City of Spades Read online

  And all this time the nasal calypso permeated the lino-laden passages. As I approached the bright light from a distant open door, I heard:

  ‘English politician he say, “Wait and see,”

  Moscow politician he say, “Come with me.”

  But whichever white employer tells those little white lies,

  I stop my ears and hold my nose and close my eyes.’

  I peered in.

  Sitting on the bed, dressed in a pair of underpants decorated with palm leaves, was a stocky youth topped by an immense gollywog fuzz of hair. He grimaced pleasantly at me, humming the air till he had completed the guitar improvisation. Whereupon he slapped the instrument (as one might a child’s behind) and said, ‘What say, man? You like a glass of rum?’

  ‘I’m looking,’ I told him, ‘for Mr J. M. Fortune.’

  ‘Oh, that little jungle cannibal. That bongo-banging Bushman.’

  ‘I take it,’ I said, accepting some rum in a discoloured tooth-glass, ‘that you yourself are not from Africa?’

  ‘Please be to God, no, man. I’m a civilised respectable Trinidadian.’

  ‘The Africans, then, aren’t civilised?’

  ‘They have their own tribal customs, mister, but it was because of their primitive barbarity that our ancestors fled from that country some centuries ago.’

  This was accompanied by a knowing leer.

  ‘And the song,’ I asked. ‘It is of your own composition?’

  ‘Yes, man. In my island I’m noted for my celebrated performance. It’s your pleasure to meet this evening no less a one than Mr Lord Alexander in person.’

  And he held out a ring-encrusted hand with an immensely long, polished, little-finger nail.

  ‘Perhaps, though,’ he went on, ‘as I’m seeking to make my way in this country, you could help me into radio or television or into some well-loaded night-spot?’

  ‘Alas!’ I told him, ‘I have no contacts in those glowing worlds.’

  ‘Then at least please speak well of me,’ he said, ‘and make my reputation known among your friends.’

  ‘Willingly. Though I have to tell you that I don’t care for calypso …’

  ‘Man, that’s not possible!’ He stood up in his flowered pants aghast. ‘Surely all educated Englishmen like our scintillating music?’

  ‘Many, yes, but not I.’

  ‘Now, why?’

  ‘Your lines don’t scan, you accentuate the words incorrectly, and the thoughts you express are meagre and without wit.’

  ‘But our leg-inspiring rhythm?’

  ‘Oh, that you have, of course …’

  ‘Mr Gentleman, you disappoint me,’ he said. And taking a deep draught from the rum bottle, he strolled sadly to the window, leant out, and sang into the opulent wastes of SW1:

  ‘This English gentleman he say to me

  He do not appreciate calypso melody.

  But I answer that calypso has supremacy

  To the Light Programme music of the BBC.’

  I made my getaway.

  Prying along an adjacent marble landing (affording a vertiginous perspective of a downward-winding, statue-flanked white stair), I saw a door on which was written: ‘J. Macdonald Fortune, Lagos. Enter without knocking.’ I did so, turned on the light, and saw a scene of agreeable confusion. Valises up-ended disgorging the bright clothes one would so wish to wear, shirts, ties and socks predominating – none of them fit for an English afternoon. Bundles of coconuts. A thick stick of bananas. Bottles, half empty. Rather surprising – a pile of biographies and novels. And pinned on the walls photographs of black grinning faces, all teeth, the eyes screwed closed to the glare of a sudden magnesium flare. A recurring group was evidently a family one: Johnny; a substantial rotund African gentleman with the same air of frank villainy as was the junior Mr Fortune’s; his immense wife, swathed in striped native dress; a tall serious youth beside a motor-bicycle; and a vivacious girl with a smile like that of an amiable lynx.

  On the table, I noticed an unfinished letter in a swift clerical hand. I didn’t disturb it, but …

  Dear Peach,

  How it would be great if I could show you all the strange sights of the English capital, both comical and splendid! This morning I had my interview at the Welfare Office with – well, do you remember Reverend Simpson? Our tall English minister who used to walk as if his legs did not belong to him? And spoke to us like a telephone? Well, that was the appearance of the young Mr Pew who interviewed me, preaching and pointing his hands at me as if I was to him a menacing infant …

  Ah!

  ‘… I have made visits, too, this afternoon, both of which will interest Dad – tell him I’m writing more about them, but don’t please tell our dearest Mum or Christmas that I give you this message. Just now I have returned here to my miserable hostel (hovel! – which soon I shall be leaving permanently) to change to fresh clothes and go out in the town when it’s alight.

  And Peach! It’s true about the famous escalator! It can be done, early this morning I made the two-way expedition, easily dashing up again until …’

  Should I turn over the sheet? No, no, not that …

  I closed the door softly and walked down the chipped ceremonial stair. At its foot, the secretary waylaid me.

  ‘And did you then discover Mr Fortune?’ he enquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will it be necessary for me to convey to him some message of your visit?’

  ‘No.’

  He frowned.

  ‘As secretary of the hostel committee, may I ask of your business on our premises?’

  I gave him a Palmerstonian glare, but he met it with such a look of dignified solemnity that I wilted and said, ‘I am the new Assistant Welfare Officer. My name is Montgomery Pew.’

  ‘And mine, sir, is Mr Karl Marx Bo. I am from Freetown, Sierra Leone.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘I hope, sir,’ he said, ‘you have not the same miserable opinion of our qualities as he who previously held down your job?’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t think that. Come, come.’

  ‘May I offer you a cup of canteen coffee?’

  ‘I’d love it, but really, I’m in somewhat of a hurry …’

  I moved towards the massive door. Mr Bo walked beside me, radiating unaffected self-righteousness.

  ‘Here in London, I am studying law,’ he told me.

  ‘That means, I suppose, that you’ll be going into politics?’

  ‘Inevitably. We must make the most of our learning here in London. Emancipation, sir, is our ultimate objective. I predict that in the next ten years, or less, the whole of West Africa will be a completely emancipated federation.’

  ‘Won’t the Nigerians gobble you up? Or Dr Nkrumah?’

  ‘No, sir. Such politicians clearly understand that national differences of that nature are a pure creation of colonialism. Once we have federation, such regional distinctions will all fade rapidly away.’

  ‘Well, jolly good luck to you.’

  ‘Oh, yes! You say so! But like all Englishmen, I conceive you view with reluctance the prospect of our freedom?’

  ‘Oh, but we give you the education to get it.’

  ‘Not give, sir. I pay for my university through profits my family have made in the sale of cocoa.’

  ‘A dreadful drink, if I may say so.’

  He tolerantly smiled. ‘You must come, sir, if you wish, to take part in one of our discussions with us, or debates.’

  ‘Nothing would delight me more, but alas, as an official, I am debarred from expressing any personal opinion, even had I one. And now, for the present, you really must excuse me.’

  And before he could recover his potential Dominion status, I was out of the door and stepping rapidly up the moonlit road. ‘To the Moorhen public house,’ I told a taxi driver.

  He was of that kind who believe in the London cabby’s reputation for dry wit.

  ‘Better keep your hands on your pockets, guv,’ he said,
‘if I take you there.’

  7

  Montgomery at the Moorhen

  Though fond of bars and boozing in hotels, I’m not a lover of that gloomiest of English institutions – the public house. There is a legend of the gaiety, the heart-warming homeliness of these ‘friendly inns’ – a legend unshakeable; but all a dispassionate eye can see in them is the grim spectacle of ‘regulars’ at their belching backslapping beside the counter or, as is more often, sitting morosely eyeing one another, in private silence, before their half-drained gassy pints. (There is also, of course, that game called darts.)

  It wasn’t, then, with high eagerness that I prepared to visit the Moorhen. Nor was I more encouraged when the driver, with a knowing grimace, decanted me on a corner near the complex of North London railway termini. The pub, from outside, was of a dispirited baroque. And lurking about its doors, in groups, or half invisible in the gloom, were Negroes of equivocal appearance. One of these detached himself from a wall as I stood hesitating, and approached.

  ‘What say, mister?’ he began. ‘Maybe you want somesings or others?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, no?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Not this?’

  Cupped in the hollow of his hand he held a little brown-paper packet two inches long or so.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Come now, man,’ he said with a grin of understanding and positively digging me in the ribs. ‘Is weed, man.’

  ‘Weed? What on earth should I want with weed? Now if you had seedlings, or even the cuttings of a rose …’

  ‘I see you’s a humourisk,’ he said.

  As a matter of fact, I wasn’t quite so ignorant, for I had read my Sunday papers. But this was the first time I’d seen the stuff.

  ‘All sames,’ he went on, closing his fingers over the little packet, ‘if you need some charge later in your evenings, come to me. Mr Peter Pay Paul is what’s my name.’

  I thanked him remotely, and pushed open the door of the Moorhen’s saloon.

  Within, where dark skins outnumbered white by something like twenty to one, there was a prodigious bubble and clatter of sound, and what is rare in purely English gatherings – a constant movement of person to person, and group to group, as though some great invisible spoon were perpetually stirring a hot human soup. Struggling, then propelled, towards the bar, I won myself a large whisky, and moved, with the instinct of minorities, to the only other white face I could see who was not either serving behind the bar, or a whore, of whom there were a great many there, or a person of appearance so macabre as scarcely to be believed. The man whom I addressed was one of those vanishing London characters, the elderly music-hall comical, modelled perhaps on Wilkie Bard, all nose, blear eyes, greased clothes and tufts of hair. ‘Cheerio!’ I said to him.

  He eyed me.

  ‘Crowded tonight.’

  ‘Yus.’ (He really said ‘Yus’.) ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘Oh, you think so? You don’t care for crowds?’

  ‘Course I do – when they’re rispectable. But not when they’re darkies like what’s here and all their rubbish.’

  ‘Rubbish?’

  He gazed all round the room like a malevolent searchlight and said, ‘Jus’ look for yourself. And to think a year or so ago this was the cosiest little boozer for arf a mile.’

  ‘But if,’ I said, ‘you don’t like it, why do you come here?’

  ‘Ho! They won’t drive me out! They drove out me pals, but they won’t drive me.’

  ‘Drove them?’

  ‘They left. Didn’t care for it as it got to be ever since the Cosmopolitan opened opposyte.’

  ‘That’s the dance hall?’

  ‘Yus. They let those darkies overrun the dance hall, but they haven’t got a licence there. So what did they do? Came trooping over the road for drinks like an invasion, and turned this place into an Indian jungle.’

  ‘And the landlord let them?’

  ‘He can’t refuse. At least, he did try to for the sake of his regulars, but when he saw all the coin they dropped on to his counters, he gave up the fight, and me pals all had to move on. But not me. This is my pub and I’m staying in it till something happens and they all get thrown out again.’ And this outpost of empire stared at me with neurotic, baleful zeal.

  A juke-box that had been blaring out strident three pennyworths now stopped. I edged my way over to an argumentative group around it, one of whom, a hefty, vivid-looking Negro, was shouting out what sounded rather like:

  ‘Ooso, man. See molo keneeowo p’kolosoma nyamo Ella Fitzgerald, not that other woman. See kynyomo esoloo that is my preference.’

  The speaker was wearing pink trousers, a tartan silk shirt bedecked with Parker pens, and a broad-brimmed hat ironed up fore and aft like a felt helmet. A watch of gold, and silver chains, dangled on his gesticulating wrists.

  A smaller man beside him, an ally apparently, turned to the others and said, ‘Is best let Mr Cannibal have his own choice of record if someone will please give him a threepence bit.’

  No one offered, and I ventured to hand the giant a coin.

  ‘Oh, this is nice,’ said the smaller man. ‘Here is this nice personality who gives Mr Cannibal his tune!’ He took the coin from me with two delicate fingers, put it in the juke-box, then said smiling wide, ‘So I offer you a cigarette? And then maybe you offer me a light in your own turn?’

  I took the Pall Mall, and held out my Ronson to his own. His fingers encircled it as if to guard the flame when, hey presto! the lighter was flicked from my hand, and this person had scurried through the throng towards a farther corner.

  I looked about me and saw amiable laughing faces whose eyes dropped politely when mine caught theirs. I began to make my way through them towards the robber and found that, while not exactly stopping me by standing full in my tracks, they presented hard shoulders that made progress difficult.

  When at last I reached the corner, I saw an ancient hair-stuffed sofa tottering against the wall. On it were seated Mr Cannibal, the little nuisance who’d taken my lighter, and a third man who wasn’t talking, only listening. He was small, tightly built into his suit, at ease, alert, alarming, and compact. He glanced up at me: our eyes locked: his glare had such depth that my own sank into his, and while for two seconds I stood riveted, this stare seemed to drain away my soul.

  I blinked, hemmed in behind a wall of dark faces and drape suits. Abruptly, I shook my brain, moved a pace towards the thief, and said to him: ‘Can I have my lighter?’

  The gabbling conversation in jungle tones went on until the third time of asking. Then the little thief looked up and said, ‘What is this stranger? You ask for some light from me, or what?’

  It was a shock to see how with this race, even more than with our own, an expression of great amiability can be replaced, on the same face, within seconds, by one of cold indifference and menace.

  ‘No,’ I said, enwrapping myself with draped togas of torn Union Jacks. ‘Not a light, but the lighter.’

  He took it out of his pocket and tossed it up and down in his hand.

  ‘You wish to buy this?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Merely to have it back.’

  ‘You mean you say that this my lighter is your lighter?’

  ‘Well, my dear chap, you know it is.’

  The giant got up, and so did the lighter-lifter, but not the third man, who sat looking at eternity through his lashes.

  ‘Then what I ask,’ said the culprit, ‘is if your words mean that you call me now a thief?’

  The giant stood looking like the Black Peril. The third man now glanced up at me again. When his eyes fixed once more on mine, I felt myself absorbed into a promiscuity of souls closer even than that which can bind, and then dissolve, two animal bodies in each other.

  ‘No,’ I said, faltering. ‘Keep it.’ And as I moved off: ‘I hope it brings you luck.’

  Rage and disgust filled
my heart. ‘That idiot at the Welfare Office was right!’ I cried out to myself, as I heaved back through the crowd. ‘Disgusting creatures! Bring back the lash, the slave trade! Long live Dr Malan!’

  Standing in the doorway was a figure different from the gaudy elegants inside – one dressed in dungarees, half shaven, with anthropoid jaws and baby ears, more startling even than alarming. He gave me a great meaningless grin, held out a detaining hand and said (this is the rough equivalent), ‘You want some Mexican cigaleks?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘At sree sillins for twentik, misters …’

  ‘Oh, really? Well, yes, then.’

  He slipped them to me discreetly. Lighting up, awaiting for the return of my shattered poise, I asked him, ‘How do you get these, then?’

  Conspiratorially, he replied: ‘From him GIs who sells me in cartoons wisouts no legal dutiks. So you better keep him secrix.’

  ‘They sell them to you here?’

  ‘No, out in him streek, because of Law and his narks that put the eye insides. Anysing from GI stores you wants I gess you: sirts, soss, ties, jackix, nylons, overcoats, socolates or any osser foots …’

  ‘You make a good profit?’

  He looked bland.

  ‘I muss have profix for my risks. That is my bisnick.’

  ‘Do other boys here have things to sell?’

  ‘Oh, misters! Here is him big Londons Spadiss markik place! Better than Ossford Streek hisself!’ And he roared out laughing loud, doubling himself up and slapping himself all over. Then he looked coyly discreet. ‘Those bad boys,’ he said, ‘they relieves you of somesink?’