Ramsay had begged Nellie to send him reading material but it was Niven who obliged, sending out crates of books for him, everything from the Mabinogion to Virginia Woolf. When he returned to English shores a few months ago, Ramsay’s brain was so infected with words that he was almost overcome by the insistent need to purge them. A novel, he decided, he would write a novel! （A great one, obviously.） Unfortunately, the actual act of putting anything on paper （paper as blank and blindingly white as Swiss snow） had proved less easy than it looked.
Shirley and Betty had bought him a little Remington portable typewriter for his recent twenty-first birthday. （The machine for the man who travels—not true unless you counted Switzerland, which Ramsay didn’t.） What to write?
“Don’t they say ‘write what you know’？” Betty said. “But you don’t know anything, do you?”
“Thanks.”
If he wrote what he knew, it would be a sparse novel about a man in a Swiss sanatorium in the grip of hopelessness and existential dread. Who on earth would want to read that? Ramsay certainly wouldn’t.
“All you have to do,” Shirley advised, “is write one sentence after another and—voilà! A novel.”
It would be easier if he had a title. If he had the right title then the rest of his novel would start to flow naturally from it. Could you be a writer if you hadn’t actually written anything? An artist if you hadn’t actually produced any art?
“Of course you can,” Shirley said. “You have the soul of an artist, you don’t necessarily need to do anything.” Edith snorted contemptuously but Shirley continued blithely, “You know, how’s this for an idea, Ram? You and I could run off together—to the Riviera or Paris—and live in the traditional garret, and I’ll paint, and you’ll write the great roman du jour, you know, like The Green Hat.”
Oh, not that book again, Ramsay thought. Ramsay was sick of hearing about it. Anyone could write a provocative but ultimately quite tedious contemporary novel.
“You could!” Shirley said, without irony.
Ramsay didn’t know that Shirley painted. “I don’t,” she said airily, “but I’m sure I could.”
* * *
—
From her seat at the window, Kitty had a good view of the man who was standing in the private gardens that separated Hanover Terrace from the street. The man was staring fixedly up at the house, as if he were waiting for something to begin. He was olive-skinned with a foreign look about him. Smoking a cigarette, he had the brazen air of someone who didn’t care about whether he was seen or not. He was wearing two-tone brogues that Kitty knew were called co-respondent shoes, although she didn’t know why and no one would tell her when she asked.
Her being there didn’t put him off, in fact he seemed amused by Kitty’s presence. She raised an enquiring Coker eyebrow and he touched his hat in a small gesture of acknowledgement and ambled away. Kitty chewed thoughtfully on a piece of toast. She said nothing. The man was too interesting to share.
* * *
—
Niven came in with the post that they had all been too lazy to collect from the doormat and distributed it around the table by tossing it in the direction of its recipients. He poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it standing up, his overcoat still on, a lovely tweed ulster from Huntsman. It had a deep beaver collar that Kitty had a sudden urge to stroke; she reached out a hand to touch the fur but Niven batted her away as if she were a fly. The collar reminded her of Moppet, their cat from Great Percy Street. He had been run over by a dustcart the previous year and Kitty wished that they had had him stuffed or made into a collar. Or even mummified, like the Egyptian cat that decorated the bar of the Sphinx. She was not allowed in the Sphinx—the most rackety of the Coker clubs—but that didn’t stop her going there.
“Ma’s deserted,” Shirley told Niven, callously decapitating her second boiled egg. “Absent without leave.”
“She’ll have to go in front of the firing squad, then,” he said. “That’s the penalty.”
“Poor old Ma,” Betty laughed.
“What’s that?” Kitty asked, hanging round Ramsay’s neck like a boa constrictor as he opened an envelope addressed to him.
“Get off, you’re strangling me.”
She read aloud. “You are invited to Romps. The Honourable Pamela Berowne requests your company at a Baby Party.”
“What the heck is that?” Shirley asked. “Do you have to bring a baby with you? That would be a nightmare.”