Freya Read online

  ‘Well, you said there’d be a lot of men!’ Jean made a quick survey of the room, and seemed satisfied. Then, indicating with her eyes, she said, ‘Who was that extraordinary boy you were just talking to?’

  ‘Oh, he’s called Nat Fane.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s him … I did wonder – they say he put on a school production of The Merchant of Venice, starring himself, and took it to the West End. What did he want with you?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure. He said he wanted to cast me in a play, but …’ She made a comical grimace to suggest some deeper intention than this.

  Jean, reading her look, demurred. ‘I don’t think so, darling. Surely you can see he’s a roaring queen?’

  Freya only shrugged – though from the glint in Fane’s eye she doubted it. The party was picking up in volume; next door she could hear them chanting along to ‘Minnie the Moocher’. Even Jean was having to raise her voice to be heard. Jean’s gang, friends she had made in the University Labour Club, wore the unsmiling air of prison warders about to break up a riot.

  Spotting Robert still hovering in the wings, she caught his eye and pulled him towards her as if with an invisible lasso. She had secured her means of escape.

  ‘Jean, meet Robert Cosway – he’s the chap who invited us here.’

  Jean’s eyes gleamed as they settled on Robert. As Freya slipped away she saw in Robert’s glance a full awareness of his being used as a decoy; the stab of guilt was not deep enough to discomfit her. She ducked back into the roar of the party on the lookout for Nancy. After a few minutes she found her in the relative quiet of the kitchen talking to Charlie, who clearly couldn’t believe his luck. He didn’t even seem to mind that she towered over him.

  Charlie looked over her shoulder. ‘So you managed to shake off that flaxen-haired fop?’

  Freya laughed. ‘It wasn’t difficult. Anyway, I’m told he’s queer.’

  ‘That’s not what we’ve heard,’ said Charlie. ‘For one thing, he’s engaged to be married. For another, he’s been tupping the ladies in his Hamlet production.’

  ‘Ophelia and Gertrude,’ Nancy added.

  ‘Ah, that’s interesting. He’s just asked me to be his Duchess of Malfi,’ said Freya.

  Nancy looked horrified. ‘You don’t act!’

  ‘That didn’t seem to deter him.’

  She had been flattered by his attention. He attracted her, not in a sexual way – he was too epicene for that – but in his willingness to stand apart from the crowd; no other man here would have dared to wear such clothes, or to affect that languid manner of address. He was an extraordinary creature, and he behaved as one who knew it. Through the doorway she could see Robert shooting glances at her: another suitor. He was as self-involved as Nat Fane, she thought, but less assured, more bumptious; an arrogance lacking in confidence. He had practically confessed to her that he’d never had a girlfriend. His desperation rather touched her.

  Another jug of beer was being passed around, and she helped herself to more. She had taken two Benzedrine on her last trip to the lav, and felt ready to go again. She grabbed Nancy’s hand and led her back to the music room, where she could hear Louis Armstrong playing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. Another one she loved! Since no one asked them to dance she turned to Nancy, and by unspoken consent they improvised a quick-step waltz across the floor. It was the first time they had danced together since VE night at her dad’s flat, and as she surrendered to the music and inhaled Nancy’s scent and her scalp tingled with the wild silvery onrush of the drug, she fancied she saw at last the point of being at Oxford.

  With her eye on the curfew Nancy said she would have to get going. Freya offered to walk her back to St Hilda’s, and having extracted their coats from a heaped bed upstairs they slipped out. Hazed gaslights along Banbury Road offered illumination against the night. Behind them they heard the door open and a blast of the party echoed forth; a figure had emerged in their wake. Freya for a moment thought it would be Robert or Charlie, but the grand billow of his silhouette argued otherwise.

  ‘Ladies, a moment please,’ Nat Fane drawled. He sauntered up to join them on the drive. The billow was explained by the opera cape he had slung around his shoulders: no ex-army greatcoat for him. In the dark his face gleamed as pale as the moon. On learning they were heading for St Hilda’s he asked leave to accompany them, since he was going that way too, though once they fell into step Freya had the confounding sense that they had tagged along with Fane – he had the air of one who led, not one who joined.

  ‘So how did you become so devoted to the theatre?’ Nancy asked him.

  Fane made an interested ‘hmm’ noise before saying, ‘I long for the day when someone asks: How did the theatre become so devoted to you? I suppose my coup de foudre was Olivier as Hamlet. The first time, I adored him. Second time, I studied him. The third time, I understood him.’

  ‘And the fourth time?’ asked Freya.

  ‘There will not be a fourth time. The challenge now is to unseat him.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted to be a playwright, or a producer?’

  ‘Why not all three? I am a creature of ambition … I’m minded to regard modern stage acting as a Trinity of sorts. Irving is the Father. Olivier is the Son –’ he paused, glancing at his listeners – ‘and I am the Holy Ghost.’

  Freya half snorted a laugh. ‘You’ll be founding your own Church next.’

  ‘Unnecessary,’ said Fane lightly. ‘I shall make believers of you without the yoke of religion. The stage will be my Church.’

  They had crossed over Magdalen Bridge and stopped at the gate of St Hilda’s, where Fane took Nancy’s hand and placed on it a lingering kiss. He made the gesture seem at once solemn and lascivious.

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ said Nancy, whose eyes, flicking sideways to Freya, delivered an unmistakable message: watch out. Freya quickly kissed her goodnight before she and Fane retraced their steps across the bridge.

  ‘An interesting study, your friend – Nancy, is it? The hair is Pre-Raphaelite, but the face, the body, well … a diffident Valkyrie is perhaps the closest I can get.’

  Freya thought that rather clever, though she declined to say so; he looked too puffed on praise already. ‘She’s my best friend,’ was all she said, which induced a little moue of confusion on her companion’s face. Some men, she realised, could never quite grasp friendship between women: they imagined it a sort of conspiracy against them. She abruptly lost this train of thought as Fane grasped her arm outside the entrance to Magdalen and put a finger to his lips. Under the dim lamp in his cape and pallor he looked like an albino vampire. He silently leaned his head inside the lodge gate, then withdrew it. Without asking, he put her coat collar up and tucked her hair beneath the loose woollen beret she wore.

  ‘The porter’s off his watch. The game’s afoot. If we’re quick about it we can sneak in.’

  ‘To your rooms?’ It was ten minutes past curfew.

  ‘Of course. Or do you require a formal invitation?’

  She followed him through the stone-flagged lodge and thence into the inky dark of the quad. Lights glowed from high windows, but they encountered no one as they skirted another quad and entered a staircase. Fane’s rooms were large, ancient and cold. He switched on a table lamp, illumining walls that swarmed with postcards, playbills and theatrical memorabilia. Everything was framed, photographs, letters, even menu cards signed by the famous to ‘Dear Nat’; the room was evidently his personal museum. Above the fireplace was mounted an original poster advertising a corrida in Spanish, with matador and bull painted in flaring, torrid colours.

  She shivered as she stood at the empty grate, though Fane made no move to light a fire.

  ‘Do you have coal?’ she asked him.

  ‘I believe so. My scout takes care of all that.’

  ‘And if the scout’s not here …?’

  He shrugged, already preoccupied with his drinks trolley. Freya found a few coals left in the scuttle, and with the aid
of an old newspaper lit a small fire. On the opposite wall she spied a framed black-and-white photograph of Fane onstage in doublet and hose, a crown perched jauntily on his head.

  ‘Youthful self as Henry V,’ he supplied on enquiry, shaking a silvery beaked object from side to side.

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  Fane held the object still. ‘It’s a silver-plated cocktail shaker in the shape of a rooster,’ he drawled, as if to imply: what else? He poured out a jewelled liquid into a pair of glasses and handed her one of them. ‘Old-fashioneds. Two fingers of Scotch on a sugar lump, with a dash of Angostura bitters.’

  ‘Here’s how,’ said Freya, taking a long swallow. She had seated herself close to the fire, which gave out feeble pops and crackles. Fane, lighting another cigarette, ambled over in his languid way and flopped down next to her. He stared hard at the fire she had made, and frowned.

  ‘You are very practical, I must say.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t bother doing it yourself?’

  He returned an arch look. ‘I only play with fire. I leave others to set them.’

  The line sounded like something from a play – a play he himself had written and regarded with enormous satisfaction. Freya had the curious impression of being addressed not as a person but as an audience. She wondered if he expected applause. Of small talk he had none, which may have explained the abruptness with which he had shifted his weight and plumped his mouth upon hers. Before she could react she felt his long tongue sliding inside her mouth, over her teeth, like a seal squirming over rocks. She allowed him a little more of this oral exploration before she drew away.

  ‘Is this your casting couch, then?’ she said, patting the chesterfield they sat on.

  He had fixed her with a searching look. ‘That’s one of its uses. Now would you care to take your coat off?’

  ‘It’s bloody freezing. And by the way, regarding the part of the Duchess, the answer’s still no.’

  His expression changed; he now looked rather sly. ‘Is that why you think I brought you up here?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘The play is immaterial. As I said, I’m a collector of beautiful things.’ He took that as a cue to resume the kissing. This went on for some time, with Fane trying to extend the scope of intimacy netherwards – and Freya humorously resisting him. Then something else occurred to her, and she disengaged herself.

  ‘Is it true you’re going to be married?’

  Fane allowed himself a bark of laughter. ‘What a question – and what an extraordinary moment to ask it.’

  ‘Well?’

  He sighed. ‘There was a brief engagement, some months ago. I asked the lady in question to be released from it, and she assented. Would it have made any difference if I still were?’

  She considered for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Probably not.’

  ‘Well, then. Are you ready for a little game? It will require the removal of all but your underclothes.’

  Freya tucked in her chin. ‘You may have noticed I’ve still got my coat on. My teeth are chattering. Unless you’ve got firewood I’m not removing anything.’

  Fane looked at the fire with bored disapproval. He stood up, cast his gaze around the room and strode over to the wall they were facing. He took down one of the larger paintings and, using his letter knife, began prising the canvas away from its heavy frame. After several protesting snaps the wood had been reduced to spars, which he placed upon the fire. It seized upon this luxurious fuel, and soon flames were dancing in fierce delight around the splintered fragments.

  Fane, gesturing at the blaze, said, ‘Just drop your things on the rug. I’ll be back presently.’

  After that extravagant show of resourcefulness Freya thought it would be poor form to back down. She was also intrigued to know what ‘game’ he had in mind. She threw off her coat and, still shivering, removed her cardigan and blouse and skirt. She hesitated over her stockings, then (not to be a spoilsport) peeled them off too. Fane, who had withdrawn to his bedroom, now reappeared in a scarlet-and-black silk dressing gown, carrying what looked like a small racket.

  ‘Bit late in the evening for tennis, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a squash racket, actually,’ he said, handing it to her. He took in her semi-clad form and gave an approving nod. Then he began rearranging the furniture, pushing the table and sofa back and turning the leather club chair by the fire right round so that its back faced the room. She couldn’t guess what he had in mind, but hoped it wouldn’t be anything too energetic: the Benzedrine was wearing off. He swept back his floppy blond quiff from his forehead and surveyed his handiwork.

  ‘Room for a good swing,’ he muttered with a thin inscrutable smile. He proceeded to bend himself forward over the chair and flipped his dressing gown up to reveal his bare buttocks, white and vulnerable as a pair of fresh eggs.

  Not quite the game she had envisaged.

  Looking over his shoulder Fane said, ‘I thought I’d be a gentleman and give you first whack.’

  6

  A few days later Freya was in her room when an inquisitive double tap came at the door.

  ‘It’s open, Nance.’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ said Nancy, entering with a grin.

  ‘From your knock. It sounds … friendly. Your timing is excellent – I’ve just made some tea.’

  She sensed Nancy fidgeting with curiosity. Since the Banbury Road party other commitments – essay deadlines, a visit from Nancy’s aunt and uncle – had kept them apart and thus delayed a full debrief on her after-hours adventure with Fane. Mischief prompted Freya to prolong the anticipation, diverting her guest’s attention to the second-hand tea set she had bought in a junk shop. ‘Just one tiny chip on this cup here – apart from that it’s perfect.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Nancy.

  ‘And how was it with your aunt and uncle?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Take you for dinner?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that restaurant in St Aldate’s –’

  ‘I know the one. The shepherd’s pie there –’

  ‘Freya, please, don’t keep me in suspense. What happened?’

  ‘Oh. With Fane, you mean? It was interesting …’

  ‘Did you –’ Nancy’s voice dropped to a whisper – ‘make love?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said, lowering herself gingerly onto an armchair. This was going to be painful. ‘Ow …’

  Nancy’s voice rose a scandalised octave. ‘Oh my God, what did he do to you?’

  ‘That’s what was interesting.’ She proceeded to relate, with jokes and demonstrations, the swishing entertainment initiated by Fane. At the end of it she lifted her skirt to give a flash of her bruised haunch and laughed at Nancy’s horrified recoil.

  ‘But … why?’

  ‘Because that’s how he gets his thrills –’

  ‘No, I mean why did you let him?’

  Freya gave a half-shrug. ‘Well, I suppose I was curious – and we’d been having a jolly old time. He’s terribly clever, and funny, and a great talker.’

  ‘And a sadomasochist! He hurt you, and enjoyed it.’ Her expression suddenly froze. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  Freya pursed her mouth ruminatively. ‘For the first ten minutes I couldn’t stop laughing. Then when he started on me … No, not really. I’d rather just have gone to bed with him. Instead I walked back with a sensation that my bum was on fire.’

  ‘Oh, the swine,’ said Nancy with feeling.

  ‘No, he’s not. Nance, he didn’t force me. Don’t get huffy about it.’ When Nancy didn’t say anything she continued. ‘What about you? You seemed to be getting on with Charlie.’

  ‘Yes, he’s very sweet …’

  ‘But …?’

  Nancy paused, looking down at her hands. ‘I prefer Robert.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Behind that syllable lay a complex of feelings, foremost among them a wish that Nancy preferred someone else. Fr
eya had a strong intuition that Robert wouldn’t be a good match – Nancy was altogether too thin-skinned, too gentle-souled, for him. She couldn’t bear the thought of such a girl entrusting herself – surrendering herself – to someone as immature and abrasive as Robert. Nancy needed a man who would look after her, not some wild boy desperate to dip his wick.

  And yet she could not banish a low nagging note of self-interest in her desire to keep the two apart. Despite Nat Fane’s making a dead set at her she didn’t regard his pursuit quite seriously; he was too much bound up in himself to seek after another’s heart. Robert, on the other hand … He had something about him, something tender and troubled that spoke to her. Of course his manners weren’t wonderful, and he had no idea how to dress. Compared with Fane he looked and sounded gauche. But still she couldn’t deny an attraction to him. That this was apparently shared by Nancy gave it an unsuspected – and unwelcome – twist.

  ‘So,’ said Nancy, with an uncertain smile, ‘d’you think I should invite him to tea?’

  The first peacetime Christmas in seven years ought to have been joyous, but with food still clamped in the mean jaws of rationing Yuletide cheer was thin on the ground. And for Freya it was a momentous one for entirely the wrong reason: their first Christmas as a ‘broken’ family. She spent it with her mother and brother down in Sussex, while her father was off somewhere in Scotland with Diana, whose name in conjunction with Stephen’s now seemed unavoidable. In reparation he sent her a notably de luxe present – a beautiful silk-and-wool cardigan in sage green – which she left in its tissue paper the entire holiday.

  A heavy cold confined her miserably to bed, where she read Great Expectations and dealt with her correspondence: letters from Nancy, from Robert, and one whose envelope written in mauve ink she knew instinctively was from Nat Fane. His handwriting was, in common with everything else about him, studiedly flamboyant, all fancy curlicues and extravagant ascenders. The only slight incongruity in it was the address at the top of the page. The Ferns, Pinner seemed too workaday for one of his airs and graces. ‘I was a changeling,’ he had said, straight-faced, when she expressed surprise at his provenance. ‘I ought at least to have a manor house and a few hundred acres. But fate decreed Pinner as my place of birth.’