The Birdcage (16 page)

“My back as well?”

“They never attacks the back, sir. You don’t want to worry so much about the back. Anything on the back is pimples; bound to be. But the other areas of the body should be very well scrubbed with the brush and soap provided. Take your time, sir, and do a good job. We don’t want to spoil the ship, as you might say.”

In time, scrubbed and dried but naked, Peter Ash returned to the ante-room, where the elfin man was armed with a two-inch paintbrush and a pot of thick white liquid. He surveyed Peter Ash’s body with the eyes of a sculptor, and seemed to be appraising his proportions against the bishop’s. “Yeees …” he said, “I had a bookie in here the other day. Very corpulent gentleman he was. Fat, as you
might say. Eighteen stone—I sent out for the scales, and we weighed him where he stood. Glands it was, he said, because he never ate no more than you nor me. I had to mix extra for him. Not that I grudged it, but there was extra mixed.” He dipped the brush into the liquid.” Now if you’ll just stand here, sir, where I can get
at
you. Foot on the stool, if you please. “He put a thick line of white on Peter Ash’s right foot. The liquid had a very noticeable scent, which Peter Ash hoped would pass.” Spread the toes, sir, if you will. Very important to get in … between … the toes. Yes. I had an Inspector of Police in here. Only the other day, I had him in. An Inspector, he was; a full Inspector of the police. You wouldn’t believe it, would you, but I get them all in, one way and another. I had an Olympic swimmer once. “Wistfully.” Now he had a lovely body, that man, from the swimming. It was a real pleasure to work on him.”

The elfin man was thorough in his painting, and particularly so over Peter Ash’s private parts, which had to be done carefully, he explained, because they were not a plane surface, and it was easy to miss bits if you just went slapping it on. “You may experience a sort of reaction, sir,” he said, lifting and dabbing. “Not everybody has it, of course; it takes all sorts, and not all sorts has it. The bishop had it. Natural enough it is, and don’t you think nothing of it, no more than he did. I’ve been doing this all my life, more or less, and it would take a lot more than that to surprise
me
. It would take …” he continued, working at the crevices, his tongue protruding through his lips, “a ve-ry … great … deal … to surprise me. Because I’m what you might call hardened to it. Why, I had a Colonial Governor here once. A grand old gentleman, he was, and up to everything, as you might say. Twice in three months I had him in here. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again,’ I says to him, and
it
was
a pleasure, sir, because there’s not what you might call a high rate of return, taking one thing with another. Yes, it does sting a bit if you’ve got what I call a sensitive skin. I thought it might sting a bit. I could see right away you was the sensitive sort.” He slapped the liquid on Peter Ash’s buttocks as if he were painting a wall, stood back to look with pride on what he had done, and then returned to the front, working up from diaphragm to chest with an artistic twiddle on the nipples.

In all this time no bishop, no Colonial Governor, no Inspector of Police, not even a bookie had arrived to be cleansed. Nor did one arrive while Peter Ash stood waiting for the oily liquid to dry on him, and the elfin attendant made tea on the gas-ring. The liquid dried, happily colourless instead of white, though the antiseptic smell of it grew if anything stronger, and cups of tea were drunk, and the attendant produced Petit Beurre biscuits from a tin marked “
H.M.S. AMETHYST
”. “Now, what would
you
do in the world?” he said. “Names I won’t ask for. I won’t ask for names. I prefer not to know. If you was to try to tell me your name, ‘Stop!’ I should cry, ‘Stop!’ as the words emerged from your very mouth, but I like to have my little guess at what you do. It makes an interest. You know, I’d put you down as more the artistic type.”

“I work in television.”

“I knew it. Artistic, I said to myself, the moment I saw you stripped. I can always tell. I’ve got a nose for that sort of thing.” And indeed he had. It was twitching as he spoke.

Peter Ash left the Cleansing Centre with instructions to return next day for a second coat. Taxis first to Saint Ornulf’s, then to Victoria, then from Victoria to Holborn had eaten up most of his ready money. He lacked enough for another taxi to take him back to Beaufort Street, but was reluctant to travel by bus or Underground, since he
smelled so strongly of the white liquid. There was nothing to cause him shame, but he did smell strong. People would not know what the scent was, but they would notice the scent, and he did not care to be noticed by people in public transport. Call it a whim, or too delicate a sensibility, but he did not like to be noticed. He decided to walk to Hyde Park Corner; he could afford a taxi from there. But at the junction of Drury Lane and Shaftesbury Avenue he was disturbed by a prolonged beeping from a car in the road behind him, and turned to find Squad Appleby at the wheel of a Karmann Ghia with L plates.

“Hullo, Squad,” he said. “I didn’t know you were a motorist.”

“I’m not. I haven’t passed the test. I got in
rather
a tizzy with the examiner, and when I say we didn’t part as friends, that’s the understatement of the year, my love. Anyway he failed me, so do get in and let me drop you somewhere. Then it’ll look more legal, because I’m supposed to have an experienced driver with me.”

“I haven’t a licence.”

“But who’s to know?”

Peter Ash took the scent of the white liquid with him into the car. He lowered the window on his side, but the scent filled the car before spilling out to disinfect the passing traffic. Squad said, “I never see you now, my dear, since you’ve had your little fracas with Norah. She’s
very
well, you’ll be glad to know.” Peter Ash said, “Good. I was wondering how she was getting on,” and the conversation lapsed. Then Squad said, “If I’m embarrassing you, then you must stop me at once, because tactlessness is
all
my names, but you do pong of what my dissolute old nostrils tell me is Ascabiol. I mean, I wouldn’t recognize it if I hadn’t used it myself, so you don’t need to——”

“Yourself?”

“It does happen. I think I’ve had just about everything in my time. It’s a natural consequence of playing the field.”

It began to come over Peter Ash how he must have caught the rash. “Did you have to go to this place in Holborn, then, and be cleansed?” he said.

“Holborn! You can’t be serious! You do it at home.”

“There was a specialist at Saint Ornulf’s who sent me to the Public Cleansing Department at Holborn.”

“My poor love, he must be a sadist. You buy a bottle at the chemist, and do it yourself, as they say. Mind you, even buying it’s a bit shaming, because they must know what it’s for. I always try to pretend I’m a social worker, helping out with delinquent children. I wear a hat and brown shoes, but I don’t think it deceives them. Anyway, you have a bath just before going to bed, and paint the stuff on, and then wash it off again in the morning. Otherwise, my dear, you’d spend the whole day smelling like Christmas in the Dissecting Room.” They moved rapidly forward into the wrong lane of traffic, and were born off in the stream for the Albert Gate. “Last time this happened, I drove round the Park three times before I could get it in the right lane,” Squad said.

Peter Ash saw clearly why the elfin attendant’s customers were only such unworldly persons as bishops and Colonial Governors. With the Empire falling in, and the Church growing more knowing all the time (for the bishops must learn
something
in the House of Lords), there would soon be nobody at the Cleansing Centre at all, he supposed.

Squad said, “But there is one thing I must warn you, my little love, so you mustn’t be distraught when it happens. If you have a sensitive skin, that stuff will bring you out in a rather boring rash.”

Peter Ash dreamed a dream. He was swinging at the end of a long liana, which hung from the top of the escalator at Piccadilly Underground Station. The escalator had been tilted, so that it made an almost vertical descent, and he could not see the bottom—indeed, he did not think there was one. From time to time he tried to climb up the liana, which was wound around his waist, but he could not climb as fast as Someone lowered it, and his trying to climb only made that Someone increase the speed of lowering. As he swung, he bruised himself against the sides of the shaft.

Then he was Tweetie Pie, the little yellow canary in the cartoon films, and Someone was dismantling his cage, section by section. At last there were only four wires between himself and the dark. The first wire was taken away, and then the second. Outside in the dark, the Night People were waiting, as they were also waiting at the bottom of the bottomless escalator.

The idea of the Night People obsessed him. Foolish notion. But they had come into his mind, and would not leave it; they waited until his mind was not otherwise occupied, and then revealed themselves.

Peter Ash had been leading what is called a double life. His friends did not walk in the jungle where he hunted, or, if chance should bring them there, they did not know it was a jungle, or recognize the fauna. Peter Ash himself chose the darker hours and the less crowded glades. Once at Marble Arch he had found his hand touching the wrist of the young Assistant to the Lighting Cameraman and, as the young man’s expression of delighted recognition grew, Peter Ash had closed his face, and turned, and gone away. He could not now pass that man without a pretended
preoccupation
and a quickening of step. Logic had led him to hunt in the jungle, but logic, at the first encounter, had sniffed and said, “Oh dear me no!” and had departed very
rapidly for civilization. Logic would say, “This is all too much trouble, and leads to tension, and what’s more you don’t enjoy it.” Even lust would say, “There must be easier ways of sating me.” It was not logic or lust which kept Peter Ash returning to the jungle. He was thirty-nine years old, and he could not bear to fail. So whenever he missed a spring—which was, in the nature of things, pretty often—he would return to try again, and his successes did not erase the memories of failure.

He had heard of the Night People through a joky, passing reference, made and forgotten, by an actor at a party. “Oh, don’t you know about the Night People?” the actor had said. “They’re worth seeing. You’ll find them in Soho, between half past midnight on Saturday and about three on Sunday morning. It’s a terrifying experience. The weirdest people come out of their holes, and just drift about the streets. People you never see in the daytime.” And then the conversation had been broken, and only Peter Ash had remembered it. The Night People. Night, he thought, transformed them. By day they might be as ordinary as you or I or Peter Ash, with respectable friends and a respected station in life. And at night they would change, these ordinary people. They would put off the friends and the station in life and all that tied them, put all that off like a mask and become, anonymous and free, the Night People.

*

Fog in Wardour Street at one-thirty in the morning. The great offices of the film companies are dark, though high in the air a misty yellow blur of light would spell pathe if it could. Street lamps mark, but do not light the way. Then light spills out on to the pavement from one of the buildings of the street. The Club Afrique is open. Stepping from the north towards that spilled light comes a negro woman
with platinum blonde hair, looking like the negative of a photograph. She swirls into the Club Afrique without glancing at Peter Ash, who stands there on the pavement, watching her. A sallow man in a belted raincoat comes out of the fog behind her. He has smuts on one cheek, and a dark moustache, dank with fog. He dithers for a moment before the entrance to the Club Afrique, and then makes off back to the north.

Peter Ash walks on, idling in the fog, and turns left at Broadwick Street. An old man stands at the corner of Broadwick and Berwick Streets, an old man respectably clad in overcoat and hat, not one of your tramps dressed in sacking whom Peter Ash has seen picking through basement dustbins for the evening papers. This is an old man of some substance, though not much. He has been standing in that spot for nearly an hour, to Peter Ash’s certain knowledge. He does not speak; he approaches nobody. Only, as one draws close to him, his head begins to wag up and down like that of a mechanical doll. He wears rimless glasses, and the fog glistens on burst capillaries in his cheeks. He has wrapped a woolly muffler round his throat against the cold, and one end trails down his back, jerking in time as he nods his head.

Into Berwick Street. The barrows of Berwick Street Market have all been drawn away. A juke-box is to be heard in the direction of Oxford Street, and Peter Ash walks towards the music. The juke-box sings,
What Do You Want, If You Don’t Want Money
? Peter Ash does not know what he wants. If he knew, he would have it, and be at home by now. Light again, and the juke-box at its loudest. The Lazy T coffee-bar is open. Fog has found its way inside the Lazy T with every opening of the door, and has condensed on the windows, so that the couples inside look as bored and dead as passengers in the Tourist Lounge
of a long-drowned ocean liner. He turns, and walks back down Berwick Street, passing the old man for the third time that night, and the sudden appearance of Peter Ash sets the old man nodding again, as if only a footfall were needed to start the mechanism.

Then a gap in the fog, and two people standing there, clearly illuminated by the street-lamp. The girl is a whore, surely, in that make-up and those heels? The man stands just behind her, against a wall. He is in his early twenties, and wears jeans and, even in that weather, only a T-shirt under his leather jacket. He has a black patch over one eye. His hair is dark; his eyes slant down; in spite of her heels, he tops his girl by nine inches. The word “animal” comes unbidden to Peter Ash’s mind. The man carries a small white leather handbag with a strap. But that, of course, would belong to the girl.

How odd that she should be in the street, now that the streets of London have been cleaned up by Act of Parliament! Only the boys are in the streets nowadays, and they keep close to Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue, with sidetrips to Trafalgar Square one way, and Green Park the other. The girls are not to be found on the streets now. Instead tiny points of light over certain bell-pushes in the quieter streets of Soho announce to the
cognoscenti
, “Colette, 2nd floor”, “Model, 1st floor”, “Young Model, Top floor”.