“Is that cunt Ellis Hugo Bell in here? He is, isn’t he?” The slurring — for he had had a few since last encountered — yet still unmistakable voice of Kim Grizzard, as he slapped the tattered manuscript of Freeze When You Say That down on the greeter’s podium.
As the greeter darted forward to bar Grizzard’s progress and to deal with him in much the same manner as the receptionist at the Choosers had dealt with him (“He’s not expected so far as I know, sir, but if you’d like to leave a name …”), Alex swiftly seized his chance. Taking Else’s elbow, avoiding eye contact with anyone who might cast suspicious glances, and mouthing inanities such as “And tell me, missus, do you come here often?” he steered her up towards the top-floor restaurant. Done this before, hadn’t he? Bag o’ Nails Club in Leeds with Selby, when neither of them had been a member, one of the few clubs up there where you had to be. Always some trouble on the doors at the Bagger Nails. You waited your chance and sailed in. Doddle.
There was a second greeter at the top of the stairs, clutching a little stack of invitation cards.
“Could I see your invitation, sir?”
“Er — ah. In fact I’m with James Flood of the Examiner. Just been out to get some fags.” He’d worked this one in Leeds too. Never failed, unless the person you claimed to be with either wasn’t there or had already gone.
“All right, but I’m afraid we can’t allow this lady in.”
“It’s OK, luv, she’s with me.”
“Yes, but you see, you’re Mr James Flood’s guest. I’m afraid you can’t take your own guest in, sir.”
Alex felt like saying: “Is there anywhere in this fookin town that lets anyone in?” Instead, and before Else could start on her own spiel about knowing whoever it was the book had been written about, he said: “Yeh yeh yeh, but don’t worry, she just wants to use the toilet.” Possession nine tenths of the law, that was the strategy: once he’d got her in they’d have hell’s own job getting her out again without disrupting the party.
“That’d make a change,” was the second greeter’s murmured aside to the ceiling. With a false smile to Alex: “I’m ever so sorry, sir, it’s not me, it’s policy. So if the lady could kindly —”
“All right, where’s that cunt Ellis Hugo Bell?”
Saved by the Bell again, as you might say. He’d work that gag in when it came to telling the lads the full story.
Kim Grizzard had half bounded, half fallen up the stairs, closely pursued by a burly, dinner-jacketed managerial type who was probably no more than a jumped-up bouncer.
“Now come on, Mr Grizzard, none of us wants trouble.”
“Who doesn’t want trouble? You speak for yourself.”
The distraction was enough for Alex. He propelled Else into the crowded, half-darkened restaurant, where they were soon swallowed up among the chattering mass of freeloaders, as Alex judged the majority of them to be. Well, they must be, if even he and Else had managed to get in, and that ace wankah Ellis Hugo Bell was here. James Flood would have got an invite of course, being press, but a lotter them, apart from the phalanx of young women in black who could have arrived for a fashionable wake, looked as if they’d walked in off the street. Here for the beer, eh? He wondered if there were any of them canapés going. He could murder a chicken vol-au-vent.
A designer-stubbled waiter was hovering with a tray of what Alex thought was champagne but which proved to be rather nasty sparkling wine. He took two glasses and placed one in Else’s gnarled hand.
Else thanked him without removing the ash-dribbling panatella from her mouth. “You’re a very resourceful young man. You remind me of the late John now what was his name again, dead now of course. You know, the photographer. Now he could get in anywhere, he would charm his way in or bluff his way in. But he was a nasty piece of work, was John it’s on the tip of my tongue. I’ve known so many people at my time of life I forget their names. Yes, a nasty piece of work. But you I think are a nice piece of work.”
“Thank you. So are you,” said Alex woodenly. He wished he could get compliments to trip off his tongue, same as they all seemed to do down here. “Darling, you’re looking absolutely absolute,” they were all saying, mouthing the latest catchphrase. If Alex said anything of that sort back at the Metro they would never stop taking the piss. It was a bit of an art form if you asked him.
They were drifting towards the centre of the room. It was a big room, tall and airy, with a curving glass roof like the Victoria Arcade in Leeds. Alongside it, and overlooking the alleyways behind Frith Street, ran an outside iron walkway, fire escape so Alex supposed, on which loitered a knot of dinner-jacketed figures from what seemed to be a different party, next door probably. Life must be just one long fookin party for this lot.
Else clutched his sleeve excitedly. “Oh, look! Now that’s what he looked like in middle age. They should have used the later portrait, the famous one, but then the other biographies did that, didn’t they?”
Alex didn’t know what the old trout was rambling on about, except that they had stopped at a long central table stacked with copies of the book they had come to celebrate, and surmounted by a huge cardboard blow-up of its cover. The Light and the Shade: the Chiaroscuro Life of Augustus John. Alex had heard of him, just. Didn’t know what chiaro-whatever-it-was meant, though. Italian, sounded like.
“He did some sketches of me, you know. In the Fitzroy Tavern.”
“So you said.”
“John Minton, I sat for him more than once.” Never heard of him. “Francis Bacon. Many others. They didn’t all climb to the top of the tree, you know, or live high off the hog. Many of my friends died all too young.”
She sounded wistful. She reached out and picked up a copy of the new John biography, spilling a quantity of ash over the frontispiece, an etching of some gypsies. With none-too-clean fingers she leafed through it until she came to a page of pastel drawings, one of them a sepia head and shoulders of a soulful-looking young woman with her hair in a bun. Looked like that young Queen Victoria that you saw on old stamps.
“Here I am. I was very beautiful in those days.”
“Still are,” said Alex gallantly. “I bet you’re a cracker with your teeth in.”
“Epstein was going to do me, you know.” What, shag her, did she mean? Who wouldn’t, if that was how she looked? So why didn’t he? “But he died, of course.”
As Else brushed ash from a page, succeeding only in creating a long grey smudge, the book was taken, snatched almost, from her grimy hands by yet another efficient young woman in a black suit with a lapel badge pronouncing her function as Lisa, Sales. She was a bit of a cracker too, in fact So-oh was fuller them. It was a comfort to Alex that if Selby meant to pull while she was down here, there was some stiff competition.
“Excuse me, madam, do you wish to purchase this?”
Without thinking, Alex heard himself say: “How much is it?”
Well, why the fook not? His hand strayed to what he had learned to call his back sky-rocket. There was two hundred pounds in twenties tucked away in there. Two hundred smackeroos, as Brendan would have called them had he known he’d parted with that much. In fact the extra was not for special services — Christ knew they were special enough as it was, Alex didn’t even want to think about that little interlude — but because when it came to peeling off the dosh, which he had done from a wad of readies on the bedside table, Brendan had been too pissed on his own champagne and gin to count properly. And who was Alex to put him right? The bugger had got it, hadn’t he, it was practically coming out of his ears.