Freya Read online

  Robert glanced at Freya, who said, ‘With respect, we should treat our readers as grown-ups. The real danger is ignorance – if people still think homosexuality is a “disease” then of course they’re going to fear it. We should definitely talk to the British Medical Association about how effective this treatment is. For all we know the whole idea of medical intervention might be a mistake.’

  ‘But what’s the alternative?’ asked Robert. ‘Do you really think people are going to put up with a lot of sodomites doing as they please?’

  Standish made a grimace. ‘I think “inverts” is the word here, Robert. “Sodomite” is rather, um – distasteful.’

  Freya felt a sudden bleakness of spirit descend on her. If the Envoy was supposed to be the liberal end of the newspaper market … But no, the battles had to be chosen carefully. ‘I don’t think we should lose sight of Summerhill in all this. He’s the victim, after all.’

  ‘Not in the eyes of the law,’ said Robert with a shrug.

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re debating,’ she replied levelly. ‘The law may well be at fault. Anyway, I could do a piece on Vere, gather tributes from people in the business.’

  ‘I don’t think we should turn him into a martyr,’ said Robert. ‘Summerhill knew the risks, consorting with those lowlifes – he just made the mistake of getting caught.’

  ‘We’ve been through this before,’ said Freya, nettled. ‘To say he shouldn’t have got caught presupposes he was doing something wrong. The counterargument is that the state has no right to intervene in what goes on in private between consenting adults.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Standish. ‘Robert, if you concentrate on the legal and judicial side, Freya can take care of the medical and moral questions. And I like the idea of personal tributes – we could use that picture of Nat Fane outside the court.’

  Robert groaned theatrically. ‘As if he needs any more publicity.’

  The next day, while Freya was writing her weekly column, Robert sidled over to her desk. ‘Doing anything for lunch?’

  ‘I’m insanely busy,’ she said without looking up.

  ‘Not even a quick sandwich at the Marquis?’

  There was a pleading note in his voice. When she said she could spare him three-quarters of an hour he looked grateful. The Marquis was a musty old-fashioned pub situated in the warren of courts off Fleet Street. Sawdust carpeted the floor. She arrived to find Robert at a corner table with a pale ale on the go.

  ‘Let me fetch you a libation,’ he said, getting up.

  When she asked for a ginger beer he sniggered, and went off to the bar. It took her a few moments to work out what had amused him. Settled at the table Robert began talking about their meeting with Standish; he was pleased that they had been entrusted with a ‘big story’, he continued, given they were relative juniors in the office. This could be a significant step-up for both of them.

  Absorbing this, Freya said, ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Standish, Robert, but – do you really want to do this story?’

  He looked at her. ‘What d’you mean? Of course I do.’

  ‘It’s just that, I don’t think you much care for Summerhill or for what he’s been put through. You don’t like queers and never have. “Ginger beers”! If I didn’t know you better I’d say you regard prison as exactly what they deserve.’

  Robert’s face froze for a moment; he looked stunned with disbelief. ‘Why would you say that? I’ve got nothing against Summerhill or his kind –’

  ‘But you have. Yesterday you said that if they got caught they only have themselves to blame. It alarms me to think of you reporting on this when your starting point is that Vere Summerhill and “his kind” are basically criminal.’

  Robert was shaking his head. ‘I’ve never said that. And I don’t think prison sentences for homosexuality are justified. All I was proposing was the need for discretion. I don’t think it’s monstrous of me to say I’d rather they kept themselves to themselves.’

  ‘– because you’re revolted by them. Which is why I’m wondering how you can possibly write about this in an unprejudiced way.’

  ‘For God’s sake, I’m a journalist, that’s the job – you learn how to evaluate the information, not get bloody emotional about the arguments. I could ask the same about your impartiality. How do you know your sympathy for Summerhill won’t affect what you write?’

  ‘None of us is absolutely impartial, I agree. All you can try to do is give someone a fair hearing. And in the case of a homosexual it strikes me that a woman would be naturally more disposed to understand, because she knows what it’s like to be feared and despised by society.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ said Robert, his face puckered in disgust.

  ‘Well, look at recent history. Forty-odd years ago our government imprisoned women because they had the temerity to demand the vote – to demand the basic rights of a citizen. Whether the suffragists back then felt much affinity for the likes of Oscar Wilde, also languishing in jail, I couldn’t say. But times have changed, and women who’ve grown up on stories of their mothers and grandmothers being persecuted for their beliefs perhaps look on this outlawed minority and feel, I don’t know, a recurring sense of injustice.’

  ‘The two aren’t comparable,’ he said. ‘Suffrage was a political question. Homosexuality is a moral one.’

  ‘Robert, you sound horribly like a politician. Do you really think morality and politics are somehow independent of one another? One of the reasons Asquith’s government refused to countenance female suffrage was their fear it would undermine the moral fabric of the family – that a woman who was allowed to vote would neglect the duties of “hearth and home”.’

  ‘Your analogy’s rot in any event. Whatever their political inclinations, most women don’t feel the slightest sympathy for men who hang around public lavatories for their thrills.’

  ‘That’s just what I’d expect a man to say.’

  He was glaring at her now. ‘You’re so bloody self-righteous, you know.’

  She paused for a moment. ‘And I thought you’d changed, too.’ She said it with a half-laugh and got up to leave. Robert, with an anguished groan, rose to stop her.

  ‘Freya, please – don’t. Don’t go.’

  ‘Why not? Everything I say seems to annoy you.’

  Robert hung his head, and took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t even mean to talk about this, I wanted to –’ He looked in forlorn appeal to her. ‘Please stay, just for a few minutes.’

  She sighed, and took her seat again. He watched her as she took out her papers and tobacco and rolled a slender cigarette – roll-ups were her new thing; she liked their home-made feel. As she smoked he began a tale of woe. The divorce proceedings had hit the buffers; Elaine had had a change of heart and wanted to give the marriage another try.

  Freya was nonplussed. ‘Wait – I thought you already were divorced. You said she was your “ex-wife”.’

  ‘Well, she is, in all but name. We decided months ago on a separation. Now it seems that she took the arrangement to be – more temporary.’

  ‘You have a lawyer, though – you told me.’

  ‘Yes, I hired one down in Brighton and just assumed he’d get on with it. But nothing’s happened. She’s told her lawyer she expects me to come back.’

  They were silent for a few moments. Around them the pub’s lunch-hour activity was sluggish; there was hardly a stir beyond the clink of glasses, the scrape of a bar stool against the wooden floor. Freya wasn’t sure what Robert expected her to say.

  ‘Have you talked to her about it?’

  ‘Not much. Letters, phone calls.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to sit down and have it out with her? Letters always leave room for ambiguity. With a face-to-face conversation at least you know where you stand.’

  Robert looked away, brooding. When he spoke he seemed to be dragging the words out of himself. ‘Face-to-face with her … is the last thing in the wo
rld I want. I know I’ve behaved badly, why make it more difficult than it is? I don’t love her, and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘She may need to hear that from you,’ said Freya, expelling a plume of smoke, ‘if you’re determined to go through with a divorce.’

  He closed his eyes again, as if to blank some inward pain. ‘I don’t want to go through a divorce. I just want to be divorced, gone, out of her life.’

  There was something about his refusal to take responsibility she thought pretty abject – strange, too. In the office Robert was always on hand to negotiate or conciliate, to soothe the disgruntled feelings of a colleague. And he certainly wasn’t shy about putting himself forward in editorial meetings. His professional and personal lives simply didn’t fit together. In private he let things drift, probably in the hope that they would resolve themselves. Some mixture of frankness and affection suddenly emboldened her.

  ‘Do you remember back in Oxford – that night I saw you at the Union with your new girl, what was her name?’

  Robert looked sheepish. ‘Cressida.’

  ‘That’s her,’ she smiled. ‘God, I was furious with you! It wasn’t just that you’d thrown me over. It was realising that, if we hadn’t run into one another, you’d just have gone on with your life, and left me to find out for myself. It was cruel and yet passive at the same time.’

  Embarrassed, he had started to knead the middle of his forehead with his fingers. ‘You’re right,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t bear confrontation – I’ll do anything to avoid it.’ At last, he dared to catch her eye. ‘Only please say you’ve forgiven me.’

  ‘Well, of course I have,’ she said, rolling her eyes, ‘but that’s not the point. I’m trying to prevent you making the same mistake. Don’t just let it lie! Be responsible. Arrange a meeting in Brighton, or wherever, and tell her the truth –’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can – and you must. Delaying will only make it worse. And more expensive. You can’t afford to have a lawyer on the meter.’

  Robert nodded ruefully. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how over the years you’ve acquired such good sense, while I’m still –’

  ‘The same old sodding cockchafer,’ she supplied. Robert looked stung for an instant on hearing this, and she realised his mood was too fragile to stand even a little teasing. She quickly added, ‘It’s why we love you, Robert.’

  The words had an emollient effect. He smiled again. She realised that she had been learning something from him these past weeks, something she had never much appreciated before: that tact sometimes worked better than truth-telling.

  17

  Unforgiving Eye: Portrait of a Soho Jester

  by Freya Wyley

  In the teeming urban jungle of Soho Jerry Dicks is everywhere and nowhere. He is its very own Mr Kurtz. For weeks I tracked his vanishing presence all over, but picked up only rumours of his whereabouts. In the pubs and cafes where he’s known to be a regular they shrugged at my enquiries. ‘Jerry was in a while ago, but …’; ‘He’s been in Paris, I think …’ He is a man always on his way through somewhere. He has a flat near Berwick Street and a studio off Kensington High Street. I first wrote to him at the former, and some weeks later the Post Office returned my letter with ‘Not known at this address’ scrawled across it. I later discovered that the handwriting was his own. Nor is there any use in trying the telephone. A friend of his said that in twenty years he has never known him to answer one.

  This elusiveness would not be remarkable but for the fact that Jerry Dicks is an internationally renowned photographer. His work has been exhibited in London, Dublin and Paris. His portraits of the great and good have adorned the pages of Vogue. I had glimpsed him once, from a distance, at a private view of his recent work at the Villiers Gallery, off St Martin’s Lane. He was surrounded by admirers and well-wishers whom he kept in a roar with tall stories and ribald jokes. It did not seem an appropriate moment to interrupt him, though afterwards I wished I had. It would be another three months before I managed to clap eyes on him again.

  His friend and sometime model Hetty Cavendish said that when in the right mood Dicks can be ‘the most entertaining company in London’. He has been adopted as court portraitist and jester to that exclusive clique of writers, artists and drinkers who have made Soho their personal fiefdom. The painter Ossian Blackler is his closest friend and a notable collaborator: it is his custom, whenever painting a portrait, to use Dicks’s photographs of his subject as an aide-memoire. The two men often holiday together in Spain and Morocco, where they are sometimes accompanied by Hetty Cavendish, presumably in the Dorothy Lamour role. Not everyone is so enamoured of him. At Vogue and other magazines Dicks is known as a troublemaker, mislaying expensive equipment, provoking people, arriving late at shoots or failing to show up at all. A colossal spendthrift, he has been through lean times, giving rise to rumours of his association with loan sharks, pimps, racketeers and other characters of low repute.

  When I asked him about his acquaintanceship with Soho’s underlife he laughed, or rather, he unleashed a savage bronchial cackle. ‘People are always claiming to know me,’ he said. ‘I’ve not the foggiest who they are.’ But in his time has he not encountered some shifty characters? ‘Oh, yeah. I met this very sinister cove once, quietly spoken, tight suit – tried to put the bite on me for some money.’ He stopped, and gazed off. So who was he? I asked. ‘Turned out to be my bank manager. Never saw him again.’

  One day in mid-June I finally ran Jerry Dicks to ground, and we went to a small Italian restaurant on Brewer Street, close to his flat. Though it was a lunchtime he ate nothing; his one concession to ‘victuals’ (his word) is breakfast, when he has either scrambled eggs or a kipper. He made up for this austere regimen by drinking and smoking a great deal. When the waiter was about to pour the bottle of Soave, Dicks indicated his glass and said, mildly, ‘Just up to the brim, thanks.’ By the time I finished my spaghetti vongole the bottle was empty and he had ordered another. In person he can be viciously rude or impossibly charming. I caught him on a good day; his mouth, sullen in repose, frequently split into a wide grin. With ears that protrude either side of his small head he suddenly resembled Mickey Mouse.

  About his past he is comically unreliable. When he said he was born on the pier at Skegness ‘and sold off to a touring mime troupe’ he didn’t seem concerned whether I believed him or not. As far as the record goes he was actually born in Chester around 1912. In his early twenties he nursed ambitions to be a draughtsman and worked for some years at a cartographer’s in Covent Garden. Tiring of that, he quit and loafed around Paris, where he used to earn his keep as a street artist and sign-painter. He still speaks good French, throwing in the odd Anglo-inflected phrase such as ‘Twiggez-vous?’ (You understand?) He came by his trade through the war. Having learned to work film cameras he was assigned to the Army Film and Photography Unit and saw action in Malta, Tripoli and Normandy. He said that he acquired his first Leica by wresting it from the hands of a dead German. As the Allies advanced through northern France he photographed scenes of atrocious carnage. ‘You never forget the smell of a burning corpse.’

  In post-war London he found his work much in demand, and earned enough to allow him to open a studio. While many admire Dicks’s photographs of urban ruin and desolation, it is his eye for the landscape of the human face that most intrigues. A short man, he holds his Rolleiflex camera at waist level, obliging his subjects to adopt an awkward stoop; their faces in consequence look quizzical, vulnerable, possibly guilty. Certain actors playing up to the camera suddenly take on the disturbing aspect of asylum inmates. Writers don’t come off much better. Nathaniel Fane, clad in pinstripes, looks like a half-starved spiv. The theatre critic James Erskine, bulbous-eyed, wears the fearful aspect of an offender preparing for a night in the cells. Even his old friend Ossian Blackler seems to shrink before the unforgiving lens, his thwarted gaze like a fox that’s been chased out of the henhouse.

  How much these port
raits owe to chance and how much to design is difficult to tell. Dicks spends long hours in his darkroom punching up the grain and contrast of his monochrome prints, but their atmosphere seems to be shaped by an unheard dialogue going on between the photographer and his sitter – or ‘victims’ as he prefers to call them. Some of them are clearly in deep discomfort. The photographs he has exhibited in The Public Image cock a snook at the measured, classical approach to portraiture of his contemporaries. He slyly referred to Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton as ‘my so-called rivals’. Where they flatter and coddle, Dicks interrogates his subjects, pursuing the ‘truth’ of a face to the point of cruelty. There is something of the devil in this recording angel. The wonder of it is that so many are willing to present themselves to his dark-adapted eye. ‘I’ve no interest in making people look good,’ he said. ‘I want to put their soul on view. And if they haven’t got a soul, then I’ll make do with their conscience.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Joss, looking up from the newspaper rather sternly. ‘Very … lively.’

  Freya knew his tone too well to miss a faint withholding in his praise. They were in the living room at Great James Street, as early-morning sunlight bulged across the floor. Seated crosswise on the easy chair, she waited for a moment, and said, ‘“Very lively.” That’s your code for “lacking in subtlety” – am I right?’

  Joss’s reluctant laugh indicated he would not be drawn into a fight. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it as a piece of writing,’ he said carefully.

  ‘How else would you enjoy it?’ she asked. ‘As a piece of cake?’

  ‘Don’t be provoking. I was very entertained, and I’m sure readers of the Envoy will be, too.’

  ‘Right. But for argument’s sake, had you been editing it what improvements would you have made?’

  He rolled his eyes heavenwards, a habit, she noted, he had picked up from her.

  Holding up his palms in surrender he said, ‘Please note, this is a comment, not a criticism – I was quite amused by the way you shielded him from any imputations of unpleasantness. I mean, you’d hardly know from this that he’s a drunk who sponges off his friends, consorts with known criminals and happens to be as queer as a nine-bob note.’