Freya (40 page)

‘D'you think so? Jerry will swig it down like bootleg hooch. Ossie and that sweet cretin Roger will do the same. Felix will pretend to know but hasn't a clue. That leaves the ladies: Edie I can't tell, though at least like Felix her birth pre-dates the wine. Martine – no. Hetty drinks gin and Nescafé. And the schoolgirl drinks – milk? Which leaves us.'

He poured them each a glass, and took a sip, his eyes closed as if in prayer. He whistled softly: ‘Fifty years old and yet fresh as a breeze. I think it can be safely said that no one else in the world is drinking this wine at this moment.'

Freya had taken a sip, too, and felt embarrassed. ‘I'm sorry, Nat – it's delicious, but I'm no connoisseur, either.'

If Nat was disapppointed he hid it well. ‘Christ, it's only a bottle of wine,' he said, his tune abruptly changed. ‘Here's how.'

They drank again, and she sensed him watching her over his glass. He was in an odd mood tonight, preoccupied, though his hosting could not be faulted. Did he perhaps miss Pandora? That was, she thought, unlikely. He lit a cigarette, picked up the bottle and guided her back into the dining room, where Jerry was entertaining them with another of his tall stories. The kif had made a bluish fog over the table, and Freya took a couple of long drags when her turn came round. Time seemed to thicken and slow. She found herself giggling at Jerry's vaudevillian patter; egged on by Ossie and Hetty, he strung together a magical routine of jokes, impersonations, surreal flights of fancy, before topping them with a tale about being drunk and ill in a hotel bedroom where the wallpaper frightened him ‘horribly'. It was Poe, as narrated by Max Wall. Somehow he used his spindly body to act out the sinister whorls and curlicues of the wallpaper's pattern while simultaneously describing his own befuddled self cowering beneath the blankets – by which point the whole company were crying tears of laughter.

Bottles kept arriving at the table, and emptying without notice. As the clock struck half past midnight a slow exodus began. Roger and Felix were the first to go, taking Martine with them. Ossie was slumped in his chair, eyes glazed like a doll's. Gwen, with urgent whispers, got him to his feet.

‘How are you getting home?' Edie asked them.

‘Motor's outside,' he mumbled, his dark hair stuck sweatily to his forehead.

Gwen looked in appeal to the others. ‘Could you help me out with him?'

Freya and Jerry, each with an arm around the shoulder, slow-walked Ossie out onto the pavement, Edie following behind. The Roller gleamed imperious under the street lamp. Gwen had optimistically opened the driver's door, but Jerry, trying a few slaps across Ossie's face, couldn't rouse him. He said, ‘This one's too pissed to go in the
back
seat.'

‘But how will we get home?' wailed Gwen.

Edie, surprising them all, announced that
she
would drive them. She didn't live far from Ossie in Notting Hill, it turned out; she'd got merry without being paralytic, and she had at least stayed off the kif.

‘Are you sure about this?' asked Freya.

‘I've been driving since I was twenty-one, darling,' said Edie, briskly pulling on her gloves and climbing behind the wheel. They managed to shovel the near-insensible Ossie into the back with Gwen, who had turned in panic to Freya and said, ‘He'll hit the roof if there's a scratch on it.' But Edie, warming to the role of chauffeur, had already started the engine and cried, ‘All set?'

The car pulled out, like a boat heaving massively into water, then – with an insolent toot of the horn – surged off into the blue-black night. Freya went back into the house with Jerry. She realised, on returning to the dining room, that some perceptual mischief was at work. The detritus of smeared glasses and loaded ashtrays and discarded plates were sprawled on the table like a still life gone wrong. Indeed the stillness of the room seemed quite arbitrary; some objects had detached themselves from their background and floated into her field of vision. She was very far from sober. As though in a dream she reached with both hands for a coffee pot, still warm, and keeping a close eye on it succeeded in tipping the vessel over an empty cup. From its spout poured something black and aromatic – why, she'd made herself a coffee! She asked Jerry, seated opposite, if he cared for a cup, and was rather glad when he declined. She didn't trust herself to repeat the manoeuvre.

Jerry had just decanted half of a bottle of claret into two glasses, of which the first he quaffed down in one. He placed the second daintily in a waiting position while he got out his cigarettes and offered one to her. She smoked, happy to listen to Jerry running on about his time in Tangier and his first encounter with cannabis when he and Ossie were on holiday. He talked fondly, almost fraternally, about Ossie, and Freya, disinhibited by booze and kif, asked him whether there'd ever been anything more than friendship between them. Jerry was unruffled by the question and said that when they first knew one another he'd been physically attracted to Ossie and wondered for a while if the feeling might be reciprocated. The reality soon dawned that Ossie was the most ravenously heterosexual man he'd ever met (‘only two things he cares about – painting and fucking') and also the least trustworthy; it wasn't that he made a point of cheating on women, merely that he saw himself under no obligation to be faithful to them.

They had been talking for half an hour or so when Freya noticed they were the only ones left at the table. When she pointed this out, Jerry shrugged and said he'd last seen Nat and Hetty smoking in the kitchen. The cook had gone off hours ago. Then something else occurred to her.

‘Why did Martine leave when she did? I thought she and Nat might be –'

Jerry made a pursed comic face. ‘Nat's another one who likes to change the bowling. Twiggez-vous?'

She could feel the coffee begin to steady her; the furniture had stopped playing games of perspective with her eyes. Jerry was now talking about the races, another passion he shared with Ossie. Both of them had their own bookie and would drop hundreds of pounds on a single bet. Ossie, he said, had got into serious trouble recently with some shady blokes he'd borrowed money from; they'd threatened to break all his fingers and then his arms if he didn't cough up. ‘Inconvenient for a painter, that,' Jerry sniggered. In the end he had to leave town while one of his ‘patrons' sorted out the debt.

Prompted by his evident intimacy with the low life, Freya suddenly said, ‘Do you know a man called Sewell?'

Jerry paused on a frown. ‘Vernon Sewell, you mean?'

‘I'm not sure. I gather he was an informer for the MoD in the war.'

‘That's Vern. He's also a fuckin' thief. I'd be sorry to hear you had any business with him.'

She told him the story of Alex, of his counter-espionage work during the war and the unfortunate re-emergence of Sewell in his life; the compromising photographs of him, the blackmail and now the threat of public exposure. Jerry's olive-black eyes were watchful as he listened, flicking ash off his cigarette and knocking back great draughts of wine.

At the end of it he scratched his ear, and said, without emotion, ‘Sounds like he's for it, your friend.' He asked her if she knew where the photographs had been taken. She recalled the name of a club – the Myrmidon – that Alex had mentioned, though she had no clue of its whereabouts.

‘I know it. For queers with expensive tastes. Oh dear.'

Freya thought she may as well come to the point. ‘Can you help me get him out of it? Maybe introduce me to this –'

Jerry snorted in sardonic dismissal. ‘I don't think you'd like to meet Vern –
not quite your class, dear
.'

‘I've met plenty of lowlifes in my time. I work for a newspaper, don't forget.'

‘You've no idea. Vern's a proper slag – the sort who'd sell his own grandmother and then ask for a receipt. You think he'll just
give
you these photos?'

‘No,' said Freya, ‘but he might give them to you.'

Jerry turned away, shaking his head; he wasn't interested. Freya, aware of his nest-feathering instincts, said, ‘I'm sure we could negotiate a quid pro quo.'

He laughed in scoffing disdain, and squinted at his watch. ‘Sorry, love, but you haven't got the quids to tempt me.'

He rose from the table, announcing it was time for him to push off. On his return from scouting the kitchen he said, ‘Dunno where our host has got to. Tell 'im Jerry said goodnight.' He winked at Freya and patted down his pockets to check he had his keys and his snout. And then he was gone; she didn't even hear the front door shut behind him. He had taken his leave in the silent, slinking way of a cat, vanishing into the night as it pleased him. The cat that walked alone.

Freya, surveying the empty room, had a sudden sense of exclusion, as if the other guests had moved on to something more interesting and not bothered to ask her along. It seemed very odd of Nat to have disappeared without so much as a goodnight. Fully alert again, she got up and wandered about the rooms, half expecting to find him lounging on a sofa with a book, or listening to a record. There was no one about. She was back in the hallway when she heard voices from somewhere below; they rose and fell, their hum strangely secretive. Then there was a noise she couldn't identify, followed by a kind of laughing cry of protest. She followed the sound down the stairs to the basement. A fancy gas lamp, turned low, was the only illumination in the corridor. From what she presumed was a bedroom at the end came the sound, more distinct now, of two or perhaps three people talking.

As her footsteps clacked on the parquet flooring, the voices behind the door fell silent. They had heard her approach too late. She hesitated, wondering for a moment whether she ought to enter, since they were plainly quite reluctant to be disturbed. But to turn back would be demeaning – would make her look like a skulker, a creeper. She put her hand to the doorknob, expecting it to be locked. It wasn't. The sight that greeted her had the air of a staged tableau: Nat, fully clothed and masked, a riding crop in his hand, and, bent over the arm of a plump velvet sofa, Hetty, naked but for her black knickers, pulled down just below the crimsoning globes of her buttocks. Freya's first thought was
Not again
. That the door was unlocked now struck her as deliberate, for neither one of them moved.

Nat, in his ‘stage' voice, snarled at Hetty, ‘You little fool, with your mewling. We are discovered!'

Hetty, also adopting a faux-actorly tone, began trading recriminations with Nat, calling him a ‘blackguard' and accusing him of plotting her dismissal from the house. Then she turned in appeal to Freya and said, ‘My Lady, please forgive.' They had evidently been working on this vignette of erotic intrigue – and its sudden exposure – for some time.

Freya realised she would have felt less embarrassed if she'd simply interrupted them having sex; there was at least a sincerity about being caught in flagrante. What she couldn't stand was this play-acting, the coyness of their pretending to be domestic underlings and her own unwitting role as the ‘mistress' who discovered them. Conniving at another's sexual humiliation could not arouse her. And yet … and yet there was something about Hetty's veiled expression and beautiful pale limbs disported on the couch that she couldn't tear her gaze from. She could feel her mouth had gone dry.

Hetty seemed to catch this furtive current of feeling, because when she spoke again she used her own voice, not the stage one.

‘So are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there?'

August was ticking off the days to her thirtieth birthday party, and there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it. Joss had taken the whole business in hand; he had organised the catering, hired a jazz band, arranged for a small marquee to be set up in his garden. He had got the invitations printed and posted them himself, rightly suspecting that Freya would find any excuse not to. Even her mother was going to make the trip to London for it.

Freya tried to show herself grateful. Joss had gone to such trouble, even when she'd been offish with him these last weeks – months – and had at times contrived to avoid him. It pained her to see him devotedly planning the ‘big day' (as he called it) for she sensed in it his effort to patch up the listing hull of their relationship. Both of them knew, could not help being aware, that something was amiss between them. But she couldn't bring herself to join in the repair work.

To conceal the upshot of her evening at Nat's she had taken the precaution of wearing pyjamas when Joss was staying overnight. There could be no innocent way of explaining the angry red weals across her backside. He didn't ask her much about that night, though she could tell he had his suspicions. In the days following she winced each time she sat down. She hadn't even told Nancy about what had happened, partly out of embarrassment, and partly out of caution. Nancy and Robert were spending a lot of time together, and she could no longer feel certain about entrusting confidences. This thought was more depressing to her than any of the awkwardness with Joss.

Meanwhile there had been not a peep from Alex. Telephone calls to his home rang on, drearily. His office met her with polite stonewalling; he was absent on leave, they insisted. In the end she had written him a note and hand-delivered it through the letter box of his flat in Bayswater.