to an appropriate level, then up even higher to the Board of Governors, then plummeted down once more – a massive file it must have been by then, I wish I could have seen it – to the person who actually had to wield the axe, or rather to his secretary (a bitch – I knew her in the Wrens – she probably drafted the letter for him herself).
But I don’t, as they say, ‘regret it’. Being horribly competent, I can always get a job – all I really mind is having lost a battle. And I don’t regret making a fool of myself in front of everybody in the court. All I deeply regret, Montgomery (oh, how I do! – you’ll not understand, however much you think you do), is losing my child in that so squalid, absurd and dreadfully sad miscarriage (my first – I mean my first pregnancy, as it happens), because though I’ve never meant anything to Johnny Fortune, I would still have had that … it – he – she: anyway, a fragment of him.
How is he? Better not tell me. I don’t want to see him again. I do, of course, but I couldn’t.
And how are you, Montgomery? If you’re behindhand with the rent, as I imagine, and, as I also imagine, up to your grey eyes in debt, please let me know, and I’ll do whatever I can.
Later. Just been out to buy some gin. They looked at me as if I was indeed a ‘BBC woman’, but took the pound notes promptly enough.
What’s clear to me now, Montgomery – although I know you won’t agree – is that love, or even friendship, for those people is impossible – I mean as we understand it. It’s not either party’s fault; it’s just that in the nature of things we can never really understand each other because we see the whole world utterly differently. In a crisis each race will act according to its nature, each one quite separately, and each one be right, and hurt the other.
It’s when you see that distant look that sometimes comes into their opaque brown eyes that you realise it – that moment when they suddenly depart irrevocably within themselves far off towards some hidden, alien, secretive, quite untouchable horizon …’
2
Appearance of a guardian angel
Since my trouble come, I do not go often to the places where I go before – it is not that I fear the Law, or what it can do to me any more, but that I do not wish to be seen there by my countrymen. To be sent to jail for weed was not the big disgrace, for everybody know they never catch me if they treat me fairly; but to have a Jumble woman who I do not love speak up in court and say she have a child of me, and hear the boys say it was this woman’s lies that set me free on that first charge – this is too big a shame for me. And since the sad death of Hamilton, I have no friend, except for Laddy Boy, who was now travelling again at sea, that I would wish to speak to in this city.
So what I do, as soon as Montgomery goes out, is visit cinemas and sit there by myself, or else go practising my judo and my boxing at the merchant seaman gymnasium. For now I hear that Billy Whispers also has come out of finishing his sentence, I know this boy will one day try to make some trouble for me, because he believes from what they tell him of my trial that when he go into jail, is I who takes his Dorothy.
So I sat in the darkness of the Tottenham Court picture palace this day, thinking; when near to me a white boy asked me for a match, to light his cigarette, he say, and other silly business of holding my hand too long when I pass the box, and when he gives it back to me, so that I know what his foolish hope is, and say to him, ‘Mister, behave yourself, or else you come out with me and I push your face in.’
‘All right, man, I come out with you,’ this white boy whispered. I thought: oh, very well, if he wants hitting, then I hit him, this will be some big relief to all my feelings; but when I see his face outside the dark, I