—
When the band started to trickle in and unpack their instruments and the dance hostesses began to primp themselves in the cloakroom, Nellie heaved herself up from her table and signalled for her coat. Templeton rushed to comply.
“Welcome back, Mrs. Coker,” he said as he helped her on with her matinée coat. Jail, he noticed, seemed to have shrunk her.
He noticed, too, that she had acquired a cane, topped with the handsome head of a silver fox. It didn’t seem to indicate weakness, as rather than using it as a support she wielded it like a drum major’s mace. He half expected to be whacked on the head with it.
“On to the Amethyst now?” he asked, more for the sake of conversation than curiosity.
“Where else?” Nellie said. It seemed like a genuine question. The manager had no idea how to answer.
* * *
—
The Amethyst was still quiet when Nellie’s Bentley drew up outside. Hawker helped her out. That new cane, he thought, was more like a theatrical prop.
Rather than entering the Amethyst straight away, Nellie took a little promenade along the street, an animal reclaiming her territory. The club was surrounded by a variety of establishments—restaurants, cafés and all manner of shops, from a ship’s chandler to a knife supplier, a barber, a cobbler, a tea importer, and so on. Several of these proprietors came out to greet her. She was a character. She gave the street notoriety. They appreciated that.
Nellie paused for a moment outside the Amethyst. It was disguised by soot-encrusted brickwork and peeling paintwork. The windows on the ground floor were blacked out and the fa?ade gave no clue as to the vastness inside. The building had once housed a Huguenot family, not the silk workers who settled in Spitalfields, but the precious-metal-workers who had made Soho their refuge. Their workshop had been on the upper floor, where there was the most light, and when magpie Nellie first moved in she had spotted a tiny nugget of gold, wedged between two of the broad oak floorboards. It had seemed like a good omen. A promise of greater treasure. Nellie kept it in a silk drawstring bag, where it nestled alongside other charms acquired over the years—the tooth of a Scottish wildcat, a piece of rock crystal, a hare’s foot and a lock of hair cut from the corpse of a hanged man, although she would be the first to acknowledge that there was no proof he had been hanged, let alone that he was dead, when the hair was removed from his head. If Nellie had a soul—and there was no verdict as yet—then it was a pagan one.
The bag was kept beneath the mattress of the small brass bed in her bedroom in Hanover Terrace. She had felt the lack of it in Holloway. When she had looked for it on her first night back in her own bed, she was disturbed to find that the bag was no longer there.
* * *
—
To gain entrance to the Amethyst you first had to negotiate the twin granite obelisks that were the doormen, a couple of former bare-knuckle street fighters who were proud to be Nellie’s guard dogs.
“Boys,” she said, acknowledging them with a nod of her head.
They barely moved their impassive features to greet her, although they were stirred by a sense of companionship. They had both been to prison on many occasions. Nellie was one of them now.
At the bottom of the stairs, Linwood greeted Nellie fawningly. “Mrs. Coker,” he said, “good to see you.” Nellie unnerved him with her gaze. Linwood had not been one of those who had stayed behind in the club yesterday morning to welcome Nellie. His absenteeism had been noted by Edith and Nellie in a mute exchange of bobbing eyebrows. He was, unfortunately, the keeper of several secrets, both Nellie’s and those of the guests of the club. It made him safe. For now, at any rate. He registered her cane. It seemed to threaten.
He drew back the black bombazine and bowed as if before minor royalty.
“Welcome home, Mrs. Coker.”
For it is my home, Nellie thought, forgiving Linwood his obsequiousness. The house in Hanover Terrace was where she lived, but the Amethyst was where she existed in all her glory.
“After you,” she said generously to Maud. “Try not to drip everywhere.”
The Spoils of Egypt
It was a pleasant evening, if rather chill, and the dying minutes of the spring sunset kissed the Portland stone of the capital’s buildings. Or perhaps “caressed”? Ramsay dismissed this as too romantic, along with “kissed.” “Gleamed”? No, pots and pans gleamed—in good households, anyway. By the time he had reached a word that satisfied (“brushed”), the sun had long since gone to bed. He was perfectly capable of writing in his head, just not on paper, it seemed. He should carry a notebook with him to capture these moments. (Why didn’t he?) He should put the image in his novel.
Ramsay liked to think of himself as a flaneur. Like Baudelaire. He could perhaps become a poète maudit, drowning in decadence and absinthe. He didn’t want to write the actual poetry, though. There was no money in poetry, it was the waste land of literature. Yes, he had read The Waste Land and didn’t see what the fuss was about. He considered it to be pretentious stuff, just a ragbag of quotes and fragments of history, really.
Two women passed him, giggling and clutching onto each other as if everything were a great joke. They were dressed in varying shades of green from top to toe, including the obligatory green hats. Everything was green. Why was it so popular? Surely nothing to do with Michael Arlen’s dratted Green Hat? Perhaps it was absinthe, Ramsay loved absinthe. La fée verte. The green fairy. Or was it the colour of hope? The healing grass growing back over the mud and the dead in Flanders Fields. It was a good image. The Healing Grass. That would have made a good title if he hadn’t already found one. Didn’t sound like the title of a crime novel though, too Zola-esque. He had struggled reluctantly through Zola in translation in the Swiss sanatorium.
In Soho Square a small group of men—working men, Ramsay thought, excited by the idea—were holding some kind of demonstration. There was much talk in the air of a General Strike, and Ramsay amused himself with notions of manning the barricades in Oxford Street. He still harboured fond memories of the Bolshevists in Great Percy Street. Perhaps his next novel ought to be about working men.
The ones ahead of him seemed rough and sounded northern, and occasionally the ragged chorus shouted their familiar cry—“Not a minute off the day, not a penny off the pay!” Miners! Ramsay thought. But what were miners doing in Soho? Not much point in trying to make their case here, why weren’t they protesting in Westminster? Were they in need of direction? Perhaps if he talked to them they could provide authentic detail for his working-class novel. Men of Coal—he rather liked that title. It sounded noble.
Ramsay approached the men, open-faced and open-handed but unsure how to address them. (Men? Comrades?) Before he could choose, one of them turned a weary, grimy face to him and said, “Why don’t you fuck off, you fucking posh fucker.”
Ramsay slunk away, his tail between his legs. So much for the working man.
* * *