Spring (26 page)

The latest phase of their friendship—­following the hibernal period around the turn of the millennium—­started in 2003. The post-­Interspex phase.
Plush
magazine. The magazine was Freddy’s idea. Not having spoken to him for years, he phoned James to suggest he might like to invest in a magazine he was planning to set up. It seemed at the time that any idiot could set up a ‘lifestyle’ magazine—­sex and shopping—­and make a fortune. James no longer had any money to invest, though he knew how to find some, and he liked the idea. It was a potent formula—­his own entrepreneurial know-­how and experience, Freddy’s journalistic flair, and other people’s money. Unfortunately several dozen similar magazines were launched at about the same time, and two years later the few outstanding assets were still being digested in the intestine of the legal system, dissolved in the enzymes of the law. In the end there were just two issues, January and February 2005. The March issue had in fact been written and laid out—­it was little more than a load of naked ladies; under financial pressure, the whole project was quickly simplifying into straightforward soft porn. It was never printed on account of the printers insisting on payment in advance.

One of the wiped-­out investors was Freddy’s landlord, Anselm. His £50,000 was the only money Freddy himself had managed to raise. It helped that Anselm was under the impression that Freddy was the last surviving heir of Tsar Nicholas II, and that he was involved in a legal struggle over a vast fortune held in Switzerland since the First World War. (Freddy’s Dostoyevskian appearance helped with this—­his low brow and sunken eyes, and the way that on hungover days, when he wore a long winter coat, his skin had a mortal yellow tinge.) He insisted that the Russian trove in Zurich was legally his, and Anselm had lent him significant sums to pay ‘legal fees’ and other expenses—­fact-­finding missions to Switzerland during the skiing season, for instance—­in the expectation of a share of the spoils. (Freddy had promised him, in writing, first ten and then twenty per cent.) Nor, while living in Anselm’s house for the past few years, had he ever paid him a penny of rent—­the idea was that that too would come out of the Swiss money in time.

The investment in
Plush
would not. That was an investment, not a loan, and Anselm demonstrated his faith in the existence of the Tsarina’s diamonds by making the distinction. The loss made him dyspeptic and unhappy. He hated losing money. Still, when the end was nigh, Freddy did ask him for another £50,000, to put towards the printing costs of the pornographic March issue. Which was perhaps to push him too far. Sitting in front of the terminals on which for more than twenty years he had tried, with a startling lack of success, to play the stockmarket, Anselm turned on his swivel-­seat and looked at Freddy strictly over the top of his spectacles. He said, ‘Fréderic. Do you think I’m a fool?’

Freddy laughed as if the idea was ludicrous.

In fact there was, in Freddy’s opinion, something medieval about Anselm’s foolishness—­it was scarcely believable, off the scale, like something out of Chaucer or Boccaccio. So naturally he had slept with his wife, Alison, a former airline stewardess with a sort of saucy appeal. He had been sleeping with her since the first week he lived there. Sometimes he told her that he was passionately in love with her, that he wanted to take her away from that miserable house, where the viscid leaves of the overgrown trees in the garden shut out the light and the hot water trickled from a tubercular Ascot. He told her that he wanted to take her to Zanzibar—­
Zanzibaaah
—­where he had spent his sun-­kissed youth.

*

Why he did it, he still doesn’t know. It was madness. Its only possible end was disaster. Maybe, he thinks now, on the tube with his haversack, that was what he wanted—­to push Anselm to the point of disaster; maybe he was just no longer able to take the foolishness, which had acquired a kind of ear-­splitting dissonance. Maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was just the hangover.

Whatever it was, two Saturdays ago he woke up and found Alison—­she was watching
TV
and having her first G & T of the day—­and told her to pack a suitcase. They were finally going to do it. They were going to leave, and start new lives. She downed her drink and hurried upstairs to pack. And even then, waiting for her in the hall, leaning tiredly on the paint-­thickened, time-­stained anaglypta, with the keys of Anselm’s Rolls-­Royce in his hand, Freddy knew that this was likely to end in disaster. And he did not even particularly want to do it. That was the strange thing. He knew it was likely to end in disaster, and he didn’t even particularly want to do it, and he still did it. There was a self-­destructive element, no question. There was a self-­destructive ennui at work. He watched her tiptoe downstairs—­Anselm was snoring up there somewhere under his
Times
—­in what she may have thought was some sort of old-­school elopement scenario. Except she was already married. She stumbled and fell down the last two steps—­perhaps it wasn’t her first G & T of the day after all. He took her suitcase and they slipped quietly out onto Cheyne Walk. It was one of those old Seventies Rolls-­Royces, its paintwork—­chocolate with a cupreous gleam—­sticky with substances that had fallen from the tree under which it was parked.

Two hours later they were still in London, stuck in traffic not far from Shooter’s Hill.

‘Where we going?’ Alison said—­she had expected Heathrow and Zanzibar.

‘Dover.’

She laughed. ‘We going to
drive
to Zanzibar then?’

To drive to Zanzibar in an old brown Rolls—­as an idea, it was not without style. However, Freddy said, ‘I thought we’d… spend a few days in Paris first.’

‘Oh. Alright.’

She lit her tenth cigarette of the journey with the car’s chunky cigar lighter. They were both smoking. Smoke poured from the lowered windows. Inasmuch as he had had any sort of plan, it had probably been to spend a few days somewhere—­a hotel somewhere. Yes, perhaps Paris. As they finally merged onto the motorway and picked up speed, however, he found that spending a few days with Alison was the last thing he wanted to do. He was already sick of her. She was talking quite a lot now and he wished she would just shut the fuck up. When he put on Radio 3 and found, to his joy—­it was
exactly
what he wanted—­Richard Strauss’s
Metamorphosen,
she listened with a frown for a minute or two. Then she said, ‘Do we need to listen to this? It’s really depressing.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We do.’

In his peripheral vision he could see her fat knees, her stomach straining in her short skirt… She was wearing a short skirt, sheer tights, tall leather boots. Proper mutton-­dressed-­as-­lamb stuff. Freddy was never embarrassed. Nevertheless, he wasn’t particularly looking forward to stepping out with her.

Dover ferry port on an overcast Saturday afternoon in March. As someone once said—­
Sad like work.
The indifferent sea. The stony embrace of the breakwater.

Jouncing on its sluttish suspension the old Rolls freewheeled down the slope, and squeaked to a stop in front of the P & O ticket office. It was while he was in there that Freddy settled on what to do.

With seagull outriders the ugly ship moved slowly away from the pieces of off-­white cliff. They spent the two-­hour voyage entirely in the on-­board pub, the screwed-­to-­the-­floor table pitching and tossing. Somewhere a huge engine was thrumming. It elicited a steady tinkling from the bar. Outside the salt-­blurred windows drizzle slicked the green iron decks. The question of who was going to drive when they made landfall in France, since they were now both totally pissed, was not asked. For Freddy it was not pertinent. As the ship entered Calais harbour, he said he had to visit the Gents. And he did visit the Gents—­the doors of the stalls swinging and slamming—­then he made his way quietly to the foot passengers’ disembarkation point, disembarked, walked to the station and took a train to Paris. He hadn’t had any luggage anyway. He had nothing except his passport and a scrumpled, folded envelope with £10,000 in it—­the proceeds of the ‘touch’. He spent the last of it a week or so later on a first-­class Eurostar ticket, and a taxi from Waterloo to Cheyne Walk.

He knew that Alison would be there. He knew that she would have had to account for her absence that Saturday. He expected her to have done so without involving him in the story. He expected, essentially, everything to be okay. What he did not know—­though he should probably have thought of this—­was that the ferrymen had not allowed Alison, who was hardly able to stand up, who was tearful and incoherent, to drive the Rolls off the ship. One of them had parked it on the quayside tarmac for her, warned her in pidgin English not to try to drive anywhere that day herself, and left her there in the whipping salt-­spray. She would have phoned Anselm straight away, except for one thing. This Freddy did not know about, and had no way of knowing about. Sentimentally, unsoberly, she had left a note for her husband saying that she and Freddy were going to start a new life in another part of the world, and that she was sorry, and that she would always think of him with love, and that she thanked him for everything he had done for her, and that she was sorry, and…
Please please forgive me, Alison.

She spent most of Saturday night sobbing in a hotel in Calais, and very early the next morning took a ferry to Dover and thence, at the wheel of the unwieldy Rolls, made her mascara-­smudged way to London. There she had a tearful, hour-­long negotiation through the intercom before Anselm finally let her into the house. Once inside, she threw herself on his mercy. Speaking through steady tears, she said that yes, something had indeed once passed between Freddy and herself. (Anselm lowered his face.) She said that Freddy was obsessed with her, that he had forced her to write that terrible note and more or less kidnapped her. How he had forced her to write the note she did not say, nor did Anselm ask. He had no interest in picking holes in her story. He sighed, very tight-­throated. Then, sensing that he wanted more, she told him that Freddy was not a Russian prince or princeling or anything like that. He was just an out-­of-­work journalist. This Freddy had told her only a few weeks before—­and he wished he hadn’t as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He had told her out of vanity, of course. Vanity. As he well knew, it was his worst weakness.

When he turned up at the house that dreary Wednesday afternoon and found the locks changed, he immediately feared the worst.

‘Yes?’ crackled Anselm’s voice, suspicious over the intercom.

‘Hi. Anselm. It’s me.’

A long, fizzing silence. ‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’ Freddy said with a laugh. ‘I live here, don’t I?’

‘No. You don’t.’

Something was obviously very wrong.

Finally he managed to persuade Anselm to let him into the house—­he had his own hour-­long negotiation through the intercom—­saying that he would be able to ‘explain everything’. Though it was far from obvious to him how he would do this as, warily saying, ‘Anselm?’ he mounted the spongy stairs.

He found him in the first-­floor drawing room. No lights on. A deathly atmosphere. And worryingly, he was holding an iron poker.

‘You lied to me, Fréderic,’ Anselm said.

Freddy’s intention was of course to deny everything, and the first thing he said was—­‘What are you talking about?’

‘You aren’t Russian.’ The only sound was a trickle of plaster dust falling from the ceiling. ‘Your father’s a British diplomat. And his father was a policeman in Swansea.’

That was a shock. Freddy had not expected Anselm ever to find
that
out. There were two obvious options—­deny that his father was Oliver Munt of the
FO
or…

‘Yes, but my mother—’

‘Your mother’s from St Albans,’ Anselm said, in a strange voice, somehow monotone and sing-­song at the same time. He had evidently done his homework—­there might even have been a private detective involved, for all Freddy knew—­and faced with this he suddenly felt very tired, too tired to pretend. Too tired even to explain. And what was there to explain? It was all fairly obvious. ‘Who told you?’ he said. ‘Alison?’ Perhaps it was a mistake to have left her in Calais. In
Calais
of all places… Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
in Calais.
Though she didn’t know any of the details about his parents—­just that he wasn’t a Russian prince.

And then there was another shock.

‘I know that you… you once slept with her,’ Anselm said, hanging his head and looking at the floor. He made a strange little expectorant noise. ‘She told me.’

Now this was very strange. Why on earth had she done
that
? It just didn’t make sense.

‘I thought you were my friend, Fréderic.’

For a long time Freddy just stood there. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.

‘Please just leave.’

‘Anselm…’

The poker twitched.

‘My things?’

Still staring at the floor, Anselm nodded.

Freddy went upstairs and put his things into the khaki haver­sack. They fitted quite easily—­he had few possessions. He wondered whether to try to speak to Alison on his way out; he was puzzled as to why she had told Anselm everything. There must be something he didn’t know about. Some factor he wasn’t taking into account.

He descended the stairs, with their steep mahogany handrail; the series of landings whose scurfy sash windows were filled with mature trees.

On his way out, he looked into the first-­floor drawing room. Anselm was nowhere to be seen. The whole house, in fact, was eerily silent.

Outside in the twilight he shifted the haversack onto his shoulder and walked to the tube station. He had just enough money for the ticket to Russell Square.

*

While Freddy, haversack on shoulder, was taking his place in the ululating lift at Russell Square station, James was sprawled unsuspectingly on the sofa in Mecklenburgh Street wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners on Gray’s Inn Road for a half-­litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum. Sitting forward, he stared for a few more seconds at the
TV
. All-­weather racing from Wolverhampton, seedily floodlit. Encased in puffa jackets, the pundits held their microphones in numb hands, exhaling mist into the frore Midlands night. Without switching them off—­merely silencing them—­he jacketed and scarfed himself, leashed Hugo and went out into the street upstairs.