“Try an eggnog,” Shirley suggested. Edith gagged.
“Is Ma all right?” Betty asked no one in particular. “Not ill or anything?”
“Ill?” Edith queried. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. She just doesn’t seem to be quite herself.”
“I think prison gave Ma too much time for thinking,” Shirley said.
Neither Betty nor Shirley had much time for thinking. The “life of the mind” was a waste of both life and mind as far as they were concerned, despite Cambridge. Or perhaps because of it.
“What is the hour at which nightlife begins? At Buckingham Palace I am told it is nine o’clock; Maida Vale, which likes a ‘nice long evening,’ plumps for seven thirty; Mayfair (Mr. Michael Arlen will correct me if I am wrong) for half past eight; South Kensington tucks its legs under the solid mahogany a quarter of an hour earlier; and Wimbledon wants the aspidistra removed and the hire-purchase masterpiece ready for action by eight sharp.”
“Oh, do shut up, Kitty,” Betty said.
“What is that drivel?” Shirley asked.
“Vivian Quinn, in his Society Paragraphist column,” Ramsay said wearily.
“Can’t Kitty read Children of the New Forest or something?” Edith asked irritably.
Kitty daydreamed of being mentioned in the newspapers herself. The fashionable youngest daughter of wealthy West End worthy Mrs. Coker was seen last night at the Grafton Galleries…and so on. The rest of them were disdainful of the so-called journalists who wrote these social diaries. “Fleet Street hacks,” Edith said dismissively. Patrick Balfour, Horace Wyndham, Vivian Quinn, of course—they were waspish men of a certain type, acerbic and snobbish and what Nellie termed “quietly flamboyant.” “An oxymoron,” Betty said. “Exactly,” Nellie said.
Despite her own instinctive distrust for the society gossip columns, Nellie recognized the value of publicity in places like the Express or the Sketch and the Diary in the Evening Standard. Their readers loved to feast on tales of celebrities, and if those same celebrities were parading themselves in the Amethyst or one of her other clubs then so much the better. The clubs were hungry and they had to be fed. The bread and butter of the trade wasn’t the Tallulah Bankheads of this world, but the couples who came up to town on the Metropolitan line from Pinner for the evening, hoping for a bit of fun.
Since his return from Switzerland, the burden of nurturing the columnists had fallen on Ramsay’s unwilling shoulders. He was buttering a slice of toast very slowly, as if delaying the moment when he would have to bite into it. Ramsay was not feeling in great form either this morning (too much dope last night), but he wasn’t going to incite Edith’s wrath by saying as much. Edith enjoyed a fight. He sighed in a way that made her raise a threatening eyebrow at him.
“Are you ill as well?” she asked sharply, ready for a contest.
“Not at all,” he said, taking an enormous bite out of the toast to prove his health and almost choking on it. Sometimes it felt to Ramsay as if his life were just one long struggle to be real. (He was inclined to melodrama.) He must have unconsciously voiced something to that effect because Shirley startled him by saying, “Oh, sweet, darling Ramsay, of course you’re real!” (She was much the nicest of them all.) “You suffer because you’re creative. Artists have to suffer, it’s how they arrive at the truth of the thing.”
In the Alps there had been nothing to do but lie on a veranda and stare at Swiss snow that was as blank and blindingly white as new paper until he thought he was going to go mad. No one travelled to visit him, although that didn’t really surprise him. His mother could easily have taken the Orient Express to Zurich but claimed she was too busy. With each child she had produced, Nellie’s interest had waned, so that Ramsay and Kitty at the tail end were dreadfully neglected.
Ramsay had begged Nellie to send him reading material but it was Niven who obliged, sending out crates of books for him, everything from the Mabinogion to Virginia Woolf. When he returned to English shores a few months ago, Ramsay’s brain was so infected with words that he was almost overcome by the insistent need to purge them. A novel, he decided, he would write a novel! (A great one, obviously.) Unfortunately, the actual act of putting anything on paper (paper as blank and blindingly white as Swiss snow) had proved less easy than it looked.
Shirley and Betty had bought him a little Remington portable typewriter for his recent twenty-first birthday. (The machine for the man who travels—not true unless you counted Switzerland, which Ramsay didn’t.) What to write?
“Don’t they say ‘write what you know’?” Betty said. “But you don’t know anything, do you?”
“Thanks.”
If he wrote what he knew, it would be a sparse novel about a man in a Swiss sanatorium in the grip of hopelessness and existential dread. Who on earth would want to read that? Ramsay certainly wouldn’t.
“All you have to do,” Shirley advised, “is write one sentence after another and—voilà! A novel.”
It would be easier if he had a title. If he had the right title then the rest of his novel would start to flow naturally from it. Could you be a writer if you hadn’t actually written anything? An artist if you hadn’t actually produced any art?
“Of course you can,” Shirley said. “You have the soul of an artist, you don’t necessarily need to do anything.” Edith snorted contemptuously but Shirley continued blithely, “You know, how’s this for an idea, Ram? You and I could run off together—to the Riviera or Paris—and live in the traditional garret, and I’ll paint, and you’ll write the great roman du jour, you know, like The Green Hat.”
Oh, not that book again, Ramsay thought. Ramsay was sick of hearing about it. Anyone could write a provocative but ultimately quite tedious contemporary novel.
“You could!” Shirley said, without irony.
Ramsay didn’t know that Shirley painted. “I don’t,” she said airily, “but I’m sure I could.”
* * *
—
From her seat at the window, Kitty had a good view of the man who was standing in the private gardens that separated Hanover Terrace from the street. The man was staring fixedly up at the house, as if he were waiting for something to begin. He was olive-skinned with a foreign look about him. Smoking a cigarette, he had the brazen air of someone who didn’t care about whether he was seen or not. He was wearing two-tone brogues that Kitty knew were called co-respondent shoes, although she didn’t know why and no one would tell her when she asked.
Her being there didn’t put him off, in fact he seemed amused by Kitty’s presence. She raised an enquiring Coker eyebrow and he touched his hat in a small gesture of acknowledgement and ambled away. Kitty chewed thoughtfully on a piece of toast. She said nothing. The man was too interesting to share.
* * *
—
Niven came in with the post that they had all been too lazy to collect from the doormat and distributed it around the table by tossing it in the direction of its recipients. He poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it standing up, his overcoat still on, a lovely tweed ulster from Huntsman. It had a deep beaver collar that Kitty had a sudden urge to stroke; she reached out a hand to touch the fur but Niven batted her away as if she were a fly. The collar reminded her of Moppet, their cat from Great Percy Street. He had been run over by a dustcart the previous year and Kitty wished that they had had him stuffed or made into a collar. Or even mummified, like the Egyptian cat that decorated the bar of the Sphinx. She was not allowed in the Sphinx—the most rackety of the Coker clubs—but that didn’t stop her going there.
“Ma’s deserted,” Shirley told Niven, callously decapitating her second boiled egg. “Absent without leave.”
“She’ll have to go in front of the firing squad, then,” he said. “That’s the penalty.”