18After the row overnight Ellis was looking forward to a week of baiting Flory. He had nicknamed him Nancy – short for n****r’s Nancy Boy, but the women did not know that – and was already inventing wild scandals about him. Ellis always invented scandals about anyone with whom he had quarrelled – scandals which grew, by repeated embroideries, into a species of saga. Flory’s incautious remark that Dr Veraswami was a ‘damned good fellow’ had swelled before long into a whole Daily Worker-ful of blasphemy and sedition.
‘On my honour, Mrs Lackersteen,’ said Ellis – Mrs Lackersteen had taken a sudden dislike to Flory after discovering the great secret about Verrall, and she was quite ready to listen to Ellis’s tales – ‘on my honour, if you’d been there last night and heard the things that man F
