The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [59]
It was nine-twenty on a Saturday night, and despite the scaffolding of its ongoing renovations, the Café Royal was turning over nicely. I waited until I saw a likely couple approaching its doors, then I fell in beside the woman to address her a remark about Dora Carrington. Our apparent conversation got me safely through the door—a single woman was still, even in these enlightened days, looked upon with suspicion by restaurant guard-dogs. I ostentatiously handed the porter a glittering tip to keep my black cloth bag (gold guineas were archaic, unspendable, and impressive as hell: Holmes kept a good supply of them in his bolt-holes for precisely that purpose) and swept inside.
When I had been here with Holmes, some years before, one had a choice between the Restaurant proper, the Grill Room, or the Brasserie downstairs—known to its habitués as the Domino Room for the constant click of the tiles to be heard there. The renovations looked to be sweeping away much of the Café's scruffy charm, but as I went down the stairs, I ceased to worry that its clientele would desert it altogether. A wall of noise awaited me amongst the gilded caryatids and rococo mirrors: Strident voices, piercing feminine laughter, and the ceaseless clatter of cutlery against plates emerged from a miasma of tobacco smoke and alcohol fumes that bore localised tints of blue, gilt, or scarlet from the walls and the plush banquettes.
The maître d' had that race's innate ability to make himself understood despite the handicaps, and I responded in type, by telling him that I was meeting a friend and holding up my wrist to check the time. He read the words on my lips, or perhaps merely the gesture, and although a few years before he might have hesitated, these were the Twenties. He stood aside while I looked about for my imaginary companion.
A woman of my height, in male clothing but with scarlet lips and flowered waistcoat, was noticed even in that place. I surveyed the room, allowing the room to survey me, before shaking my head at the man and telling him, “My friend isn't here yet, why don't I sit at that table over there and wait for her?”
Had the table not been small and awkwardly situated behind a particularly raucous group, he might have had another suggestion, but in that mysterious osmosis that functions in a well-run café, in the thirty seconds I had stood there, the man had learnt of the coin I gave the porter, and merely bowed me forward. Either that or, as occurred to me much later, he recognised me as a one-time companion of Sherlock Holmes, and decided to give me leave.
I ordered a drink, drew out the ivory cigarette holder, frowned at the lack of a cigarette in my pockets, and leant over to borrow a smoke from one of the men at the raucous table. Less than three minutes after I had walked in, I had a cigarette in my hand and a chair at the crowded table; the waiter swept over in his floor-length white apron to place my cocktail before me, and twenty perfect strangers clasped me to their Bohemian chests.
I had chosen the difficult little table with care, for the noisy group was clearly assembled around a Great Man, their numbers swelled by sycophants edging up at the far end. I was halfway down the length of the table, close enough to catch his eye if not his ear, but it didn't take long to figure out who he was.
Augustus John was that most unlikely of creatures, a prosperous Bohemian—one who had even been invited into the Royal Academy. Perhaps his nonconformist ways had even contributed to his success, for in an artist of the Twentieth Century, outrageousness and avant-garde were to be desired—and a man who extolled the superiority of his friends the gipsies, who kept a household of two peasant-dressed wives and their assorted barefoot children