Serge decides to go and visit Mr. Clair, who’s working for the Fabian Society. He visits him at home, a flat in Islington.
“It’s not much,” Clair tells him. “I’ve only had it for a year or so.”
Clair looks older: thinner, more worn-and, beyond this, as though the anger at society’s condition that peppered his speech when he was Serge and Sophie’s tutor at Versoie were no longer coming from some abstract, intellectual font of righteous youthful rebelliousness but had been rubbed into him from outside, almost physically ingrained, leaving him bitter.
“Where were you before that?” Serge asks.
“Farming in Yorkshire. I was made to: conscientious objector. Forced to till the earth for refusing to participate in the conquest of it.”
“ ‘Advance thy empire,’ ” Serge says, smiling.
If Clair understands the reference he ignores it.
“Some of us were even put in prison. But we’ve brought changes about. In future no one will have to-”
“Where’s the one with the jetty in it?” Serge asks. He’s been looking at the paintings on the walls while Clair’s been speaking.
“Sorry?” Clair asks.
“When you lived with us, you had a painting of a boat pulling off from a jetty. There were two canals meeting each other, and the boat was pulling off. You told us that you’d painted it yourself.”
“I did lots of paintings in the old days,” Clair says.
“You know when you gave me and Sophie art lessons?” Serge asks.
“Yes,” Clair answers. “She always did plants, or insects. You did maps.”
“Exactly,” Serge says. “You were trying to teach us depth.”
“I didn’t do a very good job there,” Clair murmurs sadly.
“Can you remember what you told us? About how to do it, I mean…”
Clair ponders Serge’s question for a while, then says:
“I probably gave you basic principles of one-point or two-point perspective: picture plane, rectilinear scene, horizon line…”
“You’ve got to have one of those if you’re going to paint, right?” Serge asks.
“To tell you the truth,” says Clair, “painting’s not really my bag these days. My interests have moved on to the artisanal side of things. I like the work of craftsmen, the aesthetic of the labourer. It seems less disingenuous, more honest…”
He stares out of the window, his face earnest but joyless. Looking at it, Serge sees reflected there a vision of the future-the collective future, or a version of it, at least: a fairer, saner, soberer one that leaves him cold.
Billie Lee’s party is the next day. Serge, Audrey, Becky and the other Amazons ride in a long procession of taxis along the Embankment, past Tower Bridge and into the East End. They pass a market that’s still going at this late hour: Jews, Poles, Russians, Turks and others bustle around in the smoky glare of naphtha flames exchanging nondescript bundles of fresh produce, fabric or electrical equipment, haggling with each other in a dozen languages.
“We could be in Smyrna,” Serge says, which prompts the girls in the cab to sing, in unison:
That Smyrna -Myrina
Enchants all who’ve seen her…
Both people and lights grow sparser as the cortege moves down Cable Street. Dark, empty roads run off this towards Shadwell and Stepney. After Limehouse Canal the street lamps give out entirely; only moonlight reflecting off the muddy creek illuminates their passage through the night. The lead taxi pauses, then turns down the narrowest of alleyways and draws to a halt beside a warehouse from whose small side-door a pool of yellow light is spilling. Other cabs are pulled up outside. Serge and the Amazons disembark and make their way through the door. Much to their consternation, they’re relieved of one pound each, then led along a dusty corridor and up a rickety staircase towards a large internal doorway from beyond which the familiar sounds of jazz are streaming. Passing through this, they emerge into a vast industrial space, a storage room or assembly hall, that’s been transformed into a setting as fantastic as an emperor’s opium-dream or some exotic film. The room’s pillars, coiled about with red-grape-heavy vines, tower above the room like columns of a bacchanalian temple. Crane-hooks around the walls are similarly vine-decked, as are gantries hanging from the ceiling. On a platform raised much higher than the 52’s stage, between fixed machine-parts, an expanded jazz band is playing double-time, as though possessed by the deity that’s being invoked by the outlandish décor. Above them, like the god himself, Billie Lee stands looking down from a raised walkway, resplendent in a blue overcoat with a luxurious fur collar.
“For once, we’re underdressed,” Audrey shouts at the other girls.
It’s true: most of the women here are wearing chiffon dresses trimmed with lace and crêpe-de-chine tea gowns; the men, like some of those he saw in Madame Z’s salon, seem got up for a pyjama party too. Waiters wearing laurel wreaths are gliding around with trays of Champagne. Serge, Audrey and the Amazons down a few glasses; then the girls skip off to join the crowd of dancers on the floor beneath the stage.
“Dr. Arbus is here,” he hears one of them say to Audrey as they slink away.
Serge looks around, wondering which reveller he might be. The dancers are mostly women. He can make out Amazonian segments interspersed among the limbs and faces: bare shoulders turning and vibrating, hands pulling vanity cases from purses (they’re so adept at sniffing cocaine that they don’t need to stop moving in order to do it). Serge has his own medicine, procured from the objet d’art-displaying antique dealer this afternoon, an H day. He retires into what seems to be a small electricity cabin and doses himself up. When he emerges, all the dancers are moving like the actors in a film that he and Audrey saw played at the wrong speed by a novice projectionist a week or so ago: slowly, their frenetic twists and shudders broken down to gestures that ooze into one another at a pace so languorous it’s almost static. Skirts draw together and apart like clouds merging and separating over the course of a whole afternoon; eye contact between partners takes as long to establish as trunk-call connections, and is taken leave of lingeringly, sadly; wisps of smoke turn solid as they extend from cigarettes to coil like lace round limbs and clothing. Viewed like this, the scene looks more melancholic than celebratory or jubilant. Even two women who are kissing each other passionately seem caught up in the grip of a slow desperation: their mouths suck at one another, as though struggling to draw oxygen out of the lungs beyond them; one of their hands is grappling at the other’s breast as though clutching at a fixed object to prevent a fall. As the breast breaks free of its clothing, the hand slips and its owner emits a shriek that takes an age to reach him and stays with him for even longer, drowning out the music: a slow, drawn-out version of a shriek he’s heard before…