Against the Day (175 page)

Ordinarily he would have humorously
disputed her theory of moral bookkeeping. But later he would swear he had seen
her surrounded then by a queer luminous aura he knew he could not banter away.
Possessing one of those English ears on which flattedseventh sonorities are
never lost, Hunter had of course immediately fallen for the ~
Tallis
Fantasia,
would always love it, but the change of heart he himself needed would have to
proceed from some other source. The time was rising like a river in a season of
storm to

rush in waves and whitecaps through
the alleyways and plazas of his soul, and he did not know if he could climb
high enough to escape it.

When his paintings had started to get
peculiar, Dally noticed immediately. In the compositions appeared deliberate
vacancies—a figure would be over on one side of the canvas looking at, or
gesturing toward, the other side as if there were someone there—but there
was no one there. Or two subjects would be likewise engaged, crowded together
on one side while nearby, close enough to touch, opened this somehow blazingly
luminescent space, as if an essential term had been left out. Sometimes in the
empty part of the composition, even the background would be missing, and it
would be the raw imprimatura which assumed the quality of a presence, demanding
to be observed
. . . .

“What is it?” Dally wanted to
whisper, afraid for him. “What is it you don’t show?”

He usually referred questioners in
this vein to the immoderate lightspace appearing in Turner’s
Dido Building Carthage,
then hanging in the National Gallery. “If one must steal, it’s always
advisable to steal from the best.”

   
“Not
buying that one, Hunter, sorry.”

“Or perhaps having a solid background
now in Angel of Death work, you might want to come round and pose for one of
these empty spaces, should things over at Arturo’s shop ever grow tiresome.”

“A little creepier than that,
actually.” She told him about the latest episode at the Chelsea atelier. Naunt
the other day had requested her to dispense with the usual A.O.D. drapery and
wear instead only a pair of military jackboots. Then, from a back room, emerged
what was known in the business as a Well SetUp Young Man, likewise unclothed
except for a dark blue lineinfantry helmet. “You know the position, Karl,” instructed
Naunt. Karl without comment got on all fours and presented his—Dally
couldn’t help noticing—presentable bottom. “Now Dahlia, if you’d just get
behind him, gripping him by the hips in rather a firm, nononsense way—”

“You said she’d be wearing a dildo,”
Karl reminded him somewhat breathlessly.

“What’s going on, Arturo,” Dally
inquired, “if you don’t mind sharing your thoughts here?”

“Maternal tenderness,” Naunt
explained, “is certainly one of the A.O.D.’s attributes, but hardly the only
one. Anal assault, not unknown in the military imagination, is an equally valid
expression of her power, and the submission she expects, as well as a source of
comfort, indeed at times provides pleasure, to the object of her attentions.”

“So
then I’m supposed to . . .”

   
“Don’t
worry about the penis element, I can put that in later.”

   
“I
should hope so,” muttered Karl.

“These
artistic types,” Hunter sighed, when she told him. “So. Did you two, ehrm . .
.”

“Must
be my puritanical American upbringing,” she said. “Sodomizing idiots has never
been my cup of tea.”

As
destiny would have it, whom did she run into out on the town that very evening
but her old admirer the American impresario R. Wilshire Vibe, for whose product
in recent years the West End had been proving more congenial than Broadway.

“Well,
Jehosaphat, saw that hair all the way from Shaftesbury Avenue, thought the
place was on fire. You may be in a position to do me
such a mitzvah,
young
lady.” It turned out that he’d been looking for a “typical Irish lass” to decorate
his latest effort,
Wogs Begin at Wigan,
and nobody who had showed up at
casting calls so far had quite filled the bill. Even better, the part was a
firstact walkon, and one of the
figurantes
in the big thirdact number in
Roguish Redheads
just a few doors down was leaving, so if Dally could
sprint along the Strand fast enough to get into costume and makeup in time, why
she’d be a perfect replacement.

   
“What
you call a twofer,” she said.

   
“There
you go. You aren’t committed elsewhere or anything, are you?”

   
“Oh,
a sort of amateur religious pageant, but I think I can get out of it.”

From
doing walkons, she soon had a couple of lines, then eight bars of a duet with a
character juvenile whose vocal range was half an octave, well inside Dally’s
own, and before she quite knew what was going on, she found herself celebrated
as one of the wonders of the world as defined by Shaftesbury Avenue, the
Strand, Haymarket, and Kings Way, though recognized as well by suburban
audiences from Camberwell Green to Notting Hill Gate, often by quite peculiar
people who were not above calling out to her in the street, offering Scotch
eggs and digestives, snapping photos, asking her to sign theatre programs, bits
of chipshop newspaper, husbands’ cheerfully inclined heads. Understanding that
none of this could last much beyond one season, almost in innocence amazed that
she could watch so calmly the ardor of others as if from inside some glacial
and lucid space, Dally was invited to weekends at some of the more sizable
manor houses of the British countryside, required to do nothing but look the
way she looked—as if her appearance possessed a consciousness, and must
be allowed to obey its impulses— attended by domestic staff, puzzled by
extravagant acts of abasement from

young men whose names she did not always hear, let alone
remember. They begged for items of her intimate apparel to sew into their hats.
Her toes became objects of adoration, not always in private, requiring her to
change soaked or laddered stockings sometimes three or four times in the course
of an evening. Men were not her only admirers. Grown women, mad poetesses,
beauties of photogravuredom, offered to abandon husbands, ponying up fistfuls
of currency which even on a perhour basis Dally couldn’t make sense of. She was
given jewelry which had reposed in the vaults of distinguished families for
centuries, as well as rare orchids, stockmarket advice, Lalique creations in
opal and sapphire, invitations to faroff sheikhdoms and principalities. Always,
not exactly lurking, but obstinately staring from behind some Himalayan
rhododendron or swiftly melting ice sculpture, never out of his habitual
uniform of tropical white dittoes and Panama hat, persisted the figure of her
newest faithful suitor Clive Crouchmas, into whose gravitational field Ruperta
had been able to steer the girl with no more than a twitch of her cigarette.

 
From Turkish railway intrigues,
Crouchmas had by now grown into one of the world authorities in the dark arts
of what was becoming known as “borrowing in quasiperpetuity.” He was the one
the various Powers preferred to consult—when they could get an
appointment. Government spending being not altogether disconnected from arms
procurement, he was in communication as well, if not especially intimate, with
the likes of noted death merchant Basil Zaharoff. Indeed it was the fabled arms
magnate’s reported desire for Dahlia Rideout, because of her hair color, to
which Zaharoff was notoriously susceptible, that had got Clive himself
interested in the first place.

“Yes
I suppose that’s so,” Ruperta had shrugged, “even if one doesn’t care for the
type.”

   
“And
she isn’t. . .”

“Spoken
for? Whatever that might mean in her case, you could always make arrangements.
These girls. Always another. It’s like a florist’s inventory, isn’t it, cheaper
toward the end of the day.”

Clive
sat there, among the pure white napery, the perfectly shining silver and
spotless glassware, his mouth slightly open. Once, when they were small
children, Ruperta had offered him a pound for one of his lead soldiers, and
upon his handing it over she had picked up a nearby cricket bat and begun,
rather solemnly, to pound him with it. He should have been crying but later
recalled feeling only admiration, while perhaps making a note to try this on
someone else. A
horrible
little girl whom, over time, he came to regard
as the expediter of his lessconfidable dreams.

·
    
·
    
·

Well, it was
that Principessa all over again, it
seemed to Dally. Were procuresses the only sorts of women Hunter knew? As it
turned out, being a kept crumpet was not nearly the sordid horror she might
have imagined. Crouchmas himself was just a breeze. Mostly he liked to watch
her masturbating—so sweet, really. Nothing to go to the police about, was
it. He played as fair as he could, respected her feelings, didn’t try to set
her up in some dismal little bedsit in Finsbury or someplace, nor, when they
did rendezvous, was it in shabby hotel rooms but in actually quite swell
surroundings, right out on Northumberland Avenue, in the full dazzle of the
great city and all it offered— the Métropole, the Victoria sorts of
place, always fresh flowers, vintage Champagne—the soiled opacity of his
daily business, its hundreds of small weaselly arrangements with gobetweens who
did not always remember which name they were supposed to be using, transmuted
to clarity and grace and herself in expensive
déshabillé
and a warm fog
of selfpleasure, while he sat at his safe distance, watching.

Dally happened to
meet
Lew Basnight at a
weekend party at Bananas, the sumptuous Oxfordshire manor of Lord and Lady
Overlunch. She was wearing a gown made of printer’s muslin, enjoying just then
a great chic among the ~the bohemian of spirit. The pressmen in Fleet Street
used it to clean the type after each day’s run—you fetched it out of the
bins and took it to a Clever Seamstress in Regent Street you knew, and showed
up at your function looking like the day’s
Globe
or
Standard,
and
spent the entire evening deciding whether people were admiring your toilette or
only trying to read it.

There
were T.W.I.T. in attendance tonight, for these days there were T.W.I.T.
everywhere, as if something fateful were in progress that made their attendance
indispensable. Dally had recently had a Tarot reading done, Earl’s Court,
nothing fancy, nothing swell, the same reading a shopgirl might pay sixpence
for, so when Lew explained what kind of detective he was, she at least knew her
way around the twentytwo Major Arcana.

   
“You’re
one of these T.W.I.T. folks?”

“Used
to be, opened my own practice, more like a consultant on retainer now if that
Icosadyad decides to really start acting up. Always something new, though over
the years,” he calculated, “I’ve been out in search of them all— simplest
turned out to be the hardest, Moon, Sun, and so forth, tried to avoid them
whenever I could.”

Today
in fact he’d been lying beneath the Sun, hat down over his eyes, half snoozing
or as some would have it meditating, from sunrise till hard overhead noon. The
Sun was trying to tell him something—“Beyond the usual, ‘say, it’s me.
It’s me,’ o’ course, which is more or less standard by now.”

Later
on, tonight at the Overlunch manor, it was the Moon which had found him, among
these tailcoated and Vionnetgowned guests drifting the pavilioned gardens,
reflected in the obsidian smoothness of the ornamental lake, calling down from
the sky, again, “It’s me
. . . .
It’s
me . . .” as the giant crayfish clattered slowly out of the bathingpool, and
the dog began to bay from some distant part of the grounds, and here came the
strong and beaming Moon herself, just above a bared and passing shoulder,
beaming down on these privileged at play, with their circusstriped tents, their
lamps radiantly lensed from within fantastic grottoes of ice, their Oriental knife
corps with clever white accents at toques and teeth.

   
Then
at last, pure and unmistakable, The Star. “It’s me
. . . .
”

In
ordinary divination practice, The Star, number XVII, which at first glance
signified hope, was just as apt to portend loss. It showed a presentable young
woman, unclad, down on one knee, pouring out water from two vases, her
nakedness meant to suggest that even when deprived of everything, one may still
hope. A. E. Waite, following Éliphaz Levi, believed that in its more occult meaning
the card had to do with the immortality of the soul. Lew in his earlier days,
perhaps understandably, was more interested in that naked woman part, though
various T.W.I.T. advisers tried to talk him past it. He seemed convinced, so
compelling was the vision of deckdesigner “Pixie” Colman Smith, that one
evening he would turn a bend in the landscape and there would be the same exact
conjunction of earth and water, the tree on the knoll, the bird on the tree,
and there for the moment oblivious to his presence, with the sweep of foothills
and mountains behind her, this glorious naked blonde. Old Tarot hands had seen
this condition of pointmissing before, and even had a word for
it—“Pixielated.” “The present occupant of that Arcanum might not even be
female,” he was warned repeatedly, to little effect.