Excerpt: Ghosts of the Red Lightship

The oppressive self-regulations of the upper middle-class that had so far informed, educated and dressed Pearl Linster, were the very things that she was trying to shake off the night she first met him in the dance hall.  An impossible industrial-scaled haze of cigarette and cigar smoke hung down from the ceiling to just above the large round tables. On a miniscule stage, decorated with the latest ragtime designs of strung-out black men making fiery love to trumpets, an anaemic-looking band squiggled its way through a furiously good-time jazz stomp.  Pinioned by her drunken elbows to one of these tables, Pearl was being aggravatingly loud and opinionated during a risque discussion on pre-marital morality, when Geoffrey Risley-Shaw leant over her shoulder and asked her for a light.

That Geoffrey was holding a bow tie instead of a cigarette between his lips wasn’t what Pearl had first noticed. As she turned, proferring a taper that she had lit from the table’s candle, Pearl looked into his eyes, eyes that held a fascinating hue and depth.  They weren’t brilliant eyes by the usual standards of male beauty, but they were so looking right into her that she dropped the taper.  Picking it up again and relighting it gave her the chance to compose herself, and then she saw the bow-tie held between his lips.  She laughed functionally and immediately regretted every drink that she had downed that evening, recognising that these invasive eyes were well worth a considered and sober appreciation.  Recovered, and with her sanctuary of sarcasm back around her, Pearl waved him off with a disdainful staged derision.  Geoffrey left and became just another black suited shape amongst the sloshed crowd.