‘What are things coming to?’ Sadie was highly indignant and bristling like a porcupine. ‘I’d like to take their silver-topped canes and stick them where the sun don’t shine; that’d take the smiles off their silly faces and make their eyes pop, sure enough.’
Sophy had to smile. But the incident had shaken her. The more so now she had time to think about what the man had said. That Toby had been saying such things about her, hurt her to the quick – but perhaps she should have expected it.
She instructed the cab driver to take her straight to the theatre before he drove Sadie home, and as she was a little late she didn’t have time to dwell on the episode before the afternoon performance. In the interval before the evening show, several members of the cast, including Sophy, had a light meal brought in from a nearby restaurant, and the usual jocularity and clowning around from one or two of the younger members of the cast banished the last of her distress. If nothing else the incident had shown her she was right to distance herself from Toby, she told herself when she was back in her dressing room getting ready for the next performance. Not that she had doubted it. Yet, she asked herself, how could she have been so mistaken about the man with whom she had thought she would share the rest of her life? When she looked back over those first two or three years of their marriage, she could see a hundred different times when she should have realised what he was really like, but loving him as she had, she’d made countless excuses for him. Perhaps she herself had contributed to his decline into the habit which had mastered him body and soul? If she had challenged him earlier, forced him to get help, maybe he could have risen above his addiction? She had tried, heaven knows she had, but perhaps not hard enough . . .
The five-minute curtain call came and she mentally shook herself. Toby had made his decisions and nothing she had done or said could have persuaded him otherwise. She had loved him, she had genuinely adored him, but love hadn’t been enough.
No more heart-searching. She had to look forward now. But even as she thought it, she dreaded the fight which would undoubtedly ensue in the next months and years before she could gain her freedom.
Chapter 19
The day had started dismally for Toby, like the ones before it since he had left the comfort of the house overlooking Berkeley Square. He didn’t remember coming back to his room at the club but when he awoke, fully clothed and lying on top of the covers, he could smell the vomit splattered on the floor at the side of the bed.
Dragging himself into a sitting position with his back resting against the iron bedhead, he lit his first cigarette of the day and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Then he reached for the whisky bottle and glass on the bedside cabinet. He poured himself a good measure and drank it straight down, and after a minute or two his hands stopped shaking. Shutting his eyes, he finished the cigarette and lit another with the stub, and had another glass of whisky but he sipped this one, making it last. The bottle was almost empty.
The angle of the shafts of sunlight slanting in through the high window told him it must be late morning, and when he glanced at his watch he saw it was, in fact, two in the afternoon. He finished the last of the whisky in the bottle and sat for some time thinking of nothing in particular, his mind in the empty vacuum it retreated into these days.
After a while he stirred himself. There was a small washstand holding a bowl and a jug of cold water in the room, but the bathroom was at the end of the corridor and shared by anyone staying at the club. There were ten guest rooms in all, but only half of these were normally occupied at any one time.
He swung his legs out of bed on the side opposite to the mess. He’d have to clear it up before he went out. A housemaid came in every day to clean and straighten the rooms, but he had been warned by the manager of the establishment that if she reported finding puddles of vomit one more time he would be asked to leave the premises. Silly little scut. He straightened his aching back and glared around the room. It was her job to clean up after paying guests like himself, wasn’t it? To hell with her. To hell with all women.
He left the club at four o’clock and made straight for the barbers where he had a shave and a spruce-up. From there he made his way to a fashionable little café favoured by the young blades and those such as he, a place where gossip and character assassination was the order of the day. Ordering his first bottle of wine, he sat and drank it at one of the tables outside, half-asleep in the sunshine. He was about to call for a second bottle when he was clapped on the back by one of a group of young men who joined him, pulling up chairs and sitting down as they shouted to the proprietor to bring more bottles and glasses.