Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  “But they blind you. They are ruthless. I never want to be possessed by her again.”

  He murmured something about her father, of which, in her agonies of self-reproach, she heard only the word amid a blur of soothing sounds.

  “Oh, leave me alone!” she cried. “I killed him too.”

  “What was your father?” he said, his cool hands closing on hers. “Tell me—as if you were telling the story of another person.”

  “An old cavalry trooper who kept a pub.”

  “And he married your mother in France during the last war, I suppose?” he asked, refusing to be distracted by her attempt to shock him.

  “Yes. And when the franc fell she was ready to get out. I can remember how happy he was the first year in England. And then Maman—for me or for herself? Just because she was made that way, perhaps—turned the pub into a famous place.”

  “That must have startled him.”

  “Slowly, if one can be startled slowly. Oh, Toots, I can see him now. He had nothing to do—nothing! Every morning he used to polish the mahogany bar, polish it for hours. It was the only use he was, for Maman’s barman served the drinks. And then she covered the bar with zinc like a bistro. It was all he had left.

  “He didn’t have me any longer then. Before I went away to school we would spend hours together. Not talking much. He didn’t talk much to anyone. But together and so happy. Afterwards, in my holidays, Maman kept me busy, always with herself or with the guests. He didn’t want to intrude. He kept away till I was used to him keeping away. He sat in the stables, trying to be busy. And when Maman covered the bar, he died.”

  Armande’s cheeks were flooded with tears, though she sobbed no longer.

  “I didn’t understand,” she cried. “I was a little fool. Because he kept to himself, I made no effort. I just accepted Marxian’s way. I could have loved him, spent my time with him, told him that he mattered to me more than anything on earth. But I was allowed no time. No time. Maman dominated us. It’s as if everything I am had been made by a human sacrifice.”

  “How old were you when he died?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “A bit young to run your own small world,” he said.

  “No. Not for a woman. Not for a tough little gamine as I had been only three years before. As I’m going to be again. Not too young to love and show love and make it all that matters to someone who needs you. Oh, Toots, I don’t know why I’ve told you this! I’ve shed all my life on to you.”

  He kissed her hair, and got up to fuss with drinks. Armande made running repairs to her complexion. She was weary of herself and her body and her sordid tear-stained face; but Carry and Xenia might come in at any moment. It would be the lowest depth of shame if either of them should see that in an afternoon alone with Toots she had made the usual Cairo scene.

  “Why do people tell you things?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied, and added vaguely: “All these homeless men and women. And then there are one’s own chaps. I learn to listen. I wish I could go on learning.”

  “After the war?”

  “If I get to the end. It makes me so anxious to settle all the unhappy too soon. And perhaps all I do, as you say, is to make prisoners.”

  “It’s not your fault. We’re just women weeping for Adonis.”

  “I don’t croon or anything,” he protested.

  “Darling, I was serious, quite serious.”

  “Were you? Yes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what there is behind all that light in your great eyes. And it’s surprising to be called Adonis by Astarte. Appropriate, perhaps—though our great scene failed.”

  “Toots, that’s the second hint. Don’t be rash, my dear.”

  “I must be a little rash. It’s what we’ve been trained for.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Into the desert,” he replied. “And soon. That’s why I’ve had to talk to you seriously.”

  “Do what I ask about Carry and Xenia.”

  “I will.”

  For a week Armande was all brittle courage, which led her only into exploration of Cairo and a few improbable interviews. One morning as she let herself flow through the streets upon the tide of busy human beings, hoping for inspiration from their very variety, she found Floarea Pitescu decorating the Rue Soleiman Pasha. The girl was staring into the window of a drugstore, where a display of beauty preparations, in the deep tints and heavy perfumes that the dusky Middle East demanded, was grouped around the portrait of a movie star. Armande first recognised the Rumanian by her valiant air of concentration. Floarea’s pose was quite unlike that of a pretty woman who had stopped to look in a shop window. She was slightly frowning and, as a connoisseur before a picture, standing a little back: undoubtedly to analyse what the star had that she, Floarea, had not, whether it could be acquired, and with how much effort.

  Armande carried her off for cakes and coffee, noticing with amused interest the appraisal—a joint appraisal—that they received, and the little silences as they passed between the crowded tables of the garden café. Alone, she attracted no particular attention; nor, she suspected, did Floarea. Floarea’s frocks and auburn hair were so provocative that her profession might well be misjudged; the casual glances of other women were more likely to be contemptuous than admiring. When, however, both were together, Floarea drew attention to Armande’s good looks, and Armande to Floarea’s respectability, or rather—for respectability was too unkind a word—to the fact that Floarea had a private and definite character inhabiting her too conspicously beautiful body.

  While they strolled through the streets, Floarea’s enthusiastic chatter, illuminated by an occasional fact tersely expressed, had made it clear that she was in Egypt to get an engagement, that the Romanova was still with her and well, and that times were hard.

  “And you?” asked Floarea. “By the way. I have a message for you.”

  “From whom?”

  “Sheikh Wadiah. Before I left he said that if ever I met you I was to tell you that you would always be welcome at Beit Chabab. He was very precise. Always, he said.”

  “How nice of him!”

  “Yes, it was. After all the trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Armande. I keep clear of politics. But there were French and British officers hanging about (they were very useful to me—I got my visa), and everyone knew it was something to do with you. First of all Beit Chabab said you were a German spy. And then Wadiah told them something. I don’t know what. And they decided that you and Wadiah together were arming all the Christians in the East. It’s made Wadiah more of a prince than ever. That’s just like my own country. Any man of influence has to be mixed up in a scandal before he gets real respect.”

  Armande laughed. She was relieved to learn that Wadiah bore no ill will. She could imagine him as he twisted his moustaches to heaven, hinting, prevaricating, dropping calculated indiscretions until a desirable legend had been born.

  “How do you like Egypt?” she asked. “Have you got no work at all?”

  “Just odd jobs as a photographer’s model. This sort of thing!”

  Floarea hunted in an oversmart bag of white patent leather, and produced a photograph in which she was lying dazzingly and completely naked on a Victorian sofa.

  “Good?” she asked, with the tolerant pride of an artist in a minor but efficient production.

  “Well …” began Armande, too startled to criticise.

  Floarea’s face in the photograph was so serious and posed that it gave to the portrait a grave beauty. The pose was not languishing enough to advertise clothes—which indeed it hardly could—or any object of feminine vanity or masculine desire.

  “What on earth is it for?”

  “Constipation. I never need pills, Armande, do you?”

  “Have you got to do that kind of thing?” Armande asked.

  “Why not? I am waiting to dance at a smart locale. I will not take an engagem
ent at the second-rate.”

  “But you’re heaps better than all these old turns in Cairo that everybody is tired of. Haven’t they given you a trial?”

  “Oh, yes. But the conditions, my dear! The proprietor! Even the doorman! In Bucharest one is allowed some choice. But Cairo is a great brothel.”

  “I am sure it is nothing of the kind for the top-flight turns,” said Armande demurely—she had already done the round of the Cairo cabarets with Toots and his circle.

  “Do they have to sit at the tables?” Floarea asked.

  “I don’t think the best do, unless they want to. You ought to be in their class.”

  “I know I ought, but I haven’t the right approach.”

  “Floarea,” Armande suggested, “what would happen if you and I asked for a job together?”

  “You?”

  “I can dance, you know. Or at least I could.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I could carry you through.”

  “I did not mean acrobatics,” said Armande coldly.

  “That’s not fair!” Floarea flashed. “How was I to know you could dance? If you can.”

  “I’ll show you. If I can, would I do?”

  “Yes, but … there might be difficulties.”

  “What’s the matter with me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Am I sufficiently snob for the big engagement?”

  “Of course, Armande, But … are you all right? I mean, we shouldn’t have any trouble with the police?”

  “Why should I have?” asked Armande indignantly. “And what about you? An enemy subject!”

  “I am a Jewess,” said Floarea smugly.

  “Are you? I didn’t know.”

  “No, Armande, I am Orthodox,” Floarea replied, drawing out from her bosom a small gold cross, and kissing it. “I wear my cross, though I hide it—and may God forgive me for the lie! But Mama found out that artists were allowed to work and travel if they were Jews. So we learned a prayer in Hebrew, and said that we were. They say it’s dangerous in Palestine, that there is a secret police who ask too many questions. But here we were believed. After all, any good Rumanian could pretend to be a Jew or a gypsy. Is it wrong, do you think?”

  “Not for you,” Armande answered. “It’s a policeman’s world, this—and each of us must do what she can. Is there anywhere with a piano where we can practise? Then you can see how much I’ve forgotten, and make up your mind.”

  “Yes. At our rooms. Mama will be there.”

  Floarea led her to a grim, unpainted apartment house, rising six stories above a row of shops. It was shabby, but in a good street, and looked as if it might be inhabited by small Greek businessmen with large families. Floarea ran up five flights of stairs with a lightness that amazed Armande, unlocked the door of a flat and called loudly for Mama.

  The flat looked and smelled as if it had been used by generations of cabaret artistes. The hall was hung with photographs of dancers, their signatures and their affectionate dedications to the landlady scrawled in vast flowing hands, a dozen European languages and green, blue and violet inks. There was furniture everywhere, covered with cheap Oriental hangings and cottons printed with scenes from ancient Egypt. Scattered about this overbearing quantity of textiles were cushions in vivid silks with the heals and feet of dolls. There did not seem to be anything in the house without a skirt except the dancers in the photographs, Romanova and the landlady.

  The landlady wore trousers. A roll of fat from her hips, surprisingly bagged in the pink silk of her underwear, emerged from the undone placket like the shapeless materialisation from a cheap medium. Romanova, in a flowered cotton wrap, lay among the dolls drinking coffee. She looked cool. Indeed the whole flat, heavily curtained and shuttered, was cool. The same air had been imprisoned for year after year, but at a more gentle temperature than that of the street.

  The Romanova greeted Armande with reserve. Her eyebrows, painted in two appealing semicircles high on the aging forehead, were raised more in interrogation than welcome. Floarea explained, in a rush of emphatic and musical Rumanian, the reason for Armande’s visit.

  “Let us see,” said Romanova neutrally.

  She led the way to a room which was empty except for a piano and a stool. It occurred to Armande, who was trying hard to think charitably, that this barren space probably accounted for the pantechnion of furniture everywhere else.

  “Can you lend me some clothes?” Armande asked Floarea.

  “I got ’im!” said the landlady, bursting importantly into English. “Nice, clean! I know what you like.”

  She had been staring at Armande with embarrassing approval. She now waddled out of the room, and returned with a neatly ironed play suit, thoroughly practical except for a quantity of fish-fin frills.

  “I like English,” she said. “When you finish, you come have tea.”

  Romanova looked critically at Armande’s long legs.

  “Tap?” she asked.

  “Classical.”

  “Not without more muscles in your calf than that, my girl! But you’ll certainly give the clients something to look at.”

  Romanova seated herself at the piano.

  “What do you want?”

  Armande, overcome by a flurry of nervousness, could not think of a piece.

  “‘Tristesse’? That do?”

  “All right.”

  Romanova began to play, watching Armande’s interpretation of the music and sympathetically adjusting the accompaniment whenever she landed herself in a dead end.

  “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Floarea regretfully.

  “Little fool! After all, you don’t know a thing!” sanpped the Romanova. “She can manage her arms—which is more than you ever will till you stop thinking how pretty they are. You’re hopelessly out of training,” she added to Armande.

  “I know. How long would it take to get back?”

  “Months.”

  “Well, that’s that,” said Armande.

  “But I thought you wanted to dance with this child. Not ballet. You’d be good enough to partner her in a fortnight—if you really worked.”

  Floarea stood still, her shocked eyes filling with tears. Then she suddenly swooped across the room, lifted Romanova off the piano stool and kissed her.

  “Mama! Will you stop trying to take the conceit out of me!”

  Romanova, for the first time, smiled at Armande, as if she too must admire the relationship between this impetuous girl and her so-called mother. Armande did admire it. She also began to think more kindly of the Romanova than at Beit Chabab. There was, after all, no real reason why a woman should ever remove powder from her face if she didn’t want to.

  “Can I train here?” she asked.

  “Yes. Two hours in the morning alone with me. Two hours in the afternoon with Floarea. If you do less, I won’t take you. Are you eating well? You look like it.”

  “Very well,” said Armande guiltily. “And—and you?”

  “On tick. Ecaterina is an old friend”—Romanova lifted her eyebrows in the direction of the door through which the landlady had gone—“but getting restive. Pay for the lessons if you can.”

  “I can, but not for very long.”

  “You won’t have to for long. You and this child will be on easy street if you behave yourselves.”

  The landlady had tea waiting for them. She was a Rumanian Greek from Galatz, and passionately pro-British. Her exclamations made it plain that this was partly due to the sympathetic natures of British seamen on the Danube, and partly to enthusiasm for the useless gallantry of British aid to Greece. Mme. Ecaterina understood English, but could only summon up her phrases after some thought. The conversation settled easily back into Middle Eastern French.

  Armande, now committed to a future that appalled her, forced herself to ask whether Mme. Ecaterina had a room that she could occupy. Ecaterina had. It was clean, and could have been cheerful if scissors had lopped off the fringes of bedcover, curtains, lamp shades and mantel
piece.

  The landlady waddled back into the hall, Armande delicately following in her wake, and poured out more tea.

  “But one thing,” said Ecaterina, “must be clearly understood. You are not to bring gentlemen here. I will give you a very nice address.”

  Armande froze. All of them, the flat, the room, the dancing, immediately took on an air of unreality, while she, an intact observer, sat on. Then suddenly she realised that there was no reason in the world why she should not be angry; no reason why here, at the bottom of society, she should not say aloud the things she was saying to herself. Her spirit leaped back seventeen years into the easy past.

  “Mme. Ecaterina,” she remarked, with an irony that grew through every word of her exquisite French, and culminated in sheer invective, “if I take a room and pay my rent, I demand the right to receive my friends. And if my friends are men, I shall lead them into that bedroom directly under your filthy nose and shut the door and close the keyhole and leave the rest to your disgusting imagination.”

  “You are English. You can do what you like. I trust you,” Mme. Ecaterina surrendered at once, the whole jelly of her body quivering with timidity at this attack. “I only made it clear, as I always do.”

  “Bien,” said Armande, “but I am old enough to assume there is a vase de nuit under the bed without you placing it in the middle of the room.”

  “Armande!” exclaimed Floarea, horrified.

  “Armande—I am sick of Armande! What’s your name when you dance?”

  “Mavis. It’s romantic.”

  “It’s suburban—but if you like it! Then I will be Marthe. Mavis and Marthe. Will that do? I will come tomorrow, Mama, for a lesson. And I will take the room, Mme. Ecaterina, at the end of next week.”

  Armande stormed out of the flat, utterly ashamed of herself, lips trembling with nervousness, but hot with satisfaction in the bottom of her heart at the shocked faces of her landlady-to-be, of Floarea and of the Romanova.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mavis and Marthe

  The Hungarian and Rumanian artistes who normally staffed the cabarets of the Eastern circuit had been rounded up and dispatched to Cyprus, where, among the limited circle of officers who were fortunate enough to be stationed there and to have private incomes, they preserved the traditions of Aphrodite’s island. Egypt was short of high-class entertainers, and had to fall back on its native supply of acrobats, conjurers and stomach dancers. Their exotic feats on stage or floor were of international excellence, but did not suggest to patrons of ordinary tastes that there was any object in getting to know the performer over a bottle of so-called champagne. Troops and contractors with money to burn had little temptation to spend any really substantial sums in the cabarets.