“Is it always so lively in the Amethyst?” Gwendolen asked Niven when he drove her back to Knightsbridge in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He laughed. “No, tonight was an anomaly.”
Well, that was an educated word, Gwendolen thought. Not that she had thought him uneducated, but he was a Coker, and Cokers seemed smeared with such blasphemy by all and sundry that she had expected their behaviour to be on a par with the Yahoos. She berated herself for her snobbery.
It was a good-tempered place usually, he said, people came to enjoy themselves, to spend money. “To have fun,” he added, glancing at her, as if to assess what effect that word would have on her, as if she were the apocryphal maiden aunt.
“There’s nothing wrong with having fun,” she said. She had, after all, briefly revelled in being in a roomful of people who were dancing themselves into a dervish-like delirium on a sea of alcohol. She had to admit, she had enjoyed the dancing, the cocktails, the tormenting of Constable Cobb. She had even, and it was perhaps something best kept to herself, taken satisfaction from dealing with a man on the cusp of death. She had felt more like herself than she had done for a long time.
What did Niven regard as fun?, she wondered.
“Fun’s overrated,” he said dismissively, as if she had voiced the question out loud. “Although for those gangsters I suspect that was their idea of it. My mother doesn’t tolerate violence in the club,” he added. “It’s bad for business, and business is everything for my mother.” It took Gwendolen a moment to remember that “my mother” was Nellie Coker—she didn’t seem like anyone’s mother. And Niven didn’t seem like anyone’s son. Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.
It had been unexpected, to put it mildly, to discover that Niven was a Coker. Niven was his first name, not his second, that was what had misled her, of course. What a strange coincidence it was that the man who had scooped her up from the pavement in Regent Street the day before yesterday and the man who had been undaunted by trying to save a man’s life tonight were one and the same.
Once Aldo had been stretchered away on an old trestle top that had been commandeered from somewhere, Niven had put his coat around her and said, “I’ll take you home.”
“Your coat will be spoilt by all this blood on me,” Gwendolen said, mindful of how expensive his coat appeared.
“Then I’ll get another one,” he said.
“And will you get another car?” she asked as she slid gingerly onto the cream leather of his splendid car. He laughed and said, “I’d rather not. He was a bleeder, wasn’t he?” He added, “Poor bastard.”
He made no excuse for his language, Gwendolen rather liked that. There had been camaraderie between them as they dealt with the wounded man. They had both seen worse.
They bowled along Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning by now and the streets were deserted. Gwendolen supposed the Cokers were nocturnal creatures, quite used to seeing in the dawn. London felt fresh in the night air and she felt strangely elated. She glanced at Niven. In profile he was suspiciously handsome. “You’re staring at me,” he said, without looking round.
“No, I’m not.” She hastily changed the subject. “How did it start? The catalyst for the fight? I didn’t see.”
“Something and nothing. These gangs get worked up pretty quickly. Your partner seemed to abandon you at the first sign of trouble, not very gentlemanly of him. Who were you dancing with?”
“A man,” Gwendolen said. “I was dancing with a man. I don’t know his name.”
He was amused. “So—you came to the Amethyst on your own? And danced with a stranger? Generally only women of ill-repute come to nightclubs on their own and dance with strangers. You don’t strike me as being of ill-repute, I seem to recall you telling me the other day that you were a librarian.”
“I came to London for a friend,” she said. “To look for her sister and her sister’s friend.”
“On a mission, then?” he said.
Was he being sarcastic? It was hard to tell with him.
“And this man, the stranger you were dancing with, is he helping you on your mission?”
Gwendolen squirmed under this further catechism. How to explain Constable Cobb, both his appearance and disappearance? To her relief, they had reached the Warrender. They drew up outside the hotel and Niven turned the engine off. “You’ll be in trouble with the Mother Superior, coming in after curfew,” he said.