what she spends it on.’
‘That, my dear fellow, even for an Englishman, is very difficult to find in our sad country.’
‘I’ll find it.’ He beetled at me, then, leaning forward, said, ‘And do you know why I think your landladies are scared of us?’
‘I can but imagine …’
‘Because of any brown babies that might appear.’
‘In the nature of things,’ I said, ‘that may indeed well be.’
‘An arrival of white babies they can somehow explain away. But if their daughter has a brown one, then neighbouring fingers all start pointing.’
I silently shook my head.
‘But why,’ he cried, ‘why not box up together, Jumble and Spade, like we let your folk do back home?’
I rose once more.
‘Really, Mr Fortune. You cannot expect me to discuss these complex problems. I am – consider – an official.’
‘Oh, yes … You have to earn your money, I suppose.’
I found this, of course, offensive. And moving with dignity to my desk, I took up the Warning Folder of People and Places to Avoid.
‘Another little duty for which I’m paid,’ I said to him, ‘is to warn our newcomers against … well, to be frank, bad elements among their fellow countrymen.’
‘Oh, yes, man. Shoot.’
‘And,’ I continued, looking at my list, ‘particularly against visiting the Moorhen public house, the Cosmopolitan dance hall, or the Moonbeam club.’
‘Just say those names again.’
To my horror, I saw he was jotting them on the back page of his passport.
‘To visit these places,’ I went on, reading aloud from the mimeographed sheet I held, ‘has been, for many, the first step that leads to the shadow of the police courts.’
‘Why? What goes on in them?’
I didn’t, perhaps fortunately, yet know. ‘I’m not at liberty to divulge it,’ I replied.
‘Ah well …’
He pocketed his passport, and took me by the hand.
‘Have you any further questions?’ I enquired.
‘Yes, Mr Pew. Excuse my familiar asking: but where can I get a shirt like that?’
‘Like this?’
‘Yes. It’s hep. Jumble style, but hep.’
He reached out a long, long hand and fingered it.
‘In Jermyn Street,’ I said with some self-satisfaction, but asperity.
‘Number?’
I told him.
‘Thanks so very much,’ said Johnny Macdonald Fortune. ‘And now I must be on my way to Maida Vale.’
I watched him go out with an unexpected pang. And moving to the window, soon saw him walk across the courtyard and stop for a moment speaking to some others there. In the sunlight, his nylon shirt shone all the whiter against the smooth brown of his skin. His frame, from this distance, seemed shorter than it was, because of his broad shoulders – flat, though composed of two mounds of muscle arching from his spine. His buttocks sprang optimistically high up from the small of his back, and his long legs – a little bandy and with something of a backward curve – were supported by two very effective splayed-out feet; on which, just now, as he spoke, gesticulating too, he was executing a tracery of tentative dance steps to some soft, inaudible music.
4
A pilgrimage to Maida Vale
This Maida Vale is noteworthy for all the buildings looking similar and making the search for Dad’s old lodging-house so more difficult. But by careful enquiry and eliminations, I hit on one house in Nightingale Road all crumbling down and dirty as being the most probable, and as there was no bell or lock and the door open, I walked right in and called up the stairs, ‘Is Mrs Hancock there?’ but getting no reply, climbed further to the next floor. There was a brown door facing me, so I drummed on it, when immediately it opened and a Jumble lady stood there to confront me: wrung out like a dish-rag, with her body everywhere collapsing, and when she saw me a red flush of fury on her face.
‘Get out! I don’t want your kind here.’
‘I have to speak to Mrs Hancock.’
At these words of mine her colour changed to white like a coconut you bite into.
‘Hancock!’ she called out. ‘My name’s Macpherson. Why do you call me Hancock?’
‘I don’t, lady,’ I told her. ‘I merely say I wanted to speak to a lady of that name.’
‘Why?’
‘To bring her my dad’s greetings – Mr David Macdonald Fortune out of Lagos, Nigeria. I’m his son Johnny.’
By the way she eyed me, peering at me, measuring me from top to toes, I was sure now this was the lady of Dad’s story. And I can’t say, at that moment, I quite admired my dad in his own choice. Though naturally it was