City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,90

heard it too, and one of the officers patted him gently on the back of the knee.

The judge returned, and so did the jury. They did not, despite the nature of their impending verdict, gaze benevolently at the accused as juries are traditionally supposed to do, but sat like ancient monuments on their hard seats.

The clerk asked the foreman how they found. He said, ‘Not guilty.’

Mr Vial then rose and said, with infinite deference, to the judge: ‘May the prisoner please be discharged, my Lord?’

‘He may.’

A week later, Johnny was re-arrested on the charge of being in possession of Indian hemp. Montgomery could borrow no more money quickly anywhere, and Theodora was in hospital with a breakdown and a miscarriage. ‘I’ll come over to the court for free, if you really want me to,’ Mr Zuss-Amor told Montgomery, ‘but why don’t you tell him to plead guilty and settle before the magistrate? Believe me, if they don’t get him for something, they’ll never let him alone. And it’ll only be a fine.’

It was, but no one had any money, and Johnny went to prison for a month.

PART III

Johnny Fortune leaves his city

1

Tidings from Theodora

The word ‘freelance’, I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills. I’d desperately succeeded in appearing in some serious periodicals that paid little, and were seen by few; and in printing some disreputable anonymous paragraphs, cruelly chopped by the sub-editors, in newspapers I’d hitherto despised. As for the BBC, since Theodora’s departure from it, under a lowering cloud, it would not hear of any of my rich ideas.

How I missed Theodora in the house, and how unexpectedly! True, Johnny’s company, since he’d come out of prison, was some small consolation: small, because a different Johnny had emerged – a rather bitter and less kindly person, a disillusioned adult Fortune who no longer seemed to think – as Johnny always had – that everything in the world would one fine day be possible.

I opened the bedroom door and looked at him still sleeping, rolled in an angry lump, his head underneath a pillow. I drew back the curtain, and let in a shaft of reconnoitring spring sun. ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘it’s past eleven.’ He bunched the sheets closer round him, and jerked himself in a tighter, unwelcoming ball. I put on the kettle, went back to the front room, and took up Theodora’s letter.

I’d forgotten, Montgomery, how ghastly the country is until I came here to recoup. The colours are green and grey, invariably, and in the village nothing happens: nothing. I’ll be glad to get back to London, and only sorry, because of you, it won’t be the old flat, but I just can’t face living there any longer. You will see about the removal of my things to the new place as you promised, won’t you. (Be practical about all this, Montgomery, for Heaven’s sake.)

I’ve heard from the Corporation, as I expected, that my appeal is disallowed. Their letter is roundabout and civil – almost deferential – but very clear as to essentials. My old job is out: that’s definite; and if I can’t ‘see my way’, as they put it, to accepting being kicked upstairs (or rather, kicked downstairs, it really would be, as the office of the alternative job they offer in the Editing service is in the sub-basement of a former department store), they ‘have no alternative but to accept my offer of resignation’. They’re giving me a surprise farewell bonus, though: rather nice of them, don’t you think, after everything?

In fact, I really have to admit they’ve behaved very decently and (unlike me) quite sensibly. I broke the written and unwritten codes, and forfeited my claim to their paternalism. As the high-up I eventually got to see quite frankly said to me, ‘It’s not so much what you did, Miss Pace, as that you did it without asking anyone’s permission. The Corporation can’t be expected to answer publicly for its servants’ actions unless it knows what they’re going to be.’ I imagine it was most of all those lurid pieces in the Press about the ‘BBC woman’ that really got them down.

From what I hear from kind friends who’ve telephoned (not, of course, on the office lines), it was a close thing, all the same. My ‘case’ went straight to the top, then down again