City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,67

simply another form of nostalgie de la boue. You’ve taken the easy way and are losing face, even with them. Do you see anything, for instance, of the intelligent types? The coloured intellectuals?’

I decided a dressing-down was due. ‘In the first place, I’d remind you, Theodora, that I see much of Mr Karl Marx Bo. I listened to him addressing a meeting only last Sunday in Hyde Park, and we had a long and angry conversation afterwards. As for you, my dear, and your predilections, would you really describe Johnny Fortune as an intellectual?’

‘He’s most intelligent.’

‘I don’t deny it; but not lacking, I would say, in animal attraction.’

‘He’s handsome, in the way they are – yes.’

‘Theodora, I don’t wish to be unkind, but you’re pathetic. Why not admit you love him?’

She looked at me long and hard. ‘Because I’m ashamed to,’ she said at last. ‘Not ashamed because he’s coloured, or, as you say, animal, or anything else, but because it’s a feeling so strong I can’t control it. I’m not used to that, and I can’t cope.’

I ventured to pat her on her unyielding shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps one should not be able to dominate every situation …’

She looked to be crying, so I considerately turned away. ‘They’re so appalling!’ she said at last, quite softly. ‘So tender and so heartless. So candid and so evil!’

It was my turn now, I felt – from the depths of what was, after all, a wider experience than her own and, so I thought, one more dearly won – to lecture her.

‘I don’t think you must take,’ I said, ‘a moral attitude towards these people: or rather, a moral attitude within the English terms of reference. I don’t think you must suppose, if they seem to you such charming sinners, beyond good and evil (or before it, rather), that the devil has therefore marked them for his own.’

‘Why not?’ she said, rather sulkily.

‘Use your historical sense, Theodora – one certainly far better documented than my own. Remember, for instance, that in parts of Africa not a soul had ever heard of Christianity less than a hundred years ago …’

‘Where hadn’t they, precisely?’

‘Don’t be pedantic. In Uganda, for example. May I go on?’

‘But Johnny doesn’t come from Uganda.’

‘Who said he did? Can’t we move, just for a second, from the particular to the general?’ I was quite exasperated.

‘Go on, then.’

‘I shall. You should therefore remember that if coloured men seem, to your eyes, more happily amoral than we are, they have other spiritual ties, quite unknown to us, and very different from our own, that are every bit as strong.’

‘Such as?’

‘Don’t interrupt. They have sacred tribal loyalties, for instance, of which we feel absolutely nothing that’s equivalent. If Johnny had been a Gambian like those boys who set on me that evening, and of the same tribe as they were, he certainly wouldn’t have helped me, however close our friendship.’

‘The more fool he.’

I restrained myself. ‘There’s another thing,’ I went on. ‘The family. We think our family ties are precious, or, at any rate, that we should feel so. But they’re nothing at all to theirs. Have you noticed, when an African makes a solemn promise, what he says to you?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘He says, “I swear it on my mother’s life.”’

‘And probably breaks his word.’

‘Oh, no doubt! Just as we do when we swear upon our gods, or on our sacred books. The point I’m trying to convey, though, to the frosty heights of your Everest intelligence, dearest Theodora, is that there are entirely different moral concepts among different races: a fact which leads to endless misunderstandings on the political and social planes, and makes right conduct in you, for instance, seem idiotic to Johnny Fortune, and some gesture of his which he believes necessary and honourable to seem foolish, or even wicked, in your eyes.’

‘Don’t bully me, Montgomery,’ she said. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘I’m sorry, Theodora. Let’s have some coffee in the kitchen, if I can find my way through the provocative underclothes my lodgers have hung there in festoons.’

She put Tungi down and came and helped me make it, turning thoughtfully over the gossamer vests and pants that rested on the lines.

‘Have you seen Johnny lately?’ I asked, as I handed her a cup.

‘Yes, several times, and he telephones. But I’m worried about him, Montgomery! If only he’d work!’

‘He’s a lazy lad, I fear.’

‘Like you. How is your freelancing going?’

‘It’s not.’

‘I thought