Freya (10 page)

She felt rather proud of her mother as she took her on a little tour of the college. Cora Wyley was tall and slender as a mannequin, still striking in her mid-forties, even if her clothes bore signs of weathering; the soft tweed jacket and silk blouse pre-dated the war, and Freya had an inkling that she might have worn the jacket more recently to do the gardening. No threads of silver could be seen in her brown hair (she dyed it) and her eyebrows were so neatly arched they looked plucked. Even the tiny wrinkles that had formed around her eyes and mouth heightened her sad elegance. She let out little coos of appreciation as Freya conducted her around the chapel and the hall, but she sensed her mother's relief on getting back into the open so she could have a cigarette.

‘Has your father been up yet?' she asked as they made their way towards the lodge.

Freya shook her head. ‘He wrote to say he would, maybe next term. He intends to bring
Diana
.' She gave the name a tart emphasis.

Cora said, in a level voice, ‘He wants you to like her.'

She found this mild-mannered acceptance of Stephen's new help-meet unfathomable. As one who had nursed a grievance against her mother's controlling personality – it was she who had instigated her hateful education at Tipton – she imagined that Cora would put up more of a fight to keep her marriage together, and would have raged against Stephen's taking up with someone else. But she seemed determined to put a glad face on the whole business. The college tour done, they were walking down the Woodstock Road towards St Giles. Freya thought she had better ask or else go mad from wondering.

‘Mum, why aren't you more upset about him?'

Cora gave her a sidelong look. ‘I
was
upset at the beginning, but what good would moping about it do? It was the war, and company was valued – people had to make temporary arrangements.'

An alarm rang inside Freya's head. She stopped on the pavement and looked at her mother, and wondered how it had never occurred to her. ‘Did you – have you – I mean …?' She couldn't bring herself to articulate it.

A crooked smile tweaked her mother's mouth. ‘You have to remember, I was alone, for a
long time
. Stephen was mostly in London getting up to who knows what, you were in Plymouth, and Rowan was either at school or – well, you know what he's like. He's not even there when he's home, so to speak.'

‘So who was – is – he?'

‘It's over now, and it was no one you know. Darling, don't look so disapproving. D'you expect me to just retire from life?'

‘No, no – of course not. I only wish you'd told me. You should have been honest with me.' She realised she had said the same thing to her father at the Lunch of Doom.

‘Oh, you and your honesty! Why does everything have to be so personal? Choosing not to tell isn't being
dis
honest, my love. When your father first went off with someone, I didn't know about it, and frankly it wouldn't have helped if I
had
. The pain of being thrown over isn't lessened by somebody confessing it …'

Freya's voice went very quiet. ‘Are you going to get a divorce?'

‘Well, Stephen has told me he wants to marry –'

She came to a halt on seeing her daughter's face averted, shoulders in a silent judder. She was right, thought Freya, leaning into her misery. Being honest didn't always help, for there was no comfort in knowing this, the final evidence that her mother and father were parting irretrievably. She sobbed it out against Cora, her consoling murmurs briefly tautening the ache within.

‘There's nothing I can do,' she said, her voice gluey, not sure if she was asking or telling.

Her mother, still holding her, sighed. ‘I'm afraid not, darling. But nothing else has changed – we're still your parents, you're still our marvellous girl.'

Freya wasn't used to being vulnerable in front of her mother. Cora had been a loving parent to her and Rowan, but she wasn't soft. In the face of distress she was brusque and given to no-nonsense exhortations along the lines of ‘Buck up, dear' and ‘Don't be a ninny'. It had become a family joke. That she did not take recourse to those phrases now suggested to Freya how chastening this flood of emotion had been for her.

Once she had calmed down she took her mother's proffered handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. ‘Sorry,' she muttered.

Her mother tutted the word away and said, ‘You're not the one who should be apologising. I think what we both need is a good stiff drink.'

They had one in the bar of the Randolph while they waited for their guest. Freya also took a moment to repair her smudged eyes before the mirror in the ladies, and contemplated the prospect of her parents' divorce. Another casualty of war, as broken and forlorn as any bombsite. She gazed at her reflection, at the defiant set of her mouth, and silently vowed never to inflict that mistake on a child of her own.

Nancy arrived just as they were being seated in the restaurant. Freya, hollowed out from her crying jag, already felt light-headed with the large whisky she had bolted down in the bar. Her delight on seeing Nancy was almost possessive in its intensity; her wide-eyed gaze, her gawkiness, even the slight uptilt of her nose seemed an unconscious expression of her lovability.

‘Mrs Wyley,' said Nancy, shyly offering her hand.

‘It's Cora,' replied her mother. ‘How nice to meet you at last.'

Nancy shot a look of uncertainty at Freya, who didn't miss a beat. ‘That manuscript I was reading down in Sussex was Nancy's novel,' she explained. ‘She has an amazing talent – it's like Elizabeth Bowen, only more enjoyable.'

Cora canted her head at an interested angle, and said to Nancy, ‘My word, you must be good! Freya hardly ever praises anyone.'

Nancy's face was a blushing confusion of pride and astonishment. ‘I think Freya's just being kind. The book needs an awful lot of work –'

‘But you're going to write an even better one,' said Freya, with a confidence that seemed to embrace and exclude at once. Cora, perhaps sensing Nancy's discomfort under this fierce glare of approval, steered her towards a conversation about her studies, and how she liked Oxford. Meanwhile Freya had seized the wine list and ordered the first bottle she recognised. She looked around the room, at the waiter's retreating back, the carver with his trolley a few tables along, the anonymous couples facing one another, the dusty potted palms by the door, the limp brocade curtains, the smells of mediocre food being cooked – and felt a terrible crushing sadness. A line of poetry came to her –
Say not the struggle naught availeth
. But how mundane the struggle felt, after what they'd put themselves through, this effort to wrest back a semblance of normality; how feeble and dogged and lost we all are.

‘Look, there's partridge on the menu,' her mother was saying. ‘I haven't seen that since before the war.'

The waiter had returned with the wine, and Freya watched impatiently as he uncorked and decanted it. ‘Would madam like to taste …?'

‘No, just pour it,' she said with a peremptory nod. The wine was barely in her glass before she had emptied it with great gulps.

‘Someone's thirsty,' her mother said. ‘So what do you girls do when you're not at lectures? There seem to be a lot of men around the place.'

‘Nothing but,' said Freya. ‘They're either beer-drinking ex-servicemen or serious chaps in flannels smoking pipes. Though I did meet one quite presentable fellow at Balliol …' Pleased to provoke their outraged laughter with the story of her staircase encounter with Robert, she was spurred on to a little comic embroidery. ‘When he started yarning about his scholarship I got rather fed up and dropped my gaze to what I'd just seen on display under his towel. I said, “I don't know about a scholarship, but I suppose they might have given you an exhibition.”'

Nancy, over her giggles, said, ‘I could never tell a story like that to my parents.'

‘Nancy's a Catholic,' Freya jumped in, for her mother's benefit. ‘That's why she's having the cod – fish on Friday!' She turned to Nancy. ‘So you never talk about sex?'

‘Freya,' said her mother, more in weariness than warning.

‘Well, no,' said Nancy hesitantly, ‘but it's not just that. We never really talk about anything … intimate. My parents wouldn't know how. Most things, they're either understood or they're just undiscussed.'

‘Do you have brothers and sisters?' asked Cora.

‘I have a younger sister, Miriam. She's still at school.'

‘That's quite small for a Catholic family,' observed Freya.

Nancy nodded, and paused before replying. ‘My mother had another child, a boy. He was still a baby, not even a year old – one morning they found him dead in his cot. I was about eight, and didn't understand what had happened. I was told that it was God's will, but beyond that they never talked about it. If someone accidentally mentioned an infant dying a sort of blind went down – so it remains this terrible unspoken thing.'

Freya kept a brief silence before saying, ‘If only people could talk honestly about painful things, instead of bottling them up. Wouldn't it have been better if your parents had been open with you?'

Nancy returned a shrug. ‘I think they must have talked to the parish priest about it. But I know what you mean – it might have helped us all if they'd been willing to sit down and talk. Instead, when the anniversary comes round the house is plunged into this gloom, though nobody will ever acknowledge it. So it goes on.'

Freya exchanged a look with her mother that seemed to touch on their own familial turmoil: they would have to tread softly. The arrival of the food was timely, and the cloud which had been threatening dispersed. The partridge she had chosen was a bit stringy, but it was tastier than anything they served at hall in Somerville. After the relative bounty that sustained the officers at Plymouth – steaks and butter and real coffee – the return to a civilian diet had been dismal. She had forgotten how disgusting powdered eggs could be.

‘Isn't it grand to eat proper food once in a while? Even that mutton they were just carving looked nice.'

‘I wonder where they get it all,' mused Nancy.

Freya's mother arched her eyebrows and said softly, ‘The same place most of the restaurants in London get it – the black market.'

‘The last time Nancy and I were in London together we went to Gennaro's.'

‘Ah, yes, I remember hearing, with your father. And I suppose you had the ice cream?'

Freya flashed a conspiratorial look across the table. ‘No, I was in the most terrible bait with Dad at the time and I refused it, just out of pride. Of course it didn't bother
him
at all, so I went without for no reason.' Drink had made her voluble, and she was happy again. ‘But afterwards I was sulking outside on my own when Nancy showed up – carrying ice creams for both of us! She'd only walked halfway round Soho to find a shop selling them. Now what d'you think of that?'

Cora smiled across at Nancy. ‘I'd say that's the loveliest thing a friend ever did.'

Her voice was lightly amused, but Nancy, not for the first time in the course of lunch, had a stunned look, like someone who had won a prize in a contest she'd not been aware of entering.

By the time they emerged from the Randolph's dining room the dreary autumnal weather had closed in; a gauzy mist off the river had submerged the streets and the flagstones were oily underfoot. But her mood was still flying. Nancy had gone, leaving a trail of effusive thank-yous in her wake; Freya accompanied her mother back to the railway station.

‘I feel a bit tipsy,' Freya admitted.

‘I'm not surprised, darling. You drank the best part of two bottles – and that huge whisky in the bar.'

Freya linked her arm through her mother's. ‘What did you think of Nancy?'

‘She's a dear, isn't she? Such beautiful eyes –'

‘I know!' said Freya. ‘That was the first thing I noticed about her.'

‘It's very sweet …'

‘What is?'

‘To see how besotted she is with you – hanging on your every word.'

Freya tipped her head slightly. ‘Do you think so?'

‘You should be careful with her. Not everyone's as robust as you. A tear nearly came to my eye when she talked about her brother dying. “God's will”, indeed. Poor thing, if
that's
all she had to console her …'

Freya, who was more fascinated by Nancy's Catholicism than she cared to admit, said spontaneously, ‘How terrible to be God. Imagine having the whole world on Your conscience.'

Cora made a huffing sound – the sound of a stillborn laugh – and said, ‘That's one way of looking at it.'

As they edged their way through the press of bodies a tune was coming from a gramophone in the next room.

Freya cupped her hand to Nancy's ear. ‘I love this song!'

Nancy pulled an uncertain face. ‘What is it?'

‘It's “The Sheik of Araby”.' And she tootled along with an imaginary clarinet, swinging it from side to side to make Nancy laugh.

They had arrived at the Banbury Road party together, which in the days since the Randolph lunch was how they did most things – afternoon tea in their rooms or in the covered market, evening drinks at the Eagle and Child, bicycling up to Headington Hill, trips to the cinema or the lecture hall. On the previous Sunday morning she had even accompanied Nancy to Mass. For Freya it felt like compensation for the best friend she had never had at school. At Plymouth she had knocked around with other Wrens, and had affairs with various men, but none of them were close to her in the way Nancy was. The awkwardness over her novel had, if anything, bound them tighter together, for in those moments of hostile disputation they had both felt the warning touch of estrangement, and recoiled.