Arabesque (24 page)

“Let us see,” said Romanova neutrally.

She led the way to a room which was empty except for a piano and a stool. It occurred to Armande, who was trying hard to think charitably, that this barren space probably accounted for the
pantechnion of furniture everywhere else.

“Can you lend me some clothes?” Armande asked Floarea.

“I got ’im!” said the landlady, bursting importantly into English. “Nice, clean! I know what you like.”

She had been staring at Armande with embarrassing approval. She now waddled out of the room, and returned with a neatly ironed play suit, thoroughly practical except for a quantity of fish-fin
frills.

“I like English,” she said. “When you finish, you come have tea.”

Romanova looked critically at Armande’s long legs.

“Tap?” she asked.

“Classical.”

“Not without more muscles in your calf than that, my girl! But you’ll certainly give the clients something to look at.”

Romanova seated herself at the piano.

“What do you want?”

Armande, overcome by a flurry of nervousness, could not think of a piece.

“‘Tristesse’? That do?”

“All right.”

Romanova began to play, watching Armande’s interpretation of the music and sympathetically adjusting the accompaniment whenever she landed herself in a dead end.

“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Floarea regretfully.

“Little fool! After all, you don’t know a thing!” sanpped the Romanova. “She can manage her arms—which is more than you ever will till you stop thinking how pretty
they are. You’re hopelessly out of training,” she added to Armande.

“I know. How long would it take to get back?”

“Months.”

“Well, that’s that,” said Armande.

“But I thought you wanted to dance with this child. Not ballet. You’d be good enough to partner her in a fortnight—if you really worked.”

Floarea stood still, her shocked eyes filling with tears. Then she suddenly swooped across the room, lifted Romanova off the piano stool and kissed her.

“Mama! Will you stop trying to take the conceit out of me!”

Romanova, for the first time, smiled at Armande, as if she too must admire the relationship between this impetuous girl and her so-called mother. Armande did admire it. She also began to think
more kindly of the Romanova than at Beit Chabab. There was, after all, no real reason why a woman should ever remove powder from her face if she didn’t want to.

“Can I train here?” she asked.

“Yes. Two hours in the morning alone with me. Two hours in the afternoon with Floarea. If you do less, I won’t take you. Are you eating well? You look like it.”

“Very well,” said Armande guiltily. “And—and you?”

“On tick. Ecaterina is an old friend”—Romanova lifted her eyebrows in the direction of the door through which the landlady had gone—“but getting restive. Pay for
the lessons if you can.”

“I can, but not for very long.”

“You won’t have to for long. You and this child will be on easy street if you behave yourselves.”

The landlady had tea waiting for them. She was a Rumanian Greek from Galatz, and passionately pro-British. Her exclamations made it plain that this was partly due to the sympathetic natures of
British seamen on the Danube, and partly to enthusiasm for the useless gallantry of British aid to Greece. Mme. Ecaterina understood English, but could only summon up her phrases after some
thought. The conversation settled easily back into Middle Eastern French.

Armande, now committed to a future that appalled her, forced herself to ask whether Mme. Ecaterina had a room that she could occupy. Ecaterina had. It was clean, and could have been cheerful if
scissors had lopped off the fringes of bedcover, curtains, lamp shades and mantelpiece.

The landlady waddled back into the hall, Armande delicately following in her wake, and poured out more tea.

“But one thing,” said Ecaterina, “must be clearly understood. You are not to bring gentlemen here. I will give you a very nice address.”

Armande froze. All of them, the flat, the room, the dancing, immediately took on an air of unreality, while she, an intact observer, sat on. Then suddenly she realised that there was no reason
in the world why she should not be angry; no reason why here, at the bottom of society, she should not say aloud the things she was saying to herself. Her spirit leaped back seventeen years into
the easy past.

“Mme. Ecaterina,” she remarked, with an irony that grew through every word of her exquisite French, and culminated in sheer invective, “if I take a room and pay my rent, I
demand the right to receive my friends. And if my friends are men, I shall lead them into that bedroom directly under your filthy nose and shut the door and close the keyhole and leave the rest to
your disgusting imagination.”

“You are English. You can do what you like. I trust you,” Mme. Ecaterina surrendered at once, the whole jelly of her body quivering with timidity at this attack. “I only made
it clear, as I always do.”

“
Bien
,” said Armande, “but I am old enough to assume there is a
vase de nuit
under the bed without you placing it in the middle of the room.”

“Armande!” exclaimed Floarea, horrified.

“Armande—I am sick of Armande! What’s your name when you dance?”

“Mavis. It’s romantic.”

“It’s suburban—but if you like it! Then I will be Marthe. Mavis and Marthe. Will that do? I will come tomorrow, Mama, for a lesson. And I will take the room, Mme. Ecaterina, at
the end of next week.”

Armande stormed out of the flat, utterly ashamed of herself, lips trembling with nervousness, but hot with satisfaction in the bottom of her heart at the shocked faces of her landlady-to-be, of
Floarea and of the Romanova.

The Hungarian and Rumanian artistes who normally staffed the cabarets of the Eastern circuit had been rounded up and dispatched to Cyprus, where, among the limited circle of
officers who were fortunate enough to be stationed there and to have private incomes, they preserved the traditions of Aphrodite’s island. Egypt was short of high-class entertainers, and had
to fall back on its native supply of acrobats, conjurers and stomach dancers. Their exotic feats on stage or floor were of international excellence, but did not suggest to patrons of ordinary
tastes that there was any object in getting to know the performer over a bottle of so-called champagne. Troops and contractors with money to burn had little temptation to spend any really
substantial sums in the cabarets.

Mavis and Marthe, new, exciting and pre-war loveliness, had no difficulty in obtaining a profitable engagement where they chose. Armande decided on the Casino. It was out of bounds to British
troops, and therefore less embarrassing to her first shyness; and it was about to move out of winter quarters into its attractive summer garden by the Nile. At their interview and exhibition, the
proprietor, though a good business Greek, was unable to hide his enthusiasm at this unexpected gift from heaven. Armande seized the opportunity to bargain.

Neither she nor Floarea, she said, had any intention of taking a contract which compelled them to sit at tables with the clients. Floarea added, to gild this bitter pill, that they would do so
if they chose, and that she, at any rate, might often choose if her commission on the drinks were generous. The proprietor turned their offer down flat, with a regretful discourtesy of a bazaar
merchant who had tendered half the real value of his wares. Armande left her address and walked out. The proprietor, as she expected, remained silent for a week—during which she and the
Romanova had the utmost difficulty in persuading Floarea not to return to the Casino—and then accepted Armande’s conditions.

Their engagement opened at the end of April. Romanova had arranged two numbers designed to show the grace and ease of her pupils, but demanding no more than a beginner’s skill upon the
points. The artistes at the summer Casino were not confined between tables; there was a good stage upon which to exploit the romance of flowing skirts and swirling draperies.

The first number was a waltz of crinoline period, with Armande in white organdie, Floarea in sea green, and an atmosphere of innocent girlhood at the court of Vienna or St.
Petersburg—Armande was never sure which. In the second number they were two butterflies, and dressed in little else than wings attached to jewelled brassière and thigh, wrist and
shoulder. Romanova made no secret of her intention: to show the beauty of Armande’s arms to the lover of ballet, and as much of Floarea as the police permitted to the connoisseur of women.
Armande agreed only after violent argument.

“But why, Armande,” Floarea asked at last, “are you so ashamed of your own body? It’s not too slim. It’s very pretty.”

“I’m not in the least ashamed of it.”

“Yes, you are. Yet you wouldn’t mind swimming in just as little as you will wear as butterfly.”

“That’s different.’

“But why?’

“I suppose,’ replied Armande, flushing, “because I am not being stared at by men.”

“But you are,” said the Romanova. “There are always a lot of cretins on any beach with nothing else to do.”

“I’m not being paid for them to look at anyway.”

“That’s just the point,” Romanova snapped. “At the Casino you are being paid for them to look at.”

“Well, I won’t do it.”

“Then you shouldn’t take the money.”

“And think of your art,” said Floarea. “After all a butterfly doesn’t wear any clothes.”

“But I have not the pretty habits of the hymenoptera,” exclaimed Armande sardonically, exasperated by Floarea on Art. “We needn’t go into details. For one thing I do not
lay eggs. And, Mama, you talk nonsense. I am
not
paid to exhibit my navel. I cannot make it turn it circles like Miss Fatima.”

“And you—you dare talk of shame!” Floarea cried.

“All right, my darling, all right,” said Armande, wearily surrendering. “Give me my wings. Measure me for my—what do you call it, Mama?”

“
Cache-sexe
,” answered Romanova modestly.

“Well, for heaven’s sake see that it does.”

Mavis and Marthe were received with acclamation by civilian Cairo. To the military—except security men and others with the right to wear plain clothes—they were comparatively
unknown. Any uniformed soldier visiting the Casino fell into the capable hands of the Military Police.

Armande was prepared for the usual questioning. She was certain that the security people would fuss, as soon as they looked her up in their files and found that the British subject practising so
enigmatic a profession had been black-listed. In due course an elderly major turned up at the Casino, and invited her to call at an address in Gezireh the following afternoon.

Never had she been so little impressed. His fumbling futility was the more obvious since he had chosen his own flat in which to question her. His view of life was black and white; it would, she
suggested, be a valid view among the dregs of the Egyptian populace, the drug smugglers and politicians and
souteneurs
, but it hardly fitted him to undertake the analysis of all the fine
shades of grey in the mind of the intelligent European, especially if the European were an educated woman.

Armande treated him
de haut en bas.
She was, she said, a trained dancer from her youth and entitled to earn her living; she had been unjustly black-listed, and, if he knew anything of
the secrets of his own business, he shuld know that; she was respectable—and she lit up the word by the tone of a woman to whom respectability was a harmless virtue of the lower middle
classes. Finally, remembering old days in London, she asked:

“If you were to prevent me from working, would your Minister be prepared to defend such a policy in the House?”

The major at once became tender and fatherly. He offered her a small retainer either to report on any suspicious visitors to the Casino, or, if she didn’t like that, simply to come to his
flat and talk to him once a week. She refused. She thought him a pitiable, lewd and lonely old man who should have retired long since to grow roses in England. She did not appear, however, to have
forfeited his good will, for Mavis and Marthe remained untroubled by any but small fry of the Egyptian police. Their half-hearted attempts at blackmail were contemptuously dismissed by the
experienced Romanova.

Toots and Rashid had vanished from Cairo. Armande received a number of visits and telephone calls from their friends, but was deliberately evasive. She writhed under an intolerable sensation
that everyone was staring at her, that women despised her and that men would congratulate each other, with great guffaws and warnings to be careful, upon the entertainment of that pretty piece from
the Casino.

Carry Laxeter refused to be dropped. She did not hide her love of Armande and was adored in return. She assumed that Armande was starting, or rather continuing a serious profession as a dancer,
and accepted her surroundings as amusingly eccentric rather than sordid. Armande could not really bring herself to believe in Carry’s fiction! She knew too well that she had no intention of
making a career of dancing, that the whole hated business was partly an angry protest and partly a provision for eating and living in comfort. It had to be that, or else a life like Xenia’s,
existing on the wealth of her emotions and other people’s kindness. Even for Xenia Armande had not allowed such a course to continue. Toots had found the girl a job in a Jugoslav camp. She
served tea in the canteen, and had taken to communism with the hysterical fervour of a convert. After a vain attempt to proselytise Armande and Carry, she ignored them as lost and parasitic
souls.

Carry treated the Casino as if it was a smart London restaurant with a floor show. At least once a week she would sit with Armande, Floarea and the Romanova before and after their dance, and
mischievously encourage Armande to accept an occasional invitation from the tables. The unreality of Carry’s capricious lightheartedness shocked Armande; to exhibit one’s body to fat
Levantines, and to listen to their suggestive conversation (thank God most of them didn’t dance!) was a horrible way of earning a living, and witty irresponsibility made it no better. Still,
Carry’s humour was a refuge. Armande clung to her as a companion, and loved her as the last existing bond between herself and her past life.