paraded through the streets. Henry was Uncle Sam; Selma was the Empress Theodora; the other girls were slave girls and concubines. There were marines and infantrymen and airforce pilots on the Pacific atolls; and in a jeep with which I had provided him stood Mr Blackwhite. He stood still, dressed in a fantastically braided uniform. He wore dark glasses, smoked a corncob pipe and his left hand was held aloft in a salute which was like a benediction. He did not dance, he did not sway to the music. He was MacArthur, promising to return.
On the Tuesday evening, when the streets were full of great figures—Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart: men parading with concentration—Blackwhite was also abroad, dressed like Shakespeare.
*
Selma and I settled down into a relationship which was only occasionally stormy. I had taken Mr Henry’s advice that first morning and had gone around to the store where she worked. She did not acknowledge me. My rough clothes, which were really Henry’s, attracted a good deal of critical attention and much critical comment on the behaviour of Americans. She acknowledged me later: she was pleased that I had gone to see her in a period as cool and disenchanted as the morning after.
Henry’s, as I said, seemed to have its own especial rules. It was a club, a meeting-place, a haven, a place of assignation. It attracted all sorts. Selma belonged to the type of island girl who moved from relationship to relationship, from man to man. She feared marriage because marriage, for a girl of the people, was full of perils and quick degradation. She felt that once she surrendered completely to any one man, she lost her hold on him, and her beauty was useless, a wasted gift.
She said, ‘Sometimes when I am walking I look at these warrahoons, and I think that for some little girl somewhere this animal is lord and master. He. He doesn’t like cornflakes. He doesn’t like rum. He this, he that.’
Her job in the store and Henry’s protection gave her independence. She did not wish to lose this; she never fell for glamour. She was full of tales of girls she had known who had broken the code of their group and actually married visitors; and then had led dreadful lives, denied both the freedom they had had and the respectability, the freedom from struggle, which marriage ought to have brought.
So we settled down, after making a little pact.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you are free and I am free. I am free to do exactly what I want, and you are free too.’
The pressing had always been mine. It wasn’t an easy pact. I knew that this freedom might at any time embrace either Blackwhite, shy reformer in the background, or the white-robed preacher whom we called Priest. They both continued to make their interest in her plain.
But in the beginning it was not from these men that we found opposition after we had settled down in one of the smaller jalousied houses in the street—and in those days it was possible to buy a house for fifteen hundred dollars. No, it was not from these men that there was opposition, but from Mrs Lambert, Henry’s neighbour, the wife of the man in the khaki suit who sipped the glass of rum in the mornings and spoke in rhyme to express either delight or pain.
Now Mrs Lambert was a surprise. I had seen her in the street for some time without connecting her with Mr Lambert. Mr Lambert was black and Mrs Lambert was white. She was about fifty and she had the manners of the street. It was my own fault, in a way, that I had attracted her hostility. I had put money in the Lamberts’ way and had given them, too late in life, a position to keep up or to lose.
Mr Lambert had been excited by the boom conditions that had begun to prevail in the street. The words were Ma-Ho’s, he who ran the grocery at the corner. Ma-Ho had begun to alter and extend his establishment to include a café where many men from the base and many locals sat on high stools and ate hot dogs and drank Coca-Colas, and where the children from several streets around congregated, waiting to be treated.
‘Offhand,’ Ma-Ho said, for he was fond of talking, ‘I would say, boom.’ And the words ‘offhand’ and ‘boom’ were the only really distinct ones. He began every sentence with ‘offhand’; what followed