The Language of Bees (22 page)

By ten-forty, the peak of the evening was reached, and the revellers began to move on to other late-night venues. A lavender-clad playwright stood up and announced that he thought he would go to a
party he’d heard of in Brompton, and he departed with a woman on each arm. Two married couples across from me shook hands all around and then they, too, left, although it seemed to me that each went out of the door with the other’s spouse. Eventually, Augustus John rose and made his way out, looking irritated at the half a dozen admirers who drifted after him. The sleeping poet snorted awake, dashed down the contents of the nearest glass, and staggered off in the direction of the entrance. When the waiter returned, I ordered another drink, although my glass was still half full, and asked the two people next to me if they’d like another. They would.

“That was Augustus John, wasn’t it?” I asked the woman, a thin, brown creature with untidy fringes and mismatched clothing.

“You must be new in town, if you don’t know him.” She had an appealing voice, low and just beginning to roughen with the cigarettes she smoked.

“I’ve been away for a while, in America,” I told her, although John had been a fixture in the Café Royal for years.

She asked me about America, I made up some stories about the art world there, about which I knew next to nothing, then asked about John again.

“I wonder if he might know where a friend of mine is, another artist. I should have asked him before he left.”

“Who are you looking for?”

“Damian Adler.”

“Sorry, don’t know him.”

“Yes, you do,” piped up the man at her side. “Painter chap, French or something, his wife knows Crowley.”

“Oh, right—him. I haven’t seen him for a while, though.”

“Aleister Crowley, do you mean?” I asked the man—a writer, as I recalled. Yet another writer.

“That’s the chap.”

The woman interrupted. “Except it wasn’t Crowley, was it, Ronnie?”

“It was, though,” he asserted.

“No, they were talking about him, but I don’t think she knew him.”

“But why should I—oh, you’re right, it was Betty who was talking about him, to her.”

I wasn’t sure I was following this fairly drunken conversation. “You mean Mrs Adler was talking to someone else about Aleister Crowley?”

“Betty May. Crowley killed her husband.”

“Betty May’s husband?” This was sounding familiar, although not the name May.

“Raoul Loveday. Took a first at Oxford, fell into Crowley’s circle, died of drugs or something down in Crowley’s monastery in Italy or Greece or someplace.”

“Sicily,” I said automatically. I remembered this, from the newspapers a year or more ago. “So Yolanda Adler was talking to Betty Loveday, here?”

“Being lectured by her, more like,” the woman said. “Poor Betty, she’s terrified of Crowley, any time she comes across someone interested in him she feels she has to save them from him.”

“And Yolanda was interested in Crowley?”

“Yes. Or maybe not Crowley directly.” She blinked in owlish concentration.

“Someone like Crowley?” I persisted.

“Or was it that someone she knew was interested in Crowley, and she was looking into how much trouble he was? Sorry, I really don’t remember, it was a while ago. I’m Alice Wright, by the way. And this is Ronnie Sutcliffe.” I shook her hand—bashed, scraped, and calloused—and his, considerably softer.

“Mary Russell,” I said, introducing myself to her for the second time that night. “You’re a sculptress, aren’t you?”

She beamed. “You’ve heard of me?”

I hadn’t the heart to admit that her hands had told me her avocation. “Oh, yes. But forgive me, Ronnie, I can’t place where—”

“Ronnie’s a writer. He’s going to change the face of literature in this century, taking it well past Lawrence.”

“D. H.,” Ronnie clarified, looking smug.

I nodded solemnly, and gave way to an unkind impulse. “Are you published yet?”

“The publishing world is run by Philistines and capitalists,” he growled. “But I had several poems published while I was still up at Cambridge.”

“I look forward to seeing your work,” I assured him.

Alice remembered what we had been talking about. “Why are you looking for her, anyway?”

“For Yolanda? I’m more trying to find her husband, Damian. He’s an old friend, known him for years, and as I said, I’m recently back in town. I was hoping to see him.”

The arch smile Alice gave indicated that she had read all the wrong meaning into my desire to see Damian Adler, but I caught back the impulse to set her straight: If it made her think me a denizen of the artistic underworld, so much the better. I shrugged, as if to admit that she was right.

The Café was being tidied for the night, the chairs arranged around the marble tabletops, glasses polished and set back on the shelves. The remaining seven members of our party were one of three tables still occupied, and we would soon be politely expected to depart.

Fortunately, before I could come up with a reason to attach myself to them, my two new friends claimed me instead.

“Would you like to go on for a drink?” Alice asked.

“The Fitzroy?” Ronnie suggested.

“I’m running a little low on funds,” I told them, “but I’d be happy to—”

“Why not pop on home?” Alice interrupted, before they could find themselves paying for the rest of the evening. “Someone left a couple of bottles there, and Bunny won’t have finished them off.”

Having encountered such a wide variety of human relations that evening, I should have been willing to bet that Bunny was not, in fact, a large rabbit. However, since there might be more information to be had from the two, I agreed readily.

Outside on the street, we all three blinked under the impact of fresh air. After a moment, a man came out of the Café and pressed an object into my hand—the bag containing the skirt and blouse that I had put on in Sussex many long hours before. I thanked him, but he
vanished before I could find a coin for him, and I joined my two companions as they turned up Regent Street, braced together against the sway of the pavement. My own feet meandered uncertainly, but once my ears stopped ringing and the stinging sensation in my eyes cleared, I discovered that it was a very pleasant evening.

Alice talked at me over her shoulder, in tones that reached those in the buildings around us as well. She was a modern sculptress, she said, providing a woman’s perspective to the most male bastion of all the arts. Her main problem, apart from the disinclination of the art world to treat women seriously, was finding a studio large enough to contain her vision. When we reached their home and studio, half a mile away in Soho, I saw what she meant.

The garret she worked in, four sagging flights up from street level, was intended to house servants, not to support a ton and a half of scrap iron. I started to follow the two inside, then spotted the object in the middle of the floor and stopped dead. Surely it was my imagination that put such a dip to the floorboards?

“I call it ‘Freedom,’” Alice told me with pride. The sculpture appeared to have some vague representational basis, but whether the extremities were the arms of a number of women strewing chicken feed, or the legs of war horses, I could not tell.

“It’s autobiographical,” Ronnie added. “Where’s the corkscrew?” Since he was pawing through a drawer at the question, I thought he was not asking about a component of the sculpture.

“Bunny was using it this morning to score the pots before she put them in the kiln.”

Lord, a kiln as well? “Are there people underneath us?” I asked.

“Just Bunny, and she won’t hear us,” Alice assured me, which hadn’t at all been what I was asking.

“How …” I stopped, at a loss for words.

“How am I going to get it out? The back wall is merely brick and tin, I’ll invite a bunch of friends over to bash out a hole and help lower it down.” She seemed proud that she had already solved that problem.

“Honestly, are there people living below? Because I really don’t think the floorboards are sturdy enough to support your … vision.”

This struck the two as funny, and they began to giggle. Ronnie set off across the room, aiming for a bottle that sat on a long, high work-table, only to have his orbit pulled towards the monumental piece of art—no, the dip in the boards had not been my imagination.

“We’re the only ones here, us and Bunny,” Alice finally answered. “She owns the building, in fact, although her father is taking her to court to force her to sell it to cover some bills. But if the old man succeeds, we’ve told him he’ll have to knock it down with us inside.”

It didn’t look to me as if he’d have to wait for the end of a court case to see the demolition of the building, but I was relieved that there were no families sleeping beneath us.

“I’m not altogether certain I don’t own the building,” Ronnie said, addressing the bottle with whose cork he had begun to wrestle.

“The law is so patriarchal,” Alice commented to me.

“Er,” I said.

“The husband has rights to his wife’s possessions,” she explained.

“So, Ronnie is married to Bunny?”

“Bunny isn’t her name, of course,” Alice said blithely. “We called her that after she proved so enthusiastic about—”

“Alice!” Ronnie chided.

She giggled again, and finished the sentence. “—about reproducing. Three children in four years indicates a certain enthusiasm, don’t you think? But yes, she and Ronnie and I are married. Does that shock you?”

I was not about to confess to any shock at the doctrines of free love, but I did go back to my initial concern with renewed urgency.

“Are the children living here?”

“Not at the moment. Bunny’s mother wouldn’t have it, and came to take them away.”

I breathed more easily; at least I didn’t have the safety of innocents on my hands.

Ronnie cursed at the bottle; Alice propped her elbows on the high table to observe his struggles. I followed gingerly, keeping to the very edges of the room. The cork had come apart, so Ronnie jammed the remnants inside with a carving tool, then picked up the nearest glass,
which bore both lipstick and food around its rim. He splashed some wine and cork bits into the glass and set it down in front of me. I raised it gingerly to the vicinity of my lips—although, from the raw smell rising out of the glass, any contamination would be well and truly sterilised.

“When did you meet the Adlers?” I asked bluntly. It had been a long day, and I figured these two were in no condition to require subtlety.

“The winter sometime.”

“It was at the Epsteins’ Christmas party, remember?” Ronnie said.

“Jacob Epstein gave a
Christmas
party?” I asked.

“It wasn’t so much a Christmas party as a party at Christmas,” Alice explained helpfully. “His wife gave it to show that she wasn’t still angry at Kathleen. You know Jacob’s wife, Margaret? She took a shot at one of Jacob’s lovers last year, when she found out Kathleen was pregnant, although she’d been perfectly willing to raise the little girl he had by someone else five or six years before. She’s usually perfectly content to let Jacob’s lovers live with them, but for some reason she took against Kathleen. Anyway, that’s settled now.”

Heavens, my life was dull. “So that was when you met Damian and Yolanda?”

“Yolanda wasn’t there, was she, Ronnie?”

“Wasn’t she?”

“No, I remember because Damian couldn’t come out with us to the country after the party, he had to be home because Yolanda would murder him if she heard he’d left the child by itself. It must have been when they first got here—that’s right, there was some nonsense about finding a nanny. Children are so tedious, aren’t they? Why can’t one just leave them to their own devices?”

“Was Yolanda away, then?”

“Something religious, wasn’t it?” he said, remembering.

“Probably,” she agreed.

“I do remember now. You wanted him to come along because you hoped you could get him into bed.”

Alice laughed and shot me a glance; I braced myself for further
naughtiness. “Really, it was Ronnie who wanted to have a fling with him, and was hoping I’d join in. I would have, too.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said evenly. “Damian is very attractive.”

“Have you—”

“No,” I said, my response a shade too quick. “No, I have not. Nor with Yolanda,” I added, to restore my Bohemian
bona fides
.

“Neither have we. He turned us down, first one, then the other. Not that I’ve given up on him—he has a dark side one can practically taste.”

“Er, what do you mean by dark side, exactly?”

“Oh, Damian comes across as the wholesome boy, married to one woman, a daddy even, but when one comes to know him, the darker impulses are there. I mean to say, just look at his paintings.”

I had to agree that
wholesome
was not the first word one would choose to describe The Addler’s paintings, but I couldn’t tell if Alice actually knew something about Damian’s “dark” side, or if this was merely romantic twaddle from a spurned woman.

“He keeps his temper under control,” I ventured.

“One would hardly know he has one, most of the time,” she agreed, which exchange got me no further.

I had taken but a single sip from the glass in my hand, but either the alcohol was strong or the conversation itself was dizzying. I put the glass down, caught it as it tipped, and moved it to a flatter place on the edge of a sheet of gravy-smeared newspaper, the remains of someone’s lunch. Perhaps several days’ lunches. Ronnie stretched out a hand and absently broke off a bit of crust from a dried-up stub of beef pie, ignoring the mouse droppings scattered around it. I shuddered, and would have averted my eyes except they were caught by a word on the gravy-smeared newsprint:
Sussex
.

Alice asked if Ronnie had picked up the eggs and bread she’d asked him to get, and he declared that it wasn’t his job, causing her to retort that she was hungry, and they fell to wrangling about whose responsibility it had been to stock the pantry. Since I had no intention of putting any morsel of this household’s food into my mouth, I idly nudged the wad of crust to one side, the better to see what event in
the nation’s placid southland had caught the attention of the afternoon paper. I read: