“Marylebone,” Audrey tells the driver.
They start kissing in the taxi. They snort more cocaine. Audrey lets Serge slip down her dress’s shoulder; while he strokes her upper breast she runs her hand over his hardening crotch. Her flat, like his, is on the second floor. It’s strewn with stockings, blouses, camisoles. Clearing some space on a divan while she goes into the small kitchen to fetch two glasses of whiskey, Serge finds a song-sheet marked with pencil annotations; perusing it, he learns that, in the original draft of the “abreast” song, “of suits” was “in suits” and the line “Your mores or polities” was the vastly inferior “Your offers of jollities.” Beneath this sheet lies a flyer for a weekly spiritualist meeting taking place in Hoxton Hall. These papers and all other paraphernalia are swept to the floor as Audrey takes her place on the divan beside him, passing him his whiskey. They take one sip each, then continue where they left off in the taxi. She removes his clothes herself, firmly unbuckling his belt and yanking down his trousers. When they’re naked he tells her to turn round.
“Why?” she asks.
“I like it that way,” he replies.
Afterwards, as they lie on the divan, she makes quiet sniffing noises. Serge thinks it’s the cocaine at first, but realises, as the small, short sniffs continue, that it’s him she’s sniffing at, his chest.
“You smell like my brother,” she says.
“Is that good?” Serge asks.
“Yes,” she answers. “I always liked Michael’s smell.”
“You don’t anymore?”
“I doubt he smells as good these days,” she tells him. “He’s been dead for three years.”
“The war?” Serge asks.
“ Verdun,” she replies. “We’ve had contact since, though.”
“How?”
“Through séances.” Her finger draws a circle on his chest, as though sketching a group of sitters round a table. “He’s not always there-quite rarely actually. But it’s always good to go.”
“In Hoxton, right?”
“How do you know?”
“I’m psychic.”
She snorts derisively; her fingers clench into a fist and thump his chest. His own hand reaches down and, rustling through the below-divan debris, hoists into view the flyer.
“Oh, of course!” she giggles, her hand softening and stroking his chest better again. “I’ll take you sometime if you like. It’s really good.”
Serge thinks of his father’s theories about static residues, bouncing electric waves. He’s got the ammeter right here in London, in his flat: his father asked him to take readings at various spots around the city, a task he’s signally failed to carry out…
They try to sleep but can’t: the cocaine’s made them jittery. Audrey offers to go and get some veronal to help them come down from it, but Serge has a much better idea:
“Do you know where to find heroin?”
“Oh, Becky’s into that,” she says.
“Becky?”
“The one who chopped off the Sumerian warrior’s head. She was sitting across from you in the Boulogne.”
“You think she’s still up?”
“Only one way to find out.”
They take a taxi to Bayswater. Becky is up, but has no heroin. She knows where they can get some, though: a woman named Zinovia or Zamovia in Primrose Hill.
“She runs a kind of salon,” Becky tells them.
It’s mid-morning by the time they find themselves riding across town in yet another taxi. As they pass through the West End Audrey makes them stop so that she can pick up a pair of ballet shoes from Arthur Frank’s.
“You like them?” she asks, slipping the shoes on and straightening her feet against the driver’s partition as the cab pulls off again.
“Dr. Arbus buy them for you?” Becky half-sings. Audrey nods.
“Who’s Dr. Arbus?” Serge asks.
“Her mentor,” says Becky in a mock-stern voice.
“Protector,” adds Audrey, equally faux-solemnly.
“Instructor,” Becky elaborates, nodding slowly.
The two girls start laughing. Serge laughs too, although he doesn’t get the joke, and looks out of the window. Streets are growing leafier, houses bigger and smarter. They chug uphill for a while, then stop beside a house whose entrance is held up by light-blue columns (Ionic, Serge deduces as they wait between them for admission). A servant opens the door; Becky enters into an exchange with him whose phrases don’t make sense to either Serge or Audrey but result, like combination lock-dials rotating to their designated slots, one after the other, in a second door being opened and the three of them being led up a finely carpeted staircase into a living room with sensual curtains and hangings, low-shaded purple lights and an uncanny atmosphere of lassitude. People-some in dinner jackets, some in suits, and some in what look like elegant pyjamas-are strewn around this room like clothes at Audrey’s: draped across divans, curled up on rugs, slumped in lush armchairs.
“This is like the Mogul’s opium dream in Sunshine of the World,” whispers Audrey. “You know, Niziam-Ul-Gulah, or whatever he’s called, in the first act.”
“Niziam’s the Vizier,” Becky whispers back. “The Mogul’s called something else.”
“Isn’t that the lord who’s chasing Mabel?” Audrey says, nudging Becky. “You know, the political man. Lying on the sofa, with that girl you always see in the lounge of the Denmark Street Hotel.”
“I think maybe it-” Becky begins, before catching her breath and gasping: “Oh, look! It’s the chap who’s in that film we saw last week!”
She clasps both Serge and Audrey with excitement. Audrey squints piercingly towards the man in question, but is unable to confirm or deny Becky’s claim, as her view’s blocked by the approach of an ageing lady who floats towards them with an indolent, cat-like gait.
“My angel,” the lady, whom Serge presumes to be their hostess, this Zarovia or Ferrovia, purrs as she gathers Becky’s hand between her own, smiling at her with a languid and matronly look. “So glad to see you.”
Her voice is husky, foreign: maybe Greek or Russian. Becky introduces Serge and Audrey to her; she takes their hands too. Her hands are limp and clammy; she reeks of perfume. Her eyes move from one of them to the other with a dull and heavy motion as she asks:
“What will my angels have? Pipe or syringe?”
The two girls turn to Serge, who answers:
“Syringe, definitely.”
Their hostess leads them to an enclave in which poufs lie in a circle round a Persian rug, sits them down, then floats away, returning shortly afterwards with three loaded syringes. Serge injects himself, then watches Zoroastria inject first Becky and then Audrey. By the time she’s got to Audrey he’s already under the drug’s spell; watching an air bubble rise through the liquid in the barrel as the madame taps it with her clammy finger, he feels himself rising too, shedding gravity like clothes, like curtains, hangings, tapestries…
Serge, Audrey and Becky visit the salon several times over the next few weeks. After a while Becky teaches them the password sequence so that they can go without her: it consists of the visitor enquiring whether there’ll be a piano recital today, and the servant (since Madame Z’s seems to be open round the clock, these keep rotating) asking whether they’ve come to hear the Chopin or the Liszt, to which the visitor must answer “Liszt.” There is a piano in the main room, as it happens; from time to time, one of the guests will play it for a while, but their recitals never get completed, any more than the intermittent conversations rippling about the place, which fade away almost as soon as they get going. Serge learns other passwords too: there’s one that works at Wooldridge and Co. chemist’s shop in Lisle Street, and another in a taxidermist’s store in Holborn; at a confectioner’s in Bond Street, by announcing himself favourable to liquorice, then purchasing either a flask of perfume or a box of sweetmeats, Serge is able to procure much more than he ostensibly requests; at an antique dealer’s out in Kensington, the code works the other way, one or other (sometimes both) of two Oriental objets d’art, calligraphic watercolours bearing (originally, at least, quite accidentally, Serge imagines) the likenesses of the Western letters C and H, appearing in the window to indicate the availability of various stock. He starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversations heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on window-sills or clothes on washing lines. He also comes to realise just how many of his fellow citizens are subject to the same vices as him. He picks up the telltale signals all over town: the sniffs, the slightly jaundiced skin, the hands jerky and limp by turns, eyes dull yet somehow restless too. Sometimes a look passes between him and a chance companion on the bus, or in a queue, or someone brushed past in a doorway, a look of mutual recognition of the type that members of a secret sect might give each other: Ah, you’re one of us…