The Gale of the World Read Free Page B

painter had not painted, the Great Vacuum had arrived with riff-raff splurging on canvas imitations of Picasso and selling their daubs to rich and foolish Yanks. One phoney went about London in a Rolls with buffalo horns across the front of the roof, a Cockney with a fudge-up dialect supposedly from Greenwich Village —he having helped Al Capone (he declared) to blast New York’s bootleggers from their headquarters in the Bowery.
    Overcome by so much fake, so much untruth, O’Callogan, the London-Irish painter, hadn’t painted. Who could paint in this bloody war, he had repeated amidst raised glasses and the thud of bombs, until he believed it and was finished.
    Phillip looked around the curtain at the top of the stairs, but could not see Piers. At the far end of the room O’Callogan stood talking to an officer in uniform standing upright, reading a book. He was, apart from this detail, the picture of military rectitude. And vaguely familiar—where had he seen him before? No, it must have been someone else.
    In fact it was someone Phillip had seen in hospital during the war; but without the parade ground stiffness which was due to the spine being held rigid, under the uniform, within a steel corset. The facial complexion was pink, the waxen effect emphasised by a wide ginger moustache below a very straight nose grafted on a face which had partly perished in the heat and flare of a flamethrower in the Reichwald, after the body had received the disruption of a mortar shell.
    Sitting beside this living effigy, on a stool, was a girl with short black hair, rose-pink complexion, and when she turned his way, large and dark-blue eyes. She was smiling—at him? Had he met her somewhere? He felt weak. Was this the beginning of mental disease—a split mind? When she turned her head to speak to her Madame Tussaud companion, Phillip crossed the floor to a table at the other end of the room, near the piano where sat the same blind pianist with apparently the same fag hanging from his lower lip, as during the last visit there, in the middle of the war, with Piers on overseas leave before embarking for the Far East,and the ‘forgotten’ Fourteenth Army. Less substantial than shadows, weak saline in the sea.
    The drummer, aged and white-haired like himself, bowed his head. He at least was real. “Glad to see you back, sir!” Carnation in button-hole of frayed but clean dinner jacket with no breast-pocket , relic of the ‘twenties, when one put a handkerchief in one’s cuff, later a middle-class solecism. That jacket was a relic of pre-war upper-middle class grandeurs of S.W.1, before the black-market boys came out of the East End, when young ladies still ignored, at least in public, the commonplace four-letter words. The disintegration had come after the bombings, following a we’re-all-in-this-together-boys camaraderie in the Medicean Club: the blitz pulled people together when it didn’t bury or tear them to bits. Thereafter the wide boys, the spivs, had taken over.
    The drummer caught Phillip’s eye again, gave another little salute and smile. He remembered Phillip as one of the original founder-members with Sir Piers Tofield, Mr. Archibald Plugge. and other gentlemen of what he called the ancient régime of the pre-war. He watched Phillip sit down at a table, unfold the evening paper, glance again at the front page; put the paper aside. The drummer thereupon leaned over and said to the pianist, “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.”
    Hearing the music, Phillip re-entered the present. So the drummer remembered! He ordered a pint of bitter and a bottle of brown ale; put down the glasses on the top of the piano, and stood there, smiling.
    “Good to see you again, sir!” said the drummer, taking the brown ale. “One of our stalwarts, if I may say so.”
    “Thank you for remembering my favourite tune!”
    The pianist drank from his pot, and then came Rachmaninov’s marvellous white music. Gone black thoughts of the