is no good For anything but jazzing around. He'll go live in a cathouse, He'll jazz it all over town. And all kinds of meanness To put a good woman down. Now I am a good woman Because I'm telling you I am And I sure been put down But honey, I don't give a damn. You going to have a hard time Finding you a kind hearted man. Because a kind hearted man Is the kind who will . . . Presently the light in Paola's room began to leak out the window, up the air shaft and into the sky, accompanied by clinking bottles, running water, flushing toilet in the bathroom. And then the almost imperceptible sounds of Rachel fixing her long hair. When she left, turning off all the lights, the hands on an illuminated clock near Paola Maijstral's bed stood near six o'clock. No ticking: the clock was electric. Its minute hand could not be seen to move. But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time. II The party, as if it were inanimate after all, unwound like a clock's mainspring toward the edges of the chocolate room, seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium. Near its center Rachel Owlglass was curled on the pine floor, legs shining pale through black stockings. You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head. Young Stencil the world adventurer, seated on the sink, waggled his shoulderblades like wings. Her back was to him; through the entrance to the kitchen he could see the shadow of her spine's indentation snaking down a deeper black along the black of her sweater, see the tiny movements of her head and hair as she listened. She didn't like him, Stencil had decided. 'It's the way he looks at Paola,' she'd told Esther. Esther of course had told Stencil. But it wasn't sexual, it lay deeper. Paola was Maltese. Born in 1901, the year Victoria died, Stencil was in time to be the century's child. Raised motherless. The father, Sidney Stencil, had served the Foreign Office of his country, taciturn and competent. No facts on the mother's disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available. The father died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta. On an evening in 1946, separated by stone balusters from the Mediterranean, the son had sat with one Margravine di Chaive Lowenstein on the terrace of her villa on the western coast of Mallorca; the sun was setting into thick clouds, turning all the visible sea to a sheet of pearl-gray. Perhaps they may have felt like the last two gods - the last inhabitants - of a watery earth; or perhaps - but it would be unfair to infer. Whatever the reason, the scene played as follows: MARG: Then you must leave? STEN: Stencil must be in Lucerne before the week is out. MARG: I dislike premilitary activity. STEN: It isn't espionage. MARG: What then? (Stencil laughs, watching the twilight.) MARG: You are so close. STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a season? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, none conceivable unless, ha ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents. Envoys from the zones of human crucified, the fabled districts of human love. But in whose employ? Not his own: it would be lunacy, the lunacy of any self-appointed prophet. . . (There is a long pause, as the light reaching them through the clouds weakens or thins out to wash over them enervated and ugly.)
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