Lady Be Good

Lady Be Good

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 7

Tom Bass

It’s a massive favor and Noemi didn’t intend to impinge or disturb.

But she does.

Noemi reclaims her Toby Jug in Momma Empire’s emporium and bazaar, the grinning chap ensconced on a mirrored shelf among a group of grinning pickaninnies and a pile of tortoise shell combs. He’s grotesque, forlorn and scarred, clutching his infantile teat of ale, his cheeks burnished a lackluster pink under his blue and green tricorn. Unworshipped, unclaimed in his tattered waistcoat, the price tag is peeling off, the dust having mined underneath the not so sticky balm.

Noemi senses the smelly objects that her mother has lugged back from her empire where the sun neither set nor rose, the things she must have enjoyed along with her privileges, replicated here in her glorified pawn shop.

She pulls down the jug: could this namesake be her son?

Momma Empire bristles with discontent. Her broad simian face is smeared with rouge and her lipstick wavers between her nose and her chin. She’s said yes to Noemi’s request to stay, which she regrets, because she wants to be kind and unselfish, but that isn’t the message in her deportment, her garments dragging her in great warrior-like postures of territorial movement as she paces in the narrow galley of the emporium, her earrings shaking, cowry-shaped silver droplets with cross-sectioned slices of snails.

The sight of Noemi, the restless, fidgeting, ungrateful lump, sitting in a cracked Windsor chair, hardly able to control her infant son, much less her own clumsy hands, irritates her enormously. Noemi’s a low priority for her and she’s noted how Noemi appears just when things appear to be going wrong, as if her daughter is a harbinger of personal and economic misfortune.

London is overstocked with the loot and leftovers of the imploded imperial realm; consequently, prices and profits are rock bottom.

Momma Empire, urged on by her new cobra-like business partner, probably Jeremy as far as Noemi can ascertain, feels the need to diversify, at least as far as Ghent to purchase a damaged, termite-ridden lot of art nouveau furniture reputed to be from Congo hardwoods. No, she didn’t escape the mud-filled footprints of the scramble. Instead her enterprise depended on it, although she still has trouble realizing the consequences of the near euthanasia that had led to her returning to what no longer seems like home.

“Noemi, the infernal man has vanished with all my capital,” she says. “It wasn’t like that in Sudan where we had our own syndicate and firm. You see I’m in a bit of a pinch.” She can’t quite adjust to a reluctant life back on the plain damp isle. Even an illusionist like her could not find room for an empire and all its trimmings inside her portmanteau.

Noemi know that she’s included, too—she, she without a name, no one.

Momma Empire brims with anger. She’s been betrayed. Her hair, a knot of hissing dreads, shakes in contempt. “Jeremy’s bloody well gone to Port Moresby or Hobart, somewhere he thinks without repercussions. But I’ll remind him that it was I who built the first crown court in Guinea and the first crown court in Tasmania.”

“Yes, mum,” Noemi says.

Few people like to be reminded of what was, what had been, and what nearly could have been, not least Noemi seemingly pinned down by Momma Empire’s mausoleum of antiques, the gloomy arcade nearly collapsing from the misery of her figure hedging bets with her bric-a-brac. What’s an Ibo ceramic head or a Watusi gauntlet when the trend is for chic plastics molded by machines from the oil her son-in-law—who she likes very much, even if he’s American—is denuding from the territories that once were hers.

That’s how she deludes herself. It’s an irony she resists at all. The colonial social mobility that had made her extravagant, free, outlandish, and curt is no longer a foreign posting but a domestic psychedelic, a knack for guitar licks, a dash of up-yours style, the border between ordinary and entertainment, that’s the way ahead on crusty old Blighty, pop. Sure, Momma Empire, she’s a rebel, too: ancient, consumed and co-opted by the powers to whom she’s a dedicated subject. 

Threatened with bankruptcy, she’s damning and damned.

“Bloody fool,” she vents, turning over the accruals in her vile hands, tattooed with henna for good luck, a reminder of her latest ceremony that has failed dramatically, whether due to the countervailing forces of the heavens or some other presence kettling her plans. She’s neither infallible nor invulnerable.

“You’ve read too much Graham Greene,” says Noemi, her contribution breathy, mousey and thin. Submission and humor are the only way when Momma’s in such a state.

“Do you like that pouf?” asks Momma Empire, insouciantly pointing at an crocodile skin, steering away from the truth of her reading habits.

“O, Mummy, no use being bitter. You can’t change a thing now.”

“You’re to be seen and not heard. That’s the condition of you coming here. Or have you forgotten?”

“I’ve got my own baby now, mum. It’s not just you anymore.”

Noemi thrust forward the dozing package to her mother.

“But Toby’s yours,” she says, sputtering and aghast, pushing the baby back.

 Change has been foisted upon Noemi. She has to be responsible. She has to care. She nearly had broken in two in the hospital, yet here is Toby, her marker of adulthood.

What had been a dream on the way over, a soft focus of ambient noise, the engines lulling Tobias into the feeling that he’s back at the desert camp of drilling equipment and vibrating sands, is something far different on the return to Europe, tense, the cabin poorly pressurized, the crew acrimonious, and Tobias has been sick, an alarming sign of his distress. It had been even more dramatic, parting in Heathrow, when Wyatt joined the queue of oilmen heading to the Middle East.

“Daddydaddydaddy,” he had cried to the parting jolly blur he knew to be his father. Tobias swallows something he’s scavenged from the terminal floor. He chokes and Noemi whacks him until he coughs up the luggage tag.

Even when they pull aside for a last kiss as they separate at the terminal, Noemi had been adamant. No amount of coaxing would convince her back to Libya. She needs people like her, easy to get along with, united and happy about how miserable they are, prisoners on their humdrum isle.

Wyatt agrees.

Go.

Momma Empire is waiting on the other side, shaking a calabash rattle at the passengers, like she is now, rattling her head and nosediving into her antiques. Noemi senses the justice. Because she has been waiting all her life for Momma Empire. And due to her own Gypsy wanderlust, perhaps a symptom of the ice in her heart and pain in her soul, covering the surface of her fear, Momma now is disposed to wait for her.

Momma Empire freezes mid-stride, her slippers staunchly embedded in a Rajastani carpet. She never has been challenged by her daughter before. Or if she has, she’d never have realized. This is a new development! Is Noemi growing up at the dowdy age of 32?

“Why not ask Daddy Empire for some help?” Noemi suggests. “He likes a mystery.”

Noemi, on distant terms with her father, has recently sent a letter to his last known address: Daddy Empire, Aberystwyff, Wales. But what’s startling is that she received a reply!

“Bosh! That useless fart. He’s not going to find my money or that lousy Jeremy. I’ll tell you that Daddy Empire costs a woman the clothes on her back and more to boot. But go ahead and meet him and find out for yourself if he doesn’t come crawling for handouts.”

“Yes, Mum,” she says, hastily retreating, “That’s what I want to do.” She must tread very lightly. She shouldn’t show too much pluck or confide that she plans to meet Daddy exactly this afternoon and that he has issued instructions that he didn’t desire careening into his former wife and abuser. Noemi’s good at following their orders and complicit in their games.

“Manzanilla?” asks her mother, needing a cooling swat of sherry.

She declines. The sherry decanter kissed the crystal glass, rang like a bell.

“You look quite smart, after all. By the look of you when you arrived, I’d thought you were down in the dumps.”

She’s made a supreme effort to squeeze into black slacks and a purple and brown Jaeger turtleneck, but she still feels a blimp. “Can’t I look nice?” she says, her voice tinged with acid.

Naturally, Noemi has camouflaged her rendezvous with Daddy Empire with defensiveness, a natural part of her armory of lying, false motives, and not telling what she couldn’t deny are lies. The emotional strategy is well suited to her management of Momma and Daddy’s divorce and the inimical period of her childhood thereafter, abandoned with her Nan, brooding on her feelings of blame, smothered between parental loaves and smeared with fatty problems like an ersatz sandwich paste.

Momma Empire screwed up her face, nosy and prying, persistent to a fault. She loves a quiz. “Gone off Wyatt, eh? O, you’re a right tart. I should’ve warned your husband.”

Noemi wants the little boy to look snappy and he does so, more or less, in his blue and white sailor suit, with a tam on his crown, sprouting blond hair now that he’s older and could hold up his head and focus, and even make a locomotive crawl for a trench. Daddy’s an army man and she hopes he’ll defer to the naval theme.

“Smart he looks, doesn’t he,” she says.

“Like a walrus,” Momma Empire replies, slugging back her sherry and dabbing out a Woodbine. “With Roman legs.”

Is Noemi paranoid or is her mother a total bitch? And if that’s the case, how’s her father?

She sets out from the basement arcade, glad to escape from the smell of hummus and mould, the tangle of hair, wood, jute and metal. It’s like standing in a sunken garden or a demolition zone, skips of broken materials parked at the cellar door. She’s afraid of the leftover bombs.

What had her mother meant when she said, “Roman legs.”

Catholic legs? Moorish legs? Jewish legs? What’s she on about, the old bag who grew up in an alm’s house along Offa’s Dyke, part Mercian, English, Gypsy and mixing with Geordies from along Hadrian’s Wall. They’re right mongrels and that’s why she’s so exceptionally beautiful. Daddy Empire comes from up north, from a dynasty of legionnaires, he claims, though that seems very unlikely.

The nervous puzzlement crinkles over her face, foil not cream. Toby she carries in her arms. She doesn’t want a fancy pram. Noemi’s proud and she has a length of cloth if she needs to bolt him to her waist or sling him under her arms. It isn’t very attractive, might be misinterpreted as horribly native, but it would have to do.

She’s happy walking along the flagstones, skating almost, random drops of rain scattering on the surface, not a shower, nor a flurry, but just a reminder of what’s above, the burly lilac clouds wiping the sky with a pleasant composure. Yes, Noemi’s home and the pavement is all she needs to feel satisfied, the windows and goods bumping together, falling out of their displays so anxious are they to find buyers, to please her, with the assurance that the years of privation are over and the country is remaking itself. She watches the legs and feet moving with such confidence, soles touching the pavement with an optimistic feel, no longer squelching in dung and mud, but walking with a happiness and solidarity that is their solace on this cramped rock on which they are just tenants. It’s a ridiculous system yet she thrives in it. One didn’t have to leave for France anymore to see the bouncing rollicking expansion of taste from spuds and butter to pasta and olive oil, that she had neither liked nor known until submitted to the Italian kitchen of the Libyans. She couldn’t even register the change unless she went away, and she had, and then it becomes apparent that waves of Mediterranean, Caribbean and Himalayan peoples are making it a very absorbing place to be, flavoring street, mouth and families.

She’s a traditionalist, she thinks as she tows her son along the reassuring flagstones, but the change in the country resonates with her and surmounts her most fundamental ideas. They should be her tenants just like anyone. Even Momma Empire’s bastion of Hampstead isn’t immune to Chinese kites dancing on its heath, conjoining like paper moths. Walking, she almost admits that a little social mobility would do her no harm, though she’s hesitant to say that she’s anything other than working class. Yes, Momma Empire might have pretensions for Bloomsbury, but Noemi did not. So engrossed is she in speculating about how quickly her home seems to be transforming, and how provincial she feels even for all the sophistication of the Med, that she strolls right past the patisserie, their meeting point, welcoming her with the pungent grittiness of fresh roasted coffee.

Often put off by the tedium of motherhood, today she’s pleased with the bright whimperings of her son. He’s all energy and his cheeks burn incandescently.

The door tinkles behind her. The patisserie’s a garble of long vowels and tongue twisting consonants, a black fog of cigarette smoke, glittering of jewelry that is insurance in case of flight, the drawn noses and depressed attitude of the eyes, the strange cut of the clothes, narrow in the chest, dark and out of date, beards in abundance that spoke of the east. It’s not a chic place, yet it has a core of visitors, exiles and faces far more intelligent than her, Tatars, Huns, Gypsies and Jews reduced in circumstance by misfortune and war and the lives that cannot be replaced and joined together by the want of a good, understated Habsburg cake and topnotch espresso.

The Hungarian proprietor grins like Lothario, resumes sniffing over a newspaper, the Hungarian print looking like a mixture of Norse and Udmurt, none of which she knew.

Noemi doesn’t want to recognize him—Jeremy, shoveling countless crèmes through the gate of his beard into his mouth, his jacket spread over his seat like velvet wings.

He registers her quick, hostile look, purposefully doesn’t lock eyes, wondering if the shisha would come to his table.

She sits down at an adjoining booth. There’s no need to be afraid or avoid him. But Noemi’s more nervous that she expects, rolling her wrist every few minutes to check the time. Talking to Jeremy gives her an excuse to forget and relax.

“Healed?” he asks, pointing at Toby, brushing puff pastry from his cummerbund.

“Oh yes, very much,” she says. “He’s very chuffed. And yourself?”

Jeremy deflects the question about his well being with a crafty return to his request of Wyatt. “Did you or your husband find anything about the Jews in Libya?”

“I haven’t been back,” she says, “Well, not lately. It’s been busy after the birth.”

“I was just wondering,” he says.

She might as well broach what’s nagging her. “Jeremy, are you my mum’s business partner? She says you ran off.”

“Madame, absolutely not. What she trades is unkosher. We cannot have the hair sacrificed to pagan gods or any of her taboo wares.”

“I suppose she’s got to blame someone, Jeremy.”

He readily directed the conversation back to finding and repatriating Jews.

“Candy kicked us out after the Six-Day War, didn’t he, Noemi? Ransomed the Jews, yeah?”

“He kicked everyone out. We’re the last. And I’m not going back. He wants us to live in Brega, and it’s no more than a few trailers and an oil terminal.”

“Your husband’s alone?” He couldn’t remember the man’s name.

“He’s there. He stayed on. Has a project with Candy, he says.”

“Does he?” He would never advise a wife to separate like this. “What keeps him there?”

“He likes to scratch the rocks.”

“If you talk or write to him, could you remind him to find the synagogues? If he could just document what remains. Take some photos. Maybe find the Jewish cemetery. Something. If he’s got the tolerant ear of the great leader?”

“Last I heard he’s been cut off.”

When did they talk? Has she gotten a letter? No, she’s forgotten about him outright, so enthralled is she with London, preoccupied with the idea that it’s normal. After all, she has promised herself not to tamper with his work or weigh down his conscience with her problems. “What would you do?”

“I’d go back. If my people need me, I go back somehow.”

“Good point. What do you want there, really?”

“Why, to drink the Libyan’s blood!” he says. “Of course, it’s a joke.”

Jeremy could sense Noemi’s distrust. He’s pushed too far. But he’s a radical and thinks it best to challenge stereotypes with humor, hint at the seriousness with a laugh, and then he can go about introducing the knowledge behind his remarks, the shared pillars of body, spirit and soul that made a man real. It isn’t just opposing thumbs.

Toby sniffs and claws at the pastries but it seems like he wants a coffee, not only the vertiginous sweets. The Hampstead pastry shop is dense with the narcotic sexual smell of the beans roasted on the premises in a giant tumbling copper drum.

The coffee isn’t quite the same. The Berbers would make it in the camp, crack the dry cherries open on their haunches, sort, roast and grind the beans in one long ceremony. The Italians had cultivated coffee in Libya, used the locals as free labor for the tedious job of picking, cleaning and drying. The plantations in the highlands along the Libyan coast are snow-white all year with the heavy scent and bright exploding pompoms of the flowers. They had stayed at some lovely plantation houses, perfect places to convalesce.

Enjoying her cake and the memory of her times together with Wyatt, quite insatiable and keen, she realizes the birth has come as quite a shock. She’s had to move abruptly from child to adult, which isn’t something she readily would do. Noemi decides it’s the Hungarian pastry shop that’s making her so reflective, which she cites as a sign of depression. She spoons a little coffee into Tobias who spits it out after thinking he wants it. She already expects so much from the cute bugger and coffee is only the beginning. Then it crackles in her head like a burnt circuit: Bugger Pleasure. She snorts. What a horrible nickname.

She isn’t prepared for his entrance. Frankly, she’s stunned. Britain is partitioning? Daddy Empire looks more like Mountbatten than her own estranged father.

The detachment of guards are adorned with their bearskin hats; their red-trimmed trousers move precisely to the song of Jerusalem by Eldridge and Blake, their pipes and drums competing for the counterpoint. Only a few men, they march along the high street, pushing aside the black taxis and red Routemasters, swinging their way to the premises, the vanguard to a single Jeep, its windscreen folded down, its main occupant, gallant and erect, stroking a white bull terrier with a swollen nose perched on the bonnet. They halt and grin, very pleased by the attention, not the young stallions of the active guard but an older breed, cracked by the sun, dipped in gin, spit-polished by batmen, used to privileges beyond coolies and kaffirs.

The doors to the patisserie are thrown open.

Is it her father? 

“Noemi Pleasure nee Empire?” he asks, his voice stentorian and registering like a continent. He has the stripes of a lieutenant major and the sharp pointed cap rises over his white hair trimmed neatly from his ears, the mustache moving with authority, the belly neatly tucked behind the broad green canvas of his uniform.

How acutely embarrassing.

She squirms, not daring to move.

No one steps forward from the pastry shop.

“For curry at half past eight?” He voice starts to warble. He has done his absolute best to arrange his mates, men from his old regiment who are alive and in the area standing at attention with their instruments under the drooping Jack.

Nothing.

Very anti-climactic.

“Where the devil are you hiding?” Daddy Empire shouts. Has he been had?

The crowd dwindles outside the shop. The ephemeral moment of nostalgia or emotion, whatever they expected, doesn’t seem to be happening. The guards relax from attention to ease.

She cringes. She’s like a son in that way: she hates her father. But she swallows the crisp hatred down and eventually scoots forward.

“It’s me,” she says.

Is she an imposter or a double? She looks too like him yet not like him at all.

Daddy Empire dismounts from the Jeep. His terrier jumps from the bonnet.

“Steady on, Bull’s-eye!” calls Daddy, baritone, moving swiftly to heel his dog that pays no attention and darts into the patisserie, a white flash, a true ratter.

“Daddydaddydaddy,” blurts Toby.

“Daddy, please,” says Noemi, sighing, faint. She doesn’t want to be emotional but she feels it welling up, an urge to defecate, sneeze and cry at once.

“Why, yes,” he says. “It’s Daddy.” His voice rings with the melodious call of the north, his body wonderful and plious like a manatee, decorated with a row of medals hanging from funny bits of ribbon, velvet and gold crowns and epaulets of glue and board on his shoulders, fancy brass buttons running down his tummy, buckles and stitches holding him together.

“How are you, love?”

He hugs her with a might and fondness that she rarely feels. He’s covered in trinkets and symbols, an elephant foremost, a white tusker, sewn to each shoulder. He smelt like leather, metal and boot polish, unfound tarnish, Old Spice, razors, pomade.

A clap, then a holler from the crowd.

From the lads: “Hip, hip, hooray!”

It’s their splendid moment as Bull’s-eye faithfully returns with a pair of soft, limp rodents.

“Real ratter,” Daddy says, leaning down into his daughter’s hair. “Learned in Bangalore, he did.”

“Lovely dog, Daddy,” she says. “Very handsome.”

“Why thank you, Noemi.” She’s just like her mother, always talking indirectly. “And who’s this?” he asks. He couldn’t help being stiff, formal, even if he’s thrilled to see his daughter and her son, after having been swept away for so long, partly by the new wife, partly by the old one.

“Why it’s Tobias. Haven’t you met?”

“Looks like an Empire to me. Get him in the fields and the streams, won’t we, when the season starts.”

Of course, she thinks, one always has to do something with Daddy Empire. The same with Wyatt. Her chief complaint: no such thing as relaxing, just sitting and having a cup of tea.

“Right lads, you’re excused,” he says to his pals wanting for instructions. “I saved you lot once and now you’re saved me, so we’re equal.”

They scatter along the pavement, seemingly to the Rook and Pillard. Daddy’s extremely envious of course and would like to rejoin them with the great adventures they’d had together, the clockwork precision of their engineering unit, the fixing of vehicles and structures under fire and on the march, how ingenious and vital that had been to the war effort and the clean up afterwards as the curtain had closed on the Empire.

“We must catch up,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, meekness rising in her voice. “You married again, Daddy?”

“I’ll answer that in a tic, love.” Daddy Empire checks the horizon, filled with the spic and span brick houses congealed around the heath. “Where are we going to get a curry round here? Don’t see too many of the right kind of chaps.”

“We could take the tube down to Aldgate East. Isn’t it Brick Lane?”

“Absolutely not. Bull’s-eye will find us a Vindaloo. He was born in Hyderabad and he loves his curry, too. Won’t you, Bully?”

Daddy is much more communicative with his dog, admittedly a quizzical cocky fellow, than his daughter or grandson. Typical, he always has to put some obstacle in the way, be it animal or mineral.

Without much ado, they stride forward, following the white dog. Leading them on with his egg-white snout, father and daughter and grandson navigate the streets of Hampstead and then suddenly much further. Trained to find only the very best handmade sauces from spices ground on the premises, only accepting Basmati that has been cold-soaked for hours, sensitive to rancid frying oils, demanding fresh naans and chutneys, sniffing for the best onions and lady fingers, unaccepting of anything tired, spoiled or leftover, Bull’s-eye checks every pub, rushs into takeaways, double-takes outside the better establishments until he catches the scent of some disagreeable kitchen shortcut, often returning with another rat to prove his piont. Daddy Empire can see plainly the dog is unhappy with his inspections and urges his scout to find them somewhere to eat.

“But this must be the East End, Daddy.” protests Noemi, who’s flagging. She’s unequipped, needs a pram, at least a shopping trolley; her native cloth has not worked very well.

Daddy Empire sucks on his pipe and Toby is on his shoulders, his little hands holding the tufts of the man’s hawkish eyebrows. He has a sturdy grip.

They zigzag and crisscross. They circle and backtrack. They skirt, then pincer, are cleverly outmaneuvered, until they at last encircle what looks like a proper curry house, a guard standing at the door. They didn’t talk much on the last stage of the forced march but Noemi, in her tiredness, feels an odd tingling ecstasy from the paradise of brick, mortar, asphalt, concrete, glass, and the materials that make a city. Though she’s never trained or been inclined that way, she’s an engineer’s daughter, close to but not quite the union of a jailor and a whore. She feels as if she’s on a stage and the backdrop of city has simply passed by as she and Daddy Empire walk on a hard and unforgiving surface, trusty Bull’s-eye barking, flashing his tail and merrily pointing the way to the Rajput, Curry House Extraordinaire, First Class Just For You.

They breach the entrance and in they go, Bullseye clawing at Daddy’s well-creased army trousers, executing twirling jumps, Noemi following, ragged, her feet tired and blistered from the Bally shoes she insisted on buying the week before.

They sat in a dark booth and Daddy Empire rattled out commands in Hindi. He’s smiling wonderfully, Toby at one side, expectant, his nostrils quivering at the amplitude of scents rising from the red upholstery. Bull’s-eye could do no wrong and Noemi wonders what the dog wants. The air’s toasted with the piquant scent of chilis, cumins, jeera, everything that the Arabs had brought halfway around the world to the souks and that had slipped over the black continent to London.

“The quartet was a lovely treat, Daddy.”

“Some of the fellows from the Indian campaign, before withdrawal.”

“Quite,” she says.

“Horrible idea, withdrawing. We’d just got our heads round governing those bloody seepoys and then they turned on us. Very ungrateful. We made their country.”

“Wasn’t that the case everywhere you were posted? Doing good? Or was it bad?”

“Wasn’t in Sudan and Eritrea. They loved us. We bought all their cotton, salt, copper, built their railroad, gave them ships, taught their children, stopped their barbaric ways, educated their women, gave everything and it came for naught. Though we had our incompetent moments of course. Bad apples in every box.”

“That’s where things went wrong, wasn’t it? Between you and mummy, I mean.”

He balks, stiffens like Punch, grips his mortal bat. But there’s no way out, nothing other than surrender or capitulation, certainly at the bank of Obduran. One has to face one’s mistakes, even if it means the gallows. Daddy Empire guesses that’s why he agreed to come out of hiding and meet. He didn’t like to think he’d been a bad man, though at the rate at which he burnt through wives, he deserves to be faulted. Not for infidelity, not for disloyalty, but for sheer parsimony. Yet he’s a plump as a gander and his wives become mere feathery prawns as he refuses to feed or cloth them, all the while absorbing their money, not a lot, but enough for him and his grand habits of tobacco, fishing, drink, tailoring, meals, and the dues for his private clubs.

“Well, I do say that’s a bit impudent. Who told you that?”

“Mummy may think I’m a little girl, but I know what happened.”

“She left me for another man.” He doesn’t like saying that. But there’s no use. She was his ally, his daughter.

“She didn’t say that.”

“Ask her. She left for a civilian. A Frog. Our great rivals in Africa, the Frogs.”

“A Frog?”

“She loves Frogs.”

“What was he like, this Frog?”

“A gentleman like myself, I suppose. It was about money.”

“Of course?”

“She’s love money more than anything.”

She dare not add, “I do too.” But she thinks about it. Isn’t Wyatt in Libya for that alone. Certainly not for his stomach. “She’s gone bankrupt.”

“In more ways than one, my dear.”

“And the Theosophy?”

“Bah, palaver! Those cheeky loons.” He’s been envious of Momma Empire’s ability to raise cash.

The waiter bows, beginning with a baffling array of English compliments, and and Daddy Empire follows with order for a nosh up: “Err, samosas, yes, two please, and what, yes, paranthas, certainly, naans, butter but no garlic, chapattis, yes, chicken madras, beef vindaloo, yes, fish biryani, mango chutney, mint sauce, err, please, yes condiments, what, fried bananas, two, and raitas all round.”

He loves India.

He could eat the subcontinent whole. He would start in Cochin with the synagogue, sweep across Keralia and gobble up the Marxists, stretch his jaws for Tamil Nadu and the island of Ceylon, backwash the tea estates and push in the Hyderabad, take on the big steaks of Goa, and work down the whole damn thing, partition and all, into his gullet, biting it all off at the Himalayas.

“The accent’s in the ears,” he says, “Not the throat.”

Toby bangs the table in anticipation, grips his knife and fork, bangs and wails, as the smell of caramelizing onions and the roasting spices waft through the Rajput. He’s glad to help.

“Got an appetite for snap, does the young squire?”

“Very much. He loves harissa.”

“He may, but has he had a vindaloo?”

Toby’s investigating under his plate while slurping a mango lassi brought by the kowtowing staff, overjoyed to have so enthusiastic a diner.

“See what you mean,” he says.

“The Libyans love him.”

“You’ve been very clever to perpetuate the Empire breed.”

“It’s miserable being a mummy. And a Pleasure. ”

“Your mother said the same thing about motherhood.”

“But she wasn’t there.”

“She did care. In her way.”

“I bet. Between choosing among gowns and deciding who to invite and making gins and tonics. Fat lot of good she was.” The bile and bitter rise from within, turn her nearly green.

He doesn’t defend her. He’s seen it, too. Actually, he’d encouraged it, but he couldn’t say so, the leaving of Noemi behind, the bad behavior, in the end, even the affairs that had made matrimony dissolve.

The first steaming plates arrive, each planted with a cocktail stick of the Indian flag.

“Cheeky,” he says, “But good.”

They gorge. It’s wonderful. Fresh. Spicy. Hot. Aromatic. Emblematic. The fire of Empire.

Daddy releases the buttons on his jacket. Loosens his cravat. Slurps the Kingfisher. Rolls back his sleeves. Tucks on a napkin for a bib.

“My mates…” he says inconclusively.

“Yes?” she asks.

He doesn’t elaborate, just eats with abandon and relish.

Neither Noemi nor Toby can keep up, though they try, Noemi doing double time to feed herself and her charge across the table, landing great gobs of mutton and beef in his mouth. They’re gluttons and when nearing the end of the mammoth feast, Daddy Empire orders dessert.

“You do like lychees in syrup,” he asks.

He gobbles the slick slimy eyes at once, orders another before calling for the bill, suddenly in a rush.

“I’m not going to pay for this,” he says, steam rising behind his ears, “A second lychee dessert? It hardly qualifies.” He’s outraged in a mock boozy way.

“O, Daddy, must you?”

But he makes a scene, a voluminous, turbulent one, and the Rajastanis have only to look at Bull’s-eye, glowering, full but completely capable of the utmost violence despite his clownish good looks.

“Shall I call Momma?”

“Why not?” Daddy Empire’s drunk enough to face the harridan.

Noemi pops into the red box, a lovely silent haven, rain drizzling down the side. Bloated, she makes the call.

“It’s me,” she says.

“I’ve just talked to Equiano and he’s taking us to a club. Like to come?”

“Sure,” she replies inadvertently. She’s pleased Momma deigned to be seen with her after an evening on the town with Daddy.

“You’ve turned into an American, child,” she quips. That made her very cross. Sure. Yeah. Duh. O, the hideous language of the Americans, full of short cuts. “My dear, Wyatt’s gone to your head: you don’t want to be English anymore. But it doesn’t matter, Equiano will take your place. He loves England. It freed him, so he says.”

“I’d never surrender my nationality,” says Noemi, the invitation taking off in quite a different direction, disarming, as her mother steered straight for the rocks. She tries to rope the sloop back, her mouth full of chili and anise. “Where do we need to go?”

Momma Empire missed the “we” part, for she’s incredibly buzzed from Equiano’s pink kola nuts and a stimulant that he claims to be sweet cinnamon leaf. “Hang on,” she says, shouting to him, and then she delivers the address. “The password at the door is ‘obe’—the chief will let you in.”

It isn’t that far. They could walk. Sort of.

They turn up their collars and ignore their sore feet. Toby finds a koala-like place in the pouch of Daddy Empire’s jacket, free of rain and warm with greasy curry pong.

“Usually a friendly lot,” Daddy says, unintimidated by the groups of black men laughing and toasting on the street in the vicinity of their destination.

A row of scooters are parked outside. They have to dip below the street and are confronted with an iron door with a slot in it that smells sweet like shea and cocoa butter.

“Obe,” she says to a pair of red eyes striped with dreads.

They are hustled in, quickly rid of their coats and bid to enter the red, green and yellow themed club pulsing with music and bodies turning in the lights. Bull’s-eye leads the way at a trot, but Daddy calls him back, orders him to sit with Toby, who they place in the nest of their coats, and he obeys, realizing its not his duty to questin order, resting his head in his white paws, but not before licking them dry.

The music sounds like jazz, but then it isn’t that either. Someone leans in to ask her, “Dig that Afro soul, babe,” and she’s even more puzzled.

“Afro soul?” Then what’s just plain soul?

It sounds very naughty and in no time Noemi finds herself swaying and grinding, letting her teeth work through her lips, the band on stage led by a very charismatic if not pixie-like black man, his shirt off, his face dotted and circled with white paint, playing saxophone, sometimes keyboard, with a line of women chanting call and response, and a steady clave, leaving a little time to pause between steps, and short sharp toots of the horns. It’s a kind of mesmerizing musical sorcery, so much so that she loses herself dancing with a black man, suavely dressed, and sees Daddy Empire doing the shuffle with his tie off and his belly rolling to the waist of a very pretty negress with an outrageous Afro, who she almost mistakes for a wicked nurse from the hospital where Toby had been born, before lo and behold, in the midst of this brilliant dancing dream, the sweat and elation, she saw Equiano, smiling outrageously, his chest heaving and his shirt open to the navel, and Momma, who Noemi had never seen dancing, shaking and grooving to the funk that did not stop or really alter, massaging her soul in funny syncopated beats and makes her feel that for once she’s back with her parents, not their pawn or child or blackmailer, but their adult daughter who has succeeded in making it really seem like they are together and not alone, dancing with their ancestors.

Music does unite and this strikes her as so odd and trite, but there it is, in her ears, tickling her bones, leading her akimbo, when she reaches out and touches the hips of her partner, a black man whose name she did not know, the first one with whom she had danced, since it has not been possible in the desert. How he touches her back, electrically, his hand drawing down her bodice, his leg inserting between hers, and taking her in the tight hug of a rumba, yet not a rumba at all, but something that could lift her from the poverty of her emotions and make her feel that everything’s pretty superb, even this miscegenation, if it’s that, associating between the races under the watch of Momma and Daddy.

They must have changed, too.

“Who’s that?” she asks the stranger with whom she dances. She’s early when she should be late, but he corrects that.

“Fela Kuti,” he says, in a deep sweet voice. “A special brew from Nigeria.”

Noemi feels very disoriented. Without even battling her prejudices, she’d already forgotten that he’s black. He seems such a nice chap. The disco ball limns the room with its mosaic and the dancing is just beginning.

She’s never been so tempted. She’d even do it here.

But she knows fully and with every sense of honor and consequence that there’s no other way than back to her own bed, surely tagging along with Daddy and Momma to the mad afterparty of cane schnapps, crab soup and fufu that mark on this morning a renewed sense of trust as London begins a vainglorious rainy day, full of import and subterfuge lacing its silent fogs. The Empires reach home certain that they have appeased many an angry messenger with their diplomacy, forgiveness and tight dancing, for none of them have brought any shame upon themselves, new friendships apparent in their chits of paper with the names and addresses of mechanics, suppliers, handymen, grocers and shops all wanting customers.

“What a night,” she says to Toby as she changes him and puts him to bed. “You’ve been lovely.”

Noemi tucks a pillow between her thighs, preparing a nest in the apple boughs of her idyllic, unsullied dreams.

She loves Wyatt, she thinks, actually feeling sorry—why he couldn’t be there to dance and why he’s not there to share with her—but the poor guy will never understand why she loves London so. 

Up next: Mumbo Jumbo