The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [61]
“I wonder if he might know where a friend of mine is, another artist. I should have asked him before he left.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Damian Adler.”
“Sorry, don't know him.”
“Yes, you do,” piped up the man at her side. “Painter chap, French or something, his wife knows Crowley.”
“Oh, right—him. I haven't seen him for a while, though.”
“Aleister Crowley, do you mean?” I asked the man—a writer, as I recalled. Yet another writer.
“That's the chap.”
The woman interrupted. “Except it wasn't Crowley, was it, Ronnie?”
“It was, though,” he asserted.
“No, they were talking about him, but I don't think she knew him.”
“But why should I—oh, you're right, it was Betty who was talking about him, to her.”
I wasn't sure I was following this fairly drunken conversation. “You mean Mrs Adler was talking to someone else about Aleister Crowley?”
“Betty May. Crowley killed her husband.”
“Betty May's husband?” This was sounding familiar, although not the name May.
“Raoul Loveday. Took a first at Oxford, fell into Crowley's circle, died of drugs or something down in Crowley's monastery in Italy or Greece or someplace.”
“Sicily,” I said automatically. I remembered this, from the newspapers a year or more ago. “So Yolanda Adler was talking to Betty Loveday, here?”
“Being lectured by her, more like,” the woman said. “Poor Betty, she's terrified of Crowley, any time she comes across someone interested in him she feels she has to save them from him.”
“And Yolanda was interested in Crowley?”
“Yes. Or maybe not Crowley directly.” She blinked in owlish concentration.
“Someone like Crowley?” I persisted.
“Or was it that someone she knew was interested in Crowley, and she was looking into how much trouble he was? Sorry, I really don't remember, it was a while ago. I'm Alice Wright, by the way. And this is Ronnie Sutcliffe.” I shook her hand—bashed, scraped, and calloused—and his, considerably softer.
“Mary Russell,” I said, introducing myself to her for the second time that night. “You're a sculptress, aren't you?”
She beamed. “You've heard of me?”
I hadn't the heart to admit that her hands had told me her avocation. “Oh, yes. But forgive me, Ronnie, I can't place where—”
“Ronnie's a writer. He's going to change the face of literature in this century, taking it well past Lawrence.”
“D. H.,” Ronnie clarified, looking smug.
I nodded solemnly, and gave way to an unkind impulse. “Are you published yet?”
“The publishing world is run by Philistines and capitalists,” he growled. “But I had several poems published while I was still up at Cambridge.”
“I look forward to seeing your work,” I assured him.
Alice remembered what we had been talking about. “Why are you looking for her, anyway?”
“For Yolanda? I'm more trying to find her husband, Damian. He's an old friend, known him for years, and as I said, I'm recently back in town. I was hoping to see him.”
The arch smile Alice gave indicated that she had read all the wrong meaning into my desire to see Damian Adler, but I caught back the impulse to set her straight: If it made her think me a denizen of the artistic underworld, so much the better. I shrugged, as if to admit that she was right.
The Café was being tidied for the night, the chairs arranged around the marble tabletops, glasses polished and set back on the shelves. The remaining seven members of our party were one of three tables still occupied, and we would soon be politely expected to depart.
Fortunately, before I could come up with a reason to attach myself to them, my two new friends claimed me instead.
“Would you like to go on for a drink?” Alice asked.
“The Fitzroy?” Ronnie suggested.
“I'm running a little low on funds,” I told them, “but I'd be happy to—”
“Why not pop on home?” Alice interrupted, before they could find themselves paying for the rest of the evening. “Someone left a couple of bottles there, and Bunny won't have finished them off.”
Having encountered such a wide variety