The Nightingales raised their instruments and began assiduously to scrape and tootle at ‘In a Monastery Garden’, which caused Jack to guffaw loudly. Then the drapes parted again and out into the circle of light danced a statuesque blonde girl, wound with flowing translucent scarves. By her height and the breadth of her shoulders, Collis guessed she was probably Swedish or Finnish. Her hair was cropped into close curls, and she had the kind of clear-eyed, straight-nosed face that he remembered from illustrations to stories of the Norse gods.

She danced and twirled around the room, pirouetting from box to box, and curtsying coquettishly in front of each. Collis raised his hands and applauded her as she came past his box, and she lowered her shiny green-painted eyelids and ran the tip of her tongue across her bared teeth.

‘She likes you, damn it!’ Nathan Hackett laughed. ‘I swear to God she likes you!’

The blonde girl, having completed her provocative tour of the boxes, arranged herself on the red daybed. Now the three-piece orchestra clumsily changed its tune, this time to some pastiche of an oriental melody, complete with tinkling finger cymbals from the flautist. Out of the drapes, to rough shouts of pleasure and amazement, emerged a Negro girl, as tall as the blonde, wearing nothing but a triangular loincloth of gold coins linked together. Her skin was densely black, as blue-black as writing ink, and her hair had been wound into curling snakes and wrapped with gold leaf. She was slant-eyed and big-lipped and mesmerisingly sensual, and Collis found it was impossible to take his eyes away from her. She swayed past them, snarling at them with her wide white teeth and leaving behind her a musky, arousing perfume.

‘Now for the Mighty Marmaduke,’ said Nathan. ‘I bet you he can’t manage both ladies in the next fifteen minutes.’

‘Five dollars?’ asked Collis.

They shook hands.

The cellist drew her bow across her instrument in a deafening discord. Then the curtains were thrown aside and out stalked a muscular, curly-headed man, six feet two at least, in a leopard-skin costume and black leather knee boots. His face was rugged as a cliff, with a huge shaggy moustache, but it was the prominent bulge in his costume that drew most attention. He could have been an out-of-work actor, or an Irish road-digger, or anything at all, but he walked around the room with an air of arrogance and brutish superiority, because he knew that not one of the gentlemen who were watching him had anything to match, no matter how wealthy they were.

Collis couldn’t take his eyes away from the bright-lit circle in the centre of the room as the two girls slunk from the daybed and curled themselves around the shins of the Mighty Marmaduke. Then the blonde girl shed her scarves, one by one.