‘You make me sound like a peeping Tom,’ Freya protested. ‘I was only there because it was my dad’s old staircase. The last thing I expected was some youth bursting through the door with his privates on parade.’
‘I made rather a fuss, didn’t I?’ said Robert, grinning.
‘Yes – and over such a little thing,’ she replied with a sly look.
‘You didn’t even blush!’ Robert said, shaking his head.
‘I’ve never seen Freya blush,’ said Rowan, ‘not even when we were little. But she was good at making other people do so.’
‘She’s toned the language down a bit,’ said Elspeth, continuing this third-person appraisal as though Freya herself were not there, ‘though I always laugh to recall the first time someone got on the wrong side of her. These production managers came in, and one of them saw Freya and said, “Coffee for the three of us, love.” Freya just said, “The kettle’s over there. And I’m not your fucking love” – the whole room went into shock.’
Joss laughed and, having filled everyone’s glass, said in a heightened formal way, ‘Well, now we’re all here, let’s have a toast and wish all the best to Freya in her new job.’
As the toast was echoed around the table Freya caught Joss’s eye and raised her glass, touched by a show of support that had been rather slow in coming. When she had first told him about the job offer from the Envoy he had looked incredulous. He asked her if she was unhappy at Frame. From his expression she could see he didn’t understand, not really, given what the magazine had done for her. Thinking about it later, she realised she could never be absolutely truthful with Joss about her reasons for leaving. For one thing, she sensed that the magazine’s decline was terminal, and that if television didn’t finish it off then indecision and faint-heartedness ‘from upstairs’ surely would. Her estimation of Brian Mowbray’s editorial capability was low, and the Jerry Dicks business had only confirmed it.
But there was another, deeper impulse behind her decision. She was more driven than Joss suspected. Joss himself was content in a position where she, at his age, probably would not have been; he had settled for deputy instead of pressing for the editorship, or else moving on. Freya wanted her journalism to be read, she wanted her name to be reckoned with. She knew this would always be difficult as a woman, and that it would be doubly difficult if she stayed at Frame.
Across the table Elspeth and Joss were chatting away to Rowan, whose nine years at Cambridge had set hard a shell of personal eccentricity first fired in the kiln of his schooldays at Tipton. A junior fellow in mathematics, at twenty-six he had somehow absorbed the manner of a seventy-year-old archbishop. It was mysterious to her that he was academically accomplished, and in maths of all things, a subject about which nobody else in the family had the smallest clue. It was entirely like him to have arrived out of the blue, and to be sporting, for no discernible reason, a black reefer jacket and a pair of tartan trews. She and Nancy had been preparing dinner while he mooched around.
‘Are you going to do the Gay Gordons later?’ said Freya, nodding at his attire.
Rowan gave her a blank look. ‘Oh, I thought it was just dinner – there’ll be dancing too?’
She looked at Nancy, who laughed and said, kindly, ‘No, nothing like that. We were just admiring those trousers of yours.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the compliment at face value. ‘Got them in a second-hand clothes shop. My landlady did the alterations on her sewing machine.’
Freya’s attention was now diverted by something Fosh was telling Ginny. He had been at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court that morning to photograph Vere Summerhill, an actor and West End star presently on trial for committing ‘indecent acts’ with two naval ratings. Freya had been following the trial.
‘I felt that sorry for the chap,’ said Fosh (no one called him Arthur). ‘He looks like he’s aged about ten years in two weeks.’
‘D’you think anything can save him?’ asked Ginny.
Fosh pulled a dubious expression. ‘A miracle? There seems to be a bit of a witch-hunt against queers at the moment. You heard what the Home Secretary called them – “a danger to others, especially the young.”’
‘The charge is “acts of gross indecency,”’ said Joss. ‘Apparently the phrase hasn’t come up in a court since the trials of poor old Oscar.’
‘From what I’ve heard,’ said Freya, ‘the prosecution’s case is a sham. Summerhill picked up the two sailors at a pub and took them home. The next day, after the men left his house, they got into a fight with two others in a club. Beat them up. One of the victims turned out to be a policeman. When the sailors were arrested and the story came out about their night with Summerhill, the police did a deal. In return for dropping the assault charges the men would testify against Summerhill, claim they were “surprised” by his advances and tried to resist. Can you imagine – two strapping brutes like that being “overpowered” by a fifty-year-old actor?’
‘Where did you hear all this?’ asked Elspeth.
‘From Nat Fane. He’s standing bail for Vere.’
Robert spluttered out a laugh. ‘If that doesn’t condemn him in the eyes of the jury, nothing will.’
‘I hope I’d have such a friend in the circumstances,’ said Freya with a sharp note of reproof.
Robert said, half chastened, ‘Yes, quite so. All you can really damn Vere Summerhill for is being an actor of gross indecency.’
‘Robert,’ said Nancy, marking his flippancy with a shake of her head.
‘My apologies,’ he said, grasping her hand in supplication. ‘I take it back. Though I can’t help thinking the fellow should have been more careful. Everyone knows that the best thing to do if you’re queer is keep a low profile.’
‘But why should he have to?’ asked Freya. ‘The very idea of punishing someone for what he does in the privacy of his bedroom – it’s shameful.’
‘I’m afraid not everyone’s so tolerant,’ said Joss. ‘As long as the government insists on criminalising homosexual acts and treating the likes of Summerhill as outlaws, privacy can go hang.’
‘The press must take a share of the blame, though, don’t you think?’ said Nancy. ‘They so enjoy stirring up people’s outrage with talk of “unnatural vices” and “lurking evil”. And as Fosh says, they always invoke the young as if they’re some defenceless species, ready to be exploited. Those sailors that Summerhill picked up were twenty-one and twenty-two. That’s young, isn’t it? Yet they both knew what they were doing when they went back home with him.’
‘Of course they did. And when they were given a chance to save their skins they, well, jumped on the lifeboat.’
‘Like rats from …?’ suggested Robert.
Freya stood up. ‘Right. While you’re belabouring the metaphor may I help anyone to more of Nancy’s casserole?’
The plight of Vere Summerhill continued to occupy the table. While Freya was serving seconds in the kitchen Robert wandered in and offered to help. They talked a little about the Envoy, and what date had been set for her to start there.
Robert, gazing around in a noticing way, suddenly said, ‘So, you and Nancy. How long have you been here together?’
‘Nearly three years now.’
He nodded distractedly, and said, ‘What she was saying about the press just then – is it a bit awkward for you that she’s anti-newspapers?’
‘But she’s not. She’s just against their prurient moralising. On that subject I’m in perfect agreement with her.’
‘She’s changed quite a lot since the old days. Not afraid to speak up. And something about her looks – she’s become more, I don’t know, womanly.’
Freya stopped spooning out the casserole to look round at him. ‘Yes, and she can cook, too. All a man’s heart could desire.’
Robert heard the challenging insinuation, and laughed. ‘No, no, I didn’t mean – I’ve got an ex-wife and a lawyer’s bill to think about.’
His words were resigned, a
nd yet in his tentative tone Freya could detect a quickening of interest. Whatever responsibilities lay on him, Robert was not the type to settle into solitariness. He had never liked being on his own.
‘Is she angry, your ex-wife?’
‘I should say so. We married too young –’ he looked contrite as he said it – ‘but I could have made it easier for her. I didn’t, and I’m damned sorry for it.’ Freya was sorry, too. An impulse of devilry had prompted her question, and she had accidentally pressed a tender spot. In apology she offered him a comradely smile.
‘Here,’ she said, presenting plates to carry, ‘this one’s Elspeth’s, the other’s for Ginny.’
He took them from her, and returned to the living room. As she opened another bottle of wine at the sink she considered Robert in the light of his marital disaster. He did seem to have been humbled by the experience; he was more thoughtful, less abrasive than the youth she had known. He had always had a roguish formality in company, but he had also learned manners from somewhere. His wife? That he was back on the market was certain, and she sensed there would be no shortage of women throwing their hats into the ring.
By the time she rejoined them Robert was entertaining the table with a little vaudevillian routine, pulling his face into contortions that shaded towards the grotesque. He had just demonstrated his ‘shot-in-the-back face’ and was now testing his ‘Martian-invader face’. Ginny and Nancy were both helpless with laughter. The men were more loftily amused. Freya watched him for a few moments, and realised what was afoot.
‘Can you do a “sex-life-in-ancient-Rome face”?’ she asked him.
Robert blinked his surprise. ‘How did you –?’
‘Lucky Jim, I believe?’
He threw his hands up and said, ‘At last – someone else who’s read it! Will you please tell them what a bloody marvellous book it is?’
‘It’s very funny, in parts. Nance, you remember me in stitches a few weeks ago reading that library book?’
Nancy’s frown cleared into recognition. ‘Oh, so that was it? Gosh, I wish I’d borrowed it from you now.’
‘I’ll lend you mine,’ said Robert eagerly. He looked around the table. ‘It isn’t just a comedy, though. It’s a sort of blast against all that’s stuffy and pompous and narrow-minded about this country. “Merrie England”! It feels like –’ he seemed to be searching for the momentous phrase – ‘like the book I’ve been waiting to read all my life.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Joss mildly.
Robert, seizing on his ally, said to Freya, ‘Didn’t you think it was something written just for people like us?’
Freya allowed a pause before she answered. ‘It is terribly funny. You can’t fault it for entertainment. But I wasn’t so enamoured of Dixon. He seems to me – well, a selfish sod, actually.’
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Robert, frowning.
Freya, aware that nobody else at the table knew the book, decided to keep it brief. ‘He’s an assistant lecturer who wants to get on but despises academia and the people in it. He hates his boss and his awful son – which you can understand – but he also hates the woman he’s involved with, Margaret, who’s a bit of a pill, it’s true, but hardly the loathsome witch he makes her out to be. There’s something self-congratulatory there, and an underlying nastiness about women – like he’s settling a score.’
Robert gave her a blank look. ‘Are you joking? What about Christine?’
‘Well, he fancies her, and wants to get her into bed. But that doesn’t mean he particularly likes her.’
‘I think you’ve misread him,’ said Robert, shaking his head. ‘Dixon exaggerates his resentments for comic effect. He’s bored and frustrated by the people above him, by the situation he’s in – but not by women. He’s just fed up with the woman he’s with.’
‘Possibly,’ said Freya, in a voice that implied very little possibility at all.
‘Oh, Freya! I wish someone else had – Nancy, I’m going to insist that you read this and tell me I’m right.’
Nancy gave a tolerant lift of her chin. ‘After this I feel I must.’
Ginny, still giggling, said, ‘But, Robert, you didn’t answer Freya’s original question – can you do, what is it, a “sex-life-in-ancient-Rome face”?’
Robert smirked, and composed himself before narrowing his eyes and protruding his lower lip in a mime of gormless lechery. This time they fell about laughing, even the men, and Robert obliged them, without much persuasion, by performing an encore.
Freya, recovering herself, said, ‘Very good, though as I recall it doesn’t seem very different from your “sex-life-in-Oxford-University face”.’
‘– and that wasn’t even an act,’ added Nancy, at which Robert roared in a nervous show of mirth.
Over pudding – Freya had made a chocolate mousse – Elspeth told them about a news item her mother had sent her from their local paper in Lancashire. The town had recently been presented with a pair of statues, the work of a renowned sculptor, who unveiled them with great to-do at the town hall. Elspeth’s mother had enclosed a photograph of the statues with the news story.
‘What I hadn’t realised, of course,’ said Elspeth, ‘was that the figures were male and female nudes. Now no one here would bat an eyelid at them, but up in the provinces … The newspaper recorded the mayor’s comments on inspecting the statues. He said, and I quote, “Art is art, and nothing can be done to prevent it. But there is the mayoress’s decency to be considered.”’
‘Quite right, too,’ said Fosh, laughing. ‘I only hope they didn’t offend the eyes of your sainted mama, Elspeth.’
‘Funny, isn’t it? She just wrote, “They did look awfully nice together,” as if they were off on honeymoon or something.’
‘Oh, bless your mother!’ said Nancy. ‘My father would have been shoulder to shoulder with the mayor, I’m afraid.’
‘My God, this country,’ said Robert, eyes half closed in disbelief. ‘Has there ever been a place for such puritanical, curtain-twitching killjoys? I beg your pardon, Nancy, I don’t mean your father any disrespect –’
‘None taken,’ Nancy smiled. ‘He’s Catholic, in any case, not puritan. He’d be horrified even to hear such things discussed.’
‘It does seem we’ve talked about nothing but sex this evening,’ said Freya.
‘Yes, as the oldest person here I must say I’m shocked by your modern ways,’ said Joss.
‘How old are you, by the way?’ asked Rowan, out of nowhere.
Joss angled his head to the question. ‘I’m – how old d’you think I am?’
‘Dunno,’ said Rowan. ‘About fifty?’
Freya burst out laughing. ‘He’s thirty-nine! Sorry, darling,’ she said to Joss, who looked slightly stunned. ‘Rowan, I think as penance you should go and make the coffee. There’s a pot on the shelf above the sink.’
Rowan obediently rose from the table and headed off to the kitchen. Elspeth widened her eyes comically. ‘Glad he didn’t try to guess my age.’
Joss looked across to Freya. ‘Isn’t he meant to be good with numbers, your brother?’
‘I don’t think maths at Cambridge helps in this instance,’ said Freya, who dropped her voice. ‘Rowan’s not very worldly, as you can probably tell. I have the feeling that most conversation passes him by.’
‘He’s very sweet, though,’ said Nancy. ‘He regards Freya like some kind of deity.’
‘Not an assumption Freya would necessarily discourage,’ said Joss drily.
‘He certainly jumped to it when you told him to go and make the coffee,’ observed Ginny.
The talk had moved on to other things by the time Rowan returned from the kitchen bearing a tray with cups and a twin-handled clay vessel. Freya looked at it for a moment: whisps of steam were rising from its narrow neck.
‘Rowan, why have you brought that old thing in?’
‘You said there was a pot above the sink, so I made the coffee in it.’
‘That’s
actually an amphora. Mum brought it back from Corfu. It’s not –’ She looked at Rowan, his face a perfect blank of incomprehension. ‘Oh, never mind. Greek coffee, anyone?’
Elspeth, Ginny and Fosh left around midnight. Robert stayed on for another nightcap, gossiping about life at the Envoy and the state of office politics there – ‘like the Balkans,’ he said. Only when Nancy yawned behind her hand did Robert twig it was time for him to leave. After clearing the dinner table Joss helped Freya make up the divan for Rowan, who stripped down to his shorts to perform a bizarre series of exercises before settling down. Sometimes she hardly knew what to say to him.
Joss was already in bed by the time she had finished tidying up in the kitchen. The bedside lamp cast a feeble glow. Outside she could hear the occasional hiss of car tyres along the street; it had been raining. She put a record on the turntable and placed the needle on its revolving edge. It was Thelonius Monk’s ‘Well, You Needn’t’, whose tune she couldn’t get out of her head.
Joss watched her as she got undressed. ‘Won’t you keep him awake with that?’
‘He’s probably asleep.’
He said, after a pause, ‘My God, do I really look fifty?’
Freya chuckled at his half-wondering, half-pleading tone. ‘Nothing like. I think your grey hair confused him. Pay no mind – Rowan hardly knows his own age.’
He didn’t reply; she could tell from his silence that he was mulling on it. An idea sparked in her head. She went to her stack of records and picked out an old Dinah Shore album. She replaced the Monk with it, having checked the song she wanted, and dropped the needle again.
‘Here, this one’s for you,’ she said, as the lyric wafted across the music’s stately swing.
I may be wrong, but – I think you’re wonderful!
I may be wrong, but – I think you’re swell!
I like your style, say – I think it’s marvellous.
I’m always wrong, so how can I tell?
Still in her slip she did a little shimmy around the bed. By the end she had laughed him out of his drooping mood. She accepted his ‘bravo’ with a bow, and climbed into bed.
Freya Page 23
