City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,49

time for spiritual things.’

‘Our thoughts of war?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Moscow Gentry. ‘You English people are constantly crazy about war.’

‘Besides which,’ said his friend Norbert, ‘you don’t appreciate the artistry of what we do. In Rome or Copenhagen, or even Madrid-Spain, we get all the top people at our recitals. But here, it’s only the degenerates who really like us.’

‘Can you fill a theatre in this city with degenerates for several weeks?’

‘Oh, sure,’ said Norbert Salt.

‘Well,’ I told him, nettled, ‘you should be thankful to our degenerates for not thinking about war as you say the others do.’

‘We don’t thank anyone, sir. We perform, that’s all, and if they like us, then they pay. We don’t have to thank them for patronising an entertainment that they’re willing to pay for.’

I offered them a drink: they took lemon squash and tonic water. ‘And this rehearsal,’ I enquired. ‘It takes place soon?’

‘It takes place,’ said Norbert, looking at a gold watch two inches wide, ‘in forty minutes from this moment. I guess we should all be going to the theatre. In the Cornwallis company, we’re always dead on time.’

The two young Americans made a royal progress down the streets that lay between the Candy Bowl and the Marchioness Theatre: catching the eyes of the pedestrians as much by the extravagance of their luminous sweaters and skin-tight slacks as by the eloquence of their bodily gyrations, shrill voices and vivid gesticulations; and did anyone fail to look at them, his conquest was effected by their bending down suddenly in front of him or her to adjust an enamelled shoe, so that the recalcitrant bowler-hatted or tweed-skirted natives found themselves curiously obstructed by an exotic, questioning behind.

There was some opposition to our entry at the stage door – which was manned (as these doors are) by a person who would have been disagreeable even to Sir Henry Irving. But his rude rudeness was outmanoeuvred by an abrupt and devastating display of bitchiness by our two hosts. ‘These ain’t no stage-door gumshoes, they’re my friends,’ hissed Norbert, after an ultimate nasty salvo. He led us past the doorman’s corpse to a narrow lift of the alarming kind that receives you on one side and ejects you on the other. Norbert and Moscow preceded us along a clanging concrete corridor to their dressing-room, where they immediately stripped naked, and started painting their faces and bodies in improbable jungle hues. ‘The number we’re rehearsing’s African,’ said Moscow. ‘Cornwallis wasn’t pleased with our performance of last evening, and she’s called this rehearsal to get us in the ripe primeval mood.’

‘Come and meet the girls,’ said Norbert, and, still in nothing but his paint, he stepped down the corridor, and flung open the door of a larger dressing-room in which a dozen resplendent coloured girls were gilding the lilies of their beauty. He passed rapidly from one to the other, fondling each with gestures of jovial obscenity, and capering at times to the music of a portable radio they had. ‘Say hullo to Louisiana,’ he called out to us from a far corner. ‘Boys, this is Louisiana Lamont, our ingénue.’

She was a succulent girl with radiant eyes that positively shone. She smiled at Larry and me as if we were the two men in the world she’d most been waiting for, and said, ‘My, ain’t you both quite a size.’

‘Just average,’ said Larry, who was gigantic.

‘Louisiana is our baby,’ Norbert told us. ‘She’s just turned seventeen and she shouldn’t really be travelling outside her country yet.’

‘Why, Norbert! Where I come from, we’s married at twelve years old – that was the age my mom had me at. Why, honey, we’s grandmothers before we’re your age.’ She offered us some sponge fingers from a paper bag. ‘I do appreciate your British confectionery,’ she said to me.

‘Together with marmalade, meat sauces, and some cheeses,’ I answered, ‘biscuits are the only thing we make that’s fit to eat.’

Louisiana paused in the biting of the sponge. ‘Why, Montgomery!’ she cried out in amaze. ‘You said that just like an Englishman.’

‘But I am an Englishman, Miss Lamont,’ I told her. ‘I am one.’

‘I know you are. But you said it just like they do.’ She appeared entranced.

A sharp bell rang.

This was the signal for a scattering and caterwauling of coloured boys and girls, racing out of dressing-rooms, tumbling downstairs in a brown and gold cascade, their voices shrill and laughing-screaming, then suddenly, with a last cry and clatter, silent. Larry and I were left alone