The tulips had seemed gay and cheerful in their paper wrapper as he had made his way home. He had taken the train back to Ealing. He was picking up his car from the showroom next week and it struck him how much he would miss the hustle and bustle of public transport. It made him feel as though he was part of something and not stranded in solitude. There was an Evening Standard discarded on one of the seats in the carriage. The headline read Old Ma Coker released from jail. Frobisher disliked that soubriquet. It made Nellie Coker seem like a benign character in a fairy tale, when in fact she was, if anything, the witch.
A woman in his carriage—rather downtrodden-looking, he thought—smiled at him and said, “I wish my old man would buy me flowers.” He’d had no answer to that, but now he regretted not saying, “Here, please have these,” and presenting her with the whole bunch, for his own wife had scowled at them as if they reminded her of something she would rather forget.
Lottie was in retreat, in her customary place in the back parlour. When she was in one of her moods, she would sit in her chair by the window and gaze listlessly at the garden for hours.
Lottie was a good needlewoman and from an antique shop in New Conduit Street Frobisher had bought her a pretty little rosewood sewing table, lined inside with pleated pale-blue silk. She was working on a tapestry cushion cover of brightly coloured parrots, but more often than not she picked it up and then put it down again without working a stitch.
Frobisher had also put up a bird table in the garden so she would have something to look at, but she seemed to take no notice of the flock of greedy finches who preyed like vultures on Frobisher’s charitable offerings. It was dusk now, the birds all roosted, but Lottie stared into the darkness as if she were waiting anxiously for someone to emerge from the gloom. Her daughter, he supposed. A tiny casualty of war.
She gave him a bleak look, almost as if it were he who was responsible for her state of mind. The glacial chill of neglect was on the house, too. There were only cold ashes in the hearth, so Frobisher set about the satisfying task of laying a fire. The warm spring day had turned cold as twilight encroached.
The marital bed would be frosty tonight, too, as it was on many nights. When she was in a good mood （“up,” he thought） she would fling her thin arms around his neck and smother him with so many kisses （Mon amour, mon amour, je suis désolée） that he almost wished she would stop. Her abandonment could be disturbing. There would be no disturbance tonight. Lottie, dressed in the thick cotton nightdress that reminded Frobisher of a shroud, would turn her back on him and he would lie awake and think about how different his life would be now if he had come along five minutes later and Lottie had already plunged into the Thames and been on her way to the Dead Man’s Hole.
He put the tulips in a jug because he couldn’t find a vase and placed it on the sideboard where she would see it. Then Frobisher sat in his armchair and watched the fire catch. He supposed he could make another start on his piece for John Bull. A few days ago he had begun soberly enough—
The district of London known as the West End, and described by His Majesty’s Post Office as “London W1,” is roughly one mile square. It includes Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, and all the little restaurants and clubs that form Soho, which is not so much an area as an atmosphere that pervades that part of the West End.
“Jazz it up,” the editor of John Bull told him. “It’s not a street gazette. Our readers know where the West End is. They want things that they don’t know about or what’s the point? You know, little titbits.”
He laid down pen and paper without having written a word.
He would have liked to tell Constable Cobb to keep an eye out for Maddox in the Amethyst, but what if Cobb was in league with Maddox? It was unlikely but not impossible. What if they were all in league with Maddox? What if the whole barrel was rotten? He mustn’t become delusional, suspecting everyone and everything, like a paranoiac. Oakes, the so-called Laughing Policeman, seemed like he might be a man he could trust. Perhaps he should enlist him in his mission.
It was no good, he was too restless to unwind. He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the flames and put the fireguard in place. Shrugging on his overcoat, he took his hat from the hallstand. “I’m popping out to get some fresh air, I won’t be long,” he shouted, but received no answer.
He walked around the streets of Ealing. Not a policeman’s purposeful beat walk but the meanderings of a man who found no comfort at home. It was late and he received one or two suspicious looks. Perhaps he should get a dog, after all. No one felt at risk from a man with a dog.