Roundabout

Ice- box

IN THE BIRDCAGE

`Nice,' they said. 'Good stuff, ice-cream.' Then they noted crossly that the early birds had bagged all the tables and were lunching off chicken and mousse and camembert and claret, with hardly an ice-cream in sight. There was a flutter of ex- citement when they learned they could order some decorated frozen sweetmeat to be sent to their nearest and dearest free of charge. Everyone began dispatching crinoline ladies and baskets of edible roses to a cherished tot.

`Will I be sick?' inquired one lady with in- terest, holding a large gin in one hand and a lolly in the other. The Directors thought not.

`Velvet Lady was a queer name to choose,' commented another guest. 'Sounds hairy to me, like a peach.'

As the last spoonful of grass-green cassata slipped down the greediest throat, and guests had begun surreptitiously to repair their lipstick ravages in corners, the company was scooped up and piped out again in the factory up the road. At once they were half-strangled by ammonia pressing over the face like a stifling flannel, and they reeled back against walls freshly painted in a damaging grey. Small fierce men, grumbling in unknown tongues, heaved blocks of ice about, and a polyglot in the party observed that all the fire instructions were written in Polish and Greek.

Corpulent metal churns in the next room were receiving their daily diet of milk and complaining flatulently that their tummies were not up to it. A pitiful shrieking went up as the milk had its globules of fat forcibly removed and felt itself begin to petrify into ice-cream.

'Almost puts you off ice-cream, doesn't it?' suggested someone.

The iron door of a store-room unexpectedly ground open, icicle-hung curtains parted, and a giant emerged in a wreath of ice-smoke, flashing his gold teeth in a terrible Slavonic laugh.

The muddle of tubes and tanks on the ground floor discharged a white ribbon with toothpaste neatness on the floor above. There the brusque, peremptory machines in a neurosis of hurry pushed it sadistically around qntil it was trapped in its appropriate cardboard prison. Workers looked on without taking sides. A sweetish vanilla smell smarmed the air.

In a tiled retreat away from it all six girls were aristocratically piping roses and working on special orders. 'Happy Moorings, Tim' (picture of a galleon) and 'Love to Mum and Dad on their 50th Anniversary."Now! Don't you look at our dirty postcards,' the girls said archly, in- dicating a wall patchworked with fat ladies and wind-blown skirts. But nobody did. They were all yearning to snatch up an icing bag and have a go.

Hot-house

AT 29 ENNISMORE GARDENS Herbert Machiz was throwing a party. The room hummed with the badinage, the back-biting and the bitchiness which only the theatre can provoke. Beautiful young women with bright brittle models' voices, loose flowing dresses and pointed shoes repeated spite-. ful stories. Beautiful young men with gentle modulating actors' voices, tight angular suits and pointed shoes talked about themselves.

Mr. Machiz was so excited about directing Tennessee's two plays in London. Yes, they were still running on Broadway—well, almost on Broadway—and did you know he was going back for another production in the States, so he would have three running at once, but my dear why hadn't you got a drink, you would have the cham- pagne cocktail, wonldn't you, and this was Penelope, but of course you knew Penelope, and there was dear Tilly Losch, excuse him, please.. Mr. Machiz is short, dark and thirty-five. Be- neath his domed forehead a pair of thick-rimmed glasses rests on his nose. He basks in the sun of his own achievement. He is brilliant. Everybody says so.

He was delighted with this perfectly charming flat, but you must see the rest of it. This was his bedroom, and do look at these, they were his most recent set of portrait photographs. Yes, he liked that one best, and here down the corridor was the, well, they called it the rosary, because, as you saw, the walls and ceiling were patterned with roses. Conveniently at hand was a Selected Proust.

The reporter from the Daily Sketch gossip column was grubbing round for an angle. Mr. Machiz could not relate the details of his career now, he had done so much. He had worked with Orson Welles and Louis Jouvet and Jean-Louis Barrault. Yes, he had given Julie Harris and Rod Steiger their first chances. There was a unity be- tween the two plays in the programme, more than a psychological unity. The critics hadn't noticed it. But they loved it. It was a great success. He thought it would be a success over here, too.

And the future? Well, there was a musical play and then The Garden, of Sweets, by Walde- mar Hansen, and an Auden version of a Cocteau play, and then there were so many things.

Mr. Machiz is brilliant. Everybody says so.