Florence had instructed Freda on the etiquette of fairyland, which seemed to be a very frightening place, not at all like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “You must never eat or drink in fairyland” (as if she were planning a visit), Florence admonished. “Always be polite and remember nothing is what it seems to be. They’ll serve you wine in crystal cups and peaches on golden plates, but really the wine is pond scum and the peaches are snails. And all the gold and jewels are just rocks and ashes.” Florence could wax quite lyrical when it came to fairyland.
They spent quite a lot of time speculating about what went on inside the nightclubs of Soho. Florence had her vision of fairyland to fall back on, but Freda imagined it to be more like the pictures of Mount Olympus in her Child’s Guide to the Greek Myths—people lying around on couches eating ambrosia and drinking nectar while someone played a harp.
* * *
—
Freda had to eat. To eat she needed money. But if you want to earn money, then I know a way. Do you? Want to earn money? the horrid police sergeant who had stolen her half-crown had asked. He had taken out his notebook and written something down in it, and then he had torn off the page and folded it up very small and pressed it into her hand, as if they were playing a game of Consequences. “It’s an address,” he said. “There’s people there who’ll find work for you.”
* * *
—
Freda stepped into her dancing shoes and applied lipstick, squinting at her reflection in the small, spotted mirror above the sink of the public lavatory. She sighed. She would have to do.
The warm day had cooled down rapidly now it was almost dark, but Freda decided against wearing her old coat, as it might give the wrong impression. Before folding the coat up and stuffing it into her long-suffering suitcase, she rooted in the pocket for the piece of paper the policeman had torn from his notebook. She unfolded it and read the address on it. Tisbury Court. “Number 26,” he had written in a scratchy hand, “two floors up, ask for Dame Wyburn.”
Tisbury Court was a dismal lane that ran between Wardour Street and Berwick Street, Freda had used it as a shortcut a few times. Dame?, Freda pondered. She thought of Widow Twankey and Mother Goose. It seemed unlikely that anyone like that lived there. In the Babes in the Wood she had been in, the dame—Nanny Trott—was the children’s nurse, “completely invented,” the director said, not in the original, “but you have to cram a dame in there somewhere.” She—or he, Freda was never sure how to address Nanny Trott—was played by a big, burly man who “moonlighted” from acting as a boxer.
One last check in the mirror. She screwed up the piece of paper that the policeman had given her and flushed it down the toilet. She was no longer so naive that she didn’t know what would happen to her in that house in Tisbury Court. Girls were currency in the capital and she would be bought and sold, traded again and again until she was worthless. Freda straightened her back and put up her chin. She was not that girl. She girded her loins.
Fairyland
Ramsay was following his well-worn path from the Sphinx to the Amethyst, having undergone the nightly ritual of being ministered to in the storeroom by Gerrit. He was walking slowly, holding himself carefully, in case he fell into pieces, as he ran the usual gauntlet of streetwalkers and drunks.
The streets were slipping around him, he must get a grip before he reached the Amethyst and found himself in front of the customary maternal inquisition. He was going to Quinn’s Belgravia spieler later and he would need his wits about him.
There was a breeze blowing up the river from the sea and Ramsay thought he could smell the brine coming off the Essex marshes, possibly sewage as well. He spotted a pair of streetwalkers advancing towards him like lionesses homing in on an antelope. He tried and failed to make a mental note of that image.
Neither of the women was in the first flush of youth. One had black hair that looked as if she’d coloured it with boot polish. The other was an equally unnatural redhead. “Hello, sweetheart,” the first one squawked. “What’s a nice boy like you doing out at this time of night?”
The redhead was wearing a ratty fur that had once been white but was now yellowing and mangy. She laughed and put her hand on his arm. “Would you like a nice time, pet?”
“A lovely time!” the other one cawed, grabbing his free arm. “Both of us for five bob, if you like.”
The boot-polished woman was very close to him, even in the dim streetlight he could see the grey skin beneath her eyes, her sloppy red lips moving like those of a cod, intent on ravishing him. The other one clung on tightly like a particularly determined clam until Ramsay finally managed to wrench himself away from the harpies and break free. He walked on quickly without looking back.
He had a horror of streetwalkers, they were such coarse creatures, or at any rate the London ones were. The Orient was a different matter, apparently, where it was all seductive houris and odalisques. A “brother” of Nellie’s (James) had turned up one day—a sea captain, apparently—just before they left Edinburgh for London (“I found you, then, Ellen”) and spent an evening regaling Ramsay with dissolute tales of his time in Shanghai, while Nellie was occupied with the girls’ bedtime.
She had returned from upstairs when he was in full flow, explaining in considerable detail the acrobatic skills of Chinese “ladies of the night.” Nellie had thrown him out and told him not to come back.
“Well, someone has to teach him what it is to be a man,” he groused, as he made his way out of the front door.
“I can teach him that,” Nellie said.
“Well, then you’re not doing a very good job,” he muttered.
They never saw him again. Edith said he wasn’t really their uncle.
* * *
—
“Hello?”
Oh, God, not another one. You couldn’t stand still for five minutes without one of them propositioning you. This one was young and wearing the oddest get-up, a gauzy green dress covered in spangles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a circus. A green fairy, he thought. La fée verte. It reminded him how much he liked absinthe. How much he wanted some now.
“Give us one, will you?” the green fairy asked, striking a very artificial pose and indicating the cigarette case in his hand. She was too young to be so world-weary, Ramsay thought. He suspected she was acting. She had a suitcase with her. Was she just off the train and already plying her trade?
“Please,” he said.
“Give us one, please.”
He offered a cigarette reluctantly and then lit it for her. She choked immediately.
“Turkish tobacco,” Ramsay said. “Highly unsuitable for juveniles. You have to work your way up to them from something milder.”
She took another, less ambitious drag and, stifling a cough, said, “I am not a juvenile.” Holding out a hand towards him, she said, “Fay le Mont, how d’you do? It’s my stage name,” she added defensively when she saw his sceptical expression.
Ramsay returned her handshake rather warily and said, “Ramsay Coker. Not a stage name,” he added.
“Are you one of the Cokers?” she asked eagerly.
“Well…” he demurred. Must he always be tarred with notoriety? Never to have his own identity? But—a stage name! Why hadn’t he thought of that? Not a stage name, a nom de plume. An identity far removed from his mother’s business. The name Coker implied infamy, he would never be able to shake it off and acquire respect in the world of literature. What should he choose? Something manly, like John Buchan. Something more enigmatic. Ricard de Saint Pierre, Jean DeFlamme. That had been the name of his French teacher at school. They had—
“Still here,” the green fairy said, grinding out her barely smoked cigarette beneath the heel of one of her silver dance shoes. They looked identical to the one he had found in the storeroom of the Sphinx.
Ramsay sighed. “What do you want?”
“A job.”
“A job?”
“Yes, a job. Dancing. In there,” she said, indicating the Amethyst. “Please.”
Nellie would never take her on. She was waif-thin, a half-starved stray. “When did you last eat?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he sighed again and, stubbing out his own cigarette, said, “Follow me.”
* * *