She looked round at the other guests to check that nobody was earwigging. ‘Twenty-one weeks, thereabouts,’ she said in an undertone. ‘I’m getting – I have an “appointment” for this Monday.’
Nancy’s brow was creased with concern. She seemed to be taking the news almost personally. ‘Do you need – would you like me to come with you?’
Freya, touched, felt she mustn’t give way, not here. She had arrived at the house only an hour before with her defences up, bristling, and yet Nancy had just hurdled them, first with an astonishing leap of intuition, and then by the simple tenderness of her tone. She covered her hesitation with a brave little laugh. ‘Thanks, but I’ll manage.’
Any further discussion of the matter was firmly checked by the interruption of Robert, in company with Bruce Haddon, thus doubling Freya’s inclination to make herself scarce. But, perhaps eager to batten on the goodwill his wife had been re-establishing with their guest, Robert had planted himself before her in such a way that blocked escape. He introduced Haddon, who gave Freya a nod before saying, without charm, ‘We’ve already met.’
‘So, now you’re back, Freya, can we hope to see you more often?’ Robert, emboldened by his political success of yesterday, seemed to be trusting in its extension to the social sphere today.
For Nancy’s sake she decided to keep a civil tongue. ‘I don’t know. It looks like you’re going to be the busy one – your secretary was just telling us about the big push for the next election.’
‘Well, we always have time for friends, don’t we?’ he said, looking to Nancy, who, arms folded, returned a supportive smile. ‘We should have a dinner for you, a sort of welcome home. Bruce here seems to know the manager of every posh restaurant in London.’
Haddon gave a twitch of a smile. ‘At your service.’
Freya, goaded by mischief, said, ‘Maybe we could all meet up again at the Corsair, with Chrissie.’
Nancy tucked in her chin, puzzled. ‘Chrissie Effingham? Do you know her?’
Freya shook her head. ‘Not well. We’ve met a couple of times.’ She glanced at Robert, who seemed rather put out by the conversation’s turn: her instinct had been right, though she couldn’t tell why.
Bruce, staring at her, said, ‘I heard you two’d met the other week. She just took off in the car one morning without telling me.’
‘Does she have to tell you? – I mean, is it in her contract?’
Haddon didn’t rise to the bait. He spread his hands outward in a gesture of reasonableness. ‘She’s my client. I worry about her.’ He drew in Robert and Nancy with his gaze. ‘She’s a twenty-year-old girl, and a bit naive. She’d think nothing about talking to a hack off the record. It’s my business to protect her against personal intrusion.’
Freya shrugged. ‘I’d be surprised if Chrissie thinks of me as an intruder – if she bothers to think of me at all. And she’s twenty-one, by the way.’
Nancy started to ask something about Chrissie, but Haddon cut her off. He was still buzzing with curiosity about Freya’s unscheduled meeting with his ‘client’.
‘So you and Chrissie – what did you talk about?’
Freya gave an objecting half-laugh. ‘I really don’t think that’s in the contract. But since you ask, we chatted about knitting, about Bromley, about her dog – a Jack Russell, is it?’
Haddon nodded, listening intently. ‘Is that all?’ he said bluntly. Now he was annoying her. His tone was at once officious and condescending. She had been polite, and he was addressing her as if she were some two-bit gossip columnist.
Without adjusting her tone she said, ‘Actually, we talked mostly about the size of your cock. Quite small, we imagined.’
Haddon stared at her for a disbelieving moment. Nancy snorted a laugh behind her hand, while Robert shook his head in the manner of a schoolteacher who’s had enough of the disruptive kid on the back row. ‘Freya …’ He sounded wearily reproachful. But Haddon looked as though he had swallowed a wasp.
‘You think you’re so smart, don’t you?’ he said, his mouth in an ugly sneer.
‘In your company I feel like a bloody genius,’ Freya replied. They stood toe-to-toe, like duellists.
‘I knew your type the moment I saw you with that jumped-up poof Fane. You people make me sick –’
‘Bruce, really,’ said Robert in a low calming voice.
‘You people?!’ Freya echoed, turning to Nancy. ‘He doesn’t like Nat because Nat called him a cretin, though I’m not sure he knew what it meant –’
‘You fucking bitch, how about I give you a –’
‘All right, that’s enough,’ said Robert, placing his hand on Haddon’s shoulder and pushing him away. Other guests were looking round, alerted by their raised voices. But Haddon still wasn’t done; narrowing his eyes he almost hissed at her: ‘I’m gonna make sure you never talk to Chrissie again. That’s a promise.’
Nancy stepped across Freya’s eyeline, perhaps to prevent her firing a parting shot and inflaming the mood further. But Freya, her blood up, felt constrained by the circumstances: this was not how a reunion with her friend ought to go. She wasn’t going to apologise, all the same. Nancy had pulled a face, widening her eyes in humorous complicity.
‘Would you like to meet some other people?’ she said, lightly steering her back into the house.
Freya smiled at her tact. Robert (she noticed) had guided Bruce Haddon to the far edge of the lawn, his head bobbing as he poured conciliatory words in his guest’s offended ear. She wondered why he, a Shadow Cabinet minister, should be so eager to appease such a man. Or did Haddon command more respect than she assumed? Inside, Nancy introduced her to one of their neighbours, a waveringly tall, bespectacled man who turned out to be a critic and essayist of some note – in fact, as Freya admitted, Jimmy Erskine had talked about him en passant the previous week. The man twinkled at the mention, and they proceeded to chat about ‘the old boy’. Freya thought how pleased Jimmy would be to know that his name in London drawing rooms had not been wholly forgotten. They were joined a few minutes later by Barry Rusk, his antennae twitching from the ‘unpleasantness’ in the garden. He gave a sideways wag of his head.
‘What was that all about?’
She dismissed it with a snort. ‘Nothing. Chrissie Effingham’s manager, being an arsehole.’
When Barry pressed her for his name, he raised his eyebrows on hearing. ‘I’ve heard about him. He’s got some form.’
‘Has he?’
Freya’s interest was piqued, but the essayist neighbour chose that moment to shunt this promising line of gossip into a siding: instead he wanted to know about Chrissie Effingham, wasn’t she the girl in the bread advert? – and was she terribly famous …? Barry began a patient account of her to the man, while Freya silently cursed this dozy diversion into a subject he should already have known about. She waited for a pause to wrest the talk back to Haddon’s ‘form’, but agonisingly the thread was being pulled further away by the two men. She glanced at her watch, and saw that it was later than she’d thought. Excusing herself, she did a once-around the party in search of Nancy before turning into the hall, where she saw her at the foot of the stairs.
‘I’d better be going,’ she said. ‘But before I do, will you show me where you write?’
Nancy smiled. ‘Of course. Come on.’ And they started up the staircase. The Morris wallpaper of the hallway changed as they reached the first landing into a buttery yellow with pale green fleur-de-lys. The patterned runner on the stair looked affably worn. On the second floor Freya peeked into the bedrooms – for a moment she wondered if the small one belonged to a child, except she’d heard that they didn’t have children.
‘Does someone else live here?’
Nancy nodded. ‘Our lodger, Marian. She’s a student at King’s. We like having her around, and it’s a bit of extra money.’
Her study was the back room at the top of the house. It was narrow but orderly, with a strangely expectant air, as if the desk and t
he typewriter and the telephone were obediently awaiting their owner’s return. An oak swivel chair with a buttoned leather back was the only pompous touch (‘Robert bought me that,’ said Nancy). The sash window looked onto the backs of houses, clustered and clotted against the encroaching dark. Bookcases had been fitted on either side of the desk, and as she gazed on the serried volumes – the ones Nancy had read earnestly at school and Oxford, mixed in with the wild multiplication of paperbacks devoured in London – they seemed to her like rings of grain in a tree, marking the years. And there, placed at eye level, was another tender relic, the devotional portrait of Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers. Freya picked it up for a closer look.
‘He’s done you proud.’ They both laughed.
Nancy moved around her, leaning her weight back on the edge of the desk. They faced each other in the diminishing light.
‘I wondered about when you might come back – if you might. It seemed quite possible that you never would.’
Freya nodded faintly, and looked out again at the curving backs of the houses beyond, moved by the everyday wonder of bricks and chimneys and gutters and windows that furnished a shelter – a home.
After a moment she said, ‘D’you ever think about Great James Street?’
‘Oh, often,’ Nancy replied. ‘Remember how cold it was? It’s the only time I’ve ever had chilblains.’
‘Yes, I have an image of us sitting on the sofa, muffled in our winter coats and eating fish and chips. And –’ She was about to mention her getting into bed with Nancy on those freezing mornings, but it felt too sudden and intimate a reminiscence for her to bring up: they were still, at some level, strangers. Nancy had waited for a moment, and then pushed herself off the desk with purpose. From a run of uniform spines she plucked out a copy of The Hours and Times.
‘I know you’ve read it but I want to sign one for you,’ she said. ‘I would have sent you it if I’d known where you lived.’
She switched on her table lamp and cracked open the book to the title page. Freya, watching as Nancy uncapped her fountain pen, was in two minds about what she was going to say next; she had a question, and knew there was a strong chance that she might not like the answer. It would be wiser to let it lie. But curiosity trumped wisdom every time.
‘May I ask you something? The character of Stella –’
Nancy, finishing her signature with a flourish, looked up. ‘Ah, she’s the one they all ask about.’ She offered a smile of encouragement.
‘I wondered about her – is it me?’
She laughed – a little nervously, Freya thought. ‘What made you think that?’
‘Actually I wouldn’t have done, until the end, when I came across a description of Stella – I can’t remember the exact words – but it tipped me the wink.’
Nancy nodded, seemingly relieved. ‘I didn’t quite realise it myself. I’ve never based a character wholly on someone I know. But I suppose there are strong correspondences between the two of you.’
Freya stared at her. ‘So that’s how you see me?’
Nancy flinched. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean – this impossible, demanding, egotistical freak who almost destroys an entire family, this is the woman you base on me?’
‘I just told you, my characters aren’t based –’
‘– on real people, yeah, right, except in this case you admit that there are correspondences – strong correspondences – between me and Stella.’
‘Yes! And I’m amazed you could even think of taking offence. Stella – she’s the most interesting character I’ve ever created. Even the reviews said so. You say she’s a “freak” – to me she’s a funny, headstrong, vulnerable woman. And the best parts of her I took, well, from you.’
Oh God, she thought, replaying in her head those scenes involving Stella and her awful abrasive treatment of the people she was supposed to love. Her witty but careless put-downs, her wilful misprisions, her pathetic efforts to make amends that only got her in deeper – these were passages in the novel that Freya had tutted and cringed through. The best you could say of Stella was that she spoke her mind, and it brought down chaos and misery around her. Do other people think of me like that? Freya wondered.
‘I have to go,’ she said.
‘Oh, Freya, not like this – don’t.’ There was pleading in her voice. But Freya, having heard the truth, was feeling sick. She turned for the door, but Nancy darted in front, blocking her way. ‘Please. Could we just talk?’
‘We just did. There’s nothing more to say.’
She brushed past her and took the stairs, feeling her stomach lurch with every step. She couldn’t tell whether she felt queasy because of this horrible revelation or because she was pregnant. Three days to go before she went off to – another fucking ordeal. (At least the doctor wouldn’t know she was the model for Stella.) She heard Nancy’s footsteps in her wake as she reached the door.
Collecting herself, she said, with stiff courtesy, ‘Goodnight. Thank you for inviting me.’
Nancy opened the door for her, looking at her but not speaking. She assumed this hurt silence was her reply, but as she went down the steps and onto the pavement Nancy trailed behind her. The trees screening the terrace struck wide postures of alarm against the purplish evening sky. Lamplight leaked a thin, yellowish illumination.
Still she heard Nancy a few steps behind her. Was she going to follow her all the way to the car?
‘What do you want?’ she said, halting.
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘To be your friend again of course! To start making up for lost time.’
‘You should have thought of that before you skewered me in your book. Enjoy your revenge.’ It was as if someone else – someone she loathed – had spoken the words before she could stop them coming out of her mouth.
Nancy gasped, took a step back. ‘Revenge? What are you talking about –?’
‘Look, Nancy, I feel tired and sick. I have to go.’
‘You always quit,’ she said, so quietly that Freya had to lean forward to hear. ‘You leave things – people – behind, you push them away even when you need them. You did it with me.’ She inclined her head towards Freya’s stomach; their eyes met for a moment. ‘That’s how I knew what you were going to do about that.’
It took Freya a moment to find her voice, so winded was she. ‘Fuck you,’ she said, at a gasp, and walked away down the terrace. It wasn’t until she got to the car that she realised she was still holding Nancy’s book.
The call came early on Sunday morning. She’d been dreaming about being trapped – nearly all of her dreams at the moment were about that. She was trying to find her way out of a dark warehouse that was essentially a labyrinth, except the direction of her struggle was not horizontal but vertical: as eagerly as she clambered upwards to some notional point of exit, her path to the light kept turning up blind alleys.
She had recently taken the precaution of putting the telephone on the floor next to her bed. Blearily she swam into consciousness and reached down to quell its dreary ring.
‘Hullo?’ she droned, sleep-stunned.
‘Freya. It’s Nat.’
‘Hnngh? Oh.’ It didn’t sound like Nat. It sounded like a dead sober eighty-year-old impersonating Nat.
‘Are you listening? I’ve some news. Bad news.’
That did it. She hauled herself up in bed. ‘What? What is it?’
She could hear him take a breath. ‘It’s Chrissie. She’s dead. They found her at her flat this morning. Chrissie Effingham’s dead.’
29
Chrissie Effingham, who died in the early hours of Sunday morning, had the world at her Bally-shod feet. Signed up by an agency at eighteen, she was the highest paid model in the country at nineteen and a bona fide star at twenty. In London this spring one could hardly pass a billboard that didn’t have her face on it. People wanted to meet her, or just be seen with her. There is a photograph from the Royal Variety Show last year in whic
h she is shaking hands with the Queen, and you can’t tell which of them looks more impressed. Last week Vogue hit the news-stands with Chrissie’s face staring out from it – her first cover, and now her last. It captures in that doe-eyed gaze the twin poles of her attraction, both the erotic allure and the unassuming girl-next-door homeliness. The picture is cropped, showing her from the waist up wearing a flower-print Quant dress and twirling a small Chanel handbag, the epitome of cosmopolitan glamour. But you can bet that below the camera’s eye she wasn’t wearing Bally, or any other fancy-named shoe: more likely she was in plimsolls, or simply barefoot, as she preferred to be. It is a beautiful cover that has accidentally, and tragically, become a memento mori.
Her face, with its milk-soft skin, retroussé nose and heavy fringe, still had the look of a schoolgirl. Her voluptuous five-foot-ten frame, though, was very much a woman’s, and the moment her agency released pictures of her the advertisers came flocking. She herself had no inkling of why the world of fashion had taken to her. ‘They hand me the clothes and I put them on, and they look all right. I don’t have a clue about “poise” – that’s just a word they use.’ It’s true that for a model she was rather gawky, and sometimes looked ill at ease under the spotlight. Yet there was an unknowing gracefulness of manner that singled her out: one saw no contradiction in her being both coltish and a thoroughbred. As a person she was, in a word, adorable. She suffered from shyness, which she camouflaged with her natural qualities of enthusiasm, good humour and spontaneity. She wanted to know about things, like jazz and painting and food, which her schooling at a Bromley secondary modern had failed to supply.
She could not bear to see anyone in discomfort or distress. When I happened to tell her that I’d been sleeping badly she took me in hand with maternal solicitude, drawing up a list of herbal remedies and infusions I should prepare. No stranger herself to insomnia, she favoured more serious medication in the struggle for a night’s sleep. She had prescriptions for barbiturates. That she had been taking them for a while ought to have set off alarm bells. Early reports issuing from the coroner’s office suggest her blood contained dangerous levels of the drugs; she freely admitted to taking more than the recommended dose.
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