‘Jerry, Miss Wyley’s here –’
He glanced briefly over his shoulder and grunted something, which the assistant took to be a dismissal; she gave Freya an apologetic smile and started backing out of the room.
‘Shut the door behind yer,’ Jerry called. Still with his back to Freya he said, ‘Have a gander at these.’
She came over to the long table and stood beside him. He handed her his magnifying loupe and pointed at the contact sheet that had been absorbing him. She placed the loupe over the strip, bending her head to look – and was startled to see a black-and-white portrait of Hetty sprawled naked on an unmade bed. The coincidence of what she’d just been remembering on the Tube was almost sinister. Was Jerry already wise to what had happened at Nat’s? But when she stole a glance at his face she read nothing sly or knowing in his expression; it really was a coincidence.
‘These are recent?’ she said, to cover her confusion.
‘A week ago. Tip-top, ain’t they?’
Freya murmured her agreement, her eye moving along the strip of multiple Hettys, standing or reclining, hardly seeming aware of the camera’s lens. She could just make out the dark cleft between her legs.
‘She’s never coy, is she – with the camera?’
Jerry nodded. ‘Like it’s no odds to her whether she’s wearin’ clothes or not.’ The pictures were intended for Ossie, he added, who sometimes preferred to paint her from photographs.
He carefully slid the contact sheets into a frosted-paper sleeve, and paused, as though something had just occurred to him.
‘She must hold you in very high esteem – Het’s never asked me for a favour like this.’
He took out a small key, which he used to unlock one of the table’s built-in drawers. He extracted two buff-coloured envelopes, and tipped a sheaf of photographs from each onto the worktop.
‘I do hope these won’t shock you,’ he said with a snigger. He arranged the photographs side by side, with the watchful air of a street seller displaying his wares to a customer. There were about thirty of them, ten by eights in black and white. Jerry explained that they had one thing in common: all were taken at the Myrmidon Club.
‘So, your friend – what’s-his-name – he may be in there.’
A few were of men formally posed in drag, gaudy with make-up; others were hurried snapshots of men in company, drinking, kissing, fondling. Some were more explicit. She had leafed through them all once, and was about to say that he wasn’t in any of them when a face sprang out at her. The heavy mascara and rouge might almost have been a disguise; but she knew those eyes for certain. Alex was standing arm in arm with another man, similarly made up. Both wore stockings and suspenders.
‘That’s him,’ she said quietly.
Jerry peered at the shot. ‘Ain’t she pretty?’ he laughed.
‘You took this?’ she said.
He returned an incredulous face. ‘You must be kidding. That’s some tuppenny smudger’s.’ His pride had been piqued.
‘So why have you got it?’ she pursued, baffled.
Jerry sniffed. ‘I’ve got a darkroom. Sewell pays me for the developin’. It’s not like he can take this stuff to Boots the chemist.’
She looked at the photograph again, and her heart turned over to think of Alex, so discreet about his private life even his close friends had never suspected. Now the life had been breached.
Trying to keep her voice steady, she said, ‘You won’t know this, but he worked for MI5 during the war – my friend there.’
Jerry shrugged. ‘So he did his bit. Won’t help him if these come out.’
She felt a lurch of indignation at his callous tone, and stifled it. He was trying to help her, after all. She asked him what would happen next, and Jerry said, in the same illusionless way, that he’d be ‘in touch’ with Vernon Sewell – though he couldn’t make any promises.
‘I want to come with you – when you meet,’ she said to him.
Jerry gave her a sceptical look. ‘I don’t think so. Vern’s not nice, I told yer. He doesn’t like women – doesn’t like anyone much.’
‘I don’t care. I want to come. Besides, I’m the only one who can identify Alex in these – pictures.’
Again he shrugged, as though to say Your funeral. He stared at her for a moment, a sardonic twitch at his mouth. ‘Fond of stickin’ your fork in other people’s dinners, aren’t yer?’
She heard the provocation, but only said, ‘So you’ll ring me when …’
He gave a little lift of his chin, and waggled his hand, indicating that she should let herself out.
Getting home that evening she heard laughter echoing from the top floor. She entered to find Robert and Nancy in the kitchen, the remains of a chicken supper strewn over their plates. She noticed how relaxed they seemed in one another’s company.
‘Would you like a beer?’ Nancy asked, holding up a bottle. ‘Sorry, I would have saved you some dinner if I’d known –’
‘It’s fine, I’m not hungry,’ she said, making an effort at brightness. ‘I heard great peals of laughter as I was coming up the stairs …’
Robert, trading a conspiratorial look with Nancy, said, ‘We were just recalling a few choice extracts from an old diary. At one point she described me as “a bumptious Mancunian braggart” – one of her nicer remarks, as it turned out.’
The diary was there on the table. Freya stared at it as though she couldn’t believe her eyes, or her ears. ‘You read Nancy’s diary?’ Her voice sounded almost horror-struck.
‘No, no, she read a few things out – most of them from Oxford days.’
Nancy looked a little sheepish at her surrendering this privacy. ‘He pestered me, and I gave in.’
‘True. I’ve always been madly fascinated to know what she writes in there.’
Freya smiled, despite her feeling of exclusion. Why had Nancy never favoured her with a recital from the diary? ‘Anything about me there?’
‘Loads – so I gather,’ said Robert. ‘But she won’t read those bits out.’
An uneasy pause followed. Nobody seemed to have anything to say for a moment. Freya took down a bottle of gin from the cupboard and poured herself a couple of fingers. ‘Anyone else?’
Nancy began to clear the table while Robert leaned back and sipped his beer. Freya took a chair and began rolling a cigarette: it wasn’t the first time recently she felt she had interrupted a scene of domestic contentment. The lovebirds. There was no hint that she was unwelcome – it was her flat, really; she had found it and asked Nancy to move in – but the dynamic had changed.
Standing at the sink, Nancy looked over. ‘Joss rang, by the way – something about the party he wanted to ask you.’
Robert widened his eyes humorously. ‘Ah, Gerty at thirty! Are you all set?’
Freya shook her head. ‘The party’s all Joss’s idea. I don’t know why he’s so keen to have one.’
‘Oh, Freya,’ said Nancy, protesting, ‘you do know. It’s because he loves you.’
No, she thought; it’s because he’s afraid to lose me, which isn’t the same thing. She took a swallow of gin to drown the unworthy thought, and it burned all the way down her throat.
‘So who’s coming?’
‘Every-bloody-one,’ sighed Freya. ‘All my family, including two grandparents; a load of journos, people from Frame like Elspeth and Fosh, and a few Oxford people – Ginny, Alex maybe –’
Robert sat up. ‘Alex? Alex McAndrew? I didn’t know you were still in touch.’
‘We weren’t, for years,’ said Freya. Nancy had her back turned, but she must have been listening. ‘I ran into him by accident a while ago.’
‘Christ. McAndrew … what’s he up to now?’
Freya hesitated a moment. ‘Civil Service,’ she said vaguely. From beneath her brow she watched Robert digest this news. Before he could ask anything else she came up with an emergency diversion. ‘Nat Fane’s coming, of course.’
That did the trick: Robert wri
nkled his nose as though a week-old herring had been wafted in front of him. ‘Oh, I might have known. Will he be wearing his cape and kid gloves?’
‘Not sure. I can ask him for you, if you like,’ replied Freya.
‘Ha ha,’ he deadpanned. ‘Well, despite that, I’m looking forward to it. You must introduce me to your mother. I’m good with people’s parents, you know.’
‘That’s true, actually,’ said Nancy over her shoulder.
‘In that case, perhaps you could do us all a favour and keep her away from my stepmother. The last thing I need is them butting heads.’
‘Consider it done,’ said Robert, who was now giving Freya an odd look. ‘Are you all right, by the way? You look awfully uncomfortable on that chair.’
‘I’ve just got a sore back,’ she said. Backside would have been more accurate, where she felt bands of pain fiercely aglow; but she preferred not to mention this for dignity’s sake. She also feared that Nancy might make an inspired connection between a bruised derrière and her attendance at Nat’s dinner last weekend.
The dishes done, Nancy dried her hands and asked Robert if he would like another beer. My God, thought Freya, what next – fetching his slippers? They had begun to talk about what sort of day they’d had, Nancy at her publisher’s, Robert at the paper. It was strange, listening to them, how comfortably domesticated they had become. It had never been like that with her and Joss. Perhaps, she thought, that was the problem.
The meeting had been arranged in an Italian cafe on Earlham Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. Freya had never set foot in the place, though she had walked past it dozens of times before. They sat on a tan-coloured vinyl banquette; each Formica-topped table was supplied with an ashtray and two plastic bottles of sauce, one red, one yellow. It was an hour after the lunch rush, the air still fusty with the smell of fried food. Jerry Dicks had taken a sidelong look at what they were eating at the next table.
‘The stuff people put in their gobs,’ he muttered. ‘Make yer sick.’
The waitress set down a pot of tea between them. Jerry, regarding it indifferently, lit a Senior Service and exhaled through his nostrils. He had already given Freya his instructions. She was not to reveal that she worked for a newspaper. She was not to reveal any personal connection to Alex. If Sewell was to ask her anything she was to reply as briefly as possible. On no account was she to engage him in any conversation relating to his work. From Jerry’s warning tone it had become hard to imagine Sewell as anything other than a monster in human form.
When a man of nondescript appearance with a bulbous nose and inch-thick spectacles seated himself on the bench next to Jerry she assumed that Sewell had sent a minion, an errand-runner from the underworld. He was of an age with Jerry but without his puckish demeanour. His face, though pitted and pouchy, hadn’t anything rebarbative or sinister or even mildly unpleasant in it. There were no handshakes offered. The two of them instantly fell into a low mumbling sort of talk, from which she nonetheless gathered that the man in front of her was Vernon Sewell himself. The expectation had been of a gorgon; the reality was a Pooterish nonentity in an ill-fitting suit. After repeated glances across the table he gave a little sideways nod at her.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked. His voice was tidied-up cockney.
Jerry, refusing to rouse himself to an introduction, said, ‘An associate. No one you need bother with.’
‘An associate. So what does she do?’ He still wasn’t looking at her.
‘What does she do? Ah. Matter of fact she’s a rat-catcher. Useful to have around the place.’
Sewell curled his lip in disdain. ‘Always the joker.’ He did look at her now. ‘Who are you again?’
Freya said, in her politest voice, ‘As Jerry said: I deal with rats. And other vermin.’
At that he held her gaze, and then laughed. Not receiving a straight answer was part and parcel of his world: what did it matter to him who she was? The laugh had exposed his pale receding gums. Jerry, reverting to business, asked him if he’d brought the ‘stuff’, as discussed. Sewell leaned down to his briefcase and withdrew from it a bulky envelope; he pushed it across the table to Jerry, who opened it and, without removing the photographs, flicked through them like a teller counting out banknotes. As his examination continued, Sewell waited; after a while, perhaps unnerved by Jerry’s silent auditing, he began drumming his fingers on the edge of the table.
‘I’m sorry to let this lot go,’ he said. ‘The mark was playin’ along quietly enough, hundred at a time.’
Without looking up Jerry said, ‘Last I heard you had him up to three hundred.’
‘Well … I charge in instalments, like. Some of ’em have bunce put aside for a rainy day. I know when they’re shammin’. This one, though, told me he couldn’t pay – and I’m startin’ to think he was –’
Jerry was hardly listening. Unable to hold her tongue Freya said, ‘Do you know why?’
Sewell gave a little start at the interruption. ‘What?’
‘Do you know why he couldn’t pay – your mark? Because he gave most of what he earned to his mother, who’s a widow. There wasn’t any left over to pay off a slag like you.’
Jerry was staring at her. This was not part of the plan. Sewell, incredulous, was also staring at her. ‘Jerry. What’s goin’ on? Your rat-catcher has got some front talkin’ to me like that –’
Jerry may have been angry with her, but he had also scented mischief. ‘I dunno, Vern. A widowed mother – have to say, shame on you.’
Realising he would get no change out of Jerry, Sewell turned to her. ‘What’s your game? You this poof ’s intended or summink?’
‘Vern, Vern,’ murmured Jerry.
But Freya’s blood was up now. ‘No, nothing like that. I’m just someone interested to know what a thieving, crawling, blackmailing fucker has got on my friend.’
Sewell made a sound like air escaping from a balloon. ‘Now you’re hurtin’ me feelings. Jerry, I’m disappointed in you –’ He rose, gathering about him his shredded dignity, but Jerry grabbed his sleeve.
‘Vern, before you go, the negs. The negs.’
Sewell shook him off angrily. ‘You can fuckin’ whistle for ’em! I’m not dealin’ with you – or your tart.’
He was gone. The door of the cafe slammed in his wake. Jerry was shaking his head.
‘That’s torn it. I tell you to keep yer trap shut and instead you start givin’ him lip.’
‘I couldn’t help it, sorry –’
‘It’s your friend who’s gonna be sorry. Before it was touch and go. Now it’s odds-on Vern’ll shop him just for the hell of it.’
Freya stared at the leaves floating at the bottom of her teacup. So much for the acquisition of tact. If Jerry was right, she had just signed Alex’s arrest warrant. And yet they had come so close to yanking him out of the fire … She looked at Jerry smoking, cigarette held inside his palm, old-lag style. An instinct prompted her to ask, ‘Have you ever been in prison?’
Jerry squinted at her. ‘Not that I recall. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘Do you ever think that Vern might blackmail you? I mean, he knows that you’re –’
‘One of them,’ supplied Jerry, with a snort. ‘Vern’s the type to sniff out a weakness. But with me he wouldn’t dare. He knows I’ve got enough to put him away. ’Slike we got a pistol at each other’s head.’
The clank and hum of the cafe intervened for a moment.
‘He wasn’t what I was expecting,’ she said presently.
Jerry frowned. ‘Vern? What – thought he’d have horns an’ a curly tail?’
‘Just not someone so … insignificant. You’d pass him in the street without looking. I remember at Nuremberg, the Nazis in the courtroom, how ordinary they looked –’
‘Hold on a minute. Vern’s a wrong’un, but he ain’t a fuckin’ war criminal.’
Freya considered. ‘All I mean is, it’s disconcerting. Impossible to, you know, “find the mind’s construction in the
face”.’ When Jerry returned a puzzled look, she said, ‘Macbeth.’
‘Oh. Shakespeare,’ said Jerry, his tone indicating a weary disdain. His gods were from the music hall, not from drama.
‘If he goes to prison – Alex – it’ll be the end of him.’
Jerry twisted his features into an expression of cool nonchalance. What else did she expect? ‘As long as Vern’s got the negatives, your friend is never gonna be safe. Either he keeps payin’ or it’s off to Pentonville.’
Freya looked past Jerry’s shoulder through the window, at the street and its bunched traffic rumbling on unanswerably. It was the sound of London, oblivious to her failure, oblivious to everything but its own hurry.
21
Sitting at an open window high above the street Freya gazed on the buses and cabs honking, growling, along the Strand. Pedestrians and window-gazers were reduced to toy figures toddling along the pavement. The sky was a careless blue expanse on which flossy clouds were lazing. Outside on the ledge a pigeon strutted in Napoleonic style, chest out, its tiny piercing eyes scanning this way and that.
On the single bed her mother’s suitcase yawned open. An evening dress had already been taken out and hung on the back of the door. A moment later Freya heard footsteps approach the door and Cora entered, drying her hands on a towel.
‘Well, the bathroom is reasonably clean,’ she reported.
‘You could have had one en suite at the Savoy,’ said Freya.
Cora laughed. ‘I’m not made of money, darling. This place will do perfectly.’
Freya felt the crêpe de Chine of the dress between her fingers. She was unaccountably touched by the effort her mother had made in coming up to town for the night, party outfit in tow. They decided to have tea down in the residents’ lounge. Reclining on one of the scallop-backed plush sofas Cora watched her daughter roll a cigarette.
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