Free Mr. Love and Justice by Colin MacInnes Page B

him.
    After this ceremony there was the continued proof, usually in the small hours, of Frankie’s devotion to his girl. And then a number of minor but very important social imperatives: the Sunday evening visit, on her night off, to the Odeon; appearances at certain clubs which for professional purposes (but thoroughly indirect ones) she frequented; and occasional calls at lawyers’ offices when minor difficulties arose, or were thought to be about to do so.
    If Frankie had adhered to his original intention – backed by her own sage counsel – to get a cover job, a great many of these errands could no doubt have been avoided. But he had not. The reason wasn’t simply that having enough money he didn’t feel the need to: many rich men love work, after all. It was just that any sort of normal toil seemed quite incompatible with his position.In this he resembled the aristocrat who, appearing before the bankruptcy court, tells the judge with manifest and rather hopeless sincerity that he just couldn’t find work appropriate to his status.
    So there was a paradox (one of many now) in Frankie’s life. On the one hand, time hung heavy on his hands and much ingenuity had to be expended in wasting it without total boredom. But on the other – this was the point – he did have the ever-present sensation of being occupied : of having if not a job, a function and even a ‘function’ in society. And apart from anything else, to remain constantly available so far as his girl was concerned, and constantly watchful himself in regard to the mysterious and ever-present law, did constitute a full-time activity of a kind.
    As for the disposal of the money, this had its problems too. A growing acquaintance with his fellow ponces (which Frankie had tried to avoid but which, just as with fellow mariners on board ship, was really quite inevitable) had shown him that by and large they fell (as with all other human creatures) into two sharply divided categories: the spenders and the savers. The chief stratagem by which spender-ponces relieved themselves of the intolerable burden of holding on to money they had coveted so eagerly, was by gambling: but Frankie had tried this and found it unbearably meaningless and dull – even if he won as, being indifferent, he often did. Others invested in huge wardrobes or fast cars: but this, except among the pin-headed, was considered most unwise for it was agross and needless provocation of the law. It was true, of course, that a great many of the more foolish girls loved their men to spend the money in this way, as a taste for visible riches bound the man to them all the closer; and its fruits were the manifest proof of their own success in their business.
    As for the savers, whose usual intention was to ‘cut out’ one day with the girl (or possibly without her) to start a business of some kind, the chief disadvantage was that they were usually grudging and unattractive characters (as Frankie Love was not) and more, that to be a business man , even if a ponce, you need a business head : which Frankie knew he hadn’t got at all. And his determination to save had been baulked, as the girl had foreseen, by the acute danger of opening any sort of an account and by his genuine reluctance to have all the money in her name: for the whole meaning of the symbolic emptying of the bag at night – the gesture which bound him absolutely to her – would have been lost if the money went back from the bag into an account that she controlled.
    He therefore hit on an expedient that would have seemed inconceivable a few months ago. Frankie, like most proletarian Europeans, despised Asiatics to such a degree that you could hardly even call it contempt (quite unaware, like millions of his countrymen, that this feeling was reciprocated by Asians at much profounder levels). But in his predicament it suddenly occurred to him that throughout his considerable commerce with them, no Asian had ever robbed him:exasperated