IV.

I have said already that we were fickle young men, and it is true. After almost half a year of fortnightly tea parties we began to yearn for something meatier. Sophie and her ilk, refinement personified, were frankly as dull as ditch-water. I compared them – not out loud, of course! – to some of the rough, boisterous neighbourhood girls I had grown up with: bare-legged, foul-mouthed, playful urchins. Sadly, I was no longer invited to partake in their games. (My parents, whilst poor, were more respectable than theirs, and my move to public school was the final, permanent frosting of our relationship.) For Sophie’s type, politeness was not so much a mask as a hardwiring. Everything in life ran according to instructions and protocol, and mimicry of one’s elders. You risked wedding them not out of love, nor of physical desire, but for the sake of their damnable “proper form”. And what a frustrating life it would amount to: an unending carousel of social climbing, of affecting airs and grace, of peering over garden fences. (Did they have garden fences? Perhaps estate boundaries.)

Percy, a quite moronic but very amusing friend of mine, happened at one point to mention a certain unlicensed nightclub near Cambridge Circus, which sounded extremely debauched, with American-style jazz bands and dancers on podiums. He said his roguish uncle (how clichéd!) had told him all about it. We were spellbound by the idea of all that naked – or, realistically, semi-naked – feminine flesh… This, mind you, was more than ten years before Paul “the King of Soho” Raymond set up his revue in Walker’s Court, before the Soho area took on an artificial, synthetic kind of degeneracy.

It is fair to say that I was worldlier than many of my Dulwich peers, who, to put it kindly, had from the cradle been smothered by privilege, but even my worldliness stopped short of the authentically depraved, and I was thrilled by the idea. We knew the winding streets by day, as well as by dusk, but by night – when the trumpets blared and the devils arose to play – it was an unfamiliar, beguiling maze. But Percy being Percy, he had no scheme whatsoever for getting us into this club, and I don’t believe he even knew the address. It was Mathilde who came to the rescue. We were picnicking in Battersea Park on a spring afternoon with some of the girls, chaperoned of course, and deliberately segregated by gender. We boys were arguing amongst ourselves about cabs and false moustaches, all in strained whispers. The girls sat apart and discussed whatever inanities they liked to discuss. After some time Mathilde, doubtless bored with their conversation, crossed the divide to join in our debate. At first she was unnoticed, but then she interrupted Percy:

“Oh, you surely mean the Natchez?”

Percy had thus far been calling the club in question “the Nacho”. Immediately we turned to her, agog.

“You’d not get in on a Friday night, that’s for sure,” she said, pausing to sip her lemonade. “Policemen loiter near the entrance in disguise, and raid it once a week. Bertram – that’s the owner – he can’t afford to be caught with underage drinkers on the premises.”

“Indeed – I had heard as much,” replied Percy, a deeply absurd young man, keen to repair his standing but not knowing quite how.

“We could go there in the Easter break,” said Mathilde. “And on a Wednesday or a Thursday night, things might be more relaxed. Or we could forget Natchez altogether. Some friends of mine from art school are organising a little party in a flat off Curzon Street in two Saturdays’ time. There’d be a band. We could have some cocktails at mine beforehand – daddy’s away in Toulouse – and go onto the party once we were merry.”

Her proposition met with a startled silence. Dancing girls were one thing, but cocktails? I had not even held a cocktail before then, let alone gotten merry on one, and as for the party... Except for family events – tedious and forgettable – I had never been to one. Indistinct schoolboy fantasies abruptly took shape, and promptly were stirred up again into frenzy. It was that promise of dissolution, rather than of opulence, which most attracted me to Mathilde’s idea. Let the barons hold on to their coronets; I envied them only their liquor and their wayward daughters. Had Mathilde instead offered some squalid, Hogarthian romp in Bermondsey, complete with tattooed sailors, gypsy guitars and moonshine, I would have been just as eager.

“Have you really been to the Natchez?” I asked her afterwards. We were walking, she and I, in the direction of the embankment. “You weren’t fibbing?”

“Why would I say I had, if I hadn’t?”

“To tease Percy?”

She laughed. “Oh, that was a bonus. The boy’s an ass. But I don’t want him to get arrested.”

“Kind of you.”

“No, not really. Can you imagine Percy being arrested? I think I’d die laughing. I’d positively die.”

 “Well, come to think of it – so would I.”

“But, see, if he were arrested, Sophie would surely find out I was there, and then she’d tell daddy, and that’d be the end of it.”

“Ah.”

The end of what, I did not ask. I never spent much time in those days trying to fathom Mathilde. It was clear from the off just how starkly unalike we were – how unalike our upbringings had been, and how unalike we had formed as a consequence. We were hewn from a different rock to one another. I was a flint on the strand, tossed aimlessly about in the surf, choked in foam. Mathilde was a precious gem whose dazzling facets were hidden from full view, and whose worth presumably defied measure. I gained little from her directly, and kept her close only that I might bathe in her refracted glory.

 

The fateful evening came after what seemed a very long wait. Dappled skies were swept clear, and in the parks and gardens pale shoots gave way to fragrant, pink-tipped buds. April, and the Easter break, were at last upon us, and it was time for the party. From a charity shop near to Clapham Common I had purchased what I believed to be a raffish blazer-pullover ensemble, and I matched it with a bow-tie which had belonged to my grandfather. I polished my brogues until the leather wore thin, and stuffed into my breast pocket a silk handkerchief. I side-parted my hair and, seeing that my lips were dry and colourless, applied the very tiniest, most imperceptible smudge of my mother’s lipstick. And aside from cosmetics, it was clear my school friends had pursued a similar “look”. We convened at around half past six at a bus stop near Kennington, and to a passer-by we might have been posing for a clothing catalogue, albeit not a stylish one. The general effect on Kennington’s public was, unfortunately, one of mirth and puzzlement. Percy, in a frilled shirt, could have passed for a pubescent Lord Fauntleroy, right down to the daring, effeminate buckled shoes. Yevgeny – in spite of his name he was thoroughly anglicised – wore a double-breasted blazer one or two sizes too large. Hubert, the most handsome of our set – and who, just four years thence, would marry Sophie – wore a tweed jacket, a shooting tie, a checked shirt and bottle-green corduroy trousers. He looked like an Edwardian country squire. But no one else, at least, had thought to wear a bow-tie. Thus suited and booted we set off for Mayfair, almost too nervous and thrilled to speak. We drew towards our destination, and peered eagerly at the pedestrians outside. Fur coats appeared on one or two as we approached the north embankment, and were thereafter commonplace; heels grew taller and hemlines more daring. Smart, inscrutable gentlemen tapped their umbrella canes on the pavement, strode quickly to whichever club or casino they were happening to grace that evening, and their companions – coifed, immaculate – hung on to their arms for dear life. Car horns blared rudely; lights flashed; expectation was palpable. 

We alighted at Piccadilly Circus and walked the rest of the way. On arrival we had half-expected to find the usual crowd at Mathilde’s father’s apartment (which, incidentally, was palatial: decorated professionally, and at considerable expense) but besides our hostess we were presented only with Emilia, whom we half-knew, and a middle-aged man whose name, or pseudonym, was utterly preposterous. Tragically, I have long since forgotten what it was. Emilia and this gentleman were plainly very drunk already, and Mathilde was under the spell of some narcotic.

“So good of you to come,” she simpered, leading us inside. “So, so good of you to come.”

Her pupils were dilated and her eyelids wide apart. At first she was sedate, but a moment later was bounding and energetic. She rushed over to a wooden cabinet in the living room, the ceiling of which was dizzyingly high, and began to mix our drinks for us with peculiar, sinister-sounding liqueurs from various dusty flagons, and with arbitrary measurements. I asked for a Cuba Libre – it was the only highball I knew the name of, having read about it in my mother’s copy of Vogue – and received a tumbler of white rum on ice, and with the tiniest, subtlest hint of lime juice. Percy’s Cuba Libre, a minute later, came in a martini glass, had Coca-Cola in it, and tequila, but no ice. By the second round of drinks, an hour later, it had mutated yet again into a rum-and-lemonade cocktail, was served with a lime wedge, and was profoundly disgusting. Presently Emilia, red-headed and petite, was flirting desperately with the unnamed gentleman, but he seemed oblivious and had eyes only for Hubert in any case. He claimed to be a philosopher and had arrived in London that very morning from Calais. He had a long beard and long hair, and there was more than a hint of Rasputin in his eyes. We boys didn’t know what to make of him. The only bearded, middle-aged men we knew were our house masters at Dulwich, and they were strict, paternal figures whose sole interest was education, and what they termed “the public school ethos”. This particular kook, whom Mathilde seemed hardly to know, spoke of little else but the vibrancy of speed, the “cleansing power of violence”, and the shortcomings of Italian futurism. He drank his gin neat.

By half past nine crackling Mozart segued into fast, mesmeric jazz, and the drinks had their way with us. Percy was very sick in the toilet, and we tried to send him home.

“No…no, no – it’s too far gone. That’s to say…we’re too far gone…Mustn’t stop now.”

He was insensible, but rather sweet-looking in his stained frills.

“Alright Perce,” I said, “so how about a sit down? Just pop here a moment, there’s a good boy.” I laid him down beside the hat-stand outside the bathroom and placed a cagoule over him, like a duvet cover. “When you’ve had a nap we’ll sort you out with another drink – what d’you say to that?”

But Percy didn’t say anything – he had fallen asleep. Hubert and I left him to re-join the party. Emilia was now standing on a leather-bound ottoman, trying to jig and spilling wine on the carpet in the process. I watched as the purple stains bloomed in the fabric. Our nameless philosopher friend was sketching the Léger with a fountain pen on a white handkerchief, and a copy of his crude study was made on the table beneath where the ink soaked through. All the while Mathilde waltzed grandly about the dinner table, led by an invisible partner. Her eyes were closed and her head was tilted serenely. She was humming a tune to herself, and I watched her for some time, wondering where she had learned to dance.

Presently, the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed for ten and Mathilde announced that we would move on to Curzon Street. In truth we were in no state to move anywhere. The world was pitching before me; Hubert and Yevgeny were bleary-eyed and dishevelled; Emilia was drunk; Percy was unconscious. Only Mathilde was still vitalised. The walk should not have taken more than fifteen minutes but we spent twice as long, staggering hither and thither. Percy had to stop a number of times to be sick, and at one point Rasputin encountered a policeman, altercated with him, and was eventually wrestled into a waiting paddy waggon. I was relieved to see him go, and Mathilde seemed unconcerned.

The party was in full swing when we arrived. It was on the upper floor of a townhouse split into apartments, and though majestically proportioned it was visibly rundown. Chandelier fittings hung empty and on the walls were ornate, sinuous lamps, the bulbs of which were black and burned, or cracked open like eggshells. Fragments of plaster lay in conical piles by the wainscoting. A once cavernous fireplace had been ripped out, and in the space was a pyramid of green wine bottles – six layers high – the labels of which were stained and illegible. I do not doubt they were old, eminent wines; misprized and gaily quaffed.

But this is to say nothing of the revellers themselves, who were eye-catching in the extreme. In the living room, or what had once been the living room, were gathered about three dozen young men and women, some with their faces painted with spots and stripes, and others wearing elaborate headdresses of ostrich and peacock feather. The “band” was a pair of bored-looking foreigners in the corner, West Indians perhaps, one with a trumpet and the other with a tambourine, and their music was very fast and peculiar. The eccentric carousers, plumages flailing, were dancing and writhing on the uncarpeted floor, out of time to the music and with bottles of cheap champagne in hand. Mathilde had disappeared to the bathroom with Emilia and we boys were left alone in the doorway, gazing in at the jamboree, roused and horrified.

“Steel yourselves,” murmured Yevgeny, and we stepped forward as one, uncertainly, into Gomorrah.

Mathilde reappeared in the room with Emilia almost half an hour later – both looking flushed and dishevelled – by which time I was ensconced on the chaise-longue between a pair of budgerigars (or that, at least, is what the young women claimed to be dressed as). One yanked my bowtie loose, and the other charged my empty flute with exotic-coloured punch from a jug at her feet. Drops of it splashed over my shirt and trousers.

“Tell us who you are – who you really are,” slurred the budgerigar to my left. Her warm breath smelled of ripened peaches.

“He’s a spy,” whispered the budgerigar to my right. “Look how he’s dressed.”

“I assure you, ladies – “ I replied, in what I hoped were mock-gallant tones, “— I am no spy.”

“He’s lying,” said the budgerigar to my right, her sharp talons sinking into my thigh.

“Yes…he’s lying,” chirped the other. “We should torture him until he confesses.”

And from a clutch bag she produced a flick knife. For a dreadful moment I believed she would stab me, and was in the motion of recoiling, but then she erupted with laughter.

“For cutting apples!” she cried, holding the blade up. And it was indeed the kind for fruit, not more than one and a half inches long. From my flute I extracted a hefty quarter of lemon, and with the knife she split it three ways. We sucked on our ration until our eyes watered, and dissolved again into laughter. I felt giddy with excitement. After a time I gathered they were second year art students at Goldsmiths’, and the prettier of the two, called Esther, was a former girlfriend of the host, whom she pointed out to me: a very tall, muscular fellow with a shaven head and a deep, fresh-looking tan. He was naked but for a loincloth and a quiver filled with arrows his feet were bare. He was dancing by himself and looked quite forlorn.

“Tarzan, Lord of the jungle,” announced Megan, the less pretty budgerigar, whose breath smelled of peach. “But his real name is Elmo van Solling.”

Elmo was a sculptor, explained Megan in almost reverential tones, and he was squatting in the apartment since his father had ejected him from the familial home, following some lurid, heart-breaking scandal involving Elmo and a politician’s son.

“Oh dear,” was all I could say at first. That, and: “How regretful.”

“Isn’t he something?” said Esther.

I shrugged. “Perhaps…he is certainly rather striking.” In truth he was mesmeric.

“Go and dance with him,” said Megan, and Esther nodded eagerly.

“Yes, go and dance with Elmo,” she agreed.

“Why? What’ll I say to him? I haven’t even got a costume.”

The theme was “birds and beasts”, and I was clearly neither. Mathilde ought to have warned us; there is nothing more awful, except perhaps the reverse, than arriving at a fancy-dress party in civilian clothes. In the end, we all went up to dance with him, the budgerigars and I, and we held hands and span in a circle, to and fro, back and forth, until we were dizzy and delirious. Elmo smiled sadly. Up close I could properly admire his pronounced, angular features, like one of Breker’s marble warriors, though his tightly cropped hair gave him the look of a prisoner. For that reason, perhaps, I found I was too nervous to meet his eye. He could not have been older than twenty-two, but he struck me as so worldly; so very much in his element that he could afford to be downcast, so solemn, amid all that euphoria surrounding him. I tried to speak every now and then, but the words wouldn’t form, and in the end I left the talking to Esther. From the look in her eyes, I gathered she was still in love with him, and I think Megan loved him too. As we danced, they shot questions at him – of his work, of his younger sisters, of his artist friends. His family, I guessed from what little constructive conversation took place, were German or Austrian expatriates. (I happened to know that Solling was the name of a range of foothills in Saxony. The original “von” preposition had been altered, presumably, to evade anti-German sentiment in one or both of the wars, like the Battenbergs who became the Mountbattens.) Eventually we were joined by other revellers, one at first, then two or three, and then several at a time, and our circle became a dense, torrid, writhing mass of bodies, with Elmo and me virtually stationary at its core. The heat was tremendous and my fortitude, undercut with punch, finally crumbled. Feathers brushed up against the bare skin of my neck, sweat spewed in geysers, and through the forest of limbs there came bestial whoops of exhilaration. The music had tipped into frenzy, and I could not say exactly what happened, or with whom. I only recall the feeling of ecstatic abandon.

An hour later, during a lull in the music while the band took refreshments, I left Elmo and his harem to find the others. Hubert I spied in the hallway. He was slumped in a chair against the wall and he looked tired and irritable. His tie was loose and his top button undone.

“Filthy degenerates,” he muttered as I approached. He was glaring at a young couple kissing frantically in the doorway through which I had just passed. The girl was evidently a tigress, but her partner’s get-up was less clear. He wore a black leotard, and pinned to his lower back was a kind of tail. (In fact he had come as the Minotaur, but the exquisite papier mâché bull’s head he had abandoned next to the toilet earlier that evening. I came across it when looking for Percy.)

“Let’s get out of here,” said Hubert. “I don’t like these people.”

“Oh?”

“They aren’t our people. We shouldn’t have come.”

“No?” I would have given the world not to miss it. And as for “our people”, in truth I knew I wasn’t one of Hubert’s people either. In that respect I was a free agent.

“Where’s Yevgeny?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“Gone home probably.” Yevgeny lived in Westminster, a short walk away. It was his habit to leave parties entirely unannounced.

“Mathilde? Emilia?” I asked. He shrugged again.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s well past midnight. Let’s go.”

I was sorely tempted to send him off without me. I wondered if Elmo would let me sleep on the battered chaise-longue, if such a feat was even possible. But then again it was past midnight and the party had, if anything, grown larger and wilder. Nobody would be thinking about sleep until at least four or five o’clock, and I simply hadn’t the willpower or the stamina.

“Alright then Hubert. I’ll find Percy, you find Mathilde to say goodbye, and we’ll meet back here in five minutes, come what may.”

 

I found Percy in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He was curled cherubically at the foot of a poster bed, unconscious, grasping in his vomit-stained hands an overhanging slither of duvet, as a leper might grasp at the trailing hem of a passing messiah. The room was dark, filled almost to the ceiling with mess, and the bed itself was occupied by an unclad couple, thankfully also asleep by that point. There was a trail of red handprints along the carpet, leading from a puddle of red wine in the bathroom someway down the hall, through the bedroom door, and ending where Percy presently lay. It appeared he had been asleep beside the toilet earlier in the evening, had awoken, and had sought out a nest in which to sleep off his intoxication. He had crawled infant-like along the hallway and eventually spied the bed through the open door, but not possessing the strength to pull himself into it had made do with the floor. I wondered if he had noticed the couple’s intrusion, or if in fact they were already using the bed, in which case had they noticed his intrusion? I shook him awake, whereupon he emitted a very long, lamenting sigh. His limbs moved slowly and cautiously.

“It’s alright Percy – let’s get you on your feet shall we?”

He sighed again, this time from the pain which undoubtedly wracked his skull. I tried to shift him bodily, but gave up after a moment’s exertion. I was of average height and lightly built; Percy was shorter but much very much heavier.

“Want help?”

I turned to see, silhouetted in the doorway – in fact, blocking much of the light – was Elmo. He had discarded the quiver and looked more naked than ever.  

“Is this your room?” I asked, and he nodded, casting an impassive eye over his ruffled bed-sheets and the entangled occupants. He came forward and I stood aside. He crouched and scooped Percy up in his arms, as easily as one might a baby.

“I will carry him as far as the front door,” he said, which struck me as more than reasonable – if anything, overly generous.

I trailed behind as he descended the staircase, every now and then protesting at his being overly good-mannered. Percy was one of my lot, after all, whether I liked it or not. We had come to the party together, and he was my responsibility – or in any case, more mine than Elmo’s. But my protests went unheeded and unanswered. Meanwhile I was entranced (and not to mention a little disturbed) by the sight of Elmo’s broad back, across which rippled vast, muscular knots and couplets, and I was put in mind – though could not say why – of great tubular pythons writhing beneath a silk sheet. It was practically indecent.

Hubert was stood waiting for us in the hallway, and he blanched a little at the sight of Elmo, cradling poor Percy in his arms.

“What have you done with him?” he cried, apparently believing that Elmo had attacked Percy, and was in the process of disposing of the evidence.  

Elmo ignored the question and placed his burden into the chair which Hubert had vacated. He then turned in the direction he had come and strode off.

“Isn’t he the one who lives here?” whispered Hubert, eyeing the titanic figure who was ascending the staircase.

“That’s Elmo van Solling. You needn’t have been so alarmed – he was helping me out. Percy was poorly upstairs.”

“Poorly how? Not drunk again, surely?”

“Again? Hubert, he never recovered from the first time.”

At this point, Percy let out a groan. His head was slumped forward into his frills.

“Hubert,” I said, “I’m going to stay here and clear up the mess Percy made upstairs. Why don’t you take him home? I’ll chip in for his cab when I next see you.”

“Yes alright. Was he sick?”

“I think so. And he got wine on the carpets.”

“Poor Percy.”

“Poor lamb.”