With that in mind, I feel an urgent incentive to put my house in order, and I don’t just mean getting my front doorbell fixed. First, and most important, I want to make a proper apology to you, in person. I could cook dinner for us, only the kitchen here is a bit poky, and the oven a bit nasty. So we could dine out in town, or else – the thought has just occurred – I could drive us out to the country somewhere and we could find a pub. (Did I tell you that Nat has lent me his sports car?) Of course I realise that you may prefer not to see me after those horrible words outside your house the other night. I could make an excuse of the volatile nature of a pregnant woman. Or I could just admit what a bitch I am! But I hope I can appeal to your great reserves of forbearance and forgiveness. You’ve always been better at that than I have.
With much love,
Freya
There was a little record and hi-fi shop she knew, off Wardour Street. A couple of skinny youths were absorbed in flicking through the long stacks of sleeved vinyl. The air was sour with patchouli, cigarettes and dust. One wall was a scruffy patchwork of flyers announcing concerts and adverts for new releases. The floor and front window were shaking to a heavily amplified song brash with twanging guitars. Freya approached the counter: behind it a man in his middle twenties was examining the inner label of a long player, holding its edges lightly on his fingertips. He flipped it suavely to look at the reverse. His unkempt black hair and bottle-end spectacles could not wholly conceal a certain pleasantness of face.
‘Would you mind –’ she began, and he canted his head towards her, as if she needed to speak up – ‘would you mind turning the volume down, please?’ Christ, that sounded old, she thought. He stared at her for a moment, before reaching beneath the counter: the noise dropped a few decibels. On his checked shirt he wore a button badge urging BAN THE BOMB.
‘I’m looking for something by the Flamingos. Heard of them?’
‘Yeah … doo-wop, isn’t it? Pretty sure I got nothin’ in by them.’
She told him the song’s title and asked whether he could get hold of it from somewhere. He gave an absent nod and picked up a well-thumbed paperback catalogue, which he briefly riffled through. ‘Mm. “I Only Have Eyes For You”. Single. 1959.’
‘Right …’
‘Take two weeks. Maybe three.’
‘What?’
He shrugged. ‘Have to order it, from the distributors. It’ll be the same anywhere else.’
With a heavy sigh she gave him her name and telephone number, which he noted in biro on the order form. He’d give her a call when it came in, he said. She saw that he had written her name down as F. Y. Lee.
Outside on the street she was about to get into the car when a tall, tousled-haired figure ambled by. In his air of preoccupation he hadn’t seen her, so she could have let him pass unbothered.
‘Ossie,’ she said, and he started on hearing his name. The eyes spoke of someone surprised in a furtive act, or a criminal one, which in his case was not that unlikely. He stared for a few moments, seemingly unable to place her. Then he said, ‘Oh. It’s you.’
She knew better than to expect courtesy of Ossian Blackler. He wore a fawn-coloured suit with a tie loose at his collar. His hard, gaunt face had not changed much in the years since she had last seen him, though the prices his paintings now fetched had. Despite his burgeoning wealth he remained loyal to the wild side of Soho – the only loyalty he was known for – and stories of his gambling debts and scrapes with loan sharks still did the rounds. His dark gaze, feral and quick, had taken her in.
‘Up the stick, then,’ he said without preamble.
She nodded. ‘Is it that obvious?’
He gave a half-laugh. ‘Well, I’ve never seen you with tits before.’
‘I think the last time I saw you was that evening at Nat Fane’s house. You were with a young girl –’
‘Was I?’ he shrugged, as though he couldn’t be expected to remember a particular evening, or a particular girl. ‘I heard you and Fane were – not his, is it?’ he said, nodding at her stomach.
‘No. And we never were, by the way. Have you seen Jerry Dicks?’
Ossie made a regretful little noise at the side of his mouth. ‘He’s back in the sanatorium. Got TB, emphysema, jaundice. He’s fallin’ apart, poor fucker. I’m going to visit him next week …’
‘May I go with you?’
He looked at her, disbelieving. ‘You don’t wanna see him, not in his state. And he won’t wanna see you, either. He only agrees to have me there cos I bring him a bottle of vodka and a sleeve of fags.’
‘What – in a sanatorium?’
‘I smuggle ’em in. If I didn’t he’d lose the will to live – what little he has left.’
‘Oh God,’ she muttered. ‘Poor Jerry … I wonder if – if there’s something you could give him from me?’
‘What is this? Jerry’s been sick for years –’
‘And I’ve been away for years. He once – I was in a terrible jam, and he helped me out, though he didn’t have to. And I never managed to thank him.’
Ossie twitched his chin. ‘He probably wouldn’t remember.’ He was staring at her again, but in a more speculative way, as though he’d just noticed something new about her. ‘Tell you what – if there’s something you want me to give old Jer’ you can bring it over to the house. Call me Friday or Saturday.’
‘I don’t have your number,’ she said.
‘Nobody does!’ He laughed his old laugh – ha ha ha, each syllable mirthlessly enunciated – and without warning he clasped her arm and shoved up the sleeve of her cardigan, exposing her bare flesh. From his jacket pocket he took out a marker pen and plucked off its cap with his teeth. Very carefully, on the inside of her forearm, he inscribed SLO 2211, and then drew a fancy picture frame around it. He pulled her sleeve down. ‘There – you got my phone number and your own Blackler limited edition, too. Don’t pass it on.’
He held her gaze for another moment, and walked off up the street. As she got into the car she chuckled to herself. Ossie really hadn’t changed. He hadn’t said hullo, and he didn’t say goodbye.
30
At the inquest into the death of Chrissie Effingham the verdict was out. The deceased had been found with lethal quantities of barbiturates and alcohol in her blood. The coroner did note the anomaly that the young woman was said to be teetotal, so the fact she had been drinking at all must be counted as ‘mysterious’. However, he ruled out the possibility of suicide. The deceased was known to be taking medication for insomnia, but the weight of evidence from those who knew her suggested there was no predisposition to overdose. The probability was that in the unfamiliar state of inebriation she had accidentally taken a higher dosage of sleeping tablets than was advisable. Thus: death by misadventure.
From the gallery Freya watched as reporters hurried out of the courtroom to the row of expectant telephone boxes. She ought to have been one of them. Brock’s treachery still rankled, though her stirrings of homicidal intent had been quelled; now she only wanted to punch his face. Outside the day was warm, the air drowsy with pollen. Early summer had sidled into the city. She walked on to Fleet Street, where buses and taxis grumbled along its length. Newspaper stalls stood in readiness; the late edition would gobble up the verdict. By the time she got back to the Journal she was sweating. She felt – she hated the word as much as the condition – blobby.
Late in the afternoon, just as she was packing up for the day, her phone rang.
‘Is that – Freya Wyley?’
She confirmed that it was.
‘This is Ava.’
‘Er, who’s that?’
‘Ava Dunning. I’m – I was a friend of Chrissie’s. We met once at the Corsair.’
‘Yes, of course …’
The black girl with the beautiful sloping cheekbones. She said she had just read in the Standard about the inquest. ‘I remembered you worked for a newspaper, so I thought you might want to know, but …’
‘Want to know what?’
There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Could I – can we meet? I’d rather tell you this in person.’
She invited her to come to the flat, but Ava said that her work would make that difficult: would it be all right for her to suggest somewhere? Freya took down the details, and after a few moments they ended the call.
At an old-fashioned tobacconist’s in Holborn she found something for Jerry Dicks. She recalled that when she knew him he used to smoke Turkish cigarettes, but in his present condition such a gift might seem irresponsible, and Ossie Blackler was already keeping him in supplies. In one of the glass display cases she spotted an art deco ebony cigarette-holder. This felt to her a decent compromise between something he might like to have and the habit that was slowly killing him.
Ossie had described his house in a lane off Cadogan Square, since there was no number on the door. On the phone he’d been very particular in laying down the procedure on arriving: three distinctly spaced knocks, and then wait – ‘as long as it takes’ – for him to answer. She presumed this was his safety measure against the unscheduled calls of coppers and gangsters. Though it was getting on for nine in the evening she knew he was probably still at work; he talked about his ‘night paintings’ as if they were a genre of their own. She had knocked, and taken a step back to survey the tall stucco-fronted house, its windows opaque to the world. A few moments passed before a low buzzing sounded at the door lock, like a trapped wasp; she pushed through into a musty, darkened hallway. She almost tripped on the rubbish – a mound of unopened post, old newspapers, coats, a broken bicycle. You could scarcely move for it.
Having navigated a path to the foot of the stairs she called up: ‘Ossie? Could you switch on a light?’
No word of reply came. A scratching, scurrying noise from the far end of the hall indicated mice. She felt for a light switch and clicked: it was dead. Had she not just been admitted she would have assumed the building to be derelict. A faint illumination from above beckoned her on. She took the staircase, carpeted with old leaves and rags, rags everywhere, splotched with paint and stinking of turps. Neglect coated everything; even the banisters were velvety with dust. She had been inside a few artists’ houses in her time, with Stephen, and they weren’t always quite clean: but she had never encountered squalor on this level before. As she approached the second-floor landing she saw that the paltry light was decanted from a glass cupola in the roof. It seemed to be a house ill-lit by moonlight.
She called his name again, and this time it brought Ossie’s voice, from a room on the left. ‘Door’s open.’ It was a relief, she felt, to hear any voice at all. She walked across the bare-boarded landing and through the door, adjusting her eyes to a different gloom, where a single gas lamp burned on the floor. The sight that met her provoked a laugh of surprise. Ossie stood a foot away from his easel, knife in one hand, smeared palette in the other, cigarette at his lips: he was completely naked but for the unlaced boots on his feet. The lamp cast one half of him in glare, so that she could see flecks of paint spattered the length of his lean body, from his neck and shoulders down through his torso, pendulous cock and balls, to his scribble-haired legs. Yet nearly as remarkable was the absolute lack of self-consciousness he displayed in his undress. Indeed, he might have forgotten he was naked at all. He seemed to her in this moment less a painter than some wild creature – a satyr, perhaps – whose lair she had stumbled upon.
‘Found it all right, then,’ he said. His long vulpine face stared at her through the murk.
She nodded, and looked around the room. It was as scruffy as the rest of the house, paint peeling off the walls, uncurtained windows, with only a disused fireplace to hint at its erstwhile elegance. Of furniture it had but two items: one was an armchair with a wide cracked leather seat, the other a mattress, reduced to its striped and stained ticking. He waved an arm towards the window ledge, where alongside tubes of pigment stood an opened bottle of Lynch-Bages and a couple of cloudy glasses.
‘Help yourself. I’ve just got to finish this,’ he said, and scraped up a gobbet of paint onto his knife. For the next few minutes he was absorbed again in his canvas. She had a sense that he didn’t appreciate chat while he worked, so she poured a glass of the claret and folded herself into the armchair to wait. Ossie looked somewhat sinister, standing there, his great forked shadow looming against the bare wall. There was something highly ‘painterly’ in the scene, for which she pondered a title: ‘Ossie by Gaslight’, perhaps, or ‘In the Altogether’. She rolled a cigarette, and asked him for a light.
‘On the bed,’ he said absently.
She found his cigarettes there, and a book of matches – from the Corsair. Her quiet groan of dismay caused him to look round.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘This place – I was once there with Chrissie Effingham. I attended the inquest this morning.’
‘Oh yeah? I met her a few times. I’d like to have –’ a choked snigger – ‘painted her.’
‘I’m sure you would.’ It was useless to reprove Ossie on grounds of delicacy: he wouldn’t understand.
Still daubing away, he mused, ‘Though it sounds like she was busy enough already –’
‘What d’you mean?’
He shot her a disbelieving glance. ‘You think a girl like that got anywhere without opening her legs?’
‘Not everyone’s as cynical as you. From what I knew of her she preferred knitting and a cup of tea.’
But Ossie was warming to his theme. ‘Any time you saw her she was surrounded by men. That fucking manager of hers. And the actor, Tarrant –’
‘Queer, according to her.’
‘What about the MP? You’re not telling me he never gave her a portion.’
‘Who – Robert Cosway?’
Ossie had come over to the bed, on which she had been idling. He kneeled down in front of her and began stroking her legs. He murmured, almost to himself, ‘Don’t understand women wearing trousers.’ She assumed he meant ‘instead of a skirt’, though it may have been a more general point about them wearing anything on their lower half at all.
His hand had reached her thigh, and she knew that now was the moment for evasive action. Sitting up, she placed his bony, bespattered hand to one side and, with humorous tolerance, said, ‘Not really in the mood, I’m afraid, Ossie.’
She had a fleeting image of him clambering on top of her, and having to deal a swift knee to his unprotected groin. But he backed off without complaint, perhaps accepting that, even with his powerful naked allure, refusal was one of those unfathomable hazards.
‘You’d be offended if I didn’t try,’ he said, shrugging, and she returned a sweetly non-committal smile. ‘But take your clothes off anyway – I should at least like to draw you.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Have you forgotten I’m –?’ She gestured at her stomach.
‘Not at all. I find pregnant women the most satisfying of all – like Rubens.’
She wondered if this might be another stratagem to get his leg over, but in fact Ossie had got up off the bed and padded across the floor to fetch a loose-leaf pad and his charcoal stick. He was ready to return to work. ‘Painting and fucking’ – she remembered someone say it – these were the only things he cared about.
‘To be honest, I only came by to drop this off,’ she said, indicating the cigarette-holder she had wrapped up for Jerry.
But Ossie wouldn’t be refused twice: ‘– which I’m taking round to poor old Jerry on his sickbed. So wouldn’t you say one good turn deserves another?’
‘I’m no great model,’ she said, running out of objections.
‘Doesn’t matter – I’m a great painter.’
That made her laugh. He had opened a window, and the air stirred a little. A distant church clock struck the hour. She asked him if he had any kif, which he did, and she smoked a joint while she slowly pulled off her sandals, then her T-shirt and trousers. In a reflex she folded her arms across her narrow braless c
hest, but Ossie wasn’t even looking at her. She stepped out of her knickers.
‘Where d’you want me?’ she said, momentarily blindsided by the strength of the cannabis. A small detonation had made her brain wobble. Ossie had settled himself on a camp stool. He pointed to the mattress.
‘Resting back on your elbows … that’s it. Legs apart. Turn your head a bit –’
Within a minute he had re-entered his trance of concentration, making marks on the paper. He muttered to himself as he worked, while she let herself swim in the rubbery intoxicating fumes of the kif.
At one point (she recalled later) Ossie had tipped his head appraisingly. ‘I always thought you’d have a nice cunt,’ he said.
She laughed again. It was the closest she had ever heard him come to paying her a compliment.
Having picked up the Flamingos record from the shop she had taken it home and spent the evening playing it to death. The echo on the singer’s voice, the drowsy hypnotic piano figure, the backing chorus and their harmonies – she couldn’t get them out of her head.
You are here and so am I
Maybe millions of people go by
But they all disappear from view …
It was on perhaps its tenth repeat when the telephone rang.
‘Freya, is that you? It’s Nancy.’
‘Nance!’ She felt her heart do a flip. ‘I was hoping you’d – did you get my letter?’
‘I did. I was very touched.’
‘Oh … so you’ve forgiven me?’
‘I don’t see anything to forgive. A small tiff. You surely didn’t imagine I’d let another eight years go by, did you?’
‘Nance, please never let us argue again – please? I don’t think I could stand it.’ Oh Christ, here it comes, she thought, as tears sprang to her eyes. Why am I crying when everything’s all right again?
‘Freya, darling, are you OK?’
‘I will be in a sec,’ she replied, knuckling her eyes. ‘Ever since I knew I was … I’ve become this quivering jelly. I don’t know what on earth has got into me. Or rather, I know too damned well what has – I can feel it kicking.’
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