”Of course. He’s longing to meet you.”
”Is he? I didn’t imagine he conceived of my existence.”
”Of course he does. He’s all agog.”
”You make me feel quite nervous. I’ll let Miles have first go. I’ve always so much wanted to meet you and Bruno. Is Bruno very ill?”
”Yes and no. He’s not in pain and he’s quite rational. He’ll like you.”
”I’ll like him.”
How stupid of me, thought Danby. It never occurred to me that there might be, like this, a girl. And what luck for Bruno. She would know how to deal with the old man. Girls had so much more sense. He looked about the room again. A girl who did nothing. Who sat in plump chintzy chairs and read. He saw a book on one of the chairs. Jane Austen. A woman who was perhaps a little bored. Who waited.
”I’m so very glad we’ve met at last,” he said.
Then, oh God, he thought, what awfully sexy music. What is it? It was something familiar. “What is that thing on the gramophone?”
She turned it up. It was a slow foxtrot, formal, dignified, intensely sweet, bringing with it again that precise and yet unplaceable sense of the past. Danby’s feet sketched a movement, sliding, catching, upon the close-woven carpeted floor.
Then the next moment he had sidled forward, slid his arm around her waist, and they were dancing in silence, advancing, retreating, circling, their slow precise feet patterning the floor and their mingled shadow climbing over the furniture after them.
The music stopped and they moved apart. Blue eyes stared at brown eyes and brown eyes dropped their gaze.
”You dance beautifully, Diana.”
”So do you.”
”I think the slow foxtrot is the best of all dances.”
”Yes. And the most difficult.”
”I haven’t danced in years.”
”Nor I. Miles hates dancing.”
”I won a dancing competition once.”
”So did I.”
”Diana, will you come and dance with me, some afternoon, at one of those dance halls, you know, one can dance there in the afternoons.”
”No, of course not.”
”Miles wouldn’t mind would he?”
”Danby, don’t be silly.”
”Diana, slow foxtrot?”
”No.”
”Slow foxtrot?”
”No.”
”Slow fox?”
”No.”
9
Barefooted Nigel squats beside a railing looking down. His feet are muddied, his hands red with rust. A man passes by him on the pavement in the darkness, turns and pauses, stares. Nigel smiles without moving, flashing his white teeth in the half dark, catching a ray of light from a distant lamppost. The man hesitates, retreats, flees. Nigel still smiling returns to gaze. He sees through a divided curtain a man going to bed in a basement flat. The man is stepping out of his trousers. He leaves his trousers in a coiled mound upon the floor and goes to urinate into the washbasin. The tail of his shirt is ragged. He pulls off his shirt and scratches under his arms for some time, each hand busy scratching inside the opposite armpit. He stops and with intentness smells his fingers. Still wearing his cozy dirty vest he puts on crumpled pajamas and crawls heavily into bed. He lies a while vacant, scratching, staring up at the ceiling, then switches out the light. Nigel rises.
These are the glories of His night city, a place of pilgrim age, a place of sin, a place of shriving. Nigel glides barefoot, taking long paces, touching each lamppost as he passes. He has seen men prostrated, writhing, cursing, praying. He has seen a man lay down a pillow to kneel upon and close his eyes and join his two hands palm to palm. All through the holy city in the human-boxes the people utter prayers of love and hate. Unpersoned Nigel strides among them with long silent feet and the prayers rise up about him hissing faintly, like steam. Up any religion a man may climb. Along the darkened alleyways the dusky white-clad worshippers are silently carrying the white fragrant garlands to lay upon the greasy lingam of great Shiva.
Nigel strides noiselessly, crossing the roadways at a step, his bare feet not touching ground, a looker-on at inward scenes. He has reached the sacred river. It rolls on at his feet black and full, a river of tears bearing away the corpses of men. There is weeping but he is not the weeper. The wide river flows onward, immense and black beneath the old cracked voices of the temple bells which flit like bats throughout the lurid black air. The river is thick, ribbed, curled, con vex, heaped up above its banks. Nigel makes offerings. Flowers. Where was the night garden where he gathered them? He throws the flowers down upon the humped river, then throws after them all the objects which he finds in his pockets, a knife, a handkerchief, a handful of money. The river takes and sighs and the flowers and the white handkerchief slide slowly away into the tunnel of the night. Nigel, a god, a slave, stands erect, a sufferer in his body for the sins of the sick city.
He reclines upon the pavement where the rising waters have lifted up the window of a houseboat near to his telescopic eye. A man and a woman are sitting on a bed, the man fully clothed, the woman naked. He speaks angrily to her and brings his fist up to her eyes. She shakes her head, moving it uneasily away, her face made ugly by evasiveness and fear. The man begins to take his clothes off, tearing them off, stripping himself bare with curses. He drags back the blankets of the bed and the woman darts inside like an animal into its burrow and hides, peering, with the blankets up to her eyes. The man pulls the blankets off her and turns out the light. Nigel lies on the damp pavement and sighs for the sins of the world.
He lifts himself a little to see over a sill through an uncurtained window. Beside a cluttered kitchen table Will and Adelaide are arguing. He takes her hand which she tries stiffly to withdraw. He hurls her hand back at her. Auntie is knitting an orange cardigan. “So there is a Cape Triangular stamp?”
”Yes, there’s several.”
”You must get the right one, I’ll show you a picture.”
”I’m not going to get any one.”
”Oh yes you are, Ad.”
”Oh no I’m not.”
”Sometimes I could murder you, Adelaide.”
”Let go my arm, that hurts.”
”It’s meant to hurt.”
”I think you’re hateful.”
”Why do you come here to torment me.”
”Let go.”
”You enjoy tormenting me.”
”Let go.” Auntie, who has noticed, not for the first time, Nigel’s face risen like the moon above the window sill, smiles mysteriously and goes on knitting.
Altogether elsewhere beside a glass door he prostrates himself among feathery grey herbs. Here there is only a chink in the curtains through which he can see a thin-faced sallow man with narrow eyes and a heavy fall of dense dark hair disputing with a thin woman with sticklike arms and la gaunt ardent face. Her brown hair is wild, formless as a dark cloud about her thrusting face.
