Before I Sleep by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Author:Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448306206
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Vere the Boys Are

In the hierarchy of London clubs, there were very posh and less posh, and the very posh ones tended to be the ones that had resisted allowing women to become members. Make of that what you will, but the membership fees of those clubs amounted to serious biccies, and you had to pay a one-off joining fee of a serious order as well, to prove that you wanted to join badly enough. You probably also had to know someone, since just about anybody nowadays could turn out to have money, and that wasn’t the point of club membership, not at all.

Gascoyne had a wife and teenage daughters to go home to, but with college looming he could do with a bit of overtime, and in any case, it was his wife’s evening for selling beauty products from home, and he’d as soon not be there for that. Women found him attractive, and their house was too small for him easily to avoid her friends and customers when they swarmed on it. His wife only laughed when they flirted with him, but he didn’t think it was right.

So he had a toasted panini and a cup of coffee in the café in Freemason’s Hall, just out of interest, and then went along to the De Vere.

It was, as he had taken the time to find out, one of the very posh ones. In the Wiki listing, under ‘Affiliation’, it had ‘science, medicine and the law’, and his father, whom he had given a quick ring, had added that most senior judges were members, along with the top coppers and both archbishops, and that it was also, in his words, ‘a little bit masonic’. It was fortunate, therefore, that it had a kitchen entrance round the back, since Gascoyne would probably not have got far via the discretion barrier of the front door, the hall porter and the club secretary.

It was lucky, too, that he found a large individual in a sous-chef toque lounging by the kitchen door having a crafty fag, and was able to get into conversation with him. He was tall, hefty and swarthy – so swarthy it was hard to tell if he had designer stubble or just stubble – but despite his alarming appearance he turned out to be disarmingly friendly and easy to talk to. He said his name was Blagoy, he was Bulgarian, but he had learned cooking as a child from his mother, who was French, and had cooked both French and traditional Bulgarian dishes. There was not much call for the latter in his present incarnation, but his ambition was to save up and open his own French-Bulgarian fusion restaurant, where the central feature would be a cheverme grill on which a whole pig or lamb would turn slowly all day, filling the restaurant with wonderful smells. If he had his restaurant right now, with Easter coming, it would be lamb, the traditional …

Gascoyne let him run long enough to make him grateful for the sympathy, then gently turned him to his own concerns.

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