The Doctor Is Sick (23 page)

‘Vat goes for me too.' The two German daughters slept deeply in a bliss of myth: the ring in the forest and the guardian dragon and the shining hero with the sword. Renate said loudly:

‘Ach, Jew. Jewish pig. Fat of Jewish pigs to make fat German land. No good else.'

‘You'll take that back,' said Leo Stone, coming nearer. ‘You'll take back that bloody slander or I'11 cut your throat with this bread-knife here.' Renate grew visibly frightened. ‘Now,' said Leo Stone, gripping the lapel of the overcoat, ‘take it all back.'

‘Jewish pig and hound,' persisted Renate. ‘Jewish fat for soap to wash swinehouse.' Leo Stone, his face alight with the long hates of his people, said:

‘The only good ones you ever had in Germany were Jews? Yes?'

‘No, no. Jews pigs. Oh,' said Renate, strangling hands upon her. ‘Yes, yes. Jews good, very good. You stop now, Jewish pig. Jews very good.'

‘You,' said Leo Stone fiercely to Edwin. ‘You're
educated. Who were the big German people? Writers and whatnot?'

‘Oh,' said Edwin. ‘Look, I've got two separate shillings here. Let's have that fire on, for God's sake.' Harry Stone came and collected the coins bitterly. He lit the gas-fire. Its miniature pillars of fire hissed and glowed comfortably. ‘Well,' said Edwin, ‘there was Goethe and Schiller and Heine. And Kotzebue and Wagner and Schumann. And Nietzsche and Kant and Schopenhauer and Beethoven. And Hans Sachs and Martin Luther.'

‘And they were all Jews, weren't they?' threatened Leo Stone. ‘Everyone of those German bastards was a Jew. Say yes, blast you, or I'll do you in.'

‘No, no,' said Renate. ‘Yes, yes,' she amended. ‘All Jew. And Hitler dirty bloody swine. He Jew too.'

Leo Stone dropped relenting hands. ‘As long as you know,' he said, ‘who's the master. We want no trouble, really. We want love and peace and harmony, as was taught in olden times. We want shillings in the meter and a hot meal ready when we ask for it. Now get cracking on that.' The gas-ring was hissing its poison. Renate lighted the jets. Leo kissed her on the cheek. All was forgotten.

‘I was finkin',' said Harry Stone, ‘vat we could use vem two.' His sad eyes of speculation were on the sleeping sisters. Edwin said:

‘Isn't the club open this afternoon?'

‘You kiddin'?' cried Harry Stone. ‘After vose visits from ve law? And you passin' aht and makin' vem get suspicious? We got to lie low for a time.'

‘I think I see what you mean,' said Leo Stone. ‘Dressing them up and using them as a sort of pair of bridesmaids.
And he could have a sort of stick in his hand and a train behind. Like the Coronation.'

‘Vat's right,' said Harry Stone. ‘Vat curtain vere might do ve job.' And indeed there was a fine moth-eaten length of what looked like red flannel bunched at one end of a runner at the top of the window.

‘These girls,' said Edwin. ‘What do they really do?'

‘Well,' said Leo Stone, ‘it's a night job, you see. We don't quite know what it is, but they do it together. Two nice girls they are if you get to know them. We call them Lili and Marlene.' Their mother meanwhile was frying some garlicky mess, singing:

And at the very mention of Christmas she began to cry gently, tears sizzling in the pan, thinking of the Christchild and the candles, the silent snowy night and clank of beer mugs. Evening came, cosy with only the two foci of burning gas. Leo Stone said: ‘Christ, I nearly forgot. I've got to rehearse. Not a bad idea really, trying it out on him.'

‘Just ve song?' said Harry Stone, handing his twin a walking-stick.

‘Just the song. I can ad lib the rest. You know: sorry I'm a bit late getting here, but I just got blocked in the passage. That kind of thing. That comes easy enough. Lights,' he called. ‘Music.' No music sounded, but Harry Stone switched on the one bare bulb and the room became less cosy. The sleeping sisters stirred, groaned, frowned. Leo Stone sang in raucous old-style Cockney:

‘And now,' said Harry Stone, ‘we've got to join in ve chorus.' Leo Stone sang, at the same time performing a rudimentary stick-dance:

And then, for want of a shilling, the light went out, and there was Leo Stone, a shadow against the gas-fire, leaping and shouting in the repeat of the chorus. ‘Eat,' called Renate. ‘Eat is ready, my darlings.'

‘ 'E's got to 'ave vat 'ead gone over wiv ve razor,' wailed Harry Stone. 'And vere's no light. Light, light,' he moaned. ‘Oh, bleedin' 'ell.'

Roused by the smell of the nearly invisible food that Renate slopped on to four plates, the dog Nigger crawled out from under the girls' bed, groaning and stretching. The girls turned over together, like another comedy turn, and the bells of their Eskimo hair could just about be seen, shaking. They slept solid. But Nigger wagged his tail at the complicated aroma of garlic, tomato sauce, burnt fat, baked beans, fried stale bread, bacon scraps and crumbled cheese. He put his chin to Leo Stone's knee, as to a fiddle, and looked up in firelit worship. Those bitter words of his master and master's mistress had been to him but as the sound of flutes and viols.

‘ 'Ave vem two vere in bed got any manny for ve light?' asked Harry Stone. ‘Aht all ve bleedin' night and fetchin' no manny in.' He forked in food from his dark plate, standing by the mantelpiece. ‘What in ve name of God is ve kind of work vey do, bringin' no manny in to ve ‘ouse?'

‘Their day,' said Renate, ‘is sleep-time. Money in sleeptime man does not spend.'

‘But what kind of work do vey do?' Harry Stone insisted.

‘For their mother they work,' said Renate, and she spoke, wiping her plate with bread, with pride. ‘Hard work, small money, but I am not angry if they enough each night for one bottle gin bring. That is enough, for I am no cruel mother.'

‘WHAT DO VEY DO?' cursed Harry Stone, and he pronged the wall with his fork.

‘What could they do?' said their mother. ‘No education
because of the cruel war they have not. Little English speak they. But there gives work for girls with willing body in night-time London. They work hard, and sometimes in schillings only the money to me they bring.'

‘Shillin's,' said Harry Stone bitterly. ‘Shillin's for ve light and ve gas, and you 'as to spend it all on gin.' But he groped about for a razor, fetched a tin mug of cold water from the landing, and then ordered Edwin to come to the gas-fire. The shaving was done carefully, though both patient and agent had to crouch by the glowing gascolumns. A pleasant domestic evening: two German prostitutes in bed, their mother sucking her teeth, Leo Stone audible from the landing lavatory, Nigger washing plates and frying-pan, Edwin becoming smooth as an egg by the fire. ‘Lovely, vat is,' said Harry Stone at last, his phrenologist's fingers feeling Edwin's scalp. ‘You'll walk away wiv it to-night if you don't do nuffin' stupid.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Out of his five shillings Edwin now had left only four-pence. Three men and a dog with only fourpence between them had to reach a cinema on the other side of London. They must walk, then, but there seemed to be plenty of time, and Edwin had plenty of cigarettes. It was decided that the fourpence should be spent on some little treat for Nigger. After some argument and peering into cheap butchers' windows they finally bought a few bones with rags of meat on them. These Nigger refused to touch. Hard-faced Harry Stone returned the bones to the butcher with disparaging remarks on their quality, was given back the fourpence, and then bought an old fish head from a fishmonger's that was just closing. Nigger played with this for much of their journey.

There was a fine moon rising. As they walked eastwards they talked of many things. Legitimate ways of making money: a small cigarette factory fed with picked-up dog-ends; conducted night tours for American tourists; Leo put out to stud; old bedsprings sold as radio aerials; home-made potato crisps; face cream made out of horse fat; Nigger taught to do tricks; palmistry; Leo back on the boards; dust sold as snuff; ideas sold to great firms (a refrigerator with a back door, double-headed matches to save wood, a tickling machine, warm water sprays in W.C. pans); Renate deported and her two daughters on the bash for the Stones alone; a sixpenny soup bar with bread unlimited; miniature plaques of the Golden Hind
½d sold in envelopes for ninepence to Westminster tourists; street-singing as blind and cripple respectively; lonely girls met at King's Cross and sent out on the bash; expensive scent-bottles filled with Soir de Stoke-on-Trent; Edwin as the starving man in a sideshow; a cure for smoking (unlightable cigarette); Leo's body sold to queers; good honest work. Old London: the gates of the City from western Lud to eastern Ald; Finsbury Fields; St Olave's; Thames Street and Fleet Ditch; gas-flares and jellied eels; Jack the Ripper; Sweeney Todd; the Princes in the Tower; the difficulty of stealing the Crown Jewels. Classical murders; the old-time crook as gentleman; travel for broadening the mind. And all the time Nigger danced his fish head along, happy as the moon in the sky.

It was Nigger, through no fault of his own, that precipitated the trouble which almost wrecked the night. He and his masters and Edwin were only a street or so off their goal when it happened. They had reached a region already well-known in the world's press as a cockpit of racial dissension, a curiously policeless district with static mobs lounging in doorways and at corners. ‘Now ven,' said Harry Stone to his companions, ‘go easy 'ere. Don't say nuffink, don't do nuffink. We don't want no trouble, not tonight we don't.' Edwin looked with interest at a lounging group of youths, simian-browed with horror-waxwork faces, their clothes and coiffures most, by contrast, civilised. Each jacket was as long as a British warm, the trousers were almost Second Empire, the shoes rose in layer after layer of sole. The hair of the head was piled up dramatically but was not balanced by a poetic cravat; instead, the tie was vestigial, a mere string. This was collective dandyism, thought Edwin, a crazy synthesis
of rebellion and conformity. ‘Stop lookin' at vem like vat,' warned Harry Stone. ‘Vey'd fink nuffink of doing ve free of us.' And then happy prancing Nigger danced a little too close, fish head in his jaws, and one of the youths kicked out. Nigger, though untouched, yelped with surprise and fear, dropped his fish head and ran. ‘Vat,' said Harry Stone loudly, ‘was a bleedin' filfy fing to do, dead bleedin' cowardly vat was. Vat's abaht your bleedin' mark, I reckon, a poor bleedin' defenceless dog.' Meanwhile Leo Stone, disturbed at the dog's panic, ran after him, shouting:

‘Nigger! Nigger!'

It was unfortunate that three genuine negroes from the West Indies should at that moment leave their exile-crammed house and see a white man now standing in the middle of the pavement and hear him calling gratuitous abuse:

‘Nigger! Come here, you silly bastard!'

Edwin saw the three negroes – smart men in raincoats and trilbies – advance on Leo Stone. They had had enough of white derision; they had learned that to ignore it was but to fan it. They were joined by two others of their race from another house: their ears had pricked at Leo's call. Meanwhile the seven loutish dandies were more slowly and with far less grace preparing to liquidate Harry Stone. ‘And,' said Harry Stone, ‘vis is just as bleedin' cowardly goin' to 'ave a go at me. I'll take any one of you 'ere on but not ve bleedin' lot of you, vat stands to reason.' It didn't, however, not to these; it was an out-worn code, the law of the fair chance. Leo Stone was explaining, genuinely shocked and apologetic, that he'd merely been calling his dog, that was all, named Nigger because of his colour. That didn't go down well. ‘See,' said Leo Stone, ‘I'll show
you I'm telling the truth. I'll call him again. See, there he is down there.' And Leo Stone desperately, wildly called the hated name again. But Nigger did not respond; he looked back hangdog, his tail between his legs, a nice hound but not very bright.

Edwin looked from one group to the other, bewildered. The twins were converging and their respective pursuers with them. West Indians and white louts were perhaps now smarting in an uneasy truce. Now they found themselves face to face, not really ready for battle, and suddenly they turned in surprise at the mild professorial voice of Edwin saying: ‘This is so obviously pointless, isn't it? There's just been a couple of mistakes, that's all. I suggest that everybody concerned forgets all about it.' Harry and Leo Stone exchanged nods, Leo made a dash for it, and both whites and blacks found themselves preparing to kill or maim or otherwise discomfit the same man. Had it been a collective dream, that conviction of this man's being in duplicate, just for a second or so before that other man there starting talking? ‘Vat's right,' said Harry Stone in a sort of loud fearful glee, ‘you bleedin' lot of cowards. Not satisfied wiv ‘avin' a go at each over, so now you bofe 'ave to get togever to do in a poor bleedin' Yid. Go on,' he said. ‘Black unite wiv white for vat purpose.' A white lout pulled out a bicycle-chain and a quick negro responded with a knife. In half a second they were at each other. ‘Right,' said Harry Stone to Edwin. ‘Leave vem to it.' They ran, shouting battle proceeding behind them, and then Nigger suddenly became brave again, barking loudly. He had lost, but perhaps now forgotten, his four-penny fish head.