Time jogged forward in a strange, jerky fashion and then all of a sudden the room was empty, the hyenas had left. Why hadn’t they called in their debts before dispersing? The reason revealed itself. Not a hyena at all, but a snake, a sleek fat king cobra uncoiling itself from an armchair in a dark corner of the room. Had he been there all along?
The snake spoke. “Do you know who I am?” it said. It seemed amused by the fact that Ramsay had no idea. “My name is Azzopardi,” the snake said, introducing himself with a flourish, rather like a conjuror.
He looked like a rather overweight Valentino. “You are quite the reckless player, Ramsay,” he said. His accent was heavy but his English was good for a foreigner. “You will be pleased to know,” he continued, “that I have taken on your debts for you.”
Taken on his debts? What did that mean?
“It means,” Azzopardi said, “that now you owe them all to me, and me alone. And I regret to say that interest will be added if the repayment isn’t prompt. I will be in touch about it.” He took Ramsay’s gold cigarette case out of his pocket and handed it back to him.
“You should be more careful with that,” he said. “Your mother would be very disappointed if she knew that you had lost it by gambling.”
Ting! Ting!
Edith had spent a week in hospital before being returned to the fold yesterday and was currently in her bed upstairs in Hanover Terrace, where she was convalescing irritably, tucked in tightly by Nellie in an effort to imprison her in the bedsheets, in much the same way that Nellie had swaddled her like a small embalmed mummy when she was an infant. Edith had had a streak of restlessness from birth, as if nothing could ever satisfy. Now she had been given a bell so she could ring for assistance and the house had already grown weary of the sound of her summons. “She should be called an impatient rather than a patient,” Betty grumbled.
“Clever,” Shirley said.
Against the odds (scarlet fever, measles, accordion lungs, the war, fishbones), Nellie had never lost a child and she was not about to start at this point in her life. Edith must be mended and made whole again, or at least as whole as she ever could be now. To this end, beef tea was endlessly ferried upstairs to her, along with warm milk sops and cold custards. It would have been cheaper to buy a cow, the cook said.
Nellie’s first thought was that Edith’s close call was due to Maud trying to exact her revenge. Now that Edith was on the mend Nellie worried what the dead girl would try next—for Maud manifested nearly every day now. Sometimes she seemed amused, sometimes she seemed angry, but generally she wore an enigmatic smile that was difficult to decipher but seemed to indicate a secret she wasn’t yet ready to reveal. Nellie was considering exorcism. She imagined it would be exhausting on many levels.
“Going for a walk in the park,” she said to the cook, although it was none of her business. “Never known her to walk so much,” the cook said to Phyllis. “Must be something up with her to be so restless.”
“Prison’ll do that to you,” Phyllis said knowledgeably.
* * *
—
Ting, ting.
Would Edith ever stop with that dratted bell? Ramsay had been up and down too many times to count now, fetching and carrying things for her. Nellie had gone out and charged him with “keeping an eye” on his sister, but there was a limit surely to being Edith’s servant. Betty and Shirley were also out—shirking their duty towards Edith—and Kitty was the last person you would want looking after you. Ramsay suspected that Edith was asking for things for the sake of it. Out of all of them, it was Edith who was usually the first to get bored. And that was saying something as it was a highly competitive field in Ramsay’s family.
The first time she summoned him it was to request a “small cup of tea,” which was duly delivered. Half an hour later she asked for another “small cup of tea.” Why didn’t she just ask for a large one the first time?
He was trying to write, but there was not much chance of doing that when he had to spend all his time fetching and carrying for a fractious Edith. In a fit of generosity, he offered to read to her, but she waved him away as if he were offering something reprehensible. Instead she was intent on badgering him into conveying an endless stream of food that even a restaurant would have had trouble keeping up with. Two crumpets lightly toasted and thickly buttered. A slice of ham. Is there any cold chicken? A pickled onion, a pickled egg. A book, a magazine, a copy of the Radio Times, a jigsaw puzzle. Bread and dripping! Their cook was becoming insubordinate. (“I can hand in my notice at any time, you know.”)
Of course, anything other than slops and pobs was forbidden to Edith by Nellie, so Ramsay felt some sympathy for her for fancying something tasty. He remembered his time in the Swiss sanatorium, where the food had been excellent—endless mugs of cocoa and bowls of rich soup and plates of local cheese and ham. It had helped him get better, so how could it harm Edith? And the sooner she got better, the sooner she would stop needing to be waited on hand and foot.
Detective Chief Inspector Jones was patrolling the streets of Soho. Or prowling? Prowling had a criminal feel to it, though, didn’t it? Perhaps he was a criminal as well as a policeman. Not impossible—look at Maddox.
Ting, ting.
Only ten days after starting his magnum opus he could feel his creativity dimming, coming in fits and starts with interminable longueurs in between. He felt overcome by ennui. Did people really do this for a living? Every day?
The typewriter keys glared balefully at him. Soldier on.
The Age of Glitter had rapidly become unwieldy. Yes, it was a crime novel, but it was also “a razor-sharp dissection of the various strata of society in the wake of the destruction of war.” (Ramsay was not without ambition.) “Hm,” Shirley said. Disappointingly, Shirley, usually his greatest champion, had reservations. “Should you really be trying to portmanteau everything into it, darling Ramsay? Wouldn’t it be easier just to stick with the idea of the body on the pavement? I rather liked that. And you haven’t even written that bit yet.”
“And what about romance as well?” Kitty said, clutching her heart and pretending to swoon. “You should have people who fall in love with each other.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” Ramsay said. “I can’t think of anything worse.” But, on reflection, perhaps he should introduce a romantic element? It would open the novel up to a whole new readership (women). How would he go about it? He had no experience of either love or romance. The female sex seemed unattractive to him, but then living with his sisters, who could turn on a sixpence, was enough to put anyone off, let alone someone with “the soul of an artist,” as Shirley had pleasingly termed it.
Ting! Ting!
Great writers did not have to work under these conditions. Great writers had wives to keep the mundanities of life at bay. Perhaps that was what he needed, but who could he marry? Most of the girls Ramsay knew, like Pamela Berowne, were ghastly creatures who would hinder, not help.
Of course, there was an argument for marrying Pamela Berowne—she was filthy rich, so it would solve his financial difficulties and he could repay Azzopardi the ludicrous sum of money he owed. The memory of the evening in Belgravia popped up unwanted and was promptly quashed. It had been a week now since the nightmarish spieler and Azzopardi still hadn’t approached him for reimbursement. Ramsay was hoping that if he continued to ignore the problem it might just go away.
If (when) he became successful, people crowding into Hatchard’s for his latest bestseller (Do you have the new Ramsay Coker? I hear it’s brilliant), he would be independent, earning his own money, a proper income rather than the weekly alms doled out by Nellie from the profits of the clubs. Enough money to enable him to cut the ties of the apron strings. Not that he could remember ever seeing Nellie wearing an apron. (“In Holloway,” she said, “every ruddy day.”)