Freya

by Anthony Quinn

  Fane’s was a long letter that rarely strayed outside the necessary span of his own moods, fancies and tastes, a self-obsession that should have been tedious but in his case was leavened by a style that switched without effort between charm and light-voiced mockery. No mention was made of their night together, though Freya had the impression that this was not on his part a discreet avoidance of the subject; he merely had other things on his mind. He wrote about the two or three plays he had seen since returning to London, at such a length and with so many considered aperçus and bons mots that he might have been rehearsing a column for a newspaper. But if he took for himself the role of headline performer he was also quick to appreciate a correspondent capable of entertaining him. Freya’s reply brought, to her astonishment, another letter from his pen by return of post.

  … I confess that I stand, or rather, lounge-on-an-unmade-bed, corrected – it had hitherto been my conviction that the only English letter writer of note under the age of twenty-five was myself. Then your last arrived and lo! I was of a sudden bewitched, my pulse set racing by the furioso tempo of your epistolary vim. Strange to say the most brilliant of your paragraphs were those to which, philosophically, I felt least sympathetic; to wit, your sustained assault on our beloved seat of learning, the city of perspiring dreams, that modern Arcadia – Oxford, by any other name. I much enjoyed your disobliging reflections on its somnolence, its smugness, its want of excitement, but then – as you admit – the pace of Life Itself has fallen off since war ended. For my own part I’m with Hazlitt: ‘We could pass our lives in Oxford without having or wanting any other idea.’ Like a stick of seaside rock I am stamped OXON all the way through. I came to the place from the dismal oubliette of school, you see, not from war service, and thus feel the beautiful privilege of it more keenly.

  Now, apprised of your disillusion, I shall endeavour next term to show you its Elysian delights, for I can’t bear to think of you unhappy there, in tears amid the alien Cornmarket …

  She found herself rereading this passage several times. Habitually suspicious of praise, she was tickled to be thought capable of ‘epistolary vim’, indeed of ‘brilliant paragraphs’, and not just by anyone but by Nat Fane, who was already being feted as a stylistic dandy. This seemed to her an imprimatur far more valuable than anything her tutors could bestow. As for Oxford, she envied Fane his besotted devotion to the place. He had perhaps hit the nail on the head in contrasting their pre-university lives. To her the undergraduate routine felt becalmed after the frenetic rhythms of wartime; she missed the perilous excitement of being always on call in the Wrens. Rising for a ten o’clock lecture on Chaucer’s Pardoner was no match for being woken at five and summoned to an emergency meeting in the Ops Room at Plymouth while German bombers droned overhead. It was not the war she wanted back but the sense of a shared endeavour, of knowing her own role in the grander scheme and being good at it. Back then you couldn’t help feeling there was something always at stake. But what could be at stake in this city of hushed cloisters and bicycles and Latin grace at dinner?

  It also disheartened her to realise that the age-old assumptions of male superiority had not been eradicated by war – merely displaced. In the Wrens a kind of meritocracy had been established faute de mieux; a woman was trusted to do a job usually because there wasn’t a man at hand. By degrees the woman would prove herself just as capable of playing her part, perhaps more so for having assumed it in adversity and been hardened in consequence. In her own experience as plotting officer she had gone head first into the unknown, but determination, mingled with pride and fear, had seen her through. She had kept her nerve because to do otherwise was unthinkable. By the end she had secured the respect of her superiors simply by being as efficient and reliable as a man.

  Oxford didn’t operate on those egalitarian lines. Of course it had been a redoubt of male privilege since twelve hundred and whenever it was, back in the days when women counted only as childbearers and chattels. Even the advent of women’s colleges had made barely a dent in the ramparts. Winning her spurs in the Wrens carried little weight here. Amid the bovine atmosphere of collegiate maleness she was just a skirt with a library book.

  And she missed boxing. Denied access to a boxing gymnasium she took to practising in her room. If Ginny was about she would get her to hold up a cushion while she pummelled away at it – a duty that Ginny soon tired of. Craving exercise she went for long walks, to the north as far as Woodstock and Blenheim, or south to Boars Hill and Bagley Wood. Most times she took Nancy or Ginny along on a footslog and they hiked through water meadows and fields and dripping copses where rooks cawed in the treetops.

  One Saturday at the end of January she and Ginny crossed Port Meadow to a pub in Binsey, the Perch, and stopped for a sandwich and a pale ale. The saloon bar was in a competitive roar of braying voices, but they managed to find a table in the back offering quiet. Ginny, who was beginning to get the measure of her friend’s restlessness, suggested she look for something to occupy her time.

  ‘Really, there are so many hobbies besides boxing.’

  Freya clicked her tongue in reproof. ‘Boxing isn’t a hobby, it’s a sport – maybe not even that. I don’t want a “hobby” in any case. That conjures up flower-arranging and model-aircraft-making. There has to be something more.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Ginny, peeling back the sandwich and wrinkling her nose. ‘Spam again.’

  But Freya was pursuing her own line of thought. ‘The problem – our problem – is that we’ve done it the wrong way round. Going out into the world, having all that responsibility, that should have come after university. But we did the serious thing first, because there was a war on! No wonder Oxford feels so tame.’

  Ginny was gazing off at a group of young men in duffel coats and college scarves crowding the bar. ‘I don’t know – seems all right to me.’

  ‘Really – can you imagine three years of this? What are you going to do with yourself?’

  Ginny’s attention was still directed over Freya’s shoulder at the drinkers. ‘I can think of a few things,’ she said. ‘Not everything’s on the ration, you know.’

  Freya smiled back at her. Perhaps I’m the exception, she thought, the malcontent in Lotusland. She wished she could be like Ginny, so gregarious and relieved to be free, but she wasn’t; she felt something inside her had stalled. Writing an essay a week wasn’t much of a stimulus. At twenty-one she never suspected there would be so much time to fill.

  She noticed Ginny giving her an odd look.

  ‘I think one of those chaps is giving you the eye.’

  Freya turned round, but her short-sightedness made her struggle to pick out an admirer. They had chatted on for a desultory minute or two when a figure loomed up beside them. His face, with its chiselled features and dark eyes, seemed familiar to her.

  ‘Hullo there. I think we’ve met before …’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ she replied, in a tone that was eager to make it true, though she still couldn’t place him.

  ‘You had the trunk – at the railway station.’

  The clouds parted. ‘And you helped me with it. Of course!’ She made a reflexive gesture that invited him to join them. ‘I’m Freya, this is my friend Ginny –’

  ‘Alex McAndrew,’ he said, shaking their hands and taking a seat. She recalled now the faint Scottish burr in his voice. The college scarf he wore was also familiar to her.

  ‘You’re at Balliol?’

  He was indeed – a Greats scholar. He spoke with a smile at once modest and becoming.

  ‘D’you know Robert Cosway?’

  ‘I know the name – we haven’t been introduced.’

  Alex was originally from Edinburgh, where his mother still lived. Like them he had deferred his university place for the war effort, working the last four years for the government in an unspecified ‘intelligence’ department. But he didn’t want to talk about that, he wanted to know about them, and so out came their war stories – the institut
ional rivalries, the carpetings, the friends lost and found, the triumphs, the mistakes, the great escapes. Ginny kept pressing him to ‘spill the beans’ about his department, and he, with perfect good humour, kept swatting her away. It made Freya wonder if he had actually been involved in something too difficult to explain. All he would admit to was a relief that he had got through it ‘unscathed’, the implication being that certain of his colleagues had not.

  ‘And to go from that to this,’ he added, his hand wave seeming to encompass the Oxford life entire.

  Ginny’s expression was wry. ‘Would that everyone were as grateful!’

  Alex saw that Freya was the target of this jibe. ‘You don’t like it here?’

  The gentle note of concern in his voice awoke a sudden remorse in her: she was ungrateful. ‘It’s not that … we were just talking about how different it’s been from wartime. Oxford feels like – I don’t know – an irrelevance. An anticlimax.’

  ‘Time hangs heavy after the Wrens,’ Ginny explained.

  By now the cluster of men with whom he’d been drinking at the bar had started to circle their table, like sharks, obliging Alex to perform some introductions. Ginny proved very amenable to this extra company, and Freya, though she would have preferred a tête-à-tête with Alex, mucked in with the rest. Later, when they had been turfed out of the pub, Alex made a point of accompanying her and Ginny back to Somerville. Freya, happening to peek into the basket on the bicycle he was wheeling along, noted the spines of several library books. She picked one of them out.

  ‘Henry Green? I thought you were reading Greats.’

  ‘I am. That’s research – a piece for Cherwell on the war in modern British fiction. Not quite the commission I was hoping for.’

  ‘So you want to be a journalist?’

  He blew out his cheeks. ‘I dunno. I should have been hard at it this afternoon – due first thing Monday and I haven’t written a word!’

  ‘Just like a journalist. I suppose you’ve read the latest Waugh?’

  He shook his head.

  Ginny, who’d been listening, said, ‘That’s one you were reading last term, wasn’t it?’

  Alex’s voice turned supplicating. ‘You know it? Oh! This could be the saving of me.’

  Freya wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not sure I’d be of any use.’

  ‘Freya, dear,’ Ginny interposed, ‘if I’m not mistaken you’re in this fellow’s debt over a certain immovable object he helped you with …’

  She studied his face, the noble cheekbones and sad-spaniel eyes reminding her for a moment of a Renaissance martyr. You could sense something almost erotic in that banked-down yearning gaze. Almost? Who on earth was she trying to kid? ‘I could probably spare you a couple of hours tomorrow,’ she said, feigning a note of concession.

  ‘Just a florid, cringing, self-indulgent book about nobs,’ said Robert, with a savage little jerk of his head. ‘Not enough that they’re spoilt and stupid, they have to be Catholic too, so that Waugh can moon about what sensitive souls they are. And as for his treatment of the common man –’

  ‘I imagine the common man will get along fine with or without his book.’

  ‘– the snobbery of it is breathtaking. I’m amazed at you, Freya. I can understand your reverence of Jessica Vaux, she’s a real writer, but this stuff – I thought you had more taste.’

  ‘Sorry to let you down,’ said Freya pleasantly. ‘Though I believe I’ve the advantage of you in having actually read the book.’

  Nancy stuttered out a laugh. ‘Robert! Why are you so resentful of a thing you don’t even know about?’

  ‘It hasn’t held him back before,’ drawled Freya.

  The three of them were drinking tea in her room the week after she had given Alex the emergency ‘tute’ on Brideshead. She had spent Sunday afternoon coaxing him through the entire fiction piece, of which the passages on Waugh she had more or less written herself. Alex had been grateful to her, though he hadn’t responded to her flirtatious promptings with quite the degree of commitment she would have liked; when, for instance, she had tipped her head to one side in a way that other men had found irresistible, he had merely beamed at her and knitted his brows again over Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Flyte family. He was of that charming, and rather maddening, type who hadn’t the smallest idea of how attractive they were.

  ‘So how far did things go with this Alex fellow?’ asked Robert, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘As a matter of fact he was a perfect gent. He didn’t lay a finger on me.’

  ‘You sound disappointed. Was it your plan that he should?’

  ‘He is terribly good-looking,’ said Freya, making it sound a matter of philosophical certainty.

  Robert, now properly nettled, said, ‘I must say, your taste in men –’

  ‘Ah, my taste again – first it’s writers –’

  ‘– quite mystifies me. Fane’s a ridiculous narcissist, but he at least has a sort of glamour. Alex McAndrew, though, really – he looks effete even in his rowing kit. And he’s bloody Scottish to boot.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being Scottish?’ asked Nancy.

  He gave out a tsk, ignoring her. ‘I don’t understand it. Of all the men you could have …’

  ‘Oh yes? Who did you have in mind?’

  Robert responded with a silent scowl. Freya’s eyes flicked to Nancy, who had been watching their little sparring match with guarded interest. An emotional minefield was opening before her: she could tell Nancy’s feelings for Robert were gathering strength, but so far she could detect no reciprocal interest from him. As his display of petulance had indicated, Robert’s romantic affinities seemed to be tending if anywhere towards herself, which was gratifying in its way.

  ‘Anyway, the Cherwell literary editor thought Alex’s piece so good he commissioned another – on why the Great War poets were so much better than those of our war.’

  Robert, the sulk still in his voice, said, ‘I’d have thought the answer to that was obvious.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘Because a good half of our lot managed to stay out of it. Whatever else you say about the ’14–’18 war, everyone mucked in, the intellectual classes and the workers alike – so in the trenches you were as likely to meet a poet as a postman. That didn’t happen in ’39.’

  ‘Are you saying there were more shirkers?’

  Robert made an equivocal expression. ‘Let’s just say there were a lot who managed to save themselves by staying put.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m not sure Alex would care to pursue that line, given what he did in the war.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Something in intelligence. He was a bit mysterious about it.’

  ‘That rather proves my point,’ said Robert. ‘Bright chaps who would have been scribbling away on the front line first time round got themselves office jobs in the second. Much safer.’

  Freya squinted at him, and said coldly, ‘I dare say Alex gave as much blood, sweat and tears as anyone else. The last war required sacrifices too, they were just of a different kind. It’s one thing to talk out of your arse, Robert, but your insinuating that he tried to avoid the fighting is pretty low.’

  Robert coloured at this. ‘I wasn’t insinuating anything. I don’t give a stuff what he did in the war –’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ said Freya, her blood up.

  ‘I was at school, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, and you sound like you’ve never left.’

  Robert got to his feet, and straightened in a show of dignified hurt. ‘I don’t see why I should sit here and take this.’

  ‘Why not?’ she retorted. ‘You might learn a thing or two.’

  A brief daggered silence followed as Robert seemed about to match her taunt. But he only glared at her, before shaking his head and leaving the room.

  Nancy, who had been half hypnotised by this altercation, said, ‘Should I go after him?’

  Freya pulled a face. ‘Why?’ Of course
, she knew why, but objected on two counts; first, that Robert’s ruffled feathers deserved no smoothing, and second (what she couldn’t mention), that it was imperative to thwart a potential intimacy between them. Robert seemed careless of her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of Nancy blundering in and getting hurt. Friends needed protecting, especially the ones who didn’t know any better.

  Nancy was watching her with a hooded look. ‘You enjoy provoking him, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I do. He rises to the bait every time.’

  ‘You should take pity on him. He’s half in love with you.’

  ‘What? Did you not just hear him deploring my “taste in men”?’

  Nancy nodded slowly. ‘Yes, and you could tell what was behind it – he only made a fuss about Alex because he wants you himself.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied, with a laugh more cavalier than she felt. It disturbed her that Nancy was so astute in reading between the lines; she too had sensed the possessive undercurrent in Robert’s personality. Strange, she thought, how very different men could be. There was Nat Fane offering sexual perversion at the drop of his pants, while Robert could only express his attraction through the heat of argument. As for Alex, the most obviously desirable of the three, she hadn’t yet got his measure: he’d been so eager to get her to his rooms, only for them to spend the whole afternoon working.

  As they said goodbye, she felt Nancy’s eyes fixed upon her in mute enquiry. Freya had batted away that theory of hers about Robert, but could tell she wasn’t convinced. Nancy understood her better than people who’d known her for years – really, it was almost spooky. Outside the afternoon was darkening as she collected the tea things and emptied the loaded ashtray; another drab Oxford evening lay ahead, with dinner in hall the only diversion. Perhaps she ought to go out –

  A knock came at the door. She presumed it was Nancy, come back to collect something she’d forgotten, but she opened it to find Robert. He looked subtly altered from when he had exited the room half an hour ago; he seemed no longer enraged, though his brow was troubled and his gaze downcast. He had the resigned air of a defendant preparing to be sent down.