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.
In the end he owed an enormous sum—nearly a thousand pounds in total, a king’s ransom. He would never be able to find that kind of money. It was so much money it didn’t even seem real.
He wondered if he could just get up from the rosewood table and walk away—would the hyenas bring him down in his tracks? But was he even capable of walking? The room was spinning intolerably, despite the fact that he was sitting down. And even if he left, the hyenas would hunt him down afterwards, wouldn’t they?
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?