‘The lager, I think, please.’
She made a note on the pad she held. ‘Would you like me to sit with you?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’
‘All right.’
She pointed to the very bottom of the card:
Flamenco Revenge- & marriage of green-eyed Chartreuse with aphrodisiac Cointreau. Soho Wallbanger-z dramatic confrontation of voluptuous Vodka with a tantalizing taste of Tia Maria. EastemEcstasy – an irresistible alchemy of rejuvenating Gin and pulse-quickening Campari. Price: £6.00
£6.00!
‘I’m sorry,’ said Browne-Smith, ‘but I just can’t afford-’
‘I can’t sit with you if you won’t buy me a drink.’
‘It’s so terribly expensive, though, isn’t it? I just can’t aff-’
‘All right!’ The words were clipped and final, and she left his table, to return a few minutes later with his first small glass of lager, setting the meagre measure before him with studied indifference and departing immediately.
From the alcove behind him, Browne-Smith could hear the conversation distinctly:
‘Where you from?’
‘Ostrighlia.’
‘Nice there?’
‘Sure is!’
‘You’d like me to sit with you?’
‘Sure would!’
‘You’d have to buy me a drink.’
‘Just you nime it, bighby!’
Browne-Smith swallowed a mouthful of his flat and tepid lager and took stock of the situation. Apart from the proximate Australian, he could see only one other customer, a man of indeterminate age (forty? fifty? sixty?) who sat at the bar reading a book. In contrast to his balding pate and the grey-white patches at his temples, the neatly-trimmed and black-brown beard was quite devoid of grizzled hairs; and for a few seconds the fanciful notion occurred to Browne-Smith that the man might be in disguise, this notion being somewhat reinforced by the fact that he was wearing a pair of incongruous sunglasses which masked the eyes whilst not, apparently, blurring the print of the page upon which he appeared so totally engrossed.
From where Browne-Smith sat, the decor looked universally cheap. The carpet, a continuation of the stairway crimson, was dirty and stained, with threadbare patches beneath most of the plastic tables; the chairs were flimsy, rickety, wickerwork structures which seemed barely capable of supporting the weight of any over-fleshed client; the walls and ceiling had clearly once been painted white, but were now grubby and stained with the incessant smoke of cigarettes. But there was one touch of culture-a most surprising one: the soberly volumed background music was the slow movement of Mozart’s ‘Elvira Madigan’ piano concerto (played by Barenboim-Browne-Smith could have sworn it), and this seemed to him almost as incongruous as listening to Shakin’ Stevens in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Another man was admitted through the curtain and was duly visited by the same white-breasted beauty who had brought his own lager; the man at the bar turned over another page of his book; the Australian, clearly audible still, was none too subtly prodding his hostess into revealing what exactly it was she was selling, because she’d got what he wanted and his only concern was the price she might be asking for it; the girl behind the bar had obviously exhausted whatever the Daily Mirror could prognosticate; and Barenboim had landed lightly upon the final notes of that ethereal movement.
Browne-Smith’s glass was now empty, and the only two hostesses on view were happily supping whatever the management had decided were today’s ingredients for Soho Wailbangers, Flamenco Revenges, el al. So he got up, walked over to the bar and sat himself down on a stool.
‘I’ve got another one paid for, I think.’
‘I’ll bring it to you.’
‘No, don’t bother. I’ll sit here.’
‘I said I’d bring it to you.’
‘You don’t mind me sitting here, do you?’
‘You si’ down where you were – you understand English?’ All pretence at civility had vanished, and her voice sounded hard and mean.
‘All right,’ said Browne-Smith quietly. ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble.’ He sat down at a table a few yards from the bar, and watched the girl, and waited.
‘You still didn’t ‘ear wha’ I said, did you?” The voice was now crudely menacing, but Browne-Smith decided that a few more rounds of small-arms fire could safely be expended; not quite time yet for the heavy artillery. He was enjoying himself.
‘I did hear you, I assure you. But-’
‘Look! I told you!’ (Which she hadn’t.) ‘If you want a bloody rub-off there’s a sauna right across the road. OK?’
‘But I don’t-’
‘I shan’t tell you again, mister.’
Browne-Smith stood up, and stepped slowly to the bar, where the man reading the book flicked over another page, disinterestedly neutral, it appeared, in the outcome of the escalating hostilities.
‘I’d like a pint of decent beer, if you have one.’ He spoke quietly.
‘If you don’t want tha’ lager-’
Abruptly Browne-Smith crashed his glass on the counter, and fixed the girl with his eyes. ‘Lager? Let me tell.you something, miss! That’s not lager-that’s horse-piss!’
The battle odds had changed dramatically, and the girl had clearly lost her self-control as she pointed a shaking, carmined finger towards the crimson curtain: ‘Get out!’
‘Oh no! I’ve paid for my drinks.’
‘You heard what the lady said.’ It was the man sitting his book by the bar. Although he had neither lifted his eyes one centimetre from the text, nor lifted, it seemed, his flat (West Country?) voice one semitone above its customary pitch, the brief words sounded ominously final.
But Browne-Smith, completely ignoring the man who had just spoken to him, continued to glare at the girl. ‘Never speak to me like that again!’
The hissed authority of these words reduced the girl to speechlessness, but the seated man had slowly closed his book, and now at last he raised his eyes. The fingers of his right hand crept across to the upper muscles of his left arm and, although as he eased himself off the bar-stool he stood some two or three inches shorter than Browne-Smith, he looked a dangerous adversary. He said nothing more.
The velvet curtains by which Browne-Smith had entered were only some three yards to his left, and there were several seconds during which a quick, if inglorious, exit could easily have been effected. But no such decision was taken; and before he could consider the situation further he felt his left wrist grasped powerfully, and found himself propelled towards a door marked ; ‘Private’.
Two things he was to remember as his escort knocked quietly upon this door. First, he saw the look on the face of the man from Australia, a look that was three-parts puzzlement and one pan panic; second, he observed the title of the book the bearded man was reading: Know Your Köchel Numbers.
The anonymous Australian, sitting no more than four or five yards from the door, was destined never to mention this episode to another living soul. And indeed, even had he reason to do so, it seems most improbable that he would have mentioned that enigmatic little moment, just before the door closed behind the two men, when the one of them who seemed to be causing the trouble, the one whose name he would never know, had suddenly looked at his wrist-watch, and said in a voice that sounded inexplicably calm: ‘My goodness! I see it’s exactly twelve noon.’
For a few seconds after he had crossed the threshold of the office, Browne-Smith experienced that dazzling, zigzag pain again that seemed to saw its way across his brain, momentarily cutting him off from any recollection of himself and of what he was doing. But then it stopped-as suddenly as it had started-and he thought he was in control of things once more.