Freya Page 27

  Alex straightened his gaze, and said, in a quiet voice, ‘Not the girl. The man. His name was Jan.’

  So there it was. All that time, and no one had the smallest suspicion that Alex was queer. He’d met Jan in London during the war; he was a Czech navigator attached to the RAF. He’d come up every so often to stay in Oxford, though of course nobody knew, and Alex never dared introduce him. They were together for nearly eight years, before Jan went back to Czechoslovakia – and disappeared. Freya, stunned, was trying to fathom how Alex had kept it secret for so long, from her, from everyone. How could she not have known? He said: ‘You forget that I worked in Intelligence, where everything was encoded, hidden. Secrecy became second nature to me. The invert learns to deceive from an early age – society has forced him to play the double agent in his own life.’ He admitted, though, that he was as close to telling Freya as he’d ever been. She saw that he meant this as a compliment, but she still felt a bit of a fool.

  As for Jan, Alex had been trying to track him down for two years. He had gone to ground, whether by choice or by compulsion he didn’t know.

  Nancy, her legs folded underneath her on the couch, had kept the silence of sympathy during this narrative. At length she spoke. ‘I know you must feel hurt by this, but imagine how awful it must have been for him. All those years, not being able to tell anyone.’

  Freya tilted her head minutely. ‘I wish he’d trusted me. His mother has no idea, of course, still thinks he’ll bring some bonny bride up to Edinburgh one day …’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Nancy feelingly.

  Freya thought again of Alex’s face, surprised by tears as he gazed on the photo of their vanished youth. Perhaps it was knowing how much she felt for him that had doubled his determination not to let his secret slip – he couldn’t bear the idea of her recoiling from him once she found out.

  ‘I wonder –’ Nancy began. ‘I wonder why he told you this now?’

  Freya held her gaze for a moment. ‘I wondered about that, too.’

  18

  She didn’t have to wait long to find out. Her intuition that Alex had more to tell proved correct, though its exact nature was more serious than she could have guessed. In the ordinary run of things she would have told Nancy straight away, but circumstances and her own temperament militated against it. It so happened that the next time she saw Alex was the day before they set off for Florence, and she didn’t want to sabotage the holiday spirit before they’d even got off the plane. She could almost persuade herself that her withholding was a matter of tact, the virtue she had adopted in a spirit of ‘better late than never’. But in fact she had kept quiet out of what she vexingly knew to be her own wounded pride, and a lingering sense that she may have been duped.

  He had telephoned her at the Envoy one morning, less than a week after they’d had dinner. His alacrity rather surprised her, though in the wake of that night she realised that nothing ought to surprise her any more.

  ‘I’m just calling to say sorry for the other night,’ Alex began meekly. ‘I ought not to have burdened you with it.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise. I’m over the initial shock, but I may need a few weeks for a full recovery.’

  There was a silence at the end of the line, and she wondered if her light-hearted tone had offended him. But no, he was only considering his next words. ‘The truth is, Freya, there’s one other thing I need to talk to you about, and I can’t do it over the telephone. It relates to –’ It was a discreet invitation to fill in the gap.

  ‘Oh. When were you thinking?’

  ‘Today, if you possibly can.’

  ‘Um, I’m not really –’

  ‘Please. It’s important.’

  She glanced at the wall clock. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘In a telephone box about two streets from your building.’

  Now she felt a flutter of alarm. This was not the steady, self-contained Alex she knew – or thought she knew – it sounded more like some needy stranger impersonating him. But she could hardly refuse. She asked him to give her half an hour. Where should they meet?

  ‘The same place as last time,’ he said and hung up.

  He was sitting on the bench, her favourite one in New Square. The look he directed at her from beneath his brow was watchful. His outward appearance had changed since last week. He might almost have slept in his clothes, they were so crumpled; his shirt didn’t look quite clean, and the bluish stubble lent a furtive touch. When she sat down he tried a smile that seemed suddenly pitiable.

  ‘Sorry to drag you out. I called in sick at work.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said, keeping her tone bright.

  Alex seemed to gather himself to begin, and then shook his head; a dispirited sigh escaped him. He began, haltingly, ‘If I asked you to – to help me out of a jam – would you do it, no questions asked?’

  She stared at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘If I was able to, yes – of course I would.’

  He nodded, barely. ‘Even if it meant lending me some money?’

  ‘Yes. I mean … how much?’

  ‘A lot. A lot.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘Three hundred quid.’

  Freya gasped out a laugh. ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘far from it. You earn a pretty good screw, I would have thought.’

  ‘Nothing like that! Alex, I’d gladly lend you three hundred if I had it –’

  ‘Well, how much do you have?’

  She shrugged: this wasn’t the sort of question a friend asked. But his evident desperation demanded an answer. ‘Not even a hundred. In my bank account, maybe twenty. And about forty in savings.’

  He winced, distractedly, then looked to her in renewed appeal. ‘D’you know anyone you might – I mean – touch for a loan?’

  ‘Alex, I want to help. Please tell me what this is about.’

  He leaned forward, his head lowered. For a while he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t push him. In the gardens office workers and the occasional begowned lawyer sauntered by, oblivious to their tense mood. A little breeze hurried through the square. At length Alex said, ‘What I told you the other night – you know what it’d mean if it came out, at the ministry.’

  ‘Nobody there knows, surely?’

  He shook his head, no; or at least, not yet. He had been careful, always, when he was with Jan. In recent years he had had to seek out company – of my sort, he said drily – but even then he had been circumspect, about names, places you could go, people you could trust. As he said, the double life had become second nature. It was a stroke of bloody awful luck that had done for him. It went back to his days in Military Intelligence, when for purposes of information they sometimes resorted to narks, black marketeers, other lowlifes. He had not for a moment imagined encountering them again. My mistake, he said, with a bitter laugh. He had been drinking in some dive one night when he thought he saw someone, a snitch he had used during the war. He cleared out of there pretty quickly, hoping he hadn’t been spotted.

  Some weeks later he was approached by the same man – name of Sewell – who had ‘taken an interest’ in his old wartime associate. He’d heard (this came with a smirk) that Mr McAndrew was now a person of influence in Whitehall … Alex, caught unawares, brushed the man off, but he sensed trouble in the offing. Two days later he received a package at his flat; it contained a sheaf of photographs of himself in the company of certain young men. ‘Trade,’ Alex supplied, in a quiet, unillusioned tone. There was no note, only a telephone number. Sewell, answering his call, explained the terms, with all the nonchalance that Alex recalled from ten years before. He could hear in Sewell’s voice the relished irony of getting the upper hand on his former employer. His dilemma was stark: either pay for the photographs, or face a call from Scotland Yard.

  ‘When did this happen?’ asked Freya.

  ‘A few months ago,’ said Alex. ‘The first mistake I made was getting caught. The second was to pay up immediately. That was when
Sewell knew he could play me. There was more to follow. There’s always more.’

  Freya, who had listened to this in a mood of sympathetic indignation, now felt prodded by a little dagger-point of doubt. ‘And you last heard from him – when?’

  Alex paused to think. ‘About ten days ago.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, scrutinising him. ‘So that was a few days before you invited me to dinner –’ and killed the fatted calf for me, she thought.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was …’

  ‘– and gave me the lowdown on what you were up to at Oxford – all that guilt and secrecy. Now I see why you told me.’

  ‘Well … I told you because you’re a friend.’

  ‘Yes, a friend you could immediately put the bite on. All those years of silence, then you invite me to dinner. I’m surprised you didn’t ask me for the money there and then – why wait another five days?’

  Alex’s face had passed through confusion into shock. ‘You’ve got it wrong. This was never a plan. I am mortified – mortified – to ask you for money. Can you not tell?’

  She was regarding him narrowly. ‘Maybe you didn’t want to, but clearly you overcame your scruples.’

  Alex slowly sank his head into the cage he had made of his hands. ‘God almighty, this is worse than – Freya, please, I’m appealing to you as one of the few people in the world I’ve ever told this stuff to. I’m sorry the timing looks off, but there was nothing I could do about that. Someone is extorting money from me, and with great reluctance I’m asking for your help.’

  Her pride had been piqued. She’d thought Alex had wanted to renew their friendship because he’d missed her – perhaps even loved her. He had certainly given that impression over dinner last week. How could she have allowed herself to be fooled? To him she was merely someone to be tapped for a loan. She wondered if his dishevelled appearance was part of the ploy, too.

  ‘I don’t have that sort of money, Alex. And I don’t know anyone who does.’ There was a cold note in her voice she didn’t much like, yet couldn’t disguise.

  Alex heard it, for certain; he nodded sadly, and said, ‘I’m sorry to have asked you. I made a mistake.’ They had both got to their feet. It was obvious that she had embarrassed him. ‘I hope you won’t refuse to shake my hand.’

  The grave humility of his gesture pierced her. She couldn’t tell if she was punishing him or punishing herself. Was it both? Unsmiling, she merely shook his hand, and watched him as he walked away.

  ‘And you’re sure Joss doesn’t mind?’ asked Nancy as they lugged their suitcases towards the bus station in Florence.

  ‘Of course not.’

  But in fact he did mind, as she knew he would. She had fobbed him off with a story about Nancy being exhausted and in need of a break, and her stepmother insisting that Freya bring her to the house for rest and recuperation. (She didn’t tell Nancy about this subterfuge.) Joss’s crestfallen look on hearing that he was surplus to requirements caused a pang, enough for her to plead with him to come out for the last weekend. His huffy agreement to this almost provoked her to tell him the truth, namely that she preferred Nancy as a holiday companion.

  The bus stuttered through the outskirts before beginning its wheezy ascent of the hills. The heat and dust of the streets mingled with the close smell of tobacco, exhaust fumes and sweat. Gazing out of the window Nancy remarked on the meagreness of everything, and it was true, the stalls and shops seemed hardly equipped to serve its people, little old ladies with stolid, wrinkled faces sitting in doorways and swarms of tanned thickset men in white vests or short-sleeved shirts. Carts and taxis and buzzing Vespas jammed the narrow ways, and their bus kept beeping and halting in its effort to get clear. Huge billboards advertising aperitifs loomed towards them, then fell behind.

  As the winding road climbed, the houses became fewer and farther between. When they reached the main piazza of Fiesole, Freya presented the note she had made of the address in the hope that the driver might direct them onwards. He seemed to recognise the name, and the volley of demonstrative Italian he shot at them was met by her with much nodding and si-si-ing.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Nancy, as the bus pulled away in a gritty cloud of fumes.

  ‘I have no idea,’ she replied. It seemed respectful just to appear to understand. ‘Wait, I’ve got Diana’s map somewhere.’

  The directions to Villa Colombini were quite straightforward, though the final half-mile up a rutted cart track, the early-afternoon sun ablaze, caused a torment of sweating and swearing. Their stiff, exhausted smiles at the gardener (‘Buongiorno, signorine!’) softened once they emerged onto a terrace, its walls overrun with dark green creepers. Freya whistled softly. A commanding panorama over the basin of Florence, with somnolent wooded hills at the rim, had stopped them in their tracks.

  ‘Golly,’ murmured Nancy.

  The gardener, or perhaps he was the major-domo, took charge of their slick-handled suitcases, and, before disappearing into the house, nodded them towards a trellised stairway around which roses straggled. It dropped down to a forecourt that led in turn to a swimming pool of brilliant blue. Nobody was about, and all that could be heard within the tranquil enclosure was the distant sawing of cicadas. The water’s perfect glittering surface seemed to call Freya forward.

  ‘Hold this a sec, will you?’ she said, taking off her wristwatch and handing it to Nancy. She kicked off her sandals and pulled off her sweat-soaked dress over her head. She thought about taking off her slip, too, but decorum checked her.

  ‘Erm, Freya …?’ said Nancy, alarmed.

  Freya rocked back a step, and then sprinted for the edge. Her dive broke the surface with a sharp crack. The shock of the water, colder than it looked, nearly tore the breath from her, and as she came up for air she gave a protesting shriek.

  ‘You madwoman,’ shouted Nancy with a laugh.

  She had just hauled herself gasping out of the pool when an elderly lady in a green sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat appeared from the shadows of the house. She gave a little whinny of surprise.

  ‘Hullo! You’re very keen,’ she said, frankly appraising Freya in her soaked underclothes. ‘Now which one of you is Freya?’

  The lady introduced herself as Kay, Diana’s aunt, and the owner of the house. She was firm-bodied, strong-jawed, with a penetrating ice-blue gaze. She spoke in the formidable clipped accent of her generation. But her manner was warmer than her appearance, and as they talked she became genial and confiding. She asked them about their journey, and grimaced at the account Freya gave of the pensione in Rome they had stopped in overnight.

  ‘Ye-e-e-ers, I can imagine the fleas. And then that footslog to get here – no wonder you wanted to cool orf!’ She was staring again at Freya, who realised she was showing a lot of herself through the clingy dampness of her slip.

  ‘It’s a wonderful place you have,’ said Nancy, hand shading her eyes from the sun.

  ‘Thenk you. Been in the family for years. Perhaps you’d like to see around?’

  They fell into step as Kay conducted them through the cool, shuttered rooms, some with the unstirred air of disuse, others festooned with the clutter of long acquaintance – a piano room, with piles of sheet music spilling out of the padded stool, and on the wide mantel a domestic shrine of silver-framed family photographs; a library, and a desk with a typewriter where Kay worked; upstairs led to a huge living room with a card table and plump old sofas swathed in blankets and paisley shawls. In a basket by the fireplace lay a careless pile of old magazines. She spotted a Frame among them. Then they filed down a corridor lined with prints and crossed another, smaller, living room to the kitchen. Here a short Italian woman was conversing with the major-domo, who smiled as if at old friends. Kay briskly introduced them as Tomas and Marina (‘she’s our housekeeper’) before getting down to business in rapid Italian. It seemed that lunch was to be prepared for them. Diana and Stephen were due back any moment from their trip into town.

  ‘I�
��ll show you the bedrooms,’ Kay was saying over her shoulder as they followed up another flight of stairs. On the landing she paused outside a bedroom, and looked at them with a sudden candid vigilance. ‘Do you wish to share a room?’

  Freya and Nancy looked at one another, momentarily thrown. It seemed unlikely that space was at a premium. ‘We can share, if it’s more convenient –’

  ‘Oh, no, we’ve heaps of rooms, it’s no trouble …’ Her bright manner seemed for a moment to suggest that sharing might be more ‘fun’, but then thought better of it and allocated them rooms next door to one another. ‘Right, you get settled in – the bathroom is down the corridor. Lunch at half past one.’

  She left them admiring the view out of the first bedroom. Nancy turned with a knitted brow of puzzlement to Freya and said, sotto voce, ‘Does she think we’re …?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ whispered Freya.

  ‘Why would she presume …?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Freya, which concluded the matter. She pulled aside the mosquito net to open the window. ‘My God, Nance, is this the most –’

  ‘– beautiful place ever? Yes. We’ve only been here ten minutes and I’m dreading the moment we have to leave.’

  Freya was up at eight the following morning to plough up and down the pool. Kay was already on her deckchair doing the Times crossword in the shade, occasionally peering over the paper to check the swimmer’s progress. When Freya emerged dripping from the water, hair dark and sleek against her black swimming costume, she stretched herself out on the lounger, her chest still heaving from the exercise. Kay looked over at her.

  ‘My dear, you look like a marvellous otter. Shall I pour you some tea?’

  They talked about the house. It had been left to Kay’s grandmother by her first husband, whose family had made their money in a Midlands brewery; they had been part of an expat community in Florence and were friends with the Trollope family (there were signed first editions by Anthony in the library). Kay, the oldest of three sisters, used to holiday here in childhood, ‘when the place was very cut orf – no motor bus then’. Once their parents became too infirm to travel Kay, unmarried and footloose, decided to take over the maintenance herself. She had improved it a little at a time, installing electricity and paving the courtyard entrance. Then she had the swimming pool put in, tamed the garden (‘an awful mess’) and planted the lemon trees in front of the terrace. She made her own oil from the olive grove below. Of course she depended on Tomas and his boys for the upkeep, fixing the roof, replacing the old tiles and what have you. There was always something that needed doing.