He certainly did.
I invited him down for the night, something I didn’t do often for a number of reasons. One of them was village gossip, which, if it lights like a swarm of blowflies upon the conjunction of white male with white female alone under one roof overnight, buzzes out in density and intensity into a swarm of worker-wasps if the male happens to be black. Another was the fact that John didn’t like the country much. ‘Not my scene,’ he would say, sniffing the pure air uneasily. His big hands, capable of immense delicacy and precision when handling the strings of a guitar or a semi-visible measure of spice for a dish he was cooking, became as bunches of bananas when he tried to come to grips with a flower. But the thing he disliked most was the quiet.
‘Janie,’ he said, standing in the middle of the garden and shaking his enormous head. ‘How you stand it, all this no-noise? It scares me. Like in a horror-film when something going to jump out.’
‘But the whole air’s full of sounds,’ I objected. ‘Listen to the birds.’
‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed with an involuntary shudder. ‘I meant, proper, natural noise. People-noise,’ he elaborated for the benefit of my raised eyebrows. I said no more. When I reflected on the solid wall of decibels with which he was customarily surrounded, specifically in the night-spot where he played, I could not be too astonished that he found my country garden with its amiable twitterings and hummings disorientating.
‘My head going to burst, like up in outer space,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in quick and put on the radio.’
We carried in his ‘luggage’, consisting of one loudly-striped zip-bag, a huge bunch of wilting flowers, a hospital-type basket of exotic fruit and a whole paper carry-all of bits and pieces for David.
‘Where that boy?’ he roared as soon as he got indoors.
‘Out riding.’ His face fell. He adored David. ‘Oh, don’t look like that. He wouldn’t have gone if he’d known you were coming. He’ll be back at lunchtime and till then I want you to myself. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
‘That’s right.’ He encircled me with his massive arm, and his smile broke out again, a vast, dazzling crescent, like the moon lying on its back. His hug had much in common with that of an anaconda, except that it was inspired by the purest affection. ‘I love you, Janie! Much too long we’re not together.’
We went into the kitchen and John made a beeline for the radio, which he switched on full-blast to a record programme. I let him have his fix of ear-pressure while I made some coffee, and then, very firmly, I turned it down.
‘Hey!’ he howled in outrage.
‘Ten minutes of your row, ten minutes of my quiet,’ I said ruthlessly. ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’
‘I can listen with it loud.’
‘But I can’t think. Sit down and don’t loom. It’s like talking to a tree.’ He folded himself into a kitchen chair and his mug of coffee disappeared between his hands. The steam rose out of them without any apparent source.
‘You really look like a witch-doctor with the steam coming out of your hands like that,’ I said.
‘Hey, listen, you stop calling me that. I don’t know no magic. I wish I did.’
‘It’s Jo who calls you that, not me.’
‘Yes, well she’s a funny lady. Prejudice.’
‘Oh, rot! She’s very fond of you.’
‘Sure. In spite of. Not because of.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong, but never mind that now. It’s me I want to talk about.’
‘Go ahead, Janie, or your ten minutes’ll be finished.’ He made twitching movements of his fingers, as if they were moving of their own accord to switch up the volume again.
‘It’s about Toby.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Well, that’s one point. I don’t think there’s anything natural about it, after all this time.’
‘What that mean?—that you stop from loving just because you don’t see each other for a while?’
‘“A while” is not seven years.’
He reached over and grasped my hand. ‘But you the faithful type, Janie.’
‘Oh, John, don’t! Listen to me. You’ve never really grown out of the L-shaped room, and the relationship the three of us had there. You hated Toby getting married as much as I did, because you resented anything that destroyed our threesome, the whole atmosphere of that time. Me going on with this—this obsession about Toby, that fits in, it suits you, it helps to keep your illusion that nothing very much has changed.’ He looked bewildered, as well he might. ‘John, listen—’ I began again.
‘I listenin’. But I ain’t followin’.’
‘All right, I’ll put it another way. I don’t know how you manage without being married, or—or anything like that. How do you?’ I broke off to ask.
‘I dunno. Not too easy. I don’t really want to be married, I can’t see it somehow; I never met no girl I could love, ’cepting you, and that’s different. I always knew you belonged to Toby.’
I dropped my eyes because of the question that had come into them. John could sometimes read my mind. He did it now.
‘Sometimes,’ he said very quietly, ‘some—some john turns me on. You know what I mean.’ I nodded. He pressed my hand convulsively. ‘But I hate that feeling. I wouldn’t never do nothing about it.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? You tellin’ me you think that’s okay—two men?’
‘If that’s the way they are.’
‘It ain’t the way I am. Not if I can help it.’
‘But that means you’ll never—have anybody.’
‘Better nobody than that. That’s horrible. Not natural.’
After a moment’s silence, he said, ‘I ain’t never spoke about it even, to anyone but you. Only lately I let myself know it—that I had feelin’s that way. I guess I been stupid. I guess you—’ He stopped, and then went on with difficulty, ‘I guess you knew it all along.’
I frowned and didn’t answer.
‘Did Toby—sure, I know he must’ve.’
‘What does it matter?’
He shook his head. ‘I just can’t understand why it didn’t make him sick, me being like that.’
‘Of course it didn’t. Not everybody feels like you about it.’
‘Maybe other—fags—don’t,’ he said stumblingly. ‘But a man like Toby, a woman like you, who’s normal, how can you look at a big black freak like me and not get sick to your stomachs?’
‘Oh, shut up! Now you are being stupid! Don’t you know we loved you, as a friend and because of the sort of person you were? That’s what counts. The whole shooting-match isn’t sex, you know.’
‘Ten minutes is up,’ he said abruptly, and turned up the radio to full deafening volume, like a barrier between us.
I felt this was his way of ringing the bell between bouts of self-exposure. That had been primarily his round and he needed to retreat to his noise-corner and have a rest. So I patted his hand and went out of the kitchen and did something about his flowers till his ten minutes was up. On the dot, I heard the radio go right off and his voice call, ‘Come on back. Your turn.’
I sat down again in the same place, opposite him.
‘To get back to me and Toby,’ I began without preamble. ‘You know he’s divorced. And he’s gone off to Israel with one of his daughters.’
‘To the land of the Bible,’ said John sentimentally.
‘To the land of bombs and bullets,’ I retorted. ‘There’s going to be a war over there, very likely.’ John’s face changed and he sat up. ‘Well, that’s a relative side-issue at the moment. The main point of this discussion is that I think I’ve fallen in love with somebody else, and I want—’
I became aware that John had drawn his hands away from me and was staring at me in horror and disbelief.
‘Now don’t look at me like that,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light. ‘It’s been seven years, Johnny! Seven years of living alone, raising my child alone, dealing with all my problems and worries
alone. I don’t see the least virtue in being “the faithful type” all that time. Believe me, if it had been within my power to shake myself completely free of Toby when he got married, I would have done it, and been a whole lot healthier and happier because of it.’
‘What’s happiness got to do with it? Lovin’ got nothing to do with being happy, necessarily.’
‘Is that so? You must allow me to disagree. Love should have everything to do with happiness, and health, and fulfilment. Love, in the words of the old song, makes the world go round. And my world has been very still for a very long time. Maybe I never grew out of the L-shaped room, either.’
‘And maybe, just maybe, Toby never did, too. Have you thought of that? ’Cause of that, maybe his marriage don’t work out. It had magic, that little room. Strong magic. John-the-witch-doctor say so.’ But he wasn’t smiling. ‘That room keep us in its power, all these years. All the time we wanting with part of our secret selves, to get back to it.’
‘Yeah, the L-shaped womb! Now stop that, will you? I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to turn me back to that time, you’re trying to pretend nothing’s changed and that I didn’t say I loved another man who was no part of our little L-shaped triangle.’
He gazed at me steadily.
‘Who is this john? He better be something special.’
‘He is.’ I told him very briefly about Andy. His only overt reaction was to say that Felix was a funny name. I didn’t tell him any details of our relationship. I only tried to make it clear, against a barricade of almost tangible unwillingness to listen or accept, that I wanted to marry him and sever myself from Toby for ever. Only when honesty compelled me to add, ‘—at least, I think that’s what I want,’ did John return to me fully.
Having claimed his complete attention with this piece of emotional ambiguity, I then proceeded to outline my immediate dilemma, to whit, should I or should I not go to Israel? His face, protected by its black skin, presented to me in that moment a strange ambivalent mask. It bore no detectable expression; his narrow eyes with their yellow whites gazed at me unblinkingly from inside the mask but they seemed unfocussed, withdrawn to some dark unknowable inner region within the huge black headpiece nature had placed on his shoulders for his ritual dance through this world. These tribal images were impossible to avoid at such moments. Not for the first time I sensed an unbridgeable division between us, though our hands were linked on the table in the simplest, least complicated, and in effect purest love of my life. It was not the difference in race so much as our stemming, way back, from cultures so diverse that we might have belonged to alien species. My question to myself was not, ‘What is he thinking about?’ but ‘By what process, unattainable and incomprehensible to me, is he arriving at some conclusion?’ In that long silence before he spoke, I knew I would act on whatever he said next. Why? Perhaps because I felt and had always felt that John was nearer to some well-spring, some root-source of knowledge both basic and primitive—primitive in its meaning of undisturbed, primordial, aboriginal. Something lost to us so-called cultivated races, or fatally blunted, like our sense of smell, only usable now for trivialities like perfume, a surface thing—its original function, of providing us with vital information, lost.
At last he stirred, shifting his huge shoulders in a little shiver, as if waking from sleep, and the mask became living skin again, the eyes seeming to come forward and fill their rims.
‘We go to Israel,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You and me both.’
INTERLUDE
CHRIS
Chapter 1
THE little ferry showed its rounded stern to Piraeus docks and began to chug out to sea.
John looked over his shoulder uneasily.
‘Plenty of fuzz back there,’ he muttered. ‘What they all doing, standing around lookin’ at us like they’d like to fling us all in jail?’
I laughed. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? There was a coup here about a month ago.’
‘A what?’
‘A coup. A military take-over.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know at all. Ask a Greek.’
John looked round the boat obediently, and made a move towards one of the sailors. I grabbed him back.
‘On second thoughts, you’d better not.’
‘Why? I want to know.’
‘I’m not sure the Greeks know themselves.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Don’t worry about it. We won’t be here long enough.’
‘I sure don’t want to get mixed up with any military,’ John said fervently.
‘They won’t bother you. You’re a tourist. They want your money.’
‘Yours, you mean.’
‘Some of it’s yours.’
‘You sure you don’t mind me comin’ along, specially with you having to pay for most of me?’ he asked for the hundredth time.
‘On the contrary, I’m eternally grateful to you for coming. I’d be finding this whole double enterprise far too frightening on my own.’
‘I findin’ it frightenin’ with two of us.’
‘You mean, the fuzz?’
‘Them too.’
‘Why are you nervous of the police, John? I bet you’ve never crossed the law in your whole life.’
‘I smoke pot,’ he said after some thought. ‘That’s not legal, for some reason I can’t understand.’
‘Well, don’t start puffing it in some Greek copper’s face, and you’ll be all right.’ But he was jumpy. ‘What else?’
‘I don’t like aeroplanes,’ he burst out. ‘And I don’t like boats. I even don’t like trains, though I’m more used to them. Why it has to be so far?’
‘One would think,’ I said, impatiently I fear, because he’d been increasing my nervousness all the way from Surrey to Greece, ‘that you’d never travelled in your life. How did you get to England?’
‘Get to England?’ he asked blankly.
‘Yes, from wherever you came from originally.’ Quite suddenly it struck me as extraordinary that I didn’t know where this was.
He stared at me a moment, then laughed so loudly several people turned to look at us.
‘I don’t come from nowhere,’ he said. ‘I come from London, same as everybody. I never been out of it except to visit you and play at some country-house dances.’
‘Then why is your English so strange?’
‘Who, mine? Don’t I talk like anyone?’
‘No, you talk like an African who never went to school.’
‘Well, that’s cause I am an African who never went to school,’ he said, laughing again. ‘Mama come from Africa, and she wasn’t exactly educated. And after she died, I was raised in a—you know, an orphan’s home. Was mostly black kids there, and our person who mostly looked after us, Granny Baker, she was black too. Best, kindest woman I ever knew. She never been to school, so she told us. Life been my school, she used to say. We didn’t get much schoolin’ either. It was just after that big war they had, there was lots of black and half-black kids left over from the American soldiers, younger than me of course, and I kind of helped look after them. There was a teacher come there, teached us to read, write a bit, sums and like that, but we didn’t pay no attention to him much, specially not me, bein’ bigger than the others, I felt so silly sittin’ in lessons with ’em . . . All that whole time, I remember like if you could remember something from before you was born. You want to know when it all began to be real, what I think of as my birthday? One day Granny Baker took a bunch of us to a cinema, only it wasn’t a film, it was a band. A lot of the kids was so disappointed they started in to stamp and whistle, but after a bit the band played loud and their sound was so good, man, it just forced all those wild ignorant kids to keep quiet and listen. There was one kid who played sax, and boy, he sent me. Way, way out! Out into space, into dreams, into real life. I found myself out in that shitty old street among all the litter and traffic noises. Granny Baker was shakin’ me with one hand and dryin’
my eyes with the other. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” she says. “You never heard real music before?” I just shook my head and cried some more. Couldn’t stop. I thought she’d make me go home. But she said, “Get stirred up all you want, only don’t cry loud or you spoil the music.” And she took me back in and let me hear the rest.’
I tore my eyes from his face and looked out to sea. The coast of mainland Greece was shrinking behind us, its white buildings brilliant under the high sun.
‘You didn’t need school anyway,’ I said. ‘You know everything that counts. You knew I was pregnant before anybody.’
‘Anybody knows things like that,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I seen girls get pregnant at thirteen when they still playin’ in the playgrounds . . . That’s all crap, all that instinct stuff, I want to know real things, facts. Too late now, and maybe I never had the brain anyhow.’ He contemplated the blue Adriatic with greater calm than I had seen in him since we left England. ‘Look at that deep-down water . . . think of all the fish down there. And all that white, where our boat churn it up, like whipped cream . . .’ He turned his face up to the tinted sky, and snuffed the air. ‘This maybe ain’t so bad,’ he said consideringly. ‘Better than the country. The smell ain’t so dainty.’
This was undoubtedly true. It was a strong odour combining Greek ozone, Greek boat, sweaty Greek sailors, bilge, and a lot of stinking rubbish the cook was just tipping overboard below us.
‘Plenty of noise for you, too,’ I pointed out encouragingly.
‘Yeah!’ he said, brightening up even further. ‘Let’s count the noises. Engines . . . nice. Throbby, rhythmical. Goes right through you.’
‘Swish of water.’
‘Like the wire-drums. And what’s with the birds?’
‘Fighting for the bits of thrown-out food. Rowdy buggers, aren’t they?’
‘Don’t swear,’ he reproved me sharply.
‘Sailors’ curses.’
‘Footsteps runnin’.’
‘Baby crying.’
‘Ah, and there! Some angel just turned on his transistor,’ John exclaimed with a look of rapture.