City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,48

of my personal intentions.

5

The southern performers at the Candy Bowl

Though Larry the GI had been wonderfully entertaining (telling me of how it was back home in Cleveland, Ohio, with Pop and Mom and his six young brothers, including the one who was in love with horses), I began to miss Johnny; and explored all the Sphere’s bar cubicles, until I met Ronson Lighter, and learnt he’d already left. These sudden disappearances I was by now used to, so I went back to Larry and suggested we both have lunch. ‘Man, here’s no food,’ he answered. ‘So why don’t we go down to the Candy Bowl?’

He said this was the club most preferred by coloured Americans, and he told me he had two swell southern friends of his he’d like to have me meet – performers in the Isabel Cornwallis ballet company, now visiting the city, and stirring up a deal of excitement in balletic and concentric circles.

How little one ever knows of one’s home town! I’d been in that courtyard a dozen times, but never sensed the presence of the Candy Bowl: which, it is true, looked from outside like an amateur sawmill, but once through its doors, and past a thick filter of examining attendants, it was all peeled chromium and greasy plush, with dim pink and purple lights, and strains of drum and guitar music from the basement. GIs, occasionally in uniform, but mostly wearing suits of best English material and of best transatlantic cut, lounged gracefully around, draped on velours benches, or elegantly perched upon precarious stools.

Sitting at a table by the wall, writing letters, were two boys in vivid Italian sweaters. ‘That’s the pair of them,’ said Larry, ‘ – Norbert and Moscow. Norbert you’ll find highly strung, but he’s quite a guy. Moscow’s more quiet, a real gentleman.’ We drew near to their table. ‘I want you to know my good friends Norbert Salt and Moscow Gentry,’ Larry said. ‘Boys, this is Montgomery Pew.’

Norbert Salt had a golden face you could only describe as radiant: candidly delinquent, and lit with a wonderful gaiety and contentment. His friend Moscow Gentry’s countenance was so deep in hue that you wondered his white eyes and teeth weren’t dyed black by all the surrounding blue-dark tones: a face so obscure, it was even hard to read his changes of expression.

‘Montgomery,’ said Larry, ‘is mightily interested in the ballay.’ (Not so: I’ve never been able to take seriously this sad, prancing art.)

‘I’ve not seen your show yet,’ I told them, ‘but I look forward immensely to doing so.’

They gazed at me with total incredulity. Clearly, anybody who’d not yet seen their show was nobody. ‘If you wish it,’ said Moscow Gentry, ‘we’d be happy to offer you seats for the first house this evening.’

‘Alternatively,’ said Norbert Salt, ‘we could let you and Larry view a rehearsal of our recital if you’d care to.’

‘Man,’ said Larry, ‘that’s something you certainly should not miss. If these boys don’t shake you in your stomach, then I’ll know you’re a dead duck anyway.’

I asked them about Miss Cornwallis and her balletic art.

‘Cornwallis,’ said Norbert, ‘isn’t pleased with the British this trip so very much. Two years back when we were here, we tore the place wide open, and business, as you know, was fabulous. But this time there’s empty seats occasionally, and that doesn’t please Cornwallis one little bit.’

‘She’s having to kill chickens once again in her hotel bedroom,’ said Moscow Gentry.

Even Larry didn’t quite get this.

Norbert Salt explained. ‘Cornwallis believes in voodoo, even though she’s a graduate of some university or other in the States. So when business isn’t what it might be, well, she gets her Haitian drummers to come round to her hotel and practise rituals that bring customers crowding to the box office.’

‘And it works?’

‘Man, yes, it seems to. At lease, it’s not failed to do so yet.’

‘And is Miss Cornwallis’s style Haitian, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no – she choreographs a cosmopolitan style,’ said Norbert. ‘Being herself Brazilian by birth, and internationally educated by her studies and her travels, her art’s a blend of African and Afro-Cuban, with a bit of classical combined. It makes for a dance that’s accessible to cultured persons on every civilised continent.’

‘And has your art been well received in Europe?’

‘In Rome-Italy and Copenhagen-Denmark,’ Norbert told me, ‘we found they still liked us this trip as particularly as before. But as for here, I guess with all your thoughts of war you British haven’t so much