Freya

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘Might be best to keep that to yourself. There’s a whole chapter in the memoir about his fear of dying.’

  ‘Oh, so he’s got a book out, too?’

  ‘Published by a small press and reviewed hardly anywhere. Ecce Homo, it’s called.’

  They were admitted to the flat by a cheery fellow in a striped apron named George, who seemed to be the old boy’s manservant. He led them through a hallway hung with a lot of dusty paintings and photographic portraits of theatrical bygones; thence into a stuffy living room. The two-bar fire was on, despite the mildness of the day, and the windows overlooking the street were shut firm. A sour smell of Brasso and mothballs permeated the place. The furniture was all pre-war; certain things, like the gramophone, possibly pre-Great War. There was no television, but by the armchair hunkered a huge old wireless, the sort that once would have crackled with the voices of the Crazy Gang. George, bending his ear to a closed door, gave it a respectful knock.

  ‘Jim? Your visitors are here.’

  From the other side of the door came an indecipherable muttering. George offered them a smile that seemed to plead for patience. He joined them in the middle of the room and, dropping his voice, said, ‘He’s just had a new set of teeth put in. They’re giving him some grief.’

  He asked them if they’d like tea, and disappeared off to the kitchen. Fosh, staring in bemusement around the room, silently picked up an ancient pair of lorgnettes from a side table and gawped at Freya through them. He replaced them quickly on hearing the far door open: Jimmy Erskine’s bald head poked out like a venerable tortoise from its shell, followed slowly by the rest of him. He had shrunk to gnome-like proportions in the years since Freya had last clapped eyes on him, though the sartorial style was largely unaltered: a checked three-piece suit, dicky bow, and cream-coloured spats over his shoes. A monocle glazed his left eye.

  He shuffled towards them on his cane, wheezing piteously, and stopped. Everything about him looked tired – everything but his eyes, which blazed fiercely in the ruined mosaic of his face.

  ‘What’s this – it requires two of you to conduct an interview? One holds the page, the other reads the questions off it, I presume.’

  Freya gave a polite laugh. ‘No, he’s the photographer. I’m doing the interview.’

  Jimmy shook his head, and muttered, ‘The monstrous regiment advances.’

  She ignored that. ‘Actually we’ve met before, quite a few years ago. Freya Wyley.’

  Jimmy frowned and shook his head. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Spring of 1946,’ she continued. ‘We were introduced at the Oxford Union.’

  The old man paused, staring ahead. ‘Then possibly at the Oxford Union I may know you again.’

  George returned at this moment carrying a tea tray and invited them to sit down, since Jimmy hadn’t. Fosh asked Jimmy how he would like to be photographed.

  ‘Oh, clothed, I think,’ said Jimmy, running his eye up and down Fosh.

  ‘No, I mean, would you prefer to be standing or …?’

  Jimmy waved away the suggestion and lowered himself into an armchair. ‘I’m not standing for anything. Snap away as you wish.’

  George, having poured them all tea, was backing out of the room when Jimmy looked around and asked him where the biscuits had got to. They didn’t have any in, the manservant replied.

  ‘Then would you kindly go and purchase some. Those sponge ones with the orange and chocolate on top.’

  ‘Jaffa Cakes.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want cakes. These are biscuits.’

  ‘Yes, I know the ones. They’re called Jaffa Cakes,’ George explained.

  Jimmy looked unimpressed. ‘Well, whatever the blazes they’re called, I should like a plate of ’em.’

  George hurried off, and Jimmy leaned back to gaze in a bored way at his guests. Fosh, checking the focus on his camera, said, ‘Congratulations on the book. A triumph!’

  Jimmy nodded. ‘It has its moments. But it’s a mere distillation of the diaries that I’ve been keeping since 1931. They’re now close to half a million words. I’d have liked to put the lot out. My publisher thought otherwise.’

  ‘Oh, shame,’ said Fosh, raising the camera to his eye. ‘Personally I don’t think you can have too much of a good thing.’

  He’s laying it on a bit thick, Freya thought; the old boy’s going to slap him down. But Jimmy, far from suspecting flattery, accepted Fosh’s compliment as his due. ‘I’m not alone in thinking the diaries the best of my omnia opera. A hundred years hence I’d like them to be considered alongside Pepys and Evelyn. In some respects I’m a better diarist than either. They had the Plague and the Fire to help ’em, after all.’

  ‘You had the war,’ Freya pointed out.

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘But I hardly used it. World events, politics, these are less important to the true diarist than who said what at lunch, and whether X really did cut Y in the street that day. Anyone can write history. But it takes an artist to render gossip and opinion interesting.’

  He took a sip of his tea, and continued. He was one of those talkers who saw no reason to share out the conversation, since he regarded his own portion as more entertaining and instructive than anyone else’s. But his was not a generous form of sociability; he didn’t inspire others to say brilliant things. If he could not dominate a room, he would sooner be out of it.

  Fosh, having shot a reel of film, announced that he’d got enough. As he was readying himself to leave he said to Jimmy, ‘Best of luck with Echoes of Homer. I look forward to reading it!’

  He winked at Freya on his way out. The door closed, and Jimmy pursed his lips in the manner of someone who’d just been done by a three-card trick.

  ‘A very pert fellow, I must say. When he was buttering me up a few minutes ago I assumed he’d at least read the book. In the event he couldn’t even remember the title.’

  ‘I suppose Echoes of Homer is a sort of accidental compliment …’ she said consolingly.

  Jimmy made a little ‘huh’ sound. ‘Given how nervous my publishers are about Ecce Homo, perhaps I should use it. So … how old is he, your colleague?’

  ‘Fosh? Oh, mid-thirties, I should say.’

  ‘Hmm. I wonder what his cock’s like.’

  Freya stifled a snort of mirth. Jimmy, noticing the shorthand pad she was scribbling on, added, ‘You can strike that last from the record, dear. Don’t want to startle the innocent eyes of your readers, do we?’

  ‘I’m not sure they’d believe their eyes if they saw it,’ she said. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve another friend you, um, admired, when we were at Oxford – Nat Fane.’

  ‘Ah! Saw him at a dinner they gave me just the other night. Still playing the cleverest boy in the class.’

  Freya looked up from her notepad. ‘And yet you’re full of praise for him in your book. Didn’t you nominate him the best young playwright under forty?’

  Jimmy lifted his chin imperiously. ‘Fane’s got talent, no question. One could only wish he weren’t so prodigal of it. His first couple of plays were remarkable, and he seemed likely to push on to greatness. Alas –’ he made an explosive motion with his hand – ‘the playwright has been taken hostage by the controversialist. He appears to have got hold of the idea that he must have something to say, as though his audience were waiting for the Great Fane to come down from the mountain and tell us about Suez or race relations or, God help us, the Bomb. Whereas what we really want is a well-made play with characters and situations that intrigue and provoke us.’

  ‘I don’t imagine he’ll be bothered with the theatre now that he’s writing screenplays for Hollywood.’

  ‘Ughh,’ he exclaimed, wrinkling his nose in distaste. ‘I don’t care how many awards it won, The Hot Number was a wretched thing. It combined all his very worst faults – glibness, modishness, self-advertisement. A good editor would have taken him in hand. But I fear there’s no one brave enough to try.’

  At this moment George returned fro
m his errand, Jaffa Cakes in tow. He handed the packet to Jimmy, who emptied half of the biscuits onto a plate and began contentedly feeding them into his mouth; it didn’t occur to him to offer Freya one. In the meantime she had spotted a painting on the wall and got up to take a closer inspection. It was a small oil of a man’s face in a convex mirror, froggy in aspect yet enchanting for his amused eyes and childlike smile.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ said Freya.

  Jimmy paused, and raising himself unsteadily on his cane shuffled over to join her. He stared at the portrait. ‘That is my dearest friend in the world, László Balázsovits. “Was”, I should say. He died four years ago this month. This he bequeathed to me in his will. He had little else …’

  Moments passed. He was lost in contemplation, his breathing stertorous. Glancing sideways she saw that tears bulged in his eyes.

  ‘It’s a lovely picture,’ said Freya gently, and waited for him to recover his composure. ‘Did you know that my father painted it?’

  Jimmy wiped his eyes and replaced his monocle, the better to glare at her. ‘What? Your father, you say – Stephen Wyley?’

  She affirmed it with a nod.

  ‘I see … László was a great admirer of his. I remember how outraged he was over that business with Gerald Carmody, back in the thirties. I’m sure you heard about it.’

  Freya had heard: in the autumn of 1936, Stephen had contributed to what he believed was a theatre charity, only for the papers to expose it as a fraudulent cover for a Fascist splinter group. When the identities of the backers came to light, he found his own name among them and was dragged into the ensuing scandal. For a few months he became a pariah. László wrote a letter to The Times in his defence. The ironic coda to the story was Stephen’s belated discovery of his Jewish ancestry.

  ‘Yes, and then my dad discovered he was half Jewish himself. He was shocked at first and then quite pleased.’

  Jimmy said, ‘I believe László talked to him about it. His own family had been forced to flee some pogrom or other back in the nineteenth century. Lost nearly all their money. But I never knew a man who bore his misfortune so lightly.’ He continued to stare at the painting. ‘One has always felt a certain pride in this place as a haven for the émigré. And yet the garden of England is still rank with the weeds of intolerance. I never thought Mosley’s idiots would amount to anything, and they didn’t, but that strain of xenophobia endures. “Keep Britain White”, indeed. Is that what we beat the Nazis for?’

  ‘The voters of Netherwick may enlighten us on that score.’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, the by-election … I was listening the other night to that young Labour MP, what’s-his-name –’

  ‘Robert Cosway.’

  ‘Yes, him. About time someone talked sense on immigration. Met him once – had plenty of charm …’

  ‘I know,’ said Freya, who ever since Robert had become the immigrants’ friend had felt the purity of her animus somewhat adulterated. You couldn’t straightforwardly despise a champion of the oppressed. She waited for Jimmy to continue his song of praise, but the old man’s expression had altered. She wondered for a moment if he was going to speculate about his ‘cock’.

  ‘Don’t quite trust him, though, do you?’

  Here was a different music to her ears. ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘He reminds me rather of an actor. A good one, I should say, got all his lines and gestures down. Yet still one detects in him something … counterfeit. I imagine he’ll go far.’

  Good old Jimmy, she thought. He hadn’t been a critic for nothing. They were on their second pot of tea when George returned with a tray loaded with squat brown bottles. ‘Time for the master’s medicine,’ he announced, and proceeded to measure out a selection of pills from each bottle. There were a lot of them.

  ‘I take so many damned pills I’ve started to rattle,’ Jimmy complained.

  George, with a little glance over his shoulder at Freya, said, ‘Pills for his asthma, for his blood pressure, for his arthritis. Not forgetting his eyedrops …’

  ‘For glaucoma,’ the patient explained. ‘That would be fate’s cruellest trick, turning me blind. An echo of poor old Homer, indeed.’

  His tone was at once self-pitying and stoical. Freya saw that some rallying was required: ‘Well, even blindness doesn’t stop you being a writer. Milton dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters. Maybe George can be your amanuensis.’

  ‘George? No, no. Anything more than a shopping list is beyond him. I’d be spelling out every word.’ George, with a tolerant chuckle, continued counting the pills. ‘It isn’t just the eyes. The energy is gone. Time was when I would write from nine in the morning to six or seven in the evening, clattering away at the typewriter. The words poured out of me. They don’t any more.’

  ‘Well, instead of writing you’ll have more time for living,’ said George coaxingly.

  Jimmy gave a gloomy shake to his head. ‘I subscribe to the theory that no writer lives absolutely, just for the joy of living. When he stops writing, life becomes practically meaningless. Would Keats have rejoiced in the song of a nightingale, or the brightness of a star, if he hadn’t been able to write poetry about ’em? Perhaps he would … But I fear that life cannot be faced without the shield of prose to deflect all the slings and arrows. For sixty years and more I wrote to live – to earn a living – but it would be more truthful to say that I lived to write.’

  George tapped the tray, now dotted with pills. ‘Well, while you’re still breathing, here’s your medicine. Shall I do the drops for you?’

  With a flutter of his hand Jimmy dismissed him. He sat there for a moment, looking disconsolate, then slowly lifted his eyes to Freya. ‘And so I return to a condition that becomes, unavoidably, the spiritual home of the aged – we call it, the Dumps.’

  Freya pulled a sympathetic expression. ‘There are still reasons to go on.’

  ‘Really? Name three of ’em.’

  ‘OK. One – you’re not actually blind.’ At that Jimmy made a harrumphing noise which seemed to be short for Is that the best you can do? I’ll have to throw him a bone, she thought. ‘Two – you’ve written a wonderful memoir.’

  This drew an approving grunt. ‘Perhaps you could remind my publishers of that. So far they’ve spent all of tuppence on promoting it.’

  ‘Three,’ she continued, her eye alighting on his side table just in time, ‘you still have half a packet of Jaffa Cakes left.’

  On returning to the flat she gave a start on entering the living room; she still wasn’t used to the sight of the television squatting there, like a shiftless and rather sinister house pet. She had written a note to Chrissie thanking her for the gift, though it didn’t stop her secretly wishing that she’d sent a fridge instead.

  She took her copy of Ecce Homo from her bag and opened it. Before leaving she had asked Jimmy to sign it, and while he looked for his spectacles and pen she had one more go at jogging his memory: could he really have forgotten that evening at the Oxford Union when he caved in to her pestering? She would write up an interview with Jessica Vaux and he promised to help her place it at the Chronicle. Jimmy listened, and made a shrugging face.

  ‘What munificence. They should raise a plaque to me. But at my age I can’t be expected to remember every instance.’ His pen was poised over the title page of his book, and as if to confirm his imperfect recall he said, ‘Your first name again?’

  ‘Freya,’ she replied, ‘– Wyley.’

  Jimmy looked up. ‘Yes, I know that. I’m not senile.’

  The handwriting was tiny, crabbed and wavery. She had not anticipated much warmth in the inscription, but the old man had surprised her.

  For Miss Freya Wyley

  Who was kind, and admired this book.

  James Erskine, London MCMLXII

  She had left a bookmark in there, a page torn from her notepad with a telephone number scribbled on it. For a moment she couldn’t remember whose it was. Then she did: it was the doctor she had
rung a few days ago to arrange the disposal of the unwanted guest in her stomach. He hadn’t given her his name, only an address and an appointment for the following Monday.

  28

  Almost until the point she needed to start getting ready she was in two minds about going. She had rehearsed the arguments in her head all day. If she did go, she would be conceding ground in an estrangement she had nurtured for years. In spite of her avowals that no ‘great scene’ of reconciliation was expected, Nancy would count it a victory if she entered her house. Robert, having felt the edge of her asperity that night, would presume that she had at last relented. The thought of that false smile plastered across his face was a strong incentive to stay away.

  But if she didn’t go it would reflect badly on her, not least because she would be snubbing Nancy’s noble effort at fence-mending. And would it not also cast herself as an obsessive keeper of grudges? She would seem perhaps quite pitiable in having neither the capacity to change nor the largeness of soul to forgive. And yet might there not also be something magnificent in her implacable aloofness? Her rejection of them still had meaning; they had done her wrong. If she were to climb down now it would surely diminish that proud flexing of her will eight years ago.

  And her unforeseen condition was playing havoc within her. Aside from the weariness, she found herself prey to strange moods: she was skittish, light-headed, forgetful. Before work that morning she had parked the car in an obscure little cul-de-sac and left without walking a witch’s circle. She had returned to find a parking ticket and promptly burst into tears. Those fuckers! The first time she had forgotten to walk the circle, and she’d been stung … It took her some moments to calm down. The shadow passenger inside her was the cause of this, there could be no other explanation. She was twenty weeks, a little over. She kept checking herself in the mirror, looking for signs. Perhaps there was a slight thickening here, and here. Yet nobody else had noticed; Nat, Fosh, her dad, Diana, she had seen them all in the last couple of weeks and no one seemed to suspect. There had been no curious looks, no appraising glances.