Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

She was one of those women, Freda thought, who took to motherhood like sainthood. How different from her own mother.

Frobisher was not unacquainted with would-be suicides—his wife had been one.

Bad enough to be dead, but to be dead and end up here…Frobisher shuddered.

He was drowning in nostalgia. It was worrying how fanciful he had suddenly become. Like a disease, almost.

He couldn’t help the odd sense that Gwendolen Kelling’s missing girls were the harbinger of something. There was evil in the air of London.

He hardly knew his wife at all, she had a fugitive nature, unwilling to be present.

She supposed librarians rarely disturbed the status quo of a man’s heart.

A soldier from the battlefield could be identified by his dog tags. A girl found in London could be identified by a locket.

She had, of course, presumed that Freda and Florence were alive and well somewhere. It had never even crossed her mind that it might be otherwise,

Gwendolen was looking for neither husband nor child, and the one seemed to be the inevitable consequence of the other.

He was on a mission, of course, and men on missions had little time for fripperies.

She had created a hostage to fortune, hadn’t she? Beware of promises, she thought. What if the daughter she returned to the Ingrams was no longer living? It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Balancing the books isn’t just about balancing the books. It’s more subtle than that.” “Subtle? How can accounts be subtle?—Oh, I get it! It’s about fraud, isn’t it? Légerdemain with numbers. Avoiding the tax inspector and all that stuff.

Nellie knew that her children thought her incapable of dying. She was too monumental. But if she handed over the reins to Edith, then Edith would need a lieutenant of her own, a Coker who was willing to do anything necessary to preserve the legacy of the business. Betty might be shallow, but she had depths of ruthlessness not shared by Shirley and Ramsay.

she had expected more villainy and less cliché from this courtship.

“It’s always amusing to reinvent oneself, don’t you think?” he said, looking pointedly at Nellie. “I wouldn’t know,” she said, raising an eyebrow over a second éclair.

Was he trying to flirt with her? Better men than Azzopardi had tried and failed. The man was oily.

Why didn’t he just get down to business and make her an offer, instead of all this flimflam?

I am not for sale, she thought grimly. She had the strange feeling that Azzopardi was toying with her. A cat with a mouse. He didn’t want to pay money for the clubs. Did he even want them? She suspected he was after something else altogether, but she couldn’t imagine what.

what he couldn’t acquire through persuasion he would take by piracy.

He worried that there was a crack in her shell since prison. A strong Nellie was predictable, but a weak Nellie might do anything.

In a series of tortuous negotiations with Nellie, Hawker had managed to secure one day off every fortnight. “It’s like being a medieval serf,” he said to his daughter.

‘my people,’ as you put it, may be thieves, but at least they’re honest thieves. Your people are the rotten ones!”

They had kissed, modestly, which was how adults should kiss, in Freda’s opinion.

Freda suspected she would be blamed for both absences. In the end, she supposed, she would be blamed for everything.

Freda, although she couldn’t admit it, felt her stomach clench with sudden fear, but Florence, despite the weight of her suitcase, wasn’t in the least disconcerted and trotted happily along the pavement.

There followed some confusion about the purpose of their visit. Mrs. Darling, surveying Freda, offered to “solve” her “problem,” and it took some time before their new landlady understood that the “problem” was the difficulty of finding lodgings. She laughed—a grating, humourless kind of sound—and said, “Well, as it happens, you’re in luck. A room in the attic’s just been vacated.”

Florence was still a child, Freda thought ruefully, she believed in angels and fairies and the goodness of mankind, all rejected some time ago by Freda.

She didn’t understand why a big modern city like London—surely the most important city in the whole world—should be convulsed by the idea of someone who died in Egypt thousands of years ago.

In York, you couldn’t lay a gas pipe or a new drain without digging up a Roman skeleton. If they didn’t like their “eternal rest” being disturbed, then surely the streets of the girls’ home town would be full of legions of the dead roaming about. (“They are,” Florence said.) Freda’s next-door neighbour in the Groves had a Roman skeleton in his coal cellar, people paid tuppence to come and gawp at it. Freda would rather spend the money on a bag of pear drops.

“I think the angels would catch us. I think I can see them waiting,” Florence said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the hills in the distance. (Sometimes, Freda really worried for Florence.)

How handy it must be to have one’s slate wiped clean on a regular basis.

the Corpus Christi church was a splendid affair, like a particularly glamorous theatre. Freda had peeked inside, rather cautiously, in case she suddenly succumbed to conversion and found herself wishing that she had a god, any god, if it would entitle her to this magnificence.

Freda’s heart was heavy. It would never have crossed her friend’s mind to run away from home without Freda suggesting it. Freda had a feeling it was going to end badly. One way or another.

“She’s definitely not herself,” Templeton murmured to the barman as they watched Nellie toasting the empty air.

Jail, he noticed, seemed to have shrunk her.

If Nellie had a soul—and there was no verdict as yet—then it was a pagan one.

He didn’t want to write the actual poetry, though. There was no money in poetry, it was the waste land of literature.

He still harboured fond memories of the Bolshevists in Great Percy Street. Perhaps his next novel ought to be about working men.

Surely the dead should be buried, not put on display?

Each of the Cokers, apart from Niven, was nominally in charge of one of Nellie’s nightclubs, and Ramsay, on his return from abroad, had been afforded the Sphinx, the most questionable of them all. Nellie said it would be the making of him, but Ramsay thought it might prove to be the unmaking.

he had once been a merchant seaman but now claimed to be an artist, only bending his knee to capitalism (by which he appeared to mean Nellie) in order to subsist.

The Alhambra was quite different to ancient Egypt, he had pointed out, but Nellie said that anything east of Dover counted as foreign to most people. “We must pander to their ignorance,” she said.

but then Nellie wasn’t really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

Ramsay took a seat on an upturned empty wooden box with “Louis Roederer” stencilled on the side, his evening jacket slung carelessly on the handle of a mop. He rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt to allow easy access to his vein for Gerrit’s silver syringe.

He mostly kept his philistine thoughts to himself. He wished to be regarded as au courant by the world at large.

In Gerrit’s room, too, there would be the rumpled, soiled sheets of an unmade bed, perhaps Gerrit’s lover of the night still entwined in those sheets—a woman. Or perhaps a man. Ramsay started to have palpitations.

For an extra two shillings she would teach you how to inject yourself, but Ramsay was too squeamish to take charge of the needle.

it was often the brazen who survived and the meek who went under,

Betty and Shirley had got scholarships to Cambridge, Edith reminded her mother. “And look how stupid it made them,” Nellie said.