Page 26 of Infamous

Five minutes after her arrival at the Nicholsons’, Eddie was trapped between the artist Kitty Stuart and another woman she’d never met before in her life, the stranger’s hands firmly cupping her head as her eyes raked all over Eddie’s face.

‘Excellent bone structure,’ she said, pressing her thumbs quite forcefully into Eddie’s cheekbones. ‘You’re all skull.’

‘Iss tha’ good?’ Eddie said, her voice slightly distorted due to being so violently compressed.

‘Claire is a sculptor,’ said Kitty, providing the context that would have been very useful a minute or so ago. ‘She collects heads.’

Eddie’s eyes widened.

‘I don’t disconnect them from bodies,’ clarified Claire the sculptor, but her wistful tone wasn’t entirely convincing, and Eddie decided it was high time she wriggled free. ‘God, all that dark hair and those eyebrows, you look positively—’

‘I must find Nash,’ she said, and Claire watched her back away with a hungry expression in her eyes.

‘Come and see me some time,’ she called, as Eddie turned and started shouldering her way through the crowd.

Based on Albert’s description of Nash’s mental state, Eddie had expected to arrive at a quiet, solemn house, and perhaps discover Nash deep into a bottle of wine. In reality, she hadn’t been able to locate him or ascertain just how soused he was, due to the fact that the house was absolutely full to the rafters with people. The party was so loud that she had been able to hear it from all the way down the street, and she had almost given up on trying to summon somebody to the door to let her in when she had simply pushed and it had swung open, revealing at least thirty people packed into the hall.

The society parties she had attended with Rose had sometimes been loud; there had been a certain amount of visible drunkenness, and occasionally somebody had bucked decorum and done something really quite saucy, like walking from room to room unaccompanied by a chaperon, or eating a lemon ice in a manner that could have been described as lascivious.

Nash’s house this evening looked like the afterparty of a circus on the outskirts of Sodom and Gomorrah in comparison – and Eddie was completely enchanted.

Dayo Akerele was moving through the riotous, heaving crowd in the opposite direction, and they met in the middle of the room.

‘Good evening, Miss Miller!’ he shouted.

‘Good evening, Mr Akerele! Have you seen Nash?’

‘He was in the garden, the last I saw of him,’ he said, his nose wrinkling. ‘He was attempting to drink an entire bottle of wine while the crowd sang “God Save the King”. When I left, there was only one verse remaining, and not much wine.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Eddie. Somebody tried to walk between them, and they were jostled apart, Dayo waving to her as he was swept up in the momentum and started to move away. ‘Thank you!’

Getting to the garden was no mean feat; Eddie had to dodge and weave as if she were playing some sort of mad contact sport, trying to avoid elbows to the chin and spilled wine as it flew through the air. Eventually she found a door that led to the outside world, and she tumbled through it, the cool air an instant relief.

Nash was leaning against a mossy stone sculpture of the god Pan. There was a small crowd assembled around him, but things seemed to have cooled since the drinking contest that Dayo had witnessed; an empty bottle of wine lay at Nash’s feet, and he had one hand pressed politely to his mouth, as if he might be considering vomiting.

‘Nash?’

His companions didn’t seem to notice her – they were preoccupied with laughing and clapping him on the shoulder, their voices overlapping as they all talked at him – but after a moment Nash’s eyes found her, and he removed his hand from his mouth so that he could beckon her over.

‘Edie! Where did you come from?’

There it was again. That glow in her chest; the feeling that she had been divinely selected for companionship.NowNash’s friends turned, appraising Eddie as she walked forwards to greet him. She ignored them, taking Nash’s hand when he offered it, and then just holding on to it awkwardly as he neither shook hers nor kissed it.

‘Where’s Mrs— Where’s Liza?’

‘Out,’ said Nash. ‘Well, she was in, but then she saw how many people were heading up the garden path and she fled. Really, I don’t know how word spreads like this, you’d think I’d put an advertisement in the paper.’

There was a very brief pause, and then he winced. Clearly, he had inadvertently reminded himself of the review, and Eddie quickly attempted to change the subject.

‘I met a sculptor in your hallway,’ she said brightly. ‘She said I had good bones. She seemed disappointed that she couldn’t remove them from my body for further study.’

Nash didn’t laugh, but he did tilt his head to one side in that very puppyish fashion of his and look at her face quite intently, which made Eddie smile self-consciously.

‘They are good,’ he announced. ‘As is the rest of you. Come on, I want to show you something.’

The crowd around him seemed perturbed that he was leaving, and a few of them broke off and attempted to follow, but he put his head down as if battling through a rainstorm and pushed on into the house and through the hallway, leading her to a room at the very end of the corridor. He turned to her with an expression of mock severity and put a finger to his lips, and then produced a small key; it took him two attempts to unlock the door, and once it was open he pulled Eddie inside as if they were running from some ravenous beast, shutting the door behind him and immediately locking it again.

‘You can’tlockit,’ Eddie said, shocked despite herself. ‘What will people think?’