The Call-Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

cocktail hour was over.
    The dining-room looked more like a cafeteria, with a great number of small square tables distributed chessboard fashion, each table seating four. The tables and chairs were of metal covered with gaudy plastic. There was accommodation for two hundred people, but now there were only about thirty, huddled together at adjacent tables at one end of the room.
    Claire, who had to give some instructions to Hansie and Mitzie, was the last to get into the dining-room. She saw that Nikolai was seated between Harriet Epsom and Helen Porter; the fourth chair at their table was empty. Although he had two women at his sides, one of them confoundedly attractive, Claire thought, he had an absent look. Helen Porter was talking with her usual intensity to Harriet, who interrupted her occasionally with a monosyllable which Claire lip-read as ‘rot’. Nikolai was moulding a piece of bread into a shrunken skull with his long, powerful fingers. He did it so expertly that one hardly noticed the black leather cap, like a thimble, which covered the stump of his missing left ring finger. She caught his eye and decided to join his table instead of playing hostess somewhere else.
    â€˜Niko’s harem,’ Harriet uttered by way of comment as Claire sat down.
    â€˜He needs it,’ Claire said. ‘Without at least two adoring females around he feels depressed.’
    â€˜What has he got to be depressed about?’ Harriet said and wanted to bite her tongue off: she remembered that young Grisha Solovief had just been sent off to fight that nobody’swar in nobody’s land somewhere far east. Abruptly, Nikolai turned to her:
    â€˜Tell me what you think, H.E. Do you think this conference is a hare-brained idea?’
    â€˜Rot. The call-girls in their finest hour are going to save humanity. Or at least have a jolly good discussion. Or just a discussion. Or climb up a mountain.’ She thumped the stone floor with the heavy stick leaning against her chair. ‘I love climbing mountains. What did you make of that scene made by that Miss Carey?’
    Solovief arranged the head-hunter’s trophies he had made in a neat row. There were five of them. ‘I did not like it much. Valenti insisted on bringing her along. She is one of his assistants.’
    â€˜She looks to me more like a patient,’ said Helen.
    Miss Carey could actually be seen sharing a table with Dr Cesare Valenti and Professor Otto von Halder. Halder was telling a story to which she listened with demure disapproval, while Valenti wore his unwavering smile over his immaculate bow-tie; both seemed to be permanent fixtures. Halder concluded the story with a leonine roar of laughter.
    â€˜When men and mountains meet,’ Claire remembered and giggled. ‘I thought he only quoted Goethe.’
    â€˜What’s wrong with Goethe?’ Harriet protested. ‘He knew all about the unconscious and the split mind. “
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust
.” Two souls inside my bosom,
ach.
Isn’t that the first scientific definition of schizophrenia?’
    Claire thought that Harriet’s bosom could accommodate at least four souls. She couldn’t stop giggling, oh dear. Helen said:
    â€˜Goethe suffered from premature ejaculation and was a bedwetter.’
    Claire asked, as straightfaced as she could manage: ‘Who discovered that? A Kleinian at Yale?’
    â€˜No, at Minnesota. But that isn’t much of a joke, you know.’
    They were off to a happy start.
5
    Later in the evening – they had all gone to bed early, tired from the journey and the mountain air – Claire applied herself to the task of writing the first of the ‘long letters’ she had foolishly promised to her
beau
back at Harvard.
    â€˜The call-girls are getting more moth-eaten every year,’ she complained. ‘Even the younger ones look as if they had spent the night on a shelf in the public library. I