Maggie Gee: The White Family

All the same, she knew her youngest cared. He’d noticed last night that she wasn’t eating. ‘Mum. You haven’t touched your food.’

‘No … I suppose I’m not hungry.’

‘I’m not surprised. This tuna is disgusting. I never liked tuna. Cat food, isn’t it?’

May had been touched. He was a good boy. Alfred had always been hard on Dirk, but she saw his good side. She was his mother. Mothers were naturally soft on sons.

Whereas fathers weren’t always easy on daughters. Of course Alfred had doted on Shirley as a baby. And she was a darling, sweet-natured and biddable, with yellow curls and a smiling mouth; people always smiled back at her in the street, and then approvingly up at May, as if she’d done well, to produce such a paragon. Shirley, in her way, was a good girl still, a girl in her thirties now, of course, a thing that May could scarcely believe.

But Alfred had had no time for his daughter ever since she’d taken up with Kojo.

‘My own daughter. Taking up with a black man.’

‘She’s still your daughter,’ May had said, after Shirley for the first time brought Kojo to visit and Alfred had sat at the head of the table ignoring them, mouth compressed. He had avoided shaking Kojo’s hand, when they left, and shouted at their backs as they went down the passageway ‘You watch out for yourself, Shirley. You be careful.’ And Kojo had turned round with that gleaming smile and said, ‘It’s all right, Mr White, I’ll take care of her,’ and Alfred had been gobsmacked, speechless. Then when he got inside, ‘Cheeky black bastard! I know what he’s after. Why can’t she find herself a normal fellow?’ May was a bit upset herself, but Kojo had such lovely manners. ‘Well you can’t really say he’s not normal, can you?’ she tried, but tentatively, not wanting to annoy. ‘You bloody women,’ he’d raged at her, Alfred who hardly ever swore. ‘First performing monkey turns up in a suit, you’re practically begging him to take our daughter —’ ‘No,’ she had said. ‘But I liked his suit. I always did like men in suits.’ ‘I’ve never been good enough for you, have I …?’

He went to their wedding because May said she would never forgive him if he didn’t, and sat in a corner, he and Dirk, only talking to each other, morosely drunk. He never visited when Kojo got ill; she went alone even when Kojo was dying. Alfred only cheered up when he found out about the will, and she’d thought that then he would acknowledge at last that Kojo was responsible, a good provider, but he just said, ‘Well that explains it, doesn’t it. That’s why Shirley married him.’ And he’d softened to his daughter, briefly. And then she had taken up with Elroy, and May knew Shirley would never be forgiven.

But I’m her mother, and there’s nothing to forgive. I’ve read James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King …

I loved Kojo. And I like Elroy. They’re not so different, when you get to know them. I don’t care what colour people are, thought May, looking at the glorious red of some enormous daisy-like flowers on a bedside table far down the ward. Flown in from unimaginably far away. Some beautiful, amazing part of the world I never knew existed then, when I was young, when Alfred was courting. He would have felt embarrassed, bringing flowers.

Though he did have nice manners. Which she liked, in a man.

She had tried to teach her sons nice manners.

Dirk stared out of the window of the bus at the windows of the big houses by the Park, very nice houses owned by people with money, white people, nearly all of them, though a few Paki twockers had wormed their way in … One day he, Dirk, would make money.

He would raise himself. He would better himself. He would prove to his father that he had backbone. He would be … someone … a gentleman … like some of the officers were in the war, though Dad said most of them were donkeys … he would make his father proud of him. One day he would own a house like that. The sunset light on the window-panes winked back at him, encouraging him.

He would go far. Farther than the others. Then he could do something for the family. First he’d make Darren and Shirley look small. Then he’d be kind to them. Give ’em a leg-up. Maybe he would, if she changed her ways.

He would be … an international businessman. The net was the answer. He would do it that way. And buy a mansion for his father and mother. And they would be grateful. Fucking grateful. And Mum would have to be nice to him, not laughing at him because of his crewcut, not sneering at him because of his friends. Head in a book, what did she know? Did she notice anything about what was going on? Did she know that a battle was being fought, on the streets of London, Liverpool, et cetera? — Bristol. That was the other one. The other spot where they’d gone in force. According to Spearhead . (Dirk had never been to Bristol.)

One day he’d travel. He’d like to travel. To parts of the world where things were still all right. Not that there were so many of them left. South Africa had fallen. Had been sold out. It was a black day for whites, when they sold out. It used to be paradise. He’d read about it. He tried to imagine it. Fucking paradise. He closed his eyes. Lions, tigers. Sort of pink blossoms, lots of them. Boogie-something. Boogie blossoms. And — swimming pools. And strong white men. Muscular. Toned. Working out in the sunlight. Short haircuts and — brick-hard buttocks. Press-ups flipping over into sit-ups, and fuck, they all had enormous hard-ons, and most of the men round the pool were black …

He jerked awake in a sudden panic to find he had been carried past his stop, tried to get up before the bus moved again, and was blocked by the old woman beside him, gasping and moaning in her scarecrow get-up, muttering in some horrible lingo, wailing as if he had hurt her foot when he only trod on the side of it, and only because she was in his way — He shoved her, hard, and was out in the gangway, pushing his way to the front of the bus, and the driver must have heard him coming, he closed the doors and began to drive off.

‘Oi!’ shouted Dirk. ‘I want to get off!’

‘Next stop Hillesden Turn,’ said the driver.

‘OPEN THE DOORS! FUCKING LET ME OFF!’

The driver stopped the bus, with a hiss of the brakes. Dirk felt good about that. So they still obeyed orders. Then the driver got up, and Dirk saw with a start that he was eight feet tall. A fucking giant. A great woolly-haired coloured bloke eight feet tall. And there were all the others on the bus to help him. Dirk wasn’t a coward, but the odds were hopeless.

The driver got Dirk by the sleeve of his jean jacket. ‘You are bothering me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I say when this bus stops and when it doesn’t.’

The doors swung open, Dirk fell out and skidded on his bum on the slimy pavement. It felt very cold; the damp soaked through.

Fuck

Fuck

Fucking coloureds

Dad always told us. Always warned us.

In dirty Hillesden, the Park seemed miraculous. Just past the notice-boards, life came back.

The sky poured in through the gap in the roof-tops. Thousands of miles of cloud and sunlight, tethered to the neat square mile of grass. Pale paths gently traced the contours of the small hillside and rounded the lake. There were only a few figures walking today, a mother with a baby, a mother with a child, a man in a tracksuit with a giant poodle, a teenager (a truant?) on rollerblades doing showy arabesques at the foot of the hill, and there by the aviary surely Alfred — wasn’t that Alfred, back where he should be? — Thomas’s spirits leapt up for a moment before he saw it was an older man, bending stiffly to peer at the birds inside.