* * *
—
“All right, pet?” Vanda asked when she came in. “I stayed up for you. It’s wild on the streets tonight. All kinds of strange folk out there. I’ll make some tea, shall I?”
Folderol
Ramsay was hoping that at least the stupid Baby Party might give him some fresh material. The Bright Young Things were idiotic lotus eaters, but their inane excesses could provide a bitingly cynical chapter in The Age of Glitter. Not to mention the potential for piling up the corpses, because someone ought to murder those awful people, even if only between the pages of a book.
An effete-looking youth who had crammed himself awkwardly into a large perambulator was pushed past Ramsay by a hirsute nanny, who looked like a ship’s stoker. The youth, in what appeared to be a bespoke romper-suit, was sucking on a baby’s feeding bottle. Nearby, a girl whom Ramsay knew to be the daughter of a prominent member of the Cabinet was crawling on the grass with a pacifier plugged in her mouth. She took it out occasionally in order to cry “Waa-waa-waa!” as if in distress. Eventually, she was “rescued” by another nanny, actually a member of the Brigade of Guards—Ramsay recognized him from the Sphinx—dressed in a nurse-like uniform apparently requisitioned from Norland College.
Whoever the uniform belonged to originally must have been awfully big, Ramsay thought. But then nannies often were. They had been in possession of one themselves for a while in their far-off Scottish childhood, long before Kitty was born. The woman—a giant—was later convicted of attempting to murder one of her charges. It could easily have been one of them. “Lucky escape,” Nellie had said, unperturbed.
The Baby Party was being held in a garden square that fronted one of London’s grandest houses in Lowndes Square. The square was brilliantly lit by strings of light bulbs, illuminating the antic parade of people still arriving—in perambulators or on scooters and trikes, dressed in baby clothes, waving rattles or sucking on pacifiers while clutching an assortment of dolls, teddy bears, toy boats and so on, so that it looked as though they had just come from raiding Hamley’s. Once in the gardens, they rode wooden rocking horses and scooters, bowled hoops or took it in turns to ride on a sorrowful troupe of seaside donkeys, all the while screaming with excitement.
Ramsay held himself aloof from this unabashed tomfoolery. Vivian Quinn’s much-trumpeted （by himself） novel, Folderol （the title didn’t get any less stupid）， was about “Bright Young People become tarnished” sort of stuff, wasn’t it? If Quinn could do it, then Ramsay could, too. And if he got his skates on, he could do it first and everyone would think that Quinn’s novel was just a copycat—or an homage, which would be even better, really.
A donkey brayed loudly, or perhaps it was one of the partygoers, it was hard to distinguish the one from the other. These people were self-indulgent idiots. Edith had once encountered a posse of such women grubbing around on their knees on the dirty pavement at Seven Dials—they had a fad for scavenger hunts at the time. “I say,” one of the girls had said to her, “you haven’t come across a stuffed wombat, have you?” Edith, with cunning presence of mind, told the girls that she believed they had one in the keep of the Tower of London, information that sent them yelping off towards the Embankment like the frenzied Thracian Maenads in pursuit of Orpheus.
“Is there really a stuffed wombat in the Tower of London?” Kitty asked. She had no idea what a wombat was. She had imagined a large bat—a female one, perhaps.
According to the papers next morning, a group of the Bright Young People had narrowly escaped arrest when trying to break into the Tower in an apparent attempt to steal the Crown Jewels as a prank. They were let off with an admonition.
“Should chop their heads off” was Nellie’s judgement.
When the scavenger hunts had grown stale, the hateful Bright Young Things had moved on to throwing parties, the more ludicrously exhibitionist the better, like this Baby Party with its dress code of romper-suits, matinée jackets and sun bonnets. Ramsay would rather have died than complied with it.
Of course, the Bright Young Things were not the only ones seemingly obsessed with ludic diversions. There were parties everywhere, all the time—“snow” parties in Mayfair, opium parties ferried into Limehouse from the West End, orgies in Soho, cocktail parties in Knightsbridge, and bacchanalia of all kinds behind the closed doors of private houses, like the one in Piccadilly that Rollo had taken Shirley to the previous evening. The trick of this particular party, she said, was to stay in disguise as long as possible, and to that end people had brought several changes of costume with them.