Shrines of Gaiety

by Kate Atkinson

The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho’s nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency—the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs—that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.

Nellie Coker’s progeny in the order in which they entered onto the world’s stage. First of all, Niven—unsurprisingly absent from Holloway this morning—followed soon after by Edith. There had followed a hiatus while Nellie attempted to refute further motherhood and then, having failed, she produced in quick succession Betty, Shirley and Ramsay, and bringing up the rear, the runt of the litter, eleven-year-old Kitty, or le bébé as Nellie sometimes referred to her, when searching and failing to find the right name amongst so many.

Nellie had grown fond of the landlady in the course of the time they had lived there, sometimes taking tea with her in the afternoon. The woman was a keen baker, her repertoire based on the Be-Ro recipe book—rock buns, drop scones, queen cakes, all much appreciated by Nellie.

She supposed she should come to terms with the concept of “fun.” She didn’t want any for herself but she was more than happy to provide it for others, for a sum. There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself.

At no point in the war or after, including the Armistice and the Peace, did Niven ever think anyone had won. He no longer had the patience for people’s foibles. No patience for people at all. No time for religion, no time for scruples, no time for feelings. Niven’s heart appeared adamantine, fired in the crucible of the war.

Since running away from home, Freda—Alfreda Murgatroyd—had been renting an attic room in a dingy boarding house in Henrietta Street, so close to the market that she could swear she could smell the rotting cabbage leaves trodden underfoot. Freda had come to London to find her fortune, to become a star of the West End stage.

Although small, Freda looked older than her years. For a pretty girl, she was surprisingly lacking in vanity about her looks, which she considered to be more a matter of chance than anything else. Or God-given, if you believed that God gave beauty as a gift, which seemed unlikely. It was more like the kind of trick that the Greek gods played on people—a curse rather than a gift.

It was her talent rather than her looks that gave Freda cause for pride. The hours she had put in spinning, turning, tapping, pointing and chassé-ing. Since the age of three she had attended a dance school from which, every year, the Theatre Royal harvested the best pupils to swell its pantomime chorus, as did the touring ballet and opera productions that came to York, hence her Clara (Girl from the Groves charms in role).

They were a team, Vanda said. There were three of them, Duncan, Vanda and Freda, plus Adele, who “worked for the company” and was responsible for their travel and accommodation, clutching her Bradshaw’s in one hand and with the other lugging a suitcase full of “the Knits,” as she called them (indisputably a capital letter), from one smoky third-class train carriage to the next.

Vanda was tall and raw-boned, with hair the colour of ginger nuts. Glamorous in a rather seedy way, she was always doused in Molinard’s Habanita, which could knock your socks off if you got too close.

Vanda had “lost her man” early in the war. Freda thought he must have been killed in battle, but Duncan said he’d run off to Barnsley with a barmaid. “Alliterative adultery,” he said.

The cook had been with the Cokers so long that she had acquired their expressions for her own. The Cokers all had very eloquent eyebrows. They could conduct entire conversations with them, without saying a word.

The genteel and rather elderly coven of the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw had exasperated her, but they meant well and so Gwendolen had suffered them sublimely, every morning donning a mask of docility, along with the librarian habit of lisle stockings, tweed skirt, woollen cardigan and one of her increasingly worn-out lawn blouses. She may as well have joined a holy order, so cloistered did her life grow between the Library and Mother.

The Library had not been a career choice (after all, who would choose to be a librarian?) but a financial necessity after the family money was lost. No, not lost—stolen. Many things were lost—wars and keys and hearts and boys at sea—but family fortunes, even modest ones, were stolen.

Gwendolen’s mother had been a foolish woman, inclined to believe any passing nonsense. Of such people were patriots made, in Gwendolen’s opinion. More’s the pity.

Before the war, the Kellings were well off. There had been five of them: Mother, Father, Gwendolen and her brothers, Harry and Dickie. They lived in a lovely house close to the Knavesmire and employed a cook, a scullery maid, a parlour maid and a gardener. There was a croquet lawn and a pond, an orchard of apples, pears and plums. The Kellings had been rooted firmly to the ground beneath them—it would have to be a great wind that could blow away such a life. And so it was. The war had been an awfully great wind.

“Gossip,” Mr. Pollock called it dismissively, but Gwendolen thought that was the word men gave to women’s conversation. Men talked in order to convey information or to ruminate on cricket scores and campaign statistics. Women, on the other hand, talked in an effort to understand the foibles of human behaviour. If men were to “gossip,” the world might be a better place. There would certainly be fewer wars.

He had seen the best of London, but since the war the capital had gone into decline. O tempora! O mores! he thought. Everyone had gone quite mad in the peace, he sometimes wondered if they were not approaching the death of Western civilization. But then he supposed people had been talking about the end of civilization since Babylonian days, or, indeed, Tutankhamun.

“I heard Ma go out earlier,” a jam-smeared Kitty said. She was sitting on the window seat entertaining herself by reading out loud from the gossip columns in the papers. She had recently been expelled from boarding school (arson, vehemently denied) and no one seemed to know what to do with her, so Nellie had tasked her with being the one who kept an eye on the papers for useful snippets of information—Lady Melchior has departed from Durban on the Windsor Castle and is homeward bound to Southampton, for example.

Betty was very hard-nosed yet occasionally mawkishly sentimental, a combination shared with her mother and many dictators both before and since.

Ramsay yawned his way to the table and mumbled something that could have been a greeting or an insult. They rarely resorted to good manners with each other. An ashen Edith pinched out a piece of toast from the rack but then put it to one side as if it were crawling with spiders. “Have some rum,” Shirley suggested. “That always does the trick for me.” Edith shuddered at the idea.

“I think prison gave Ma too much time for thinking,” Shirley said. Neither Betty nor Shirley had much time for thinking. The “life of the mind” was a waste of both life and mind as far as they were concerned, despite Cambridge. Or perhaps because of it.

“What is that drivel?” Shirley asked. “Vivian Quinn, in his Society Paragraphist column,” Ramsay said wearily. “Can’t Kitty read Children of the New Forest or something?” Edith asked irritably. Kitty daydreamed of being mentioned in the newspapers herself. The fashionable youngest daughter of wealthy West End worthy Mrs. Coker was seen last night at the Grafton Galleries…and so on.

Edith enjoyed a fight. He sighed in a way that made her raise a threatening eyebrow at him. “Are you ill as well?” she asked sharply, ready for a contest. “Not at all,” he said, taking an enormous bite out of the toast to prove his health and almost choking on it. Sometimes it felt to Ramsay as if his life were just one long struggle to be real.

Ramsay had begged Nellie to send him reading material but it was Niven who obliged, sending out crates of books for him, everything from the Mabinogion to Virginia Woolf. When he returned to English shores a few months ago, Ramsay’s brain was so infected with words that he was almost overcome by the insistent need to purge them. A novel, he decided, he would write a novel! (A great one, obviously.)

If he wrote what he knew, it would be a sparse novel about a man in a Swiss sanatorium in the grip of hopelessness and existential dread. Who on earth would want to read that? Ramsay certainly wouldn’t. “All you have to do,” Shirley advised, “is write one sentence after another and—voilà! A novel.” It would be easier if he had a title. If he had the right title then the rest of his novel would start to flow naturally from it. Could you be a writer if you hadn’t actually written anything? An artist if you hadn’t actually produced any art?

I’ll paint, and you’ll write the great roman du jour, you know, like The Green Hat.” Oh, not that book again, Ramsay thought. Ramsay was sick of hearing about it. Anyone could write a provocative but ultimately quite tedious contemporary novel. “You could!” Shirley said, without irony. Ramsay didn’t know that Shirley painted. “I don’t,” she said airily, “but I’m sure I could.”

Lying came easily to Niven, he thought of it as a means of protecting the truth.

Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one’s purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.

The door had opened quite suddenly, releasing the scent of cheap stewing meat, followed by a woman in a filthy, greasy apron who fired the discouraging opening salvo of “What?” Her name, it transpired, was Mrs. Darling—rarely had a woman been so badly named—and she glanced quickly up and down the street before saying, “Get inside,” as if she wanted no one to see them enter.

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.

When he eventually opened his eyes again, he spotted something that looked like the heel of a shoe, lodged between two beer crates. He stood up slowly and shifted the crate. It was a shoe, the silver-sandal type that most of the dance hostesses wore. What had one of the girls been doing back here that had resulted in the loss of a shoe?

Shirley and Betty were in the habit of travelling to the Foxhole and the Pixie together. They did most things together—they were “Irish twins,” born in the same year, and although very different were also very alike, both possessing a preference for style over substance. (“Substance,” Shirley said, “led to the battlefield, style rarely so.” “Perhaps a killing look,” Betty said, pleased with herself. They considered themselves to be wits.)

“You’re such an ignoramus, Kitty,” Betty said. “Am not!” Kitty protested, under the misapprehension that an ignoramus and a hippopotamus were close relatives. “It’s deception,” Shirley said. “It’s getting inside the walls of the enemy under false pretences and then destroying everything within. For all we know, Gwendolen Kelling could be working for the police. A spy.”

It was possible that she was the girl in the mortuary, but a drowned exsanguinated girl looked very different to a robust schoolgirl. “Catholic?” he murmured, more to himself than to Gwendolen. “You can tell simply by looking? What an extraordinary gift, Inspector! I imagine the Inquisition would have made wonderful use of you.” He wished she wouldn’t tease.

Anyone looking at her would have been unable to discern the inner workings of her brain. Not that anyone did look at her. A woman in her sixth decade, dressed in everyday drab, is more invisible than a librarian.

Once the tea was made, she took it through to Vanda, who always looked a fright first thing. Make-up all smeared and her eyes glued together, wayward tufts of hair everywhere. Clothes were draped all over the place and the room smelt ripe and salty and perfumed all at the same time. The occasional slight whiff of dead rat entombed in the wall added an unpleasant top note.

Freda sang out, “I’ll be off now!” and Vanda shouted back in her gravelly morning voice, “See you later, pet. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t!,” which gave Freda a pretty broad canvas to work on.