The Man Who Was Left Behind (12 page)

“Let’s have a look,” I said.

“All right.”

There was a knot of people entering as we came up. We followed them in to a sort of cloakroom and I saw that you had to buy tickets as a cover charge. The door into the club opened and the sound of the music came through, and I could see lots of people sitting at tables.

“What is it?” my wife asked.

“Just a cover charge.”

“Let’s go, then.”

“Don’t be so stingy. It looks like this is the only nightclub in town. We might as well see it, and hear some of the music.”

I paid, and we were pushed through the door. The people who had gone in ahead of us were still standing up, waiting for a table. There was a circular dancefloor in the centre of the room; it was about ten feet in diameter, raised up, and the surface looked as though it had been covered by a special material to insure against slipping. No one was dancing on it.

Looking from the doorway, the building was a reversed L-shape. The foot of the L was very broad and branched
off to the left. Everyone sitting in it would be able to see the little wedge of dancefloor. About three-quarters of the way across from the door, the part of the room in the longer upright of the L was raised three feet up, and there was a white open-work fence like a stair railing across all that part of the room except for the middle passage, where there were stairs going up. The whole floor, not counting the dance circle, was bare wood and very scuffed. Two carpets ran across it like trails, one up the stairs, and one over to the left. To the right of the door, backed up against the wall, a sitting band played, and a statuesque girl was singing at a microphone.

We were bullied along the carpet and then halted.

“You don’t mind you sit all at one table?” the waiter asked me. He seemed to be including several other people in the request.

“We don’t mind,” I said. Two of the people turned around. It was the English couple from the shop.

“Do you mind sharing?”

“Not in the least, old chap,” he said.

The other couple were very young. The boy was saying to his girl, “I don’t think there’s a table for two.”

“Are you American?” I asked him, and he turned around. A big, beefy boy in a seersucker suit, with a light crew cut and a face full of freckles. He smiled sheepishly.

“Yeah,” he said. “What gives here, anyway?”

“They’re doubling us all up. Do you mind joining us?”

“Oh. No, we don’t mind, do we, Linda?”

The girl looked at me and gave me a come-on smile.

“We’d love to,” she said. She was small, but wearing very high heels. Her eyes opened all the way up like a doll’s so that no lid showed.

“It looks like they’ve got plenty of tables up there,” the boy said, indicating the raised part of the room behind the railings.

“Reserved for a party, maybe. Or maybe the Greek navy’s arriving at midnight.”

“I’d like to see that,” the Englishwoman said. We all started to introduce ourselves. Her name was Betty and the Englishman was Graham. The waiter darted forward and began to shoo us along the carpet to the left, and sat us down at a table not far from the wall. Another waiter was hanging over us with a notepad in his hand before we had even sat down. I ordered a bottle of retsina. Graham wanted to go through the wine list. I said to the American boy, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your names.”

“Linda Whiting,” the girl said, and then corrected herself. “Linda Butterworth.”

“Rocky Butterworth,” he said, and held out his hand. I shook it and introduced myself and my wife and Betty and Graham, whose last names I hadn’t heard distinctly.

“Honeymooners, or I miss my guess,” Graham said to them.

“Give the poor kids a chance,” I said. “Everybody and their grandmother has been asking them if they aren’t on their honeymoon.”

“They certainly have,” the girl said, and Butterworth grinned self-consciously. I told him that I didn’t think there would be much sense in ordering a cocktail unless they were really dying for one. It would be a lot better, and also cheaper, just to order a bottle of the local wine.

“I can’t bear the local wine,” Graham said.

“What I’d give for a snowball,” Betty told him.

“What do you say to some champers, old girl?”

Linda looked up. “What’s champers?” she asked.

“A spot of the old bubbly.”

“Champagne,” I said.

“Do you want some?” Butterworth asked.

“No, let’s follow Mr. Coleman’s advice,” she said, demurely flicking her doll’s eyes in my direction.

My wife lit a cigarette and blew a long jet of smoke across the table. Then she looked as though she were about to smile, and murmured, “My goodness.” Butterworth started to turn around. “No, don’t look just yet,” she said.

I glanced quickly to the side and saw what she was looking at: the table to the left, up against the wall. It was like a tableau out of something by Zola. A local tart, perhaps attached to the club, was being treated to champagne by a family man out on the town. He looked very respectable and was wearing Sunday best with a stiff collar. And he was very, very drunk, but quietly so. As I watched, the waiter poured out the last of the champagne, upended the bottle in the bucket, and went for a new one. He seemed to be working for that table only. And the whore was fabulous. She was squat, well muscled but not fat, and wore a nineteen-twenties’ type of sleeveless black evening dress with glimmering black beads or sequins sewn on it. Her bushy short hair was parted in the middle and dyed a dark orange-red, and underneath it her face—low forehead, deep-set eyes and a prominent nose—had the stony, libidinous look of a gargoyle. She might have been any age from twenty-five to fifty, and she was the only clip-joint girl I had ever seen who actually drank. She was belting back her champagne as fast as the man.

Their fresh bottle of champagne arrived at the same time ours did.

“No, leave it here,” Graham ordered our waiter. Nobody was going to wrap a towel around his bottle and turn it upside down into the bucket while it was still half full.

“Chin chin,” he said.

“Cheerio,” Betty laughed.

“Christ, I hope he thinks it’ll be worth it.”

“He probably won’t be sober enough to find out,” I said.

“Always sober enough for that, old boy,” Graham said,
and leered in the Butterworths’ direction. Butterworth looked into his glass as though searching for a fly. Linda asked my wife what resin was.

“It tastes like leather,” she said. “But it’s some kind of gum, isn’t it?”

The girl at the mike started on another song which I thought was probably Turkish. She was getting a lot of appreciation out of the two big tables to our right, where about fourteen men dressed in unpressed dark suits were drinking together. They might have been dockworkers or taxidrivers, or waiters on their time off. None of them was out of hand, but the pitch of their talk rose, and they were looking at the singer with increasing approval.

“Can you understand any of the words?” Butterworth asked me. His wife and mine were carrying on their conversation across us.

“I have a feeling this one is Turkish,” I said. “All the Greek ones have words like
monos,
which means alone, and then there’s another word that means pain. As far as I can figure out, they’re all about some boy standing on his girl’s doorstep and feeling out in the cold.”

“Would you say this was very authentic music?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t played ‘Never On Sunday’ yet, or that other one.”

“‘Zorba,’” he said.

“Just taking a guess, I’d say it’s like American and Scottish folksongs: the more off-key it sounds, the more authentic it is.”

The singer was doing a lot of sexy death-of-the-breath business around the minor notes. I took a long drink and began to feel high.

“Does it excite you?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. It just sounds so foreign to me. And a little monotonous.”

“It makes me feel excited,” I said.

“Oh, don’t go there,” my wife was saying to Linda.

“I like the ones they dance to,” he said. “The faster numbers. Like balalaika stuff.”

“Yes, I like those, too.”

A waiter sped past with another bottle of champagne for the two against the wall.

“You can look now,” I told Butterworth.

He turned his head slowly, saw them, turned back and was laughing.

“Gee, is he going to be sorry in the morning,” he said. “They’re going to have to carry him out.”

Graham was making toasts to Greece, to Rhodes, to the nightclub. A man sitting at the table to our right had been included in the toasting and given a glass of champagne.

“I wonder who that is,” my wife said. Linda turned around, and I looked, too. At a table just below the raised part of the room sat a man in a white dinner jacket, a red flower in his lapel. He had his own private waiter. While we were watching, the waiter presented him with a tiny grey tiger-striped kitten.

“Oh, how cute,” Linda said. “I guess that’s the local millionaire or something.”

He was middle-aged and looked rich, healthy, civilized, and as though he were enjoying himself.

“All alone, too,” Linda said. “Do you suppose he’s waiting for somebody?”

“Maybe he’s the owner,” I said.

“Oh no, I’m sure he’s sailed here in his yacht.”

“You romantic,” I said, smiling.

“Oh yes, I sure am. I’d hate to be anything else.”

My wife was taking small, discrete sips of her wine. She wasn’t enthusiastic about retsina. The song ended, and Graham leaned over Betty.

“This chappie says the bloke’s the chief of police from one of the other islands.”

“The guy with the gargoyle?”

“That’s the one. If they knew about it at home!”

“And he probably has a wife and five children at home, too,” said my wife. “I bet that’s his year’s salary. And what do they get?”

“If she knows what she’s about, she gets the milkman while he’s away,” Betty said, laughing.

Graham pinched her under the table.

“Now then, none of that,” he said.

“Not a chance,” my wife said. “In Greece they probably lock them up before they go away.”

For a moment Graham had the look of a man about to unburden himself of a story about chastity belts, but he changed his mind and took another long look at the visiting policeman and his incredible child of joy.

“What a perfect situation for blackmail,” he said. And not for the first time in the evening, I wondered what his work really was. There was something spurious about him.

“Oh look,” Linda said, “they’re going to dance.”

A man from the band had come forward, leading the singer with the dark hair. Behind them walked another woman, with auburn tinted hair. She was big, but lovely looking. Both women had the same teased-up hairstyle that fell into a curl at the base of the neck. The auburn girl wore a skin-tight bronze dress. The dark one was wearing green. A second man joined them on the dancefloor as the music began.

All four joined hands and began to dance around in a circle. Every once in a while one of the dancers, still holding hands, would crouch down and twist, first in to the centre of the circle, then out to the side, and then jump up again.

“The one in the gold dress is beautiful,” my wife said.

“My God, what a body,” Graham said. “Have you ever seen anything like it? She’s like one of those jars—what do you call it—”

“Like an amphora,” I said.

“That’s it, like those wine tubs. I say, it’s solid. Isn’t she marvellous?”

“She is,” Betty agreed.

“You couldn’t dance like that, could you?”

“Why not? I’ll take you on for the challenge match.”

“That’s very sporting of you,” he grinned, and kissed her neck while she laughed.

I said to Butterworth, “Tell Linda not to clap when it’s finished. It’s considered an insult.”

He whispered to Linda. From the other side of the room where a group from the tourist boats had been seated, came rhythmic finger clicks. At the end of the dance they applauded wildly. Linda turned around and made a smug face, and said, “They don’t know any better.”

The policeman’s waiter scurried past us with another bottle and the next dance began. The men dropped out this time and left only the two girls.

“I thought Greek dances were only for men,” Butterworth said.

“I think they’re supposed to be,” I said. “But the regular crowd obviously comes for the girls.”

The policeman was so drunk that he didn’t know there was any dancing going on. He remained looking across the table at the woman. They were getting so drunk that it was almost painful to watch, although it was also funny. I was slightly tight myself. Not very, but enough to feel good.

When the dance had ended, the two girls went back down the carpet to the band. Then the man in the white evening jacket stepped forward. He was holding the kitten in his hand. The band began to play again, and he stepped up on to the dancefloor, putting the kitten on his shoulder. And with the kitten sitting there, and a lighted cigarette in his mouth, he did the slow leap and jump and handclap dance,
his shoulders back, his arms loosely out to the side, and pivoting from the hip.

“Oh,” Linda said. “Oh, isn’t he wonderful?” She had clasped her hands together over her collarbone.

Still dancing, the man handed the kitten out to a waiter. He got a round of applause for that. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and stuck it into his left nostril, and danced that way. The steps became more complicated and the leap more dramatic, but the dance hadn’t changed in quality or pace. It was still a combination of casual sloppiness and iron muscular control. The other people in the club did not matter to him. I’d seldom seen anyone who could enjoy himself alone like that without actively ignoring others around him. Most people need a group or another person. This man clearly was happy without needing anyone or anything. He was dancing for the sake of the dance and for himself. I was glad we had come.

When he had finished, Linda started to applaud and caught herself just in time. My wife wanted to, too.

“That was great,” Butterworth said. We all agreed. The light-haired singer began a song in Greek. Graham and Betty had their arms around each other’s necks. The Butterworths finished their bottle. She lit a cigarette and beat him to the draw with a miniature lighter which might have been a going-away present.