Shrines of Gaiety

Nellie arrives at the Amethyst where she’s welcomed back by the staff, including the “dance hostesses,” young women who are paid to dance with men at the club. Some of the women work as sex workers. It’s revealed that Nellie was in Holloway for six months. Nellie has six children, some of whom help her manage her five nightclubs: the Amethyst, Pixie, Foxhole, Sphinx, and Crystal Cup. Her oldest, Niven, fought in World War I. He’s described as an “enigma” to his family (14), running his own businesses rather than overseeing the family’s clubs. Nellie seems suspicious of Niven. When he greets her with a kiss on the cheek, she thinks, “[i]t felt more like Gethsemane than filial affection” (28). Edith is Nellie’s right-hand woman and oversees the clubs’ bookkeeping and accounting, as well as the Amethyst club specifically. Betty and Shirley oversee the Pixie and the Foxhole clubs; Nellie hopes to marry them off to aristocrats. Although the Coker family is rich, they don’t have aristocratic lineage. Ramsay was too young to fight in World War I. He recently spent time in a Swiss hospital for a lung condition. He manages the Sphinx club but hopes to write a book to achieve fame beyond his family. Kitty is too young to oversee any clubs. She’s a frivolous daydreamer who spends her time reading the gossip papers. Nellie’s favorite club, the Crystal Cup, is the only one not managed by one of her children.

The narrative flashes back to describe Nellie’s rise to fame and fortune as the “Queen of Clubs.” Nellie comes from a poor Irish family. Her husband was a gambler and had an alcohol addiction, so she left him, took the children, and settled in London. There, she found cheap lodging with an elderly landlady. When the landlady died, Nellie searched the woman’s apartment and found a small box filled with jewels. Nellie stole the jewels and sold one of them, an amethyst, to launch her start in the nightclub scene. The Amethyst club is named, secretly, after the stolen jewel.

Early in her days as a club proprietor, Nellie discovered one of her dancing girls, Maud, dead of an opium overdose in her club. Nellie paid some men to dump Maud’s body in the Thames. Nellie remains haunted by this incident and, the reader will learn, sees visions of Maud’s ghost. Since Nellie entered the club business, she has paid the corrupt Detective Sergeant Arthur Maddox to warn her about police raids.

The narrative shifts to Frobisher. After leaving Holloway, Frobisher arrives at the Bow Street police station where he works. Although it’s his day off, he’s still on the job: “Dirt never slept, so neither would Frobisher until he had swept it away" (29). There has been a string of murders across London over the past few months. Frobisher blames a “madman.” Meanwhile, “[t]here were some superstitious fools, encouraged by the scandal sheets, who blamed the curse of Tutankhamun” (31). Frobisher is told that a dead girl’s body has washed up on the banks of the Thames. He goes to the morgue to investigate.

The narrative shifts to 14-year-old Freda Murgatroyd who “had come to London to find her fortune, to become a star of the West End stage” (36). She ran away from home, away from her mother (who had an alcohol addiction) and her mother’s abusive boyfriend who, it’s later revealed, sexually assaulted Freda. Freda has run away with her friend Florence Ingram.

Nellie wakes up the morning after her release from prison. She knows that her empire is under threat. Nellie realizes that Maddox knew about the raid that resulted in her imprisonment and didn’t warn her on purpose. Nellie is also facing the threat of Frobisher “who intended to sweep the Cokers and their ilk out of the door” (52). Nellie takes a walk. As she walks, Nellie remembers Maud, the dead girl whose body Nellie helped to dispose. Nellie is frequently visited by Maud’s phantom and anticipates a retribution: “Maud was an account demanding to be settled. There was a reckoning coming for Nellie. Could she outrun it?” (54).

On Frobisher’s way to the morgue, he stops by the flower hall. He considers getting some flowers for his wife, Lottie. Frobisher has hidden Lottie’s existence from his colleagues: “His colleagues would have been intrigued to know he had a French wife, even more intrigued to know that she was often not in her right mind” (56). Frobisher leaves the flower hall without purchasing any flowers.

Gwendolen’s past is revealed. She was a nurse in WWI and had two brothers killed in the war. Her father owned a wireworks factory which did well during the war: “‘I’ve profited from death,’ her father had said sadly” (61). After Gwendolen’s father died, her mother squandered his fortune, and Gwendolen went to work in a library to support herself: The quiet library was a “balm for her war-weary soul” (60). Gwendolen’s mother is also now dead.

Although Gwendolen has agreed to Frobisher that she will go undercover and infiltrate Nellie’s clubs, she thinks about her mission vaguely in this chapter: “Could she do what Frobisher had asked? She had no idea, but she would give it a go” (69).

The narrative jumps in time to describe Frobisher’s first meeting with Gwendolen. Gwendolen, a friend of Freda’s sister, comes to Frobisher for help finding Florence and Freda. Gwendolen presents Frobisher with the note that Freda left when she ran away: “Dear Mother, I have run away to London to seek my fortune. I am going to dance on the stage. The next time you hear from me I will be famous” (73).

Frobisher agrees to send a constable around to London’s dance schools to see if Freda is enrolled in any of them. Frobisher knows that most of the dance school graduates don’t make it onto the stage: “Instead, they were siphoned off into the nightclubs or sent abroad to dance and were often never heard from again. Some ended up on the street, of course. Or washed up on the banks of the Thames” (73-4). Nellie Coker’s nightclubs are the worst, according to Frobisher: “They seem to eat girls” (74).

During this meeting with Gwendolen, Frobisher sees an opportunity to use her as a mole in Nellie’s nightclubs. Frobisher doesn’t have any female constables in Bow Street who could go undercover. He tells Gwendolen that he’ll arrange for another constable to escort her to one of the clubs and warns her: “The club is a den of iniquity, you may come across behavior that might shock you,” to which Gwendolen replies, “I nursed throughout the war, Chief Inspector, I doubt there is anything left on earth that could shock me anymore” (75).

The narrative shifts to the Coker household, Hanover Terrace, where Nellie’s children are having breakfast. Edith is ill (later revealed as pregnant) and can’t eat. Kitty is reading out the gossip news and is impressed to learn that Ramsay knows Vivian Quinn, a famous gossip columnist. Ramsay is thinking about the book that he wants to write. Niven brings in the mail, which includes an invitation for Ramsay to a “baby party,” a party where adults dress up as babies. The party invitation comes from a girl who Ramsay refers to as a “Bright Young Thing” (82). The children disperse. Only Kitty is there when Nellie returns from her walk.

After leaving Hanover Terrace, Niven goes to the barber. The barber warns Niven that a man called Azzopardi is looking for Nellie: “He is inviting your mother to meet him tomorrow. For afternoon tea” (88). The barber also warns Niven that “[s]he should watch her back” (88). Niven is familiar with Azzopardi, who approached Niven at the dog track a week previously. Azzopardi told Niven that he's seeking “compensation” from Nellie, but he doesn’t yet reveal that the compensation is for the bag of jewels that Nellie took from her dead landlady that belonged to him (89). Azzopardi suggests that Nellie should retire, as she’s become complacent in her success, and tells Niven: “The world today, Mr Coker, belongs to those with the appetite for change. For new ways of thinking. The victor will take the spoils” (90).