Freya (46 page)

‘Watch me,' she almost snarled. ‘And don't try showing your face at the flat again – ever.'

At the Strand Palace, over a bacon-and-tomato sandwich, Freya listened as her mother talked about the party; but the event now seemed so remote to her it might have happened in another lifetime. Cora hurried on about her old friends, the excellence of the catering, her disappointment at Diana being so ‘pleasant', her annoyance at Stephen's unwithered agelessness. When she paused a moment to squint at her daughter and ask if anything was the matter, Freya only smiled and said she was still hung-over from the night before. It seemed to satisfy her.

In silent relief she eventually handed her mother into a carriage at Charing Cross. Cora had made her promise that she and Nancy would come for a weekend at Finden very soon – she had
so
enjoyed seeing Nancy again.

She walked back to Great James Street, head and heart burdened with the drama of the last twelve hours. She had decided to spare her mother any rehearsal of it, partly because she knew she wouldn't understand, and partly because she feared to choke in the telling. The empty Sunday stillness of the flat depressed her, though she felt in no mood for company. Nancy's bedroom door stood open, her party dress from last night crumpled on the bed. She must have heard by now about Robert's treachery: the newspaper lay open on the kitchen table, its headline the writing on the wall. Freya was turning away when her eye snagged on the tantalising sight of Nancy's diary, expectant on her bedside table.

And all at once it fell into place. She knew, suddenly and absolutely
knew
, how Robert had got his story. In a trice she snatched up the black-boarded volume with its marbled endpapers and began riffling through its recent entries. It must be somewhere in the last ten days of July, she thought, when they were in Florence. She felt certain that a clue,
the
clue, would be yielded up to her –

She sat on the bed and read it again, aghast that her secret should have been entrusted to so frail a receptacle. Nancy didn't even bother hiding the diary away; it was always lolling on her desk or her bed, inviting temptation. Which wasn't something Robert would have resisted overmuch: she could imagine him, pricked by curiosity, casually flipping its pages in search of references to himself – only to stumble upon
this
dynamite.
Alex McAndrew
, right there in Nancy's steady, even cursive. Oh, the ghastly mischance of it! Alex, undone by the few strokes of a pen. A tear rolled off her eye and ploshed onto the open page. She dabbed at it with the edge of her blouse, smudging a few words. She closed the diary, and half lay, face down on the bed. She didn't know if they were tears of rage, or sorrow, or loss; or all of them at once.

For a long time she lay there, until the scrape of the latchkey from below and footsteps on the stairs roused her. She stood up and moved to the bedroom doorway as Nancy reached the landing. Their eyes met, and Freya knew a moment of truth, another one, was coming.

‘Oh, darling,' Nancy said, her brow creased with pity.

‘When did you know they were going to run the story? Did Robert tell you?'

She shook her head. ‘I only found out this morning, when I saw the paper.' She came forward and clasped Freya's forearms in sympathy.

‘But you know how he got hold of it?'

Now she nodded. ‘He told me – one of his contacts at the Ministry of Defence had tipped him off. They knew there was someone in the building who was using an encrypted code to communicate with his handler. I never would have dreamed Alex could be a double agent –'

‘Oh, but he isn't! He was trying to trace Jan – his old lover. That's why he was using a code. They've got him because he's
queer
, not because he's been passing secrets. And it's not from anyone in the MoD Robert found out.'

Nancy frowned. ‘But how else could he –?'

‘He got it from
you
– from your diary! It's the only way he could have.'

Nancy's hands dropped, releasing her. Her expression had clouded. ‘How would you know that?'

For answer Freya stepped back into her bedroom and snatched up the book. She held it out as though Nancy hadn't seen it before. ‘Because it's here, written down, everything I told you about Alex when we were in Florence.'

Nancy held herself very still. ‘You read my diary?'

‘Yes, I did – and so did Robert. I just had to make sure it was in there.'

There was an unsteady pause between them. Then Nancy stepped forward and took the diary from Freya's hands. ‘You shouldn't have done that,' she said quietly. ‘Of all people I'd never have thought you'd do that.'

‘And I wouldn't have, but – but I knew that
he'd
read it, and I needed to prove a point.' She had been wrong-footed, and now she heard the weakness in her excuse. ‘Nance, I'm sorry, I wouldn't have done if it hadn't been absolutely neccessary.'

‘Really. So you
knew
that Robert had read it, and because of that you had to read it too. Please, you'll have to explain – how do you know? Why shouldn't Robert have got the story from somewhere else?'

She heard a cold, sceptical edge in Nancy's voice, and shrank from it. ‘I just know, because I know Robert. I saw him at the office this morning and had it out with him. He was almost hugging himself with delight – the editor's promised him the Home Affairs desk. God, I knew he was ambitious, but I never imagined he'd stoop to this –'

‘He was surely only doing what the editor told him to – find the story – and you resent him for succeeding. A promotion? He deserves it.'

Freya couldn't believe her ears. ‘How can you be taken in like this? Nancy, listen to me, two weeks ago Robert as good as admitted he thought the idea of a mole in the MoD was cobblers – his word. Next thing, he's got Alex cold.
The only way
he could have done was by opening that book and finding Alex's name there.'

‘So you say.'

‘Why d'you not believe me? Leave aside the fact I've resigned over this – yes, I've quit! – this all comes down to trust. You're too nice to believe that Robert could be this underhand, this unscrupulous. But I
know him
. And he wouldn't think twice about violating someone's privacy if he thought it might give him an advantage.'

Nancy stared at her, almost pityingly. ‘You've never really forgiven him, have you, for throwing you over back then. You resent him, and you resent other people for liking him.'

‘God – give me strength! You want the truth? I considered Robert a friend, I enjoyed his company and found him charming. Yes, he once dropped me, and I thank my lucky stars he did. It was easy to forgive him, we were so young. What I'll
never
forgive is his betraying Alex for a fucking news story.'

Nancy, eyes cast down, shook her head. ‘Please don't say anything else. I mean it – please.'

A cold premonition of disaster had gripped Freya within. But she kept going. ‘I only wish you could see through him as I did. I can't stand the idea of you not knowing –'

‘Freya,
stop it
! Not another word. I wasn't going to tell you this yet, because I didn't want it to come between us. Robert's found rooms to rent, and he's asked me to share them.'

It took her a moment to find her voice, lost somewhere near the bottom of her throat. ‘But … you're not going to, are you? I mean, why would you do that?'

Nancy gave an incredulous gasp. ‘Because we want to,' she said, and added, in a quieter voice, ‘I want to.'

Freya felt that something had dislodged in her head, because she couldn't order her thoughts into a coherent sentence. Distracted, her voice came out in an odd croak. ‘Where?' It wasn't the question she wanted to ask; her mind was playing an involuntary trick.

‘Near here,' Nancy replied. ‘We could still, if you were willing –'

‘I see,' she said, and paused. ‘So given the choice between him and me …'

Nancy said nothing, which was tantamount to an admission. The shock of it made her regroup. She could beg Nancy to forgive her over the diary, say it had been a mistake; she'd apologise to Robert and set things right between them. Anything but let her go. Anything but that.

Apologise to Robert?

‘Why would you let him ruin your life? He'll never change.'

Nancy stiffly looked away. ‘It's already done. I'm going to move in. You can choose to see us or not – I hope you will.'

Freya wasn't sure how long it was before she answered. She was staring past Nancy at the rooftops and chimneys framed in the long window. She had always liked their solid last-century steadiness: they had survived bombs. She would miss looking at them. In time she would be able to imagine herself living somewhere else, with other views and staircases and bedrooms not known to her. Her present life was breaking up and scattering the wreckage in front of her.

She managed to smile, and, in a moment that could have broken her heart, Nancy smiled back, mistaking a farewell for a truce.

It was all going up, fast. Freya kept craning her neck as she drove through the north London streets, trying to adjust her eyes in the shadow of another high-rise. When had this happened? She had left behind a more or less horizontal city and returned to find a vertical one. It was as though an invisible alien race had descended on the town and immediately set about throwing up their space-age cabins. ‘Streets in the sky' she'd heard them called. Flats stacked high, one on top of another. And the best thing about these cellular habitations, apart from the view, was that they had ‘all mod cons' – even their own bathrooms. She stopped at a traffic light and looked up through the windscreen at a looming tower. She grinned, and shuddered.

Strange to be back after all this time. She used to be wary of taking a backward step, but this felt different, it was a place at once familiar and transformed. More traffic, more shops, more noise, more adverts, more colour, more hustle and bustle. And more people, inevitably, streaming across the junction as she waited for the green light. Rome, where she'd mostly been living for the last eight years, had seen change, too, but it wasn't something you noticed as much when you stayed put. And in any case it was still in the dark ages compared with thrusting modern London. The two capitals seemed to be moving at different speeds, one at the pace of a horse and cart, the other of an express train.

She had joined the traffic heading west along the Euston Road when something made her double-take. It was the gigantic arch fronting Euston Station, shrouded in scaffolding. A repair job. But no, wait; looking closer she saw that huge chunks of it were missing. Not everything was going skywards after all; they were taking this old giant down. How had she forgotten that? She had read about its proposed demolition months ago, there had been an outcry and a late campaign to save it – up in smoke, by the look of things. Amazing that something she thought so immovable, so much a part of ‘her' London, could be made to disappear. An old song came to her, and she hummed a few bars.

That stuff looked to her more like granite. But it was going all the same.

She turned down Gower Street, dodging around the buses, and took a right into Shaftesbury Avenue. Dusty blossom shimmered on the trees, and the air, following a recent shower, had a sharp, rinsed smell. She parked on Greek Street, just round the corner from the restaurant. Kettner's patina of
fin-de-siècle
grandeur had been chipped away down the years, but within Soho it retained a certain faded respectability, like the madame of a brothel down on its luck. On the way in she glanced sideways at the long mirror and saw a stranger: herself, only like a boy.

She had taken the plunge that morning at a salon on Upper Street. The hairdresser, Bernard – or
Buh-naaard
, as the ladies addressed him – had looked startled when she asked for ‘the lot off'. He gave her a quizzical look, and she explained: she wanted it short and gamine, like Jean Seberg in
Breathless
. Bernard hadn't heard of her. He took her hair in the palm of his hand, as if weighing it, and said, ‘Are you sure?' His expression made her think she was consenting to an invasive and possibly dangerous operation, but she nodded anyway. As hanks of dark hair dropped silkily to the floor under the busy threshing of Bernard's scissors she began to quail at her boldness. Minute by minute she had the impression of being sheared, like one of those wretched Frenchwomen being punished for collaboration in the war. Her ears seemed to stick out, and her face looked suddenly bare and defenceless. She was on the verge of tears when Bernard, oblivious to her dismay, stared at his handiwork in unfeigned wonderment. ‘You've got the look for this,' he said, and called over one of his minions. She cooed the standard flattery. Bernard now held the mirror at different angles for Freya to check the back of her head. It was awful; it was exciting.