* * *
—
Gwendolen had taken the watch at many a deathbed vigil, but this one was perhaps the hardest of all to bear.
“He won’t last much longer,” a nurse had whispered to Gwendolen as she lifted the marble hand and touched the marble brow. A massive injury to the brain. “Why didn’t you look where you were going?” she said crossly to him as tears rolled.
Frobisher was beyond rebuke.
He had been delighted to find himself suddenly transported from lying amongst the filth and ordure of a London street to strolling through a hay meadow in full midsummer fig. He murmured the names of the wildflowers to himself. Yellow rattle and red clover, wood cranesbill, lady’s mantle, meadow foxtail. Such lovely words. He wished he could show them to Miss Kelling.
A lapwing was disturbed and took flight from its nest on the ground. A curlew cried. And—oh—the scent of the lilacs in the lane. His soul rose. He could put down his burden. He was home. At last.
A Long Prove
“So today I found an agent for The Age of Glitter,” Ramsay said happily. “He says he’ll have no problem finding a publisher.”
“You’ve finished it already?” Gerrit queried. “I thought you’d only just started it.”
He was like an animal, Ramsay thought, limbs slack with sleep yet ready to move in an instant. They were lying naked in bed, one of Gerrit’s great tattooed arms behind his head, the other around Ramsay’s shoulders. Gerrit shifted and reached for his cigarettes, lit two and gave one to Ramsay. Ramsay sighed with pleasure. His life had finally begun.
* * *
—
Freda never went back to the Sphinx. She had recognized the man who rescued her from the Thames—he was the one who had kindly given her the half-crown, but he was also a policeman, and as soon as he had dragged her out of the water he told her that people were looking for her, and she wasn’t about to hang about and find out who. But for the rest of her life she regretted that she had failed to thank him for risking his life to save hers. Nor did she ever go home to York. She never saw her mother again, or her sister, Cissy, never even sent them word of her new life.
Miss Fay le Mont attended her first spieler a week later, having persuaded Ramsay to take her and introduce her. It was a modest affair, just people enjoying losing their money, and Freda only cheated when she was in a corner, which wasn’t often. The pair of them tried to spread themselves across as many different venues as they could, in case people grew wary of the little card sharp who had infiltrated their evenings. Freda was generous with Ramsay, sharing her winnings with him at the beginning, but eventually she started to go to games on her own.
Ramsay wasn’t bothered, his book had been accepted by a London publisher and that was all he could talk about. My novel this, my novel that. It was called The Age of Glitter and had created a bit of interest amongst the “literary crowd,” as he referred to them to Freda, because it was supposed to be a “romanaclay,” which meant there were real people in it, disguised by different names—so, much like real life, then, as far as Freda was concerned. She read a few pages but it was hard going and she soon gave up. Other people did, too, and interest in the novel didn’t last long and it didn’t sell as many copies as expected. Ramsay wrote two more novels, but they failed to get a publisher. The Age of Glitter had gone “out of print” within a couple of years, he told her indignantly. That was the last time she saw him—it was during the phoney war and she was running a little bar in Mayfair that she’d bought with the proceeds of her spieler winnings. It was quite a classy place and Vanda, it turned out, scrubbed up well to work behind the bar, where she was very popular. When the real war got going, though, despite her age, Vanda reverted to her old trade, too profitable to be ignored. Those boys in uniform needed mothering, she said. “Well, that’s one word for it,” Duncan would have said.
Freda lived a long life away from the stage and ended her days running a pub in Suffolk that she bought after the war. By then she was married and had a daughter, whom she had insisted on naming Florence after her lost friend, an old-fashioned name that the new Florence resented for the rest of her life. As the Sixties swung in, Florence became a fashion model and rechristened herself Jenny.
At the end of the war, when she was still living in London, Freda’s eye had been caught by the name “Ramsay Coker” in a newspaper. It was the report of an inquest, followed by a short obituary. Mr. Ramsay Coker had been found on the pavement below his third-floor flat in Hans Crescent, and although there was some question of him having taken his own life, an open verdict was recorded after evidence was heard about his chronic alcoholism and drug addiction. The newspaper article failed to mention The Age of Glitter, only reporting that Ramsay was “the son of the notorious nightclub owner Nellie Coker.”