The theatre was closed and she eventually found her way round to the stage door in Maiden Lane. Bartholomew had been no help, he seemed to have no interest in mapping the stage doors of London.
The stage door was open, the doorman visible. “I’m looking for someone—a Freda Murgatroyd—she had an audition here,” she said. A callow youth, rather jaundiced-looking, was sent for. The callow youth gave her a pitying look. “Do you have any idea how many girls come through this door?”
And did they all also come back out of that door?, Gwendolen wondered. “No, I don’t actually,” she said.
“Hundreds, that’s how many,” he said indignantly. “And I couldn’t tell you the name of a single one of them.” Gwendolen wished she had Freda’s photograph with her; it might have helped to jog this strange boy’s memory.
“I shall ask Management,” he said grandly and disappeared for so long that Gwendolen supposed he must have forgotten, but eventually he resurfaced and said, “No, no one knows anyone by the name of Freda Murgatroyd.” He lit a cigarette, rather ostentatiously, as if proud of being a smoker. Gwendolen doubted that he was much older than Freda. “Was there something else?” he asked.
As the callow youth turned to go, Gwendolen said, “Did she get the part?” but the boy just laughed (a joke shared by the doorman, apparently) and said, “What part?”
In the face of so much intransigence, retreat seemed the only option, and Gwendolen retired to a café and ordered sardines on toast and ate them while studying her precious Bartholomew’s. She would soon be quite au fait with the streets of London, she thought with some satisfaction.
* * *
—
In Henrietta Street there was no response to Gwendolen’s polite knock, so she banged harder. The doorknocker was in the shape of a leering, devilish face, not very welcoming, Gwendolen thought. Perhaps that was the idea. From the outside, the building had an air of abandonment, but a flutter of grimy lace at an upper-floor window hinted at someone on the premises.
She knocked again loudly, but the door sullenly refused to open. There was something untoward about the place. Gwendolen was not usually given to fancy, but something about the house in Henrietta Street gave her a chill. Perhaps that inhospitable door required a policeman’s more official knock before it would open. She sighed; retreat was once more the order of the day. Being a detective was frustrating. No wonder Frobisher sighed so much.
A newsagent’s kiosk on the Strand was festooned with postcards, including a conjoined strip, advertising itself as “The Sights of London.” Gwendolen paused. Those were the same cards that Florence had sent her parents, weren’t they? She felt strangely impelled to buy a set. The postcards hanging in the kiosk were for display. When they were sold to her, they were folded up and enclosed in a greaseproof envelope. She paid and slipped them in her bag. She must spend a day sightseeing—they might come in useful. And she must send one to the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw. She could only imagine the excitement when they received it.
The Crystal Cup
You might be forgiven for thinking that the Amethyst—by far and away the most famous and lucrative of her clubs—would be the one that would be closest to Nellie’s heart, but this was not in fact the case, it was the Crystal Cup for which she had a particular affection. It was here that she was often to be found sequestered in the late afternoons, relishing the quiet before the evening’s revels began.
The club’s (mostly) exalted clientele was composed of many members of the Lords, as well as several who had taken the silk or indeed sat on the High Court bench, which might explain why it had never been raided. Its location was convenient for neither the Inns of Court nor Westminster, which, Nellie said, explained its discreet attraction for members of the Establishment, as no one expected to find them straying this far from their native habitat.
It was the most refined of all the clubs. Nellie had spent eight thousand pounds on the Ritzy blue and gold décor of the Crystal Cup—satin-quilted walls, pleated and gathered artificial silk on the ceiling and a maple herringbone parquet floor, pretty glass chandeliers, tables with pink-shaded electric lamps—it was like a little gilded chocolate box. Gunter’s in Berkeley Square did the catering. It was the only one of Nellie’s clubs where caviar was served. She charged seven shillings and sixpence a portion and barely made a profit by her standards. The head waiter was Russian and rumoured to be a minor Romanov, but Nellie had never asked because she didn’t want to be disappointed by denial.
The liquor licence was always up to date and the curfew for alcohol, although broken on a regular basis, was never investigated. The dance hostesses were of a superior calibre, nicely brought-up girls only a few shades short of debutantes. They cost two guineas a dance, twice the price of the Amethyst girls.
The restaurant of the Crystal Cup was on the ground floor, and Nellie liked to sit there and watch the last rays of the day seep through the harlequin lozenges of glass in the windows while breathing in the soothing scent of stale alcohol and cigarettes. Sometimes she took a small glass of Mariani coca wine, reckoning that if it was good enough for a pope it was good enough for her, even though she had shunned religion after an unfortunate incident in her girlhood, long before her convent education had finished.
Narcotics in themselves did not put the fear of God in Nellie. In fact, when Niven had set off for the Front in 1916, she had slipped into his kit bag a “Welcome Present for Friends” bought from Harrods that contained cocaine, morphine, syringes and needles. He had thrown it overboard on the Channel crossing, doubting that drugs would aid his survival.
Usually, however, it was a pot of tea that sat in front of Nellie on the table at the Crystal Cup. If she was still there when the dance hostesses started coming in, they would beg her to read their fortunes and she would fan her cards out on the table in front of her, offering them like promises to the girls. Or threats. Depending on how you looked at it. In Nellie’s world, everything depended on how you looked at it.
There was a flat on the floor above, fitted out with every convenience and decorated in shades of pink. No one lived there, and Nellie found it extraordinarily soothing to go upstairs and sit in its untouched atmosphere. It was perhaps the only unsullied corner of her life.
The head barman, a smooth Spaniard, assiduously polishing glasses, said, “Welcome back, Mrs. Coker.” Could he get her anything? To his surprise, Nellie said, “A whisky. A malt. A good one, mind. Neat.”
A Macallan was poured generously and served with great courtesy. She must be celebrating her release, he thought. “Is she all right?” the manager, a man named Templeton, asked. He had arrived quietly and they observed Nellie together unseen.
“She’s drinking whisky.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea.”
Templeton’s days were numbered at the Crystal Cup. Edith had told Nellie that he was suspected of having his hand in the till.
Nellie took a cautious sip from her glass. It was a long time since she had drunk whisky and she was not sure what memories would surface with the taste. Just a faint, peaty one of her wedding night, when she had been tutored in the meaning of the word “conjugation,” which previously she had thought only applied to Latin verbs.
The Crystal Cup ought to be deserted at this hour, that was its charm for Nellie, but when she glanced up she saw that there was someone sitting at one of the tables, over by the far wall.
It was Maud, of course, who else? She was dripping water onto the lovely herringbone maple of the floor. Nellie had to stop herself calling for a mop; the floor had cost a fortune.
There was a glass of absinthe in Maud’s hand and she raised it in a toast. Nellie raised her own glass in silent acknowledgement.
“She’s definitely not herself,” Templeton murmured to the barman as they watched Nellie toasting the empty air.
* * *