There wasn’t even a moon; it was new, and would set early. So we left Pinkie-dog at the Big House for the evening, and Mummy let me have the car after I swore we wouldn’t drink anything at the interval, and we sailed off to Perth for a night on the town.
The show was wonderful. I’d never have seen anything like that if it hadn’t been for Frank. Mémère had only ever taken me to the opera, and that not often. At home it was amateur Gilbert and Sullivan or the pantomime. Once, in a moment of blazing and astonishing good fortune, Sandy met me in London on my way home from school at Christmas and we saw a new play by J.M. Barrie, The Boy David, with original orchestral music in the background like in a moving picture. But good old-fashioned vulgar music-hall entertainment? Not a chance.
The featured star of the variety was a person who went by the stage name Le Sphinx. Ellen was fooled, or possibly just distracted, by the fact that in addition to peppering the audience with French clichés in an American drawl, and as well as singing jazz in a sonorous deep contralto that made you want to take off your clothes and bathe in it, Le Sphinx had skin that was easily as dark as the peat we had been digging in two days ago. The singer stood in long satin gloves and a simple evening gown of bridal white that was constantly shifting to blue and lavender under the lights, with bare thin muscular shoulders and sleek waved hair glittering with diamanté clips. That incredible voice seemed to be whispering to you in particular (you, you, you) as if you were alone together in an empty Parisian nightclub – just you at a table alone with that voice and no one else.
But I was not fooled.
I glanced at Ellen, just once, and she was watching with her mouth open.
At the interval she turned to me and said simply, ‘Thank you. It’s the barriest show I’ve ever seen. Better than a month at the pictures. She’s pure magic.’
‘She’s a man,’ I said.
Ellen burst out laughing.
I said, ‘I swear it.’
‘She’s never a man! You can see down her dress! And in front – you’d see if she was a man, in that tight dress! She never is!’
‘She is. You can hide anything if you want to badly enough.’
Ellen tilted her head, looking at me quizzically. ‘But not from you – why’s that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, thinking about it. ‘I love looking for things that other people haven’t noticed and then trying to fit them together, like jigsaw pieces. You know what a sphinx is – a creature with a lion’s body and a woman’s head? You’d call it “she” in English. But “Le Sphinx” is masculine, so you have to say “he” in French.’
‘Och, away wi’ you, Davie Balfour,’ Ellen teased. ‘You dinnae ken your ain he from she.’
‘Also, it’s the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.’
‘What is?’
‘A man. The Sphinx goes around eating people up because they don’t know the answer to her riddle, and the answer is “a man”.’
Le Sphinx wasn’t in the second act, but during the interval stood with an elbow propped against the bar, sipping a cocktail that glowed green as a starboard light, and autographing programmes.
I linked my arm through Ellen’s to give me courage and stood in the queue to get my ticket stub signed.
‘Vionnet,’ Le Sphinx observed approvingly in that voice like melted chocolate, casting a connoisseur’s eye over my frock. ‘Been shopping in Paris, chérie?’
‘It’s last year’s and you know it,’ I said.
She gave a low and delighted chuckle. Her eyes were black as a moonless December night and reflected the electric lights like stars. ‘A sophisticate,’ she said. ‘Here’s me thinking I was playing a hick town.’
‘Je suis fran?aise,’ I said. ‘Et vous? Un citoyen de Paris?’
I could feel Ellen smouldering beneath my own arm, ill at ease as if she were at sea in this place. We must have looked a very odd pair, me in the shimmering rose and silver Vionnet dress with a little gold velvet evening jacket I’d borrowed from Mummy dangling over my shoulders, and Ellen in her tweed skirt and navy cardigan. She looked perfectly nice, but she wasn’t dressed for the theatre. Her glorious loose hair kept buying her slanted and disapproving looks from the other theatregoers. If I hadn’t been hanging on to her with such schoolgirl-chum determination she could have easily passed as my secretary.
Or my maid. I didn’t want people to think she was my maid. I didn’t want her to feel like people thought she was my maid, so I hung on to her arm as if I were propping her up.
Le Sphinx eyed our partnership with curiosity, then chuckled again and boldly answered my very cheeky question. ‘Oui, chérie, aujourd’hui je suis fran?ais.’
I’d used the masculine form when I called her a ‘citizen’ and she’d done the same when she called herself ‘French’.
She said in English, for Ellen’s benefit, ‘You’ve guessed my riddle. Some people can tell; it’s not a secret. I’m a more exciting performer as a woman, so why not?’
‘You’re the most exciting performer I’ve ever seen,’ I said honestly.
She grinned at me. ‘You’re glowing, ma petite. You think you know men? Did you win the argument about me?’
‘Yes, I won the argument, but not because I know men,’ I said. ‘It’s because – I love to fool people. So I see through them too. You do it for a living and you get it right. And it must take so much courage, to be so different and not be afraid of how people might react. And I …’ I laughed also, at myself. ‘I don’t think I could do what you do. But I am a sphinx too.’
‘Chameleon, maybe. There’s only one sphinx.’ Le Sphinx sipped at the green cocktail, then turned, catlike, on Ellen.
‘And what do you think of me?’
‘I think,’ Ellen said, ‘you must be always lonely.’
‘One of a kind is how I see it.’ She reached for Ellen’s ticket stub and scrawled her stage name across it theatrically, not getting a single drop of green ink on the white silk gloves. ‘Are you afraid of me?’ she asked.
‘A wee bit, aye,’ Ellen admitted with ill-concealed resentment and fascination. She took back the ticket stub as though she expected it to bite her, avoiding touching the gloved hands.
‘What about you, Vionnet? Afraid of me?’
‘I wouldn’t tell you if I was,’ I said.
‘Give me a kiss, ma petite,’ said Le Sphinx, leaning down and offering her cheek. She smelled of powder and hair oil and stage paint and Chanel No 5.
I tilted her smooth chin towards mine with the tip of a finger and lightly touched our lips together. They were just like all the other lips I’d lightly touched this summer: warm and soft and full of human hope and fear and cruelty and kindness.
Ellen laughed. A handful of people at the bar applauded, and a woman in a hat flounced away.
‘I like a daring girl,’ said Le Sphinx.
‘I do try to be daring.’
She laughed. Then she warned quietly, ‘Do try to be careful too. You can be both.’