—
He reached the Sphinx still licking his wounds. Inside, a large plaster of Paris reproduction of the mask of Tutankhamun greeted him above an inner entrance. Were they inviting the curse by having it hanging there? He passed uneasily beneath the boy king’s sightless gaze and entered the long, narrow corridor that sloped down to the basement. Nellie had consulted an Egyptologist from the Ashmolean (her reach was far and spidery) and the corridor was meant to reproduce the tunnelled entry to a pharaonic tomb, although Ramsay thought it was more like entering a drift mine. Not that he had entered either a pyramid or a mine, but he had read about both. Ramsay was not comfortable with the Egyptian dead; when younger he had visited the British Museum and its gallery full of mummies. For weeks afterwards he had suffered a nightmare that he was locked in that room at night and the mummies had come back to life. Surely the dead should be buried, not put on display?
He always experienced a chill in this corridor in the Sphinx, as if he were walking to his own embalmed afterlife, and he was relieved when he finally reached the end and the (relative) safety of the glimmering interior of the club. Nothing was entirely safe, of course, certainly not in the Sphinx.
Each of the Cokers, apart from Niven, was nominally in charge of one of Nellie’s nightclubs, and Ramsay, on his return from abroad, had been afforded the Sphinx, the most questionable of them all. Nellie said it would be the making of him, but Ramsay thought it might prove to be the unmaking.
As its name suggested, the Sphinx had been inspired by the Egyptomania that descended on London after Carter and Carnarvon’s discoveries on the Nile four years previously and it was tricked out with the mock spoils of Egypt—wall paintings, hieroglyphs, oriental lamps and so on—as well as quite a few genuine artefacts that Niven had procured for Nellie from someone he knew who had been in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and had managed to bring home several trunks’ worth of looted goods.
Nellie had entertained a fancy for a sarcophagus for the Sphinx, preferably with its occupant still inside—Dalton, who ran the Morgue Club in Ham Yard, had coffins for tables—but she had been dissuaded from the macabre, mainly because there was a dearth of such novelties and even Niven was unable to source an ancient Egyptian mummy in the West End. Shame, Nellie said. She knew that the denizens of the Sphinx would have been unfazed (if not delighted) by drinking their Rum Daisies and Queens of the Night in the company of the dead. It was that kind of crowd.
The best that could be managed was a mummified cat, bought for a shilling in the Museum Tavern opposite the British Museum from a man who was a janitor there and who said that in the basement there was a storeroom that was “full of the bloody things.” Another nightmare image to keep Ramsay awake at night.
* * *
—
Ramsay was early, only Gerrit, the head barman, was there. The Sphinx’s manager, an unnecessarily argumentative Glaswegian, wasn’t due for another half an hour, followed in short order by the rest of the staff.
Gerrit was a pugilistic Dutchman who was made to wear a fez by Nellie when working behind the bar, an item that looked comical on top of his large, bland features, although Ramsay would never have voiced this observation as he was nervous of Gerrit. He was a big man with sailor’s tattoos on his arms—he had once been a merchant seaman but now claimed to be an artist, only bending his knee to capitalism (by which he appeared to mean Nellie) in order to subsist. He seemed an odd choice on Nellie’s part, although the Sphinx was the most disorderly of her clubs. Nonetheless, Ramsay wondered why she hadn’t employed someone who looked a little more Byzantine, if not, indeed, an actual Egyptian. Every nationality beneath the sun was available to his mother from the buffet that was London.
Gerrit was behind the bar, sans fez, polishing the countertop—copper with little lapis lazuli lozenge inserts that would have satisfied even Cleopatra’s pampered taste. She might not have been so pleased by the cat mummy, which had begun to develop some kind of mould. It had painted-on eyes that seemed to stare at you wherever you were in the room.
“For atmosphere,” Gerrit said when he caught sight of Ramsay’s nostrils twitching at the sickly odour in the club. “Your mother,” he added, by way of further explanation. Ramsay vaguely remembered a conversation when Nellie had voiced a desire for the “scents of the Alhambra” in the club, whatever that meant. The Alhambra was quite different to ancient Egypt, he had pointed out, but Nellie said that anything east of Dover counted as foreign to most people. “We must pander to their ignorance,” she said.
The incense was making the Sphinx smell like…
“A whore’s boudoir?” Gerrit offered.
“I wouldn’t know,” Ramsay said primly.
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” Gerrit said. He always seemed to be leering at Ramsay, but perhaps it was just his accent or the arrangement of features on his big pale face.
Gerrit was a communist, muzzled at work by Nellie, who did not allow politics, particularly Russian politics, in the club, not wanting a red flag raised over grenadine and gin, although the fast crowd that generally populated the Sphinx, despite their Russian cocktail cigarettes, had an eye-rolling antipathy to politics.
Women were drawn to Gerrit, as they seemed always to be drawn to brutes. Gerrit, Ramsay noticed, did not reciprocate. Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn’t really a woman, she was an element, like iron. Or metonymic—as the King was to the Crown, so Nellie was to the Coker empire.
To Ramsay’s ears, Gerrit’s throaty accent made him sound as if he were speaking through a mouthful of sponge. It made “fucking” sound like even more of a debased activity than it was.
“Can I do something for you, Ramsay?” Gerrit asked, looking at him through heavy-lidded eyes. He always called him Ramsay, not Mr. Coker. Ramsay suspected that it marked him as a boy rather than a man, in Gerrit’s opinion.
Ramsay didn’t reply, but Gerrit moved from behind the bar, a languorous movement for such a big man, and made his way to the back of the club, where a red velvet curtain screened an alcoved doorway. A little sign said “Private” and Gerrit pushed his way through the curtain’s heavy folds. He didn’t need to glance behind him to know that a lamb-like Ramsay was following his big rolling buttocks.
Those patrons of the Sphinx enticed to peer behind the red velvet curtain beyond which Gerrit and Ramsay had disappeared might have imagined that an alluring domain—a harem or, indeed, the inner chamber of a pyramid—was to be found there. And indeed the antechambers in Tutankhamun’s tomb, with their haphazard piling of grave goods—Ramsay had seen the photographs—were not dissimilar to the back room of the Sphinx, except in the Sphinx the jumble was not composed of gilded couches and fans and the decayed remnants of royal chariots, but rather wooden beer crates and packing cases and the cleaning paraphernalia of mops, buckets, soaps and detergents, as well as their stock of tea and sugar for the staff. Food was not provided for the clientele—they consumed such vast amounts of alcohol and dope that they had no interest in eating.