by John Lodwick
“Who is this young woman?” interposed Aranjuez. “She is Spanish?”
“It’s of no importance. She won’t find me again. If I mention her at all it is merely to illustrate the pressure of circumstance upon me.”
“Ah, forgive me, but now you are being silly,” said Aranjuez, repolishing his spectacles. “You are ill: this I grant, but you are ill of your own volition . . . because you wish to be ill. I can cure you, for your illness is the result of unemployment.”
“Is it?” said Rumbold. “You thinking men have a definition for everything of course, but I am not so fortunate.”
He uncrossed his legs, extinguished his cigarette, and this time, rose frankly to his feet.
“You are not going?” said Aranjuez.
“I’m afraid that I must.”
“Well,” said Aranjuez. He displayed a fine white palm, the fingers outspread in evidence of civilised resignation. “Well, I shall not attempt to detain you, nor, though it is within my power, shall I prevent you leaving Spain. I appreciate that you must ascertain how you stand with the British authorities. When you have done so, make a call at the Spanish Embassy in London and mention my name. I think we shall have many more instructive conversations, Mr. Rumbold.”
“You are so sure of that?”
“I have never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“You think you know the kind of man I am, then?” Rumbold felt depressed: he had no reason to suppose that the estimate of Aranjuez was other than correct.
“I have been dealing all my working life with the kind of man you are, Mr. Rumbold,” said Aranjuez. “You are a man of violence.”
Five
Rain was falling. The wind blew in gusts from the north. Beneath the wand-like shape of the great telephone building the cafés gleamed cosy; for electricity is cheap in the Peninsula. Passing with mackintosh flung loose about his shoulders, Rumbold peeped at the chess players whose haunches indented the plush.
At the Puerta he turned left. He knew his way . . . “Escapada” . . . the ribbon lighting of the sign shone blue, reflected impartially upon the streaming pavements and upon the faces of urchins still attempting to sell waterlogged copies of the evening press.
A queer bloody name for a boîte. . . .
Rumbold turned into the café next door. He ordered a fine. Members of the night-club’s feminine orchestra, who were enjoying a last coffee here before attuning their instruments, ignored him. They were an unattractive bunch. Piano, drums, accordion and effects, the soft flesh just above and just beneath their eyes was baggy; their complexions, though smooth with fard, chlorotic from the prolonged inhalation of an atmosphere alien to health.
His misery coagulating, Rumbold tapped his glass upon the zinc and received a second fine. He drank it and his thoughts soared away into realms of profundity and recollection, untapped except by this means. The world was once again explainable.
He watched the coffee-drinkers depart, allowing them ten minutes advance. The intervening wall was thin, the repertoire of the band not new. Throughout Sweet Sue he waited patiently. At the second chorus of Some of These Days, he made his entrance.
Swing doors. Beyond them a long room, as bare of surplus fittings as a garage, and as cold. A bar flanked by quasi-inaccessible stools, from which, once seated, it would be a case of mountaineering to descend. Tables with dirty covers, with for all furniture a pepper-pot, an ash-tray and an unpolished champagne bucket. Some of these tables were favourably placed, being near the rostrum of the band and by the touch-line of the dance floor, upon which, in due course certain artistes would perform. Other tables ranged away into a smoky gloom which, by reason of the early hour, it had not yet been thought necessary to illuminate. In the farthest reaches of this hinterland neon lights bespoke the offices . . . “Telephone” and “Gents” and “Ladies Cloakroom”. The mural decorations, parodies of classics (the Miaya Vêtue, the Miaya Nue, Los Borrachos, the View of Zaragoza) were witty in intention, in execution lamentable.
Between the bar (at which some half dozen deadheads were knocking back Amontillado on the house) and the tables, ladies of the Sapphic persuasion circulated; their impregnability to mankind affiché by the tie, the stiff collar, the cropped nape and the ill-fitting tailor-made.
For the lusts of the flesh are not sinful when sterile, and the “Escapada” enjoyed the patronage of Ministers—no less—as well as that of the entire foreign colony.
Choosing a table equidistant between the din of the band and the lounging wine waiter, Rumbold sat down. The latter sprang forward. The eyes of the two men met, in mutual respect of a right of choice that was in fact no right at all, but simply a convention.
“Champagne,” said Rumbold.
When the bottle came the cork flew seven metres. It was Navarrese white wine, heavily aerated, and the Mumm label had been clumsily affixed.
Sipping the gaseous mixture (eighty-five pesetas for one bottle, the contents of which had been squeezed from the grapes by the black toes of peasants, working at fifty centimos to the hour), sipping, Rumbold surveyed the dancing scene.
Jig-a-jig-a-jig. Low heels, high heels. The whirling swish of dirndls, the dull sound of trouser turn-ups as they encountered the hiatus between male shoe and sock. The proprietress, a woman who would have made no mean figure in a catch-as-catch-can ring, picked her way from table to table, attempting to sell roses to clients not yet sufficiently sentimental to buy.
At Rumbold’s entrance there had not been many genuine clients, but by the time he had emptied his first bottle and been once to the toilet the local colour in the house had become swamped by those who were prepared to pay for these sad pleasures. South American diplomats, newly dined, cigars between their canines, their wives imperious but a little flustered by the attentions of the intermediate sex to which they were immediately subjected . . . the odd American from the airport ground staff, a few British of apparently Consular status, even some Spaniards, though these latter exclusively of the theatrical profession.
The drums rolled. The spotlight, inexpertly handled, settled upon the bosom of the proprietress, who made an announcement inaudible beneath the clinking of glasses and the chatter of the men at the bar. A dancer appeared, a thin and earnest woman wearing a mantilla, a brassière, and a full skirt of floral design. She was not a very good performer but such talent as she possessed was not aided by the refusal of various guests to vacate the dance floor. Confined within an area of some twenty square feet, greeted with indifference, the poor woman pranced, pirouetted, sank beneath the weight of an insufficiently suggested misfortune, and crouched at last at ground level to the reward of ironic hand-claps.
Something in the hostility of this reception seemed to find a response in the dancer, whom Rumbold now perceived to be drunk. Brushing aside the hand of the proprietress who had come to lead her away, she rose to her feet. Gone now was the languor, gone the resignation. The confusion of styles was absolute, but the effect not without a certain comic value. The navel oscillated in homage to the Can-Can. The fingers flexed and rippled somewhere in the Indian ocean between the Dravidians and Bali. The buttocks, unassisted by a bustle, yet contrived to play their part, while the feet, twirling ever faster, caused even the drinkers to turn in delicious anticipation of an accident.
Allez-oop . . . the high heel rose four feet three inches. Allez . . . oop; this time it was four foot nine. Fed by rage, the woman’s employment of the small area at her disposal was masterly, but this same rage was to be her undoing. Turning to reply to the indelicate aside of some man immediately behind her she lost balance, fell, and falling, carried Rumbold’s champagne bucket and his table cloth in a fine cascade of froth and linen to the floor.
A roar of applause arose. The dancer did not appear to hear it. She sat, crying, in the mess. Blood dropped from her chin and from a finger. Ri
sing, Rumbold offered her his handkerchief amid sniggers. The woman looked at him with hate, seized the handkerchief, and fled.
Peace returned. The band struck up. The dancers circulated, grinning. The wine waiter approached, replaced the dripping cloth, replaced the broken bottle. Several people peered curiously at Rumbold, among them a woman who was sitting at a table on the other side of the dance floor with two men, both obviously Spanish, and a girl. The woman, however, seemed to be either English or American. Looking up, Rumbold found that she was inspecting him with an intensity unwarranted by the circumstances. He shifted position slightly, ducked his head behind the screen of dancers, and lit a cigarette. As he did so, the wine waiter reappeared, holding a pleated theatre programme.
“For me?” said Rumbold.
“For you, Señor.”
Rumbold smoothed down the crinkled art-paper. “Would you,” the note ran, “care to join us at our table?”
The writing was rhomboid, schoolgirlish and in English.
“Keep this,” said Rumbold, indicating his bottle, “for me.”
“I cannot retain the table for you if you leave it, Señor,” said the wine waiter.
“No?” said Rumbold. He held out a bank-note.
“I will reserve both bottle and table, Señor,” said the wine waiter.
Rumbold crossed the floor. “How did you know that I was English?” he said, still standing.
“By your tie,” she said. “My cousin was at Harrow.”
“Then I must disappoint you. I wear the tie for business purposes, and from snobbishness.”
“Well, at least you are frank,” she said. “Won’t you sit down? Don’t let my companions alarm you. I only met them an hour ago. This,” she continued, indicating the man upon her right, “is Mariano, and this . . .” She pointed to the young man on her left:
“Juan,” said this one, bowing slightly.
“He took a Berlitz course in languages two years ago,” explained the Englishwoman. “The girl is named Inez. The three of them work the clubs together. Something for every taste, you know, with just the hint of blackmail thrown in. They are really most disconcerted at your arrival, I can tell you.”
“Not at all,” said the young man called Juan, his enunciation of each syllable both luscious and correct. “If you wish to talk with this gentleman, Inez and I will dance.”
“It is a pity that Mariano cannot dance too,” said the Englishwoman.
Juan said something to Mariano in Catalan.
“I will drink at the bar,” said Mariano, rising with tragic dignity.
“Well now,” she said, when all three had gone, and Rumbold had sat down. “Don’t you think that was rather neatly done? They would be off for good, of course, if they knew that I had only three hundred pesetas in my purse.”
Rumbold surveyed the two empty bottles of champagne upon the table, the third in its bucket, already more than half-way gone. “So that’s how it is, is it?” he said.
“That’s how it is,” she confirmed.
Rumbold took the champagne bottle, and poured himself a glass. “I am not in the habit of assisting my compatriots,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I have much more in my hotel.”
“That fairy tale, too, I have heard before.”
“You don’t like me, then,” she said. She lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring, which burst.
“You have two legs and certain attributes,” he said, “but I’ve seen hundreds.”
He gazed at her. She was a well-built woman, big of bone, wide-hipped, long-legged. Her height, in her nylons, might have been a full five feet seven, her weight ten stone, of which the last fourteen pounds was an interim dividend of advancing years and inattention to simple exercise. This surplus weight was distributed between hip and thigh and ankle. Her hair was a rich mouse colour, neither russet, nor, except in certain areas bleached by the sun, true blonde. Some grey hairs were present and no attempt had been made either to remove or to disguise them. The eyes were green, not the colour of grapes, but that of goose droppings. The nose was blunt and formless, the lips generous; but of a generosity inherited rather than acquired. Seen from a distance of five yards, with her white complexion touched by freckles, her great eyes tragic, and as tragically blank, she reminded Rumbold of the moon on the second day of its declension from the full. Her age he estimated at twenty-nine: he was to learn that she was thirty-two.
“Fiona Lampeter,” she said, acknowledging his inspection with an ironical bow.
“Rumbold,” said Rumbold.
There was a short silence. Among the dancers Rumbold observed Inez and Juan. The girl, Inez, was watching him.
“I cannot lend you any money,” he said.
“No? And yet you gave your handkerchief to that poor woman when she fell. . . .”
“That was different. No commitment was involved.”
“Look,” said the Englishwoman suddenly. She opened her bag and displayed it. Amid the confusion of compact and lipstick, of papers and photographs and pieces of string lay a bundle of one hundred peseta notes. She began to laugh.
“I am glad you find the joke amusing,” he said.
“Amusing? No . . . deadly serious, I promise you. I like to find out about people from the first.”
“It is time that I returned to my table,” said Rumbold.
He made as if to rise. She laid a hand upon his forearm. Her nails were very long, the colour of betel nut juice, the shape of almonds.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I apologise.”
“You are surely not going to pretend that you are incapable of dealing with a couple of ponces?”
“Yes, I am,” she said humbly.
“In that case you have no business to pick up such people.”
“No.”
“Where are you going?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“You want the story of my life?”
“I feel sure that it is coming.”
And come it did, to the accompaniment of a further bottle of champagne, for which Rumbold paid. She had been born in the year of the First Great War, in Peterhead:
“I know. There is a convict prison there.”
“There are also some resident gentry and an east wind from Norway which blows for half the year.”
Good family. Sound Scottish Presbyterian stock with a claim to have fought for Charlie at Culloden, and an engraving of John Knox among the bric-a-brac of the best bedroom. Her father had been a Macleod: a fils unique, much pampered, much be-whiskered; a poor fellow, it would seem, but a man of good will and some latent courage, who, enlisting at the outbreak, had died, a subaltern, in the carnage of First Arras.
“Mother said she often dreamed of him hanging on the barbed wire. I don’t remember him, and so can tell you nothing.”
“Mother,” while not possessing the social connections of her husband (she was a Curtis and the daughter of a draper), had family in Australia, and, in consequence, some stock and expectations in sheep farms, and four per cent Commonwealth Government bonds. This was just as well, for the Macleods, despite their large and hideous house, were in reality as poor as church mice—a metaphor which is by no means inapposite, for the grandmother was a most regular attendant at matins.
“Thank you, God, for my good dinner.”
When the dinner was poor, as it often was (the barbarous cuisine North of the Border must be tasted to be believed), the two little girls, of whom, Peggy, the junior, had been born three months after her father’s death, would abbreviate the text to:
“Thank you, God, for my dinner.”
The First Great War, the Zeppelins, the sugar ration. “Mother,” a hot-blooded and intrepid woman, sought refuge from the sexual chagrin of her husband’
s death upon the front of Salonika. Here she contracted congenital malaria, and stank of quinine ever after. The war over, she appeared at Peterhead only at long intervals, touring the world meanwhile upon funds inherited from a brother, by then fortunately defunct. The two small children, now six and seven years of age, remained with their paternal grandmother, subject to all the whims of that rigid Scottish conscience.
Books, apart from the Waverley novels, Robbie Burns, some (but not all) of Compton Mackenzie, and the massive family bible, were forbidden. The butcher’s boy must touch his cap before laying meat upon the kitchen table. Life was conducted upon the North-British principle that if a man is left alone with a girl, he will immediately whip up her skirts.
There was an aunt, sister to the grandmother, in the background, and also an Irish nurse, picturesque and voluble in the role of family retainer. But neither of these personalities impinge. The most that one can say in their favour is that it was in their rooms that the children cried.
The mother, who though destined to pay the fees, had expressed her entire lack of interest (she had just married an Australian bookmaker, and was much preoccupied by the payment of his debts), the girls, at an age somewhat below that of puberty, were despatched to a public school which shall be nameless, but of which it must be said that the worst faults of the male system were there multiplied.
“By which you mean?” said Rumbold.
“If I didn’t sew well, if my French dictée was bad, I would be sent, in summer, to the nets. Horrid girls, members of the first eleven, would bowl at me. It didn’t matter how often my stumps were broken. The point was to find the bump in the pitch and bruise me. My mother was paying one hundred and fifty pounds a year for this. In winter, when they played hockey, I was always goalkeeper. That’s the place to get hurt, I can tell you. And all that goes on . . . still . . . still.”