Freya Page 11

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Did you just see Nancy on her way –?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was hiding round the corner. May I come in?’

  She stepped aside to admit him. He slouched into the room, seemed about to sit, then moved to the far window, facing away from her.

  ‘I’ve just cleared away the tea things, but I can …’

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said, his face averted. ‘I only wanted to – You know, it’s strange, I think I must have some terrible instinct for self-sabotage, because even when I’m in the company of people I like I feel a compulsion to aggravate them, alienate them, usually by talking a lot of –’

  ‘Balls, my liege,’ she supplied. Now he did look at her.

  ‘Yes – balls. It’s just to get a reaction out of people. It’s a fault in me, and I apologise. I didn’t mean to cast aspersions on Alex, or his integrity. I’m sure he’s a good egg who’s done his bit. But what I can’t bear is the thought that you like him more than me. Really, how is that possible?’

  She laughed, not unkindly. ‘Robert, don’t be silly. I hardly know him. I’ve spent a single afternoon in his company talking about bloody Evelyn Waugh. And I don’t know what you mean about liking him more than you. It’s not a competition.’

  ‘It’s always a competition,’ he said, unsmiling.

  She sighed, and moved towards him. ‘It’s nice of you to apologise. It shows honesty. I like that in a friend.’

  He reached out and clasped her hands in his. ‘Is that all you want – honesty?’

  ‘It’s one of the things,’ she replied carefully. His eyes were fixed in earnestness upon her while his grip on her hands tightened. Oh dear, she thought, he’s going to turn this into a Big Moment.

  ‘Freya, I do want you –’ his voice had gone husky, almost hoarse – ‘to be more than a friend. If I have to get on my knees and beg –’

  ‘Oh, please don’t do that,’ she said, stifling another laugh in the instant before he nearly winded her with the force of his embrace, and she realised that asking him not to beg could be construed as a sort of licence for him to do something else. Suddenly his face was blocking the light and he had clamped his mouth upon hers. It was not suavely done, but she had at least prepared herself for his spring; she could feel the hormonal fury pouring off him. He reminded her of a young American pilot she had been out with a few times at Plymouth, the heat of him, the sinewy strength of his arms and the needy questing hands on her body. The difference was that back then it wasn’t the first time for either of them; what they had done together felt more like a transaction, hurried and unsentimental in the wartime way, but friendly withal. Here, with Robert, there was the pressure of responsibility, and it devolved mostly on her: he was a virgin, and she wasn’t.

  They had tumbled onto the ancient horsehair couch, and in between kissing her he was emitting low urgent grunts that she supposed were meant to indicate overmastering desire but sounded more like a bull preparing for a charge. It was not unpleasant to have his weight on top of her, pinioning her, but the noise was not to be borne.

  ‘Robert. Robert,’ she repeated sharply.

  He raised his head to look at her. ‘You want me to stop?’ he said, and he looked so forlorn that her heart turned over. Yes, this would be the moment to take the bull by the horns, so to speak – but her initiative had snagged on a spike of pity.

  ‘No,’ she said, holding his face steady in her hands. ‘Only stop making that noise, would you? We can get along very well without it.’

  Afterwards they lay there, stupefied, half listening to voices raised in the quad and the occasional muffled footstep on the staircase. She could feel a dampness pooling on her stomach from where she’d managed to pull him out at the critical moment. Robert propped himself on his elbow to look at her, the edges of his face blurred in the early-evening gloom.

  ‘You know what’s great about you?’ he said in a tone of post-coital gratitude.

  She blinked up at him. ‘Do tell.’

  ‘You’re not just a woman – you’re a right good chap, too.’

  It wasn’t a compliment to set the heart on fire, but she could tell it was kindly meant. ‘Er … thank you.’

  Ginny would be back any minute, so she told him to look sharp. She watched him drag his clothes on while he chattered about some film he wanted them to go and see next week. He had never sounded so cheerful. She realised, with inward self-reproof, that she had allowed something to be set in motion, and it was neither sensible nor kind.

  ‘Robert, listen to me. One very important thing,’ she said, with an emphasis that stopped him in his tracks. ‘Nancy mustn’t hear about this.’

  From his expression she could see he had no idea why.

  Next day she found a note at the lodge addressed to her. It was from Alex, who turned out to have news of an appointment at Cherwell.

  … in fact so short-handed have they been that – mirabile dictu – I’ve somehow landed a minor position in editorial, with a brief to commission articles, reviews &c. You’re probably laughing your head off, and I wouldn’t blame you. I’m aware that I owe this preferment to you – nearly all the best bits of that War in the Modern Novel piece were yours – which is why I hope you’ll agree to write something for the paper under your own name. It can be about anything, really, so long as it’s vaguely connected to the arts. We’ve got a theatre issue planned, and an idea for a profile is being bandied around. Have you by any chance heard of a chap called Nathaniel Fane?

  7

  Fane is the Spur

  by Freya Wyley

  His name is a typo, he said: he really ought to have been Nathaniel Fame, ‘since that is my calling’. At the age of 19 he is already on the way to being notorious. On the grey streets of Oxford, spring 1946, Nat Fane stood out like a harlequin at a convention of undertakers. That was him, tall and rake-thin, wafting through town in a purple velvet suit, yellow silk shirt, polka-dot handkerchief foaming at his breast pocket and chisel-toed patent leather shoes. He turns heads wherever he goes. Other favourite accoutrements include an opera cape lined in scarlet silk and kid gloves the colour of buttermilk. On the morning I met him he was dressed, with comparative restraint, in a white shirt, high-waisted grey slacks and a fawn-coloured top coat slung, film-producer-style, over his shoulders. This was his ‘working attire’, he explained, brushing an invisible speck off his sleeve and lighting his first cigarette of the day.

  As we walked down Beaumont Street towards the Playhouse, someone hailed him from across the road. ‘I wave a gloved hand, and they cheer,’ he said with an imperious lift of his arm. The line was pinched from Oscar Wilde, an earlier legend of Magdalen College to whom Fane is the natural heir. Like Wilde, he has an affinity for the theatrical and a challenging line in instant self-mythology. On the night I was introduced to him, at a party, he declared himself to be ‘an artist, an actor, a director, a writer, a critic and a collector of beautiful things’. He is an athlete as well as an aesthete, if his sporty swing of a squash racket was anything to go by. And, also like Wilde, he is apt to get other people’s backs up. It is often the fate of the man brave enough to set his face against the forces of orthodoxy that he will be sneered at as a mountebank, a flibbertigibbet, a poseur. In Fane’s case the outlandish exterior – those clothes, that make-up – will only stoke the flames of indignation. He has not yet been ‘debagged’ and dumped into Mercury, but were that sentence pronounced on him one may imagine the eager young bullies queueing to take the job.

  If he were only a monster of conceit his reputation around town would be neither here nor there. Yet Fane is possessed not just of a giant ego but of an outsize talent. It was apparent from a young age. Born in Pinner, he was educated at a minor public school (‘I forget where’) whose drama club furnished him with the means to indulge his precocity. At fifteen he put on two interlinked plays, King and Country, written by, directed by and starring himself. That they won golden opinions from all quarters wa
sn’t enough for the young playwright, who wrote an anonymous review of the production and managed to get it published in the local newspaper. It praised the author’s ‘magisterial accomplishment’. No opinion, it seemed, has quite the goldish lustre as the one he holds of himself. Since then he has taken major Shakespearean roles in his stride – Hamlet, in his most recent production, Henry V, Iago, Benedick, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (‘I wasn’t considered pretty enough for Romeo,’ he added in a baffled aside). There will be more to follow.

  I had been accorded the privilege of witnessing a rehearsal of his latest production, The Duchess of Malfi, at the Playhouse. The first night was coming up fast, yet Fane showed no sign of nerves as he greeted his cast good morning and settled into a canvas chair with a cup of pungent black coffee. Fane initially observed the actors in silence, his posture concentrated, still, hawkish. He barely gestured – then of a sudden he swooped into action, seizing on a line and shaping it precisely. At one point in the play Ferdinand, the mad brother whose incestuous desire will doom the Duchess, says, ‘I am to bespeak a husband for you.’ Fane stopped the actor and asked him to replay the line as an unconscious fluff, so that it became, ‘I am to be – er, to bespeak a husband for you.’ He has a seemingly infinite capacity for taking pains. ‘Any fool can put on a play,’ he said later. ‘But to me there is no satisfaction in merely entertaining. I want a play to immerse the audience, to plunge them into something strange and disconcerting. I want to grab them by the throat and not let go.’

  The company broke for lunch, and I accompanied Fane for what I assumed would be a sandwich and a cup of tea at Fuller’s. Instead he insisted on going to the restaurant upstairs at White’s, where we dined – rationing be damned – on shellfish, trout à la meunière and a bottle of Puligny. Restaurants are his natural element, appealing both to his epicurean tendency and his gregarious instincts. Waiters here fussed around him; they seemed to believe he was a ‘personality’ of some kind. Uncoiling from the tensions of the rehearsal room, Fane enlarged on his personal ambition as actor, producer and impresario. Next term he is to play the title role in a modern-dress version of Macbeth, another part he considers to be his destiny: ‘I am Fane of Cawdor,’ he remarked, straight-faced. He has no use for modesty – false or any other kind – outlining a ‘sacred Trinity’ of British stage actors: ‘Irving is the Father. Olivier is the Son. And I am the Holy Ghost.’ He said this with the tiniest glint of mischief. It is on occasion difficult to know if Fane believes such grandstanding or if he merely seeks to provoke his listeners. One cannot rule out the possibility of it being both. His conversation is all high-denomination banknotes; quotation is his loose change. Even over lunch he could not help performing, and the entertainment was gold standard.

  He looked at the pudding menu and discarded it, but he decided that we must have another drink to send us on our way. His tipple of the moment is Brandy Alexander, though he claimed not to have heard of Anthony Blanche, the witty exquisite of Evelyn Waugh’s recent novel Brideshead Revisited, who in one memorable scene drinks four of them in quick succession. Blanche becomes to the narrator, Ryder, a near-mythical figure, a brilliant dandy who is also the story’s inadvertent truth-teller. In him one may discern something of Nathaniel Fane, the marvellous boy who seemed to arrive in Oxford a fully-formed man, innocent yet sophisticated, forward yet elusive. Just as in that rehearsal room, he hovers on the edge of proceedings while simultaneously focusing them. He is, in every sense of the word, egregious: standing apart from the flock, an outrageous foe of propriety, and a caution. Fame, one senses, is hurrying towards him.

  ‘It’s … wonderful!’ said Nancy, lifting her face from the new issue of Cherwell. She wore a look of grave admiration. ‘You’ve got him completely, the manner, the talk. And it’s funny, too.’

  Freya, with a little uncertain laugh, said, ‘D’you think so – really?’

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t know you were –’ She stopped herself, and blushed.

  ‘Capable of it? Nor did I! But it was a stroke of luck to have Nat for my first assignment. I may never be as entertaining again.’

  They were occupying their usual places in her rooms, Freya lounging on the couch, Nancy in the armchair, cross-legged and leaning forward. It was a fresh spring morning towards the end of Hilary term, and Nancy had brought a bunch of daffodils as a present. Freya, skittish about the reception of her debut in print, felt in her friend’s verdict a grateful shock of relief. Before Nancy arrived she had placed the paper at a carelessly discarded angle on the floor that gave no hint of herself having read the thing over and over again. To contemplate her byline at the head of the page became in itself a near-erotic delight; it was as though she had never really seen her name before, with the pleasing visual rhyme of its three ‘y’s, kicking their legs sideways like chorus girls. Freya Wyley: it sounded so authoritative, so mature, a byline that knew what it was talking about and would tell it straight. From the moment it seized on her eye she realised that this was what she wanted to do. It wasn’t even that she had an urgent message for the world: she knew only that she must write.

  ‘Has he read it yet?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘I don’t know. He asked to have a look at the piece before I filed –’ she was picking up the terminology – ‘but I refused, told him no journalist would let a subject read their copy before it went to press. Alex said the editors were delighted and want me to do more.’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Nancy with reflexive loyalty. She allowed a beat to pass before changing her tone. ‘Have you made any progress with him – I mean Alex?’

  Freya shook her head. ‘The game’s up. I did a bit of digging, all quite innocent-seeming, and it seems that he’s got some girl up in Edinburgh. I’m not sure how serious it is, but …’

  ‘That’s bad luck,’ Nancy replied, somewhat preoccupied.

  ‘How did your evening with Robert go?’ said Freya lightly.

  Nancy’s brow creased in an unhappy frown. ‘OK, I suppose. We had a few drinks in the White Horse. He’s very easily distracted. Every time an attractive girl passed by his eyes came out on stalks.’

  Freya made a commiserating gesture. ‘You know how men are. Do you think he’s –?’

  ‘Keen? No, not really. I mean, he’s charming company, and he paid me some nice compliments. But I get the impression he has his sights fixed on someone else.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Not exactly. I think something’s happened, I can almost hear it in his voice, but he won’t tell me what.’

  Freya nodded, and said quickly, ‘He does get distracted, you’re right. I’m not sure he’d be terribly trustworthy as a romantic prospect.’ She had to be careful, she knew; if Nancy were to find out about her and Robert this line of conversation might not reflect well on her.

  ‘What have you done about the novel, by the way?’ She was aware of raising another awkward subject between them, though in the diversion to a matter of literary uncertainty it felt much the safer of the two. She sensed Nancy’s sidelong glance to be a touch sharper than usual.

  ‘I’ve put it away. I can’t bear to reread it at the moment.’

  ‘Oh. I hope it’s not because –’

  Nancy gave a little shake of her head before saying, ‘Once I’d thought a little more I realised you were right about certain things – the need for a single narrator, for instance. But I don’t think I should waste any more time on it.’

  She spoke of that criticism with a dispassionate calm that both impressed and embarrassed Freya, contrasting as it did with Nancy’s generous estimation of her own venture into writing. ‘Nance, I do think you have a true talent –’

  She looked at her directly. ‘I know I do.’ The steely note of self-assurance gave Freya a start – this was not the first time she had felt this disjunction between Nancy her friend and Nancy the would-be writer. ‘Which is why I’ve started a new one,’ she continued. ‘Only this time I must hold off showing it t
o you. I don’t think I can bear that much honesty.’

  She concluded this with a rueful little laugh, which seemed at once to absolve Freya of undermining her and to assert that she would never do so again. There was a warning there, and it caused her an odd double spearing of her conscience. With justice might Nancy allude to the pain her friend’s ‘honesty’ had caused – and yet was it not, conversely, the very absence of that virtue that would damn Freya in the light of what she and Robert were doing?

  The following day she answered a knock at her door to find the porter toting a riotous, and somewhat ridiculous, bouquet of spring flowers.

  ‘There’s a note attached,’ he said, laying the flowers in her surprised embrace. ‘He must be some admirer!’ he called in retreat.

  For a dreadful moment she thought they had come from Robert, but a glimpse of the actressy handwriting on the envelope reassured her as to the sender.

  Dearest Freya,

  I was going to write that your Cherwell profile humbled me, but lacking as I do ‘modesty of any kind’ let me say only that it pleased, piqued and provoked its subject. This floral tribute is but a token of my admiration. Quand même,

  Nat

  PS Are you a member of the Union? If not, allow me to invite you to a forthcoming event with a certain theatrical lion, with myself in the part of tamer.

  PPS Very amused by ref. to squash racket!

  She looked for somewhere to put his flowers; the one vase she owned already held Nancy’s daffodils, which she was reluctant to displace: though modest in comparison, they seemed to her the more authentic gift. She found her scout’s tin bucket in a cupboard on the stairs and dunked the bouquet in it.

  Her post had included a note of congratulation from Alex, who enquired as to what she was going to write next for the paper. She felt somewhat disappointed that this time he stopped short of suggesting a drink to discuss it. She wondered now if his revelation of a girlfriend back home was meant to warn her off; perhaps he had picked up in her manner a vibration of something beyond the orbit of friendliness – the gaze held a moment longer, the smile that was a little too winsome. Yet she felt herself to be caught in a maddening bind. She didn’t want to be seen gaining a foothold at Cherwell by ingratiating herself with one of the editors – she would get by on merit. But how could she prove her professional integrity if the rest of the time she was helplessly making eyes at him?