Part 22 (2/2)

”The Blue Tiger, where we were Friday? Is she still there?”

”She wouldn't be, no-she'd be too old even for the chorus now.”

”Billy's no spring chicken,” Flo commented, in what sounded like an objection.

Billy? I thought, then: Ah. Belinda Birdsong, the saucy chanteuse.

Donny gave a snort, and said, ”Billy was old when he was in short pants.”

Hmm. Another Billy, then. Unless this was another of the slang turns my American contemporaries used, where a girl was ”old man” and a man ”young thing.”

Flo giggled. ”Don't be absurd, Donny. Billy never wore short pants; he was born in a skirt.”

”Wait a minute,” I broke in. ”Are you saying that Belinda Birdsong is a man?”

My two companions flew into gales of laughter, making me realise that I'd sounded like someone too ancient, or too naive, to have imagined such a thing as a man acting as a woman. ”No, honestly,” I protested, ”I've seen men impersonating women before, but a person can usually tell. Are you sure?”

This set them off again, into the sort of choking noises that can only come from a risque joke. ”Oh, yes,” Donny got out at last. ”No mistake.”

”Do you care to tell me why?”

The cool edge to my question reminded him of his manners. ”Sorry,” he said. ”Didn't mean to . . . That is to say, yes, I'm sure Belinda's a man, 'cause I saw his, er, fittings one evening. I was walking by his dressing-room when someone threw open the door at a . . . revealing moment.”

”I see.”

”As did I. Gave me quite a trauma, I tell you, seeing the, er, lengths the boy would go to to conceal-” A slapping noise came out of the darkness as Flo chastised him, and I made haste to move the subject on a step.

”I'm impressed. Their throat usually gives them away, the Adam's apple, you know, and a degree of exaggeration in their manners. He's very natural.”

”They all are.”

”What, you mean the others on the stage were all men, as well?”

”Not the chorus line, but the three other singers, yes.”

I'd never even suspected it. Alcohol, of course, was partly to blame for my lack of perception, and the room's thick, smokey air, but on reflection, I decided that the reason I had failed to notice was that, in England, such acts as I had seen were generally in small and seedy cabarets, not in a glittering palace the size of a warehouse with a big, slick jazz band to accompany its internationally known singer.

”Well, fancy that,” I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody a.s.suring us that ”It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo',” some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.

Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.

Chapter Nineteen.

Tuesday was a day of leisure, an unlooked-for holiday from care, during which we at last eased into the att.i.tudes appropriate to a summer house. The weather cooperated in the venture, with a slight high fog to keep the sun from waking us too early, then burning off to present us a day worthy of the Riviera. Flo and Donny appeared, yawning and tousled, to exclaim in appreciation of the sparkle off the lake. Flo turned on her heel and went back to don her bathing costume, and while Donny was studying the potential contained in the cupboards, she trotted down the lawn and to the end of the dock where she stood, pulling on her red bathing cap, before launching herself off the end into the water.

Donny produced griddle-cakes (apologising all the while for the lack of some spice or other that his mother used and which, he claimed, defined the dish) until we were groaning, and we then merrily abandoned the mess in favour of reading in the lawn-chairs.

They had both brought novels, although at the moment both were buried in other things. Flo was reading one of the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Posts that Mrs Gordimer had left in the sitting room, chuckling over an F. Scott Fitzgerald story called ”How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” I glanced automatically at the book beneath her as I settled onto my chair. ”Heavens, Flo,” I said, ”what is that door-stop of a book you've got?”

”It's Ulysses, Ulysses,” she said with a giggle. ”A friend bought it in Paris and smuggled it in disguised as a five-pound box of Swiss chocolates. Have you read it?”

”Not yet.”

”They say it's hot stuff.”

”It had better be, considering the size of it. And what's that you have, Donny?”

”Cross-word puzzles,” he replied, holding up a peculiar book that had come with a pencil attached to it. ”Just hit the shops, and a friend said it was going to be all the thing. Can't see them catching on, myself. They're tough.”

The more ordinary-looking book on the gra.s.s underneath his chair said The Plastic Age, The Plastic Age, by someone named Marks. ”I presume that's a novel?” I asked. by someone named Marks. ”I presume that's a novel?” I asked.

”You bet,” he said. ”Everyone's talking about it-nearly got itself banned for the hot bits. The story of a fellow's undergraduate years. What about you?”

”A book on feng shui. It's a kind of Chinese philosophy.” I saw their faces go blank, and thought I should perhaps redeem myself a little. ”I did read a book on the boat out that had been banned for years. Have you read Jurgen Jurgen?”

They'd heard of it, wanted to know how ”hot” it was, but I had to admit that the moral outrage of the censors probably had less to do with the petting scenes than with the fact that it was G.o.ds who were doing the petting. Donny trumped my bid of Jurgen Jurgen by saying casually that he'd met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I'd found Fitzgerald's stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness-and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that-I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky. by saying casually that he'd met Scott Fitzgerald at a week-end in France the previous summer, but as I'd found Fitzgerald's stories a somewhat tedious glorification of childishness-and American East Coast aristocratic childishness at that-I had little to say. Eventually I returned to my Orientalia, they to their stories, and the sun continued its complacent way across the sky.

We ate lunch, and then Donny wanted to try the canoes. Flo protested that the sun was too hot, but he offered her one of his long s.h.i.+rts, and that (along with a wide straw hat from the house) mollified her. They paddled, they swam, I joined them and sat out, and then it was somehow evening, and the happy melancholy of physical repletion coupled with too much sun settled over us. We had a drink, and dinner, and played billiards in the front room until the worst of the mosquitoes had been driven off by the citronella.

Around ten o'clock Donny proposed another swim. Flo and I begged off, but he was set on it, and strode down the lawn into the darkness. After a minute, we heard a splash, then the rhythmic sounds of arm strokes.

”Do you suppose he went in fully dressed?” I asked Flo. He was by no means drunk, so I wasn't worried about his safety, but I was curious.

”No, there'll be a line of clothing down the lawn come morning,” she told me.

The sound of his strokes faded and grew dim, then nonexistent. ”He seems a strong swimmer,” I said dubiously.

”Gosh, you don't need to worry about Donny-for two bits he'd swim across the Golden Gate. You'd never know he had scarlet fever when he was a kid, would you?”

”It doesn't seem to have affected him.”

”It did, though. He tried to join up in '17, but they wouldn't have him. A d.i.c.ky heart. That's when he came out here-he was too wild about it to stay at home where all his friends had joined up, had to get away. Bit sensitive about it, you know?”

”I won't say anything.”

”Crazy, really, he's strong as an ox. h.e.l.l, they even took my father, who was old.”

”Yes, your mother told me he'd been killed in the war.”

”Bet she said he was her husband, too.” I heard her chair creak and protest as she sat up suddenly, then heard the sound of her cigarette case opening. In a minute, the flare of a match lit her face.

”Do you mean to say they weren't married?” I asked tentatively.

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