City of Spades (13 page)

‘You saw my sister?’ I asked Laddy Boy.

‘Your family entertained me very kindly, Johnny, at your home.’

‘They’re all of them well back there?’

‘They’re well, man, but a little worrying about you. You know why. Is not my business, countryman, but you know why … You take a drink?’

‘I’m barred inside that pub.’

‘Not with me, you’re not, man, no. You’re not barred in any public house that I go into.’

He took me inside, and there was no more reference to my recent wild behaviour. While I sipped my drink, I thought quite deeply. Yes, home would be beautiful again, but surely my duty was to try to rescue myself by my own efforts before seeking family aid?

In the nearby bar, I saw Montgomery talking with Larry the GI. This gave me a new idea of how to raise some loot quickly in a last attempt, before throwing in my sponge and going back to Lagos tail between the legs.

I went to the phone box and asked for the radio corporation of the BBC, and for Miss Theodora Pace. After some secretaries, her voice came clear over the line towards me.

‘Miss Theodora, this is Johnny Fortune.’

‘Oh. One minute, please.’ I heard some mutter, and a door close. ‘Yes, how are you? What can I do for you?’

‘You remember those radio talks we spoke about, Miss Theodora? With me as possible performer in them?’

‘Yes … Why’ve you not contacted me again?’

‘Oh, there have been things, you know, so many. But this is to say I’m willing now, though there is one stipulation I should like to ask about.’

‘Yes?’

‘Would your officials consider a small payment in advance? Of twenty pounds?’

I knew, of course, that this was asking Theodora for the loot, but it seemed a way of doing so that could satisfy both our dignities.

‘When do you want it?’

‘Today. The soonest would be the best.’

There was quite a pause here before she said: ‘I dare say that could be arranged. Come to the building, and ask for me at Reception, please.’

The Sphere was now closing for the afternoon, and the Spades were scattering all over town on their various errands, from this their daily joint collecting-point. I went off myself quite quietly, without telling Montgomery of my personal intentions.

Though Larry the GI had been wonderfully entertaining (telling me of how it was back home in Cleveland, Ohio, with Pop and Mom and his six young brothers, including the one who was in love with horses), I began to miss Johnny; and explored all the Sphere’s bar cubicles, until I met Ronson Lighter, and learnt he’d already left. These sudden disappearances I was by now used to, so I went back to Larry and suggested we both have lunch. ‘Man, here’s no food,’ he answered. ‘So why don’t we go down to the Candy Bowl?’

He said this was the club most preferred by coloured Americans, and he told me he had two swell southern friends of his he’d like to have me meet – performers in the Isabel Cornwallis ballet company, now visiting the city, and stirring up a deal of excitement in balletic and concentric circles.

How little one ever knows of one’s home town! I’d been in that courtyard a dozen times, but never sensed the presence of the Candy Bowl: which, it is true, looked from outside like an amateur sawmill, but once through its doors, and past a thick filter of examining attendants, it was all peeled chromium and greasy plush, with dim pink and purple lights, and strains of drum and guitar music from the basement. GIs, occasionally in uniform, but mostly wearing suits of best English material and of best transatlantic cut, lounged gracefully around, draped on velours benches, or elegantly perched upon precarious stools.

Sitting at a table by the wall, writing letters, were two boys in vivid Italian sweaters. ‘That’s the pair of them,’ said Larry, ‘ – Norbert and Moscow. Norbert you’ll find highly strung, but he’s quite a guy. Moscow’s more quiet, a real gentleman.’ We drew near to their table. ‘I want you to know my good friends Norbert Salt and Moscow Gentry,’ Larry said. ‘Boys, this is Montgomery Pew.’

Norbert Salt had a golden face you could only describe as radiant: candidly delinquent, and lit with a wonderful gaiety and contentment. His friend Moscow Gentry’s countenance was so deep in hue that you wondered his white eyes and teeth weren’t dyed black by all the surrounding blue-dark tones: a face so obscure, it was even hard to read his changes of expression.

‘Montgomery,’ said Larry, ‘is mightily interested in the ballay.’ (Not so: I’ve never been able to take seriously this sad, prancing art.)

‘I’ve not seen your show yet,’ I told them, ‘but I look forward immensely to doing so.’

They gazed at me with total incredulity. Clearly, anybody who’d not yet seen their show was nobody. ‘If you wish it,’ said Moscow Gentry, ‘we’d be happy to offer you seats for the first house this evening.’

‘Alternatively,’ said Norbert Salt, ‘we could let you and Larry view a rehearsal of our recital if you’d care to.’

‘Man,’ said Larry, ‘that’s something you certainly should not miss. If these boys don’t shake you in your stomach, then I’ll know you’re a dead duck anyway.’

I asked them about Miss Cornwallis and her balletic art.

‘Cornwallis,’ said Norbert, ‘isn’t pleased with the British this trip so very much. Two years back when we were here, we tore the place wide open, and business, as you know, was fabulous. But this time there’s empty seats occasionally, and that doesn’t please Cornwallis one little bit.’

‘She’s having to kill chickens once again in her hotel bedroom,’ said Moscow Gentry.

Even Larry didn’t quite get this.

Norbert Salt explained. ‘Cornwallis believes in voodoo, even though she’s a graduate of some university or other in the States. So when business isn’t what it might be, well, she gets her Haitian drummers to come round to her hotel and practise rituals that bring customers crowding to the box office.’

‘And it works?’

‘Man, yes, it seems to. At lease, it’s not failed to do so yet.’

‘And is Miss Cornwallis’s style Haitian, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no – she choreographs a cosmopolitan style,’ said Norbert. ‘Being herself Brazilian by birth, and internationally educated by her studies and her travels, her art’s a blend of African and Afro-Cuban, with a bit of classical combined. It makes for a dance that’s accessible to cultured persons on every civilised continent.’

‘And has your art been well received in Europe?’

‘In Rome-Italy and Copenhagen-Denmark,’ Norbert told me, ‘we found they still liked us this trip as particularly as before. But as for here, I guess with all your thoughts of war you British haven’t so much time for spiritual things.’

‘Our thoughts of
war
?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Moscow Gentry. ‘You English people are constantly crazy about war.’

‘Besides which,’ said his friend Norbert, ‘you don’t appreciate the artistry of what we do. In Rome or Copenhagen, or even Madrid-Spain, we get all the top people at our recitals. But here, it’s only the degenerates who really like us.’

‘Can you fill a theatre in this city with degenerates for several weeks?’

‘Oh, sure,’ said Norbert Salt.

‘Well,’ I told him, nettled, ‘you should be thankful to our degenerates for not thinking about war as you say the others do.’

‘We don’t thank anyone, sir. We perform, that’s all, and if they like us, then they pay. We don’t have to
thank them for patronising an entertainment that they’re willing to pay for.’

I offered them a drink: they took lemon squash and tonic water. ‘And this rehearsal,’ I enquired. ‘It takes place soon?’

‘It takes place,’ said Norbert, looking at a gold watch two inches wide, ‘in forty minutes from this moment. I guess we should all be going to the theatre. In the Cornwallis company, we’re always dead on time.’

The two young Americans made a royal progress down the streets that lay between the Candy Bowl and the Marchioness Theatre: catching the eyes of the pedestrians as much by the extravagance of their luminous sweaters and skin-tight slacks as by the eloquence of their bodily gyrations, shrill voices and vivid gesticulations; and did anyone fail to look at them, his conquest was effected by their bending down suddenly in front of him or her to adjust an enamelled shoe, so that the recalcitrant bowler-hatted or tweed-skirted natives found themselves curiously obstructed by an exotic, questioning behind.

There was some opposition to our entry at the stage door – which was manned (as these doors are) by a person who would have been disagreeable even to Sir Henry Irving. But his rude rudeness was outmanoeuvred by an abrupt and devastating display of bitchiness by our two hosts. ‘These ain’t no stage-door gumshoes, they’re
my friends
,’ hissed Norbert, after an ultimate nasty salvo. He led us past the doorman’s corpse to a narrow lift of the alarming kind that receives you on one side and ejects you on the other. Norbert and Moscow preceded us along a
clanging concrete corridor to their dressing-room, where they immediately stripped naked, and started painting their faces and bodies in improbable jungle hues. ‘The number we’re rehearsing’s African,’ said Moscow. ‘Cornwallis wasn’t pleased with our performance of last evening, and she’s called this rehearsal to get us in the ripe primeval mood.’

‘Come and meet the girls,’ said Norbert, and, still in nothing but his paint, he stepped down the corridor, and flung open the door of a larger dressing-room in which a dozen resplendent coloured girls were gilding the lilies of their beauty. He passed rapidly from one to the other, fondling each with gestures of jovial obscenity, and capering at times to the music of a portable radio they had. ‘Say hullo to Louisiana,’ he called out to us from a far corner. ‘Boys, this is Louisiana Lamont, our
ingénue
.’

She was a succulent girl with radiant eyes that positively shone. She smiled at Larry and me as if we were the two men in the world she’d most been waiting for, and said, ‘My, ain’t you both quite a size.’

‘Just average,’ said Larry, who was gigantic.

‘Louisiana is our baby,’ Norbert told us. ‘She’s just turned seventeen and she shouldn’t really be travelling outside her country yet.’

‘Why, Norbert! Where I come from, we’s
married
at twelve years old – that was the age my mom had me at. Why, honey, we’s
grandmothers
before we’re
your
age.’ She offered us some sponge fingers from a paper bag. ‘I do appreciate your British confectionery,’ she said to me.

‘Together with marmalade, meat sauces, and some
cheeses,’ I answered, ‘biscuits are the only thing we make that’s fit to eat.’

Louisiana paused in the biting of the sponge. ‘Why, Montgomery!’ she cried out in amaze. ‘You said that just like an Englishman.’

‘But I
am
an Englishman, Miss Lamont,’ I told her. ‘I am one.’

‘I know you are. But you said it just like they do.’ She appeared entranced.

A sharp bell rang.

This was the signal for a scattering and caterwauling of coloured boys and girls, racing out of dressing-rooms, tumbling downstairs in a brown and gold cascade, their voices shrill and laughing-screaming, then suddenly, with a last cry and clatter, silent. Larry and I were left alone with their memory, their odour, and little scraps on the floor of their costumes’ straw and feather. He said: ‘We’d best follow them down and see.’

We reached the wings in near darkness, and saw the company sitting on the stage in an oval, staring up at a woman standing in their midst who slowly revolved, talking to one and then the other, like the axis of each one of their destinies. ‘That heavy piece,’ said Larry, in a whisper, ‘is Isabel Cornwallis herself in person.’

Miss Cornwallis was saying to her audience:

‘I want you to understand. All I want is just that you understand me. Why I bring you dancers here to Europe is for a purpose. You think it’s for the money I may make: well, if you think that, will you speak to my accountant, please, or else my lawyer? They’ll tell
you, no. It’s for my art and for my people that I bring you here. The dance is an old, old art, since the days of pre-anthropology and those things. It’s not just shaking your asses round like you children seem to imagine that it is. It’s uplifting, and an honour to participate. It’s also a source of advancement to our people. White folk imagine all we can do is jungle numbers, and ritual dances, and such. That’s why I’ve choreographed our African and Caribbean dances in with classical European and other sources. It shows them we’re up to the highest tones of their endeavour – Norbert, will you stop scratching there in your armpits?’

‘It’s an itch, Miss Cornwallis.’

‘I don’t want no itches in my company. I thought you understood what I’m telling to you, Norbert. You and Moscow and Jupiter here and Huntley are some of my older performers, my stars. It seems like I’m superfluous if you scratch your armpits during my conversation. Which reminds me to tell you what I’ve often said before. Dancers are desiring in their thousands to join the Isabel Cornwallis company. So I don’t have to stay with you, and you don’t have to stay with me, unless each party feels we want to. We’re not obligated to each other in any way. But so long as I have my company, I’m going to keep up my standards of achievement.’

On and on she went, like a playback from a tape recorder. It was clear they had heard all this a million or so times before; yet were none the less fascinated by her flow.

The boy called Jupiter, a creature of breathtaking
dignity and beauty, who sat in serene repose like a work of art more than one of Nature, said, in a high, squealing, petulant voice, ‘Miss Cornwallis, some of the younger performers smell so bad of their perspiring it’s unbearable.’

‘They should use perfume, Jupiter, like you do, and I do, and all self-regarding human beings do.’

‘I wish you’d tell them, Miss Cornwallis. They just stink.’

‘I am telling them, Jupiter, as you can hear.’

Now it was the turn of the boy called Huntley: a slender, graceful light-skinned youth with a Roman rather than a Negro profile.

‘Some of the young performers, Miss Cornwallis,’ he said, in weary, spiteful, yet mellifluous tones, ‘are saying I’m impolite to them when I take class. Now am I the ballet master here, or am I not? That’s what I want to know.’

‘You are, Huntley, since it’s there in your contract that you are, but the man who’s master never need be unpolite. And that reminds me, too, Huntley. You’re getting so pale in this land of sunshine you look almost like a white boy now. You must have some sun-lamp treatment, Huntley, or else use a colouration lotion on your body. This is a coloured company, remember, with all that it implies.’

Larry the GI nudged me. ‘The crazy old bitch,’ he said in dangerous
sotto voce
. ‘How does she get away with it? If it was me, I’d slap her down. And do you know, man? She’s getting so fat only two boys of the
whole company can catch her when she flies through the air like a ton of frozen meat. The others, she knocks them flat.’

Miss Isabel Cornwallis was off again. ‘Just one more thing,’ she said. ‘These parties you’ve been going to, that I’ve heard about. I understand the gay folk, and the rich folk that you meet, and I approve of this association – it’s good for the reputation of the company you should move in high society. But you, Norbert, and you, Moscow, have been seen in peculiar assemblies, so I hear, with people of evil reputation.’

‘If you’re speaking of last Saturday a somebody may have told you or, Miss Cornwallis, it was at a prominent lawyer’s house, and bankers and military officers and also a chief man of police were present there.’

‘Now, please don’t argue with me, Norbert.’

‘If a party’s suitable for the police chief, what can be so wrong with it as that?’

‘It’s not parties I’m talking about, Norbert – it’s how you spend your leisure time when you’re not dancing. You should be visiting the picture museums and cultural centres of which this city’s provided very freely.’

‘All right, Miss Cornwallis, we’ll visit picture museums and study pictures.’

‘Please don’t argue with me, Norbert. It’s not necessary.’

My trance-like fascination was interrupted when a pair of arms clasped me gently, but firmly, round the waist. I turned and saw a short, lissom figure standing on tiptoe, gazing up as if adoringly, and, beside him, a
tall, slender companion, holding two tapering, elongated drums.