—
In the office behind Nellie’s booth Ramsay could see Kitty, sprawled on the sofa that was kept back there, leafing idly through a copy of Picture Play. Ramsay had to stifle the urge to join her, but he was under Nellie’s whip now that he’d crossed the threshold of the club.
Their mother was wearing a strange concoction of feathers and fringing. Her dressmaker took the latest fashions and translated them for Nellie’s figure. “The Queen of Puddings,” Betty said. Both Betty and Shirley had evening dresses from all the best couturiers in Paris. Edith, too, for that matter, although she never wore them in the right spirit. The dresses were “business expenses,” according to Nellie, who said the girls had to “look the part,” as if they were characters on a stage.
“You are,” Nellie said.
* * *
—
Nellie raised an eyebrow at Ramsay. “Who is this?”
“A girl,” Ramsay said.
“I can see that.”
“She wants a job as a dance hostess.”
“Does she now?”
Nellie peered at Freda over the top of her spectacles and said to Ramsay, “How old is she?”
“Don’t know.” He turned to Freda and said, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen,” he reported back to Nellie. Nellie laughed and went back to sticking bills on a spike. Freda glanced at Ramsay for clarification. He shrugged.
Eventually, Nellie looked up again and said to Freda, “What’s your name?”
“Fay. Fay le Mont.”
Nellie laughed scathingly now and said, “And I’m the Queen of the Fairies. What’s your real name, dear? Tell me the truth.”
Ramsay knew from a lifetime’s experience (literally) that it was impossible to lie to Nellie when she turned the spotlight of her attention on you, and Freda crumbled like many before her and admitted, “Freda. Freda Murgatroyd.”
“Take Miss Murgatroyd down to Betty, Ramsay. See what she makes of her.”
“Really?” Ramsay said, surprised. He had been expecting his mother to reject her. The girl would be a bagatelle down there, snapped up like one of the novelties that were sold in the club.
“Yes, really,” Nellie said. “We’re short of hostesses.”
“If you say so, Ma.”
“I do. Your friend’s in, by the way.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Welcome to fairyland,” Ramsay said, propelling the girl towards the bamboo curtain and pulling it aside.
She hesitated for a moment but then said, “Thank you,” and passed through the doorway and was swallowed by the Amethyst.
* * *
—
“Where are you going?” Nellie asked when Ramsay came back from depositing Freda in the club.
“Out,” he said.
“Out where?”
“Nowhere.”
“Nowhere?” Nellie said. “Very popular place that. You’re always going there.”
Ramsay sighed. Did he really have to answer to his mother for every movement he made? He was twenty-one, for heaven’s sake. “I’m seeing Pamela Berowne,” he lied. “I’m taking her to dinner.”
“Where?”
“Kettner’s.” He had eaten there last week and hoped he could remember the menu as Nellie would probably grill him on it later. She would make a better detective than Maddox.
“You’d better get a move on, then,” Nellie said.
* * *
—
Ramsay took a cab to Eaton Square at the appointed time. Quinn was already waiting for him on the steps outside the house, smoking furiously. “Thought you weren’t going to come,” he said.
“I’m not late,” Ramsay protested.
Quinn seemed oddly nervous as he yanked out the bell pull at the side of the front door. The brass door furniture was shined to a spotless finish, the black paint had been glossed so that it resembled a mirror. The usual impassive major-domo type answered the bell. Whether he was the butler of the house or whether he was hired for the night was hard to say. He took their names with very little in the way of greeting and then simply opened the door wider to admit them without announcing them, so they had to find their own way up the stairs to the drawing room.
The place was opulent. The rolled-up rugs were Persian this time, the lights hanging from the ceiling were lustrous chandeliers, and the “card table” was a massive rosewood dining table. There was a buffet table off to one side which was lavishly laid out with oysters, devilled eggs, caviar and salmon mousse. It was bookended by several large silver ice buckets of champagne.
Quinn remained jittery, perhaps because he didn’t seem to be acquainted with any of the men in evening dress who were congregated around the buffet. At previous spielers Ramsay had attended there had been a scattering of women present, lending a pleasing animation to the proceedings, but here the company was exclusively male. Not that they weren’t welcoming, indeed they were extremely well mannered, skilfully drawing Ramsay into a trivia of social exchanges. His champagne glass was constantly refilled by the man who might or might not have been a butler, so that by the time they actually sat down to play, Ramsay was decidedly squiffy.
A felt cloth had been thrown over the polished surface of the table and from nowhere a professional-seeming dealer appeared and took his seat. Ramsay was rather impressed. Interesting people, quite a classy crowd, in fact was how Quinn had lured him, and Ramsay was hoping that the glamour of a spieler in Belgravia would be just the ticket for a chapter in his novel. He imagined Jones, his detective, righteously raiding just such a place, being rather disapproving in his Welsh way of the affluence on display. Ramsay could almost hear the satisfying snap as the handcuffs closed on the privileged wrists.
He took his own seat and looked around for Quinn, but could see no sign of him.
“We are playing Chemin de Fer, gentlemen,” the dealer announced.
Ramsay had never played “Chemmy,” as these people referred to it, but it seemed surprisingly easy to get the hang of and he won a good deal more than he lost. As the night wore on, however, the balance tilted and he began to lose more than he won, although he was so drunk by then that he couldn’t always tell the difference. He’d been set up, of course, gulled into thinking he was as good, if not better, than the other players present. Afterwards he wondered if his drink had been laced with dope—spiked. He knew what it felt like to be drunk on champagne, but this had been different. It had been as if his free will had been removed, almost as if he were a puppet and someone else was inhabiting his brain, pulling his strings, forcing him to keep on playing.
The evening developed a sour undertone and he realized that he was in the company of a pack of hyenas masquerading in evening dress and preying exclusively on him. (Where was Quinn?) It was not long before the hyenas dropped their civilized masks and the atmosphere in the room turned increasingly savage as Ramsay’s debts racked up—signed pledges and IOUs all over the place, even the engraved gold cigarette case that Nellie had given him for his birthday was forfeited.
And he just kept losing and losing, and the only thing he could do, the puppet master in his brain said, was to plough on recklessly until the tables turned and he won it all back in one hand. The gambler’s curse.
In the end he owed an enormous sum—nearly a thousand pounds in total, a king’s ransom. He would never be able to find that kind of money. It was so much money it didn’t even seem real.
He wondered if he could just get up from the rosewood table and walk away—would the hyenas bring him down in his tracks? But was he even capable of walking? The room was spinning intolerably, despite the fact that he was sitting down. And even if he left, the hyenas would hunt him down afterwards, wouldn’t they?