‘You can’t leave me so arouse – come, tell me how you do that?’

Slipping the clinking coppers into his pocket, Arthur nodded good night – first to Michael, placing a finger to the side of his nose, and then to me with another wink – before leaving the room. Michael lifted his eyes to me. I thought he was going to say something so I held his gaze. But he didn’t. One of us had to look away first. And it had to be me, I was burning up.

‘I didn’t know he did that – he’s a constant surprise to me,’ I said. Michael was still staring, still silent. ‘Well, I should be getting to bed,’ I said.

‘Won’t you stay awhile with me?’

‘It’s late.’

‘I will be gone tomorrow. Why don’t you ask me all the questions you have been thinking about sitting quiet there?’

‘What questions?’

‘I don’t know – you tell me.’

‘What makes you think I’ve got questions?’

‘So you no curious about this coloured man in your house?’

He wasn’t reading my mind, it was me – I was too obvious. ‘Okay . . .’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Where am I from?’ He repeated the question two more times to himself.

‘Is it too hard for you? Should I ask you something easier?’ I asked.

‘Jamaica.’

‘In Africa?’

He made a strange noise, as if he was sucking out a bit of trapped gristle from between his front teeth. ‘Why every English person I meet think Jamaica is in Africa?’

‘Is it not?’

‘No, it is not. It is an island in the Caribbean.’

‘Oh, well, I’ve never been anywhere,’ I said quickly.

‘A person who has never travelled still believes their mother is the best cook. Do you like your mother’s cooking?’ His face warmed with a smile.

‘Not much.’

‘Then you must have made a journey somewhere.’

‘Don’t you miss your family?’

‘I have no family in Jamaica. My mother and father are dead. There is no one else.’

‘No sweetheart?’ His gaze once again turned to mine. Feeling awkward I said, ‘You must miss being among your own kind.’

‘My own kind?’ He frowned but his eyes never left me.

‘I mean you’re a long way from home.’

He came and knelt on the floor beside me resting his elbow on the edge of my armchair. I felt his leg gently touch my foot. ‘We have bird in Jamaica,’ he said, softly as a bedtime story. ‘A humming-bird – our national bird.’ His breath was on my cheek. ‘It is very small but beautiful – blue, green, purple, red – every colour you can see in its tiny feathered body. And when it flies, its wings flicker so fast your eye cannot see them. It hovers – its wings beating to hold it still – while, steady as a man with a gun, it sticks its long yellow beak into the flower to feed . . .’ His hands made tender movements close to my face – his fingers the fluttering wings, his pinched lips the still beak. ‘One time in London during the Blitz, everywhere I look is devastation. But then you know what I see?’ His hand floated up high. ‘A humming-bird. In the middle of rubble and bricks, a humming-bird. In the buses and bustle of a city, a humming-bird. Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square and a humming-bird. I thought my eye was playing trick on me – too long flying in this war. But not only I saw.’ He was mesmerised – staring at our ceiling as if that pretty bird was flying near our cornice and coving, and pointing so I might see it too. ‘A humming-bird in London. I watched that bird like I see an old friend. It looked dowdier in this grey British light – no sun to sparkle it up. But there it was so far from home and so happy to have the chance to sample the nectar of English flowers.’ And as his hand fluttered downward, his fingers delicately caressed my hair.

Twenty-nine

Queenie

It wasn’t me. Mrs Queenie Bligh, she wasn’t even there. This woman was a beauty – he couldn’t get enough of her. He liked the downy softness of the blonde hairs on her legs. Her nipples were the pinkest he’d ever seen. Her throat – he just had to kiss her throat. This woman was as sexy as any starlet on a silver screen. The zebra of their legs twined and untwined together on the bed. Her hands, pale as a ghost’s, caressed every part of his nut-brown skin. She was so desirable he polished her with hot breath – his tongue lapping between her legs like a cat with cream. It wasn’t me. This woman watching his buttocks rise and fall sucked at every finger on his hand. She clawed his back and cried out until his mouth lowering down filled hers with his eager tongue. It wasn’t me. This woman panted and thrust and bit. And when he rolled her over she yelped wickedly into the pillow. Mrs Queenie Bligh would never do such a thing. That one, Mrs Bligh, usually worked out what she could make for dinner during sexual relations with her husband. But this woman, if it hadn’t been for the blackout, could have lit up London.

I’d felt him leave me in the night. With me naked under the slovenly bedclothes, the side of the bed that he’d heated so nicely gradually grew stone cold. I knew Michael, and the other two, were all down to catch an early train in the morning – they’d asked about the best route to the station. It wasn’t long before they were all jumping the stairs and slamming their way out, back to their squadron for more active service. But there was a gentle knock on my bedroom door before they left – once, twice. It even opened a crack before it was carefully shut. It seemed so feeble to me just to say a simple goodbye. Truth of it was, Michael Roberts deserved a fanfare with trumpets and dancers. But with Arthur waking me so urgently it did occur to me that perhaps I was wrong – that there was still a woolly-haired black head or a foot with five nigger toes where my buttoned-up, pyjamaed husband should have been.

‘What is it, Arthur?’ I asked. There are times when his eyebrows just will not do. Like a dog trying to get his master to come to rescue the kid down the well, I had to guess what these grunts and pointing fingers and head-flicking movements meant. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ I finally snapped. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your voice, Arthur – can’t you just bloody well say it for once?’ A blank curtain dragged across his eager expression and I immediately regretted what I’d said. I was so sorry.

He’d found a battered leather wallet that Sergeant Michael Roberts must have mislaid or forgotten in his rush to get away. There were photographs in its tattered inside. One of an old negro man standing formally in front of a house. Looking to all the world like a chimpanzee in clothes, this lord of the manor stood behind a seated black woman with white hair and a face as grumpy as Monday morning. Another was of a little darkie girl with fuzzy-wuzzy hair tied in ribbons as big as bandages. They were like any airman’s photos, dog eared and fading with sentiment. The wallet must have fallen from his jacket when he was rummaging for his war-time weapons of seduction – his tin of ham, his orange. But there was something about its tattiness that let you know this wallet had been places. Stuffed into a pocket, jammed into a kit-bag, sheltered in a hat. It was so beloved its preciousness warmed my fingers as I held it. It might even have been his good-luck charm. I was told that most flyers had them – that they weren’t safe flying without them. This was Michael Roberts’s fortune and it had no place lying in my hand. So I dressed quickly with the idea of catching him at the station, handing it to him before it was too late. And, anyway, it was easier to find a coloured man in RAF uniform at a station than it was to spend the morning looking apologetically into Arthur’s face and finding his wanton trollop of a daughter-in-law could no longer stare him in the eye.

I was not far from the station when I heard my name being called with the urgency Bernard used when he needed a towel getting out the bath. Looking around me I swore someone was taking my photograph – the flashlight’s spark burnt spots on to my eyes. But then my legs were lifting off the ground. I could see the pavement lowering under me, feel a whoosh of air, a roaring waterless sea rushing my ears. Then everything was quiet except for a note that sang sharp and high in my head. I wasn’t the only one flying. Over there a woman, a bundle of rags, was rolling over – a cardigan, a skirt, twisting and flapping. A man, or was it a boy? making an arc, diving off a swimming-board. A silent ballet so beautiful my eyes were sucked from their sockets with the sight. Something hit me hard across the back taking all the wind from me. And then I was coming back down. Sliding down the slide near our school. Wilfred in his dead dad’s boots screeching like a girl. ‘Shut up,’ I told him, ‘you’ll wake the dead.’ Landing with such a thump – the ground is so hard in winter. ‘It’s dark. Look at the fog. What a pea-souper! Go home. I don’t want to slide again, Wilfred, and I’m out of puff now. You find your own way home. Go on, hop it. I’m going to stay here and have a little sleep.’