Madame Vatatzes accepted it all as a matter of course. Indeed, she might not have been present; stooped above the tray, re-arranging the bottle and the glass thimbles, she was as unaware as her bare feet.
Mrs Golson was able to study her afresh, the tendrils escaping from the nape of her neck, the little, almost imperceptible hackles rising from the ridges of her great toes. The finger-joints could have been arthritic, and must have prevented her ever dragging off those antique rings, had she wanted to, but probably she didn’t want. The rings of women such as Madame Vatatzes (like Eadie Twyborn) were ingrained and ingrown.
Joan Golson had a sudden brief vision of an enslaved dog or cat rubbing against, licking the beringed hand casually offered for adulation.
She looked at her husband to see whether he had caught her at it.
He hadn’t. Curly was more likely preparing for the stroke he had started expecting in recent years. There was a vein in his temple which reminded his wife of that other, horrid one.
She looked away.
‘Shouldn’t we have something to eat?’ Monsieur Vatatzes remembered. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound — or is it the pig is in for a poke?’
‘Angelos had an English governess,’ his wife informed herself as much as those who could not know. ‘Wansborough, wasn’t it?’
‘Walmsley!’ He might never forgive her the mistake.
Somewhat to Madame Vatatzes’ relief, the Golsons declined food, with incredulous chins and murmurs of ‘figures’ and ‘livers’.
‘But,’ said Mrs Golson, glancing at her husband, ‘we were hoping you might treat us to some music.’
‘They may not be in the mood, treasure. Nobody is always in the mood.’
That Curly might have developed a sensibility perhaps superior to her own, astonished and annoyed Joanie; it was not to be expected in a man.
‘Of course if they don’t feel like it. I know one has to feel like it …’ Then she blushed, looking to the Vatatzes for some manner of corroboration or forgiveness.
Neither of them showed a sign. They had sunk into chairs. Their eyelids looked as solid as stone.
Of them all, only Curly appeared to be enjoying himself, his resentful wife could tell. He had drained his tot of rather nasty wine, and sat revolving the glass thimble between a finger and thumb gigantic by comparison. His calves tensed, he was beating time with the balls of his feet. She hoped he was not about to take the floor.
‘Where you’ve got it over we Australians,’ she heard with horror, ‘you know how to start early.’ He clucked with his tongue in the direction of his empty glass.
‘I’d have thought,’ she hastened to correct, ‘nobody could teach the Australians.’
‘What’s wrong with the Australians, darling? Except that that’s what we happen to be.’
She could not refute it, nor remind him that he would refer to the horrid porto as ‘rotgut’ at some less exotic, more rational hour.
Monsieur Vatatzes had sucked in his lips till his mouth resembled nothing so much as a wrinkle in a sooty lemon, through which was squeezed the sour assertion, ‘Other Australians have not come my way — excepting E.’
‘What?’ Mrs Golson was almost propelled out of her collapsing Provençal chair. ‘You’re not born Australian?’
Curly did not utter, but conveyed his slightly incredulous approval; the Golsons loomed at Madame Vatatzes as though all three had been Christians in a pagan world, that of Madame Vatatzes’ husband. He, by contrast, and Orthodoxy, repudiated those who could have been — well, Bogomils, Bulgars—Barbarians.
Naturally Eudoxia, torn between opposite camps, was terribly distracted.
At least Mr Golson, regardless of anybody else, poured himself another tot of the very indifferent porto. ‘To celebrate,’ he had the grace to apologise.
While Mrs Golson continued sitting forward on her creaking chair in a state of precarious enthusiasm. ‘Do tell!’ she coaxed. ‘Where are you from? Melbourne?’ before venturing breathlessly to hope, ‘Sydney perhaps?’
‘Oh,’ Madame Vatatzes sighed, still not raising her heavy eyelids, ‘it was so long ago I can’t feel I came from there. Or,’ she murmured, ‘belong anywhere, for that matter.’
Her husband had opened his eyes and was staring at her with an expression determined to accuse her of any step he might consider false, while she, in her passive stone-bound condition, seemed equally determined not to give him cause, not at the moment anyway. Although impressed by the sight of Monsieur Vatatzes’ commanding eyes, Mrs Golson regretted the withdrawal of those other jewelled ones which, now that she had this additional clue, might have enabled her to do her sums on past and present.
It was immensely irritating. She sank back at last, exhausted, exuding in her frustration and her tan velour, the luscious promise, the tantalising glitter of a baba au rhum.
Fortunately for her, Curly at least continued to find his wife luscious. Did Monsieur Vatatzes too, perhaps? For as she sank back into her chair and her brown confection, he rose in his black, his veined hands working like talons, which till now had only dangled limply from his arms and the arms of his chair.
The old cove was wearing round his neck on a broad black ribbon of watered silk, something Curly had already noticed, and dismissed out of loyalty to their sex: a gold emblem in the shape of a two-headed eagle. Could you beat it?
‘If it’s music they want,’ and the Imperial Eagle looked full at E. Boyd Golson rather than at the female of the species, ‘hadn’t we better give it to them — Doxy?’ His teeth seemed to implant ignominy in the one who bore what Mrs Golson presumed was a nickname, an unfortunate one.
Otherwise she was so delighted she drew from her chair all the sounds of threatening collapse. She clutched the handbag which contained the jewel she would almost surely offer eventually to Madame Vatatzes, metaphorically on bended knee.
It was Curly who now withdrew, into a male despair, as the young woman rose and dedicated herself to her husband’s wishes and their guests’ entertainment. She was delightful of form, moving, swaying, in this bleached-out robe which only a ‘bohemian’ would be seen dead in, but carrying it off with a style of her own, unlike Joanie (he would never criticise Joan’s taste in dress: it was too right and too expensive) but this young erect sheaf, he could see her falling to the reaper’s sickle, possibly his own — yes, his own.
He looked at Joanie. She was too entranced by the prospect of culture to cotton on to a man’s thoughts, so he eased his crotch, and resigned himself to the tedium he was in for.
Madame Vatatzes had seated herself at her end of the oblong piano-stool. She had arranged everything trailing which needed to be arranged, behind her, thus leaving room for the old boy.
At the same time Joanie Golson was arranging her chin in the hollow of her hand, her beatific smile preparing to be pollinated by the music scattered on it by Madame Vatatzes — less by that nasty old man her husband. Joanie had forgotten her former life, Australia, Eadie Twyborn, and in the present, threats of war. Her receptive soul was yearning to collaborate in giving birth to a promised music.
The silence, Madame Vatatzes, Mrs Golson, even the resistant Mr Golson, all were waiting; when the old Greek stalked towards the piano, in a slight susurration of pin-feathers, and clanking of the gold Imperial emblem.
‘Which is it to be, Angelos?’ his creature asked.