He found a place for them to sit on the grass and put his jacket down for her. Lanterns had been lit around the lawn to denote the stage. The staging was very pretty and captured the essence of the play without fuss. Unfortunately, it was nearing its end, Hippolyta declaring that Pyramus and Thisbe was “the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” and Gwendolen thought how more than three hundred years later it was a judgement that could be applied to so many things.
The impromptu audience, spread out on the grass, seemed to be mostly composed of fellow students and friends. They were all of them full of strength and youth, just as their doomed predecessors had once been. War was a foul thing. It should be sent back to hell where it had come from and never let out again. She gave her head a little shake to rid it of unwanted thoughts.
“Miss Kelling?”
“A wasp, I think. It’s gone now.” The dog settled down to sleep, its head against Gwendolen’s knee.
The girls playing the fairies pranced and tripped prettily around on the grass and Gwendolen thought of Freda. She had played one of these fairies, hadn’t she? Gwendolen would have liked to have seen her on stage. Perhaps she had done the girl a disservice, perhaps she had real talent. Where was she? Talented or not, I must keep looking for her, Gwendolen thought.
They had reached the restorative ending. “Give me your hands, if we be friends,” Puck said—he wore a great deal of make-up and had little papier-maché horns attached to his head—“and Robin shall restore amends.” At which the actors took each other’s hands and the members of the audience, on a whim, shuffled closer and did the same.
The girl nearest to Gwendolen, wearing a coronet woven from daisies, the kind a child would make, reached out a shy hand to her. Gwendolen was reminded somewhat incongruously of being in a Quaker meeting—she had attended them several times in York on her return from the war in an attempt to find solace or meaning, but had found neither. She looked to Frobisher on the other side of her. She expected him to be embarrassed, and perhaps he was, but nonetheless he held out his own hand and grasped hers in a brief but strong grip.
And then it was over. The dog woke up. Everyone dispersed into the gloaming and Frobisher helped her to her feet. “Time to go home,” he said. He looked rather crestfallen at the idea.
Hail, Mortal!
It was over a week since Freda had been invited by Ramsay Coker to step over the threshold of the Amethyst and into “fairyland.” She had been very quickly disabused of her previous assumption that a nightclub would be an enchanted place.
Although, naturally, she had kept the information to herself, Freda had never actually danced with a man. At her dance school in York, they had kept up with all the latest dances on a Saturday afternoon after tap class, but they had practised with each other, taking it in turns to lead and follow. It was novel, and not particularly pleasant, to be partnered now by a member of the opposite sex.
The Amethyst was a raucous place, horribly hot and airless. Freda was surprised that people didn’t die of suffocation. All trussed up in their evening suits, the men seemed to sweat from every pore, which only intensified the fug of tobacco and alcohol around them. And they all seemed so big compared to Freda—and very prone to standing on her poor toes. Still, she did seem to be quite a success, if success was measured in the volume of men who sought her out. “She’s a popular little thing,” Betty Coker told her mother. “Quite the little bon-bon.”
“A novelty,” Shirley added.
I’m none of those things, Freda thought. I’m a girl.
She had garnered rather a lot of experience with older men now. Owen Varley was never far from her mind, but at least this time she was prepared for any onslaught, although the worst she had suffered by the end of the first night was a badly bruised big toe.
“Worse things happen at sea,” Mrs. Coker said, which was a ridiculous thing to say, but Freda didn’t mind because when the club was closing Mrs. Coker raked ten shillings in coins out of a tin and handed them all to her. Ten shillings! Mrs. Coker said it came from the goodness of her heart as she usually paid the girls at the end of the week, but she hadn’t decided whether or not to take Freda on. She was “on probation” apparently, which Freda thought was something that happened to criminals.
“Well, you can come back tomorrow,” Nellie Coker said, “and we’ll see how you get on.”
The amazing thing was that she had made even more in tips. She’d had no idea that you got tips for a dance until the first ungainly quickstepper pressed a shilling into her palm, leaving his moist paw in her hand just a little too long for comfort. And then another man tipped her, and another. Not quite riches beyond compare, but enough to stop starvation, although in fact she need never go hungry again if she worked at the Amethyst because there was a little side room where the dance hostesses went when it was quiet （which was never） or when they couldn’t go on any longer without collapsing from exhaustion. A table was laid out with ham and cheese and cream crackers and jugs of water and a big pot of tea. “Got to keep the horses watered,” Nellie said. （Not a horse either, a girl!） There were two kinds of jam as well. And biscuits. Florence would have loved it here, apart from the dancing, of course. Where was she? What if she was stuck somewhere with nothing to eat? Not even a humbug.