Before Gerrit, before Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, before even Ramsay’s lungs were exiled to Switzerland—when he was still at school, in fact—he used to visit Madame Nicolaides in her cellar café in Bateman Street, where she offered cocaine injections at ten shillings a time. For an extra two shillings she would teach you how to inject yourself, but Ramsay was too squeamish to take charge of the needle. Later, Madame Nicolaides moved to the other side of the park from their home in Hanover Terrace and started up her business again from her house. It was mainly nicely brought-up girls who slipped in and out of her Regent’s Park Road drawing room.
Ramsay had much preferred the safety of Madame Nicolaides’ drawing room with its rugs and lamps and deep sofas to being here in the storeroom of the Sphinx. It had been like dutifully visiting a rather curmudgeonly aunt. Once, she had served him tea and cake—something called bougatsa, which was really a custard tart with a foreign name.
Ramsay remained sitting with his eyes closed, head in hands, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. When he eventually opened his eyes again, he spotted something that looked like the heel of a shoe, lodged between two beer crates. He stood up slowly and shifted the crate. It was a shoe, the silver-sandal type that most of the dance hostesses wore. What had one of the girls been doing back here that had resulted in the loss of a shoe? He couldn’t help but imagine Gerrit pumping his stoker’s body against one of the sylph-like girls, up against a wall of beer crates.
Ramsay left the storeroom, shoe in hand, looking for its owner, and found the band already taking their seats and tuning up and the dance hostesses trailing in, chatting nineteen to the dozen, their carmined lips still fresh, their face powder not yet caked into the tired lines of their faces. They were like new blooms that would be drooping, their colours faded, by the end of the evening. （Excellent image, Ramsay thought. He would probably forget it, though.） “Evening, Mr. Coker…Evening Mr. Coker,” they chirped. Ramsay murmured something in reply. He held up the shoe and one of them said, “Oh, look, it’s Prince Charming.”
“I thought perhaps one of you ladies dropped it,” he said, but none of them claimed it.
The Glaswegian manager appeared out of nowhere and said, “Is there something else, Mr. Coker? We’re all set up here.”
They were all eager to be rid of him. Why don’t you fuck off, you fucking posh fucker still echoed painfully in his brain.
A thump on his shoulders indicated Gerrit, fez in place, ready for the evening’s festivities. “Drink this, my man,” he said, handing Ramsay a glass of water. “And I’ll take that,” he said, removing the shoe still clutched in Ramsay’s hand.
Pinoli’s
Edith, under the weather though she was, had a tryst with her lover. They were possibly the least romantic pair ever to grace the inside of Pinoli’s restaurant in Wardour Street.
It was still early, but Pinoli’s was bustling as usual. You would think he would prefer to keep to the shadows, but he liked crowded, busy places. He was brazen that way. Edith presumed it would be his downfall one day. And yet it was often the brazen who survived and the meek who went under, wasn’t it? Edith was not meek but she was in danger of going under.
“You’ve done something to your hair,” he said. Was that a compliment? Flattery was always oblique with him. Edith was rarely eulogized by any member of the male sex. “Betty and Shirley got the looks,” Nellie said, “you got the brains. You take after me in that respect. You should be thankful.” Betty and Shirley had got scholarships to Cambridge, Edith reminded her mother. “And look how stupid it made them,” Nellie said.
Edith’s appetite was “in her boots,” she had reported to him when she joined him at the table. He was currently eating his way through the three-shilling table d’h?te. He had just finished a plate of filets de hareng à la meunière, while Edith had sipped briefly on a crème chasseur soup that had only increased her desire to retch. She regarded his herrings with distaste—all those tiny bones waiting to catch you out. She had choked on a fishbone as a child when they were still living in Edinburgh. She had no idea what kind of fish it was, but a herring seemed like a prime suspect to her. Nellie had turned her upside down and shaken her like a piggy bank. To no avail. The bone was eventually dislodged by a nurse in the Hospital for Sick Children. It was the shaking that Edith remembered, not the fishbone. Her lover had moved on to dessert, demolishing a bombe pralinée.