The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [60]
He was also a fine painter, which helped matters considerably.
I let the conversation bounce around me for a while as I sat and smoked and nodded my response to opinions on politics and a scandal encompassing a print-maker and a violinist (this was a Bohemian scandal, and therefore involved money and bourgeois attitudes rather than money and sexual promiscuity) and the relative merits of Greece versus the south of France as cheap, warm spots conveniently strewn with decorative rustics where one might spend the winter painting.
When my glass was empty, I ordered drinks for half a dozen of my nearest table-mates. The noise level of the Café pounded like surf; the smoke grew so dense, the golden walls ceased to shine. The poet to my left fell asleep against my shoulder. I transferred his head to the table; the man across from us helped himself to the poet's half-empty glass. The two people beside him, who had been pretending their legs weren't brushing together under the table, could bear it no longer and left, five minutes apart and fooling no-one. A woman in a suit similar to the one I wore lingered at my shoulder for a time, trying to make conversation until it was clear I was not interested, when she went away in a huff. The Great Man at the head of the table spotted this little play, and caught my eyes after the lesbian had moved on. He winked; I shrugged; a few minutes later a scrap of folded paper began to circulate down the table. It had a sketch on the front of an angular young androgyne in spectacles that could only be me. I unfolded it, and read:
I could do something intriguing with a model like you. Interested?
Underneath, it gave an address. I looked up to see his eyes on me, and I'm afraid I blushed, just a little, before gamely raising my glass to him.
“Sastimos!” I called down the table, which made his bushy eyebrows rise.
“Sastimos! Droboi tumay, Romalay.” His return of my Romany greeting was perhaps a test, and I summoned a memory of Holmes' long-ago tutorials in the language.
“Nais tukah,” I replied politely.
“Anday savay vitsah?” he asked, which was a little more complicated, both the language and the question of what group of Roma I belonged to. But the noise and the crowd covered any errors I made, and before he could order me down the table to him I made a show of folding the paper and slipping it into my pocket, as if to say that we would continue the conversation at another time.
(I had, in fact, no intention of doing so, but as it turned out, I did go to see John at another time, and he did end up doing a small portrait. That is one piece that Holmes values without question.)
By ten-forty, the peak of the evening was reached, and the revellers began to move on to other late-night venues. A lavender-clad playwright stood up and announced that he thought he would go to a party he'd heard of in Brompton, and he departed with a woman on each arm. Two married couples across from me shook hands all around and then they, too, left, although it seemed to me that each went out of the door with the other's spouse. Eventually, Augustus John rose and made his way out, looking irritated at the half a dozen admirers who drifted after him. The sleeping poet snorted awake, dashed down the contents of the nearest glass, and staggered off in the direction of the entrance. When the waiter returned, I ordered another drink, although my glass was still half full, and asked the two people next to me if they'd like another. They would.
“That was Augustus John, wasn't it?” I asked the woman, a thin, brown creature with untidy fringes and mismatched clothing.
“You must be new in town, if you don't know him.” She had an appealing voice, low and just beginning to roughen with the cigarettes she smoked.
“I've been away for a while, in America,” I told her, although John had been a fixture in the Café Royal for years.
She asked me about