The girl, on her knees, arms thrown back, was a dancer. She was effecting some kind of Isadora Duncan, swan-raped, Noh swoon: demonstrating both her ‘inner stillness’ and the power she exercised over her body. If there had been an assistant, he (or she) had lit the undecorated set to the key of the disturbing mood the dancer was insisting on: the self-exposure was posthumous, and fiercely erotic. She lay upon a memorial slab, the chrome maquette of a notorious torture baron. We could do nothing at all to get closer, either to this presentation, or to the girl herself: the implied narrative. It was too late to withdraw. Our interest was aroused, feverish. We would have to wait. Take whatever Roland chose to give us. It couldn’t be forced. Now there was a streak of tension to fracture the restored empathy of the underground Huguenot kitchen. No florid and sentimental inscription defaced the photograph. It could have been sold in its thousands, sepia-tinted, a gaiety postcard; but we were convinced this was the only surviving copy. We were also convinced we would have to travel back through the dancer’s grainy window to enter the story she had already persuaded us to demand from her.
Roland, returning with a tray, set it down on the table, assumed Fredrik’s abandoned chair and — unprompted — told us about his friend, Edith Cadiz, the dancer. She was originally, he supposed — the matter was never discussed — an unconvinced Canadian. He didn’t blame her for that. He’d never met any other kind. But it did leave an ineradicable trace, the faintest whiff of bear grease; and a clear-eyed, unEnglish humour to qualify her almost masculine assertion of self. You noticed next the unnatural smoothness of her body: the smoothness of the professional performer. The fierce options she enforced on her body only stressed the essentially private nature of her quest. She recognized the same loneliness in Roland, the same pattern of wounds. They were alone because they would not compromise the defiance of their solitude. They had been touched, and often, and would continue to be touched; but they would never drop that shield of protective charm. They cultivated the closeness of orphans, or revolutionary comrades in exile; making no demands on each other; seeing each other accidentally, for — much prized — afternoons of gossip and silence.
Edith came to this country, modestly funded, with money her mother saw as a final pay-off: she settled in Palliser Road, Baron’s Court — a piece of ground given back to a squabble of more or less house-trained colonials, as being otherwise unfit for human habitation. She embarked, unenthusiastically, on the usual acting, modelling, and waitressing courses that she was far too intelligent, and singular, to complete. She was not without ego, and a certain talent for showing off; but she preferred not to demonstrate her capabilities, while some anthropoid agent’s hairy chaingang-paw crawled up her skirts. It wasn’t so much that she felt her virtue was worth more than a couple of bottles of Retsina: she wearied of the invariable bullshit surrounding this banal and ugly transaction. They never said, ‘Fuck me and I’ll get you the Royal Court.’ The fatherly monologues were so repetitive, so punctuated with sincere smiles, and confidence-inducing pats on the thigh. They could have been put on disk: (a) boastful lists of possessions, (b) holiday yarns, (c) ingratitude of former clients, (d) venality of producers, (e) excellent prospects of increased earning capacity, (f) desirability for prolonged discussion in more congenial environment.
Neither was Edith keen to transform herself into a sunsilk bimbo, gagging on rampant chocolate-coated members, and conducting furtive assignations with a jar of coffee. She didn’t want to pick up brownie points hanging around holes in the ground with Peggy Ashcroft and Ian McKellen, or picket embassies to get the parts that Julie Christie turned down. She wanted to be left alone to discover the limits of what she could become. She wanted to relish performance for its own sake, to use her power to the full — because that, more than anything else, gave her satisfaction.
Roland, as he explained, had not initially been involved with whatever it was she was working on. She called around for a cup of tea. She chatted with Mother. She ate Roland’s biscuits. Sometimes she slept for two or three nights in Fournier Street. And then, out of the blue, one August morning, she knocked on the street-door, and invited Roland to come and see her show. She was leading a dog on a chain: a heavy-pelted wolf cousin, a male. Roland went with her. The show was amazing: ferocious, insulting, funny. And performed in the most unlikely — and previously resistant — setting: the Seven Stars, Brick Lane.
Our current obsession with colonizing the past — as the only place where access is free — had made available, courtesy of the Borough Library, a collection of reproduction maps of East London: gaudy fakes to authenticate any cocktail bar. They were inexpensive, printed on stiff card; with roads, the colour of dried mustard, sprouting from the empurpled lamb’s heart of the City. You could walk your fingers in imaginary journeys, and sneeze from the real dust that you disturbed. The Thames was alive; a slithering green serpent, a cramp in the belly.
Edith’s particular favourite was Laurie & Whittle’s New Map of London with its Environs, including the Recent Improvements 1819. And she had constructed, with paste and a heavy needle, a costume shaped from this map: part Edward Gordon-Craig, part Maori kite-bird — a feathered storm-disperser. Wearing it, she became an angel of threat; or a demon of bliss. She respected the traditional accoutrements of her trade — the cloak, the gloves, the boots, the thong — but she elaborated their shape, the angle of the shoulders, the constriction of the waist, until she turned herself into a living artefact, a weapon. She played with her make-up: her slightest movement provoked a paradoxical reading of the history of the patch of ground on which her audience were standing. She was increasingly absorbed, excited. Colour printers in Wilson Street provided enlargements of especially libidinous zones: The Victualling Office, Sugar Loaf Green, Callico Houses, Morning Lane.
But before she appeared in her ‘special’ costume, Edith Cadiz attacked them with a dance that was savage in its invitation. She was naked, too soon; shuddering and leaping, with no accompaniment, to wild sounds of her own invention. She laughed in their faces. She flashed them with spiders and rods of iron. She showed them wounds they knew they would inherit; then forced them back against the walls, by spinning pebbles of fear. The attention of the punters was fully engaged: they were unsexed, wary. It was what they had come for, but it was not right. Dry-mouthed, they could not swallow their beer.
After the subdued interval, in which they were able to recover their identities, Edith walked among them, collecting her tithe. They had paid, so they looked at her, and over her — as they had the courage for it: they made jokes. She was naked still, her smoothness glistened with pearly beads. There was a heat and a honey-sweetness on her. Two points — where high cheekbones stretched her face into a mask — had been pinched into colour; otherwise, she was pale, stiff, without animation. She shook out her hair. They dropped their furtive coins into an alopecic and grease-stained bowler.
The tension is broken. Conversation revives. Edith tells the publican that her hat once belonged to T. S. Eliot. He thinks she is alluding to the ‘Chocolate-coloured Coon’, and suspects that the hat is illegal, contraband: ‘worth a few bob’. He is almost tempted to make an offer.
For the second half of the show, Edith does not move at alclass="underline" a wartime Windmill nude, exposed to a ring of ‘breathers’, their knees heaving and bumping beneath rubberized police-issue raincoats. She wears her costume of maps. There are rings sewn to districts that have previously been cut so they will tear away, at a touch. Heard from the street, the sound of the audience is elongated and alarming. They are out of control. They feel their tongues being slowly split with rusty shears.