* * *
Woodrow too has every reason to congratulate himself. Watching the couples gyrate to music he detests, sipping methodically at his fourth whisky, he is the storm-tossed mariner who has made it back to harbor against all odds. No, Gloria, I never made a pass at her — or at any other her. No to all of it. No, I will not provide you with the means to destroy me. Not you, not the Archbitch Elena, and not Ghita, the scheming little puritan. I'm a status quo man, as Tessa rightly observed.
Out of the corner of his eye Woodrow spots Ghita, matching bodies with some gorgeous African she has probably never seen in her life until tonight. Beauty like yours is a sin, he tells her in his mind. It was a sin with Tessa, it is with you. How can any woman inhabit a body like yours and not share the desires of the man she inflames? Yet when I point this out to you — just the odd confiding touch, nothing gross — your eyes blaze and you hiss at me in a stage whisper to get my hands off you. Then you flounce home in a huff, closely observed by the Archbitch Elena… His reverie was disturbed by a pallid, balding man, who looked as though he'd lost his way, accompanied by a six-foot Amazon in bangs.
"Why, Ambassador, how awfully good of you to come!" Name forgotten but with this bloody music going no one's counting. He bawled at Gloria to join him — "Darling, meet the new Swiss Ambassador who arrived a week ago. Very sweetly called to pay his compliments to Porter! Poor chap got me instead! Wife will be joining you in a couple of weeks' time, isn't that right, Ambassador? So he's on the loose tonight, ha ha! Lovely to see you here! Forgive me if I do the rounds! Ciao!"
The bandleader was singing, if that was how you described his caterwaul. Clutching his microphone in one fist and fondling its tip with the other. Rotating his hips in copulative ecstasy.
"Darling, aren't you the teeniest bit turned on?" Gloria whispered as she whirled past him in the arms of the Indian Ambassador. "I am!"
A tray of drinks went by. Woodrow deftly put his empty glass on it and helped himself to a full one. Gloria was being led back to the dance floor by the jovial, shamelessly corrupt Morrison M'Gumbo, known also as Minister for Lunch. Woodrow cast round gloomily for somebody with a decent enough body to dance with. It was this non-dancing that got his goat. This mincing about, parading your parts. It made him feel like the clumsiest, most useless lover a woman ever had to put up with. It evoked all the do-this-don't-do-thats and the for-God's-sake-Woodrows that had rung in his ears since the age of five.
"I said, I've been running away from myself all my life!" he was bellowing into the puzzled face of his dancing partner, a busty Danish aid worker called Fitt or Flitt. "Always known what I was running away from, but never had the least idea where I was heading. How about you? I said, how about you?" She laughed and shook her head. "You think I'm mad or drunk, don't you?" he shouted. She nodded. "Well, you're wrong. I'm both!" Chum of Arnold Bluhm's, he remembered. Jesus, what a saga. When on earth will that show end? But he must have pondered this loud enough for her to hear him above the awful din because he saw her eyes go down and heard her say, "Maybe never," with the kind of piety good Catholics reserve for the Pope. Alone again, Woodrow headed upstream toward tables of deafened refugees, huddled together in shell-shocked groups. Time I ate something. He untied his bow tie and let it hang loose.
"Definition of a gentleman, my daddy used to say," he explained to an uncomprehending black Venus. "Chap who ties his own bow tie!"
Ghita had staked a territorial claim at one corner of the dance floor and was twisting pelvises with two jolly African girls from the British Council. Other girls were joining them in a witches' circle and the entire band was standing at the edge of the rostrum, singing yeh, yeh, yeh at them. The girls were slapping each other's palms, then turning round and tipping their bottoms at each other and Christ alone knew what the neighbors were saying up and down the road because Gloria hadn't invited all of them, or the tent would have been knee-deep in gunrunners and dope dealers — a joke Woodrow must have shared with a brace of very big chaps in native rig because they dissolved into hoots of laughter and retold the whole thing to their womenfolk who cracked up too.
Ghita. What the hell's she up to now? It's the Chancery meeting all over again. Every time I look at her she looks away. Every time I look away, she looks at me. It's the damnedest thing I ever saw. And once again Woodrow must have externalized his thoughts because a bore called Meadower from the Muthaiga Club immediately agreed with him, saying that if young people were determined to dance like that, why didn't they just fuck on the dance floor and be done with it? Which as it happened accorded perfectly with Woodrow's opinion, a point he was bellowing into Meadower's ear as he came face to face with Mustafa the black angel, standing square in front of him as if he were trying to stop him passing, except that Woodrow wasn't proposing to go anywhere. Woodrow noticed that Mustafa wasn't carrying anything, which struck him as impertinent. If Gloria out of the goodness of her heart has hired the poor dear man to fetch and carry, why the hell isn't he fetching and carrying? Why's he standing here like my bad conscience, empty-handed except for a folded bit of paper in one hand, mouthing unintelligible words at me like a goldfish?
"Chap says he's got a message for you," Meadower was shouting.
"What?"
"Very personal, very urgent message. Some beautiful girl fallen base-over-bum in love with you."
"Mustafa said that?"
"What?"
"I said, did Mustafa say that?"
"Aren't you going to find out who she is? Probably your wife!" roared Meadower, dissolving in hysterics.
Or Ghita, thought Woodrow, with an absurd leap of hope.
He took half a step away and Mustafa kept alongside him, turning his shoulder into him so that from Meadower's eye line they resembled two men hunched together lighting their cigarettes in the wind. Woodrow held out his hand and Mustafa reverently laid the note onto his palm. Plain A4 paper, folded small.