Shirley was currently often in the company of the second son of a duke, a young man called Rollo, whom Nellie had been assiduously courting on her daughter’s behalf. To no avail. Shirley said she was fond of Rollo but had met more manly men in the chorus at the Palace. She was resistant to her mother’s matrimonial ambitions. She wanted to “be someone.” (“But you’re someone already,” Nellie said.)
Betty’s current admirer, he of the silver penknife, was not in Debrett’s. He was a Canadian railroad millionaire, which gave him a certain credibility in Nellie’s eyes. But perhaps not quite enough. To Nellie, money without a title was almost as bad as a title without money. The war had, disappointingly for Nellie, cut the bloodlines of the aristocracy. Their sons, sacrificed to the greater good, were no longer available to marry Shirley and Betty, and their wealth had been swallowed by the upkeep on their houses.
* * *
—
The Foxhole in Wardour Street was Betty’s favourite club. It was a jazzy place with an American bar and a Jamaican band and a glass floor, beneath which there were lights that changed colour all the time. The place got frantic after midnight. It drew its clientele from a mixture of bohemian men and women of the demi-monde and people of every colour and creed in a friendly stew, like Babel before the tower. Chorus boys, still in full stage make-up, often came straight from their encores and poured Brandy Fancies down their throats as if they were dying of thirst.
Betty was popular with this crowd. On some nights she could spend every minute from opening to closing on the kaleidoscopic dance floor. Both Betty and Shirley were excellent dancers, almost professionally spry, unlike Edith, who had two left feet. (“Even possibly three,” Betty said.) They had talked about setting up a dance academy within one of the clubs, where members would pay extra to learn the latest dances or polish up the old ones. Nellie was ruminating on the idea. They doubted she would ever digest it.
Nellie tended to stay away from the Foxhole. It made her feel old. She felt more comfortable paying an occasional visit to the Pixie, just around the corner from the Foxhole. The Pixie was a little bijou affair with aspirations to sophistication. Dancing was the most important thing, the hostesses were all enlisted from the better dance schools, some even from the stage, and there was an entirely female band, as well as a female manager who wore masculine evening dress, tailored to her splendid figure. Men were not unwelcome, but women often partnered each other—something that was not unusual in the wider world either, as the war had taken so many men from the dance floor and never returned them.
There were clubs, Betty and Shirley knew, perhaps more secretive, where women went purposely for this kind of thing (they had no objection—women should stick together in their opinion), but the Pixie attracted a more decorous crowd—rather stiff quicksteps and lots of amused apologizing when the dancers grew confused over who was the man and who was the woman.
There was a cold snacks counter that was very popular—two shillings and sixpence for a sandwich, butter not margarine. The sandwiches were made in the back all night long by a woman called Bertha who was deaf and dumb, and who always had a tea towel draped somewhere about her person, even when she went home.
Shirley had a talent for charades that came in handy with Bertha. Shirley had always hankered for the stage. Nellie was baffled. “You don’t need to go on the stage to act,” she told her. “Life is just one long play.” Comedy or tragedy, it depended how you looked at it, didn’t it? Shirley plumped for nuance. She would learn, Nellie said darkly.
It was their job to establish that all was as it should be every evening, that everyone was in place, that there was a sufficient float in the coffers, and then all they had to do was to wind the clubs up and let them go. Like automata.
Not tonight. There was the most tremendous fuss happening at the Pixie when Betty and Shirley arrived. Most of the guests were standing on the pavement outside, as if they were a promenading audience. A wispy column of smoke was rising into the sky from somewhere at the back of the club and indeed a fire engine arrived at the same time, noisily clanging its way from the station on Shaftesbury Avenue, a late entrant on the stage.
The curtain was soon brought down on the drama with only slight casualties being sustained—a corner of the kitchen out of action and Bertha, too, who had burnt her hand when she had thrown the contents of a large container of baking soda onto the flames.
“Sensible woman,” a fireman said admiringly to Shirley. “Water would have set it right off.” The fireman seemed to be the senior officer in charge and Shirley was hanging on his every word, as well as clinging to his steadying elbow, claiming she was unstable from shock. Shirley had been too young during the war to value the aesthetic of a man in uniform. She was old enough now.
Bertha was sitting on the pavement being treated by a nurse from St. Thomas’s who was one of the Pixie’s regulars. Had Bertha caused the fire? Perhaps one of her tea towels had flapped carelessly and caught on the gas burners of the stove? Bertha dumbly but vigorously denied this possibility.
It took a lengthy pantomime between Bertha and Shirley to acquire the details of what had happened. The back door had been opened by an unseen hand when Bertha was in the middle of smashing up boiled eggs with salad cream for the sandwiches (it was a detailed account). Obviously she had been unable to hear the door, but she had been alerted to danger by the egregious scent of paraffin. She had an excellent sense of smell. “One sense will compensate for the loss of another,” Shirley explained to her fireman, who had already grown tired of the histrionic air around the Pixie. Some idiot had started a fire, his men had made sure it was out. That was all he needed to know. He prised Shirley off his elbow.
Bertha persisted, however, with her drama, through the medium of Shirley. She had turned around, she said, and had seen a flaming rag being tossed towards the gas burners and had, by instinct more than design, helped to douse the fire by flinging the bicarb on it. And no, she had not seen the face of whoever had thrown the rag.
“Arson?” the fireman said, his interest revived slightly. “You’d better get in touch with the police.”
They would, Betty and Shirley promised in unison. They wouldn’t. There was more chance of Tutankhamun being resuscitated than there was of Nellie wanting the police involved.
“She’ll hold us responsible,” Betty said to Shirley as the clearing-up started.
“I know, but we had nothing to do with it.”
“Doesn’t mean she won’t hold us responsible.”
The fire engine departed, the guests went back inside, undaunted by the soot and the smell of charring. Bertha was sent home with five pounds from the till by Shirley. In her absence, several guests volunteered to continue making the sandwiches. It never ceased to surprise the Cokers how willing nightclub patrons were to pitch in behind the scenes. For the novelty of it, rather than altruism. They loved a disaster.
* * *
—
“Everything all right?” Nellie asked when Shirley and Betty arrived at the Amethyst. She was referring to the Pixie and the Foxhole, not their state of health or heart or mind. Those things were rarely enquired after by Nellie. She had a little glass dish of cream toffees in front of her and chewed one thoughtfully while scrutinizing her daughters. Nellie had a way of making you feel as though you were lying, even when you were telling the truth.
“A small fire in the kitchen at the Pixie,” Betty said stoutly, resilient in the face of the nightly maternal audit.
“Extinguished straight away,” Shirley added hastily. “Although…”
“Although?”
“It seems it was started deliberately.”
“Well, well,” Nellie said and popped another toffee in her mouth. “Give me the details.”
* * *