Freya (14 page)

Robert made an equivocal expression. ‘Let's just say there were a lot who managed to save themselves by staying put.'

‘Hmm. I'm not sure Alex would care to pursue that line, given what he did in the war.'

‘What
did
he do?'

‘Something in intelligence. He was a bit mysterious about it.'

‘That rather proves my point,' said Robert. ‘Bright chaps who would have been scribbling away on the front line first time round got themselves office jobs in the second. Much safer.'

Freya squinted at him, and said coldly, ‘I dare say Alex gave as much blood, sweat and tears as anyone else. The last war required sacrifices too, they were just of a different kind. It's one thing to talk out of your arse, Robert, but your insinuating that he tried to avoid the fighting is
pretty low
.'

Robert coloured at this. ‘I wasn't insinuating anything. I don't give a stuff what he did in the war –'

‘Easy for you to say,' said Freya, her blood up.

‘I was at
school
, for God's sake.'

‘Yes, and you sound like you've never left.'

Robert got to his feet, and straightened in a show of dignified hurt. ‘I don't see why I should sit here and take this.'

‘Why not?' she retorted. ‘You might learn a thing or two.'

A brief daggered silence followed as Robert seemed about to match her taunt. But he only glared at her, before shaking his head and leaving the room.

Nancy, who had been half hypnotised by this altercation, said, ‘Should I go after him?'

Freya pulled a face. ‘Why?' Of course, she knew why, but objected on two counts; first, that Robert's ruffled feathers deserved no smoothing, and second (what she couldn't mention), that it was imperative to thwart a potential intimacy between them. Robert seemed careless of her, and she couldn't bear the thought of Nancy blundering in and getting hurt. Friends needed protecting, especially the ones who didn't know any better.

Nancy was watching her with a hooded look. ‘You enjoy provoking him, don't you?'

‘I suppose I do. He rises to the bait every time.'

‘You should take pity on him. He's half in love with you.'

‘What? Did you not just hear him deploring my “taste in men”?'

Nancy nodded slowly. ‘Yes, and you could tell what was behind it – he only made a fuss about Alex because he wants you himself.'

‘I don't think so,' she replied, with a laugh more cavalier than she felt. It disturbed her that Nancy was so astute in reading between the lines; she too had sensed the possessive undercurrent in Robert's personality. Strange, she thought, how very different men could be. There was Nat Fane offering sexual perversion at the drop of his pants, while Robert could only express his attraction through the heat of argument. As for Alex, the most obviously desirable of the three, she hadn't yet got his measure: he'd been so eager to get her to his rooms, only for them to spend the whole afternoon
working
.

As they said goodbye, she felt Nancy's eyes fixed upon her in mute enquiry. Freya had batted away that theory of hers about Robert, but could tell she wasn't convinced. Nancy understood her better than people who'd known her for years – really, it was almost spooky. Outside the afternoon was darkening as she collected the tea things and emptied the loaded ashtray; another drab Oxford evening lay ahead, with dinner in hall the only diversion. Perhaps she ought to go out –

A knock came at the door. She presumed it was Nancy, come back to collect something she'd forgotten, but she opened it to find Robert. He looked subtly altered from when he had exited the room half an hour ago; he seemed no longer enraged, though his brow was troubled and his gaze downcast. He had the resigned air of a defendant preparing to be sent down.

‘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?

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 wasn'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.