Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

he knew nothing about her, only that she had a quiet magnificence that he both admired and feared and the idea of her leaving so soon gave him a hollow feeling in his chest.

“She will see through the deception, and when she finds out that you are a viper in her nest then I don’t like to think what she might do.”

“She wore a crucifix, apparently.”

he searched for the word. Transparency, he eventually came up with. No—translucency. She was who she was, no dissembling.

Life was all just coming and going, wasn’t it? And then eventually it was just going.

She reminded him a little of the missing girl, Freda. If you removed the heavy mask of stage make-up that Freda wore in her photograph they might have looked like sisters.

How easy it was to fall in London. And how far it was possible to fall.

He had been rather cantankerous with her and she had been increasingly cross with him. Gwendolen wasn’t even entirely sure what the subject of the argument was. Her independence of him, perhaps.

“Grace and favour,” Nellie coaxed, “it will save you a considerable amount of money,

Gwendolen, in the useful camouflage of a lowly librarian who had been glamoured by the bright lights of the capital, expressed gratitude to Nellie for this thriftiness.

What would Frobisher make of all this?, she wondered. (And why did she seem to spend so much time speculating about his opinions?)

It’s unspoilt. Unsullied. Nothing ever happens in here. I find that a great relief.”

Ramsay will explain everything.”

she might have caught a glimpse of the man who was sheltering in the shadows of a shop doorway in the street down below. The way he was gazing up at her lighted window, he might have been mistaken for a lovelorn Romeo, one accompanied by an attentive Alsatian.

She seemed infirm since prison, but perhaps it was an act, a feint intended to fool her enemies into a false sense of security.

The thought of erotic love made Frobisher uncomfortable

All women liked kittens, didn’t they? He remembered the tulips. Perhaps he should stop making generalizations about the fairer sex.

Dogs rarely had free will, constantly at the whim of someone else. Not so very different from people, if you thought about it.

That was the thing about hospitals, anyone could wander into your room and gawp at you when you were at your very lowest, your most unflattering.

It was Edith, not Gwendolen Kelling, who had set in motion the fall of the house of Coker. The only thing that would redeem her now was if she could stop the collapse.

Edith had seen his wife once, in the street, on his arm, going into a restaurant. She was more attractive and less downtrodden than Edith had led herself to think.

That was why he was here? Not to be solicitous, but to make sure she hadn’t accidentally blabbed.

She knew him to be ruthless, that was why she had liked him, but what if he turned that ruthlessness on her? She would have to stay on her toes.

Even her Chandos Place dressmaker could not tailor the coat to make Nellie look like anything other than a giant mammal. (“A beaver, or a very large otter,”

All the time she had been in Holloway, Maddox had been seducing Edith. Edith was the key to the Coker empire—turn her and you had entrance. The books, the money, the connections, how it all worked. The pregnancy would have been the cherry on the top for him. Not only would he have possessed their secrets but her blood as well, although the two were interchangeable, really.

She had always known that Maddox would betray her one day, he didn’t have a trustworthy bone in his body, but she was surprised at the method he had used to achieve his ends.

Sometimes Freda felt as though everyone in the world wanted to take a bite out of her.

Freda was not given to thieving. No, it had been the siren call of beauty and was therefore excused.

Absurd though it seemed, Freda couldn’t shake the strange feeling that Florence had returned to wherever she had come from.

It was not just like being in a foreign country, it was like being in a hundred foreign countries at once. To their surprise, they had discovered that in the capital people seemed to do nothing but drink and dance as though they were possessed. It was as if one huge, mad party was cranked up after dark beneath the pavements of the capital, only to fade away with the dawn.

“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 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.

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.

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?

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.

here the company was exclusively male.

and Ramsay was hoping that the glamour of a spieler in Belgravia would be just the ticket for a chapter in his novel.

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.

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.

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,”

I regret to say that interest will be added if the repayment isn’t prompt. I will be in touch about it.”

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.

“Must be something up with her to be so restless.” “Prison’ll do that to 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.

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.

the sooner she got better, the sooner she would stop needing to be waited on hand and foot.

Perhaps he was a criminal as well as a policeman. Not impossible—look at Maddox.

perhaps he should introduce a romantic element? It would open the novel up to a whole new readership (women).

Great writers did not have to work under these conditions. Great writers had wives to keep the mundanities of life at bay.

Ramsay was hoping that if he continued to ignore the problem it might just go away.