Devotion

by Louisa Young

  I provide for Iris. I’ll give her no false dreams. We just live, little human creatures on the surface of the planet. We own ourselves, and that’s all. And it’s a mighty blessing. Even though it shouldn’t be.

  *

  Mabel knew Betty’s thoughts on taking up with white men. ‘Mabel, don’t go giving yourself to one of them for free.’

  *

  Iris was not a girl to show her cards. She had always known when to keep quiet and when to speak out, how to be loyal by being sneaky. You learned that kind of thing pretty quickly in the alleyways where she played, or when she was out with Mumma and trying not to be sent home. It’s not that people are mean, but when there’s not always enough to go around you learn to be protective. If Mumma was unhappy, Iris would find out why.

  *

  Grandma couldn’t keep her in and didn’t try to. Iris did her schoolwork and had nice manners. The vicar even trusted her with the key to the church room when she went to practise the piano. She could get away with things. She had a habit of picking her mother up from the shop at 5.30, and walking home with her, picking stuff up from the market on Brewer Street as it closed up, having tea with Grandma when they got in. Mumma would sing snatches of new songs, ones she was writing or ones she was performing or ones she’d heard. She’d warm up for her evening show, and Iris would do the exercises along with her, and Grandma would make comments. These were their habits, calm and nice. Then Iris would get ready for bed as Mumma got dressed to go out to whichever club it was. Iris did not like it that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays Mumma didn’t come home.

  So one sunny afternoon she followed her. She stood on the corner of Great Marlborough Street across from the shop, hiding behind a lamppost and a man with a big dog. She saw her mother come out, and head off towards Regent Street instead of south down Poland Street towards home. Across into Mayfair – Mayfair! – and further west, the heels of her little shoes clickclicking, skirting the park at Hyde Park Corner, moving on into the fairyland beyond, where buildings as clean and white as wedding cakes rose around green lush squares, and kids like Iris did not go.

  Iris went, stomping and determined.

  Her mother stopped outside one of the buildings, and was looking in her purse as if for a key, and as she did so a tall white man came up, and with a quick glance around – which did not catch Iris, standing against iron railings in the fall of a rich-blossomed lilac – slipped his arm around her waist, and kissed her hair.

  Iris raised her chin. She thought he was – what? What is he doing?

  They went in together.

  Iris sat on the kerb and stared up at the building, the tall white columns holding up its porch, the smooth broad steps, the black and white tiles, the rising layers of large clean windows and fancy plasterwork, up and up to a bluer sky than the sky she saw between Soho’s huddled buildings. She didn’t actually know the way home from here. This, she supposed, would be where Mumma stayed. She stared at it with hatred.

  After a while, the white man came out again, alone. She stood up to stare at him – and he looked round at her. He gave her, suddenly, a most radiant smile. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and his voice was gentle.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.

  He nodded and moved on.

  Mabel came down soon after. She crossed the road straight to Iris, and said: ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He said “Good Afternoon”,’ Iris said. ‘Am I in trouble?’

  ‘Uh uh,’ said Mabel. She put her arm round Iris’s shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

  ‘’Cos you’re in trouble,’ Iris said.

  ‘Not for you to tell me I’m in trouble,’ Mabel said. ‘I’m the mother here.’

  ‘I want to go in there,’ Iris said.

  ‘No, honey.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Later, sweetheart.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Iris asked.

  ‘Later,’ Mabel said, speeding up, blinking.

  Back in Lexington Street, Iris said coldly, over tea: ‘Is it later yet?’

  Looking across at her, Mabel saw a firmness in her daughter’s eyes. Glancing across to her mother, drinking her tea in her chair, wearing her pink satin gown and a cap, because she had not actually got up today, Mabel saw a questioning, and shift of position – tiny – suggesting: what’s this?

  ‘You promised her something for later, child?’ Betty said, the smile spreading across her glossy cheeks.

  They were like pincers, the pair of them, coming at her from each side. Very gentle loving pincers.

  ‘Something you goin’ tell her, maybe?’

  ‘No,’ she said. If I tell them it will all go wrong. Things will change – heaven forfend things should change! When things change they change for the worse.

  ‘She went into a big white house miles away,’ said Iris. ‘With a white man. And he came out and he said Good Afternoon to me.’

  Betty turned her face slowly round to Mabel.

  ‘He’s her boyfriend,’ said Iris. ‘He looks like Leslie Howard. The one Marion Davies should’ve married in Five and Ten.’

  ‘Go to bed, Iris,’ said Betty.

  ‘It’s not even—’ said Iris, but she went, mouth tight, giving Mabel a look – support? apology? rebellion? – as she went.

  ‘Close the door after ya,’ called Betty.

  Iris closed it.

  Betty hadn’t stirred: she just sat in her chair, and looked. She took a cigarette, examined it, tapped it on the side table, lit it, took a small, delicate puff. Looked up.

  ‘It’s her father,’ Mabel said.

  Betty blinked, and looked at the back of her hand, and took another puff.

  ‘What are you hopin’ for, my child?’ she said.

  ‘For nothing to be ruined.’

  ‘Does he know about her?’

  Mabel was silent.

  ‘You still ain’t told him. You’re hangin’ by a string, honey,’ Betty said. ‘You’re gonna fall. You know that.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mabel replied, with a tiny smile.

  ‘Hangin’ by a string,’ her mother said again. ‘How long’s it been?’

  ‘Bit over a year,’ she said.

  ‘Tellin’ lies …’

  ‘Keepin’ privacy,’ Mabel retorted.

  ‘Tellin’ lies,’ her mother snapped back. ‘To him, to me and to Iris.’

  That, Mabel thought, is not the problem. The problem is that I want to keep them both – such a demand! to have your man and your child! – and if I reveal each to the other either of them – or Lord help me both – might … they might …

  ‘I’m not bothered by the lies so much, Mama, forgive me, but by the potential for loss. I love the man.’

  Betty gazed. ‘Love!’ she said, and she hauled herself up a little in her seat. ‘I think it’s time for you to lighten up a little, Mabel. Get yourself a new man. Reginald likes ya. You’re young enough, they all still like ya. Get one with a steady job. One you don’t care about.’

  ‘Mama,’ she said.

  ‘Have another baby, if that’ll cleave you to him. But this white father – no.’

  ‘Things have changed, Mama,’ she said.

  ‘No they ain’t. He won’t want a negro child. Leave her be. A negro child. Don’t go making her think she can be white. Don’t cast that unhappiness on her.’

  ‘Things have changed, Mama,’ Mabel said again, though the repetition sounded empty.

  ‘So why you lyin’?’

  Mama, you hit the button.

  I want everything, Mabel thought. I don’t believe it’s wrong to want everything. But nor do I believe it’s possible to have everything. But I want everything.

  Her mother was looking at her. ‘Mabel,’ she said softly. ‘You don’t have to do everything yourself.’

  ‘I do!’ she cried.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you did. You and Pixy both.’

  ‘Didn’t you just say times have changed?’

&nbs
p; He has this kindness, Mabel thought. Don’t cut me in half – he’s the one I want. The only one.

  *

  She wondered if she would ever tell Peter about her family. Could he possibly understand what she came from? Well of course not. She couldn’t even understand. She knew, yes, and it was part of her, blood and bone – but understand? No. Here she was, sixty-five years after emancipation in America, living in England, with her English-born, English-fathered child, yet what had been abolished thirty years before her own birth was still ruling how she could lead her life. Only thirty years before. And then after that it was just her and Betty, moving, moving, moving, carrying no family, the brothers wherever they might be, Lord only knows, their blood lost – nothing of Pixy but the memory, for she was dead by then, wore out, Betty said, by all that working and saving, and thus she was reduced to the handful of tales and a look in Mama’s eye.

  Mabel just wanted her own life. To own my life … To write her songs, be a good mother, be a good daughter, make a bit of money, not have to think about … everything that had happened to her forebears, and was happening still.

  It’s not that I don’t want to be coloured. Bring coloured never proved so difficult for me. But I ain’t everybody. And whatever I want for myself, I am attached to everybody. A great river of blood flows through all of us, bearing the sufferings. White people don’t have that to fret them. Except maybe Jewish people. Irish people maybe. Foreigners in new terrains. But we are so damn visible! A Jewish man can cut his hair and lose the cap. An Irish man can learn to talk different. But being coloured ain’t just unchangeable, it’s so damned significant.

  She wondered: in Africa, in the countries where everybody is coloured, do they think of themselves as coloured? Do they even have to think about it at all, until some white person walks in and tells them they’re coloured?

  From time to time when she was younger she used to go along to meetings and social occasions beyond Church and Jazz. There was a bunch of folks known as the Coterie of Friends, which was black people from all over getting together to share what they learned and earned. Africans, West Indians, students and academics, musicians, all types. There was one medical student from St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, Harry Leekham – she’d liked him. Not just the Trini accent – he was a good man. And of course Thornton … The Coterie of Friends had been, to be honest, a Coterie of Men Friends, men who had time to talk about improvements and rights and responsibilities and law and opportunities and the advancement of coloured people. She admired all of that, she truly did, and dear Lord if she had only had the time … But she didn’t have the time. And after Thornton died it wasn’t the same.

  Thornton had told her a great joke though:

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, son?’

  ‘A musician!’

  ‘Well make your mind up, you can’t do both.’

  Ah, Lord, it’s all just adjectives. A female, musical, coloured person.

  *

  Peter decided, on that beautiful evening, to walk to the station for his train to Sidcup. It had been a beautiful unexpected treat to have that hour with Mabel, outside their usual timetable.

  Timetable! They were getting very set in their ways. He’d said to Riley that it was as if they were married, two days a week. Now, he was thinking about home, about Locke Hill, and this woman.

  If my mother hadn’t sold Chester Square, he thought, I would have invited Mabel to live there.

  He was trying the thought on for size, really. Would I have? he thought. Would I really?

  Steps along the pavement, blossom hanging in the trees above. For a moment he was reminded of Riley and Nadine’s wedding.

  I hope I would have. I have after all got her this flat – which is empty half the time. Like me. He barked with laughter at that image. But it’s true. It’s all very well, this. It’s marvellous – but it’s partial.

  Could he take her to Locke Hill?

  For goodness sake, old chap, you’re an English gentleman, you of all people can do exactly what you like. I could take her to Locke Hill, as my girlfriend, my mistress or my wife, I could épater les bourgeois like Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde … not that it would be very nice for her – would it? To be a full-time outrager of the bourgeois? No. And anyway she needs to sing … She needs London – she doesn’t need to work at Moores’ though – she needs to be looked after …

  He wanted to look after her.

  He didn’t know what she wanted. He still didn’t even know where she lived. It had been revealed that she lived with her mother, and thought he wouldn’t like her mother, or accept her – or vice versa! Perhaps she thinks her mother won’t like me! Or perhaps she lives in a place which is completely negro, and I wouldn’t fit in … perhaps I’m an embarrassment.

  But we’re not children. It’s not 1830.

  He wanted to be with her. To wake with her and go to sleep with her, put his head on her shoulder or hers on his, find her arm round his waist, or his arm round hers, slip his cold feet under her legs in bed, every night, not just two in seven. That was it. That was all. His body wanted her, his mind wanted her, his heart wanted her.

  That Scottish woman had married the Sultan of Johore, after all. And another Scotswoman had married a Pathan prince and was living on the north-west frontier. Which might be easier than for a London negro woman to live outside Sidcup … She was writing a book about it: My Khyber Marriage.

  For goodness sake, Peter, have you less courage than a Scotswoman?

  Again he found he was laughing at himself.

  Laughing!

  He bought his ticket, found his train, and settled in. His delivery of books from the London Library should have arrived. He had work to catch up on.

  The clubs where she sang were full of mixed couples. Not married couples though.

  Paris? In Paris you see mixed couples.

  He thought about that. But he was not at all comfortable thinking about it. He didn’t see why it needed thinking about – he resented it.

  Would people really make a fuss, if he just drew her in?

  *

  He had talked to Riley about it. Riley had been sanguine. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘will be quietly polite and deeply shocked, and will never get over it, out of embarrassment. Some will be prurient and over-interested. The ones who matter will be happy for you.’

  The more real problems people have to deal with, Peter thought, the less likely they are to provoke a problem out of something which really isn’t a problem.

  ‘But yes, some people will be unpleasant about it,’ Riley said. ‘You may face cruelty, or scorn.’

  ‘What the staff at hotels say,’ Peter said, ‘is “No you can’t have a room – it’s not us, of course – but we host so many Americans, and we must respect their wishes and expectations …” So you get that, plus the unspoken assumption that she’s some kind of prostitute—’

  ‘Whereas she is a perfectly respectable mistress …’ Riley said, and Peter snapped: ‘Riley, I’m in love with her. She’s the one.’

  Riley was sorry.

  ‘Hinchcliffe,’ he said, ‘reads all the scandal mags. They are agog about Nancy Cunard, apparently. An heiress, and a publisher. Do you know who she is?’

  Peter did know.

  ‘She keeps getting into fights in nightclubs over her negro boyfriend, Hinchcliffe tells me. Doing it to annoy her mother, while living, apparently, on her mother’s money. Of course it’s different, and who knows, and I’m sorry even to mention it.’

  ‘Yes, it’s perfectly likely to be unfair,’ Peter said. ‘But it’s not necessarily different. Aren’t most things about money and sex and love, and trying to defend people? What do any of us know about the secrets of Nancy Cunard’s soul?’

  ‘Yes, it’s gossip,’ Riley agreed.

  *

  In fact Peter did now know the secrets of Nancy Cunard’s soul. She’d sent a pamphlet around all her friends, a sort of Christmas card last year, a copy
of which had found its way to the Turquoisine, and someone had made sure, he thought, though maybe – well anyway, he’d seen it. It was called Black Man White Ladyship, and was a most phenomenal attack on her mother, and declaration of love for all things negro. In it, Miss Cunard recounted Lady Oxford arriving at some lunch for that kind of lady and greeting Nancy’s mother with the words: ‘Hello Maud, what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ And then she went off into a sinkhole of gossip and resentment, reporting that Sir Thomas Beecham said that she – Nancy Cunard – should be tarred and feathered, and Lady Cunard was running around asking people if it was true her daughter ‘knows a negro’ … And the second half was an account of the history of the negroes of Africa. Well written, Peter thought, and strong stuff. And an account of a legal case going on in America, the Scottsboro case, where nine young black men had been sentenced to death, a great injustice. And thirty negroes lynched in the first six months of 1931. Lynched! Repellent. There’d been a leaflet for contributing to the cause. Peter had sent five pounds.

  And what people think is unthinkable, is that a white person and a negro might be lovers. I don’t think it’s unthinkable. It’s just people being who they are, with who they want to be with. I think it is good. I think …

  It was all so distasteful. And why did it have to have anything to do with him and Mabel?

  He imagined himself speaking about this to his mother, to the chaps at the office before the war, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He genuinely didn’t see why anybody would have any good reason to find it a problem. Slavery was over, it wasn’t as if half the US economy depended any more on labelling a certain kind of human as inhuman. Was it embarrassment and guilt? We treated you so badly for so long that we cannot find a way now to stop being so utterly, immorally unpleasant to you?

  Surely, if there was no reason for a problem, how could there be a problem?

  And what did Mabel think?

  Peter had tried to keep the pamphlet from Mabel, and had succeeded, but there had been a very similar article in Crisis, an American magazine which Mabel read. Peter was then the embarrassed one. He didn’t want to think about them in those terms. He didn’t want to think that other people might think about them in those terms. If even I, an English gentleman, am getting annoyed at being thought of in particular terms, how does it feel for her? For negro people in general? It must be absolutely horrid; insult to injury, on top of all the practicalities like not getting a room, or a job. Anywhere you go, people don’t think, oh there’s Mabel or there’s Henry, they think there’s a negro. Even if you’re Paul Robeson. Except presumably in their own world …