The uncharacteristically tardy Edith, frowzy with sleep, joined the gathering flock and said, “I’m feeling peaky.”
“You do look green around the gills,” Betty said, summoning sympathy from somewhere. Sometimes she surprised herself. 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.
“Try an eggnog,” Shirley suggested. Edith gagged.
“Is Ma all right?” Betty asked no one in particular. “Not ill or anything?”
“Ill?” Edith queried. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. She just doesn’t seem to be quite herself.”
“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 the hour at which nightlife begins? At Buckingham Palace I am told it is nine o’clock; Maida Vale, which likes a ‘nice long evening,’ plumps for seven thirty; Mayfair （Mr. Michael Arlen will correct me if I am wrong） for half past eight; South Kensington tucks its legs under the solid mahogany a quarter of an hour earlier; and Wimbledon wants the aspidistra removed and the hire-purchase masterpiece ready for action by eight sharp.”
“Oh, do shut up, Kitty,” Betty said.
“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. The rest of them were disdainful of the so-called journalists who wrote these social diaries. “Fleet Street hacks,” Edith said dismissively. Patrick Balfour, Horace Wyndham, Vivian Quinn, of course—they were waspish men of a certain type, acerbic and snobbish and what Nellie termed “quietly flamboyant.” “An oxymoron,” Betty said. “Exactly,” Nellie said.
Despite her own instinctive distrust for the society gossip columns, Nellie recognized the value of publicity in places like the Express or the Sketch and the Diary in the Evening Standard. Their readers loved to feast on tales of celebrities, and if those same celebrities were parading themselves in the Amethyst or one of her other clubs then so much the better. The clubs were hungry and they had to be fed. The bread and butter of the trade wasn’t the Tallulah Bankheads of this world, but the couples who came up to town on the Metropolitan line from Pinner for the evening, hoping for a bit of fun.
Since his return from Switzerland, the burden of nurturing the columnists had fallen on Ramsay’s unwilling shoulders. He was buttering a slice of toast very slowly, as if delaying the moment when he would have to bite into it. Ramsay was not feeling in great form either this morning （too much dope last night）， but he wasn’t going to incite Edith’s wrath by saying as much. 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. （He was inclined to melodrama.） He must have unconsciously voiced something to that effect because Shirley startled him by saying, “Oh, sweet, darling Ramsay, of course you’re real!” （She was much the nicest of them all.） “You suffer because you’re creative. Artists have to suffer, it’s how they arrive at the truth of the thing.”
In the Alps there had been nothing to do but lie on a veranda and stare at Swiss snow that was as blank and blindingly white as new paper until he thought he was going to go mad. No one travelled to visit him, although that didn’t really surprise him. His mother could easily have taken the Orient Express to Zurich but claimed she was too busy. With each child she had produced, Nellie’s interest had waned, so that Ramsay and Kitty at the tail end were dreadfully neglected.