City of Spades

12

Splendour of flesh made into dream


For several weeks, my life in the flat had been transformed: Norbert and Moscow had made themselves at home. ‘It sure is Bohemian here,’ Norbert said, ‘and we’ll not be in your way.’ They hardly were, indeed; for so much did they overflow about the place, flinging heady articles of clothing everywhere, singing naked on the stairs down to the bath, entertaining, at all hours, their wide circle of acquaintances, that I became almost the interloper in my dwelling, and feared to inconvenience them, rather than they me. Yet though so entirely heartless, and so rigorously selfish, they radiated such bonhomie, were perpetually so high-spirited and so amiable, laughed, danced and chattered so abandonedly, that even Theodora was won over. ‘Of course, I prefer Africans,’ she said, ‘they’re more authentic. But these young Americans certainly have charm.’

Carrying her cat Tungi, she was paying me a morning visit (such as, in earlier days, she’d never made) while my lodgers were out at their rehearsal. ‘I only wish,’ I said, ‘they wouldn’t use the telephone quite so recklessly. I caught Norbert calling up Jackson, Mississippi, yesterday, and really had to put my foot down.’

‘“Put your foot down”!’ Theodora irritated me by repeating with superior disdain. ‘You’re quite unable to say no to them about anything.’

‘And you, my dear Theodora?’ I could not resist asking. ‘Have you not succumbed, despite your initial indifference, even hostility, to coloured people?’

‘My feeling for them is selective, just as it would be with one of us. I don’t admire coloured people in the mass, like you do.’

‘You mean you’ve fallen in love with one individually, and I haven’t.’

Theodora, touched on the raw, assumed her severe departmental manner. ‘For some time now, Montgomery,’ she told me, ‘I’ve been wanting to say just what I think. And it’s this. Your interest in these people is prompted by nothing more than a vulgar, irresponsible curiosity.’

‘Thank you, Theodora.’

‘You like to be the odd man out, and lord it over them.’

‘I’m happy with them. It’s as simple as that.’

‘If you call that happiness.’

‘I do.’

She shifted, woman-like, her ground.

‘It’s the crude animal type that attracts you most of all. It’s simply another form of nostalgie de la boue. You’ve taken the easy way and are losing face, even with them. Do you see anything, for instance, of the intelligent types? The coloured intellectuals?’

I decided a dressing-down was due. ‘In the first place, I’d remind you, Theodora, that I see much of Mr Karl Marx Bo. I listened to him addressing a meeting only last Sunday in Hyde Park, and we had a long and angry conversation afterwards. As for you, my dear, and your predilections, would you really describe Johnny Fortune as an intellectual?’

‘He’s most intelligent.’

‘I don’t deny it; but not lacking, I would say, in animal attraction.’

‘He’s handsome, in the way they are – yes.’

‘Theodora, I don’t wish to be unkind, but you’re pathetic. Why not admit you love him?’

She looked at me long and hard. ‘Because I’m ashamed to,’ she said at last. ‘Not ashamed because he’s coloured, or, as you say, animal, or anything else, but because it’s a feeling so strong I can’t control it. I’m not used to that, and I can’t cope.’

I ventured to pat her on her unyielding shoulder. ‘Perhaps that’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps one should not be able to dominate every situation …’

She looked to be crying, so I considerately turned away. ‘They’re so appalling!’ she said at last, quite softly. ‘So tender and so heartless. So candid and so evil!’

It was my turn now, I felt – from the depths of what was, after all, a wider experience than her own and, so I thought, one more dearly won – to lecture her.

‘I don’t think you must take,’ I said, ‘a moral attitude towards these people: or rather, a moral attitude within the English terms of reference. I don’t think you must suppose, if they seem to you such charming sinners, beyond good and evil (or before it, rather), that the devil has therefore marked them for his own.’

‘Why not?’ she said, rather sulkily.

‘Use your historical sense, Theodora – one certainly far better documented than my own. Remember, for instance, that in parts of Africa not a soul had ever heard of Christianity less than a hundred years ago …’

‘Where hadn’t they, precisely?’

‘Don’t be pedantic. In Uganda, for example. May I go on?’

‘But Johnny doesn’t come from Uganda.’

‘Who said he did? Can’t we move, just for a second, from the particular to the general?’ I was quite exasperated.

‘Go on, then.’

‘I shall. You should therefore remember that if coloured men seem, to your eyes, more happily amoral than we are, they have other spiritual ties, quite unknown to us, and very different from our own, that are every bit as strong.’

‘Such as?’

‘Don’t interrupt. They have sacred tribal loyalties, for instance, of which we feel absolutely nothing that’s equivalent. If Johnny had been a Gambian like those boys who set on me that evening, and of the same tribe as they were, he certainly wouldn’t have helped me, however close our friendship.’

‘The more fool he.’

I restrained myself. ‘There’s another thing,’ I went on. ‘The family. We think our family ties are precious, or, at any rate, that we should feel so. But they’re nothing at all to theirs. Have you noticed, when an African makes a solemn promise, what he says to you?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘He says, “I swear it on my mother’s life.”’

‘And probably breaks his word.’

‘Oh, no doubt! Just as we do when we swear upon our gods, or on our sacred books. The point I’m trying to convey, though, to the frosty heights of your Everest intelligence, dearest Theodora, is that there are entirely different moral concepts among different races: a fact which leads to endless misunderstandings on the political and social planes, and makes right conduct in you, for instance, seem idiotic to Johnny Fortune, and some gesture of his which he believes necessary and honourable to seem foolish, or even wicked, in your eyes.’

‘Don’t bully me, Montgomery,’ she said. ‘You’re as bad as he is.’

‘I’m sorry, Theodora. Let’s have some coffee in the kitchen, if I can find my way through the provocative underclothes my lodgers have hung there in festoons.’

She put Tungi down and came and helped me make it, turning thoughtfully over the gossamer vests and pants that rested on the lines.

‘Have you seen Johnny lately?’ I asked, as I handed her a cup.

‘Yes, several times, and he telephones. But I’m worried about him, Montgomery! If only he’d work!’

‘He’s a lazy lad, I fear.’

‘Like you. How is your freelancing going?’

‘It’s not.’

‘I thought it wasn’t. And Johnny does absolutely nothing – only stays with that squalid woman.’

‘If you knew Muriel better, you’d not call her so.’

‘At all events, her sister’s little friend is now in jail.’

‘Billy Whispers being sentenced has nothing to do with Muriel, Theodora. Do be consistent. And don’t gloat.’

‘Johnny said he got six months.’

‘For being an accessory to a wounding, yes. But the evidence against him was given by a Mr Cannibal – the sentence had nothing to do with Dorothy, even less with Muriel.’

She pondered and sipped her coffee. I saw her eyes become transfixed by a peculiar garment. ‘What on earth’s this?’ she said.

‘It’s what the French call a “slip” or, more accurately, a “zlip”. The boys wear it when they dance. Which reminds me. There’s a matinée this afternoon. Would you like to come?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be so ungracious, Theodora. You ought to see them. After all, my guests are courteous to you round about the house …’

‘Oh, very well, then. I could do with a day off – and the Corporation owe me plenty. I’ll call my secretary.’

For a matinée, the place was crowded, principally with males, and with a fair peppering of coloured admirers of the Isabel Cornwallis company. I noticed, and greeted in the foyer, Mr Lord Alexander, to whom Theodora, once she heard who he was, behaved most graciously – she had apparently become a collector of his records; and also Mr Cranium Cuthbertson, who did not please her possibly because, poking her in the ribs and bending double with amusement, he cried out in a familiar fashion, ‘You’s the hep-cat what stole Mr Vial’s puss-cat!’ Bells rang, and we went inside the auditorium to see how the Cornwallis company would achieve that most difficult of theatrical feats – the creation of illusion just one hour after the midday meal.

Although I’d seen the show so often before (almost nightly), I marvelled once again at the complete transformation of these bitter, battling egoists, with their cruel jealousies and bitchy gossip, their pitiless trampling ambition, and their dreadful fear of the day, some time so near in their late thirties, when they could dance no more – into the gracious, vigorous, sensual creatures I saw upon the stage. By Miss Cornwallis’s alchemy, the sweaty physical act of dancing became an efflorescence of the spirit! True, there were tricks theatrical innumerable, but Isabel Cornwallis was wiser than she knew: because her raw material, the dancers, possessed an inner dignity and nobility, of which even she could hardly be aware, but knew, by instinct, how to use. These boys and girls seemed incapable of a vulgar gesture! And as they danced, they were clothed in what seemed the antique innocence and wisdom of humanity before the Fall – the ancient, simple splendour of the millennially distant days before thought began, and civilisations … before the glories of conscious creation, and the horrors of conscious debasement, came into the world! In the theatre, they were savages again: but the savage is no barbarian – he is an entire man of a complete, forgotten world, intense and mindless, for which we, with all our conquests, must feel a disturbing, deep nostalgia. These immensely adult children, who’d carried into a later age a precious vestige of our former life, could throw off their twentieth-century garments, and all their ruthlessness and avarice and spleen, and radiate, on the stage, an atmosphere of goodness! of happiness! of love! And I thought I saw at last what was the mystery of the deep attraction to us of the Spades – the fact that they were still a mystery to themselves.

‘I can’t take any more,’ said Theodora at the interval. ‘They’re too upsetting.’

‘Can’t you stick it out until the end? We could meet them at the stage door and have some tea.’

‘You stay: I’ll go back to the office.’

We went out in the foyer. ‘Be sure you say something nice to them back at the flat, Theodora,’ I said to her. ‘You’re so parsimonious with your praise.’

‘I won’t know what to say.’

‘Just praise them. It’s all they want.’

I saw her to a taxi. Hurrying back into the theatre, amid clanging bells, I was detained by the odious Alfy Bongo.

‘You again!’

‘Yes, it’s me. Ain’t they the tops?’

‘Of course. I want to see them, though, not you. Farewell.’

He plucked at my arm. ‘You heard Billy Whispers and Ronson Lighter have gone inside?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘They should have got a good lawyer. It’s hopeless without. I told them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

‘Look! I want to see the show.’

He followed me into the theatre, already dark. ‘They should have gone to Mr Zuss-Amor,’ he whispered. ‘Remember the name – it’s Zuss-Amor.’