Earthly Powers (22 page)

       "You should hear Carlo sing mass," Domenico said. "Like a dog." And he looked with a dog's adoration at Hortense, a known gambit which she was too young to know, unless that art master—I must ask her about that art master.

       "Can you dance?" Hortense asked.

       "Oh, I can do all the latest dances," Domenico said i'i feigned boasting. "The Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot and the Castle Walk."

       "Everybody's doing it," sang Hortense with the same sweetness as for the "Ode to Joy."

       "Doing it, doing it," sang Domenico. "Addition, s'il vous plait," pulling out a wad of francs with the kind of bored automatism of one who always pays the bills, which was not true.

       There was dancing going on at the Louisiane, not far from the Casino. "Ah, the famous Casino," Hortense said, as we got out of the cab.

       "That word," Domenico said, with the hint of a leer, "is not a word used politely in Italy. A casino, you see, is a little house."

       "A little house in Ventimiglia," I said brutally, "for example," prematurely perhaps warningly, a warning itself being a kind of encouragement. Domenico flashed a warning of his own back, though with leering warmth in it, being encouraged.

       "You mean a bordel," Hortense said in her clear innocent girl's voice. "I see," looking at the rococo prettiness of the façade. "So that's what it is really. I read in The Illustrated London News I think it was about Mata Hari there and the other one, La Belle whoever it was, covered in jewels and nothing else. So the gambling is just a thing, you know, a whatsit."

       "Pretext," I said. "No, not true. A difference between French and Italian Usage."

       "My holy brother has been very lucky in there," Domenico said. "A French kind of casino is permitted to a holy man."

       I did not like this sort of talk. I must get Domenico on that damned train to Milan very soon. And Hortense wouldn't like that, released from cold England to the smile of southern teeth, wooed southernly by an Italian musician of good looks and family whose brother was a priest, meaning he wouldn't go too far, her spoilsport own brother as gloomy protector of her honour and him a homosexual anyway, what right had he and so on. We went downstairs into the Louisiane.

       "Goodness," Hortense said, "a genuine fig to make it authentic." But the black man in the little band was, from his features, only authentically Senegalese; he played his cornet like a colonial army bugler. The saxophonist, pianist, banjoist and drummer were whites. They played from sheet music, commercial or diluted ragtime not real jazz. The banjoist was singing, in Frenchified American, an old song by W. C. Handy called "The St. Louis Blues": "I love dat gal like a schoolboy loves his pie, Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint an' rye, I'll love ma baby till de day I die."

       "Let's dance," Hortense said to Domenico, and it was left to me to order three beers. The decor of the place was black and white, as if the artist had studied the illustrations in Wyndham Lewis's 1915 Blast, and the motif seemed to be of stylized Manhattan skyscrapers ready to topple. The Modern Age, Jazz Age, we were into it now. There was a loud American with two local girls, a beefy man who proclaimed himself as hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio, round at the ends and high in the middle, probably left over from his country's Expeditionary Force, in some racket or other to do perhaps with sides of army beef, spending freely. He shouted at the band to play "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" and they did. He sang: "Remember when we get there honey, The twosteps I'm goin' to have 'em all."

       He decided he would cut in on Domenjco and Hortense but Domenico was not having that. Hortense said, "You sit down like a good little boy."

       "Eo," the man from Cincinnati said, "gud leedle bawee."

       "All right," I said, "cut it out."

       He was three tables away and feigned not to have fully caught my rebuke. He aped a deaf old man, beefy hand cupped at ear, and said, "You make some remark, my friend?"

       "I asked you to cut it out."

       "Thought that's what you said," he said, and he tottered over to me. "Hog's piss," he said of the three beers on the table, making a gesture of being ready to smash them to the floor. "Garsong," he called, "whisky tooty sweety for this main sewer." The waiter did not respond. "Frogs," the man said to me, knocking one chair over but sitting on another. "Spilled good red blood for the bastards, drove the Krauts out of fucking Frogland and what you get?"

       "Watch the language," I said. "My sister's not used to it."

       "Sister, you got a sister?" He swerved round to look at Hortense then back again to me, achieving with some difficulty a maitre d'hôtel's bunched finger spécialité de its maison kiss. "You sure have," he said. "Cute little can there, see it shimmy, aaaaaoooo," doing a dog howl. "British?" he said. "You British sure were a long time getting the Hun on the run, I'll say, I'll tell the world, aaaaaoooo, garsong, whisky tooty sweety," and, in his beefy swerve, he sent a full beer glass crashing. It was then that Domenico left Hortense on the floor and came over smiling with his good Italian mouth. He now disclosed something I had not suspected in him, though I knew it to be an aspect of Italian gang protectionism, namely neat professional, as it were musical, violence. Meaning that in a swift clean and economical rhythm he slashed the Ohio man with his ringed right hand thrice on his beef face, in a single measure of slowish mazurka time. This surprised Cincinnatian, whose town was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general of great and simple virtue, looked up at Domenico open-mouthed, an aitch of bursting red on cheeks and upper lip.

       "Now," said Domenico, "we leave." And to the bald moustached manager, troubled, coming to see what the trouble was: "Ce monsieur américain va payer." Then we were off, and Hortense's eyes shone in delight and, for Domenico, admiration. This was better than dreary cold old England, and she'd not been here yet for much more than half a day. She wanted to go dancing somewhere else, where perhaps there might be other rude Americans to be slashed by Domenico, but I said no, home. But then, just outside a bar called the Palac (which might have been an English word in adventitious apocope or else the Serbo-Croat for Thumb), I was given my own chance to put down brutishness. A young fair-haired man was being sick on the pavement and two Monegascan policemen were bullying him to stop vomiting in public or else come with them, vomiting or not, to the lockup. The young man said, very English, "I've said I'm sorry, damn it, look, one can't really stop this sort of thing, something I ate, fish or something, oh dear, I have to again," and he did. While doing it he was punched on the shoulder by one of the constables, and the other laughed. I was over there at once with my good maternal French, abashing them. How dare they, did they not know who this was, a personal friend of His Serene Highness, and so on.

       "Where do you live?" I asked the young man.

       "A village in Berkshire, you may not know it. As for stay, here that is, hotel up the hill there, the Immoral, Balmoral that is, little joke, very moral place really, oh my God here we go again." So I held his head. The policemen went through the gestures of saying I was in charge, get him off the street, look at all that defilement of the pavement of the playground of the rich, disgusting (they did a kind of long-skirt-lifting mime), does the place no kind of good, then they saluted me and marched off. "Awfully sorry about all this," the young man said. "My name's Curry," holding up his hand for shaking while, perhaps under the stimulus of his own name, he got more up and then, splash, down.

       "Look," Hortense said, "while you're being the Good Samaritan, can't Domenico and I go dancing somewhere else and see you there?"

       "See you in the bar of the Hotel de Paris," I said. Not home this time, oh dear me no, not those two together alone going home, oh no. So off they went, her arm in his. A handsome couple, much of a height. "Better?" I said to the young Curry. "Ready to try walking up the hill? Take deep breaths, go on, really deep."

       "You're really being most awfully decent. It was some damned fish I ate, loup or something, wolf that means, wolfing a wolf, oh my God." But there seemed little more to come up. He stood upright and sniffed in briskly sea air. "Better, I think. That loup is still around though, flying through the ozone, I can smell it, a bloody werewolf, I say, what's the French for werewolf?"

       "Loup garou. Those police, look, are still looking. Can you walk more or less straight?" I took his left elbow and trembled. The first male flesh, or bone at least, I had handled since, ah God. "You needn't just blame the loup for my benefit," I said. "You've ingested more than loup tonight."

       "Looooo garOOOOO. I say, I like that. Very well, right turn, quick whatsit." And off we went. "My name," he said, "is, no, better not say it, damned unfortunate name sometimes, can't stand the stuff, Indian muck."

       "I know it. It's to do with leather."

       "Ah, know it, do you? Interesting. Don't know yours though." He was weakishly handsome, very blond, thin, supple, smart in grey serge unspotted by vomit, a neat vomiter, not like, say, a Glaswegian at Hogmanay. "Ought to know yours really." I told him. "Ah, I like that. Rhymes with roomy, gloomy. To do with tombs, is it? Tomby. Grave, gravy. Oh my dear God." He heaved emptily.

       "Deep breaths. See, we're there."

       The little vestibule lounge was quite empty. He flopped, done, spent, soft, supple, edible, on a soft settee. I sat down more stiffly, saying, "You're here alone?"

       "Orphan," he said. "Only got aunts and things who don't give a Chinese damn. Just jumped twenty-one so that's all right as far as administration of things goes." He drunkenly thumbed his nose at someone unseen.

       "Half an orphan, me," I said. "Just buried my mother. Flu, you know."

       "Mine," he said boastfully, "was seen off in the second month of the war. In the VAD, matron. Bomb on base hospital near Mauberge. The old man was luckier. Amazing luck till Amiens, less than a year back. Sir James. That makes yours humbly and sincerely Sir Richard." He puffed himself up and then collapsed into tired limp thinness again.

       "All, baronet."

       "Sir Dick, Bart. Got a handle to it. I say, I've a mouth like a whatsit. Uncleaned parrot cage. Could do with some Perrier or Evian or something. Eau minerale," he called to the solitary man at the desk, writing. "You got any of that?" The man shrugged, peeked toward the vestibule clock, put an arm out at a closed bar, locked cupboards, then wrote again. "All well, got some upstairs, a drop," Sir Richard Curry Bart said, "in my gloomy room." The sight of writing, my rimesakes, then the memory of my name made him then turn with some small vigour toward me and say, "I say, you said Toomey. Are you Toomey who writes things? That Toomey?"

       "I've written things, yes. Kenneth M. Toomey, playwright, novelist, that sort of nonsense, yes."

       "Well, that Toomey and no stuck-up big lyamity, the Good Samaritan and all that rot, I say, that was kind, I shall remember that."

       "You're staying long?"

       "Thought of going to Barcelona. I say, I read one of your things, all about her heavy hair and heavy breasts and their lips were glued in a, ugh, I can taste that damned loo garoo."

       "It tastes that way to me too," I said. "What the public wants. The law doesn't allow some of us to be honest, if you know what I mean." He knew all right. Bright green eyes though a little bloodshot appraised me under a fallen blond lock. "That dare not speak its name, if you know what I mean." Oh, he knew all right.

       "Live here, do you?" he said. "Marine villa and chauffeur and apéritifs on the terrace?"

       "Nothing like that. Not a bit like that, not yet. I say, why don't you get a decent night's sleep and perhaps we could have a bit of a chat tomorrow if you feel like it. Have lunch if you want. Get a decent lunch here, do you?"

       "A bit gloomy, the dining room downstairs. Quiet, though. See you about oneish if you like, make up our minds about it. No loo garoo, though. What do I call you besides Mr Toomey?"

       "Oh, Ken will do very well. They all call me Ken."

       "When a new planet swam into his, right, Ken it is, Ken. I have a small bottle of, upstairs, not such a good idea, no, I can see that. Bedfordshire, sir, my old man used to say. Home's in Berkshire, great big bloody house, roomy, gloomy, coming up all the time now those aren't they, tomby, yes, you could say that. Tomorrow, then." And he got up. We shook hands, I gripping his warmly, his yielding, limp, boneless. Then I remembered that Hortense and Domenico were in the Hotel de Paris bar waiting, and that he, hot on seduction, would be getting her drunk. So I didn't see Sir Dick to the lift.

       Hortense was drinking crème de menthe frappée and laughing too much. Domenico was telling her some story that made her laugh. As far as I knew, Domenico knew no funny stories. When I went up to them they turned from each other, together on the red velvet banquette, to grin at me with what I would have termed in those days affectionate derision. Or, if you wish, the derision of conspiratorial heterosexuality, two young people who found each other attractive—no, wait, that young is vague and dangerous: Hortense was a child, Domenico an unattached man, hence by definition a womaniser, Latin also, also not of my persuasion—and were encouraged to be bold by their shared knowledge of my sexual aberrancy, an ambulant dirty joke forced upon them; nothing like a dirty joke to foster intimacy. And of course I saw what I was doing and saw why my position was hopeless: proposing an affair in a hotel bedroom and thus taking time off from guarding Hortense from possible indeed probable indeed certain importunacy from Domenico. "Pouring in oil and wine," Hortense said crudely. Then she hiccuped like a character in a French comic paper: hips. Domenico was delighted to bang her on the back. She separated her back from the banquette so that he could bang it better.