Maggie Gee - The White Family

But most white people had no black friends.

Elroy, Elroy. Why can’t Dad see? He should be glad his daughter’s got a man like Elroy. Doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, has a job, is faithful — Shirley thought he was faithful. Though sometimes there were things — a telephone number with a female name written beside it in his jacket pocket. A woman who rang, then rang off, suddenly. Certain jokes his two sisters made, though Shirley suspected them of wanting to hurt her. A passing look of concern in her direction from Winston when Elroy disappeared with a friend.

But Elroy was so serious about the Temple. Wasn’t he? He couldn’t be leading a double life, could he?

Was each of them idealizing the other? It had to be harder to know a person when it wasn’t easy to know their family.

Hard to know Elroy’s friends, as well. She felt they saw her as Elroy’s white woman. They were nice to her, but there was some kind of distance that was only partly bridged by her sex.

But she did know Elroy was a caring man. His job was caring for other people. Patient Care Officers fixed things for patients that they were too ill to do themselves. He put up with their tantrums and complaints. How many men could do that job? She made jokes about it. ‘Patient Care … that’s what you give me, patient care.’ And he did; he was almost too nice to her. Kojo was different, very confident, a joker. She and Kojo talked all the time. Whereas Elroy was often strong and silent.

It comes from how Elroy was at home. He had to look after his mother and sisters and little brother when his father vanished. He’s had to be the responsible one. Only twenty-nine, but seems older than his years –

Lovely Elroy. He’s still my toy-boy. I love the smell of him, the feel of him — I’ve always liked the maleness of men. Talking to my women friends I sometimes wonder — They talk about men as if they hate them, their breath, their wind, their penises. But hating people gives them no choice — what can they do, except be hateful?

Waiting for Elroy. Wet for him. Wanting him as I never have. Touching myself and thinking of Thomas, touching myself and thinking of Elroy …

He brought up the tray, but seeing her lying there, he put it down, came over and kissed her.

‘Is this the land of milk and honey? What you doing to me, girl, you look so sexy —’

‘I feel so sexy. Ooh, and you’re hard.’

She had lain like that on purpose to arouse him, posed so the duvet pushed up her breasts, and she pulled him down, she held him fast, she held his warm springy head in her hands, she burrowed down and sucked his dark penis, enjoying its blackness against her pale fingers, she kissed and licked it till it bucked in her hand like a living thing, like a force of life, she weighed his heavy balls in her fingers, she told him she loved him, she worshipped him, and as she pulled him inside her she was almost coming, already coming from deep deep inside, and his slow firm thrusting made her come up, up, coming to him, coming to meet him, coming like honey from a dense dark comb, coming gold and white and wet and moaning as doves come thrumming from their warm dark dove-cote, trembling, flurrying, flying into sunlight.

And then the two bodies lay together, slowly breathing in the warmth of the morning. The brown and the cream, the black and the rose, each curl of dark hair, each shining iris, each curve of the lid, each moving eyelash, intertwined in their living beauty.

They arrived at St John’s at the last moment, took their hymn sheets from the matron on the door who recognized them and smiled automatically, a sweet smile but tired and thin. Very few black people used this church. Kojo had liked it partly because, as he said, it was so much quieter than black churches; ‘I’ve had too much of the shouting and jerking.’ They had attended quite regularly over the years, and lots of people knew Kojo by name, though she realized how imperfect the friendships were when so many of them greeted Elroy as Kojo. He put his arm lightly around her shoulders, accidentally winning a radiant smile from a middle-aged woman with a large red face and a knotted rope of long grey hair who sat on the end of the pew they chose.

Walking up the aisle, she had felt without pleasure heads turning, as they did everywhere except the poorer parts of London where mixed relationships were common, the parts of London where black people lived. In Hillesden, so many of the families were mixed. But in other places, people still noticed. One of the cruder responses had been yelled at them from a passing car only last week: ‘Oi darling, why do you like doing it with black men?’ There were three young white men straining at the windows, crewcut, thickset, leering and making disgusting gestures. Just too late, she thought of a response. ‘Because black men aren’t mannerless yobs,’ she said. Whereas here in St John’s — where all was acceptance, where communion was taken for ‘Our brothers and sisters in Islam and in the Jewish faith’, where the vicar always asked at the end of the service if there were any newcomers or foreign visitors, so all the congregation could applaud them — people were more likely to romanticize them.

On some occasions the glances were from women, envying her both men for their good looks. She knew that women who had never had a black man believed they might be better, sexier. As did white men. And it made them afraid.

Fear and envy of the black penis. That was at the bottom of it all. (Indeed Kojo joked that all white men were gay, they didn’t really envy it, they wanted it.)

Maybe in heaven there would be no colour –

But on earth, since Kojo, love had been black. She was drawn to Elroy because of Kojo, although she always had to deny that to him, for he didn’t want to be in Kojo’s shadow, Kojo who was older, cleverer, richer — She reached out gently, touched Elroy’s arm, and mouthed ‘I love you. I do, you know,’ and he whispered back, ‘Skeen, it’s blatant ’ which made her laugh aloud into a sudden silence, for the procession was just coming in.

The priest and his retinue of deacons and cantors and other Latin names she could never remember, but some of them women, long-haired white women, floated down the aisle in a cloud of white surplices.

Then the priest asked everyone to greet their neighbours, and a wave of shaking hands, of embraces, kisses, of smiles and touches and chatter and laughter swept through the church like a flock of bright birds, light-feathered birds sweeping in from the south, and everyone was lifted, they hovered in the light, everyone was part of the flock, flying, and it only died down reluctantly, slowly, when the priest raised his hands and called them to prayer, as if they didn’t want to cease and be still, to sink back into their single wooden spaces, as if once people moved, once they moved together, the tide of good feeling would rise to the rafters and float the great church straight down Piccadilly and over Charing Cross to the golden Thames, as if the life in people was unstoppable –

But no: they were middle-class, they were docile. Shirley and Elroy settled down with the rest.

The hymns began. They were always long, and the choir were the only people who knew them, their thin clear voices sprinting ahead with the congregation trailing after. The tunes were modern, to be honest rather tuneless, and each hymn seemed to have at least a dozen verses. The church felt cold; she moved closer to Elroy. She was wishing they had gone to Elroy’s church, somewhere where they could move and dance … But St John’s had its points, she reminded herself.

It tried hard to be democratic; so everyone did something, one a prayer, one a reading. Though it did make the service a little long. The Order of Service was a printed sheet, and the questions and responses went dutifully on. Liturgy, thought Shirley, this is liturgy. The word was unpromising, like something legal, and yet the repetitions were comforting … She knew it wasn’t right to sit and criticize.