Authors: Anthony Quinn
Freya
Contents
London, May 1945. Freya Wyley, twenty, meets Nancy Holdaway, eighteen, amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship that will endure on and off for the next two decades. Freya, wilful, ambitious, outspoken, pursues a career in newspapers which the chauvinism of Fleet Street and her own impatience conspire to thwart, while Nancy, gentler, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled at university with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives.
Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960s,
Freya
plots the unpredictable course of a woman's life and loves against a backdrop of Soho pornographers, theatrical peacocks, willowy models, priapic painters, homophobic blackmailers, political careerists.
Beneath the relentless thrum of changing times and a city being reshaped, we glimpse the eternal: the battles fought by women in pursuit of independence, the intimate mysteries of the human heart, and the search for love. Stretching from the Nuremberg war trials to the advent of the TV celebrity, from innocence abroad to bitter experience at home,
Freya
presents the portrait of an extraordinary woman taking arms against a sea of political and personal tumult.
Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2014 he was the film critic of the
Independent
. He is the author of four very successful novels:
The Rescue Man
, which won the 2009 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award,
Half of the Human Race
,
The Streets
, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize, and
Curtain Call
, which was chosen for Waterstones and
Mail on Sunday
Book Clubs.
The Rescue Man
Half of the Human Race
The Streets
Curtain Call
For Laura Quinn
Who is so safe as we? Where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
John Donne
At Swim, Two Girls
1
The bus, snailing up Whitehall, had nearly come to a standstill in the crowd. On its side someone had chalked
HITLER MISSED THIS BUS
, which had got them swarming onto the road, cheering. They walked alongside it as proudly as marchers with a carnival float. Passengers had pressed their faces to the windows, waving, tickled to be at the centre of this exultation.
Freya had seen the bus about half an hour before, but had decided to walk; and here she was outside Swan & Edgar, on time to meet her friends. It was warm for early May. She stood in the wide doorway watching the mass of bodies swirl and eddy in front of her. She had never seen a crowd in quite this mood before, not even when she was a girl at the Coronation in 1937. Among the women, who seemed to move along in huge flocks, she detected something excitable â no, more like hysterical, as if every single one of them were just getting married. Was that why the men looked so dazed?
On and on they came, the girls in their summer dresses, as gaily coloured as the plumage of exotic birds. A gaggle had just passed her in a great wave of perfume and laughter. They had been waiting for this day like a prisoner who has heard a rumour of his release yet still dares not believe it, so often has the hope been dashed. From the high windows above, streamers were pouring down, and Union Jacks fluttered over balcony railings. Freya hadn't yet immersed herself in the euphoria. Of course she was relieved, like everyone else, and had caught the train up from Plymouth the night before in the expectation of a jubilant welcome from her parents: our brave girl, back at last! That pleasurable sense of return had lasted until the moment she let herself into her father's place in Tite Street and found â she felt it as a shock â nobody home.
The previous weekend she had telephoned her mother to persuade her up to town for the day. She came infrequently, having sold the family house in the summer of '39 and retreated to a village in Sussex. Her husband's responsibilities as an ARP warden obliged him to be in London more often than in the country. By degrees the studio in Chelsea became his home. War had given them a kind of permission to pursue their own lives, though neither had taken the formal step of asking for a separation. Freya still believed it was in her power to engineer a rapprochement, and had announced her intention to come up for VE Day in the hope that this would at least put them in the same room. But her mother must have got cold feet, and there was no telling where her father had got to.
At Swan & Edgar she examined her reflection against the dark polished glass of the door. Bothersome though it was today, the uniform lent her a certain dash. She was leggy, like her mother, statuesque and somewhat flat-chested. Her eyebrows, darker than her mid-brown hair, framed a face notable for its hollow cheeks. Her gaze projected something more challenging than was intended; she was a little short-sighted. The set of her mouth was wilful. Now, with the babble of the crowd gathering at her back, she peered more intently into the glass, as if she might read an intimation of the future there. What in the world was to become of them now that â
âFreya!' The voice cut through the air. It was Jean Markham, also in uniform, with girls whose faces she'd last seen at school two years ago, Sophia and Betty and Maud and Catherine P. and Catherine S. The sternest girl in her year, Jean wore her smile like an unfamiliar lipstick.
âJean â'
âMy, don't you look smart!' cried Jean in her parade-ground tone. Amid the flurry of kisses and hugs Freya glanced at the stranger among them, a russet-haired girl who held back rather awkwardly from the rest. She was tall, as tall as Freya, pale-skinned yet luminous, and somewhat ill at ease; Freya's impression was of an ungainly swan. Jean, all briskness, introduced her as Nancy Holdaway.
âNot seen her in ages and she telephoned me
out of the blue
this morning!' There was the faintest touch of annoyance in her tone to suggest that surprise telephone calls were gauche and unwelcome. Freya stared at the girl for a moment before extending her hand.
âHullo,' she said, feeling the girl's slim palm.
âHow d'you do?' Nancy replied, blushing. Freya, who never blushed, always felt a little superior to people who did.
Catherine P. said that they should start to make for Downing Street, because Churchill was going to address the nation at three. As they pushed their way into the crowds moving south, Freya half listened as Jean recounted episodes from her last two years as a Waaf, first in Inverness, later in Norfolk. She had heard some of it before in the occasional letter Jean had written, though the details had been left vague on account of censorship â you could take gossip only so far during wartime. In any case, the other girls weren't that interested in the Waaf, they were much more eager for news of her boyfriends. Jean had been quite busy on that front, and told stories about men chasing her, pestering her, boring her and (occasionally) catching her. Her candour provoked giggles and squeals of mirth, which made Freya wonder if the others were still virgins.
By the time they reached Trafalgar Square the noise and the press of bodies was overwhelming. The heat of the day and the frenzy of the mood were taking a toll. At the foot of Regent Street they had watched a team of St John's Ambulance men shoulder their way out of a scrum; they were carrying a woman with blood pouring from her head. âOnly fainted,' someone called out. A bottleneck had formed at the turn to Whitehall, and Jean, raising her voice to group-leader volume, said they should stay close.
Freya looked back at Nancy, who was bringing up the rear. Jean, noticing this, leaned towards Freya's ear and said, with a conspiratorial sniff, âSchool-leaver.'
âHow do you know her?'
âOh, friend of the family. My father worked with her father, years back when we lived up north. She wrote to tell me she was in London, and I forgot all about it until â oh goodness!'
Her exclamation was prompted by a boisterous conga line of revellers cutting right across their path and causing little waves of panicked jostling. It was moving with a headlong, high-spirited abandon, indifferent to the normal rules of pedestrian behaviour; some people were dodging out of the way, others were joining in. Freya still had her back turned when, without warning, a meaty arm grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into the wild to-and-fro of the swaying line. Caught unawares, she lost her bearings for a moment, jounced along by the arms of the unseen man behind her. As she steadied herself to the forced rhythm and caught her breath, she glanced over her shoulder, intending to give her waylayer a polite smile of withdrawal, just to prove she wasn't a spoilsport. His red face, sweaty and bleared with drink, indicated that such civility was unnecessary. She dragged herself from out of his grasp and ducked back into the crowd.
She looked around at the roiling masses, loud, oblivious. The others were nowhere to be seen. She rejoined the heave towards Whitehall, her head bobbing from side to side as she tried to pick out Jean's blue-grey uniform in the throng; once or twice she thought she spotted her in the distance, then realised her mistake. (Short-sightedness didn't help.) Drat! She sensed the high promise of the day threatening to unravel. Jean had taken charge of entertainments and Freya had fallen into line with her bossy shepherding. A little stab of disappointment provoked her to call out Jean's name, once, twice. A few people looked around, blank-faced. There was no answering voice.
Squinting into the distance again she caught a flash of russet hair that seemed familiar. Wasn't that Nancy, the girl who'd been tagging along? She felt her steps quicken as she threaded her way through the tumult. Drawing nearer, Freya started to doubt her powers of recognition, for the girl, as far as she could tell, was on her own. And her wide-stepping, mannish walk didn't seem to fit with the callow schoolgirl whom Jean had introduced. She hesitated a moment, considering the potential scene of embarrassment.
âHullo there?' she said, touching the girl's shoulder.
She turned round. âOh! Freya ⦠isn't it?' Nancy's face lit up in a show of relief: she might have been her only friend in the world.
âWhere are they?'
âI don't know! One minute I was right behind them, the next â' She gave a hopeless shrug of appeal. Up close Freya now noticed Nancy's extraordinary tiger eyes, an intense olive green with very dark irises. Her skin was dewy, and flushed. As the crowds flowed by on either side an uncertainty vibrated in the space between them. Cast adrift, they clung to each other like shipwrecked mariners.