Oh, this place is Hell!
Yes, Hell. Grimacing faces, obscene bodies, chattering parrot and monkey voices; Hell’s musicians, with vicious tunes and features dark with unmentionable evil....
The lights were dimmed, the floor cleared. A dancing girl leapt into the middle of the space, throwing flowers. Her white ballet skirts spun mistily. The lights were extinguished altogether, and you saw that the outline of her bodice and her skirts, her shoe-buckles and the star on her forehead had been painted with luminous paint; so that now she was three stars and some circles and loops of light, wheeling fantastically in the dark.
Now was the time to slip out. Julian would not notice.
Half-way across the Place he caught her up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘There’s something I must show you. Come with me.’
He followed in silence, into the hotel, upstairs, into the sitting-room.
‘Wait there, then. I’ll come back.’