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thinks, what she says, how she reacts, how she has recovered (with set-backs) from Her Operation (coyly left unspecified). We all, I am sure, now dread the introduction of the phrase: My special chum, Mavis. All the same, I don’t think she’s a stupid woman. Just an inksey-tinksey bit dotty. The Americans clearly think her as crazy as a coot but typically British. This is maddening. She keeps a diary and keeps is the operative word: she carries it about with her and jots. I am ashamed to say it arouses my curiosity.
What
can she be writing in it? How odious I sound.
    “I don’t like Mr Pollock much. He is so very sharp and pale and he so obviously thinks us fools (I mean Mr Bard and me and, of course, poor Miss R-C.) for not sharing his dislike of coloured people. Of course one does see that if they sing calypsos all night in the no doubt ghastly tenements he exorbitantly lets to them and if they roar insults and improper suggestions at non-black teenagers, it doesn’t send up the tone. But don’t non-black tenants ever send the tone down, for pity’s sake? And what on earth has all this got to do with Dr Natouche whose tone is superb? I consider that one of the worst features of the whole black-white thing is that nobody can say: ‘I don’t much like black people’ as they might say: ‘I don’t like the Southern Scot or the Welsh or antipodeans or the Midland English or Americans or the League of British Loyalists or
The Readers’ Digest
.’ I happen to be attracted to the dark-skinned (Dr Natouche is remarkably attractive) but until people who are or who are not attracted can say so unselfconsciously it’ll go on being a muddle. I find it hard to be civil to Mr Pollock when he makes his common little racial gestures.
    “He’s not alone in his antipathy. Antipathy? I suppose that’s the right word but I almost wrote ‘fear’. It seems to me that Pollock and the Hewsons and even Mr Lazenby, for all his parsonic forbearance, eye Dr Natouche with something very like fear.
    “We are about to enter our second lock—the Ramsdyke, I think. More later.
    “
Later
(about 30 minutes). Ramsdyke. An incident. We were all on deck and the lock people and our Tom were doing their things with paddles and gates and all, and I noticed on the far bank from the lockhouse a nice lane, a pub, some wonderful elms, a ford and a pond. I called out to nobody in particular:—”
    “Oh, look—The place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look. A perfect clutch of them!”
    “Rory, it was as if someone had plopped a dirty great weight overboard into the lock. Everybody went dead still and listened. At least—this is hard to describe—
someone
did in particular but I don’t know which because nobody moved. Then Dr Natouche in mild surprise said: ‘The Police, Mrs. Alleyn? Where? I don’t see them,’ and I explained and he, for the first time, gave a wonderful roar of laughter. Pollock gaped at me, Caley Bard said he’d thought for a moment his sins had caught up with him, Mr Lazenby said what a droll mistake to be sure and the Hewsons looked baffled. Miss Rickerby-C. (her friends call her, for God’s sake, Hay) waited for the penny to drop and then laughed like a hyena. I still don’t know which of them (or whether it was more than one of them) went so very quiet and still and what’s more I got the idiotic notion that my explanation had been for—someone—more disturbing than the original remark. And on top of all this, I can not get rid of the feeling that I’m involved in some kind of performance. Like one of those dreams actors say they get when they find themselves on an unknown stage where a play they’ve never heard of is in action.
    “Silly? Or not silly? Rum? Or not rum?
    “I’ll write again at Tollardwark. The show looked all right: well hung and lit. The Gallery bought the black and pink thing and seven smaller ones sold the first night. Paris on the 31st and New York in November. Darling, if,