His reading’s interrupted by the dimming of the theatre’s lights. The band start playing; the curtains draw back to reveal a magnificent court in which all tasks-guarding the ruler, fanning the ruler, being the ruler-are carried out by women. The court burst into song, lauding their queen, Penthesilia, warning putative male English suitors that she’s not much of a one for Anglophilia, and would-be pretenders to her throne that a single blow from her can killya. Penthesilia introduces her sisters Antiope and Hyppolite, who sing a short, plaintive duet about every man they ever thought was half-alright turning out to be a dope. Penthesilia answers their complaint by summoning onto the stage a chorus of female soldiers holding bows and arrows, little-round-Giles-style. Audrey’s one of these. Thrusting their weapons aloft, they launch into a rousing anthem:
Oh, of Thracian and Spartan,
Of suits tweed or tartan,
We’ve all had our fill. (How much more can we kill?)
Frenchmen and Italians
From chariots and stallions
Have fallen before us. (They bore us! they bore us!)
Trojans, though cogent,
Don’t impress us. No, gent-
lemen, be you Gentile or Jew,
Whatever your qualities,
Your mores or polities,
We’ll get along fine without you.
For a girl today
Doesn’t have to say
“I do” as the church bell rings…
Who needs a man
When you’re an Amazonian?
We’re keeping abreast of things!
There are two more verses, each rounded off by the “abreast” refrain. An anachronistic newspaper vendor-girl then enters and announces the outbreak of another war, which the soldiers promptly set off to and win quite easily, bringing back harems of female prisoners whom they quickly convert to their Amazonian ways. Twenty or so minutes into the production, Serge is expecting a male hero to wash up on the Scythian shore and introduce a basic conflict into the prevailing orthodoxy, but no such event takes place: instead, the play runs through a gamut of light-hearted sketches in which aspects of contemporary London life-hailing a taxi, ordering in restaurants, navigating the new telephone-number system-are satirised through a thin Amazonian veil. He loses interest; when Audrey’s not on stage, he flips his way further through the programme, his eyes having by now become accustomed to the auditorium’s lighting. There’s an advertisement for Osram Lamps (“Brilliant, Economical, Lasting, Strong, Sold by All Leading Electricians, Ironmongers and Stores”), and one for War Seals. Initially, he misunderstands this second term and pictures a blubbery, black-metal object, a hybrid between sea-lion and submarine. On the next page there’s a notice advertising Aerial Joy Rides above the capital, taking off each day from Croydon Aerodrome. For a moment, Serge is transported back to Kloděbrady: standing with Lucia by the weir as the prehistoric aeroplane buzzes above them; then Kloděbrady’s ground-plan-the interlocking lines formed by its avenues, the circles of its mausoleums’ roofs, the inner and outer squares made by the castle walls and the meandering path leading from these to the river, past the boathouses and on towards the forest-morphs in his mind into a mesh of trench-grids, paths leading through scorched woods to ruined villages and vacant ground scarred by blast marks. He imagines taking a pleasure flight over a war-zone, looking down on all the killing from above; then, glancing again towards the stage on which another battle has commenced, reasons to himself that perhaps that’s just what he was doing in France day after day: watching it all from the upper circle, for his pleasure. Joy Rides: he recalls the way the seed fell from him that time, arcing over the plane’s tail…
He heads backstage after the show to look for Audrey, and finds her amidst a clutter of horse-heads, silhouette-outlines of vanquished cities, false restaurant interiors and two-dimensional cars.
“I was in a play with a car once,” Serge tells her as she pecks him on the cheek.
“You’ve acted?” she asks.
“Only as a child.”
“I bet you were as sweet as sugar,” she says. “Wait for me. I’ll take you to the Boulogne: the whole gang’s going there.”
The gang have a dining room to themselves, on the Boulogne ’s top floor. Serge hears them as soon as he and Audrey enter the restaurant: they’re singing the “abreast” song, raucously and a capella. As Audrey presents him to her fellow chorus-girls (the likes of Penthesilia, Hyppolite and Antiope seem to be dining elsewhere), they emit war-like whoops and whistles, then slide over to make room for them. Waiters bring out plates of chicken, lamb and fish, but these are merely nibbled at, passed around and played with as carafe after carafe of wine is knocked back. Pretty soon the table looks like one of The Amazonians’s battlefields, post-battle. Audrey’s friends drape their arms around each other’s shoulders, laugh and caress one another. Cigarette cases and purses change hands; trips to the bathroom are frequent.
“You come here every night after the show?” Serge asks.
“We start here, then move on to the 52,” Audrey tells him. “Here, go powder your nose.”
She hands him her vanity case; he heads off to the bathroom too. When he comes back the girls are getting ready to leave.
Just hailing a taxi
Is Amazonomachy!
several of them trill outside. They find cabs eventually, and ride the short distance to Gerrard Street. A small crowd is hovering around the door of number 52; they stride belligerently through this, are whisked en masse by the doorman down the club’s narrow staircase and ushered towards several of the dance floor’s tables, where they set up camp. The room has long, much-dented floorboards. At one end a stage rises roughly the same distance above the floor as Schoolroom One’s podium at Versoie. A jazz band is playing on this: four men-one Indian, one West Indian, two white-frenetically vibrating as they clasp their trumpets, saxophones and drum-sticks, as though these were wired straight into electric currents lurking beneath the wood. Behind them, on the wall, a moon winks out at the clientele; around the moon are planets: Saturn with its rings, red Mars, another one that could be any in the solar system or beyond; and, interspersed among the planets, cat-faces, leering like primitive masks. Trellises extend from each side of this scene and run down the club’s side-walls, trailing green foliage. Flowers are laid out on the surface of each table, in small glasses.
Champagne is ordered, and consumed. Some of the girls start dancing. They dance with one another: there are men in here, but not that many; at least half the couples on the floor are women. They vibrate like the musicians, their whole upper bodies shaking like the pilots’ used to after flights. Balloons float above them, bouncing off their heads and shoulders. Cocaine is sniffed at tables here, quite openly. After serving him up a snuff-sized pinch from the back of her hand, Audrey leans across to Serge and says:
“Let’s go to mine.”
They leave, and wander down to Piccadilly Circus. While Audrey hunts down a cab, Serge stares up at the giant electric advertising hoardings: hundreds and thousands of lightbulbs-brilliant, lasting, strong, pulsing back to life again and again as they scrawl the names of the Evening News, of Venus Pencils, Monaco and Glaxo out against the sky. The G of “Glaxo” has a swoosh beneath it, a huge paraph forming from left to right as though being written out in pen-strokes, like a signature, each bulb a drop of ink, then disappearing and re-forming. All the names fade into the black and reappear, signing themselves obsessively against oblivion. Only the tyre beneath the word “Firelli” stays illuminated constantly, its rim-circumference, spoke-radii and hub-centre anchoring the elevated and abstracted spectacle in some kind of earthly geometry. Beneath the hoardings cars stream by with their headlamps on, barges of light flowing in the darkness. One of them’s detached itself from the stream and pulled over.