The Chequer Board (38 page)

She stared at him. “Not already? Wherever to?”

“Jones and Porter Limited, at a place called Camborne, up the line a ways. I got taken on this morning; start on Monday.”

Another customer was waiting to be served. She said, “Oh, I am glad!” She shoved the cigarettes into his hand. “I can’t stop now. See you tomorrow, two o’clock, at the bus stop outside the church?”

He said, “Okay, Miss Grace. I’ll be there.”

He was there a quarter of an hour early, having spent the morning studying the comprehendible hardware detailed in his engineer’s pocket book, and the incomprehendible abstractions of his electrical textbook. She thought again as she walked up the road towards the bus stop that he looked ever so distinguished; his brown skin and his bright blue suit and his green shirt and collar made a colour scheme that she admired very much. Whatever people might say about going out with a coloured boy, she thought, there were very few men in Trenarth who wore clothes like he did—and in that she was about right.

He was carrying a little parcel unobtrusively, and when they got into the pictures, in the friendly darkness, he
offered it to her shyly, and it was a pound box of chocolates, which she called sweets and he called candy. None of her other swains had ever bought her chocolates in a beautiful box like that, all cellophane and green ribbon, and she knew that he could ill afford it, and that made the little present valuable to her. She said, “It’s ever so kind of you to think—they’re lovely. Here, have one.” A woman behind leaned over and asked if she would mind not talking.

They had tea in a café after the picture, and went back to Trenarth in the bus. And at the bus stop in Trenarth he raised his hat to her, and said, “I better say good-night, Miss Grace. It certainly has been one swell day for me.”

She said, “Oh no. Come on, ’n see me home. I want you to meet Dad and Ma.”

He hesitated. “Maybe they wouldn’t care so much about that, Miss Grace.”

She said, “They got to meet you some time, if you’re only going to be up at Camborne. Come on, just for a minute.” She smiled at him. “They won’t eat you.”

He laughed. “I d’know about that, Miss Grace. Maybe they will.” But he went with her to the cottage where she and her parents lived, and to which Lieutenant Anderson had come three years before.

Grace Trefusis had inherited all the vigour of her mother. She took him in and said, “Ma, this is Mr Lesurier that I was telling you about. Dad, this is Dave.”

Mr Trefusis got up and said, “How d’you do?”

Mrs Trefusis said, “Well!”

Grace Trefusis said, “Now don’t you start that, Ma. If
Dave and I can let bygones be bygones, so can you. We’ve been in to see Ginger Rogers at the Regal. Ever so lovely, it was.”

Her mother said with an effort, “How long are you staying for, Mr Lesurier?”

“I got a job here, ma’am,” he said shyly. “At Jones and Porter, up at Camborne. I got taken on for a draftsman, starting Monday.”

Mr Trefusis said, “A draughtsman?” He looked at the young Negro with a new interest. To the signalman there was some social standing in a draughtsman’s job; it was an office job that might lead to management. It was true that most draughtsmen of his acquaintance had ended up in a little sweet and tobacco shop, but some had not. “I didn’t know you was a draughtsman,” he said.

Lesurier smiled. “I d’know as I am, sir,” he said candidly. “I guess I’ll need to work plenty hard to hold it down. But it’s something to have got a start.”

“Sit down,” said the railwayman. He offered a cigarette out of a packet. “Where d’you say you come from now?”

Lesurier left them an hour later, having promised to go back to tea next day. The Trefusis family were very thoughtful when he left them on Sunday. By that time they had grown accustomed to the milk-chocolate colour of his skin, which was not unhandsome when you got accustomed to it. He was more widely travelled and better educated than any of the young men Grace had brought to the house before, for in Trenarth there was not a wide choice for her. He seemed to be infinitely considerate and kind, and they remembered this as characteristic
of Negroes in the mass three years before. Moreover, Mr Trefusis, when Lesurier went away on Sunday, had a shrewd idea that he would hold his job.

Mr Horrocks began to have the same idea on Tuesday afternoon, five minutes before the drawing office knocked off, when Lesurier came to him. The drawing office was on normal hours of work, but the shop was working overtime till eight o’clock at night.

“I took a little walk around the shop last night, sir, after hours,” Dave said. “There’s a whole raft of things here that I have never seen before. Would I be able to work down on the bench for the overtime hours, sir, on the assembly of the switches? I wouldn’t want no money. I reckon it would make things easier to see the way the drawings go if I knew more about the job down on the bench.”

Mr Horrocks thought this was a very reasonable proposal. “You can’t go down tonight,” he said. “There’s the union to be considered.” He made a note on his pad. “I’ll see the shop steward in the morning about it, Lesurier. I think that’s a very good idea.”

Lesurier started work down on the bench on Wednesday evening and found to his surprise and pleasure that the shop steward had insisted that he should be paid, which put another twenty-seven shillings in his pay packet at the week’s end. He moved into very cheap lodgings in Camborne, and got down to his work in earnest.

He did not find the office work particularly exacting. He was put under an old grey-haired draughtsman called Mr King. His work consisted principally of copying drawings
that had become torn and dirty in the print room. Mr King said severely on the first morning, “Are your hands clean?”

The Negro replied meekly, “Yes, sir. This don’t come off.” The little joke went round the drawing office, directed against Mr King, who was felt to be a fussy old man, and it spread down into the shop, where Mr King was regarded as an impractical obstructionist and the arch enemy of production. He may have been both of these, but he could teach Lesurier a great deal, and the Negro was wise enough to realise it. Under the stern eye of the old man Dave developed a neatness of drawing and a classic style of printing which was fully up to standard, and with this he began to have some inkling of what the many drawings were about, and why the radiuses and gauge thicknesses were made so.

He became quite popular in the office. His diversity of experience made him interesting to talk to, and he was always willing to help in tiresome jobs like entering in the part number book or checking details. He gave a cosmopolitan air to this small Cornish drawing office which the draughtsmen rather liked, and which was certainly no hindrance to the management.

This was apparent one day when the Managing Director, showing a buying delegation from the Turkish Government around the works and walking them through the drawing office, was asked, “You use Africans for draughting in this country?” He replied grandly, “We use anybody in this company who has the brains we want, white or black. As a matter of fact, that man is an American. He’s a very clever young designer.”

It was not, o£ course, because of this that Jones and Porter got an order for three thousand time switches from the Turkish delegation, but Mr Porter felt that his reply had been, perhaps, a small contributory factor.

Gradually, Dave Lesurier became absorbed into the life of the community in which he moved. He spent much of his spare time with Grace Trefusis, and generally had tea with her family on Sunday afternoons. They very soon discovered that he could play the flute, and in the overfurnished little parlour of the Trefusis home he would play hymn tunes for them on Sunday evening. On wet days they sometimes got him to go to church with them, on Sunday mornings, but he was no great churchgoer and preferred to take his exercise at that time. He bought a bicycle, and put it on a Jones and Porter truck that was going up to London, one Saturday, and drove to Plymouth in the truck. He spent two hours there going round the drapers’ shops with a snippet of the dress that Mrs Trefusis wore on Sundays, to find a scarf that matched it, for a birthday present for her, and rode home in the evening, fifty-five miles, on his bicycle. He was always doing things like that.

Before spring Dave Lesurier and Grace Trefusis decided to get married; it was a point of dispute afterwards between them which asked which. They did it on the sea front at Penzance after a British Legion dance. Lesurier felt secure in his job with Jones and Porter by that time; he had been advanced to the full rate for his age, four pounds ten a week, and he had joined the Draughtsmen’s Association. He felt that he was in control of his job, able to do the work expected of him, and a bit more. Practically
the whole of his spare time had been spent with the Trefusis family while he had been in England; they had lost all sense of strangeness at his colour, and thought of him only as a very courteous and pleasant young American with whom Grace went out every Saturday.

The two walked out of the dance hall arm in arm at midnight, reluctant to break away to fetch their bicycles and ride home. They stood on the sea front looking out over the moonlit seascape. Presently the Negro said:

“You know, it still seems darned funny to me folks don’t get interfering when they see you and me dancing together.”

The girl said, “Why should they? It’s got nothing to do with them what either of us do. You got this colour business on the brain, Dave.”

“Maybe,” he replied. “It’s how you’ve been brought up. I know we couldn’t go on like this back home.”

“Well, this is my home, and we can,” she said. She pressed a little closer to him. “You’d better make it yours, ’n give up worrying.”

“You mean, stay here for good?”

“That’s right. You like it here, don’t you?”

“I like it fine,” he said. “I’d like nothing better than to stay right here for good.” And then he hesitated. “But I guess there’re other things to think about as well.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Place of your own,” he said quietly. “Being married, and having kids, and that. You’ve got to settle where you can do that.”

She said softly, “Well, what’s wrong with doing that here, Dave?”

He stared out over the sea. “I guess no English girl would want to marry a black man.”

She said, “You haven’t asked one, Dave.”

They were standing arm in arm in their heavy coats; he took her other hand and drew her closer to him. “Do you reckon you could ever get around to thinking that you’d like to marry me?” he asked.

She did not answer, but he knew her silences. “I know it’s mighty difficult for a white girl to say yes to that,” he said quietly. “Color’s color, and nobody can get away from it. When you marry I guess you’ll want babies, or you wouldn’t be you. And if you marry me, they’ll be black ones; not quite so black as me, perhaps, but mighty black, all the same.”

She said gently, “You aren’t all that black, Dave. You don’t want to go exaggerating things.”

He said, “I don’t reckon that I’d pass for white, though, even in the dark.” There was a rueful hint of laughter in his voice. “I guess you know the way I feel about you, ever since those first times we met, in the store. There’s never been another girl for me, not after that. I got enough now with this last raise to ask you, Gracie. If you kind of feel that you can’t fancy it, I wouldn’t blame you. Back home in some States, even saying this to you would likely get me in trouble.”

She asked, “Do you think I’d have come out with you all these times if I cared about things like that?”

“I d’know,” he said. “I never did know rightly what girls care about, Gracie. But getting married to a nigger is a mighty big thing for a white girl, seems to me.”

She said quietly, “Getting married is a mighty big thing
anyway, Dave. There’s such a sight of things that can go wrong in a marriage, ’n I don’t think colour’s as important as some others—getting on all right, and respecting one another, and that. You wouldn’t have asked me if you didn’t think them things were right. And I think they’re right, too.”

His grasp tightened on her hand. “You mean that?”

“O’ course I do. I’ll marry you, Dave, if you want me.”

“Do I want you?” And then he said, “You do know what it means? We’ll be all right in England, maybe, but it could be mighty awkward for you if we ever had to go to the United States.”

“Who’s talking about going to the United States?” she said. “You don’t want to go back there, do you?”

“It’s my country,” he said. He stood for a minute, thoughtful, filled with nostalgic regret for the things that might have been. “I don’t reckon that I’ll ever want to go back there,” he said at last. “I’ve got a good job here, and a darn sight more opportunity than ever I’d get at home. I don’t reckon I’ll ever want to go back to the States.”

Mr Turner and Mollie waited in the White Hart till half-past six, to give Lesurier time to get back from his work and have his tea. Then they walked up the road and found Sunnyvale. It was a drab little slate cottage, but the window frames were freshly painted, and some care seemed to have been taken over the front garden. Mr Turner walked up to the door with his wife at his elbow, and knocked.

The door was opened by a young Negro. Turner said, “Mr Lesurier, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” It was nearly dark, though the room within was brightly lit by a paraffin lamp. The Negro peered at them.

“You won’t remember me,” said Mr Turner, “but I was in the White Hart, and the landlord told me you lived here. We were in hospital together back in 1943, Dave. My name’s Turner.”

Lesurier exclaimed. “Say … Captain Turner?”

“That’s right. Not ‘Captain’ any longer, though—just Mister.”

“Come right in, Captain.” He led the way into the room, half parlour and half kitchen. “Think of meeting again, after all this time!” He was introduced to Mollie. “Sit right down and make yourselves at home a minute, while I tell the wife.” He explained, “She’s bathing the baby.”

They sat down, and he vanished up a flight of wooden stairs contained in a cupboard-like structure at the side of the room; there was a murmur of voices from above.