“Mr. Azzopardi’s?” she had said to the doorman.
“Couldn’t possibly say, madam.” The doorman grinned, pocketing her pound note.
Azzopardi was trying to frighten her, whereas Maddox was trying to destroy her—or rather he was trying to destroy her business, which was much the same thing as far as Nellie was concerned. Maddox wanted the clubs, but Azzopardi seemed to be playing some kind of game with her. Nellie didn’t like games, there was always the chance that you could lose.
Nellie turned inward. She was thinking.
Morning Tea
Unlike most men, Frobisher was always relieved when he could go to work. At work he could repair himself. In Ealing he unravelled.
Miss Kelling had been his first thought this morning when he woke, even though his wife lay in bed next to him. He was struck painfully by guilt. Sometimes he wished he was Catholic, absolution must be a great comfort.
Lottie was snoring gently, not an entirely unpleasant thing in a beautiful woman. There were translucent pearls of sweat on her damp forehead and a stray lock of her dark hair was sticking to her cheek. On some （many） days, the house in Ealing seemed more like a sanatorium, their relationship resembling that of doctor and patient rather than man and wife. He was always trying to devise little pick-me-ups for Lottie—wouldn’t she like to go for a walk in the park with him? Should he pull her chair out into the garden, where she could sit in the sunshine and watch the birds? How about they take a boat out at Richmond on his day off? And so on and so on.
Frobisher had married comparatively late in life, not knowing what to expect. It had seemed noble, saving a woman, the way he had saved Lottie, but later he had to question—hadn’t it simply been weakness when confronted with beauty? Lottie was beautiful. If she had been plain, would he have been drawn to her? It was an awkward question, but asked only of himself. She was as opaque as opal and they remained hopelessly unknowable to each other.
Lottie had already been rescued once before. It was not Frobisher who had raised her from the ruins of Ypres, he had been kept busy fighting the losing battle against crime on the home front—one war that never ended. It had been an English major in the Royal Hampshires who had brought her back to England and then abandoned her.
He had first encountered Lottie balancing on the parapet of Waterloo Bridge, reminding him of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, except, unlike the statue, Lottie had still been in possession of her head, if not her mind. He had grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back down to earth. He had saved her, and in doing so he had lost himself.
Frobisher should perhaps have realized that Lottie was a woman who was resistant to salvage. She had risen and fallen like the tide, but she seemed to favour the ebb rather than the flow.
Perhaps when he retired they should move back to the countryside for her health （his, too）。 She had no love for the suburbs, perhaps the fields and woods would revive her. He gently brushed the lock of hair from her cheek and she muttered something in French. Frobisher sighed.
He brought her a cup of tea, the first and last resource of an English husband.
* * *
—
“Is Maddox back?” Frobisher said, shrugging off his overcoat.
“No, sir. They seek him here, they seek him there,” the desk sergeant laughed.
“He’s not the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, Sergeant.”
Maddox couldn’t play hide-and-seek for ever. Frobisher wondered if he shouldn’t pay Maddox a surprise home visit in Crouch End, catch him red-handed digging his garden or fixing his roof or whatever it was that husbands with time on their hands got up to in Crouch End.
“If he comes in, tell him I’m looking for him.”
“Will do, sir. Tea, sir? A brew?”
Frobisher almost relented, but the acceptance of the tea would seem to indicate a weakness on his part somehow. Shouldn’t they have a woman about the place? An older one, he imagined, plain and tightly wrapped in an apron, pushing a tea trolley. A cockney accent perhaps and a warm, damp aura of reassurance about her person. “No, thank you, Sergeant,” he said eventually, when the sergeant started tapping an impatient tattoo with his pencil on the countertop. He must be careful, Frobisher reminded himself, not to get lost in his own mind.
Simpson’s in the Strand
“May I introduce the beef, sir?” the waiter in Simpson’s asked, raising the dome on the great silver serving trolley with a ponderous flourish, as if diners in the Grand Divan lived all their lives waiting for this revelation. The slab of beef took centre stage, oozing thin, pink juices that puddled around it on the salver. Introductions over, the waiter carved two succulent slices, which he laid delicately on the plate like overlapping leaves before saying, “Horseradish, sir?”