In the Time of Greenbloom by Gabriel Fielding Page B

was going to invite you to Madeira, do you? Not really?”
    â€œYou said so.”
    Marston put back his head in the way Fleming had and tittered up at the ceiling.
    â€œInvite
you
? To
Madeira
? It was just a cod that’s all, I’d sooner invite a dago to England.”
    â€œWell why did you say so then?”
    â€œMind your own business.”
    â€œYah yah! Feeble,” said John. “You’re a coward like me really and
you’ve
got nothing to be cowardly about.”
    â€œNo I haven’t, but I hate this stinking place just as much as you do and that’s why I’m going to bloody you up in the morning when the Sarn’t puts us in the ring.”
    â€œI know something about you,” John said. “I’ve just discovered it. I wonder whether I’ll tell you.”
    Marston looked unconcerned. “Nothing
you
could tell me would worry me.”
    â€œThis will!” said John.
    â€œWell, what is it?”
    â€œYou hate dagos don’t you? You’re always talking about them aren’t you? and I’ve just realised why. It’s because you’re half a dago yourself. You look like a dago, look at your skin, you’re fat and smooth and you live in Madeira. One of your people must be a dago and that’s why you hate them. You hate yourself and whatever you do to me you’ll go on hating yourself afterwards.”
    He stopped, appalled at the change in Marston. His face had turned grey; he seemed to be standing in a different way,limply like a scarecrow; he looked small and weedy. Then, as John watched him, he saw a flush bright as a scarlet rag appear on either cheek; he saw the lower lip drawn in between the white teeth and bitten so that the blood from it began to mingle with that which had flowed from his nose. Marston’s eyes were bright with a hatred which he had never seen before, a hatred that seemed to gather up and contain within it all the hatred he had himself felt throughout that day, and he was terrified by its intensity. He cringed:
    â€œI’m sorry Marston, I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what made me think it and if you hate me then you are right to hate me. Let me off, please let me off. If you’ll let me off I’ll do anything you say, anything at all.”
    But for a few moments Marston seemed not to be there; it was as though the measure of his anger had swept him to a different place, separating him from John, making them invisible to one another.
    â€œAll right,” he said at last. “Do you know what I want you to do, Blaydon?”
    â€œNo, but I’ll do it. I promise.”
    â€œI want you never to speak to me or look at me again for the rest of the time you’re here.”
    â€œWell I won’t then.” He was chilled. “Is that a bargain?”
    â€œNo,” said Marston, “it’s not, because I’m going to make such a mess of you that you won’t want to anyway.” And he laughed again for the last time, jubilantly, his brown eyes glinting out from between his screwed-up eyelids.
    Behind him the door opened and the Toad came in. They looked at his face and saw at once that Fisher had told him everything. His thick lips drooped at the corners and between his eyebrows was the single crease-mark of the active frown he so seldom wore. His head was carried a little higher than usual so that they immediately stood to attention. They thought of the Great War; of pictures they had seen in the war diaries in Kay’s drawing room; generals and grim colonels talking to politicians in the trenches, or putteed ranks of men standing stiffly on parade grounds.
    He glanced at them and then looked over their heads to the wall on which the regimental photographs were symmetrically arranged.
    â€œWe don’t discuss things like this—filth of this sort—”
    he said. “You’ll find the Head Boy in the gymnasium. Put your running kit