Ngaio Marsh - Swing, Brother, Swing

‘As you say,’ said the pianist. ‘But what’s all this about his own number?’

Mr Bellairs spread his hands. ‘Well, now, it’s this way, boys. Lord Pastern’s got a little idea. It’s a little idea that came to him about this new number he’s written.’

‘Hot Guy, Hot Gunner?’ said the pianist, and plugged out a phrase in the treble. ‘What a number!’ he said without expression.

‘Take it easy now, Happy. This little number his lordship’s written will be quite a little hit when we’ve hotted it up.’

‘As you say.’

‘That’s right. I’ve orchestrated it and it’s snappy. Now, listen. This little idea he’s got about putting it across is quite a notion, boys. In its way. It seems Lord Pastern’s got round to thinking he might go places as a soloist with this number. You know. A spot of hot drumming and loosing off a six-shooter.’

‘For chris-sake!’ the tympanist said idly.

‘The idea is that Carlos steps out in a spotlight and gives. Hot and crazy, Carlos. Burning the air. Sky the limit.’

Mr Rivera passed the palm of his hand over his hair. ‘Very well. And then?’

‘Lord Pastern’s idea is that you get right on your scooter and take it away. And when you’ve got to your craziest, another spot picks him out and he’s sitting in tin-can corner wearing a cowboy hat and he gets up and yells “yippi-yi-dee” and shoots off a gun at you and you do a trick fall –’

‘I am not an acrobat –’

‘Well, anyway, you fall and his lordship goes to market and then we switch to a cod funeral march and swing it to the limit. And some of the Boys carry Carlos off and I lay a funny wreath on his breast. Well,’ said Mr Bellairs after a silence, ‘I’m not saying it’s dynamic, but it might get by. It’s crazy and it might be kind of good, at that.’

‘Did you say,’ asked the tympanist, ‘that we finish up with a funeral march? Was that what you said?’

‘Played in the Breezy Bellairs Manner, Syd.’

‘It was what he said, boys,’ said the pianist. ‘We sign ourselves off with a corpse and muffled drums. Come to the Metronome for a gay evening.’

‘I disagree entirely,’ Mr Rivera interposed. He rose gracefully. His suit was dove-grey with a widish pink stripe. Its shoulders seemed actually to curve upwards. He was bronzed. His hair swept back from his forehead and ears in thick brilliant waves. He had flawless teeth, a slight moustache and large eyes and he was tall. ‘I like the idea,’ he said. ‘It appeals to me. A little macabre, a little odd, perhaps, but it has something. I suggest, however, a slight alteration. It will be an improvement if, on the conclusion of Lord Pastern’s solo, I draw the rod and shoot him . He is then carried out and I go into my hot number. It will be a great improvement.’

‘Listen, Carlos –’

‘I repeat, a great improvement.’

The pianist laughed pointedly and the other grinned.

‘You make the suggestion to Lord Pastern,’ said the tympanist. ‘He’s going to be your ruddy father-in-law. Make it and see how it goes.’

‘I think we better do it like he says, Carl,’ said Mr Bellairs. ‘I think we better.’

The two men faced each other. Mr Bellairs’ expression of geniality had become habitual. He might have been a cleverly made ventriloquist’s doll with a pale rubber face that was constantly and arbitrarily creased in a roguish grimace. His expressionless eyes with their large pale irises and enormous pupils might have been painted. Wherever he went, whenever he spoke, his lips parted and disclosed his teeth. Two dimples grooved his full cheeks, the flesh creased at the corners of his eyes. Thus, hour after hour, he smiled at the couples who danced slowly past his stand; smiled and bowed and beat the air and undulated and smiled. He sweated profusely from these exertions and at times would mop his face with a snowy handkerchief. And behind him every night his Boys, dressed in soft shirts and sculptured dinner-jackets with steel pointed buttons and silver revers, flexed their muscles and inflated their lungs in obedience to the pulse of his celebrated miniature baton of chromium-tipped ebony, presented to him by a lady of title. Great use was made of chromium at the Metronome by Breezy’s Boys. Their instruments glittered with it, they wore wrist-watches on chromium bracelets, the band-title appeared in chromium letters on the piano which was painted in aluminium to resemble chromium. Above the Boys, a giant metronome, outlined in coloured lights, swung its chromium-tipped pendulum in the same measure. ‘Hi-dee-ho-dee-oh,’ Mr Bellairs would moan. ‘Gloomp-gloomp, giddy-iddy, hody-oh-do.’ For this and for the way he smiled and conducted his band he was paid three hundred pounds a week by the management of the Metronome, and out of that he paid his Boys. He was engaged with an augmented band for charity balls, and sometimes for private dances. ‘It was a grand party,’ people would say, ‘they had Breezy Bellairs and everything.’ In his world he was a big noise.

His Boys were big noises. They were all specialists. He had selected them with infinite pains. They were chosen for their ability to make the hideous and extremely difficult rumpus known as The Breezy Bellairs Manner and for the way they looked while they made it. They were chosen because of their sex appeal and their endurance. Breezy said: ‘The better they like you the more you got to give.’ Some of his players he could replace fairly easily; the second and third saxophonists and the double-bass, for instance, but Happy Hart, the pianist and Syd Skelton the tympanist and Carlos Rivera the piano accordionist, were, he said and believed, the Tops. It was a constant nagging anxiety to Breezy that some day, before his public had had Happy or Syd or Carlos, one or all of them might get hostile or fed up or something, and leave him for The Royal Flush Swingsters or Bones Flannagan and His Merry Mixers or The Percy Personalities. So he was always careful how he handled these three.

He was being careful now, with Carlos Rivera. Carlos was good. His piano accordion talked in The Big Way. When his engagement to Félicité de Suze was announced it’d be A Big Build-up for Breezy and the Boys. Carlos was as good as they come.

‘Listen, Carlos,’ Breezy urged feverishly. ‘I got an idea. Listen, how about we work it this way? How about letting his lordship fire at you like what he wants and miss you. See? He looks surprised and goes right ahead pulling the trigger and firing and you go right ahead in your hot number and every time he fires, one of the other boys acts like he’s been hit and plays a queer note and how about these boys playing a note each down the scale? And you just smile and sign off and bow kind of sardonically and leave him flat? How about that, boys?’

‘We-ell,’ said the Boys judicially.

‘It is a possibility,’ Mr Rivera conceded.

‘He might even wind up by shooting himself and getting carried off with the wreath on his breast.’

‘If somebody else doesn’t get in first,’ grunted the tympanist.

‘Or he might hand the gun to me and I might fire it at him and it might be empty, and he might go into his act and end up with a funny faint and get carried out.’

‘I repeat,’ Rivera said, ‘it is a possibility. We shall not quarrel in this matter. Perhaps I may speak to Lord Pastern myself.’

‘Fine!’ Breezy cried, and raised his tiny baton. ‘That’s fine. Come on, boys. What are we waiting for? Is this a practice or is it a practice? Where’s this new number? Fine! On your marks. Everybody happy? Swell. Let’s go.’

‘“Carlisle Wayne,” said Edward Manx, ‘“was thirty years old, but she retained something of the air of adolescence, not in her speech, for that was tranquil and assured, but in her looks and manner. Her movements were fluid; boyish perhaps. She had long legs, slim hands and a thin beautiful face. Her clothes were wisely chosen and gallantly worn but she took no great trouble with them and seemed to be well-dressed rather by accident than design. She liked travel but dreaded sight-seeing and would retain memories as sharp as pencil drawings of unimportant details; a waiter, a group of sailors, a woman in a bookstall. The names of the streets or even the towns where these persons had been encountered would often be lost to her; it was people in whom she was really interested. For people she had an eye as sharp as a needle and she was extremely tolerant.”’