Freya (58 page)

‘May I ask you something? The character of Stella –'

Nancy, finishing her signature with a flourish, looked up. ‘Ah, she's the one they all ask about.' She offered a smile of encouragement.

‘I wondered about her – is it me?'

She laughed – a little nervously, Freya thought. ‘What made you think that?'

‘Actually I wouldn't have done, until the end, when I came across a description of Stella – I can't remember the exact words – but it tipped me the wink.'

Nancy nodded, seemingly relieved. ‘I didn't quite realise it myself. I've never based a character wholly on someone I know. But I suppose there are strong correspondences between the two of you.'

Freya stared at her. ‘So that's how you see me?'

Nancy flinched. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘I mean – this impossible, demanding, egotistical freak who almost destroys an entire family,
this
is the woman you base on me?'

‘I just told you, my characters aren't based –'

‘– on real people, yeah, right, except in this case you admit that there are correspondences –
strong
correspondences – between me and Stella.'

‘Yes! And I'm amazed you could even think of taking offence. Stella – she's the most interesting character I've ever created. Even the reviews said so. You say she's a “freak” – to me she's a funny, headstrong, vulnerable woman. And the best parts of her I took, well, from
you
.'

Oh God, she thought, replaying in her head those scenes involving Stella and her awful abrasive treatment of the people she was supposed to love. Her witty but careless put-downs, her wilful misprisions, her pathetic efforts to make amends that only got her in deeper – these were passages in the novel that Freya had tutted and cringed through. The best you could say of Stella was that she spoke her mind, and it brought down chaos and misery around her. Do other people think of me like that? Freya wondered.

‘I have to go,' she said.

‘Oh, Freya, not like this – don't.' There was pleading in her voice. But Freya, having heard the truth, was feeling sick. She turned for the door, but Nancy darted in front, blocking her way. ‘Please. Could we just talk?'

‘We just did. There's nothing more to say.'

She brushed past her and took the stairs, feeling her stomach lurch with every step. She couldn't tell whether she felt queasy because of this horrible revelation or because she was pregnant. Three days to go before she went off to – another fucking ordeal. (At least the doctor wouldn't know she was the model for Stella.) She heard Nancy's footsteps in her wake as she reached the door.

Collecting herself, she said, with stiff courtesy, ‘Goodnight. Thank you for inviting me.'

Nancy opened the door for her, looking at her but not speaking. She assumed this hurt silence was her reply, but as she went down the steps and onto the pavement Nancy trailed behind her. The trees screening the terrace struck wide postures of alarm against the purplish evening sky. Lamplight leaked a thin, yellowish illumination.

Still she heard Nancy a few steps behind her. Was she going to follow her all the way to the car?

‘What do you want?' she said, halting.

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘To be your friend again of course! To start making up for lost time.'

‘You should have thought of that before you skewered me in your book. Enjoy your revenge.' It was as if someone else – someone she loathed – had spoken the words before she could stop them coming out of her mouth.

Nancy gasped, took a step back. ‘Revenge? What are you talking about –?'

‘Look, Nancy, I feel tired and sick. I have to go.'

‘You always quit,' she said, so quietly that Freya had to lean forward to hear. ‘You leave things – people – behind, you push them away even when you need them. You did it with me.' She inclined her head towards Freya's stomach; their eyes met for a moment. ‘That's how I knew what you were going to do about that.'

It took Freya a moment to find her voice, so winded was she. ‘Fuck you,' she said, at a gasp, and walked away down the terrace. It wasn't until she got to the car that she realised she was still holding Nancy's book.

The call came early on Sunday morning. She'd been dreaming about being trapped – nearly all of her dreams at the moment were about that. She was trying to find her way out of a dark warehouse that was essentially a labyrinth, except the direction of her struggle was not horizontal but vertical: as eagerly as she clambered upwards to some notional point of exit, her path to the light kept turning up blind alleys.

She had recently taken the precaution of putting the telephone on the floor next to her bed. Blearily she swam into consciousness and reached down to quell its dreary ring.

‘Hullo?' she droned, sleep-stunned.

‘Freya. It's Nat.'

‘Hnngh? Oh.' It didn't sound like Nat. It sounded like a dead sober eighty-year-old impersonating Nat.

‘Are you listening? I've some news. Bad news.'

That did it. She hauled herself up in bed. ‘What? What is it?'

She could hear him take a breath. ‘It's Chrissie. She's dead. They found her at her flat this morning. Chrissie Effingham's dead.'

Chrissie Effingham, who died in the early hours of Sunday morning, had the world at her Bally-shod feet. Signed up by an agency at eighteen, she was the highest paid model in the country at nineteen and a bona fide star at twenty. In London this spring one could hardly pass a billboard that didn't have her face on it. People wanted to meet her, or just be seen with her. There is a photograph from the Royal Variety Show last year in which she is shaking hands with the Queen, and you can't tell which of them looks more impressed. Last week
Vogue
hit the news-stands with Chrissie's face staring out from it – her first cover, and now her last. It captures in that doe-eyed gaze the twin poles of her attraction, both the erotic allure and the unassuming girl-next-door homeliness. The picture is cropped, showing her from the waist up wearing a flower-print Quant dress and twirling a small Chanel handbag, the epitome of cosmopolitan glamour. But you can bet that below the camera's eye she wasn't wearing Bally, or any other fancy-named shoe: more likely she was in plimsolls, or simply barefoot, as she preferred to be. It is a beautiful cover that has accidentally, and tragically, become a memento mori.

Her face, with its milk-soft skin, retroussé nose and heavy fringe, still had the look of a schoolgirl. Her voluptuous five-foot-ten frame, though, was very much a woman's, and the moment her agency released pictures of her the advertisers came flocking. She herself had no inkling of why the world of fashion had taken to her. ‘They hand me the clothes and I put them on, and they look all right. I don't have a clue about “poise” – that's just a word they use.' It's true that for a model she was rather gawky, and sometimes looked ill at ease under the spotlight. Yet there was an unknowing gracefulness of manner that singled her out: one saw no contradiction in her being both coltish and a thoroughbred. As a person she was, in a word, adorable. She suffered from shyness, which she camouflaged with her natural qualities of enthusiasm, good humour and spontaneity. She wanted to know about things, like jazz and painting and food, which her schooling at a Bromley secondary modern had failed to supply.

She could not bear to see anyone in discomfort or distress. When I happened to tell her that I'd been sleeping badly she took me in hand with maternal solicitude, drawing up a list of herbal remedies and infusions I should prepare. No stranger herself to insomnia, she favoured more serious medication in the struggle for a night's sleep. She had prescriptions for barbiturates. That she had been taking them for a while ought to have set off alarm bells. Early reports issuing from the coroner's office suggest her blood contained dangerous levels of the drugs; she freely admitted to taking more than the recommended dose.

A sleeping disorder is a physiological misfortune. It can happen to anyone, like cancer, or heart disease. Chrissie bore her condition uncomplainingly. But she fell prey to a different ill luck, the sort that should have been avoidable. It emerged in the choice – or perhaps rather the imposition on her – of the people paid to look after her interests. The famous attract hangers-on in the way a coat picks up burrs. Chrissie hadn't been famous for long but she had somehow accumulated a retinue of people larger than the neediest showbiz veteran's. I had evidence of this when Nat Fane introduced me to her at Television Centre. She was surrounded, as I initially thought, by friends, who turned out mostly to be hired ‘assistants' of one stripe or another. A manager, Bruce Haddon, orchestrated this party like Count Dracula with his brides, always sniffing the air for their next feed. Accountants, agents, public relations executives, and – for all I know – food tasters and soothsayers milled around, claws out, a squadron of winged Furies ready to pounce on anyone daring to approach their mistress. The only employee one saw doing a demonstrably useful job was Ken, her driver, who also happened to be the least self-important of all her staff.

Chrissie did have real friends, of course, most of them from school. One must remember how recent those schooldays were – the dew of youth was still on her. She had been born in December 1940, in Bromley, at a time when its citizens would have been among the first to hear the drone of the Luftwaffe's bombers approaching London. The youngest of three daughters, doted upon by her parents Reg and Sonia, she grew up in an unlyrical neighbourhood with unexceptional prospects. She was working in a cafe on the high street when a talent agent spotted her: he must have thought it the find of his life. If such a discovery had occurred in 1950 fame might have come calling, but it would have taken its time. In 1960, with television colonising so many living rooms, Chrissie Effingham went from unknown to face of the moment almost overnight. As well as portrait stills in magazines she was being beamed into people's homes, initially in teen-aged ensembles, then spectacularly in an advertising campaign for a well-known brand of bread. In a matter of days she became ‘That Girl'.

After the evening at Television Centre I met her once more. We had a fry-up breakfast at a cafe in Islington, where she had reverted, without effort, to the girl next door: she wore a sweater and ski pants, her face barely made up. None of the clientele recognised her. She chatted about her parents (she had plans to buy them a house), her friends back in Bromley, her dog Alfie. There was talk of her going to work in New York, and the whisper of a film role at Ealing. She had much to live for. A week later I ran into her manager, who was furious about this ‘unscheduled' meeting with Chrissie, or, as he called her, ‘my client'. It seemed that he expected his permission to be sought for any social engagement, even one that meant just dropping in on someone – as Chrissie had on me. And yet this self-appointed custodian of her time had the last laugh. Following a heated exchange between us he vowed that I'd ‘never see Chrissie again'. On that score, it grieves me to say, he kept his word.

She will be mourned, as the loss of any promising young woman might be. One suspects that more will come to light about the circumstances surrounding her death. For now, I want to remember not That Girl on the TV but that girl who, in Nat Fane's words, ‘simply cheered you up by walking into the room'. I want to remember her here, in the flat where I write this, performing a little shimmy to Dexter Gordon's ‘I Was Doing All Right'. The expression on her face was eager, poised on the verge of a smile. She was happy. She was doing all right.

Freya Wyley

Freya watched Nat, cross-legged in an armchair, hand over his brow as he read the piece. She had finished it in the ash-grey light of dawn and later telephoned him at Albany; he agreed to come over. It was now late on Monday morning, and the papers, scattered on her floor, were exultant with shock.
MODEL FOUND DEAD IN MAYFAIR FLAT
. Most of them had used the stock photograph of her hurrying down a street wearing a thin stone-coloured mackintosh, looking away from the camera.

Nat nodded, gazing at the typed pages. ‘It's strong stuff … “Brides of Dracula”? They'll spit feathers when they read it at Haddon Management.'

Freya stared at him. ‘But is that all? I wanted it to say something about her, and how lovely she was.'

‘And you do, it's very tender,' he said, thoughtful still. ‘I'm glad you mention me … but wouldn't you like a quote of mine with a little more
sparkle
?'

‘The piece isn't about you, Nat. And I like what you said anyway – it's just how I felt about her.'

Nat tipped his head in acquiescence. They had met each other on the doorstep in a mood of forlorn bewilderment. Nat's agent had telephoned him with the news. Apparently the concierge in Chrissie's building had heard her dog whining inside her flat and gone to investigate at about four in the morning. Having received no reply to his knock he let himself in, and found her lying lifeless on her bed. The police had been called, and an ambulance soon followed. An array of prescription drugs was found on her bedside table.

‘The signs are that she took an accidental overdose,' said Nat.

‘So they don't think that she –'

Nat took her meaning with a heavy shrug. ‘We must hope not. But one can never be sure. The autopsy report should clear it up.'

A gloomy silence intervened. They had talked about her to a standstill. Freya rolled a cigarette and lit it. Nat, glancing at his watch, said, ‘Shouldn't you be at work?'

She blew smoke from the side of her mouth. ‘I had a doctor's appointment this morning, which I cancelled. I couldn't face it after all this.'

‘Oh?'

‘Just a touch of anaemia.'