The first thing he notices as they return to the great chamber is that every member of the little orchestra has turned his face to the wall. They play on with their backs to the proceedings, their chins lowered, and even their leader has his toes a mere inch from the skirting, so that when he becomes too inspired in his conducting he raps his knuckles against the panelling.
‘What is afoot?’ asks Mr Hancock, his hand in Angelica’s. All the party have moved off the floor, standing three or four men deep in a circle. Some lounge on couches, some even having their hair and lapels fondled by girls, but even they are strangely watchful, craning their necks to regard the room.
‘The entertainment is about to begin,’ says Angelica, and at that moment there is a little rustling of excitement, and Mrs Chappell, strident as a schoolmistress, announces:
‘A dance! The sirens and the sailors.’
The footmen open the doors wide and first there enter eight boisterous young men, naked to the waist, wearing neckerchiefs and white broadcloth trousers that flap above their ankles. As the orchestra strikes up they execute a swift hornpipe, their neckerchiefs flying and their feet stamping. A little shine of sweat breaks out in the hollows of their backs, and above the stamping can be heard the careful rhythm of their breathing. They have scrubbed young faces, their jaws barely fuzzed, and their bodies are smooth and hairless.
‘Those boys never went to sea!’ scoffs Mr Hancock as the crowd applauds, but Angelica nudges him in the ribs.
The boys are still for a moment, their feet wide apart and their chests rising and falling in the glister of the chandeliers. Now the doors are opened again and the sound of high, liquid female singing floods the room. The crowd murmurs: the room seems to Mr Hancock to rise a degree or two in temperature, and is suddenly filled with eyes, all the men blinking and peering about, looking sharply here and there for what is coming. The light sits in many tiny stars on their moist lower lids.
Thus enter, singing, eight beautiful girls, the finest from Mrs Chappell’s stables. Each holds a comb and a mirror, her hair falling over her shoulders and back, and each is as good as naked. They wear seed pearls around their necks, and their hair is sprigged with coral and laced with ropes of pearls, but they make no attempt to cover their breasts or their bellies. Skeins of sea-green chiffon hang from their wrists and float behind them, and around their waists they wear ingenious girdles of mother-of-pearl, a very many crescents strung together to suggest a row of scales, shimmering and clinking as the mermaids move their hips. A few slivers fall down fore and aft, rather in coyness than in true modesty, for he sees clear as day that all the hair upon their mounds of pleasure has, by some cunningness, been turned as green as the moss that fringes a seaside rock-pool.
‘Ah! They are well done!’ cries Angelica, breaking out into applause.
‘If they set out to give themselves arsenic poisoning,’ says Mr Hancock, but not so that it may be heard by anybody but himself. More loudly he adds, ‘I never saw such a thing,’ which is more diplomatic but no less sincere, for indeed he is nearly as astounded by these mermaids as he was by his own genuine article. He is also as little delighted. He recognises among the girls those he has seen before – the dusky one from downstairs, her nipples dark as raisins, her eyes closed as she begins a languid dance – and it does not feel quite easy to be looking upon those little misses, whom he still half-thinks of as errant housemaids or runaway daughters. He sees that their bodies are beautiful but he feels nothing but avuncular concern: to lay hand on such a child, at his age, seems both unseemly and distasteful.
‘And yet who am I to say,’ he reprimands himself. ‘I do not make the tastes. That is for the great men in the room.’
The girls form themselves into a line, facing at two yards’ distance the line of sailors, and as the musicians play on they sing a new song.
‘Now the seduction begins,’ whispers Angelica, and truly as the girls sing and beckon, the sailors begin slowly to advance upon them. The girls are coquettish behind their mirrors, stretching thick locks of their hair out from their heads with the combs, and letting the curls fall back over their shoulders all in perfect unison.
It is at this moment that Mr Hancock perceives that the sailors’ enthusiasm for the sirens is not an act. In each of their broadcloth trousers there is an unmistakable heaving, which only grows more noticeable with each flick of the girls’ hair, each lovely sway of their naked hips.
‘What is happening?’ he asks sharply. The mood in the room – that watchful eagerness he noticed even before the girls’ entrance – has not dissipated. In fact it is building. The men are more alert than ever, and there is a steam of sweat amongst them, a strange tight breathlessness. Somebody lets out a small groan. The girls are dancing like true river-nymphs from an ancient fresco, their bosoms quivering upon their ribcages, sliding and yielding with their stretching muscles. And every man but Mr Hancock has his hand in his breeches.
‘What is this?’ he whispers. The man at his side is engaged in noisy wet kissing with one of the young ladies, and she is fumbling urgently at his belt buckle. The others watch the dance with terrible keenness, their wrists working vigorously, as the mermaids wilt into the arms of the sailors. And as the eight sailors’ hands slide up the flanks of their eight mermaids in perfect unison, and eight bright nipples are rolled between eight sets of finger-and-thumb, these old men begin to disrobe themselves, shaking off their jackets and loosening their cravats. The mermaids seem almost to swim against their lovers, their bodies nudging and undulating in a way that is so perfectly, strictly dance-like but which is not a dance any longer.
The sailor partnered with the mulatto girl is the first to unbuckle his trousers, but the other seven follow in quick choreographed succession.
‘I think they do not mean to stop,’ says Mr Hancock.
Angelica is watching intently and critically, like a woman at a new play. ‘Stop?’ she says. ‘Why, no. They are only just begun.’
Everywhere around the room, just at waist height, is a-flutter with movement. Men pleasure themselves as if in private, with their shirts falling open over their hairy bellies. Mr Hancock knows now how best each of eleven Members of Parliament likes to be touched. Some stand to watch the proceedings unfold; others have already retreated to couches, loosing the tapes of their ladies’ white gowns so they fall away from their bodies like sea foam, and these lovely nymphs knead and flatter their flaccid lovers into enthusiasm.
The sailors drop their trousers. Their bowsprits are extended.
‘Sheath up!’ booms Mrs Chappell. ‘If you did not purchase protection on the way in, you must avail yourself of it now. If I see any man going into the breach without armour, you may be sure he will never make another sally.’ A maid, artfully draped, scuttles in with a vast marble dish of milk, in which the cundums have been soaked to perfect tenderness. Mrs Chappell shakes one dry and holds it aloft for the crowd to see. ‘No excuses!’
The sailors grasp the mermaids’ hips, the assembled worthies in the front row bring out their members to air, and Mr Hancock blunders for the door. He pushes through the men, crouched and lewd as baboons, without looking at them: he is even more anxious not to touch them, and he struggles through with his arms raised up to guard his face, using his forearms and elbows to force his path.
Angelica is pursuing him. ‘Where are you going?’ she asks, when she catches him up on the landing. He is sucking in deep breaths of the air, as a swimmer surfacing.
‘I am leaving,’ he says.