City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,68

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