Free Abdication: A Novel by Juliet Nicolson Page A

otherwise smooth surface, the cake boasted a single halved walnut that had been placed smooth side down in the middle.
    “You can always tell a Fuller’s coffee cake,” Nat whispered, shushing his chattering mother-in-law as he cut into the soft icing. A tiny sound, and the barest of visible agitations of the surface as the sharp knife made contact with the glazed sugar, caused those sitting around the table to moisten their lips in anticipation.
    “Not a noise you get from any other cake,” promised Nat, as he gently pushed the knife on down until it made contact with the china beneath.
    “What about a lemon bun?” Rachel said, handing a plate round.
    “Have a drink, May. Help yourself, Sam,” Nat added, indicating six miniature, flower-patterned glasses, brimming with liquid.
    May closed her hand around the delicate stem with care. The honey-coloured wine was sweet, but not sickly.
    “L’Chaim!” Nat, Sarah, Rachel and Simon cried in unison as they raised their thimble glasses in welcome to the new arrivals.
    The next day May and Sam’s cousins took them to the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus, the most famous of all the white- and gold-painted Lyons Corner House teashops. A Jewish tobacconist had founded the company nearly forty years earlier, Nat explained, and some, the proud Greenfelds among them, considered the restaurants to be the height of luxury.
    May watched, impressed, as one of the Lyons’s “nippies,” the black-and-white uniformed waitresses popularly named for their agility, nipped between the packed tables, balancing trays of teacups, teapots and plates of curranty scones and jam. Across the other side of the huge dining room was a “trippy” threading her way cautiously through the closely packed chairs, clumsily clearing away the dirty crockery onto her trolley, looking forward to the day when she stopped tripping up and became eligible for nippy status.
    Rachel was already ordering a second round of chips, belching gently but unapologetically as she instructed the nippy to be sure the next serving was extra hot and generously salted. May traced the rim of her plate with a tepid chip but she could not actually bring herself to eat it. She had smelled the same smell on her coach journey from Liverpool, mingled with the stench of cigarette smoke inside the coach, and it had made her nauseous. Even so, May longed to have the money to pay for the tea. May had arrived in London with twenty pounds that her mother had given her. “I wish I could afford to give you more, my darling,” her mother had said. The sum had seemed to May like a lot at the time, but the cost of everything in London meant that the twenty pounds was fast running out.
    Hanging on the walls of the restaurant were a series of framed posters from Lyons’s long-running advertising campaign featuring afictional character called George. The gag was that George was never where he was expected to be. George was never at home, never in the office, never appeared on the railway platform to join his wife waiting to catch a train, never turned up to watch the Punch and Judy show with his children, and consistently failed to arrive on the golf course, his golfing plus-fours pictured hanging limply over the frame of a scarecrow instead.
    “The trouble with George,” Nat explained, “is that he has always ‘gone to Lyon ch.’”
    Three days after May’s arrival in England she was sitting in one of the brown armchairs in the front room, looking through the small collection of books on the shelves and wondering what had happened to Sarah. Simon and Nat were in the tailor’s shop, and Sam had gone down to the headquarters of the Royal Navy to investigate how he might join its voluntary service. In a corner was a tailor’s dummy dressed in the half-finished wedding suit Nat was making as a favour for a best friend. After the excitement of arrival, May was at something of a loss to know what to do with herself. Everything, the cold