The Triple Goddess Read Online Free PDF

with a sharp-edged tine such as a one-armed man might find useful to cut his food if Lady Hamilton was not around to do it for him before she peeled him a grape.
    The luncheon hour, or rather hours, because it often stretched well into the afternoon, within the Lloyd’s community was a sacrosanct time of day, and respected as an institutional art form. Amongst the broking fraternity—there was no competition between those from the different brokerage houses at lunchtime, except in the race to get to the bars: everyone knew each other at least by sight, and many of them were friends—a John Bull-ish love of boarding-school fare, and plenty of it, was accompanied by a Nordic capacity for alcohol.
    The starting gun for these marathons went off at one o’clock, and the course took between two and three hours to complete, if one were feeling athletic, unless one decided to dawdle and take the whole afternoon over it. The brokers’ gargantuan appetites were funded by expense accounts, not company canteen luncheon vouchers, on which they bogusly entertained underwriters who, at the time, were most likely eating cold Cornish pasties out of plastic wrappers at their desks, and allegedly visiting clients who were drinking, or would be in some hours owing to the time differences, bottled water in Baltimore.
    Frequently the company executive responsible for signing these creative expense account documents, which were apparently exempted from the market motto of Utmost Good Faith, was perplexed to discover that the same underwriter had been taken to lunch at six restaurants by (different of) his employees on the same day; and that instead of the transatlantic conference call he had scheduled for later that afternoon with a corporate client in Texas, the executive might more logically have asked the man, when his lavish luncheon entertainment was concluded, to stagger over to his office.
    When at one o’clock the market shut down, gaggles of brokers streamed out of Lloyd’s into the public houses in Leadenhall Market, and the plentiful wine bars and restaurants. Many crammed into the small flagstoned yard, Castle Court, between Simpson’s Tavern—which was not related to the snooty establishment on the Strand—and the George and Vulture, known as the G&V, where they would down pints of draught bitter pulled by Olive, who kept bar downstairs at Simpson’s. Olive was a diminutive and spherical blonde who daily, unaided, kept a hundred individuals continuously supplied with drink, while abusing them in a voice that could strip paint, and pouring forth along with the beer, in a Mancusian screech that rose above the din like a descant, invective that would make a sailor blush.
    After quenching their thirst with two or three pints, the brokers and their phantom guests would take the next drink and get in line for either of the two lunch rooms, upstairs or down, where they wolfed their scoff at an open-seating arrangement of bare wooden tables and benches. Others who were in no hurry to eat would remain drinking in the yard and wait for a table to become available at the G&V next door; here conditions were marginally more civilized, there were tablecloths, and one could arrange with the harassed but ever-friendly manager, Mr Hall, to come and summon one from Simpson’s when a table became vacant.
    A standard meal began with whitebait, or shrimps in a thrombotic pot of yellow butter. Hard following was rump or fillet steak accompanied by chips, sausages, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, kidneys, fried or braised onions, and bubble and squeak. This too too solid flesh (was Hamlet a vegetarian?), and trimmings were washed down with bottles of Choix du Roi red wine (pronounced Choyderoy and known as The Red Infuriator). For dessert there was jam roly-poly and custard, followed by a drenching of Sandeman’s port to anaesthetize the stomach so that it should not be overawed by the momentous digestive task ahead of it; and if that did not do the