They had just endured an unusually heated midweek evening when every second person seemed fresh from a rugger match or a Varsity drinking club. A clutch of weary dance hostesses fussed around Nellie. Close up they smelt stale, a cheap infusion of face powder, perfume and sweat, but nonetheless it was a welcome, familiar scent after the noxious air of Holloway and Nellie let them embrace her before shooing them on their way to their beds. The Amethyst deflated with the dawn. It needed the night to come alive, its open maw demanding to be fed with an endless parade of people.
The chef put the burners back on in the kitchen to make breakfast for Nellie. The hens of Norfolk were kept busy supplying the Amethyst with eggs, which came up by the dozen on the milk train overnight. The chef was eager to know about the prison breakfast. “A lump of bread and margarine and a mug of cocoa,” Nellie informed him. “I’ll add a couple of sausages to your plate, I expect you need feeding up,” he said solicitously. “I expect I do,” Nellie said.
The family retired to one of the private rooms, where a waiter set a table with fresh linen and silver cutlery and Freddie opened a bottle of champagne for them. Dom Perignon for the family, a lesser brand for the club, bought for seven shillings and sixpence and sold for three guineas. Eight for a magnum. Was there a happier sound, Nellie said, than the pop of a champagne cork?
“As long as it doesn’t come out of the profits,” Edith said, in whose veins Coker blood ran in a fast and furious torrent.
* * *
—
Nellie Coker’s progeny in the order in which they entered onto the world’s stage. First of all, Niven—unsurprisingly absent from Holloway this morning—followed soon after by Edith. There had followed a hiatus while Nellie attempted to refute further motherhood and then, having failed, she produced in quick succession Betty, Shirley and Ramsay, and bringing up the rear, the runt of the litter, eleven-year-old Kitty, or le bébé as Nellie sometimes referred to her, when searching and failing to find the right name amongst so many. Nellie had received a French education, something which could be interpreted in several ways.
There was a father on Kitty’s birth certificate, although Edith said she knew for a fact that it was the name of a major who had died at the first battle of the Marne a year before Kitty was born. (“A miracle,” Nellie said, unruffled.)
The three eldest girls were the crack troops of the family. Betty and Shirley had both gone to Cambridge. “Wear their learning lightly,” Nellie said proudly to prospective suitors. (“Hardly wear it at all,” Niven said.) Sometimes, Nellie was more like a theatrical promoter than a mother.
Edith had eschewed both university and marriage in favour of a course in bookkeeping and accounting. While Nellie was hors de combat in Holloway, the Coker ship had been steered by Edith. The Amethyst had been closed down, although Edith reopened it, of course, the day after Nellie was sentenced, under another name—“the Deck of Cards”—but to everyone it was still, and always would be, the Amethyst.
Edith was Nellie’s second in command, her chef d’affaires, and made of the same stern stuff as her mother. She understood business and had the Borgia stomach necessary for it. Money was the thing. They had all known what it was like to have some and then to have none and now to have a lot, and none of them wanted to fall off the precipice into penury again. Perhaps not Ramsay, so much. He wanted to be a writer. “I despair,” Nellie said.
Ramsay, at just twenty-one, was continually beset by the feeling that he had just missed something. “As if,” he struggled to explain to Shirley, his usual confidante, “I’ve walked into a room but everyone else has just left it.” Niven had gone to war, Betty and Shirley to Cambridge, but Ramsay had been too young for the war and didn’t last more than a term at Oxford before being condemned to an Alpine sanatorium for lungs that resembled “a pair of squeezeboxes,” according to his consultant at Bart’s. It had been a relief, if he was honest. He was cowed by his fellow students. There were still men at Merton finishing degrees that had been interrupted by the war. They had been through the fire. They were older than the date on their birth certificates suggested, while Ramsay knew that he was younger.
Ramsay seemed transparent to his family; Niven, on the other hand, was an enigma to them all. He had a share in a car dealership in Piccadilly, was a partner in a wine-importing firm, raced a dog at White City, and owned a half-share in a horse that popped up occasionally at a racetrack, unfancied by everyone, before stealing first place. (“Funny that,” Nellie said.) He knew criminals, he knew dukes. (“No difference,” Nellie said.) He hardly drank at all, yet he went to a lot of parties. He had no time for people who went to parties. He had no time for people in general and didn’t suffer fools at all. He never indulged in drugs, as far as they knew, but he used to be in with all the Chinese who sold them and was known to visit Limehouse and could have been found sitting in the notorious Brilliant Chang’s restaurant in Regent Street, sharing a pot of chrysanthemum tea with him before he was deported. He would have made a good Wesleyan but he had no time for the church.
* * *
—
Nellie’s own ancestral origins were lost in the mists of time—or, in her case, Irish bog fog—but what was known—or claimed—was that her maternal grandmother had been thrown out of Ireland for vagrancy, thereby having the good fortune to miss the Great Famine and establish the beginnings of the dynasty. This woman had washed up in Glasgow, where she peddled “soft goods” from door to door before migrating eastwards and being taken up—who knew how?—by a well-off laird from the Kingdom of Fife, a second son, elevated to first by the death of his brother in mysterious circumstances. There were some ignorant rumours that he had been cursed.
There was a hasty wedding. Nellie’s grandmother was already carrying the secret of Nellie’s mother inside her, after whose birth the new laird enthusiastically set about gambling away the family money at the same time as drinking himself to death.
By the time Nellie came along there was little of the family fortune left. When she was still quite young she had been packed off to France to be educated, at a convent school in Lyons, before being “finished” (in more ways than one) in Paris. Fresh from the French capital and possibly already enceinte with Niven, she returned to Edinburgh and married a medical man from Inverness. They set up a lavish home that they couldn’t afford in Edinburgh’s New Town and Nellie discovered that her new husband was not only a drinker but a gambler to boot, and when all the money and goodwill had eventually drained away, Nellie took matters into her own hands and yanked her children into a third-class carriage at Waverley and hauled them back out at King’s Cross.
All except Niven, her eldest, who had already been conscripted into the Scots Guards in Edinburgh and was serving at the Front. Not volunteered. Niven would not have volunteered for the Army. Or, indeed, for anything. He had been conscripted into the ranks, having refused the officer’s commission for which he was eligible, thanks to his attendance at Fettes. The public schools of Great Britain had helpfully provided fodder for the notoriously short-lived junior officer ranks. Niven had harboured no wish to be preferred in this way. He would take his chances in the other ranks, he said. He did, and lived.