not class I mean. Even when class and wealth is equal, is we who do the favour!’
The boat passed underneath the bridge, and faces suddenly grew darker. Muriel watched her native city as the boat chugged on between Venetian façades of eyeless warehouses, dropping into ancient Roman mud, where barges lay scattered derelicts under lattices of insect cranes. This was her first sight of Dockland, shut off from inquisitive view on land by Brobdingnagian brick walls. Missing familiar pavements and shop windows, Muriel saw her city as a place quite unfamiliar, and wondered what it might do to her, and Johnny Fortune.
‘It’s queer to think,’ she said, ‘how close we are, we two, and yet so far.’
‘We’re close enough.’
‘Don’t choke me, Johnny. No, no, I mean sharing Arthur as a brother, and yet not one drop of the same blood in our veins …’
‘Our blood’s the same colour, Muriel, is all that matters. Everything that comes out of all human body is the same colour – did you think of that?’
She did: ‘Johnny, don’t be disgusting.’
Undaunted by the absence, in these lower reaches of the river, of interesting monuments, and remembering the hat he’d pass round before the journey ended, the resourceful guide still bludgeoned the passengers’ defenceless ears: ‘… Wapping Old Stairs, where the bloodthirsty Judge Jeffreys was arrested in 1688, while attempting to flee the vengeance of the populace in the disguise of a sailor, and just there the former Execution Dock, where Captain Kidd and other notorious pirates were hanged in public in 1701 …’
Johnny tried to light a cigarette, but the breeze was too powerful, and he stubbed it out. ‘You white chicks,’ he said, ‘are all so maidenhood and pure. You’re badly brought up, you know.’
‘We’re not!’
‘You are. And that’s why you have no manners. And why you have no manners is that you let your kids run wild.’
‘Didn’t you run wild once?’
‘I did, yes, but I also was closely instructed in excellent manners to older people and to strangers, unlike here: to say good morning and good afternoon, and always be respectful to the other man until he gave good reason to act different.’
‘We do. We do, but we do not rub the man’s face in the dirt. We may kill and rob him, yes, but we do not make him a shame to himself, like you. Kill a man, and his spirit will forgive you, but make him ashamed, and he will never so.’
Muriel just saw what he meant. She looked round at her fellow countrymen and women, and asked herself if they would. But all were now engrossed in the guide’s tales of opium dens among the non-existent Chinese population of Limehouse Reach.
‘I’ve learnt a lot,’ she said, ‘from Arthur and his friends about how to treat you boys.’
‘You speak as if we were some cattle or baboons. Respect us, that is all.’
‘Oh, yes, you must be polite to coloured boys, always very polite – good manners seem to mean so much to you. But that’s not all. You have to be very patient, too.’
‘Are we so slow?’
‘You’re quick in your minds, but you mustn’t ever be hurried. I can’t say “Hullo – goodbye” to one of you like I can to one of our boys, without you get offended. It seems you think time’s no object …’
‘Time is to be used. When I meet a countryman on the path back home, I talk for five minutes at least before I pass on my way.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
The boat swung south, and sailed down past the Isle of Dogs.
‘What matters most of all,’ said Muriel, softly as if to herself, ‘is that you must never be afraid of a coloured man. If he bluffs you, you must say, “All right, do what you like, I’m not afraid of you,” – and you must mean it.’
Johnny Fortune laughed at her. ‘I see you make a careful study of our peculiarities.’
‘I’ve made no study, Johnny. I think you understand a man you love, that’s all.’
Even to her embarrassment, he wrapped her in his arms and gave her, in full view of the passengers, a sexy squeeze. Losing interest in the guide, the tourists had taken increasing notice of the couple in the prow. They beamed at the embrace: this was how they expected a coloured man to act.
‘I tell you one thing,’ said Johnny, hugging her to death. ‘What little white girls like most of all is force.’