‘Thank you,’ I said. I took a quick look out of the window to see if there were any pigs flying past, but no. Whatever had happened inside the Cobra’s head, the rest of the world seemed to be going on as normal.
And he was as good as his word. I don’t know what changed his mind, but the four calling birds are back behind the balls at the Roxette. I still can’t quite believe it, but as our Dickson reminded me, I’ve always said there’s good in everybody. Sometimes, you just have to dig deep to find it.
Thoroughly Modern Millinery by Marilyn Todd
The Pink Parrot was buzzing louder than a barrelful of hornets when Fizzy Potter fluttered her fingers at Lennie the barman, tossed her feather boa over her shoulder and shimmied up the sweeping spiral staircase. Down on the dance floor, the exuberance of the Charleston had given way to pencil-thin couples fusing together for the Argentinian tango, a relatively recent import, but one which seemed destined to remain the chief talking point among the middle-aged and middle-classed for years to come. Sensitive to the dance’s stillness and pauses, the conductor of the Pink Parrot Orchestra was milking its suggestiveness for all it was worth.
‘I say, Fizzy!’ A young man with a moustache that looked like an anchovy on his upper lip waved her over. ‘Care to join me with a whisky and soda?’
‘Sorry, darling,’ she quipped back, ‘but with you and me it’ll only ever be gin and platonic!’
With laughter ringing in her ears, she made her way to the corner where her friends had set up their usual Friday night colony. All feathers and beads, cloche hats and silk stockings, Fizzy also happened to own the finest pair of knees this side of the Bosphorus. A point which rarely went unappreciated when she sat down, as now, and crossed her long legs.
‘Jolly glad you made it, old girl,’ Marriott muttered across his martini.
Impeccably turned out as usual, and with a crease in his trousers that could slice bacon, he twiddled the yellow rosebud in his buttonhole. Marriott Stokes was the only member of the group who didn’t need to go out and earn his weekly envelope, his father having left him a packet several years previously.
‘Rather hoping you can do something with old Catspaw,’ he drawled.
‘Yes, I’d noticed he’s sporting a face like a vulture whose carrion has just made a miraculous recovery and is now dancing the fandango instead of providing him with a good supper,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Seems Bubbles gave him the raspberry,’ Foxy Fairfax explained.
Like Fizzy, he was also an illustrator, only instead of working freelance for magazines, Foxy tended to restrict himself to children’s books.
‘Come off it, chaps, every girl gives Catspaw the bird,’ she said, sliding her olive off its cocktail stick. ‘Why should Bubbles be different?’
Anyway, Bubbles was married, and girls like that don’t pass up on rich bankers in favour of a penniless cartoonist.
‘Exactly what I told him,’ Biff said. ‘In fact, I seriously advised the old halibut to go and get stinko and forget all about popsies. Like the Mongol hordes descending from wherever it was they used to descend from, girls only bring grief on a chap.’
Adding, as Marriott ordered another round of drinks, ‘I say, Fizzy. Given any further thought about swanning down the aisle with me?’
As a partner in the family firm of purveyors of quality pickles, Biff Kilgannon had no interest in art like the rest of the gang; in fact the nuances of Impressionism, gouache and the finer points of the Neue Sachlichkeit sailed completely over his head. He only tagged along because his sister, Lulu, was an artist and this way he got to mix with lots of Witty Young Things, something one tends not to do in the gherkin and piccalilli department. It wasn’t that Biff wasn’t a dish, Fuzzy mused, especially since playing prop forward had endowed him with muscles of steel. It was just unfortunate that he had a brain to match.
‘Sorry, Biff.’ Fizzy set to powdering the shiny spot on her nose. ‘The answer’s still no.’
The mirror in her cloisonné compact reflected a heart-shaped face with a much-kissed snub nose and big eyes enlarged further by finely plucked brows and heaps of soot-black mascara. It was only upon closer examination that one realised that one eye was brown, the other blue.
Fizzy’s appointment diary rarely showed a blank spot. Snapping the compact shut, she slotted a cigarette into its holder. Simultaneously, a battery of clicks produced enough light to power up half of southern England and quite possibly a chunk of East Anglia, too. Thanking her gallant knights with an all-encompassing smile, Fizzy struck her own match and thought, funny how the entire male section of the Westlake Set was queuing to slip a diamond cluster on the third finger of her left hand – yet every time she pictured the hatload of kids she so desperately wanted, all the little beezers sported the same ski-slope noses, lopsided smiles and floppy fringes of the only man who’d never once jumped forward in a bid to light her gasper.
Damn you, Squiffy Hardcastle. Damn you to hell.
‘- don’t you think so, Fizzy?’
‘Sorry, Kitty, didn’t catch that.’
‘I was just saying, sweetheart, that his work’s far too Gauguinesque for my taste -’
Fizzy didn’t bother asking whose work. ‘Absolutely,’ she replied, her mind elsewhere. On a certain painting, as it happened, in a gilt frame…
‘- Matisse is living in the south of France, I hear -’
‘- now does Lulu’s stuff reflect Synthetic Cubism with a hint of Purist, d’you think, or pastoralism with a touch of Analytic Cubism?’
Snippets drifted past like ducks on the Thames, while Fizzy contemplated portraits in gilt frames…
‘Sorry we’re late, everyone.’
Her train was interrupted as Orville Templeton, Hon. Member for Knightsbridge & Chelsea, held out a chair for his wife.
‘Traffic was an absolute stinker.’
‘You haven’t missed much,’ Foxy told the newcomers. ‘Chilton and his protégé haven’t arrived yet.’
‘Traffic, probably,’ Orville said, shooting his cuffs.
Poor Orville. Noble, worthy, gallant, dignified – a hundred decent men packed into one – and duller than a miner’s bathwater. Fizzy exchanged smiles with his wife and thought the same couldn’t be said of Gloria Templeton. Fizzy’s best friend was five years older than her and a study in understatement, from the simple wedding band to the pale cream silk she always draped herself in. Not half as modish as Fizzy’s white cloche, Gloria’s broad-rimmed hats were perfect for hot summer evenings like this, flattering her chestnut bob and emphasising her strong patrician features – though nothing could disguise the permanent sadness in her lovely green eyes.
That was the problem, Fizzy sighed, when one’s still in love with one’s first husband.
A husband, moreover, who was handsome and charming, gave one two gorgeous daughters, then betrayed all three of them by getting himself blown to pieces in the very last week of the war. Her blue-brown gaze rested on Orville, looking for all the world like a reject from a second-rate taxidermist’s. Poor Orville. The Hon. Member for K &C worshipped his new family. Adored Gloria. Idolised his adopted girls. Would do anything for them, anything at all. Even to accepting that he would only ever come second best…
Second best, of course, was a concept far beyond the scope of Fizzy Potter and, along the banquette, Bubbles was slipping her Cartier-encrusted wrist through Teddy Hardcastle’s arms.
‘I say, were you really the youngest captain in the Great War, Squiffy?’
Any closer, dammit, and she’d be a tattoo.
‘Too jolly right he was,’ Marriott boomed. ‘Gave him a gong for it, too.’