Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📕

the document set out for Agatha built her from the inside out. The opulence she was to inherit nourished her from the day she was born until the day she claimed it.

Agatha spends much of her time contemplating that piece of paper and its hold on her. Had it not been written, her mother might not have kept her in the country, or kept her at all. She might have stuck a pin in her before she was born, or left her on the doorstep of an Orthodox church.

Agatha wonders if they would have returned to Russia. It’s unlikely: Anastasia has never shown any interest in going back, even to visit, but what else would she have done? Agatha has met friends of her mother’s who’ve not been so fortunate. They likewise attached themselves to rich men but didn’t manage to stick around. Women like her mother but not her mother tended to wash up in brothels in dark houses on council estates. Their children too were forced to grow up far too young. If it wasn’t for that piece of paper she might have been thrown into a life of poverty, alcohol and narcotics.

Roster stops the car outside the front entrance of the club and gets out of the driver’s seat to open the door for Agatha. Fedor is with her. When she steps onto the street he shows no signs of wanting to follow, but remains sprawled across the comfortable back seat, tucked up in a blanket.

“I’ll park the car and take the boy out for another run,” says Roster.

“If he lets you,” replies Agatha. “He’ll want to sleep.”

“We’ll see.”

Agatha pushes through the heavy doors into the foyer. She’s met by a porter who looks at her trousers and opens his mouth as if wanting to say something about them. Female guests are required to wear skirts. He hesitates. Most of the staff in the club are from Eastern Europe and are likely to speak a little Russian as well as English. She says to him in Russian: “Does it matter?”

He looks up at her, startled by the choice of language, and replies, also in Russian. “Not to me, but if we don’t at least try to enforce the rules, we suffer for it.”

“I’m not going home to change my clothes,” she says in Russian. “So you’ll have to suffer.”

The porter’s face begins to redden. He looks down at his clipboard but does nothing to counter her barb. In English, he asks for the name of her host.

“Tobias Elton. He’ll be in the Trafalgar Room.”

Each time Agatha comes to this club, she is struck by its shabbiness. It fills a townhouse on one of the most expensive squares in the capital, but its interior is decrepit. The aesthetic is so pronounced, it must be deliberate. Expensive carpets are worn thin and antique furniture is scuffed, because what does it matter to these men, presumably? Renovation is a bourgeois concern.

The porter opens the door of the Trafalgar Room and stands back so Agatha can go in, then closes the door behind her. On the walls, there are portraits of British men who may once have been notable but have since been forgotten. Tobias is sitting in a deep leather armchair by one of the tall bay windows. As Agatha approaches, he doesn’t get up, she notes. He does, however, pour milk into a cup followed by tea from a silver pot, then slides it in her direction. She sits down opposite him and crosses her arms and legs.

In recent weeks, there have only been two topics to discuss: the evictions in Soho, and Agatha’s sisters. Agatha gets on well with her eldest sister, Valerie, who was born when her father was a teenager, is now elderly, and still lives in the village in which she grew up. The next three, Chelsea, Angel and Victoria, are an active and continuous nuisance. Not one of them seems to have anything to do outside harassing her, and they are still making claims on her money.

When Agatha was a child, her sisters tried to have their father’s will overturned on the grounds of diminished capacity, but the argument didn’t stick. It was possible he wasn’t in his right mind when he had the will drawn up but, then again, he may never have been in his right mind. Not having met the man, Agatha’s understanding of his character is borrowed, constructed piecemeal from offhand remarks, overheard conversations and—from those seeking to ingratiate themselves with her—hagiographies. The impression she has is crude but it is of a man who was darkly charismatic and often unhinged. She has heard stories of violent outbursts, of petty revenge. She remembers sitting in the back seat of a car when she was very young, pretending to listen to her portable cassette player while eavesdropping on the adults’ conversation. Roster was in the front speaking with another man she didn’t recognize. They mentioned a room behind her father’s Soho office full of waxwork statues, like those found at Madame Tussauds on Marylebone Road. They said that when her father didn’t like somebody, or when they did something that angered him, he showed them the waxworks. Agatha hadn’t fully understood the story, the significance of the statues or why her father’s adversaries would be so frightened by them, and as the years passed the details she remembered became detached from those she had actually heard. But the image stayed with her. When she was older, she looked for the room but didn’t find anything, and when she asked Roster he claimed not to know what she was talking about.

The trouble for Chelsea, Angel and Victoria was that they needed to navigate legal channels to wrestle from their sister a fortune that was earned illegally. After failing to overturn the will, their approach has been incendiary rather than incisive. Now, their aim seems not to be to take control of the business but to destroy it, along with Agatha. They believe