Laurie King - The Language of Bees

The maître d' had that race's innate ability to make himself understood despite the handicaps, and I responded in type, by telling him that I was meeting a friend and holding up my wrist to check the time. He read the words on my lips, or perhaps merely the gesture, and although a few years before he might have hesitated, these were the Twenties. He stood aside while I looked about for my imaginary companion.

A woman of my height, in male clothing but with scarlet lips and flowered waistcoat, was noticed even in that place. I surveyed the room, allowing the room to survey me, before shaking my head at the man and telling him, “My friend isn't here yet, why don't I sit at that table over there and wait for her?”

Had the table not been small and awkwardly situated behind a particularly raucous group, he might have had another suggestion, but in that mysterious osmosis that functions in a well-run café, in the thirty seconds I had stood there, the man had learnt of the coin I gave the porter, and merely bowed me forward. Either that or, as occurred to me much later, he recognised me as a one-time companion of Sherlock Holmes, and decided to give me leave.

I ordered a drink, drew out the ivory cigarette holder, frowned at the lack of a cigarette in my pockets, and leant over to borrow a smoke from one of the men at the raucous table. Less than three minutes after I had walked in, I had a cigarette in my hand and a chair at the crowded table; the waiter swept over in his floor-length white apron to place my cocktail before me, and twenty perfect strangers clasped me to their Bohemian chests.

I had chosen the difficult little table with care, for the noisy group was clearly assembled around a Great Man, their numbers swelled by sycophants edging up at the far end. I was halfway down the length of the table, close enough to catch his eye if not his ear, but it didn't take long to figure out who he was.

Augustus John was that most unlikely of creatures, a prosperous Bohemian-one who had even been invited into the Royal Academy. Perhaps his nonconformist ways had even contributed to his success, for in an artist of the Twentieth Century, outrageousness and avant-garde were to be desired-and a man who extolled the superiority of his friends the gipsies, who kept a household of two peasant-dressed wives and their assorted barefoot children while still collecting mistresses and befriending royalty, and who went around London looking like a Canadian trapper in a velvet cloak was the very definition of nonconformist.

He was also a fine painter, which helped matters considerably.

I let the conversation bounce around me for a while as I sat and smoked and nodded my response to opinions on politics and a scandal encompassing a print-maker and a violinist (this was a Bohemian scandal, and therefore involved money and bourgeois attitudes rather than money and sexual promiscuity) and the relative merits of Greece versus the south of France as cheap, warm spots conveniently strewn with decorative rustics where one might spend the winter painting.

When my glass was empty, I ordered drinks for half a dozen of my nearest table-mates. The noise level of the Café pounded like surf; the smoke grew so dense, the golden walls ceased to shine. The poet to my left fell asleep against my shoulder. I transferred his head to the table; the man across from us helped himself to the poet's half-empty glass. The two people beside him, who had been pretending their legs weren't brushing together under the table, could bear it no longer and left, five minutes apart and fooling no-one. A woman in a suit similar to the one I wore lingered at my shoulder for a time, trying to make conversation until it was clear I was not interested, when she went away in a huff. The Great Man at the head of the table spotted this little play, and caught my eyes after the lesbian had moved on. He winked; I shrugged; a few minutes later a scrap of folded paper began to circulate down the table. It had a sketch on the front of an angular young androgyne in spectacles that could only be me. I unfolded it, and read:

I could do something intriguing with a model like you. Interested?

Underneath, it gave an address. I looked up to see his eyes on me, and I'm afraid I blushed, just a little, before gamely raising my glass to him.

“Sastimos!” I called down the table, which made his bushy eyebrows rise.

“Sastimos! Droboi tumay, Romalay.” His return of my Romany greeting was perhaps a test, and I summoned a memory of Holmes' long-ago tutorials in the language.

“Nais tukah,” I replied politely.

“Anday savay vitsah?” he asked, which was a little more complicated, both the language and the question of what group of Roma I belonged to. But the noise and the crowd covered any errors I made, and before he could order me down the table to him I made a show of folding the paper and slipping it into my pocket, as if to say that we would continue the conversation at another time.

(I had, in fact, no intention of doing so, but as it turned out, I did go to see John at another time, and he did end up doing a small portrait. That is one piece that Holmes values without question.)

By ten-forty, the peak of the evening was reached, and the revellers began to move on to other late-night venues. A lavender-clad playwright stood up and announced that he thought he would go to a party he'd heard of in Brompton, and he departed with a woman on each arm. Two married couples across from me shook hands all around and then they, too, left, although it seemed to me that each went out of the door with the other's spouse. Eventually, Augustus John rose and made his way out, looking irritated at the half a dozen admirers who drifted after him. The sleeping poet snorted awake, dashed down the contents of the nearest glass, and staggered off in the direction of the entrance. When the waiter returned, I ordered another drink, although my glass was still half full, and asked the two people next to me if they'd like another. They would.

“That was Augustus John, wasn't it?” I asked the woman, a thin, brown creature with untidy fringes and mismatched clothing.

“You must be new in town, if you don't know him.” She had an appealing voice, low and just beginning to roughen with the cigarettes she smoked.

“I've been away for a while, in America,” I told her, although John had been a fixture in the Café Royal for years.

She asked me about America, I made up some stories about the art world there, about which I knew next to nothing, then asked about John again.

“I wonder if he might know where a friend of mine is, another artist. I should have asked him before he left.”

“Who are you looking for?”

“Damian Adler.”

“Sorry, don't know him.”

“Yes, you do,” piped up the man at her side. “Painter chap, French or something, his wife knows Crowley.”

“Oh, right-him. I haven't seen him for a while, though.”

“Aleister Crowley, do you mean?” I asked the man-a writer, as I recalled. Yet another writer.

“That's the chap.”

The woman interrupted. “Except it wasn't Crowley, was it, Ronnie?”

“It was, though,” he asserted.

“No, they were talking about him, but I don't think she knew him.”

“But why should I-oh, you're right, it was Betty who was talking about him, to her.”

I wasn't sure I was following this fairly drunken conversation. “You mean Mrs Adler was talking to someone else about Aleister Crowley?”

“Betty May. Crowley killed her husband.”

“Betty May's husband?” This was sounding familiar, although not the name May.

“Raoul Loveday. Took a first at Oxford, fell into Crowley 's circle, died of drugs or something down in Crowley 's monastery in Italy or Greece or someplace.”