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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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.
