said so close my ear I smell her whisky breath, ‘If I leave the game, Johnny, and get off the streets for good, will you marry me?’

I pulled my arm away. ‘Your life is your life, Dorothy. Do not try to mix it in with mine is all I say.’

I left this woman, and returned to Laddy Boy. When she went out some minutes later, she stopped as she passed by and said to me, ‘I’ll mix in, Johnny Fortune, if I want to. I always get my own way in the end.’

The GI shook hands to show his dislike of her behaviour, and they both left. ‘That woman should drink tea,’ said Laddy Boy.

I made the arrangement with him for the meeting next day with his quartermaster, and then went to see my overnight home at the Free Occupation club. Peter had not yet come back to his duty, so I waited in the hallways, where I saw a big poster of the Cranium Cuthbertson band, which said they would play at the Stepney friendly get-together where white and coloured residents were invited to know each other rather better.

‘Hullo, bra,’ said some voice, and it was Arthur.

‘“Bra” is for Africans, not for Jumbles,’ I said to him.

‘Why you always insulting me, Johnny? Would our same dad like it, if he knew?’

‘Blow, man, before I do you some violence,’ I said to him.

He walked back to the door, and said out loud, ‘He’s here!’, then scattered quick. The CID Inspector Purity came in with another officer.

‘We want you, Fortune,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk to you at the station.’

These two men grabbed me, though I made no resistance and said nothing. Each held an arm, and tugged me across the pavement to their car. Peter Pay Paul came up at just this moment, and stopped still when he saw me. ‘Telephone, Peter, to the radio BBC!’ I cried out loud. ‘Speak to Miss Pace. Pace! BBC radio headquarter!’

They dragged me inside the Law car. The journey was short and fast, and they did not speak. In the police station, they took me beyond the public rooms, and then, from behind me, Mr Purity struck me on the neck and I fell on the concrete. I got up, and they pulled me into a small room.

‘Fingerprint him, Constable,’ said Purity to the other officer.

‘I have no wish to be fingerprinted.’

‘Shut up. Over here.’

‘You cannot fingerprint me. I have no conviction on my record.’

The two looked at each other, then at me. The Detective-Constable, whose face was pale and miserable, came close and said, ‘You’re not going to co-operate?’ Then he beat me round about my head.

I know the great danger of hitting back against the Law, so sat still with my hands clenched by my side. This beating went on. ‘Don’t bruise him,’ said Mr Purity. The Constable stopped and rubbed his hands.

‘Our bruises do not show in court so well as white man’s do,’ I said. ‘This is the reason why you hit us always harder.’

Mr Purity smiled at this funny remark I made. He asked me for details of my name, and age, and this and that, and I gave him these. Then they searched me and took away every possession. Then he began asking other questions.

‘In English law,’ I said, ‘do you not make a charge? Do you not caution a prisoner before he speaks? This is the story that they tell us in our lessons we have back home on British justice.’

Mr Purity raised up his fist. ‘Do you really want to suffer?’ he said to me.

‘I want to know the charge. There was no drug in my possession – nothing.’

‘We’re not interested in drugs at present,’ said Mr Purity. ‘We’re charging you with something that’ll send you inside for quite a bit longer, as you’ll see. You’re a ponce, Johnny Fortune, aren’t you. You’ve ponced on Bill Whispers’ girl.’

This words were such a big surprise to me, that at first I had no speech. Then I stand up. ‘You call
me
ponce?’ I shouted.

‘Nigger or ponce, it’s all the same,’ the Detective-Constable said.

I hit him not on the face, but in the stomach where I know this blow must hurt him badly, even if they kill me after. They did not kill me, but called in friends and kicked me round the floor.

After this treatment, I was left alone and even given a kind cigarette. An old officer in uniform and grey hair then visited me, and spoke to me like some friendly uncle. ‘You’d better do what you’re told, son,’ he said, ‘and let them print you. Tomorrow they’ll oppose bail in court, and the screws can print you in the nick at Brixton … You don’t want to fight the whole police force, do you? You can only lose …’

‘Mister, this battle is not ended,’ I said to him. ‘Outside in this city, London, I have friends.’