Who should totter out of the shadows but Mrs Hay. The first of the old bodies. I knew her at once by the sticking-plaster sutures: keeping up appearances. She tried to clasp me to her breast, like a long-lost missal or a pint of gin, but I fended her off with my elbows.
‘So, what are the portents?’ I asked, being friendly.
‘Excellent, Aubrey. We’re going to give you a wonderful send-off.’
Silly old bat. You’d think it was a farewell do for me.
We ascended in Indian file, nostalgically and irritably respectively. The Café Europa was dark. I could barely make out the sign on the door: Private Function — Members Only. We stepped into the coffee-stained hush. Paper chains strung from the ceiling, and looped over one another, sketched a series of vaults upon the twilight above. A red light winking in the far corner indicated Hunky Dory’s laboratory; the pink glow in the chapel came from the ‘fruit machines’ (when Mrs Mavrokordatos first mentioned these, I thought she meant the juice dispensers one finds in cinema foyers). Washes of cherry skin and strawberry juice. Otherwise dark and empty. Never be the first to arrive or the last to leave.
Mrs Hay headed for the Ladies’ room to fix her face. I went towards table No. 2. But as I drew closer, I saw that it was already occupied. Pipped at the post again … by Spilkin and Darlene! What with his suntan and her natural shade, which had always tended to powdery shale, they were almost invisible against the Alibian sandstone.
*
‘Care to join us?’
I drew up my usual seat.
They were sitting with the armrests of their chairs pushed together, their temples touching. Her head in silhouette was swollen and empty at the same time, gaping over his own hard nut as if it were an ingestible morsel. On the table stood a bottle — I couldn’t make out the label in the gloom — and two glasses.
He looked older and wearier. The eyebrows were shrubby, the eyelids sagging. Subocular luggage (punchlines, Spilkin). I refused to focus on her, but even from the corner of my eye, I could see that she was just the same, and it made the change in him all the more regrettable.
‘Long time no see,’ he said.
I would have expected the pidgin to come from her mouth rather than his. It struck me dumb. A nonsensical phrase sing-songed through my mind: wena something or other. Eveready had written it down for me one day, his contribution to my notebook, but I’d forgotten the translation. Was it Psalm 23 in the isiZulu? Spilkin’s hand felt puffy and damp. Chop-chop, chop-chop. I forced the melody to be quiet and enquired instead:
‘Still living in Durban?’
‘No, we’re up here again.’
‘Back at the Flamingo?’
‘No, in Bez Valley with the in-laws.’
‘How do you find it? I mean Johannesburg.’
‘Turn right at Vereeniging. No seriously, it’s dreadful. Full of madmen. They’ve gone and changed the typeface in the Star again to something illegible. How’re the peepers, by the way?’
‘Like a hawk.’ I gave him a verse of the old rhyme — the Elephant variation.
‘Monoblepsia playing up at all?’
‘No way, José.’ Mexican rhyming slang courtesy of Errol and Co. I thought he might appreciate it.
It was almost like old times. If one paid no attention to the wardrobe, that is. Spilkin was wearing blue-denim breeches — Wessels would say ‘a jean’ — and a turtleneck sweater. Pork dressed as piglet. Everybody’s Darling, coming insistently into focus as my eyes grew used to the light, was got up like the Rain Queen. Enough linen in her turban to make a yurt, a dress full of darts and flounces. The cloth was so loud it made my ears hurt, banana yellow, predominantly, and garish beadwork. I greeted her civilly, still prepared to let bygones be bygones, but she was as rude as ever. That bloody mouth of hers opened like a wound in the gloaming.
‘Talk about African time. They said six-thirty for seven, and it’s just us two. Or should I say three. Where is everyone?’
As if in answer to her question, the lights went on and the room leapt into view. Those must be the eats, under a shroud. Paper chains overhead. ‘Seasons Greetings’ on the wall by the Gentlemen’s room.
Then a fuss at the door. It was Mevrouw Bonsma, in full costume, on the arm of the New Management. If Darlene was got up like a bedouin tent, Mevrouw Bonsma was a big top, extravagantly striped, sequinned and fringed. Several of her garments appeared to be inside out. On her thick coiffure lay a tinny tiara like a mislaid cookie cutter. What was happening to the women? You’d think Boswell Wilkie’s circus was in town.
‘Look who’s here!’
‘Spilkijn!’
‘Mevrouw!’
‘What a surprising development!’
Mevrouw Bonsma billowed about in the doorway. The New Management dragged her over to our table, like a hot-air balloon harnessed to a pony, and wedged her in a chair. She began to gush.
‘You don’t look a day older,’ I was able to say in all honesty (one reaches a point of decrepitude beyond which the day-to-day ravages are scarcely perceptible).
*
When the fuss had spent itself, Mevrouw Bonsma looked me over from toe to top. Her eyes came to rest on my summit. I was gazing at the confection, and so we remained for a moment in puzzled symmetry, transfixed by the tops of one another’s heads.
‘I like the new look, Tearle,’ she crackled.
I’d invented the hairstyle myself that morning, but I wasn’t sure whether to own up or not. Would it look cheap?
I’ve been cutting my own hair in my retirement. Editing the end matter, as I think of it. I last tried the professionals some years ago, around the time I met Merle. ‘Hair Affair’ was up an escalator, which gave me false hopes of privacy. The ‘hairstylist’ was an extremely garrulous woman: while I waited for her to finish off the previous customer, I established that she was a Czechoslovak, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Free Marketeer. I should have made my escape at once, but morbid fascination kept me pinned. When my turn finally came, don’t think she didn’t want to shampoo me right there in front of the windows. I’d been worrying that she might nick one of my excrescences with her scissors while she was railing against the bolshie bigwigs of the home country, but this was an entirely unexpected threat. I made myself scarce, and I’ve been doing my own barbering ever since.
Mevrouw Bonsma’s bun looked harder and shinier than before. The sight of it reminded me how Spilkin and I had behaved when we first made her acquaintance. An unholy triangle, which Merle’s arrival had restored to equilibrium. Now there were four of us again — except that Darlene was in Merle’s place. It made a mockery of quadruplicity. I couldn’t wait for Merle to arrive — even a pentagon would be better than this.
I enquired after Mevrouw Bonsma’s welfare to get the conversational ball rolling, but it trundled no further than the next sticky pause. She was doing a bit of teaching, she said, it was surprising how many of the underprivileged were interested in music. And playing a bit of bridge.
*
Punctuality is not the least of the devalued virtues. To pass the time, until the rest of the company ‘rocked up’ (Darlene), I suggested that Mevrouw Bonsma and I pay our respects to the buffet, which was lying in state under netting. We were welcome to look, but there would be no tasting until the New Management gave the signal. As he explained it, the success of the Bash hinged on the timing of the moment at which eating was introduced into the general course of drinking. Too early, and it would prevent the pot from coming to the boil; too late, and the pot might boil over and extinguish the fire. The bar was open, though. Any orders? Strictly cash. Or could he open a bottle on our behalf? Corkage waived.