Mr. Love and Justice (9 page)

‘And
why
don’t they?’ asked, or rather said, the Mum.

‘Because they’re all like you, dear. Comfortable clots.’

‘Well!’

‘Frankie!’

‘Well?’

All three had risen. The Mum, with great ‘dignity’, collected up the bits-and-pieces women always have on such occasions (no sweeping, decisive female exit is possible without stage props –
and
the implication that if not expeditiously collected, the offending male will add injury to insult by purloining them), and made off, escorted to the balcony by her daughter, where one of those feminine duos could be heard in which both speak at once yet each absolutely understands the other. Frankie sat on the table, hands in his pockets, marshalling his forces for the ensuing row.

But it burst with the mutes on, all in undertones. The girl just looked at him, sighed a bit and said, ‘I know you don’t like her, Frankie, but after all she is my mum and she’s bloody useful to us.’

‘I agree with every word you say.’

‘Well, dear?’

Frankie took her in his arms. ‘Are you
sure
she’s your mum?’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine how an old cow like that gave birth to you.’

‘I haven’t seen
your
ma ever, don’t forget.’

‘You’ll meet her in paradise. Not here.’

‘Oh? I didn’t know. Well, dear, there it is. If you want to alter the arrangement say so, but we can’t have little scenes like that too frequently.’

‘No.’ Frankie looked into her eyes affectionately
and with profound but uncritical mistrust. ‘You know what you’re doing to me?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you: you’re blackmailing me.’

‘Over this?’

‘Over everything. The threat’s always there. Take it and like it, boy, or else.’

‘You think so?’

‘Naturally. In the game the woman picks the man, whatever he may think, and holds him not with money but with blackmail.’

‘Not me. You’re free to go, dear, and there’ll be no come-backs. I don’t want you to, you know that, but you’re free.’

‘Me? Are you kidding? Not in this set-up, baby – never. Once you’re in you can’t escape – not because of the loot, or even because of the law, but because if you like the girl a lot, as I do, then you’re really hooked.’

‘Well? And so?’

‘Well, it’s just frightening a bit, girl, that’s all. Because so long as you like
me
it’s all okay – but if one day you didn’t! Or if you really lost
your
temper with me!’

‘I never do. Not often, anyway.’

‘Or we both got high, filled up with lush, and raised our voices!’

‘That could happen, I suppose …’

‘Or if I fell for someone else, or
you
did maybe, and you knew, and I didn’t know! That would be most dangerous of all!’

They were still holding each other, firm but loose, smiling a little as they spoke. ‘You know, dear,’ she said, 
‘this conversation has come up between every ponce and every whore at some time or another, and in some form or other – all I wonder is that we’ve not got around to having it before.’

‘You’re a Jezebel,’ he said.

‘Oh, no. No, no, I’m square and solid, quite a trusty. But: dig this, Frank, and there’s no escaping it. A whore can do without a ponce if it has to be that way: but a ponce can never do without a whore – not ever.’

‘Dig.’

‘That’s just the situation, baby. So what you say?’

‘What I say is, darling, that I’m going to rape you. Take all that off and come on in.’

When he left her sleeping, Frankie gathered in the dark some minimal possessions plus twenty pounds from the laundry-basket (where petty-cash was kept, loose under the week’s linen, so that a pound note had once been sent, in error, to the laundry [and returned!]), and he walked out into the Kilburn dawn. He set off across the city at an angle to the west-east, north-south pattern of its thoroughfares and, as dawn broke, he arrived again at Stepney.

Frankie’s real objection to his situation was not really any of those that had come up last evening in discussion with his girl. His objection was that, in a general way, the man-woman relationship was taking a wrong and insupportable form. Among seamen there still survives from earlier days of masculine domination the notion that the man, at least in appearances, wears the slacks; 
and that the woman is she who sighs at the mariner’s departure and accepts, without too much question, the equally sighing wife-in-every-port. On land, in England, he’d found that the symbol of the husband was now that dreadful little twerp you saw on hoardings who wore a woman’s apron while he did, alone, the washing-up. This conception would have been just as repellent to Frankie in a legitimate marriage as in any unmarried-husband-and-wife connection.

And yet he would miss his girl – and really her. In Frankie’s life sexual exchange was a very serious business, and he was old enough to have discovered that contrarily to all the legends about the delights of promiscuity, if you were really good at it yourself and found a woman who enhanced your sexual splendour – and her own – this was a rare thing to be clung to and protected. She’d certainly, in this way, got in well under his skin; and no thought of her clients had disturbed his raptures. Partly, because that core of herself which she kept absolutely intact throughout all her commercial encounters was fired to greater heat by the very fact that she held it, in reserve, entirely for him. Partly, because the idea that other men coveted her was far from diminishing her attraction to him: an instinct which, when one comes to think of it, is also shared in many cases by the clients of prostitutes themselves, and also, it may be, by complaisant husbands of candidly unfaithful wives.

Stepney, in early morning, has a macabre, poetic beauty. It is one of those areas of London that is thoroughly confused about itself, being in transition from various
ancient states of being to new ones it is still busy searching for. The City, which still preserves its Roman quality of ending very abruptly at its ancient gates, towers beyond Aldgate Pump, then stops: so that gruesome Venetian financial palaces abut on to semi-slums. From the dowdy baroque of Liverpool Street station, smoke and thunder fall on Spitalfields Market with its vigorous dawn life and odour of veg, fruit and flowers – like blended essences of the citizens’ duties, delights and fantasies. Below the windowless brick warehouses of the Port of London Authority, the road life of Wentworth Street – almost unknown elsewhere in London where roads are considered means by which you move from place to place, not places in themselves – bubbles, overspills and sways in argument and shrill persuasion, to the off-stage squawks of thousands of slaughtered chickens. Old Montague Street with its doorless shops that open outward in the narrow thoroughfare, and its discreet, secretive synagogues, has still the flavour of a semi-voluntary ghetto. Further south, in Commercial Road, are the nocturnal vice caffs that members of Parliament and of Royal Commissions are wont to visit, invariably accompanied by a detective-inspector to ensure that their expedition will reveal nothing characteristic of the area; and which, when suppressed, pop up again immediately elsewhere or under different names with different men of straw at the identical old address. In Cable Street, below, the castaways from Africa and the Caribbean perform a perpetual, melancholy, wryly humorous ballet of which they are themselves the only audience. Amid incredible
slums – which, one may imagine, with the huge new blocks replacing them, are preserved there by authority to demonstrate the contrast of before-and-after – are pieces of railway architecture of grimly sombre grandeur. Then come the docks with masts and funnels strangely emerging above chimney-tops, and house-locked basins, the entry to which by narrow canals and swinging bridges seems, to the landsman, an impossibility, were it not for the cargo boats nestling snugly between the derelict tenements. Suddenly, beyond this, you come upon the river: which this far down, lined with wharves and cranes and bearing great ocean-loving steamers, is no longer the pretty, grubby, playground of the higher reaches but already, by now, the sea.

A great charm of the area is that only here, in one sense, is London really a capital city at all. For what, elsewhere in the world, distinguishes capitals from their bleak provincial brethren is that they’re open for business all night, and for seven days in the week. Thanks to the markets, seamen, and Commonwealth minorities, in Stepney you can eat and drink, as well as other things, at any hour you choose to; and thanks to the alternation of the Jewish sabbath with the Gentile, the shops and markets never close. All that remains astonishing, since this is England, about this delightful state of affairs is that no one has yet managed to suppress it.

Frankie breakfasted in Stepney at one of those cafés usually conducted by Somalis which, unlike the more exclusive Maltese, Asian, or Caribbean establishments, are often neutral ground for clients of the most diverse
nationalities. And so fell into conversation with a Glaswegian seaman, whose opening shot was to announce that he’d just come out of the nick. Observing the etiquette on these occasions, Frankie didn’t ask for what and offered the mariner ten bob. This he accepted as by right. For the announcement of a recent release from prison, like that by children who tell you it’s their birthday, is intended to provoke an instant, identical reaction, the scale of the subsidy varying with the degree of the donor’s affluence and of intimacy, if any, with the uncaged bird.

‘Yes,’ said the Scot – speaking in those particular tones Scots use which suggest, with incredible self-esteem and unction (based, it would seem, on nothing very tangible), that each of their platitudes and banalities has a prodigious sagacity and savour – ‘it was all on account of a Salvation Army laddie.’

Frankie, whom the man bored already, expressed polite surprise.

‘He came into a boozer,’ the Scot continued, ‘where I was partaking of a dram, and he shook his collecting-box underneath my nose, appealing to me and my mates that we should exercise a bit of self-denial.’

The Hebridian fixed his leery, bleary eyes on Frankie, who courteously raised his brows.

‘Self-denial!’ the Scot repeated. ‘So I said to him this, that his coming into pubs where men went precisely to escape from hypocrites like him, and blackmailing everybody under the protection of his self-appointed uniform, was a form of spiritual pride which – as any
Presbyterian can tell you – is the deadliest sin of all, and that his first task for the salvation of his own soul by blood and fire was to deny himself this hideous satisfaction.’

‘Ah,’ Frankie said.

‘Whereupon,’ the Scot continued, emphasising each word as if it fell from his lips like newly minted coin, ‘the Sassenachs in the boozer, one and all, took this man’s side against me because the English, you see – excuse me, my very good friend – haven’t the courage of their convictions and none of them, except for me, would dare to say the man was a damned imposter.’

‘And so?’ Frankie said.

‘An argument – a fight – knocked off – the courts – previous convictions – two months – no remission.’

‘Who pinched you?’ Frankie asked.

‘Plain-clothes. In a plain car. You know? One of those ordinary vehicles that are not quite what they seem.’

‘Crafty.’

‘Ah, well … not really so. Just, man, that I, on this particular occasion, being intoxicated was
not
.’

‘And now what? Back to sea?’

‘No: back for a wee spell to Glasgow. I’ve had an offer of a ship but me, after this experience, I must have a wee spell at home in Bonnie Scotland …’

Into his tone and eyes had come dollops of the atrocious sentimentality that so frequently lies below the granite surface of the hard-headed Scot.

‘Who’s using the berth?’

‘Who can tell? Why, man – you want it? Well, if
you’ve got a tenner for the quartermaster and no one’s preceded you in search of it, take this address and so forth and send me a postcard from the Argentine.’

He handed to Frankie a cigarette-wrapping inscribed with critical particulars, and Frankie thanked him and immediately took his leave. For he was certain – not being at all a fool – that if he didn’t get out of England in a day or two he’d return, just as certainly, to Kilburn.

As he walked through Stepney, he passed by the all-night caffs that cater for the exhibitionist dregs of the vice trade and where, in the morning, a few survivors from the last night’s marketplace remained: either disappointed hustlers of both sexes who’d failed to connect and slept there, or dissatisfied clients who’d returned from various squalid set-ups whither their earlier imaginings had lured them, not to complain (for this was useless: and who to complain to?), but as the beast returns from the smaller, empty water-hole to the larger. Among them was a sprinkling of the different morning clientele: lorry-drivers, local workers and a few from the west of the city who’d visited the gamble-houses and called in for breakfast to count (mentally) their losses or more unlikely gains. It is at this hour, when someone sleepy is sweeping out among this driftwood, and not in the hopeful afternoon or the intoxicated evening, that moralists should paint their portraits of Gin Lane.

But for Frankie the change was that everything he’d seen earlier in these places now fell into focus. Just as a veteran, seeing soldiers drilling, finds no more mystery in their gyrations, so did Frankie recall this incident, or
that person, which had seemed inexplicable but now no longer were. ‘What you got in that bag?’ a voice asked him sharply.

A copper was blocking the morning view: and worse still, disturbing Frankie’s tranquil train of troubled thought. ‘You want to have a look?’ he said, dumping the bag down at the officer’s highly polished feet.

‘Open up,’ said the officer.

Frankie bent casually, unzipped the zip and straightened himself remotely, leaving the bag still closed.

‘I said open up.’

Frankie surveyed the copper, eyes to eyes. Unlike all but a fraction of the citizenry he did not fear coppers in the least: feared, perhaps, any damage, physical or worse, they might inflict on him, but not them as men at all. Nor was he in the least impressed by the art coppers have in a sudden crisis of calling up childhood memories, and suggesting to the accused that they are the father and the person they interrogate abruptly the child who, even if he hasn’t broken something, feels he must have. So for a moment, there was an impasse: for the copper was young and not quite sure of the precedents in his predicament. Till Frankie, in a somewhat equivocal gesture of compromise, put a foot on one end of the hold-all which caused the other end to gape wide open, revealing his guiltless clothes.

‘What’s these?’ said the officer.

Frankie made no reply. The officer inclined himself and rummaged. ‘Are they yours?’ he said, looking up.

Frankie nodded.

‘I asked you a question,’ said the officer.

‘Yes. I heard you. And I gave you an answer.’

The officer, his decision made, stood up. ‘I’m not satisfied with all this,’ he said. ‘I want you to come along to the station.’

Frankie zipped up the bag, lifted it and said, ‘Are you arresting me?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said—’

‘If you’re not arresting me you know there’s no charge to bring; and to take me to the station’s just a bit of spite.’

The copper took Frankie’s arm, textbook fashion. ‘So you think you
are
arresting me,’ Frankie said.

The officer applied the textbook pressure which should have resulted in Frankie’s inevitable propulsion along the road – but somehow, he didn’t move. ‘You’re coming in,’ said the officer, heaving desperately, ‘for resisting an officer in the execution of his duties as well as the other thing.’

Frankie laughed out loud. ‘What other thing?’ he cried.

‘Come on!’ cried the officer, giving a colossal shove.

Abruptly, Frankie started walking smartly forward so that the officer was now dragged behind his prisoner as is a dog-lover by a Great Dane. Round a corner Frankie stopped abruptly, making his custodian slightly overshoot him, and said, ‘son, do you really have to do this to a merchant seaman about his lawful business?’

‘Is that what you say you are?’ said the officer, panting.

‘It’s all I know, son, the sea. It’s all I am and ever hope to be.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said the young copper, schooled in scepticism. ‘Well, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact,’ he added with a penetrating professional stare, ‘we know all about you …’

Despite a momentary throb, Frankie’s good sense told him he could utterly ignore this classical copper’s gambit. ‘I’ll tell you something, son,’ he said, ‘about you and your little lot. You
do
know secrets about people, yes: but the secrets you know are all secrets of no importance.’

The intrusion of this philosophical theme was greatly to the young officer’s distaste. He searched in vain for a helpful colleague or even a law-abiding citizen, and realised that now his disagreeable choice lay between a fight or of letting, or appearing to let, Frankie escape: both detrimental to the junior constable’s estimate of his dignity.

A voice said, ‘Having a bit of trouble?’ It was that of an older officer who had emerged from a scrap-metal yard where he had been passing the time of morning.

‘This feller’s awkward,’ said the junior officer, giving Frankie an authoritative shake. Four hands – which, compared with two, are not as twofold but as twentyfold or more – now seized on Frankie and hustled him stationwards. The early hour, from the officers’ point of view, could not have been more convenient: for Frankie was comfortably in time for the morning convoy to the magistrate’s court. The old boy – one of the vanishing type whose sagacious sallies are still reported in the inside
bottom columns of the evening papers – gave Frankie the option of forty shillings or of seven days. When asked if he had anything to say, Frankie remarked in a casual and reasoned tone: ‘If the law takes a man in for nothing, he may decide he might as well get taken in for something.’ The magistrate nodded, made no direct comment, and withdrew the option of a fine.