City of Spades Read Free Page A

his passport, and took me by the hand.
    ‘Have you any further questions?’ I enquired.
    ‘Yes, Mr Pew. Excuse my familiar asking: but where can I get a shirt like that?’
    ‘Like this?’
    ‘Yes. It’s hep. Jumble style, but hep.’
    He reached out a long, long hand and fingered it.
    ‘In Jermyn Street,’ I said with some self-satisfaction, but asperity.
    ‘Number?’
    I told him.
    ‘Thanks so very much,’ said Johnny Macdonald Fortune. ‘And now I must be on my way to Maida Vale.’
    I watched him go out with an unexpected pang. And moving to the window, soon saw him walk across the courtyard and stop for a moment speaking to some others there. In the sunlight, his nylon shirt shone all the whiter against the smooth brown of his skin. His frame, from this distance, seemed shorter than it was, because of his broad shoulders – flat, though composed of two mounds of muscle arching from his spine. His buttocks sprang optimistically high up from the small of his back, and his long legs – a little bandy and with something of a backward curve – were supported by two very effective splayed-out feet; on which, just now, as he spoke, gesticulating too, he was executing a tracery of tentative dance steps to some soft, inaudible music.

4
A pilgrimage to Maida Vale
    This Maida Vale is noteworthy for all the buildings looking similar and making the search for Dad’s old lodging-house so more difficult. But by careful enquiry and eliminations, I hit on one house in Nightingale Road all crumbling down and dirty as being the most probable, and as there was no bell or lock and the door open, I walked right in and called up the stairs, ‘Is Mrs Hancock there?’ but getting no reply, climbed further to the next floor. There was a brown door facing me, so I drummed on it, when immediately it opened and a Jumble lady stood there to confront me: wrung out like a dish-rag, with her body everywhere collapsing, and when she saw me a red flush of fury on her face.
    ‘Get out! I don’t want your kind here.’
    ‘I have to speak to Mrs Hancock.’
    At these words of mine her colour changed to white like a coconut you bite into.
    ‘Hancock!’ she called out. ‘My name’s Macpherson. Why do you call me Hancock?’
    ‘I don’t, lady,’ I told her. ‘I merely say I wanted to speak to a lady of that name.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘To bring her my dad’s greetings – Mr David Macdonald Fortune out of Lagos, Nigeria. I’m his son Johnny.’
    By the way she eyed me, peering at me, measuring me from top to toes, I was sure now this was the lady of Dad’s story. And I can’t say, at that moment, I quite admired my dad in his own choice. Though naturally it was years ago when possibly this woman was in better preservation.
    Then she said: ‘You’ve brought nothing ever to me but misery and disgrace.’
    ‘But lady, you and I’ve not met before.’
    ‘Your father, then. Your race.’
    ‘So you are Mrs Hancock, please?’
    ‘I used to be.’
    ‘Well, I bring my dad’s greetings to you. He asks you please for news.’
    ‘His greetings ,’ she said, twisting up her mouth into a mess. ‘His greetings – is that all?’
    I was giving her all this time my biggest smile, and I saw its effect began to melt her just a little. (When I smile at a woman, I relax all my body and seem eager.)
    ‘Your father’s a bad man,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, no!’
    ‘You look like him, though. He might have spat you out.’
    ‘I should look like him, Mrs Macpherson. I’m legitimate, I hope.’
    This didn’t please her a bit. She stared white-red at me again till I thought she’d strike me, and I got ready to duck or, if need be, slap back.
    ‘So you’ve heard!’ she shouted out. ‘Then why’s your father never done anything for Arthur?’
    ‘Arthur, lady?’
    ‘For your brother, if you want to know. Your elder brother.’
    Clearly she didn’t mean my brother Christmas. Then who? I began to realise.
    ‘I’ve got a half-brother called