Mr. Love and Justice (20 page)

‘Frankie: it ever occurred to you that your experience, really, is very limited?’

‘Mine? Well! Well, if you say so, officer.’

‘I mean this: you don’t know about other kinds of women because you’ve never met them; and you’ve never met them because you’re only interested in them if they play it your way.’

‘Well – that may be. But you, Ted: you consider your experience is so varied, then?’

‘No – not varied but I think it’s deep.’

‘
Deep
? Yeah? Excuse the question, boy. That girl of yours: she’s not your one and only by any chance is she?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought maybe so. You mean the only one you ever
had
?’

‘Yes.’

‘At your age? And you say
you
’ve got experience? And frankly, Ted: can I say this? that girl of yours: I know she’s a loyal kid and worships you and all the rest of it but … well, she wears glasses! And she doesn’t dress very sharp, now, does she? I mean, with a chick like that in spite of all her qualities I think you’re bound to have a very blinkered vision.’

‘If you wear blinkers, Frankie, you see straight: straight ahead and see where you’re going to all on one track. I don’t think it’s real sex always to begin again and again with someone else: I don’t think you add to it or build anything or go really deep.’

‘That “deep” again: you’ve been in deep with that lass?’

‘The longer it lasts the further we both seem to be from ever coming to the end of each other. I think real sex, Frankie, is quite simple: it’s one girl.’

‘But you’ve not tried others.’

‘I still think what I say.’

‘Well: real
love
, perhaps, if you like to call it that … but not real
sex
, feller – how can it possibly be?’

‘I say real love
is
real sex: they’re one and the same thing exactly; and you find them only in one and the
same person. Break out of that and you destroy them both.’

‘Well, Ted … all I can say is you may be correct but you can’t really know that till you’ve tried.’

‘Nor can you, Frankie, if what I say is so until
you
’ve tried it.’

Again the lights glared into flame. ‘Naughty, naughty!’ cried the nurse. ‘Now, really! Into your beds at once you go the pair of you or I’ll call sister and she’ll have you both up on a fizzer before your specialists in the morning!’

Frankie and Edward rose in silence, and outside the swing door patted each other and shook hands. ‘Don’t die in the night,’ said Frankie. ‘Is that a promise?’

‘And you, pal. No interfering with the night nurse, is that understood?’

They went their several ways along the dim-lit corridors. Peace settled on the hospital except for grunts and occasional sharp little cries, quickly suppressed.

In his office the size of a small bathroom, the house doctor had a cocoa with the ward sister.

‘Disgusting stuff, sister,’ he said smacking his lips. ‘It’s a shame to make the poor fellers drink it.’

‘It’s for their good, doctor,’ she said. ‘And a bit more of
that
and less of the other thing might do some good to
your
health, too.’

‘Oh, doctors are never ill – didn’t you know? Or nurses! You’ve learnt that, sister, by now surely.’

The nurse, pursing her already purposeful lips, handed him two folders.

‘Yes, those two,’ he said. ‘Quite astonishing recoveries the pair of them: they do us great credit – don’t you think?’

‘Us, yes
and
their specialist doctors,’ said the loyal nurse.

‘Oh – indeed: and dame nature, too.
This
one with the groin wound … well, do you know sister? I’ll spare your blushes but to put it politely if it hadn’t been for some crafty work on him by the specialist, that man would never have been able to love at all.’

‘Better for him, perhaps. And the brain case?’

‘Well,
him
– he’s lucky, frankly, now to
have
a brain. If the specialist hadn’t been on hand the night they brought him to us, this feller’s judgement would have been seriously impaired for life.’

The ward sister took a decorous sip. ‘And you think,’ she said, ‘that either of them will make good use of these two essential faculties?’

‘Frankly no,’ said the doctor cheerfully. ‘Well, I mean obviously not! They’re frail human creatures just like you and me – yes even you sister, I dare say. But at any rate we’ve given them back the spare parts that they need, and that’s all a nurse and doctor – yes, and even a specialist – can do. The rest of it begins where healing always ends and life begins:
we
don’t have to decide the use they’ll make of their lives, thank God!’

C
OLIN
M
AC
I
NNES
(1914–76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London, about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day.

Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill.

A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels,
City of Spades, Absolute Beginners
and
Mr Love and Justice.
His other books include
To the Victor the Spoils,
a disenchanted view of the Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War,
June in Her Spring
and
England, Half English.
Colin MacInnes’s essays were published in
Out of the Way
in 1980 and a selection of the best of his fiction and journalism is available in
Absolute MacInnes,
edited by Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.

City of Spades

Absolute Beginners

Mr Love and Justice

ALSO BY COLIN MACINNES

London, 1957. Victoria Station is awash with boat trains discharging hopeful black immigrants into a cold and alien motherland. Liberal England is about to discover the legacy of Empire. And when Montgomery Pew, assistant welfare officer in the Colonial Department, meets Johnny Fortune, recently arrived from Lagos, the meeting of minds and races takes a surprising turn …

Hilarious, anti-conventional, blisteringly honest and fully committed to youth and vitality,
City of Spades
is a unique and inspiring tribute to a country on the brink of change.

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