A few minutes later, Sally herself arrived.
“Am I terribly late, Fritz darling?”
“Only half of an hour, I suppose,” Fritz drawled, beaming with proprietary pleasure. “May I introduce Mr. Isherwood Miss Bowles? Mr. Isherwood is commonly known as Chris.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Fritz is about the only person who’s ever called me Chris in my life.”
Sally laughed. She was dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head:
“Do you mind if I use your telephone, sweet?”
“Sure. Go right ahead.” Fritz caught my eye. “Come into the other room, Chris. I want to show you something.” He was evidently longing to hear my first impressions of Sally, his new acquisition.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t leave me alone with this man!” she exclaimed. “Or he’ll seduce me down the telephone. He’s most terribly passionate.”
As she dialled the number, I noticed that her finger-nails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows.
“Hilloo,” she cooed, pursing her brilliant cherry lips as though she were going to kiss the mouthpiece: “Ist dass Du,
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mein Liebling?” Her mouth opened in a fatuously sweet smile. Fritz and I sat watching her, like a performance at the theatre. “Was wollen wir machen, Morgen Abend? Oh, wie wunderbar… . Nein, nein, ich werde bleiben Heute Abend zu Hause. Ja, ja, ich werde wirklich bleiben zu Hause… . Auf Wiedersehen, mein Liebling …”
She hung up the receiver and turned to us triumphantly.
“That’s the man I slept with last night,” she announced. “He makes love marvellously. He’s an absolute genius at business and he’s terribly rich” She came and sat down on the sofa beside Fritz, sinking back into the cushions with a sigh: “Give me some coffee, will you, darling? I’m simply dying of thirst.”
And soon we were on to Fritz’s favourite topic: he pronounced it Larve.
“On the average,” he told us, “I’m having a big affair every two years.”
“And how long is it since you had your last?” Sally asked.
“Exactly one year and eleven months!” Fritz gave her his naughtiest glance.
“How marvellous!” Sally puckered up her nose and laughed a silvery little stage-laugh: “Doo tell mewhat was the last one like?”
This, of course, started Fritz off on a complete autobiography. We had the story of his seduction in Paris, details of a holiday flirtation at Las Palmas, the four chief New York romances, a disappointment in Chicago and a conquest in Boston; then back to Paris for a little recreation, a very beautiful episode in Vienna, to London to be consoled and, finally, Berlin.
“You know, Fritz darling,” said Sally, puckering up her nose at me, “I believe the trouble with you is that you’ve never really found the right woman.”
“Maybe that’s true” Fritz took this idea very seriously. His black eyes became liquid and sentimentaclass="underline" “Maybe I’m still looking for my ideal… .”
“But you’ll find her one day, I’m absolutely certain you
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will.” Sally included me, with a glance, in the game of laughing at Fritz.
“You think so?” Fritz grinned lusciously, sparkling at her.
“Don’t you think so?” Sally appealed to me.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. “Because I’ve never been able to discover what Fritz’s ideal is.”
For some reason, this seemed to please Fritz. He took it as a kind of testimoniaclass="underline" “And Chris knows me pretty well,” he chimed in. “If Chris doesn’t know, well, I guess no one does.”
Then it was time for Sally to go.
“I’m supposed to meet a man at the Adlon at five,” she explained. “And it’s six already! Never mind, it’ll do the old swine good to wait. He wants me to be his mistress, but I’ve told him I’m damned if I will till he’s paid all my debts. Why are men always such beasts?” Opening her bag, she rapidly retouched her lips and eyebrows: “Oh, by the way, Fritz darling, could you be a perfect angel and lend me ten marks? I haven’t got a bean for a taxi.”
“Why sure!” Fritz put his hand into his pocket and paid up without hesitation, like a hero.
Sally turned to me: “I say, will you come and have tea with me sometime? Give me your telephone number. I’ll ring you up.”
I suppose, I thought, she imagines I’ve got cash. Well, this will be a lesson to her, once for all. I wrote my number in her tiny leather book. Fritz saw her out.
“Well!” he came bounding back into the room and gleefully shut the door: “What do you think of her, Chris? Didn’t I tell you she was a goodlooker?”
“You did indeed!”
“I’m getting crazier about her each time I see her!” With a sigh of pleasure, he helped himself to a cigarette: “More coffee, Chris?”
“No, thank you very much.”
“You know, Chris, I think she took a fancy to you, too!”
“Oh, rot!”
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“Honestly, I do!” Fritz seemed pleased. “Eventually I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of her from now on!”
When I got back to Frl. Schroeder’s, I felt so giddy that I had to lie down for half an hour on my bed. Fritz’s black coffee was as poisonous as ever.
A few days later, he took me to hear Sally sing.
The Lady Windermere (which now, I hear, no longer exists) was an arty “informal” bar, just off the Tauentzienstrasse, which the proprietor had evidently tried to make look as much as possible like Montparnasse. The walls were covered with sketches on menu-cards, caricatures and signed theatrical photographs(“To the one and only Lady Windermere.” “To Johnny, with all my heart.”) The Fan itself, four times life size, was displayed above the bar. There was a big piano on a platform in the middle of the room.
I was curious to see how Sally would behave. I had imagined her, for some reason, rather nervous, but she wasn’t, in the least. She had a surprisingly deep husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sidesyet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face, she sang:
Now I know why Mother Told me to be true; She meant me for Someone Exactly like you.
There was quite a lot of applause. The pianist, a handsome young man with blond wavy hair, stood up and solemnly kissed Sally’s hand. Then she sang two more songs, one in French and the other in German. These weren’t so well received.
After the singing, there was a good deal more hand-kissing
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and a general movement towards the bar. Sally seemed to know everybody in the place. She called them all Thou and Darling. For a would-be demi-mondaine, she seemed to have surprisingly little business sense or tact. She wasted a lot of time making advances to an elderly gentleman who would obviously have preferred a chat with the barman. Later, we all got rather drunk. Then Sally had to go off to an appointment, and the manager came and sat at our table. He and Fritz talked English Peerage. Fritz was in his element. I decided, as so often before, never to visit a place of this sort again.
Then Sally rang up, as she had promised, to invite me to tea.
She lived a long way down the Kurfürstendamm on the last dreary stretch which rises to Haiensee. I was shown into a big gloomy half-furnished room by a fat untidy landlady with a pouchy sagging jowl like a toad. There was a broken-down sofa in one corner and a faded picture of an eighteenth-century battle, with the wounded reclining on their elbows in graceful attitudes, admiring the prancings of Frederick the Great’s horse.