—
Lottie had fallen asleep in her chair, her chest rising and falling gently with each breath. Beside her, the lid of her sewing table was open. Inside, nestling amongst the skeins of vibrant wool needed for the parrots, was a needle and an empty syringe. She had started again, then. Frobisher felt dulled by the inevitability of it all. Who was supplying her with the morphine? As far as he knew she barely left the house, apart from visiting the small parade of shops two streets away. Even then it was Frobisher who picked up most of the groceries.
He removed the needle and syringe, closed the lid of the sewing table and fetched a blanket to cover her with. It seemed she was determined on disintegration. He noticed that the tulips he had bought had already wilted—their soft stems had flopped over and their petals now gaped open voraciously. Served him right, he supposed, for buying them cheaply.
Carpe Noctem
“Everything all right at the Foxhole?” Nellie asked Betty when she and Shirley arrived at the Amethyst.
“Yes, Ma,” Betty said. “Everything’s fine.”
“And the Pixie?” Nellie said, turning her attention to Shirley. “No more fires?”
“No, Ma.”
“Who’s in tonight?” Betty asked. It was a routine query rather than an interest in celebrity.
“Mixed bag,” Nellie said. “Tallulah Bankhead, Frazzini, the King of Denmark.”
The King of Denmark? Shirley’s curiosity was piqued, she never gave much thought to Denmark as a country or a king.
“He seems all right,” Nellie said, rather grudgingly. She had once had an encounter in her youth with Edward, the previous king, when he was still Prince of Wales. She refused to talk about it, but take a good look at Niven’s nose, she once said when the New Year champagne had got the better of her.
“Give Mr. Frazzini a box of chocolates, will you?” Nellie said to Betty.
Nellie sold the boxes for fifteen shillings each but bought them wholesale from somewhere in the north for a shilling a box, all prettied up with ribbons (a penny each) by soldiers disabled in the war. The dance hostesses made a great fuss of persuading their partners to buy the boxes for them and then, after a few chocolates had been eaten, the boxes made their way back to the storeroom they’d come from and were refilled, ribbons adjusted, and sent out to be sold again.
“You’ll have to dance with the customers tonight,” Nellie said to them. “We’re a couple of girls down.”
“Which girls?” Shirley asked. The “girls” was a collective noun to Nellie, she never seemed to know their names. It hardly mattered to her—one girl was easily replaced by another.
“Off you go now,” Nellie said. “Don’t dawdle.”
* * *
—
The flock of Cokers was gathering. Hard on her sisters’ heels came Edith, considerably less lively. “You’ve put on weight,” Nellie said without looking up from her ledgers.
“Good evening to you too, Mother.”
Nellie lifted her head from her bookkeeping and gave Edith a long look. “You should do something about that,” she said.
“Kettle and pot,” Edith replied.
* * *
—
“Is it going to rain?” Nellie asked Ramsay when he rolled up.
“I don’t think so.” Ramsay rarely paid attention to the weather. It was just one more thing that was beyond his control. “Why?”
“The doormen say there are no carriage umbrellas, they’ve all been stolen again.”
“I don’t think it’s theft as such,” Ramsay said, “I just think people forget to return them.”
“That’s the very definition of theft. You can go to James Smith’s on Monday and order new ones.”
“A porter can do that,” Ramsay said.
“So can you.”
Ramsay sighed his acquiescence. There was no point in protesting further. Nellie might walk away from a fight, but she never lost an argument.
“Your friend’s in, by the way.”
Friend? Ramsay felt a little stab of alarm. Who was his friend?
“Now trot off downstairs and fetch me a sherry flip, will you? There’s a good boy.”
* * *
—
Ramsay watched Freddie making the sherry flip, cracking an egg into a cocktail shaker before adding sherry and sugar to it. It made him feel even more nauseated. A rather wilted-looking Edith appeared at his elbow and said, “The Swedish Match King’s in.”
“Kreuger? Ma never said. Are you feeling better?”
“Not really.”
“You do look awful,” Ramsay commiserated.
“Thanks, that makes me feel so much better. Your friend’s in. He was asking for you.”
Ramsay looked in the direction that Edith had indicated and spotted Vivian Quinn, sitting at a table with Michael Arlen and Tallulah Bankhead. Quinn was peacocking in this company, throwing his head back and laughing at everything that was being said, drawing attention to himself, of course. Bankhead—very dissolute, apparently—was in the play of Arlen’s dratted book at the Adelphi. Naturally there was a play. There was even talk of a film—with Greta Garbo! Bankhead and Arlen were being orbited by the smart West Kensington set that comprised Arlen’s acolytes. How Quinn must love being at that table, inside that charmed circle.
“Oh, when I was in Paris, of course,” he heard Quinn say, in that brash, loud way he had. He was always going on about Paris, but he’d only stayed there for two weeks last year on a trip round Europe. That didn’t stop him talking about the Café de Flore and Shakespeare and Co. or name-dropping “Zelda and Scott,” “Ernest,” Pound and James Joyce. He was so pretentious he set Ramsay’s teeth on edge. Distaste jostled with envy in Ramsay’s breast. The green of envy triumphed. He consoled himself with an olive from a dish on the bar. He caught Quinn glancing in his direction and he moved swiftly behind the parapet of the bar and ducked down.
“Everything all right down there in the trenches, Mr. Coker?” Freddie asked.
“Yes, perfectly all right, thank you, Freddie. It’s rather hot in the room and it’s nice and cool down here.”
“On the floor?”
“Yes, on the floor, Freddie.”
“Shall I tell you when the coast’s clear, Mr. Coker? When your friend’s gone.”
“He’s not my friend,” Ramsay said.
“Okey-dokey, Mr. Coker, whatever you say,” Freddie said agreeably. “If you make a dash for it now you should be all right.”
“Thank you, Freddie.”
“Mr. Coker!”
“What, Freddie?”
“Don’t forget Mrs. Coker’s sherry flip.”
* * *
—
“I’m going out to get some fresh air,” Ramsay said to Nellie.
“You’ve just had fresh air.”
“It isn’t rationed, Ma.”
“Should be,” Nellie said.
Ramsay walked round to the alley at the back of the Amethyst. The club had a secret exit here, “the escape hatch,” Nellie called it, where those members of the Establishment who were particularly favoured by Nellie could make a hasty exit in the case of a police raid.