City of Spades

PART III

Johnny Fortune leaves his city





1

Tidings from Theodora


The word ‘freelance’, I used to think, had a romantic ring; but sadly discovered, when I tried to be one, that its practice has little freedom, and the lance is a sorry weapon to tilt at literary windmills. I’d desperately succeeded in appearing in some serious periodicals that paid little, and were seen by few; and in printing some disreputable anonymous paragraphs, cruelly chopped by the sub-editors, in newspapers I’d hitherto despised. As for the BBC, since Theodora’s departure from it, under a lowering cloud, it would not hear of any of my rich ideas.

How I missed Theodora in the house, and how unexpectedly! True, Johnny’s company, since he’d come out of prison, was some small consolation: small, because a different Johnny had emerged – a rather bitter and less kindly person, a disillusioned adult Fortune who no longer seemed to think – as Johnny always had – that everything in the world would one fine day be possible.

I opened the bedroom door and looked at him still sleeping, rolled in an angry lump, his head underneath a pillow. I drew back the curtain, and let in a shaft of reconnoitring spring sun. ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘it’s past eleven.’ He bunched the sheets closer round him, and jerked himself in a tighter, unwelcoming ball. I put on the kettle, went back to the front room, and took up Theodora’s letter.

I’d forgotten, Montgomery, how ghastly the country is until I came here to recoup. The colours are green and grey, invariably, and in the village nothing happens: nothing. I’ll be glad to get back to London, and only sorry, because of you, it won’t be the old flat, but I just can’t face living there any longer. You will see about the removal of my things to the new place as you promised, won’t you. (Be practical about all this, Montgomery, for Heaven’s sake.)

I’ve heard from the Corporation, as I expected, that my appeal is disallowed. Their letter is roundabout and civil – almost deferential – but very clear as to essentials. My old job is out: that’s definite; and if I can’t ‘see my way’, as they put it, to accepting being kicked upstairs (or rather, kicked downstairs, it really would be, as the office of the alternative job they offer in the Editing service is in the sub-basement of a former department store), they ‘have no alternative but to accept my offer of resignation’. They’re giving me a surprise farewell bonus, though: rather nice of them, don’t you think, after everything?

In fact, I really have to admit they’ve behaved very decently and (unlike me) quite sensibly. I broke the written and unwritten codes, and forfeited my claim to their paternalism. As the high-up I eventually got to see quite frankly said to me, ‘It’s not so much what you did, Miss Pace, as that you did it without asking anyone’s permission. The Corporation can’t be expected to answer publicly for its servants’ actions unless it knows what they’re going to be.’ I imagine it was most of all those lurid pieces in the Press about the ‘BBC woman’ that really got them down.

From what I hear from kind friends who’ve telephoned (not, of course, on the office lines), it was a close thing, all the same. My ‘case’ went straight to the top, then down again to an appropriate level, then up even higher to the Board of Governors, then plummeted down once more – a massive file it must have been by then, I wish I could have seen it – to the person who actually had to wield the axe, or rather to his secretary (a bitch – I knew her in the Wrens – she probably drafted the letter for him herself).

But I don’t, as they say, ‘regret it’. Being horribly competent, I can always get a job – all I really mind is having lost a battle. And I don’t regret making a fool of myself in front of everybody in the court. All I deeply regret, Montgomery (oh, how I do! – you’ll not understand, however much you think you do), is losing my child in that so squalid, absurd and dreadfully sad miscarriage (my first – I mean my first pregnancy, as it happens), because though I’ve never meant anything to Johnny Fortune, I would still have had that … it – he – she: anyway, a fragment of him.

How is he? Better not tell me. I don’t want to see him again. I do, of course, but I couldn’t.

And how are you, Montgomery? If you’re behindhand with the rent, as I imagine, and, as I also imagine, up to your grey eyes in debt, please let me know, and I’ll do whatever I can.

Later. Just been out to buy some gin. They looked at me as if I was indeed a ‘BBC woman’, but took the pound notes promptly enough.

What’s clear to me now, Montgomery – although I know you won’t agree – is that love, or even friendship, for those people is impossible – I mean as we understand it. It’s not either party’s fault; it’s just that in the nature of things we can never really understand each other because we see the whole world utterly differently. In a crisis each race will act according to its nature, each one quite separately, and each one be right, and hurt the other.

It’s when you see that distant look that sometimes comes into their opaque brown eyes that you realise it – that moment when they suddenly depart irrevocably within themselves far off towards some hidden, alien, secretive, quite untouchable horizon …’