The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  ‘When I’m sure we’re ready.’ Her lips closed tight.

  He smiled, remembering the stain on the coverlet.

  34 • Thomas

  Thomas had stayed longer than he meant to with Alfred. He hurried back to the library. It was warm for March; the wind had dropped.

  It was quarter to three when he arrived, uncomfortably aware he’d had a very long lunch-break. A little crowd of people was milling about.

  Saturday film, he realized. He was surprised to see Suneeta among them, with a tall Indian girl in jeans.

  ‘Thomas. Are you coming to The Price of the Ticket?’ (Yes, he remembered. James Baldwin. A biopic about the novelist.) ‘It’s supposed to be excellent,’ she continued.

  ‘I’m on duty –’

  ‘So am I. But there’s hardly anyone upstairs. Razia and Ingrid are on Inquiries. And film only lasts hour and a half.’

  ‘I think it’s a bit specialized for me,’ said Thomas, steering away from her with a smile. ‘What I really need is a large black coffee.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked abruptly. He was suddenly aware of an atmosphere. ‘What does this mean? Specialized?’

  She managed to corner him, against the creche, so no one else could hear what they were saying. ‘Baldwin is a wonderful writer. Have you read him?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had … Years ago.’ He thought about it. Perhaps he hadn’t. Though he’d definitely bought Another Country.

  Her large brown eyes did not entirely believe him. ‘You need, what do you call it, a refreshment.’

  ‘Refresher,’ he said, evading her, sliding around in the direction of the stairs.

  ‘Thomas!’ You didn’t ignore Suneeta. He had seen her get angry once or twice in the ten years that he had known her. She was looking hard at him, slightly flushed. ‘Come and meet my older daughter, Thomas.’ She indicated the girl in jeans, who he now saw was a taller, thinner version of her mother.

  Aisha shook hands; she looked amused, patrician. Thomas began to feel smaller and less solid, just as he did when talking to Alfred. The girl was inspecting the exhibition of Turkish paintings along the walls.

  ‘Aisha is completing a doctorate in cultural studies at SOAS. Thomas is writing a book, Aisha, something very clever, too clever for us all. Tell Aisha why you will not go to the film.’

  Her elegant profile swivelled towards him.

  ‘Oh really, Suneeta, I don’t know,’ Thomas protested, embarrassed. ‘I haven’t decided. Perhaps I will.’

  ‘Go and buy your ticket,’ Suneeta said, pushing him gently towards the box office.

  He found himself queueing for a ticket. (Bossy cow. It was a damn nuisance. He had a backlog of work to clear. This was one of the special cultural events the cinema ran in association with the library, and he and Errol had helped work out the programme, but surely this film was Errol’s province. He could see Errol chatting and smiling by the door, his matt black curls now salted with grey.)

  Turning round, Thomas was suddenly face to face with Shirley. A wonderful summery smell of vanilla. He breathed it in. Her neck was round and smooth. Her lips were moist and slightly parted.

  ‘Shirley! What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for someone,’ she said, with a smile. She looked

  – stunning. Creamy, glowing, and she smiled at him as if she was really glad to see him. ‘I’m going to the film about James Baldwin.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’ he asked, without thinking.

  She stared at him a moment. ‘Because someone asked me. Writers are interesting, anyway.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ he said hastily. He felt slightly jealous she was meeting someone.

  ‘Film will begin,’ called Suneeta, imperious.

  ‘See you inside,’ he said to Shirley.

  He sat with Suneeta and her daughter. Aisha started telling him about her doctorate. Her mother still seemed to be keeping one eye on him as if he might escape at the last minute.

  As the lights went down he turned round and looked for Shirley, but she wasn’t among the scattering of faces.

  Then someone came in, and as the blue dark engulfed the cinema, his nerve-ends prickled. Tall, black, with those light strange eyes and an intense way of gazing across the room, as if he felt he had been chosen by fate – It was the worrying young man from the library. The one who had ordered One Thousand Years of Lynchings.

  ‘Suneeta –’ he tried to attract her attention, but she shushed him, staring ahead at the screen.

  By the time the lights went up again he had forgotten his moment of fear. Baldwin’s voice, caressive, teasing, rising to biblical peaks of anger but more often lucid and to the point, had seemed to be talking to him, Thomas. ‘I went to the library at least three or four times a week and I read every single book in the library …’

  Thomas had forgotten why libraries mattered. He’d almost forgotten that he loved books. Baldwin’s clear intelligence made him feel embarrassed by the quotations on the file-cards stuffed in his pockets. ‘A sign is interpreted into a different sign, an interpretant, which can be interpreted into a different sign, and so on ad infinitum …’ Was it just waffle, The Death of Meaning? Did the book he was writing express his own numbness?

  What was the wonderful thing Baldwin said? ‘Books taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who was alive and who had ever been alive.’

  Thomas had tried to forget his awful divorce. He’d tried to forget the hellish months when his parents were dying, in separate hospitals, on different sides of London, with him going between them. Avoiding pain, he had become cut off. Then Melissa had come to knock on his door … Perhaps he could rejoin the human race.

  Watching the footage near the end of the film when Baldwin, huge-eyed, faun-faced, grey, thin as a blade of grass from cancer, flittered like a dying butterfly through his sun-flecked garden in the South of France, through bushes burning pink and gold for the camera – a few seconds from one last hot summer day – Thomas felt acutely, in his whole body, how precious life was. How bright, how short.

  Whatever life offers, I shall take.

  The audience sat quiet as the lights went up. Somewhere at the back, a few people clapped. After another minute, Thomas touched Suneeta’s arm. ‘Thank you, Suneeta. Magnificent.’

  ‘Specialist interest,’ she chaffed him. ‘Ha!’

  ‘Suneeta,’ he said. ‘I am sometimes stupid.’

  She said something to her daughter in Gujarati, and they laughed at him, but without malice.

  Then he remembered Shirley, and got up, quickly.

  He was just in time to see her leave, her halo of bright blond curls under the lights, through the exit on the other side of the cinema. Somebody was with her, his arm round her shoulder. He was black, Thomas saw first, and then, unbelieving, he realized it was the strange young man. With a short sharp intake of breath, he followed them.

  35 • Shirley

  Sitting by Winston in the half-empty cinema through that extraordinary film, Shirley was aware of his excitement. He hooted with laughter at a clip of Baldwin replying to a fat Irish critic: ‘You are black, impoverished, homosexual – you must have said to yourself, Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’ ‘No, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.’ Winston laughed so loud that other people turned round. But later she was almost certain he was crying. Or perhaps he just had early hay fever.

  At the end of the film, he put his arm round her shoulders. ‘I loved it,’ she said to him, before he could speak. ‘You know I don’t read. But I want to read him.’

  ‘I’ll lend you Giovanni’s Room,’ he said. ‘Shirley, you’re a special lady.’

  He was half-bending over her under the light between the cinema exit and the foyer when Thomas Lovell bumped into them, obviously half-blinded from the dark inside, because he practically pushed between them.

  ‘Hey, Thomas,’ Shirley said. ‘This is Winston – Thomas Lovell
.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Winston. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  For some reason Thomas hardly smiled. Could he be jealous? Surely not. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘I see you in the library.’ He was noticeably slow taking Winston’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Winston and I were going to get a coffee. Would you like to –?’

  ‘I’ve got work to do –’ Then he seemed to change his mind, and stood there, frowning. ‘So what did you think of the film?’ he asked her.

  ‘It made me cry,’ Shirley said. ‘I thought that Baldwin was – wonderful.’

  (She knew she would never be able to explain it, but everything he’d said seemed to be about her. She couldn’t remember it word for word, but something about the point of suffering. That the things that made you suffer most were the ones that linked you to other people. Connected you to everyone who’d ever been alive … So it wasn’t for nothing, she suddenly thought. They weren’t for nothing, her lost children.)

  ‘I liked it too,’ said Thomas, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He had turned his body to exclude Winston. She glanced at Winston apologetically, and Thomas seemed to realize what he had done. ‘Did you like it, uhm?’ he threw in Winston’s direction, but he had apparently forgotten his name.

  ‘Baldwin’s, like, an icon,’ Winston said, and smiled his radiant smile at Thomas, the smile that usually made people like him, the smile that probably protected him (because Shirley sensed he was vulnerable).

  But Thomas didn’t respond to his charm. The conversation faltered and died; Thomas’s coldness made things awkward. Winston suddenly remembered he had things to do. Shirley felt sorry; it had been a rare chance for her to be alone with him. She had been sure he wanted to talk. Now Thomas had put paid to that.

  Shirley stared after Winston forlornly. She felt she had failed him in some important way. He had asked the family to come to the film; only she had come. And she’d let him down. She watched his elegant narrow head weaving away through the indifferent crowd. His shoulders looked rounded to her, defeated, as if he had lost an important battle. She told herself she was exaggerating. But later she would remember it.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ Thomas said.

  ‘You frightened him off. He’s a very sweet boy.’

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t.’ But he looked triumphant. ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’ She was aware she was snapping.

  ‘Oh nothing.’

  She could see there was something. It has to be jealousy, she thought, and found herself faintly stirred. Thomas was a big man. Clever. Attractive.

  She knew she mustn’t think like this. ‘I’m not going home, as a matter of fact. I’m going to the hospital to see Dad.’

  ‘I’ll drive you there.’

  ‘I thought I would walk. It’s a lovely day.’

  He was visibly relaxing. ‘I actually saw your dad this morning … But I’d like to walk with you, if you don’t mind.’

  It was almost as if he wanted to protect her. They walked together to the hospital, talking about the Baldwin film. She warmed to him, finding he had liked it too.

  ‘I thought he was amazing,’ Thomas said, as they crossed the road, arms touching lightly. ‘That bit when he said to the journalist, after the deaths of Michael X and Martin Luther King, “I have been trying to write, between assassinations.”’

  ‘Yes. Very witty. But terrible. But what got to me most was the simplest thing. He said something like, “They’re killing my friends, and have been as long as I’ve been alive.”’

  ‘At least things have never been that bad in England. I watch a film like that, and get all fired up –’ He was waving his hands, and walking faster.

  ‘That’s to your credit –’ she said, eagerly. (Perhaps that was why he had been rude to Winston. Perhaps he had simply been upset –)

  ‘– and I realize things are relatively OK here.’

  She digested this. ‘Mmm. Well, I was married to an African.’

  ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘Look, it’s complicated.’ But Shirley didn’t want to argue.

  So Thomas felt encouraged to go on. ‘At the library, you know, it’s all sorts – West Indian, Asian, Irish, a Swede – and nearly half the staff are black. But we all get on. It’s just not an issue. Apparently the only time we didn’t was the eighties, when the council got terribly p.c. and sent two race relations advisers in. Then everyone started to hate each other. Meanwhile these advisers ruined the stock, chucking out books that had the, quotes, wrong message and spending the earth on, I don’t know, huge glossy books on Portuguese slavery that cost forty quid and never went out … Hundreds of books on racism. But the public doesn’t care about things like that. People aren’t interested, is the bottom line.’

  He obviously thought he was being daring. Shirley was used to people doing that, priding themselves on saying the unsayable. Though what they said was often predictable. ‘Are you sure no one’s interested?’ she asked. They were turning in through the gates of the hospital. ‘Surely a lot of the readers are black. Winston for example. My boyfriend’s brother.’

  There was a silence. His step checked slightly. ‘Just now? Was that man your boyfriend’s brother?’

  Why did he seem so taken aback? Had he assumed her boyfriend was white? ‘He’s doing a thesis on James Baldwin.’

  ‘What? … Is he?’

  Thomas looked shell-shocked. Irritated, Shirley expanded.

  ‘At University College London. Not just on James Baldwin. On another two writers who were friends of his as well.’ She tried to remember. ‘Norman Mailer. He’s American too. And – Eldridge Cleaver. Who turned against Baldwin … He hated white people and, you know, homosexuals. Winston was telling me all about it. I think he’s been taking notes in your library. So some of those books would have come in useful. What’s the matter, Thomas? Your mouth is open.’

  He looked briefly like her father remembering a name, slowly, unwillingly, with very great pain, when he needed it, and her mother was out.

  36 • Winston

  Winston walked quickly into the Park. He felt as if skeins of inky water were twisting and turning into one great river that poured, undeniable, through his head. He was exalted; he was cast down; he was electric with conviction, leaden with doubt. The Price of the Ticket – Baldwin paid the price. He would like to speak the truth like him, he would say it, speak it, sing it out – life would be simple, lived in the sunlight (life was detestable! he lived in prison …)

  He’d come here regularly when he was thirteen and Elroy had bought him rollerblades. The Park meant ice-creams and heat and shade, under the trees where you lay and got your breath back. He admired his brother, and wanted to be like him.

  But around fourteen, the other thing started. The sense that he was not like the others had begun to be stronger and more fixed than his vague yearnings for Elroy’s friends. He could not let himself think what it meant, because what it meant was impossible. He was a normal boy, from a normal family. A normal, God-fearing family. His father was no longer around, of course, but his mother marched them to church every Sunday, and there they stayed for two or three hours, listening to the preachers shouting from the pulpit, hammering at him till his head ached, then the waves of song washing round like balm. Sex meant sin (but he knew it didn’t, because Elroy and all the other big boys went looking for it, talked about it all the time, teased the younger ones about not getting it). Winston joined in with the foolery but he always felt he was missing something.

  He fell in love with the new head teacher who came to his primary school when he was in Year 6. Mr Glover was tall and athletic – he demonstrated a sprint start on Sports Day – but best of all, he liked poetry and read them a poem every morning in assembly. When he noticed how gifted Winston was at English, he often asked him to read instead. Then Winston wrote a poem for homework so good that Mr Glover printed it in the School Newsletter. He called Winston’s mother in to s
ee him, but she refused to tell Winston what he had said.

  ‘No good will come of it. I won’t do it,’ he heard her jabbering to his sisters. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ How tired Winston got of hearing that phrase.

  Later, too late for him to try it, his elder sister let it out that Mr Glover had recommended he try for a scholarship to public school. ‘Mum wasn’t having it. And she right! You don’t want to go to no battyboy school.’

  So he didn’t go to a battyboy school. But he still grew up clever. He still grew up different.

  Unthinkable, impossible. But true, and real.

  There was no one he could tell. He was completely alone. At first he thought that only white men were queer, because his brother said it was a white thing, that only white men were dirty perverts. At school, ‘battyboy’ was the worst insult, but they threw it around with perfect freedom, because they knew none of them was gay.

  None of them was gay. So nor could he be.

  (He sometimes found himself imagining, insanely, that his father would come home, and he could tell him everything. A father who was young, kind, all-understanding … In real life, Winston had a scanty memory of a tall grizzled man who had once been handsome with an overhanging belly and big gold chains. Elroy had once told him Dad had fifteen children. What would it be like to know your father?)

  Winston had tried to go with girls. They often liked him, because he laughed a lot, and made them giggle. Because they felt safe with him, unlike his friends. Because he didn’t hassle them for sex.

  Of course he didn’t. He didn’t really want them. They were hot and shrieking and smelled like his sisters. He watched the boys doing weight training. Silent concentration; sweat, muscle. They must not notice him watching them.