The Chequer Board (36 page)

He said, “Bloody bed’s been turning over and over. Each time I lie down the bloody thing turns over.” He sounded infinitely tired.

She slipped out of bed, pulling on her dressing gown. “I’ll get you one of them powders.”

She gave him his powder, with a drink of water, and talked to him a little; presently he lay back on his pillows. She lay down then herself, and kept awake until the regularity of his breathing told her that he was asleep; then she, too, slept.

In the morning she woke up at seven o’clock. Jackie Turner slept on in a heavy coma, breathing irregularly and rather fast. For a time she tried to wake him by sponging his face with cold water; then she went downstairs and telephoned to Dr Worth.

Mr Turner stayed in his coma till about eleven o’clock, the doctor with him for the last hour-and-a-half. He woke with a splitting headache, which the doctor mitigated for him, and he lay for the remainder of the day, drowsy with drugs, in the little sunlit bedroom. Downstairs in the sitting room the doctor had a word with Mrs Turner.

“I can’t hold out much hope that there will not be more of these,” he said. “It’s going exactly as Mr Hughes told us it would.”

Mollie nodded. “How long should he go on working, doctor?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “As long as he feels he can. He couldn’t go to work today or tomorrow, of course. But it’s better that he should have an interest as long as he can manage it. We don’t want him to get depressed with having no occupation.”

She said thoughtfully, “I don’t believe he’d go like that.” And then she said, “How long do you think it will be before he has to go into a home, or something?”

He said, “I think by Christmas he will be permanently in bed, at this rate. Of course, you could keep him here, if you feel able to take on the work. The nurse can look in every day and do anything that might be necessary.” He hesitated, and then said, “I don’t imagine it would be for very long.”

She raised her head. “I’d like to do that, doctor. If there’s no reason why he should go into a home, he’d be much better off in his own house here while it lasts.”

He said, “It will tie you down, you know. He ought not to be left alone.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’ve not been such a good wife to him that I’ve not got a bit to make up, like.”

He thought for a minute. “Mr Hughes said he wanted to see him after four months. I think that takes us to about the end of October. I’ll write to Mr Hughes and make an appointment for him then.”

He gave her a few instructions about nursing and medicines, and went away. She took
The Daily Mirror
up to Mr Turner and he took it gratefully, and turned at once to the cartoon of “Jane,” who once more had got herself into a predicament that involved the loss of much of her clothing, and he chuckled over it, and laid the paper down. They had a wireless set that required no aerial or earth, and Mollie brought that up into the bedroom and plugged it in for him to listen to a talk on “Laying the Car Up for the Winter,” which interested Mr Turner very much, while she went down and cooked a bloater for his lunch.

He slept a little in the afternoon, and she brought his tea up to him as he lay in bed. And over tea he said, “I been thinking about laying up the car, like it said on the wireless. It’s quarter day next week, ’n we can turn the tax in and get something back on the insurance. I reckon we ought to save the money, ’n we shan’t want it till the spring.”

She thought, they would not want it then, but did not say so. The car was his adventure. It would be reasonable to sell it, but she did not suggest that. Instead, she said, “I dunno about that. What would you think if we went off in it first, ’n had a kind of holiday together, driving round? It’s ever so long since we had a holiday together.”

He considered this. He liked driving in the car, and a holiday touring round and staying in hotels entirely for pleasure was a thing that he had never done since he was married. He said, “I had my holiday this year. I got to think about work sometimes.”

She said, “You’ve got your sick leave coming, Jackie.”

“Aye,” he said. “Does Dr Worth think I ought to start that now?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “But I think it would be fun if we went off and had a bit of holiday together like. I mean, after all,” she said, “what’s the use of just going on working till you’ve got to stop? You’ve got to have a bit of fun sometimes.”

He felt that he could not have agreed with her more. “It’d cost an awful lot,” he said, “staying in hotels every night, and that.”

“It wouldn’t matter for a fortnight,” she said. “We’ve got that much money. Then we could come back here and put the car up like you said. We’d only lose a little bit if we did that. And the weather’s lovely still.”

He said, “Where would you want to go?”

She thought for a moment. “Devonshire,” she said. “And Dartmoor and places like that. The heather gets ever so pretty on the hills this time of year.”

Next day she wrote a letter for him to Mr Parkinson, the Managing Director of Cereal Products Ltd. They got an answer back two days later; Mr Parkinson was very sorry to hear such bad news of his illness, and had arranged with the secretary to put Mr Turner on sick leave, commencing at the end of the month. The additional ten days of full pay and commission was a gracious little act that pleased them very much.

They spent a few days planning with their maps while Mr Turner recuperated, and started off for Taunton on a Monday. They stayed the night there, after a long drive in the little car, and went on to Minehead next day, and
after that across Exmoor to South Molton, where Mr Turner found an old friend in the saloon bar travelling in ladies underwear, and a had a glorious time with him, and learned two new stories, and got a rayon slip for Mollie very cheap. From there they went to Dartmoor and spent a couple of nights at Two Bridges, stared at the prison, and then went on through Launceston across Bodmin Moor to Bodmin.

In the hotel that night, over dinner, Mr Turner said casually, “I see we’re only about forty miles from Penzance, here.”

His wife said quietly, “Like to go there, Jackie?” She had seen the point of his manoeuvres westwards for some days.

“Well, I dunno,” he said. “It might be nice to go on to the very end, now we’ve come so far. I never seen Lands End yet.”

They decided that it would be nice to go on and see Lands End, and came to Penzance the next day in time for lunch. They took a room and went out after lunch in the small car and drove out to Lands End, and stood on the cliff looking out towards America. The sea looked very cold and grey and unfriendly, and they were glad to get back to Penzance for tea in the hotel.

Over tea Mr Turner said casually, “We’re only four miles from that place Trenarth where all that happened about Dave Lesurier, the Negro I was telling you about. Like to take a run out and see what the beer’s like at the pub?”

This was his holiday, and probably his last. She knew that he had been distressed that he had only located one
of his companions in the ward so far, that the quest still lay very near the surface of his mind. She was not in the least deceived by his dissimulation; he wanted to go there, she knew, in the faint hope that he might glean something from the landlord of the pub. She said quietly, “It’ll probably have changed hands by this time, Jackie.” She did not want to see him suddenly disappointed. “There’ll be another landlord after all these years.”

He said, “Well, I dunno; it’s not so long as that. Anyway, I’d kind of like to go and see the place.”

She got up. “I’ll just run up and put my things on.”

They drove out to the little town Trenarth and parked the car in the small square outside the White Hart Hotel. Mr Turner stood for a few minutes looking round, while Mollie waited for him. This was the place that he had heard so much about in hospital in 1943 from the young Negro, and in Burma recently, eight thousand miles away, from the young man who had married a brown girl. Nay Htohn in Mandinaung had known about this place, though she would never see it. Negroes in Memphis and New Orleans, in Nashville and St Louis, remembered this small town with pleasure. This unconsidered place, these slate-roofed, unimposing houses, and these unassuming people had formed themselves into a little thread in the weave of friendship and of knowledge that holds countries together. Mr Turner felt that Trenarth had done something for the world; it was impossible to feel otherwise when he had heard so much about it in Burma.

It seemed incredible, looking at this quiet little place, that it had once been full of Negroes from America. It seemed incredible that the landlord of this shabby little
pub had once sat down in his shirt sleeves to write a letter to General Eisenhower, and had got a hearing.

It seemed incredible that all that could have happened here.

He went into the bar with Mollie. There was a stout man of about sixty behind the bar, in shirt sleeves; a common man, but a man of authority and poise. At the first glance Mr Turner knew that the White Hart had not changed hands; he glanced at Mollie and she glanced at him in the same knowledge. Mr Turner ordered a pint of bitter for himself and a gin and French for Mollie.

The landlord served them across the bar. They stood at the bar for a moment; Mr Turner gave his wife a cigarette, and offered one to the landlord, who accepted it. “Just passing through?” he asked.

Mr Turner blew a cloud of smoke. “Staying in Penzance the night,” he said. “Matter of fact, I been down here before. Not in this place. I was in hospital in Penzance for a time, back in 1943.”

“Aye?” said Mr Frobisher.

“Bit different now,” said Mr Turner.

“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher. “1943—that’s when we had all them Americans in camp here, turning the place upside down.”

“That’s right,” said Mr Turner. “I was in the ward with one of them, got into trouble here. A young Negro soldier he was, Dave Lesurier.”

“Aye?” said Mr Frobisher with interest. “You was in hospital with Dave Lesurier?”

“That’s right,” said Mr Turner. “We used to play draughts together. Checkers, he called it.”

“He calls it checkers still,” said Mr Frobisher. “He comes in here now and again; Saturday nights, mostly.”

There was a momentary pause.

“Is he about here, then?” asked Mr Turner. “I reckoned he’d have gone back to America.”

“He did,” said Mr Frobisher. “And he come back again. He lives just up the road. Works over at Camborne as a draughtsman—goes there every day. It’s only two stations up the line.”

“Well, I’m damned,” said Mr Turner. “You say he’s living here now? I’d like to see him again.”

“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher, “you’ll find him up the road. House called Sunnyvale, four doors up past Woodward’s store, just past the church. You can’t miss it. On the same side as Robertson’s.”

Mr Turner thought for a minute. “Does he live alone?” he asked. “In digs, like?”

“No, he’s married,” said the landlord. “Married a Trenarth girl last year—Grace Trefusis that was.”

From Penzance Hospital, in 1943, Dave Lesurier had been sent to Northern Ireland, where he had joined a draft for Iceland; in Iceland he had driven a truck till V-E day, when he had been sent back to the United States and demobilised. He had got back to Nashville in the late summer of that year, a free man, to find that the Filtair Corporation was laying off hands strenuously and that his old job in the garage was a thing of the past.

He did not regret it. It had been a dead-end job at best, one which would never lead him further than the maintenance of trucks. He did not know what he wanted to do,
except that he wanted more than that; as a first step he wanted to design things, to make drawings, on a drawing board, of engineering parts, and watch them come to life on the fitter’s bench. And he wanted to meet Grace Trefusis again, to say that he was sorry.

If there had been work for him in Nashville of a sort that he could settle down to, both these vague ambitions might have faded. In the turmoil of reconversion there was nothing for him at the time that he got home but those jobs which are traditional for the Negro—domestic or hotel service, work on a farm or on the roads, or in a shoeshine parlor. His travels had made Dave Lesurier despise these things. He was resentful of the land of opportunity that gave so small an opportunity to him. While he was living on his Army money in those first few weeks at home, his mind turned back to England. Compared with the glittering, streamlined prizes of a white man’s career in his own country, the rewards that England had to offer seemed drab enough and poor, but they were more accessible to him.

He talked the whole matter out with his father, who had been laid off due to reductions in the draughting staff at Filtair consequent on reconversion, and was doing casual tracing for a local architect, for irregular payments at the wage rate of a girl. Money was tight in the Lesurier household, but his father advised him objectively.

“If you reckon you can make a living better over in Europe, son,” he said, “you go ahead and don’t you worry about your Ma and me. We’ll get by all right. There’ll be plenty trouble in this country before colored folks get equal opportunities with whites, at any rate down South.
If they ever do, you can come right back home and slip into a good job. But in the meantime, if you got a hunch you can do better over there—well, son, you go ahead and try it while you’ve got some money left.”

Dave Lesurier did try it. He hitchhiked to Charleston and went to the United States Shipping Board with his Army discharge papers, and after three days got a job as a mess boy in a freighter bound for Durban with machinery. He washed dishes from Charleston to Durban, from Durban to Sydney, from Sydney to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to New York. He landed back in the United States after seven months without having made much progress towards England, but with a little money saved. He shipped again then in another freighter from New York to Buenos Aires. From Buenos Aires his ship sailed for Avonmouth, with a cargo of hides.

He drew his pay and left the ship at Avonmouth, only a hundred and fifty miles from Trenarth, eleven-and-a-half months after setting out from Nashville. He was twenty-five years old then, more fully developed and self-confident than he had been when he was last in England, still anxious to become a draughtsman, still anxious to see Grace Trefusis once again, if only to say that he was sorry for his lapse three years before. A long scar, somewhat blacker than his chocolate-coloured skin, reminded him of it each time he looked in a mirror.