Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

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.

“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.

“My name is Azzopardi,” the snake said, introducing himself with a flourish, rather like a conjuror. He looked like a rather overweight Valentino.

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.

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!

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 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?

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.”

The Refreshment Rooms were an extraordinarily noisy venue for an undercover tryst. Frobisher had imagined them having a quiet tête-à-tête, but they were conspired against by the clatter of cutlery and crockery, the hiss and squeal of the overworked tea urn and the arrival and departure of trains from the platform alongside, not to mention the occasional ear-splitting screech of an engine letting off steam.

“Did you lose anyone in the war?” he found himself blurting out. This was what happened, he realized with regret, when you were badly schooled in the art of small talk. She gave him a long, alarmingly direct look and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she said very matter-of-factly, “I lost everyone, Inspector.”

Out of uniform he was insignificant, a bird stripped of its plumage.

What a piece of luck Sergeant Oakes was. When she had left Holloway he had dropped into her lap like a ripe plum from a tree, offering to be her informant. For a regular sum of money he would “keep an eye” on his new Chief Inspector for her.

Of course, Nellie knew exactly what he was up to. He had been sent by Maddox to spy on her, not for her. The pair of them must think she was in her dotage.

Nellie knew that Gwendolen had been engaged by Frobisher to insinuate herself into their lives. She had known it from the very beginning. Gwendolen had been spotted by one of the Forty Thieves in the back of a car with Frobisher outside Holloway on the morning of Nellie’s release.

Landor knew which side his bread was buttered on, unlike Oakes, who wanted it buttered on both sides and with jam on as well.

At a stretch, she could almost see Frobisher inside the tumbledown thatch, but she could not get Niven through the door.

She must stop comparing them, she chided herself. Frobisher never came out best, when really he should.

The costumes seemed to have been gleaned from a dressing-up box and many of the actors were reading from the text, but that did not dim the magic, indeed it seemed somehow to augment it.

War was a foul thing. It should be sent back to hell where it had come from and never let out again.

It still seemed like a swizz to Freda’s ears,

A nightclub was not designed for daytime. The unforgiving electric lights illuminated every tawdry corner.

The cook was making bread, an activity that always seemed to infuriate her.

The determined bell-ringer was a small, filthy boy who looked as if he had just been up a chimney. She was about to box his ears and send him on his way when she realized it was one of her many cousins.

“Frobisher will bring Maddox to justice,” Gwendolen said. “I’m sure of it.” Due process, Nellie thought. The dry meal of affidavits and witness statements. The slow grind of the courts. And at the end of it, Maddox might be convicted, but equally he might not. Justice should be swift, not slow. It should be a knife in the heart. The black wings of retribution crushing Maddox in their righteous embrace. Nellie was feeling rather perky for a woman so under siege.

Betty took the little silver knife from her pocket and handed it to Edith.

Yes, the very same newspaper delivery boy that we met outside Holloway many chapters ago. Always eager for an execution, his wishes were being fulfilled on a miserably wet morning in early December.

Gordon, became a published novelist, writing mystery thrillers, including The Body on the Pavement in 1941. (I may have stolen a line from him, in homage.) In a case of life imitating art, he died during the war in somewhat mysterious circumstances after falling from a window of his top-floor flat onto the pavement below.

We Danced All Night, Barbara Cartland’s autobiography, was a cornucopia of little facts now largely lost. She is particularly good on the “Bright Young People,” and I owe my knowledge of “Turk’s Blood” to her, as well as a vivid description of the Baby Party.

And yes, I read The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (Heinemann, 1924), but it’s difficult from this standpoint in time to see why it caused so much fuss.

The then Prince of Wales really did attend a fancy-dress party in the garb of the Ku Klux Klan,

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd wasn’t published until June 1926, so Ramsay would not have been able to read it in May. I could go on, but I won’t, I’m just trying to pre-empt criticism!

And I would commend to you W. Slagter’s 1926 book entitled Cocktails American-en Fancy Drinks IJsrecepten en-Dranken (it’s Dutch). You can find it online at https://euvs-vintage-cocktail-books.cld.bz/​Vintage-Cocktail-Books-Netherlands/​1926-Cocktails-by-W-Slagter/​IV. It’s the most extensive list of “historic” cocktails you’ll ever find. Sadly, I have tasted none of them.