Freya (6 page)

He had given a modest little dip of his head. ‘I'll fetch you a porter.'

As he'd walked off, she'd thought to herself,
Crockery?
She sat down on the trunk and lit a cigarette while passengers streamed by on either side of her. The morning air felt stiff and inhospitable, and smuts were drifting off the train and settling on people's coats. Behind her a porter had arrived with a trolley.

‘If you'll allow me, miss …'

‘Oh.' She had stood up, looking over his shoulder for the man who had come to her aid. He had gone. Evidently his securing the services of a porter had excused him any further obligation. Or else he had been in a hurry himself? In which case his help had been all the more chivalrous. His disappearance was a little unsatisfying, though, because she had not had a chance to thank him. She had handed the porter a bob as he'd wedged the trunk into the vacant foot space of the taxi, and then they were off.

Freya hadn't seen Oxford in the three years since her interview. Her memory of the place had been mostly nocturnal, for her visit had coincided with the dead of winter when the city was still in blackout. The pale buildings had looked eerily beautiful with only moonlight for illumination. But Hitler hadn't bombed here after all. Now in daylight the shade of its stonework, somewhere between fawn and grey, seemed to complement the devotional contours of its architecture. The lawns of Somerville's quadrangles shone green after a night of rain.

Entering the staircase she inhaled a mixture of damp stone, coal smoke and dust. On a wooden board she saw her name painted, white on black, and felt a pleasant shiver of self-importance. The door to her rooms on the second floor was already open, and revealed, to her dismay, evidence of occupation. Nobody had told her she would be sharing. A trunk not unlike her own squatted in the middle of the living room, and a coat had been tossed over the back of the couch. A fire burned wispily in the grate. She crossed the room and opened the far door, a narrow bedroom, its twin on the other side. She knelt on the window seat and pushed open the oriel to look out on the quad; a cluster of students in gowns were ambling around the perimeter, chatting away. She sank into a trance of absorption, and wondered what people might make of the woman gazing out of the window, wearing a camel-coloured sweater and (she supposed) a look of sullen scrutiny. People sometimes told her she looked cross when, in fact, she was merely preoccupied. But then people were always assuming things about you.

She heard footsteps on the landing, and the door creaked forward. A girl came through carrying a blackened kettle.

‘Oh, hullo,' she said. ‘I was wondering when you'd arrive. I've just got some water to boil. Tea?'

She introduced herself as Ginny – Virginia – a short, sturdy girl who moved about the room with the confidence of one who'd been
in situ
for weeks, though it transpired she'd only arrived about an hour before. Her hair was bobbed, with a severe fringe; her eyes and mouth seemed too large for her neat, heart-shaped face. She looked at Freya with keenly appraising eyes.

‘I suppose you've been in the service. Let me guess – the Waaf?'

Freya shook her head. ‘Wrens. You?'

‘ATS. Two years of it.' She took the kettle off the boil and began rummaging in her trunk. She fished out a couple of tin mugs and clanked them together. ‘Army issue; didn't suppose they'd be missed. I gather we're meant to have brought our own crockery.'

‘I'm afraid I didn't get that memo,' said Freya.

‘Oh, I shouldn't worry – we can always borrow someone's. Here,' she said, handing her a mug. ‘By the way, you've got some post.'

‘Already?' She immediately thought of Nancy. Ginny pointed to a note she had placed on the mantelpiece: it was from Jean Markham. She hadn't seen her since their abortive get-together on VE Day.

A knock came from outside, and two porters hefted her trunk through the door. One of them, a cocky youth of about her own age, blew out his cheeks in comic exhaustion and said, ‘Dunno what you've got in there but it weighs a ton.'

Freya turned, and with a straight face said, ‘Oh, that's just the dead body.'

He frowned at her, bemused, and with a glance at his mate backed out. When the door had closed Ginny looked at her and let out an outraged guffaw.

‘
Naugh
-ty,' she said in a mock-schoolmarmish tone. ‘Now, which bedroom d'you prefer? It's a choice between overlooking the street or facing the kitchens.'

Freya, not caring either way, picked the street view. She dragged in the trunk and started to unpack; most of her good clothes had come from her mother, either as gifts or cast-offs. As well as clothes here were all sorts of oddments: a candlestick holder (with candles), an ivory-backed hairbrush, a mirror, an alarm clock, her father's old tennis racket, still in its frame press, a straight dozen of his jazz records, some sheet music in case she decided to practise, a camera, a selection of Oxford World Classics, a Boulestin cookbook she almost knew would never be consulted, a smart silver cocktail shaker, an electric reading lamp, a selection of her mother's home-made jams, a tin of tea, coffee essence (
ugh
), and – her one memento from Devonport naval base – a pair of bruised, dun-coloured boxing gloves, given to her by an admiring drill instructor.

She reached into the corner and lifted out a squarish object wrapped in felt cloth. Untying the string she laid it on the bed; it was a framed head-and-shoulders oil of herself by Stephen, to mark her twenty-first. She stared at it for some moments, not yet reconciled to the bold and somewhat accusing gaze of the sitter. Is that how she appeared to him? He had got her dark eyebrows right, and the somewhat combative jawline, but the hair with its vivid flecks of red and gold seemed an extravagant touch too far. Secretly she'd hoped for something from Asprey.

‘Do you have a – oh, I say!' cried Ginny, who had put her head round the door, and now craned forward for a closer inspection.

‘I'm not sure it really looks like me.'

Ginny folded her arms and swivelled her large eyes between Freya and the painting in her hands. ‘Who's “SW”?' she asked, squinting at the artist's initials.

‘My dad. It was his birthday present to me, a few weeks ago,' she said.

‘You don't sound all that pleased,' Ginny said with a whinnying laugh, and Freya sensed her own ingratitude. ‘This bedroom's too poky for it. Here, let's show it some light.' Plucking the picture out of Freya's hands she reversed into the living room. She wandered around, holding it up at different heights. ‘You see, it could go here –' she framed it against the wall dividing the windows – ‘but it's still not getting the full benefit.'

Freya, alarmed at such exposure, even by proxy, shook her head. ‘I don't think so, not in the living room. It looks …'

‘What?' said Ginny, puzzled.

Well, it looked like swanking. ‘Let's leave it for now,' she said, propping it against the wall; she could sneak it back into her room later. Ginny, thrown off the scent, went over to her own trunk and took out a circular tin, which she placed on a little table by the fire.

‘Look what my mother packed,' she said, wresting the lid off and lifting out a Madeira cake. It turned out that her mother ran some kind of typing school for young women in London, and one of her well-off clients had given it to her – a regular perk of the job. Ginny cut them a piece each.

‘It's awfully good,' said Freya, through a mouthful. ‘How on earth –?'

‘Black market, probably – oh blast, we really will have to get some crockery,' she added, as the cake began to disintegrate in her hand. ‘And these tin mugs will have to go, too. They make the tea taste of –'

‘Petrol?'

‘Yes!'

They spent another hour unpacking and putting the room in order. Ginny was reading History, though she cheerfully admitted that two years in the ATS had more or less destroyed her aptitude for study. (‘I could no more write an essay on the causes of the Thirty Years War than I could explain the internal workings of the combustion engine.') Freya too felt the long hiatus of the war had unfitted her for scholarly concentration. She had done a good deal of reading while she was in the Wrens – she would have gone mad from boredom without books – but the habits of library-haunting and lecture-going seemed impossibly alien to her.

She was still not certain why she had decided to come here. In the calm following the storm of lunch at Gennaro's she had examined more rationally her theory about Stephen wanting her ‘out of the way' and conceded that he had no such ulterior motive – though she didn't speak to him for weeks all the same. She knew she ought to have written an apology to Diana by now. After being demobbed she spent the rest of the summer at her mother's house near Finden, in Sussex. Attlee had brought Labour to power on a landslide in July, though, maddeningly, she had missed being able to vote by a matter of weeks. She turned down her mother's offer of a birthday party, and asked only that the family should gather for a dinner on the August weekend she turned twenty-one. Her father came down from London with her brother, Rowan, who had been staying with friends before going up to Cambridge. If her father's present to her was vexing, Rowan's was severely practical: a huge salmon, caught on a fishing holiday in Scotland. It caused some puzzled laughter in the house. An eccentric boy, he alone perceived no glimmer of oddity in his gift. ‘At least he didn't try to wrap it,' said Freya to Stephen privately.

This family reunion, the first since Christmas, was one in which Freya had invested much; too much. She still nurtured a secret hope that her parents' estrangement was not irreparable, that the company of their own flesh and blood might somehow revitalise their stalled marriage. But the experience of the weekend showed it to be illusory. It wasn't even that they argued, at least not in front of her. Cora, far from seeming abandoned, had taken to village life and talked happily of her neighbours. She treated Stephen with perfect civility, which he returned, a mutual show of good manners that baffled and depressed Freya. They might have been acquaintances meeting at a cocktail party. Only once did this social front wobble, when over dinner Rowan made an innocent but unmistakable allusion to Diana. (He would have been forewarned, she knew, but Rowan was no master of tact.) On passing her mother's bedroom the evening Stephen returned to London she thought she had overheard sobbing.

To break up the monotony she considered asking Nancy to stay. They had corresponded, or rather Nancy had written five long, newsy, somewhat breathless letters and Freya had replied, once, in what she felt was a more adult temper. It seemed to her that the girl wanted something more than a friend; she wanted a mentor. She sought her approval and advice, mostly about books. She would mention this or that novel she had just been reading, and was eager to know her friend's opinion, immediately. Of course it was flattering to have someone look up to you, even consider you a kind of oracle, but also a little exhausting; Nancy had paid her the compliment of assuming her to be much better read than she was, and the burden of having to formulate an opinion of an author she knew nothing about put her on the back foot. When she did write back she concentrated on writers she felt able to enlarge upon (Waugh, Henry James, Maugham), and covered her ignorance of the rest with vague generalities on which she hoped she wouldn't be challenged. It felt a bit like cramming for an exam. The prospect of Nancy coming down and seeking enlightenment at close quarters threatened to be tiresome, so she held off inviting her.

Her potential as literary adviser proved irresistible, however, and one morning about a month before the Oxford term began she received a large packet addressed to her in Nancy's responsible cursive. A covering letter explained that the enclosed manuscript comprised the first draft of a novel –
The Distant Folds
– she had written. She hadn't yet shown it to anyone. Would it be an imposition on her to have a look? Freya felt the honour of being Nancy's first reader. She had not had a protégée before. But she didn't like being surprised by its arrival. She distinctly recalled asking her, just after they met, whether she had tried her hand at novel-writing, and Nancy replying that she hadn't. It was inconceivable that she had started writing the thing after that conversation; these pages were quite clearly the product of many months – years? – of effort. So why had she not told her the truth when they had first broached the subject?

And now here
The Distant Folds
lay, 161 pages of foolscap at the bottom of her trunk, their edges curled from prolonged inspection. At first she had put it aside, until curiosity got the better of her. She had read it straight through once, then reread it slowly, inserting comments, queries and possible improvements down the margins. She had thought of posting it back, with her revisions, but by then the new term was nearly upon them, so instead she decided to bring it with her to Oxford and return it to the author in person. That felt like the proper conduct of mentor–protégée relations, with its promising hint of condescension on one side and humble gratitude on the other.

The next morning as she was getting dressed Freya heard a woman singing in the room above. By the time she had finished she heard the outer door being opened and the warbling started up again.

‘Good morning,' she said to the singer, who was dressed in a housecoat and kneeling at the grate with a sweeping brush. She was fiftyish and on the short side, starved-looking, bespectacled, cheerful.

‘Oh, hullo, dear,' she smiled, rising to her feet. ‘I'm your scout – Miles.'

‘Isn't that a man's name?' said Freya.