‘Rather fun, wasn’t it, this evening?’ he said.
‘What did you think of Robert?’
‘Oh … seemed a smart young fellow. Quite amusing. Quite pleased with himself. I imagine he would have enjoyed that little performance of yours just then.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said with a half-laugh.
‘But weren’t you two –?’
‘God, years ago! He was a virgin when we first met.’
‘You mean to say you deflowered him? No wonder he was making those calf-eyes at you.’
Freya shook her head. ‘Flattered as I am, I can assure you it wasn’t me he was after. It was Nancy – couldn’t you tell?’
She could sense him making up his mind. ‘Maybe it was both of you,’ he said, leaning over to switch off the bedside lamp. For some moments they lay in silence, listening to the occasional sounds of the street – footsteps, a door closing. A car slid by the house, its headlamps casting a wobbly pattern of lights across the bedroom ceiling.
She thought again about Robert. She had wondered before this evening if their long separation might have had an estranging effect, but they had settled into their old friendship without any awkwardness. The years between them had just fallen away. She was not mistaken, though, about his particular attentiveness towards Nancy; he had never been good at dissembling. Had Nancy noticed it, too? Much as she liked him, Freya could not regard Robert as dependable – too selfish, too easily bored. The danger was that both of them were on the rebound, Nancy from Stewart, Robert from his marriage. They would have stories to swap, she supposed. Her mind drifted on, turning up scenes, conversations, from their past together. An involuntary laugh escaped her.
In the dark she felt Joss turn to face her. ‘What’s funny?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, but he was curious, and pressed her. ‘I was just remembering. Talking about Robert set me off – his “deflowering”, as you charmingly put it.’
‘Ah. Dreaming about the old flame …’
‘No, nothing like that. Don’t get cross about this, but after the first time we had, you know – Robert rolled off me and said something –’ she began to laugh properly as the words resurfaced – ‘he said, “You’re not just a woman, you’re a right good chap, too.” I’m sorry –’ The laughter seemed to seize hold and shake her – she couldn’t help it.
Next to her, Joss harrumphed with a kind of scornful amusement and waited for her fit to exhaust itself. When at last she was calm she put a placatory hand on his shoulder.
‘Sorry. It seemed funny at the time.’ There came no reply from him, and she wondered if she had said too much: men didn’t tend to like it when you recounted episodes from your sexual history, even in jest. Perhaps especially in jest – one day they might end up the butt of the joke. Into the silence she said, ‘Oh dear. Now you must be thinking me some awful virgin-despoiling slut.’
She waited for a reaction, half wishing she hadn’t been so unguarded. ‘Not really,’ he said, putting his hand to hers. ‘I think you’re a right good chap.’
16
Robert proved himself a friend during her first few weeks at the Envoy. Though he had not been there long, he had quickly commended himself to the staff. He seemed at home as he introduced Freya around the place, and she was quietly impressed that some of the older hacks would hail him on sight. Most of them called him ‘Robert’, and sometimes ‘Bob’, a diminutive she knew he hated but never made a point of correcting. He got on with people, flattering them like an agent with his clients. The volatile, combative youth of Oxford days had mastered his moods, and had come to learn discretion. Once, as Freya was relaying some gossip about a mutual acquaintance to a circle of staffers, Robert had smoothly interrupted her and steered the conversation elsewhere. When she mentioned this to him later, he explained that the man Freya had been discussing was a close friend of a senior staffer: it might not reflect well on her to be seen passing on tittle-tattle, however innocently she had come by it. But he often gossiped about people, she objected. ‘Yes. Behind everyone’s back,’ he replied. Robert had done it as a favour, but she realised he meant it as a lesson.
She started to notice the subtle ways in which he would play one person off against another and yet stay friendly with both. Whenever she happened to attend an editorial conference she was fascinated by the impression of plausibility he created around himself: he never raised his voice, yet he always had his say. If discussions became heated, or tempers threatened to boil over, Robert would step in to cushion egos and dilute the tension. Where once he thrived on contrariness and discord now he was the office peacemaker – the Envoy’s very own Francis of Assisi.
But she soon discovered that Robert hadn’t lost his old acerbity; he had simply learned to hide it, like an assassin his dagger. Whenever Freya got him on his own, at lunch or over a drink after work, it came almost as a relief to hear him skewering this or that colleague. ‘That cockchafer,’ he said, a favourite new word of his. The irreverent cheek of Lucky Jim continued to obsess him, and as well as quoting lines and pulling faces he would rail, in Jim-like fashion, against the stifling conspiracies of deference and superiority that kept young chaps like himself ‘in their place’. Freya heard hypocrisy in this, and pointed out to him his own tendency to flatter those in charge. But Robert shook his head and claimed it was purely strategic on his part; if he was to get where he intended then ‘sucking up’ to the bigwigs was part of the deal. So where did he intend to be? she asked. Robert replied with a look she would never forget: it was a droll sort of frown that seemed on the one hand to question her need to ask, and on the other implied that, since she had asked, well, wherever he damn well pleased.
Their renewed friendship naturally enfolded Nancy in its compass. Because Robert was lodging in a grim Mile End bedsitter – his divorce had reduced him to a ‘pauper’ – they tended to socialise at Great James Street. If they were cobbling together a supper in the kitchen he would often be included. She found herself observing Nancy and Robert together, but couldn’t detect any romantic current crackling between them. He flirted, on reflex, with almost every woman he knew, and Nancy, still brooding on the end of her affair with Stewart, seemed content with being friendly. The past infused the air around them like pollen. They talked about Oxford and the friends they had made there, and only one subject, the short-lived passion between Robert and Freya, remained taboo.
One of the first things she did at the Envoy was to set about nailing down an interview with Jerry Dicks. It wasn’t easily done. When she rang his flat in Soho the same young man would answer and claim no knowledge of his whereabouts. On telephoning his studio an assistant said he was ‘on the Continent’, but couldn’t be more specific. Eventually the gallery let her know that Jerry was back in town and would meet her at the Café Royal at one o’clock the following day; she arrived ten minutes early and waited for over an hour. He didn’t show.
Later that week she was informed that Jerry had ‘forgotten’ their appointment (no apology) and would meet her at his club on Dean Street. This turned out to be a narrow uncarpeted room on the second floor above a grocer’s shop. Behind the bar stood a woman, perhaps fifty, her face a clown’s mask of make-up touched with a glitter of malignity; upon seeing Freya enter she fairly screeched, ‘Members only!’ The clientele sat in attitudes of vacancy, shoulders slumped over their drinks. Freya told the woman she was there to meet Jerry Dicks, to which she replied, sourly, that he was barred. ‘’Asn’t paid a fuckin’ bill here for three years.’ At the end of the bar a head lifted; a man mumbled something about finding Jerry in ‘the Dutch’, round the corner.
Back on Dean Street she endured a little pang as she passed Gennaro’s, where she hadn’t set foot in years, not since her nightmare performance at lunch after VE Day. She sometimes reminisced about it with Nancy, who said that it was the only occasion she had ever seen her look ‘inconsolable’. She walked on to Old Compton Street and into Soho’s lunchtime foot traffi
c of draymen and grocers and shopboys. A newsagent was twirling a pole to draw down the striped awning on his window. The late-spring sky, tinged with blue, held a promise of warmth to come. She had never been in the Dutchman’s Cape, a retiring little pub on Romilly Street. Outside, an aproned barman was sluicing the pavement with a bucket of soapy water. Seeing nobody she recognised in the front bar she tried the room upstairs; athwart the landing lay a brindled whippet, whose mournful brown gaze seemed familiar to her.
She passed through into the room, where huge gilt French mirrors played a trick of perspective by seeming to double the size of it. There, reclining on a horsehair couch in the corner, was the whippet’s owner, Hetty, whom she had last seen at the Villiers in March. When Freya called her name there was no recognition in her look, though curiosity induced her to rise from the sofa and approach, her hip-swaying model’s walk only a little unsteady.
‘I’m looking for your friend Jerry. He’s rather elusive.’
‘That’s the way he likes it,’ she said with a sloppy smile.
Glancing at her watch Hetty said she’d just make a telephone call if Freya wanted to wait. Her right eye, she now noticed, had the tiniest cast in it, the flaw that rendered her face more human, and therefore more beautiful. While she was gone Freya looked around the room, the blinds drawn to shield the little huddles of twos and threes, drinking, murmuring; it was a sanctum for the sort of people who regarded daylight as an unsatisfactory hiatus between nights, when the real fun happened. Soho was honeycombed with such bolt-holes, hideaways, dens; you could never know how many there were.
‘He’s there now,’ said Hetty, returning. ‘I’ll take you.’
With Rhoda the whippet trotting at their side they moseyed deeper into Soho. In a quiet flagged court Hetty stopped and rang the bell at an unassuming doorway. Some moments later a gangly youth she addressed as Kenny admitted them. They followed him up a staircase whose precarious wooden banisters hadn’t seen paint in years. The flat, on the second floor, was seedy even by the standards of its fly-by-night neighbours; grimy net curtains muffled the daylight, and hairline cracks zigzagged along the lumpy plastered walls. It hardly seemed fit habitation for a renowned photographer. But then Jerry Dicks himself hardly answered to the type. They found him in the living room, sitting cross-legged in an exhausted armchair, the air almost blue from cigarette smoke. He was wearing a collarless shirt and grey trousers with thin braces pooling about his waist like the dropped strings of a marionette. He stared from unsmiling eyes at Freya and made no movement other than to drag deeply on his Turkish cigarette.
Hetty performed the introduction. Dicks nodded, and scraped the glowing tip of his cigarette against the ashtray. His small head was accentuated by his outsize ears, which protruded like the handles of a prize cup.
‘The Envoy. That’s the lefty one, isn’t it?’ he said.
Freya tipped her head. ‘It has liberal sympathies. I’m sorry we didn’t manage to meet the other day – at the Café Royal.’
‘Oh. Were we meant to? Kenny –’ Dicks nodded at his assistant – ‘takes down all the phone messages. Can’t read his bleedin’ handwriting most of the time.’ Kenny murmured an apology and disappeared somewhere. A silence fell, so Freya began to explain the profile of him she had planned, how it would require a couple of afternoons just talking, with perhaps a look through his archive to pick out a few of his favourite portraits – she felt sure he had some stories to tell …
Dicks stared off, a blank. He couldn’t have been less interested. Then, without warning, his face broke into a wide grin that revealed his irregular discoloured teeth. Freya was disarmed for a split second until she saw what had occasioned this remarkable change: Rhoda, the whippet, had just slunk into the room, and Dicks, leaning forward, picked her up with avuncular fondness.
‘Ahhh … me pal!’ he cried, stroking the dog’s narrow head. His smile was entranced.
Hetty, watching this reunion, said with a laugh, ‘You look a bit like her, you know.’ And Freya too now saw a certain kinship in the dark eyes and pointy features of dog and man.
Jerry, after some more petting of Rhoda, addressed the business in hand. ‘So, an interview … How much?’ His eyes were back on Freya.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean, how much do I get paid for it?’
‘Well – nothing,’ she said. ‘We don’t pay anyone to be interviewed.’
Dicks gave her a disbelieving look. ‘What? You’re expecting me to give up my time for nowt?’
‘It doesn’t work like that, darling,’ said Hetty. ‘It’d be like a sitter asking you to pay them for taking their picture.’
‘I pay you!’ he said accusingly.
‘Not much. And you don’t pay me in any case, it’s the agency.’
But Dicks grumbled on; he couldn’t understand why he should put himself out for nothing. He had a living to make, didn’t he? Hetty, in a patient voice, reasoned with him, explaining the deal: the newspaper got the interview, the photographer got the publicity, and both of them got the benefit in sales and reputation. He still looked unimpressed, and Freya realised that she would have to win him round personally. As far as he was concerned she was just a face he didn’t know, from a newspaper he never read – a pest, in short.
‘By the way,’ she began, ‘I called in at your club earlier. Vera was asking after you.’
Dicks paused, momentarily thrown that she knew either his club or its proprietor. ‘Haven’t been in there for a while. Vera – la vieille dame sans merci! Did she really ask after me?’
Freya caught his eye, and gave a little comic grimace. ‘To be honest, no. What she said was, “Tell the cunt he owes me money.”’
Dicks, not expecting this verbal slap, tucked in his chin: she had flashed him the merest glimpse of personality, but it was enough. He threw back his head and cackled mightily. Hetty, she saw, was giving her a knowing look. There was something expansive and forgiving in Jerry’s tone as he told her about Vera. They’d known each other from way back, of course – Vera had been running the Dean Street club for years, ‘with all the charm of a Soviet border guard’.
‘Yeah,’ he reflected, ‘she’s a hero to thousands, that woman, and not a fuckin’ friend in the world, ha ha!’ His laugh, initially vigorous, had turned wheezing.
‘So, Jerry,’ said Hetty, perhaps sensing the moment, ‘I’m sure you can see your way to chatting for an hour or two with Freya here. Your picture in the paper – what d’you say?’
Dicks shook out another cigarette and lit it. He gulped down the smoke. ‘Dare say I can. I’ll even put on a shirt and collar for yer,’ he added with a giggle. ‘But you’ll need to gimme some notice. Twiggez-vous?’
‘What sort of notice?’ asked Freya.
‘Oh, a few weeks. I’ve got a shoot to do in Paris next week, then it’s on to Zurich, Genoa, Milan. I tell you, I’ll need a fuckin’ rest cure by the time I get back.’
Freya asked him if they might arrange a meeting before he went on his travels, but Jerry wouldn’t hear of it. Hetty had a try too, but it was really like arguing with a spoilt child. Eventually the door knocker sounded from below to break the impasse, and Kenny came up escorting a couple of men, both hard-faced and businesslike in suits. They offered neither a greeting nor a smile, not even for Rhoda the whippet. Hetty, without exchanging a word with the newcomers, signalled to Freya that it was time to leave. Jerry waggled his hand in a half-hearted goodbye.
‘Stubborn old bugger, isn’t he?’ said Hetty as she accompanied Freya down the stairs.
‘I’ll winkle him out somehow. We have a friend in common – Nat Fane –’
‘Yeah, I saw you talking to him at the Villiers that night. Nat’s rather fascinated by Jerry. Maybe a bit envious of him, too.’
‘Envious? Why?’
Hetty’s smile was enigmatic. ‘Well – Jerry lives on his own terms. He does what he likes, because he doesn’t care what people think of him. Nat, though, he
really cares what people think.’
They were at the door when Freya said, ‘Those two men who just came in – who were they?’
‘Oh, Jerry knows all sorts of villains,’ she said. ‘He’s always up to something – I think those two buy up his dirty pictures to sell in the clubs round here.’
‘Really?’
‘Nothing very serious. Boys with big cocks, stuff like that. It’s quite a nice earner for him.’
‘Does he need to? I mean, with Vogue, and the gallery –’
‘Jerry’s terrible with money – he runs through it. Why d’you think he was so keen to charge for an interview?’ They stood talking for a few minutes more outside the flat. Freya was about to leave when Hetty, almost as an afterthought, put out a restraining hand. ‘I was forgetting you work for a paper. What I mentioned about Jerry and his pictures – can you keep mum?’
Freya nodded, of course she would. Hetty held her gaze for a moment, and smiled. ‘I only told you that cos I like you.’
The verdict in the trial of Vere Summerhill was out. The defendant was found guilty of committing acts of gross indecency with two young naval ratings and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. At the Envoy that afternoon Robert and Freya were summoned to the editor’s office: Standish was planning to run a series of articles about the case.
‘I want the repercussions of it examined from every angle – talk to the judge, to the Director of Public Prosecutions, to the police. We should also get an interview with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office about homosexuality on the stage – we have to find out whether Summerhill will ever be allowed to work in theatre again.’
‘There’s also the medical point of view to consider,’ said Robert. ‘Some doctors believe that queers can be, well, cured by treatment – electric shock therapy, female sex hormones and what have you.’
Standish looked doubtful. ‘Yes, but we can’t make it too explicit. Our readers don’t like that stuff forced down their throat – as it were.’
Freya Page 24
