me be wrong?” Then you go off and rob a bank, or kill your grandmother.’
The weed-smokers laughed at this serious fellow countryman. Myself, I thought the mistake was to mix up the smokers with the others. These arguments often come up when those who smoke hemp sit down with those who don’t …
So I got up and put on discs, and asked Muriel to dance with me. But this was the time, I could clearly see, when the party came near its death, because the light outside the curtains grew stronger than the electricity inside, and everyone was losing pleasure in the other’s company. The two boys waiting with their cars outside came knocking to ask for instructions, or else they’d shoot off, and wanted more money for waiting, anyway. So Larry the GI went off with Dorothy, and Billy told Ronson Lighter to see little Barbara home. And in the other car, Montgomery went with Theodora and serious Mr Karl Marx Bo. I saw them off there in the already daylight street.
Dorothy leant out and snatched a kiss I hadn’t offered. ‘I’ll see you again soon, my man,’ she said.
At the other car I shook hands in a more steady manner.
‘Keep in touch, Johnny,’ said Montgomery, sitting like an emir in his native dress. ‘You know my telephone number.’
‘And don’t forget,’ said Theodora, gripping my hand, ‘I rely on you for my colonial programme.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes,’ I answered, and told the drivers in the Yoruba tongue to hurry them all off.
Back in the room, I found Hamilton in a deep slumber, and Cole inviting Billy and my brother Arthur to a game of dice. ‘You will come too?’ he said. I wished this badly, for dice are in my blood, but first there was the question of my Muriel. So they went upstairs without me, after Arthur had borrowed from me three pounds which was all that I had left.
Muriel was sitting by the radiogram. I kissed her quite freely, and she came up easily into my arms.
‘Stay with me now, Muriel,’ I said.
‘No, Johnny, no, not here …’
‘Then where? This is my home, and Hamilton will sleep soundly for six hours …’
‘No, Johnny, not till I know you better.’
That woman’s phrase! Which means, as all men know, ‘Not till I ask you!’ And why did she not go with all the others in the cars, if her real purpose was not to stay? If I had not been fond of this little child, and tired too, to tell the truth, and longing for my sleep, she would not have escaped me by her feeble answers.
So I said, ‘Very well, Muriel, get all your things, and I shall go out to find your cab.’
She got up slowly, but by the door she stopped and clung and kissed me. ‘Africans’ skins are soft,’ she said to me.
FIRST INTERLUDE
Idyll of miscegenation on the river
A pleasure steamer put out on the river, and seated in its prow alone were Muriel Macpherson and Johnny Macdonald Fortune. His left hand clasped her right, he held both on her lap, the white and brown fingers interlocking.
‘It takes us an hour to reach the palace down the stream,’ she told him.
‘Well, I see they have beer on board, so that don’t matter.’
Beside the helmsman, on the open bridge behind, a hybrid character – nautical in peaked cap and jacket of dark blue, but landlubber from the waist down with grey slacks and sandals – had taken his stance before a microphone. Crackling through amplifiers dispersed about the ship, his voice described, in accents part Cockney, part bogus North American, part the pedantic patronising of the lecturer, the points of interest on either shore, disturbing the peace and contemplation of the few, but delighting the docile many, who swung their heads, as if spectators at a tennis match, towards the curiosities whose histories he recounted.
Muriel said: ‘Do you have rivers in your country, Johnny?’
‘Of course we have rivers: that’s why we’re called Nigeria.’
‘Did you swim in them – like those boys there? You can swim, Johnny, can’t you?’
He leapt, climbed on the railings of the boat, and made as if to dive. Muriel let out a scream, and clutched his ankles. He swayed. Passengers, distracted from the amplifiers, turned, frowned and laughed.
He slipped down on the deck into her arms, and held her tight a moment. ‘You’re a madman, Johnny Fortune! I can’t trust you a split second. I must never let you out of my