Page 21 of The Last Kiss Goodbye

She glanced at him and found the way he looked disconcerting. When she had pictured the author of the controversial article, she had imagined a stuffy gentleman in a waistcoat and perhaps a monocle, some stodgy old-timer stuck in the Empire, with narrow-minded colonial views to match. But the man before her was about thirty, slim yet muscular, with rich brown hair swept back from his forehead in a fashionable rakish style.

‘Please, take a seat,’ he offered.

‘I’d prefer to stand,’ she said stubbornly, smoothing down the lines of her coat as if she were about to be inspected.

‘Fine,’ said Blake, sitting down and lighting a cigarette with a gold lighter, tossing the packet on to the desk in front of him.

‘So. You’ve taken offence at Capital magazine.’

Ros bristled. There was something very superior in the way he spoke. She reached into her bag and pulled out her copy of Capital, folded open at the offending article.

‘This,’ she said, holding it up and feeling her cheeks go hot. ‘This piece is a disgrace.’

‘That?’ said Blake, clearly bemused. ‘What on earth have you found to take offence at in my column?’

‘What have I found?’ laughed Ros, incredulous. ‘Everything about it, you racist, capitalist pig! How can you stand there defending it? Aren’t you ashamed?’

Blake frowned and took the magazine from her. ‘Have you actually read it?’

‘Of course!’ she spat. ‘I’ve never read anything so patronising, so insulting to another race of people in my life.’

‘What was so offensive?’ he asked, looking increasingly puzzled.

Ros started to shake her head. She had guessed that Dominic Blake would be thick-skinned and self-righteous, but his reaction now beggared belief.

‘Your attitude towards the race question,’ she said. ‘At a time when there is literally rioting on the streets over the notion of repatriation, do you really think it wise to be blithely fanning the flames?’

She stopped, suddenly aware that Blake was smiling. She was also aware, despite herself, that when he smiled, his grey eyes crinkled at the sides in a most attractive way.

‘You haven’t read it at all, have you?’ he said, snapping her from her drifting thoughts.

‘How dare you?’ she replied. ‘I read it this morning. You argue that Indians should be sent home, and that they’re better off starving back in India.’

‘I say nothing of the sort,’ said Blake, the smile fading. ‘If you had taken the time to actually read my argument instead of flying off the handle at the first difficult word, you’d have seen that I’m not talking about India at all.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Ros.

Blake took a deep breath and let it out, his irritation plain.

‘I have recently been travelling in the Amazon basin – South America, Miss Bailey.’ He waved the magazine in the air. ‘In this article, I actually argue that we should leave the Indians – Amazonian Indians, that is – alone. I write that my observations in the jungle were that they were perfectly capable of getting by in their own environment.’

‘Yes, but—’ began Ros, trying to regain the upper hand, but Blake simply waved her objections away with a waft of the magazine.

‘Moreover, I argue that when we stick our oar in via missionaries or raw commerce, we make these Indians reliant on us and turn them from proud, self-sufficient people to itinerant casual labourers by robbing them of their self-belief.’

He fixed Rosamund with a withering look.

‘If you had noticed, that is a notion that could be extended to the wider race question, as you put it, regarding the recent immigrants from India – that’s the India in Asia, by the way.’

‘Why do you care about the Indians?’ she muttered, feeling cornered.

‘Compassion is not the exclusive right of socialists, Rosamund,’ he said with a hint of irritation. ‘In fact, in many cases they’re completely devoid of that one quality.’

‘That might be so, Mr Blake, but I still know the sort of magazine this is. The sort of man you are.’

‘And what would that be?’ he asked with the hint of a smile, blowing a thin line of grey smoke at the ceiling.

‘Public school, landed gentry. A right-wing dilettante who decides to edit his own magazine with the sole intention of peddling his establishment views. Just because you’ve been on holiday to the Amazon rainforest doesn’t change the ideas that have been ingrained into your type for generations.’