Collected Short Fiction Part 40

'Oh, you meet old Blackwhite?'

'He is going to type out a letter about me to the newspapers. And about you, too, I imagine. And your colleagues and companions.'

'They don't print all Blackwhite's letters. Good relations and all that, you know. He believe he stand a better chance with the typewriter. Tell me what you do to provoke him. I never see a man look as quiet as you.'

'I asked one of his boys whether he had a sister who screwed.'

Amus.e.m.e.nt went strangely on Henry's sour face. He looked the ascetic sort. His hair was combed straight back and his narrow-waisted trousers were belted with a tie. This was the one raffish, startling thing about his dress.

Henry went on: 'The trouble with the natives-'

I started at the word.

'Yes, natives. The trouble with the natives is that they don't like me. I don't belong here, you know. I am like you. I come from another place. A pretty island, if I tell you. I build up all this from scratch.' He waved at his yard. 'These people here lazy and they d.a.m.n jealous with it too. They always trying to get me deported. Illegal immigrant and so on. But they can't touch me. I have all the shots in the palm of my hand. You hear people talk about Gordon? Black man; but the best lawyer we have. Gordon was always coming here until that divorce business. Big thing. You probably hear about that on the base.'

'Sure, we heard about it.'

'And whenever I have any little trouble about this illegal immigrant business, I just go straight, like man, to Gordon office. The clerks you know, those fellows with ties try to be rude, and I just telling them, "You tell Alfred" his name is Alfred Gordon "you tell Alfred that Henry here." And everybody falling back in amazement when Mr Gordon come out heself and shaking me by the hand and muching me up in front of everybody. "All you wait," he say, "I got to see my old friend Henry." And teeth.'

'Teeth?'

'Teeth. Whenever I want to have any teeth pull out, I just run up to old Ling-Wing Chinee, but the best dentist we have in the place and he pulling out the teeth straight way. You got to have a philosophy of life. Look, I go tell you,' he said, 'my father was a good-for-nothing. Always gambling, a game called wappee and all-fours. And whenever my mother complain and start bawling out, "Hezekiah, what you going to leave for your children?" my father he only saying, "I ain't got land. I ain't got money. But I going to leave my children a wonderful set of friends." '

'That's a fine philosophy,' I said.

'We all have to corporate in some way. Some people corporate in one way, some corporate another way. I think that you and me going to get on good. Mavis, pour this man a drink. He is a wonderful talker.'

Henry, sipping at rum-and-c.o.kes all the time, was maudlin. I was a little high myself.

One of the Americans who had been on the excursion to the bay came up to us. He tottered a little. He said he had to leave.

'I know,' Henry said. 'The war etcetera.'

'How much do I owe you, Henry?'

'You know what you owe me. I don't keep no check.'

'Let me see. I think I had a chicken pilau. Three or four rum-and-c.o.kes.'

'Good,' Henry said. 'You just pay for that.'

The man paid. Henry took his money without any comment. When the man left he said, 'Drink is never any excuse. I don't believe people ever not knowing what they do. He not coming back in here. He had two chicken pilaus, six rum-and-c.o.ke, five bottles soda water and two whiskies. That's what I call vice.'

'It is vice, and I am ashamed of him.'

'I will tell you, you know.' Henry said. 'When the old queen pa.s.s on-'

'The old queen?'

'My mother. I was in a sort of daze. Then I had this little dream. The old man, he appear to me.'

'Your father Hezekiah?'

'No. G.o.d. He say, "Henry, surround yourself with love, but avoid vice." On this island I was telling you about, pretty if I tell you, they had this woman, pretty but malevolent. She make two-three children for me, and bam, you know what, she want to rush me into marriage.'

The sun was going down. From the base, the bit of the tropics we had created, the bugle sounded Retreat. Henry snapped his fingers, urging us all to stand. We stood up and saluted to the end.

'I like these little customs,' he said. 'Is a nice little custom you boys bring with you.'

'About this woman on the pretty island with two or three children?'

Henry said, 'I avoided vice. I ran like h.e.l.l. I get the rumour spread that I dead. I suppose I am dead in a way. Can't go back to my pretty little island. Oh, prettier than this. Pretty, pretty. But she waiting for me.'

We heard hymns from the street.

'Money,' Henry said, 'all you girls got your money ready?'

They all got out little coins and we went out to the pavement. A tall bearded man, white-robed and sandalled, was leading a little group of hymn-singers, six small black girls in white gowns. They were sweet hymns; we listened in silence.

Then the bearded man said, 'Brothers and sisters, it is customary on such occasions to say that there is still time to repent.' He was like a man in love with his own fluency. His accent was very English. 'It is, however, my belief that this, at this time, is one of the optimistic a.s.sertions of fraudulent evangelists more concerned with the counting of money than what I might call the count-down of our imminent destruction.' Suddenly his manner changed. He paused, closed his eyes, swayed a little, lifted up his arms and shouted, in an entirely different voice: 'The word of the Bible is coming to pa.s.s.'

Some of Henry's girls chanted back: 'What word?' And others: 'What part?'

The white-robed man said, 'The part where it say young people going to behave bad, and evil and violence going to stalk the land. That part.'

His little chorus began to sing; and he went round collecting from us, saying, 'It is nothing personal, you understand, nothing personal. I know you boys have to be here defending us and so on, but the truth is the truth.'

He collected his money, slipped it into a pocket of his robe, patted the pocket; then he seemed to go on patting. He patted each of his singers, either out of a great love, or to make sure that they had not hidden any of the coins they had received. Then: 'Right-wheel!' he called above their singing; and, patting them on the shoulder as they pa.s.sed him, followed them to the grocery at the corner. His hymn meeting continued there, under the rusty corrugated-iron eaves.

It was now dark. A picnic atmosphere came to Henry's yard. Meals were being prepared in various rooms; gramophones were playing. From distant yards came the sound of steel-bands. Night provided shelter, and in the yard it was very cosy, very like a family gathering. Only, I was not yet of the family.

A girl with a sling bag came in. She greeted Henry, and he greeted her with a largeness of gesture which yet concealed a little reserve, a little awe. He called her Selma. I noted her. I became the third in the party; I became nervous.

I am always nervous in the presence of beauty; and in such a setting, faced with a person I couldn't a.s.sess, I was a little frightened. I didn't know the rules of Henry's place and it was clear that the place had its own rules. I was inexperienced. Inexperienced, I say. Yet what good has experience brought me since? I still, in such a situation and in such a place, move between the extremes of courtesy and loudness.

Selma was unattached and cool. I thought she had the coolness that comes either from owners.h.i.+p or from being owned. It was this as much as dress and manner and balance which marked her out from the others in the yard. She might have been Henry's girl, the replacement for that other, abandoned on the pretty little island; or she might have belonged to someone who had not yet appeared.

The very private greetings over, Henry introduced us.

'He's quite a talker,' he said.

'He's a good listener,' I said.

She asked Henry, 'Did he hear Priest talk?'

I answered, 'I did. That was some sermon.'

'I always like hearing a man use language well,' she said.

'He certainly does,' I said.

'You can see,' she said, 'that he's an educated man.'

'You could see that.'

There was a pause. 'He sells insurance,' she said, 'when he's not preaching.'

'It sounds a wonderful combination. He frightens us about death, and then sells us insurance.'

She wasn't amused. 'I would like to be insured.'

'You are far too young.'

'But that is just the time. The terms are better. I don't know, I would just like it. I feel it's nice. I have an aunt in the country. She is always making old style because she's insured. Whenever she buys a little more she always lets you know.'

'Well, why don't you buy some insurance yourself?'

She said, 'I am very poor.'

And she said the words in such a way that it seemed to put a fullstop to our conversation. I hate the poor and the humble. I think poverty is something we should all conceal. Selma spoke of it as something she was neither proud nor ashamed of; it was a condition which was soon to be changed. Little things like this occur in all relations.h.i.+ps, little warning abrasions in the smoothness of early intercourse which we choose to ignore. We always deceive ourselves; we cannot say we have not been warned.

'What would you do if you had a lot of money?'

'I would buy lots of things,' she said after some thought. 'Lots of nice modern things.'

'What sort of things?'

'A three-piece suite. One of those deep ones. You sink into them. I'd buy a nice counterpane, satiny and thick and crisscrossed with deep lines. I saw Norma Shearer using one in Escape.'

'A strange thing. That's all I remember of that picture. What do you think she was doing in that bed then? But that was an eiderdown she had, you know. You don't need an eiderdown in this part of the world. It's too warm.'

'Well, whatever you call it, I'd like that. And shoes, I'd buy lots of shoes. Do you have nightmares?'

'Always.'

'You know mine?'

'Tell me.'

'I am in town, you know. Walking down Regent Street. People staring at me, and I feel: this is new. I don't feel embarra.s.sed. I feel like a beauty queen. Then I see myself in a shop window. I am barefoot. I always wake up then. My feet are hanging over the bed.'

I was still nervous. The conversation always seemed to turn away from the point to which I felt I ought to bring it, though to tell the truth I had lost the wish to do so. Still, we owe a duty to ourselves.

I said, 'Do you come from the city?'

'I come from the country.'

Question, answer, fullstop. I tried again. Henry was near us, a bottle in his hand.

I said, 'What makes a girl like you come to a place like this?' And, really, I was ashamed of the words almost before I said them.

'That's what I call a vicious question,' Henry said.

At the same time Selma slapped me.

'You think that's a nice question?' Henry said. 'I think that's a vicious question. I think that's obscene.' He pointed through the open doorway to a little sign in one of the inner rooms: Be obscene but not heard. 'It's not something we talk about.'

'I am sorry.'

'It's not for me that I am worried,' he said. 'It's for Selma. I don't know, but that girl always bringing out the vice in people. She bring out the vice in Blackwhite across the road. Don't say anything, but I see it in his eye: he want to reform her. And you know what reform is? Reform mean: keep off, for me alone. She bring out the vice in Priest. He don't want to reform. He just want. Look, Frankie, one set of people come here and then too another set come here. Selma is a educated girl, you know. Cambridge Junior Certificate. Latin and French and geometry and all that sort of thing. She does work in one of the big stores. Not one of those little Syrian shops, you know. She come here every now and then, you come here. That is life. Let us leave the vice outside, let us leave the vice outside. A lot of these girls work in stores. Any time I want a s.h.i.+rt, I just pa.s.s around these stores, and these girls give me s.h.i.+rts. We have to help one another.'

I said, 'You must have a lot of s.h.i.+rts.'

'Yes, I have a lot of s.h.i.+rts. Look, I will tell you. Selma and one or two of the other people you see here, we call wabeen.'

'Wabeen?'

'One of our freshwater fish. A lil loose. A lil. Not for any and everybody. You understand? Wabeen is not spole.'

'Spote?'

'Spote is don't make me use obscene language, man, Frank. Spote is what you see.' He waved his hands about the yard.

The steel-bands sounded nearer, and then through a gate in the corrugated-iron fence at the back of the lot the musicians came in. Their instruments were made out of old dustbins, and on these instruments they played a coa.r.s.e music I had never heard before.

'They have to hide, you know,' Henry told me. 'It's illegal. The war and so on. Helping the war effort.'

There was a little open shed at the back. It had a blackboard. I had noticed that blackboard and wondered about it. In this shed two or three people now began to dance. They drew watchers to them; they converted watchers into partic.i.p.ants. From rooms in the houses on Henry's lot, from rooms in other back-yards, and from the sewerage trace at the back, people drifted in steadily to watch. Each dancer was on his own. Each dancer lived with a private frenzy. Women among the watchers tore twigs from the hibiscus hedges and from time to time, as though offering benediction and reward, beat the dancer's dusty feet with green leaves.

Henry put his arm over my shoulder and led me to where Selma was standing. He kept one hand on my shoulder; he put the other on her shoulder. We stood silently together, watching. His hands healed us, bound us.

A whistle blew. There were cries of 'Police!' and in an instant the yard was transformed. Dustbins appeared upright here and there; liquor bottles disappeared inside some; the dancers and the audience sat in neat rows under the shed and one man stood at the blackboard, writing. Many of Henry's girls put on spectacles. One or two carried pieces of embroidery.

It seemed to me that the police were a long time in entering. When they did, the Inspector shook Henry by the hand and said, 'The old Adult Education cla.s.s, eh?'

'As you see,' Henry said. 'Each one teach one.'

The Inspector closed his fingers when he took away his hand from Henry's. He became chatty. 'I don't know, boy,' he said. 'We just have to do this. Old Blackwhite really on your tail. And that Mrs Lambert, she too lodge a complaint.'

I wonder, though, whether I would have become involved with Selma and the others, if, during that first evening after I had undressed and was lying with Selma, I hadn't seen my clothes dancing out of the window. They danced; it was as though they had taken on a life of their own.

I called out to Selma.

She didn't seem surprised. She said, 'I think they are fis.h.i.+ng tonight.'

'Fis.h.i.+ng?' I ran to the window after my disappearing clothes.

'Yes, you know, fis.h.i.+ng through the windows. Lifting a s.h.i.+rt here, a pair of trousers there. It is no good chasing them. Carnival coming, you know, and everybody wants a pretty costume.'