Operation Nassau (7 page)

He stopped. Dressed in white tuxedo and tie he looked both distinguished and nervous. I was not surprised to observe. He said,’Look, I hate misunderstandings, and I’d like to clear one up. D’you think I could sit down? While they dance?’

I didn’t answer. I was watching the floor. ‘Christ!’ said Wallace Brady with reverence, and sat down unasked. I couldn’t have stopped him.

Dragooned occasionally by fellow students into the Bring-and-Buy Sale for the
King George V Fund for Sailors
, I have known this stiff-arm. roll-and-unroll form of jig to break out, with a stack on the stereo, after the last fruit-cake was bartered. But I have never seen it done with such impassive expertise as Johnson lent to it now.

Her eyes wide open, Denise found herself gripped, twirled, and launched into disciplined motion which lost never a beat, an opportunity, or a new angle for torso or limb. Johnson’s face, which wore a kind smile, altered not at all from the moment he flung her from him into the lip of the trumpet and sucked her with the next beat from the path of the advancing trombone. Lady Edgecombe, ranging quickly from amazed horror to dawning respect, settled for open-mouthed concentration. ‘

In twelve bars she progressed from being an ageing self-centred woman to the firm confidence of an expert performer, and Johnson helped it to happen. Then he released her to dance face to face. They improvised: they came together dead on the beat. They circled. They danced back to back, her long, well-shaped legs flashing; his hair bouncing above the gaudy swish of his tie, the shantung rippling like sheeted snakes down his arms.

‘Christ!’ said Wallace Brady again. ‘Will you look at that? Now. isn’t that just a breeze?’

It was a gale, and it wasn’t hard to look at them either: no one else on the platform was dancing. The diners made a ring around the two of them, applauding and laughing, and at length fell into a regular clap. The musicians dropped out. The drums carried on, coming to a rattling crescendo. Johnson hadn’t slowed up, but you could see the sweat as bright as the Lurex under Denise’s mesh.

I saw Johnson assessing her. He put her into a quick spin, which he braked almost immediately. Then with a brisk heave he swung Lady Edgecombe up to his shoulder where she posed, arms outspread, while he walked off the floor. He let her down, the band stopped, and a great deal of alcoholic cheering broke loose, with some stamping and clapping.

A bottle of champagne, ordered by Wallace Brady, had appeared at our table. As the performers freed themselves and presently approached, Denise bright-eyed and laughing, Johnson mopping his brow, Brady held out two brimming glasses. ‘Sir. we haven’t met, but I hope you’ll accept this in heartfelt tribute. Denise. I want to buy shares.”

‘Wallace Brady,’ I said to Johnson, to make everything clear. I added. ‘You have our congratulations, for as long as your diastolic pressure will allow you to enjoy it.’

He grinned and sat down beside me , accepting the alcohol. ‘Look: no blood.” he observed in reply. And for the next five minutes, blandly, he parried Lady Edgecombe’s intensive if lilting inquiries, while I waited for the music to strike up so that I could make my diminished cordiality to Wallace Brady perfectly clear.

My plan misfired completely. As the band returned, settled, and emitted the first notes of a tango, a brilliant figure arrived at our table, smiled at me and addressed itself to Lady Edgecombe. ‘Dr MacRannoch will tell you I had the honour of meeting your husband on his flight yesterday from New York to Nassau. I come to inquire if he finds himself better?’

He wore a silver rope bracelet and a tunic suit in plain violet silk. Krishtof Bey , the Turkish dancer, came to induce Denise Edgecombe to dance.

She did. She had already performed longer that evening than I personally would have suggested. I doubt, however, if the sure foreknowledge of a major cardiovascular event would have stopped her.

She did well, and her partner’s muscular processes, I admit, were an exceptional treat. They were wildly applauded.

Wallace Brady watched their encore in a trance, his champagne dripping unnoticed on to his shirt cuff. Johnson, catching my eye, made a brief face indicative of deeply sympathetic emotion and excused himself to dry off in the washroom.

Brady came to , mopped up his cufT, and said to me, ‘I want to explain.”

I have no time for tedious repetitions. I said, ‘Do you build bridges?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there is nothing to explain,’ I said. There was no point in thanking him for the champagne, since I was drinking fruit squash.

‘Yes, there is,’ he said. He sounded quite firm, which surprised me. ‘I do make bridges, Dr MacRannoch, and tunnels, and other major constructions which people are fortunately quite pleased to pay for. I have no need to tout for my business, even such important business as The MacRannoch of MacRannoch could give me. In point of fact, as I would have told you if you hadn’t rushed off in such a hurry, I know the Begum Akbar not through your father but because I happen to be doing a job for her on Crab Island. I regard her as a great and elegant lady. I admire a professional in whatever field it may be, and I felt an equal admiration, Dr MacRannoch, for the way you dealt with Bart Edgecombe at that airport, which was why I asked you to golf with me. Not to mention the hypodermic syringe.’

‘What syringe?’ I said. I was unable to prevent myself flushing.

‘It was sticking out of your dressing-gown pocket. Would it have put me to sleep?’ he said. ‘That might have been awkward. The Trueman always makes the beds first thing in the morning.’

‘It would have kept you quiet until the police took you away,’ I said coldly. I do not enjoy being provoked.

‘Incidentally, what did the police do about Bart?’ Brady asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. The next course had come: sliced coconut and orange in sherry. I eyed it without appetite.

‘Well, food-poisoning’s dangerous, isn’t it?’ said Brady. ‘Don’t they have to track down the bacillus by law in case other people get poisoned? Or did they fix the blame on Lady Edgecombe’s crab sandwich?’

‘Luckily, New York seems to have escaped,’ I said. ‘The doctor in charge, I imagine, found the crab was the culprit and took no further action. Certainly there were no police involved that I know of.’

I had got it in before Johnson came back. I saw him as I spoke, threading his way between tables. The music ended at the same time and Pavlova and her partner began to return.

‘Poor Bart,’ said Brady and grinned. ‘He had it public enough as it was, without the cops interfering. Listen, don’t you dance?’

‘No. The place of science,’ I said, ‘is to observe.’

In the end, we were a party of eight for the cabaret, for Krishtof Bey and his three friends insisted on our joining them, and Brady stayed stuck like surgical tape to Lady Edgecombe, Johnson and myself. We walked together out of the light of the restaurant, across the hall and down the dim-lit stairs to the Conch Club. I was not feeling cheerful, and the general inebriated levity of the large crowd accompanying us into almost pitch darkness did nothing to make my mood less gloomy. It came to me that I was probably the only entirely sober person in the room. Then Johnson’s hand gripped my arm lightly, and I realized that I was not. We found a large round table with a red mat, and sat at it.

The cabaret at the Bamboo Conch Club, although paid for by the Ascot, is chosen and run entirely by the chief drummer, Leviticus, whose solo turn on the Congo drums is the subject of most of their publicity. Inside, the architect has tried to give the impression of a native hut, with a wickerwork lining dimly lit by fake torches burning luridly red on the walls. The roof, as I pointed out to Johnson, was low, dodecahedral and wooden, thus increasing both the noise and the fire risk. Round tables like our own pressed against each other without order between the low stage and the doors and an ultraviolet light, placed strategically overhead, made Wallace Brady’s teeth glitter and turned Lady Edgecombe’s tall gin and tonic into a sugar-frosted tumbler of silver. I ordered a jug of fruit squash, and Johnson, surprisingly, a magnum of champagne. Krishtof Bey had whisky and water.

I was listening to him attempting to explain to a waiter, against the uproar of conversation and the near tinkling of a small piano, that he wished an admixture of water, not carbonated liquid or ice, when someone slammed me on the back and said, ‘Blimey, it’s Dr MacRannoch! Hullo, Doctor! How are you, Doctor? I didn’t expect to run across you in these parts, I must say. How’s the chop and rummage trade?’

It was Sergeant Trotter. Sergeant Rodney Trotter, who had been in the Monarch Lounge when Edgecombe took ill. He was lightly intoxicated, with a blood-alcohol level, I estimated, of 120 milligrams to the hundred, or so.

I said, ‘Sergeant Trotter. Let me introduce Johnson Johnson, the portrait-painter. And this is Lady Edgecombe, whose husband was taken ill in New York. Lady Edgecombe, the Sergeant here was most helpful both in the airport and on the flight the following morning.”

Denise Edgecombe gave the Sergeant her hand with strictly moderate warmth, but Johnson edged a free chair one-handed beside him and lifted his bottle out of the ice bucket. ‘A glass of champagne. Sergeant?’

It was not my place to point out the effect of this upon an unknown quantity of iced beer. He accepted and sat down, grinning, next to Brady as all the lights except the ultraviolet one went out.

There is no nobler sound, to my mind, than a march of massed pipes and drums playing Tail Toddle. I learned to pipe, as a girl, back in Scotland. Trained on this, the aural senses could withstand, as they were now called upon to do, a full percussion group of drums and marimba, trumpets, saxophone, piano and electric organ. The resulting cacophony, in quick tempo, made speech quite impossible and even, as I saw glancing around me, acted as a mild anaesthetic. Under the assault, the faces of Lady Edgecombe, Trotter and Krishtof Bey’s companions displayed a type of ultraviolet-lit stupor. Krishtof Bey himself merely showed pleasure, and Johnson, a glass in one hand, was drumming on the table with the other in time with the beat. Wallace Brady was watching me. I looked away.

The singer came on, in frilled peach-coloured satin, slit to the knee. The songs in these quarters are predictable: ‘Yellow Bird’; ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’; ‘Island in the Sun’; proceeding purposefully through a brief range of calypsos and finishing with ‘Back to Back and Belly to Belly’ about the third serving of alcohol.

With enthusiasm, the other members of my party ran this predictable gamut. All the verses of ‘Shame and Scandal in the Family’ were sung without stint by Johnson. Denise, following his lead, slightly out of tune, was becoming faintly confused. The singer left, and Leviticus walked up to his drums. ‘Leviticus’s Number,’ said Johnson, and signalled the red-waistcoated waiter for another bottle of champagne.

Leviticus was of typically African appearance: the face strongly prognathous, the nasal bridge flattened, the two rows of teeth approximately parallel and in excellent condition. He wore black trousers and a black-and-white-striped shirt unbuttoned to the waist, with a large gold locket glittering on his chest. Due to the drumming, the muscular development of neck and shoulders was almost sufficient to dwarf the profile of jawbone and chin: to shake his hand, as I had once done, was like gripping a flat plank of wood.

He came forward and sat facing us, between his two tall oval drums. The electric organ began, followed by the saxophone and trumpets, and, as they gained tempo, Leviticus joined in, the thudding beat mingling agreeably with the strident instruments in a strong rhythm which visibly excited his audience. Then the other instruments reached their fortissimo and broke off, leaving Leviticus to continue his drumming alone.

The effect on a healthy adult of insistent rhythmic experience these days is a common subject for study. At the Bamboo Conch Club that night I watched with interest four hundred people receive the maternal seventy-two p.m. heartbeat with ecstasy. The drummer showed great skill in his evocations. From an exercise in varying resonance he insensibly improved on the speed until he reached a single-toned patter of sound, so quick that the notes blurred one into the other and the bleached palms, flat and flickering, moved too fast for the eye. Behind the barrier of sound a broken rhythm made itself felt, deeper in tone, syncopated and stealthy: it stopped; the drumming stopped, and Leviticus began slowly to slap the parchment of each drum with his hands.

It seemed to me that I could feel the resonance of it in my soft palate, interspersed with bony clatter from my tympanic plates, as tempo, tone and timbre changed from second to second. Leviticus played with incision, his head flung up and down with the rhythm, the speed and colour of the rattling beats stirring the motionless audience, his hands raking curves in the air from one drum to the other.

A ball overhead began to revolve, light from coin-like apertures spinning over the musician’s face, chest, throat and hands in a long wheeling spatter. The drumming rose to a frenzy. Leviticus’s head turned from side to side, his eyes rolling, his upper lip long and underfolded, his nostrils distended. His body glittered with sweat. I wondered what I would do if he had a frank haemorrhage into the ponto-midbrain junction, as seemed very likely. The noise stopped.

The intoxicated applause continued for a long time, and was greeted most civilly by Leviticus, who finally signalled for silence. He then leaned forward, and placing his left elbow carefully on the light skin of the drum, he began with his right hand to pat out a tune on the parchment.

Performed on a single drum surface, the range of notes available to him was not of course large. However, by adjusting the strain on the skin, he produced a simple tune, very soon recognizable. The audience, with shouts of joy, began to break into song with the words, and he acknowledged with smiles their acuity. He played several in fact, and they roared them all in cheerful oblivion. ‘Jingle Bells’ I remember was one. ‘Merrily We Go Along’ I suspect was another. English student songs were never my forte, even when among students in England. ‘Don’t you sing, Dr MacRannoch?’ said Sergeant Trotter, pausing for an iron-lunged breath.