Her tone was rueful, and yet she almost swooned with pleasure on hearing Nancy’s voice. Her tears were wrung from relief as much as emotional giddiness; she knew there had been something to forgive, despite Nancy making light of it. It was true, she had been a quitter, but not any more.
‘What’s that noise?’ Nancy was asking.
‘Oh, just a record,’ she replied, only now aware of the volume at which it was playing. Freya pictured her there, sitting in her study, half smiling as she strained to hear the faint, tinny-sounding melody emanating from the Dansette. They talked on for a while. Nancy wanted to know how she was ‘coping’, and Freya felt grateful that she didn’t say the dread word out loud. Nobody understood her like Nancy did.
‘I’m finally telling my dad tomorrow. Diana’s cooking dinner at Tite Street.’ She paused. ‘I wish you were coming with me.’
Nancy gave a little laugh. ‘Well, if you really want me to …’
‘No, no, I wouldn’t put you through that.’
There was a slight hesitation before Nancy replied. ‘It’s meant to be something joyful, you know.’
Her gentle tone carried, she thought, a hint of wistfulness. She wanted to know why Nancy hadn’t had any herself, but sensed it wasn’t the moment to ask. They were still feeling their way back into friendship.
‘I know, you’re right. Joy will be unconfined. It’s just – I’m still waiting for the moment when I feel it too.’
‘All right, all right, that’s enough of that,’ she said, disengaging herself from Diana’s tearful embrace.
‘Darling, it’s just – we’re just –’ She dabbed her streaming eyes with the handkerchief Stephen had slipped her.
‘We’re rather overwhelmed,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘It’s a wonderful surprise.’
‘It was a bloody surprise to me, I can tell you,’ she said, taking another long swig of her Martini. Stephen had opened a bottle of champagne, but she had felt in need of something purely alcoholic.
‘And what does Daniele make of this?’ asked Diana.
Freya looked at her. ‘What d’you mean?’
Diana laughed nervously, and with a glance at Stephen said, ‘Well, I – you’ve surely told him about it?’
‘No, I haven’t. In fact I haven’t had any communication with him since I got back home.’
‘Oh …’ In her confusion she looked again to Stephen for support.
‘Don’t you think you ought to tell him?’ he said.
She gave an impatient sigh. ‘I told you – it was over between us, even before I left Italy.’
‘Yes, but doesn’t this rather change things?’
She had anticipated this response, of course. Stephen was very far from being a hidebound patriarch. His own past, with its trail of affairs and a divorce, had never let him presume to tell his daughter how she ought to behave – and he knew her intractable nature too well to try. His concern, she knew, sprang from a practical, not a moral, instinct.
‘It doesn’t change anything. Until a couple of weeks ago I had actually been planning to get rid of it. Since then I’ve been too busy or too panicked to think about Daniele. And I can pretty much guarantee that he hasn’t been thinking about me.’
She shrugged, and a brief silence intervened while they absorbed this sudden bump on the road to familial happiness.
‘What changed your mind?’ asked Diana.
‘I don’t know … Crazy as it sounds, it may have been something to do with Chrissie Effingham. I met her, not long before she died – she happened to drop by on the very morning I’d found out from the doctor. I was so upset I let it slip. Something about her, the way she looked at me … Then her dying just –’
She didn’t really understand the connection herself, and from their puzzled looks they didn’t either.
‘Darling, he deserves to know,’ said Stephen. ‘Obviously no one can force you, but I think it would be the decent thing – the right thing – to do.’
Freya shook her head, and took another swallow of her drink. ‘From your point of view it may look that way. But I know him, and believe me, he won’t thank me for the news. All Dani cares about is his motorbike, his clothes and getting home for meatballs at his mama’s. He isn’t a grown-up, really, and he wouldn’t be ready for fatherhood in any way.’
‘I thought Italians loved children,’ said Diana rather pleadingly.
‘Maybe he does. But not at the moment, and not one of mine. Now may I please have another one of these excellent Martinis?’
She felt that she had let them down, pouring out cold hard facts to douse the cosy fire of congratulation. She knew she was right about Dani, though it didn’t help resolve her own anxieties. She could hardly rejoice at the idea of bringing up a child on her own. What if she forgot to feed it – Christ, she had to stop saying that – or accidentally dropped the thing on its head? She had heard horrific stories: the new mother who slept with her baby next to her and woke to find she had rolled on top of it in the night, crushing it to death.
Seeking to restore the happy mood she suddenly said, ‘I have bett— I mean, some other good news. I finally met Nancy again.’
Stephen, brightening, said, ‘At last! I always wondered when you two were going to make up. You were pretty cagey about it last time I mentioned her.’
‘She invited me to a party at her house, a few weeks ago. And as soon as we started talking I realised what a lot of time I’d wasted being mad at her.’
‘I never quite got why you were so mad at her. Wasn’t it him you fell out with?’
‘Yes. He made himself my enemy. I suppose what riled me was the fact Nancy couldn’t tell what sort of man Robert was – presumably she still can’t. But in every other way she’s the person I always knew and loved.’
‘It’s a pity about him – Cosway, I mean,’ said Diana. ‘He seems rather dashing in his photographs.’
Freya wrinkled her nose. ‘He’s always been plausible. He has a lot of front. The first time we met – I must have told you – I was visiting Dad’s old staircase at Balliol. He came out of a bathroom stark bollock naked …’
‘Oh!’ drawled Diana, lifting her brow saucily.
Freya smiled back. ‘He’s not as impressive as he thinks he is. Apply that verdict as you wish.’
The sky was a sullen grey lid pressing down on the warm afternoon. Dust flew up behind the buses as they trundled along Kilburn High Road, whose exhausted pavements drummed to the footsteps of children in uniform. It was nearly four, and school was out. Freya, who had been waiting for twenty minutes, couldn’t understand why Ava Dunning had chosen this bus stop as their rendezvous. Two 31s had already carried off eager squawking presses of schoolchildren, and more were quickly replenishing the vacated stop.
Freya, leaning back against the brick wall, studied them. She was mesmerised by their complete absorption in their own world, and their utter indifference – nearly a blindness – to the actual one moving around them. Pedestrians had to sidestep, or pause, or say ‘excuse me’, just to get through the jostling throng, which barely registered the passing stranger’s inconvenience. They would be different, more noticing, when they were alone. When she tried to remember being a child herself she could recover only the feelings of boredom. She had been waiting, longing, to be an adult.
Another bus had just arrived when she heard her name called. The voice came, startlingly, from the open platform of the bus itself. She looked up, screwing her eyes, and realised that the black girl, momentarily unfamiliar in her bus conductor’s uniform, was Ava herself. She was animatedly beckoning her forward, and held off the pack of kids scrambling to come aboard (‘Oi! Wait your turn!’) to let Freya on first.
‘Go upstairs, I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said, as the tide of schoolkids finally burst around her.
On the upper deck she found a seat near the front, half listening to the hoots and cries of the adolescent zoo behind. The bus wheezed onwards, its stops announced by a ping of
the bell and, from down below, a cry of ‘Hold tight’. They were in the thick of Westbourne Grove by the time Ava found a spare moment to say hullo. She rested the back of her head against a chrome rail.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t find another time to see you. Madness round here.’
Freya’s smile took in her uniform, neat as a new pin. ‘I didn’t realise you …’
‘What – had a job?’
‘Well, when I saw you with Chrissie, at the club that night –’
The mention of her name made a brief unspoken communion between them; then Ava said, ‘Most of her friends weren’t models. We came from school.’
‘I know. She told me. She talked a lot about you, actually.’
Ava nodded, silent. They held each other’s gaze for a moment. The bus had halted. Craning forward to check the mirror on the downstairs platform, Ava pulled the bell string twice, and they were off again.
‘We get to White City in about twenty minutes. You got time for a cuppa?’
‘Of course.’
Ava had started back down the swaying deck when Freya caught her sleeve. ‘Aren’t you going to take my fare?’
She had never seen the girl smile properly before. Her teeth were shapely and white and even but for a tiny gap between the front two. ‘This one’s on me.’
The bus pulled into the terminus, and Freya was coming down the curved staircase with the remaining passengers when she saw three blazered youths crowding just behind Ava. As the last boy passed he whipped off her conductor’s cap and gave her head a quick, vigorous rub. He jumped from the platform, laughing with his mates as they ran off.
‘What was that?’ asked Freya.
Ava, stoically, picked up her hat and tossed it onto the tartan moquette bench seat. ‘They think it’s good luck to touch your hair – “gollywog’s hair”. Used to happen all the time when I first started. Some people still rub my hands to see if it’s dirt that made me black.’
‘Really?’ She felt faintly appalled.
Ava’s languid shrug said that it was no matter, since it would happen whether she liked it or not. She lifted the straps of the metal ticket machine from her shoulders and loosened her tie. They stepped off the bus, and Freya watched as she exchanged a few words with the driver, who was also black. After she had divested herself of the machine and her satchel of change at the office, she rejoined Freya and with her eyes indicated the way. Outside the depot they crossed the road and found a cafe whose patrons included a handful of bus workers. Ava nodded to this or that one as they settled themselves at a scratched Formica table and gave a waitress their order.
Ava’s gaze had dropped to Freya’s midriff. ‘So you’re, erm …?’
‘Yes. “In the family way.”’
‘Chrissie told me.’
‘She happened to call round the very morning I found out. Something a bit motherly about her.’
Ava smiled. ‘That’s what she was like. The modelling didn’t change her. The money and the hotels and having her photograph everywhere – she really didn’t care about it. The clothes she had …’
‘I remember that amazing orange minidress you wore that night –’
‘She gave me that! I couldn’t afford it.’
Freya smiled. ‘I don’t know if she told you, but at the cafe she didn’t have any money, so I paid – which was fine. But to make up for it she sent me a television set.’
‘That’s what she was like,’ Ava said again more quietly.
Freya reached for her handbag, and took out a paper napkin. She opened it to show a telephone number, written in biro:
MAYfair 6098 Chrissie x
‘I never called – I wrote a postcard to her instead. It’s odd, but I find I look at this thing more often than I do the TV.’
Touching the edge of the napkin, Ava dipped her head. When she looked up again tears were standing in her eyes.
Freya reached over and gently put her hand on hers. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –’
Ava used her other hand to shield her brow. ‘It’s just … seeing her handwriting. Like she’s still alive somewhere.’
Freya nodded, pained and simultaneously struck by how beautiful the girl looked. She waited a few moments for her to regain her composure. The waitress had just arrived with their tea, and she asked her for one of the glazed pastries that had been imploring her from the stand on the counter.
When she had gone, Freya leaned forward and began, carefully, ‘You said, when you telephoned, there was something I might want to know – about Chrissie, I think.’
Ava made a little movement of her neck before she began. ‘What they said about her in the paper, at the inquest, well – it wasn’t true.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘They said the caretaker found her at about four o’clock. That’s not right. It was me who found her.’
She had just finished a shift, she said, about half past midnight. Chrissie had asked her to telephone, because she thought there might be a ‘late one’ at the flat. This meant that Bruce Haddon was bringing over some of his cronies from the Corsair, business types who didn’t much interest her. She would usually ask Ava to come round, since she was the only one of her friends who would be up that late and still in town. But when Ava rang that night to confirm, Chrissie didn’t answer. It was a woman, Frances – they all knew her from the Corsair – who picked up the phone. There was something odd about this.
‘She said Chrissie was really upset cos Bruce had been “at her” about something. Said it was all a bit tense there, and that it might be best not to come round. I could hear Bruce shouting in the background, that was how he got sometimes, and I thought, well, what’s the point?’
‘So you didn’t go?’
‘I was done in anyway, being on me feet all day, so I got a night bus going south. We’d got to Victoria when I changed my mind – I thought, if Chrissie really is upset she’d want a friend with her, so I hopped off and caught another bus going to Park Lane. I must have arrived at Curzon Street about half past one, maybe a bit later. I could hear Alfie, her dog, whining and pawing at the door inside, but nobody answered my knock. I went down to the porter and asked him if he could let me in. The flat seemed empty, which didn’t feel right. I went into the bedroom, and there she was, lying on the bed. At first –’ she took a deep breath, composing herself – ‘I thought she was asleep. I called her name. Nothing. I sat on the bed and tried to wake her. She didn’t move. I asked the porter to come in. He looked at her, then got a mirror to hold near her mouth. He just said, “She’s dead.”’
Freya let the silence lengthen a beat before she spoke. ‘What about Bruce and the others? Where were they?’
Ava lifted her thin shoulders. ‘That’s just it. When I phoned it sounded like a party was going on – I could hear music. Now it was like they’d never been there. Someone must have cleared up pretty quickly, cos all the ashtrays had been emptied, bottles and glasses had gone.’
‘When you found her, on the bed, was she clothed?’
Ava nodded.
‘What did you do then?’
‘The porter went to phone the police. But before they came Bruce arrived, looking like a ghost. It was like … like he already knew. He said to me – “You don’t wanna get involved in this, there’ll be all sorts of publicity, the papers will be after your family.”’
She fell silent then, seeming troubled by what she had to say. Freya, with a tiny movement of her brow, encouraged her to go on.
‘I asked him about the police, and he said he’d deal with them. I knew there were drugs, which would make things … To be honest, I was so upset at that point I wanted to go anyway, and he could tell. He gave me twenty pounds, I think just to make sure I didn’t … say anything.’
‘Twenty quid’s a lot. I wonder what he thought he was paying you not to say.’
Ava was tracing her finger around a pattern on the table. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it – should I? I should have stayed and
talked to the police. Then they wouldn’t have just claimed it was an overdose.’
‘What do you think it was?’ said Freya, scrutinising her. ‘Why was he so eager to get you out of there?’
‘I don’t know. The idea she’d been drinking was crazy – she just didn’t. I have this awful feeling, you know, if I’d been able to talk to her on the phone, or if I’d gone to her flat straight away I could have – done something. Saved her, maybe.’
‘You can’t know that. She may already have been dead.’
Ava looked away, her eyes closed. It seemed she was in a struggle with delayed feelings of remorse. Freya wasn’t sure what she had got hold of. There was something fishy about that night, not least the abrupt dispersal of the gathering at Chrissie’s flat. Bruce Haddon’s fortuitous reappearance just after Ava discovered the body looked even more suspect, as did the hush money he handed to her. It was like he already knew, she said.
‘These late-night parties at Chrissie’s place – how many people would turn up?’
‘Twenty, twenty-five, I suppose. You’d see the same faces.’
‘The woman who answered the phone – Frances? – do you know anything about her – where she lives?’
Ava shook her head. ‘She was a good-time girl, you know – wore a lot of fur, always nicely made up.’
‘And she was friends with Chrissie?’
‘Well … I’m not sure how well Chrissie knew her. She was a bit older than us. We used to see her around the Corsair.’
They drank more tea, and for a while talked of other things. Now and then Ava would favour someone in the grey serge of London Transport with a smile, or just a lift of her chin. The fellowship of the route.
Ava, aware of herself being studied, said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. When I was writing Chrissie’s obituary it occurred to me that I hardly knew this girl, and yet I felt such a strong connection to her. I couldn’t understand it.’
Ava looked off into the distance. After a pause she said, ‘I sometimes find myself talking to her out loud. I keep thinking I’ll hear her voice, she feels that close. But I never do.’
Freya Page 47
