Authors: Colin MacInnes
‘I see. Very well, you may retire.’
In the emptying court, Mr Vial strolled across to the dock, leant on its edge and, ignoring the two policemen, said casually to Johnny, ‘I thought the judge’s summing-up was very fair, didn’t you?’
‘I thought you was wonderful,’ said Johnny Fortune.
In the corridor outside, Theodora stood with Mr Zuss-Amor. ‘Splendid, my dear,’ said the solicitor. ‘I’m sorry to say the Press were scribbling busily, though. I hope you don’t lose your job.’
Smoking an agitated cigarette, Montgomery was accosted by the Detective-Inspector. ‘Well,’ said the policeman, ‘whichever way it goes, there’s no hard feelings on my part for your young friend. It’s only another case to us.’
As the court reassembled, the usher in charge of the jury (who had sworn publicly, before they retired, upon the sacred book, that he would not divulge a word of their deliberations), whispered, as he passed by, to the two officers guarding Johnny in the dock, what their still secret verdict was. Johnny heard it too, and one of the officers patted him gently on the back of the knee.
The judge returned, and so did the jury. They did not, despite the nature of their impending verdict, gaze benevolently at the accused as juries are traditionally supposed to do, but sat like ancient monuments on their hard seats.
The clerk asked the foreman how they found. He said, ‘Not guilty.’
Mr Vial then rose and said, with infinite deference, to the judge: ‘May the prisoner please be discharged, my Lord?’
‘He may.’
A week later, Johnny was re-arrested on the charge of being in possession of Indian hemp. Montgomery could borrow no more money quickly anywhere, and Theodora was in hospital with a breakdown and a miscarriage. ‘I’ll come over to the court for free, if you really want me to,’ Mr Zuss-Amor told Montgomery, ‘but why don’t you tell him to plead guilty and settle before the magistrate? Believe me, if they don’t get him for
something
, they’ll never let him alone. And it’ll only be a fine.’
It was, but no one had any money, and Johnny went to prison for a month.
The word ‘freelance’, I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills. I’d desperately succeeded in appearing in some serious periodicals that paid little, and were seen by few; and in printing some disreputable anonymous paragraphs, cruelly chopped by the sub-editors, in newspapers I’d hitherto despised. As for the BBC, since Theodora’s departure from it, under a lowering cloud, it would not hear of any of my rich ideas.
How I missed Theodora in the house, and how unexpectedly! True, Johnny’s company, since he’d come out of prison, was some small consolation: small, because a different Johnny had emerged – a rather bitter and less kindly person, a disillusioned adult Fortune who no longer seemed to think – as Johnny always had – that
everything in the world would one fine day be possible.
I opened the bedroom door and looked at him still sleeping, rolled in an angry lump, his head underneath a pillow. I drew back the curtain, and let in a shaft of reconnoitring spring sun. ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘it’s past eleven.’ He bunched the sheets closer round him, and jerked himself in a tighter, unwelcoming ball. I put on the kettle, went back to the front room, and took up Theodora’s letter.
I’d forgotten, Montgomery, how ghastly the country is until I came here to recoup. The colours are green and grey, invariably, and in the village nothing happens: nothing. I’ll be glad to get back to London, and only sorry, because of you, it won’t be the old flat, but I just can’t face living there any longer. You will see about the removal of my things to the new place as you promised, won’t you. (Be
practical
about all this, Montgomery, for Heaven’s sake.)
I’ve heard from the Corporation, as I expected, that my appeal is disallowed. Their letter is roundabout and civil – almost deferential – but very clear as to essentials. My old job is out: that’s definite; and if I can’t ‘see my way’, as they put it, to accepting being kicked upstairs (or rather, kicked downstairs, it really would be, as the office of the alternative job they offer in the Editing service is in the sub-basement of a former department store), they ‘have no alternative but to accept my offer of resignation’. They’re giving me a surprise farewell bonus, though: rather nice of them, don’t you think, after everything?
In fact, I really have to admit they’ve behaved very decently and (unlike me) quite sensibly. I broke the written and unwritten codes, and forfeited my claim to their paternalism. As the high-up I eventually got to see quite frankly said to me, ‘It’s not so much what you
did,
Miss Pace, as that you did it without asking anyone’s permission. The Corporation can’t be expected to answer publicly for its servants’ actions unless it knows what they’re going to be.’ I imagine it was most of all those lurid pieces in the Press about the ‘BBC woman’ that really got them down.
From what I hear from kind friends who’ve telephoned (not, of course, on the office lines), it was a close thing, all the same. My ‘case’ went straight to the top, then down again to an appropriate level, then up even higher to the Board of Governors, then plummeted down once more – a massive file it must have been by then, I wish I could have seen it – to the person who actually had to wield the axe, or rather to his secretary (a bitch – I knew her in the Wrens – she probably drafted the letter for him herself).
But I don’t, as they say, ‘regret it’. Being horribly competent, I can always get a job – all I really mind is having lost a battle. And I don’t regret making a fool of myself in front of everybody in the court. All I deeply regret, Montgomery (oh, how I do! – you’ll not understand, however much you think you do), is losing my child in that so squalid, absurd
and dreadfully sad miscarriage (my first – I mean my first pregnancy, as it happens), because though I’ve never meant anything to Johnny Fortune, I would still have had that … it – he – she: anyway, a fragment of him.
How is he? Better not tell me. I don’t want to see him again. I do, of course, but I couldn’t.
And how are you, Montgomery? If you’re behindhand with the rent, as I imagine, and, as I also imagine, up to your grey eyes in debt, please let me know, and I’ll do whatever I can.
Later.
Just been out to buy some gin. They looked at me as if I was indeed a ‘BBC woman’, but took the pound notes promptly enough.
What’s clear to me now, Montgomery – although I know you won’t agree – is that love, or even friendship, for those people is
impossible
– I mean as we understand it. It’s not either party’s fault; it’s just that in the nature of things we can never really understand each other because we see the whole world utterly differently. In a crisis each race will act according to its nature, each one quite separately, and each one be right, and hurt the other.
It’s when you see that
distant
look that sometimes comes into their opaque brown eyes that you realise it – that moment when they suddenly depart irrevocably within themselves far off towards some hidden, alien, secretive, quite untouchable horizon …’
Since my trouble come, I do not go often to the places where I go before – it is not that I fear the Law, or what it can do to me any more, but that I do not wish to be seen there by my countrymen. To be sent to jail for weed was not the big disgrace, for everybody know they never catch me if they treat me fairly; but to have a Jumble woman who I do not love speak up in court and say she have a child of me, and hear the boys say it was this woman’s lies that set me free on that first charge – this is too big a shame for me. And since the sad death of Hamilton, I have no friend, except for Laddy Boy, who was now travelling again at sea, that I would wish to speak to in this city.
So what I do, as soon as Montgomery goes out, is visit cinemas and sit there by myself, or else go practising my judo and my boxing at the merchant seaman gymnasium.
For now I hear that Billy Whispers also has come out of finishing his sentence, I know this boy will one day try to make some trouble for me, because he believes from what they tell him of my trial that when he go into jail, is I who takes his Dorothy.
So I sat in the darkness of the Tottenham Court picture palace this day, thinking; when near to me a white boy asked me for a match, to light his cigarette, he say, and other silly business of holding my hand too long when I pass the box, and when he gives it back to me, so that I know what his foolish hope is, and say to him, ‘Mister, behave yourself, or else you come out with me and I push your face in.’
‘All right, man, I come out with you,’ this white boy whispered. I thought: oh, very well, if he wants hitting, then I hit him, this will be some big relief to all my feelings; but when I see his face outside the dark, I recognise it was this Alfy Bongo. ‘Oh, you,’ I said to him. ‘Are you still living?’
‘Why not, Johnny? The devil looks after his own. Won’t you have a coffee with me?’
‘So you are one of these foolish men who try to mess about with Spades in picture-houses?’
‘Oh, I’m a little queer boy, Johnny, that’s for certain; but I didn’t know that it was you.’
‘One day you meet some bad boy who do you some big damage.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Let’s come and have some coffee, like I say.’
‘Why should I come? I enjoy this film in here.’
‘Listen, Johnny. Why are you so ungrateful? Didn’t they tell you how I helped you at your trial?’
‘I hear of this, yes; but is much better that you leave me to fight my trial alone. If this woman you speak to not go into the box, and make her statement, I go free all the same through my good lawyers.’
‘You think you would have? Nobody else does – least of all Mr Vial, I can tell you that. And, anyway, who do you think found your lawyers for you?’
‘Well, what good it do me – that acquittal? They catch me the second time.’
‘I wish I’d known of that. If I’d known, I’d have done something for you … Why didn’t anyone let me know in time?’
I stopped in the street and looked at this cheeky person. ‘What is all this, Alfy, you wish to do such nice things for me? You hope you have some pleasant treatment from me one day that never come?’
‘Oh, no, Johnny, I know you’re square. But I just like helping out the Spades.’
‘You do! Oh, do you!’
‘I wish I’d been born a Spade.’
‘Do you now, man!’
‘Yes, I do. I tell you I
do
. You have this coffee with me, Johnny, or not?’
‘Oh, if you say so: let us go.’
He took me to a coffee-bar nearby, and there, when he order it, he said to me, ‘And how was it in the nick? Did they beat you in there at all?’
‘No, man, I play so cool. What I like least of all is
your British sanitation in that place. Man, in that jail all you turn into is not any human person, but a lavatory machine.’
‘And what do you do now, Johnny, with yourself?’
‘What I do now? Would it surprise you, after how they treat me in those places, if now I start up some really serious hustle?’
‘Don’t think of that, man. You’ve got a record now. Second offence, and they’ve got you by the you-know-whats. What you should do is … Man, why don’t you cut out and go back home?’
‘How can I now, to face my family? They speak about my dad in court – you know of that? They talk about his bravery, which I tell my white friends as a secret, not for them to put shame on my dad by mixing his name up with that charge they put upon me.’
‘I hear Billy’s out. You know what he did with Dorothy?’
‘No. Where she’s gone?’
‘Into hospital. He cut up her face.’
‘Nice. Well, I’m not surprised. That thing come her way some quite long time.’
‘Better be careful – you too, Johnny. Why don’t you leave town a while? Go up to Liverpool Rialto way, or Manchester Moss Side?’
‘Me? For fear of that man Billy? Listen now, Mr Bongo. If he kill me, he kill me. If I kill him, I kill him. Or else perhaps nobody kills nobody. We shall see.’
This Alfy Bongo person was one I couldn’t quite make out. I looked hard behind his eyes, but could not see any real unfriendliness to me, or danger there.
He looked me back. ‘Well, that’s not the great news, is it?’ he said. ‘You know you’re a father now, Johnny?’
‘Yes? No, I not hear …’
‘A boy.’
‘Is it then Muriel?’
‘Yes. She’s called it William.’
‘Well – is nice for her. I hope this William turns out a nice man like his uncle Arthur, that shop me to the Law.’
‘You’re not going out to see your son?’
‘Why, man? Let her keep this William for her pleasure.’
‘She’ll put an affiliation order on you, to support it …’
‘Oh, well. That will be just one more misery I have to suffer.’
This Alfy handed me a cigarette. ‘You’re turning sour, Johnny,’ he said to me. ‘It’s bad in London, when a Spade turns sour.’
I got up to leave him. ‘Spades will stay sour, man, let me tell you, till they’re treated right.’
‘Cheer up – they’ll be treated better soon. That race crap’s changing fast, believe me, Johnny.’
‘Not fast enough for me, Mister Alfy Bongo. How long you think this rubbish will go on? This big, big problem that they think up out of nothing, and is nothing?’
‘Not long now, man. In ten years’ time, or so, they’ll wonder what it was all about.’
I got up to leave him. ‘Roll on that day,’ I said to him. ‘But I tell you this, man, and remember it. Let them kill every Spade that’s in the world, and leave but just two, man and woman, and we’ll fill up the whole globe once more and win our triumph!’
He asked me to come round and see him in his room in Kensington West one day, but I tell him my life is occupied, and left him and went out and caught my bus. To sleep now would be best, I thought, and I came home to where I am staying with Montgomery. When I turn round the corner to his house, I see standing by the door an African girl, and from this distance I know it is my sister Peach.
I stopped, and think quickly. I want to see Peach, but I do not want to see Peach, so I turned and run. But she see me, come running after, and hold on my coat like she tear it off my body, and there in the street hugged on to me so tight I cannot breathe, and she say nothing.