For Mirth Only

The Doctor Is Sick

Excerpted from The Doctor Is Sick, a novel by my favorite writer:

A medusa, her long coat as shabby and dusty-black as the dog’s, came up to Edwin and asked him to dance.  ‘I shouldn’t really,’ said Edwin.  ‘I should be in hospital really.’  But he was borne off, too much the gentleman, into the jigging crowd.  He looked for Sheila, but he had become separated from her by two new drink-buyers - thin young Guardsmen, blind behind their peaks.  Frantic shoving dancing went on before the golden calf of the juke-box - a man who had taken his teeth out for fun; a woman whose breasts bounced lazily up and down, out of time with the music; a Mediterranean man shaven to the matt blue; a coach-driver in his cap; a genteel woman in a raincoat, tremulous with gin; two flat-chested girls who danced woodenly together, talking German; a middle-aged blonde with a bull-dog’s face - all seemed somehow mixed in one moving mush, like pease pudding.  Edwin and his partner were added to the boil, and the partner, her snake-hairs waving, was vigorous.  Edwin soon found that one of his bedroom slippers had been kicked off.  He danced as though guying a bent-backed old man, looking under feet, under the juke-box, into corners.  It was not to be seen.  He lost the other one and then, still dancing, felt spilt beer soaking his socks.  When the music ended everybody helped.
‘What’s he lost?’
‘It sounded like slippers, but I don’t see how it can be that.’

The genteel woman in the raincoat said carefully to Edwin: ‘I can see that you’re artistic, just the same as I am.  I modelled for the best painters, the very best.  John, Sickert, that other man.  There’s one of me in the Tate, you must have seen it.’
‘It’s my slippers,’ said Edwin, kneeling down, looking between the legs of the seated.  ‘There’s one there,’ he said, crawling on his knees towards the two German girls, one of whom was in the other’s lap.
‘Edwin,’ said Sheila, ‘whatever are you doing?’
‘It’s my slippers.’
‘You shouldn’t have come out, you know you shouldn’t.  I’m going to call a cab and take you straight back there.’
The loss of his slippers, the fact that he had been dancing in his socks had suddenly, for some reason, endeared Edwin to the man who had taken out his dentures.  ‘Drink this, major,’ he said gummily.  ‘Take it in your right and and repeat after me.’  He wore a good suit but no collar or tie.  Edwin, flustered, found himself holding a glass of Scotch.  ‘You’re a man as likes a lark, same as it might be myself.  I could see that soon as you come in.’ The club customers seemed quick at finding affinities.
‘I’m going to take you back,’ said Sheila, ‘as soon as I’ve finished this drink.  Dancing in your stocking-feet indeed.  You want your head seeing to.’  The shocking aptness of this struck her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, you know I didn’t, and she hooked her hand on to his arm.