City of Spades

7

Voodoo in an unexpected setting


‘Monty,’ he said, ‘you really must cease to act the elder brother to me. I have one already, called Mr Christmas Fortune.’

‘Don’t call me “Monty”.’

‘Then what is all this, please, Mr Montgomery?’

‘You’re playing on Theodora’s feelings to no purpose.’

‘Well, if you say so, man.’

‘And sponging on her too, for all I know.’

‘Man,’ said Johnny sullenly, ‘you beat my time. What can I say to calm your interference?’

‘And please,’ I went desperately on, ‘don’t use those awful English phrases they taught you in Lagos high school.’

‘Lagos high,’ he said, ‘is maybe better than is Birmingham low.’

‘I must warn you, Johnny, if you trifle with Theodora, I’ll take steps.’

‘Oh, you win, man. What is it you’ll do to me – you make me one dead duck?’

And away he went, indifferent and debonair, to rejoin Theodora, who, crouched like a flamingo on a cushion, was holding a little court of coloured boys lying round her, relaxed, inquisitive and amused. She was treating them to a display of mental pyrotechnics which delighted them as an athletic performance, however little note they took of what she said. And though her questions and observations were outrageous, they took no offence because they recognised in Theodora what I had never thought her to be – a natural.

Her chief interlocutor was a bland West Indian called Tamberlaine, who said:

‘Oh, calm you English are, certainly, Miss Theodora, like a corpse is, and reliable, as you say; but always reliable for what no man could desire: like making sure he pays his income tax instalments highly punctually.’

‘But what you haven’t got,’ said Norbert Salt (reluctant to see this West Indian steal his American thunder), ‘is the social graces and spontaneous conduct we’re renowned for. Also,’ he said, rising to his feet and clasping Moscow Gentry by the hands, ‘you’ve not got our glorious beauty. See now, what a beautiful race we are!’

The pair posed in an arabesque, like the bronze group above the entrance to some splendid building.

‘I’d like also to rebuke you, if you’ll permit me,’ Tamberlaine went on, his voice rising higher to attract eyes from the arabesque, ‘for the peculiar observations you English make to we people in public houses, omnibuses, and elsewhere.’

‘For instance?’ said Theodora, resolutely impartial, her spectacles aglint.

Tamberlaine ran to the door, and reappeared wearing a bowler hat and an umbrella. ‘Now I shall show you,’ he announced, ‘a conversation between myself and some kind English gentleman. This gentleman, he say to me,’ (Tamberlaine’s accent became the oddest mixture of West Indian and deep Surrey) ‘“I do envy you fellows your wonderful teeth.” To which I reply in my mind, if not with my voice,’ (Tamberlaine removed the bowler), ‘“Well, sir, me don’t envy you your yellow horse-fangs, and if you look clearly down my throat, you’ll see most of me back ones anyway is gold.”’

The performance was applauded. ‘Go on,’ said Theodora, seemingly unmoved.

‘Or else,’ Tamberlaine continued, ‘he come up to me and say,’ (bowler on) ‘“Don’t you miss the hot weather over here?”’

‘Oh, no, man, no, not that familiar saying!’ cried several voices.

‘Sometimes,’ the West Indian dramatist proceeded, ‘this Englishman is a more serious person, with a feeling of sorrow for past wrongs committed. In this case, he will raise his hat to me and say, “I think, sir, that conditions in the Union of South Africa are a scandal.” To which I inwardly reply, “Then please go there and tell Mr Strijdom of your sentiments.” Or else he will look very sad and sorrowful and tell me, “You may find, sir, that there is sometimes a certain prejudice in England, but believe me, sir, that some of us are just as worried about it as you.”’

Laughter and renewed applause.

‘Let me tell you,’ cried Norbert, snatching the stage from Tamberlaine, ‘what’s the craziest thing of all they say. Is this.’ He wheeled, returned with a mincing step, torso rigid, legs flaying like mad stilts, stopped dead, and said, ‘“I like coloured people, myself.”’

‘That one,’ said Moscow Gentry, ‘wins top prize for pure impossibility.’

Theodora was displeased: even saddened, I thought, as if at last minding more for generosity than for justice.

‘You’re all very unfair,’ she said. ‘You must remember our people often mean well, and are only shy. Often they do like you, and want to help you if they can, but just don’t know how to tell you.’

Tamberlaine looked slightly vicious: he no doubt felt he’d got her on the run.

‘Well, lady,’ he said, ‘all that may be. But please remember this. We’re not interested in what your kind ideas about us are, but chiefly in your personal behaviour. We even prefer the man who doesn’t want to help us, but is nice and easy with us, to one who wants to lecture us for our benefit.’

There was a loud clap of a pair of hands. Mr Vial stood on an occasional table in the middle of the room, supported round the hips by willing hands of manicured white guests and long Caribbean fingers.

‘Miss Isabel Cornwallis,’ he announced, ‘has telephoned to say she can’t be with us.’ There were polite, disappointed cries of ‘Ah!’ Mr Vial hung his head as if dejected; then, raising it up, with a bald, beaming glare, he cried, ‘But the voodoo will take place all the same!’

The lights went out.

A hand took mine. ‘It’s all right, hon’,’ the voice said. ‘I’m Louisiana.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘You’ll see. Sit down here. Cornwallis never meant to come – this party’s not up to her degree of expectation.’

‘How does she know it’s not?’

‘I called her up at her hotel to say so. I’m her spy, you see, in the company. I keep her informed of what’s going on.’

An anglepoise lamp, operated by the dim, green cheeks of Mr Vial, shone on the naked torso of the dancer Jupiter, who stood immobile. Hercule La Bataille and Hippolyte Dieudonné entered, carrying what looked to be a cat in a waste-paper basket. The two Haitians knelt on either side of the basket (which they had upended, cat inside), and, with Jupiter towering motionless above, began chanting. It was wonderful to look at for a while, but it went on, and on, and on, and on, and on. The white guests, and even the West Indians, became restive. A Caribbean voice said, ‘When you going to slay this p-ssy, now, man? We want some whisky down our throats.’ Unmoved, the Haitians chanted. ‘It usually lasts an hour,’ Louisiana whispered, ‘before they kill the animal.’ Really, I thought! Even for the sake of higher mysteries, I can’t allow that; and was about to do something inelegant and British, when I was anticipated by Theodora, who strode briskly from the floor, seized cat and basket from between the Haitians, and stumbled off into the gloom.

The three performers looked nonplussed and shocked. The lights came on, and our host Mr Vial, his face really ‘distorted with fury’, as they say, cried out, ‘What does that bitch think she’s doing?’

‘She ain’t no bitch, she’s my lady,’ said Johnny Fortune. ‘Is me who bring her here.’

‘You little bastard,’ said Mr Vial.

Johnny reached up and pulled the knot of Mr Vial’s blue bow tie undone. ‘You sure you not say, “little black bastard”?’ he asked the lawyer mildly.

Mr Vial bulldozed his face into a smile. ‘Just little bastard,’ he said gently.

‘Oh, well, I’m legitimate, so there must be some mistake,’ said Johnny. ‘I see you again some day soon, my mister.’ He followed Theodora out of the room.

There was a pause in the proceedings, and a certain amount of hard looks and shuffling. ‘I guess everyone,’ said Larry the GI, ‘is behaving most peculiar. Why don’t we put on some discs and dance?’

I found myself sitting next to the star performer Huntley, who had removed the lavatory paper he had pranced in, and attired himself, instead, in a pair of Austrian lederhosen he had found in his host’s bedroom. ‘These niggers,’ he said. ‘It’s always the same when you have them at a party.’

‘But, excuse me, you …’

‘Oh, I work in a coloured company, sure, and half of me belongs to them, I guess, but they’re just so dreadful! So hopeless, so dreadful! There’s always this confusion whenever they’re around. Man, they can’t even work – and I should know, I’m their ballet master. “Work like niggers” – whoever thought up that one?’ He drank a glass of neat whisky and arose. ‘I just can’t bear them,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to sleep at my hotel. I’ve bought me a marmoset here in this city, and it’s better company to me than they are.’

The party, it seemed to me, was deteriorating. I rose to go also, but was overtaken by Norbert Salt and his friend Moscow Gentry.

‘Moscow and I,’ said Norbert, ‘have been thinking. And what we think is, it would be cheaper for us if instead of spending money at our hotel, we moved in with you. Now, you’ve got an apartment, haven’t you?’

‘That is, if it’s not too far out from the city centre,’ said Moscow Gentry.

I handed them the keys. ‘If I ring the bell,’ I said, ‘I hope you’ll be kind enough to let me in.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘And thanks.’

In the hall there was a white boy in a barman’s jacket, reading an evening paper and sipping a glass of wine. He looked up.

‘I think I’ve seen you earlier,’ he said.

‘Yes? I don’t remember.’

‘My name’s Alfy Bongo.’

‘I don’t remember you.’

‘I work here for Mr Vial on special evenings,’ said this person, taking me with two fingers by the arm. ‘He’s a very much nicer man than you might think.’

‘And so, I’m sure, are you,’ I said to Alfy Bongo, as I opened the mortice lock of Mr Vial’s front door.