But then Banks too was gone, no longer crawling but running, with the unhelmeted head of the constable and the sight of Cowles’ freshly cut throat before him, reaching the door as he heard the hiss and exhalation of new blinding steam and the cry of the old nude member, only member, of the constabulary showered that moment from the small boy’s icy pail.
His hand slipped on the knob but it shut finally against the pushing of the steam, and the jockey handed him a towel. He covered himself, leaned back, stared at the bench upon which, shoulder to shoulder, were seated the three of them — Sparrow and Thick and Larry — with pools at their feet. Banks held the towel with both hands under the chin, looked at the dark men on the bench and the row of clothes hooks curling from the wall behind them. There was water about his own feet now.
“What did you kill him for?” Watching Larry in the middle but seeing the silks fluttering over the hump at the peak of the jockey’s spine: “Whatever for?” It was little more than a whisper above which he could hear the water falling from three pairs of hands, dropping from three sets of trouser cuffs. The flower had disappeared altogether from the blue lapel.
“Oh, come on,” said Sparrow, getting up, wringing the beret, “let’s have a dash to Spumoni’s!”
In the dusk surrounding the Baths the bees swarmed straight off the klaxon and made a golden thread from the bicycle to a nearby shrouded tree.
It seemed hardly more than teatime but it was dusk, fast coming on to nightfall when there’s a fluttering in steeples and the hedgerow turns lavender, when lamps are lit on ancient taxis and the men are parading slowly in the yards of jails. Castles, cottages and jails, a country preparing for night, and time to set out the shabbiness for the day to come, time for a drink.
Sparrow felt the mood: “Give us another liter of that Itie stuff,” he said. The waiter filled their glasses and Larry heaped the plates with second servings of the spaghetti and tomato sauce. The waiter could see the blue butt and shoulder holster inside his coat. “Cheers,” said Sparrow, while Jimmy Needles drank his health.
And between the tables: “You dance divine,” said Sybilline, “just divine. …”
A quartet of scar-faced Negroes was playing something Banks had first heard out of gramophones in Violet Lane, something whistled by the factory girls on their way to work. No favorite now, no waltz carried on the tones of an old comet, but music that set him trying to pump Syb’s hand up and down in time with the piano player’s tapping shoe. There was a trumpet, a marimba and bass and the piano on which a white girl was supposed to sit and sing. Beside his bench was a flabby fern in a bucket and the piano player kept a bottle there, under the dead green leaves. Banks could clearly hear the fellow’s foot going above the syncopation of the racy song.
Banks had never learned to dance but he was dancing now. He pumped her hand and Syb wasn’t afraid to move, wasn’t afraid to laugh, and he found her spangled slippers everywhere he stepped and saw the drops of candlelight — on the tables there were candles fixed to the bottoms of inverted tumblers — swelling the tiny pearls pushed into the fiery hair. For a moment, admiring the decorative row of pearls, he thought of the faces children model out of bread dough and of the eyes they fashion by sinking raisins into the dough with their stubby thumbs. Then, with the hand on her waist, he felt a bit of Sybilline’s blouse pulling out of her skirt and heard her voice, flitting everywhere fast as her feet, saying, “Let’s have a drink-up, Mike, a rum and a toss. …”
The room was filled with people from the Damps — a racing crowd. In this room in the town surrounded by farm and vicarage and throaty nightingale there were people who did their banking in High Fleet Seven and others who did their figuring in the slums, all sporting now — it was the night before the running of the Golden — and ordering Spumoni’s best. Like a theater crowd, a society in which the small person of Needles could go unnoticed, though wearing rainbow silks and cap and a numbered placard on his puffy sleeve. And Banks felt that he too went unnoticed, felt that he could drink and dance and breathe unobserved at last. There were enormous black-and-white paintings of horses about the walls along with the penciled handwritten names of endless guests. There was the odor of whisky and Italian cooking, and the Negroes never ceased their melody of love and Lambeth Walk.
“Coo, Mike,” she said just before they reached the table, “it’s going to be a jolly evening.” In Syb’s voice he heard laughter, motor cars and lovely moonlit trees, beds and silk stockings in the middle of the floor.
Glasses in hand they did not sit, but stood beside the table, because she wanted to dance again and couldn’t bear sitting down. They held hands while the small exsoldier poured and Needles sucked in his cigarette and looked up at him.
“Mr. Banks,” and it was Larry, lifting the fork, letting the candle shine across his face, “feeling a little better now?”
“Quite nicely, thanks,” he answered.
“Bottom’s up!” the girl said suddenly, and swallowed off the wine, balancing against his arm and tilting so that he saw the heart throb, the wine’s passage down the throat from which she was capable of laughing, crying, whispering. So he drank also and it was the hard dry dusty taste of wine and he was warmed and pleasurably composed. He remembered not the Baths, the Damps, poor wretched Cowles, nor the rooms in Dreary Station, but a love note he had written at the age of twelve when the city was on fire. And remembering it he looked at Sybilline and saw in her eyes the eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hill.
“Excuse us,” he said, and put down the glass. “This is our melody.”
In his arms she was like the women he had thought of coming out of comfort rooms. Or it was what they had done in the shelters or when the bands were marching — upright, holding each other close before the parting. One of his hands was on her body and the sequins kept falling off her blouse to the floor. They were dancing on sequins. He was able now, while holding her, to try and tuck in the blouse.
“It’s shrunk,” she murmured, “it’ll never stay.” But his fingers pushed in the cloth, and over the top of her auburn head he saw the piano player leaning to drink from the bottle pulled out of the bucket and saw the marimba player’s black dusty hands — there was a big gold wedding band on one finger — shaking, trembling in mid-air. Everyone was talking horses, talking the Golden, but he was moving round the little floor with Syb.
“You know,” pulling her head away from his brown lapels, but dancing, dancing, “that other chap was hopeless. Wouldn’t even buy me an ice. But whatever did you do with his binoculars?”
He waited and then: “Gave them to a fellow selling tickets.”
Later still, when she happened to see the jockey holding his head and Sparrow slipping something to the waiter — a Neapolitan with dirty shirt and mustaches — when the candles were softly dying and the wine was dregs — and still they were turning on the floor — then she laughed, spoke against his chest: “It’ll be a jolly evening, Mike. I promise. We’ll go to bed and you’ll like my bed, Michael. …” And then in the middle of the floor with the others watching and Larry pulling sharply on his coat over the holster, sending Needles out for the hired car, then she gave him her own lips soft, venereal, sweet and tasting of sex.
But Sparrow stopped them kissing, tapped on his arm. “Come now, Banks, Larry says we’re going to a proper place.”
6
SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS
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