“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for taking time out from your busy schedules to celebrate this new and fascinating biography of one of this century’s leading artists and certainly among its most colourful figures, Augustus John. Unfortunately the author is unfortunately indisposed and so unfortunately he cannot be with us tonight, but fortunately —” here the greeter seemed to do a rapid finger-count on her adverbs and reached for a synonym — “happily, ladies and gentlemen, we have a gentleman here, I’m sure already known to many of you, who can happily tell us all we need to know about the colourful, chiaroscuro life of Augustus John. Ladies and gentlemen, the Sage of Soho, Mr Len Gates.”
Len stepped forward, producing a formidable sheaf of notes, and was about to mount the chair recently vacated by Else when he noted its damp condition. Instead, beckoning his audience forward, he addressed it from ground level.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much, the late Mr Augustus Edwin John, ARA, whether as colourist or draughtsman, as portrait painter par excellence or landscapist, ranked with the great masters. Born at Tenby, Wales, on January four 1878 he studied at the Slade School. Whilst he was awarded the Order of Merit in 1942, he was never to be honoured with a knighthood, possibly on account of a somewhat raffish lifestyle here in Soho …”
Alex felt an elbow in his ribs as James jerked his head towards the exit, at the same time executing a knife and fork pantomime with his hands. The pair sidled out.
5
Baldini’s in Romilly Street was one of the last of the old family-run restaurants in Soho. Old Jakie, now being conveyed in state past its red-painted frontage on his way from the Crown and Two Chairmen to the Coach and Horses, would have remembered delivering a daily churn of milk there from the Welsh Dairy two doors along where he worked as a boy. The fact that he would have been lying, in that Baldini’s went back only as far as 1951 — for ancient Soho restaurants were these days more recent than they were — was neither here nor there. It could not be long now before Baldini’s became another branch of Starbucks. Unknown to its dwindling band of regulars, and certainly unknown to James Flood, Soho correspondent of the London Examiner, the deeds had already exchanged hands and the widowed Mrs Powolny, the last of her line, was looking at bungalows in Hove.
Left to himself, Alex would have preferred a Chinese or a vindaloo. Baldini’s, he surmised, would be Eye-tie. He wasn’t all that struck on spag bollox-knees, but on the other hand he was in with a chance of James standing treat. They were on exes, as he understood it, these journos.
The Dutch-print-looking dark interior of the small restaurant, lit only by Chianti-bottle table lamps with exotic hotel labels pasted over their mock-parchment shades, was divided into banquette-lined tall-backed wooden booths, so that it was impossible to see whether the place was full or empty. Good place for a snog, judged Alex, if a bit on the suicidal side.
Mrs Powolny herself, a ramrod-backed middle-aged lady dressed in black like all the other women round here — must be flavour of the month, reckoned Alex — came forward to greet them. In fact, apart from a morose-looking cross-eyed waiter standing by a serving hatch in a resigned sort of way, as if he were a victim of low expectations from the establishment he worked for, there seemed to be no other staff.
“Two, was it? Have you booked?”
Alex saw James’s face fall. On the way round from Silhouettes he had rather given the impression that he was known here, that he would be given the best table and be fawned over.
Obviously trying to save face he said heartily: “Good evening, Mrs Powolny, James Flood of the Examiner.” A proffered peck on the cheek was rejected by a backwards flinch as if he suffered from halitosis. “No, we don’t have a reservation as it happens on this occasion, but I’m sure you can squeeze us in as you usually do.”
Mrs Powolny looked doubtfully about the room, at the same time shaking her head, as if, with the best will in the world, she would be unable to accommodate Prince Charles himself if he walked through the door without having booked a table. What the fook did she think she was playing at? The place was blurry empty.
“Waitah!”
No, the place blurry wasn’t. The booming voice from the farthermost booth was an all-too-familiar one. “Is this duck on its way or is the chef still trying to wring the bugger’s neck? One only asks.”
“Iss on ees way, Meester Brendan Barton sair.”
“About bloody time. And give us some more wine, would you, chop chop? We haven’t taken a vow of abstinence, you know, or at least I haven’t. More Pellegrino for Mr Dance.”
“Yes, sair, Meester Brendan Barton, right away, sair.”
“Follow me,” said Mrs Powolny, as if granting James and Alex an audience with some luminary, and led them past three empty booths on either side of a central aisle to the one at the end of the room that was directly opposite Brendan Barton’s table, presumably on the principle that if you crowd your customers together the room looks busier, or anyway the waiter has less far to walk.
Brendan Barton, with foam flecking his lips and the sweat running down his beetroot face, was by now so drunk that he looked as if he might have a seizure. His companion, quietly if ostentatiously dressed — the quietness of his grey-stripe flannel suit was insistent about making its point — and with a moustache that looked as if it had a barber in to trim it each morning (which was in fact the case) was as sober as Brendan was drunk.
Alex had been rather hoping to go through his remaining time in Soho without setting eyes on Brendan Barton again. He feared that he was looking sheepish. Against that, he thought there was a good case for Brendan looking so too. But Brendan, for his part, showed no sign of recognising either Alex or James. It seemed probable, in his present state, that he wouldn’t even have recognised his own mother.
James Flood’s nod went unacknowledged. He tried — as a journalist, James had steeled himself to become a compulsive greeter — nodding at Brendan’s guest.
“Do I know you, remind me?” asked Stephan Dance.
“James Flood, London Examiner, Mr Dance,” said James sycophantically. “We have met. Here and elsewhere.”
“Yes,” said Dance. “And the answer’s still no.”
“The answer to what question, Mr Dance?”
“London Examiner, yes I know. You’re about to ask me how’s business. If I say terrific, it’ll be ‘Clampdown on Sex Shops Fails To Curb Vice King’. If I say terrible, it’s ‘Sex Shop Clampdown Curbs Vice King’. How can I win? So the answer’s no, no interviews.”
“Point taken, Mr Dance, but apart from that, how’s business?” asked James — rather cheekily, it seemed to Alex, given that this Mr Dance looked as if he carried an open razor or knew someone who did. Alex had seen his quota of old J. Arthur Rank movies where the villains were known to the law as Chummy and carried chivs. Bit old for the gaunt-faced Dirk Bogarde part was this Mr Dance, but you never knew.
“Ticking over,” said Stephan Dance, sipping his Pellegrino. “But that’s off the record.”
“Waitah!”
Alex had never come across a porn king before. Did they have them in Leeds? Must do, he supposed. Shouldn’t he have a blonde bimbo on his arm? And what was he doing out with Brendan Barton? Supplying him with kinky pix, that would be it. Yeh yeh, being the public personality that he was, Brendan couldn’t risk going into a dodgy bookshop, so he would deal personally with this Mr Dance, one to one. Right, got it. It was like wunner the big stores staying open just for someone like Madonna to do her shopping.