When he turned up at the house that dreary Wednesday afternoon and found the locks changed, he immediately feared the worst.
‘Yes?’ crackled Anselm’s voice, suspicious over the intercom.
‘Hi. Anselm. It’s me.’
A long, fizzing silence. ‘What do you want?’
‘What do I want?’ Freddy said with a laugh. ‘I live here, don’t I?’
‘No. You don’t.’
Something was obviously very wrong.
Finally he managed to persuade Anselm to let him into the house—he had his own hour-long negotiation through the intercom—saying that he would be able to ‘explain everything’. Though it was far from obvious to him how he would do this as, warily saying, ‘Anselm?’ he mounted the spongy stairs.
He found him in the first-floor drawing room. No lights on. A deathly atmosphere. And worryingly, he was holding an iron poker.
‘You lied to me, Fréderic,’ Anselm said.
Freddy’s intention was of course to deny everything, and the first thing he said was—‘What are you talking about?’
‘You aren’t Russian.’ The only sound was a trickle of plaster dust falling from the ceiling. ‘Your father’s a British diplomat. And his father was a policeman in Swansea.’
That was a shock. Freddy had not expected Anselm ever to find that out. There were two obvious options—deny that his father was Oliver Munt of the FO or…
‘Yes, but my mother—’
‘Your mother’s from St Albans,’ Anselm said, in a strange voice, somehow monotone and sing-song at the same time. He had evidently done his homework—there might even have been a private detective involved, for all Freddy knew—and faced with this he suddenly felt very tired, too tired to pretend. Too tired even to explain. And what was there to explain? It was all fairly obvious. ‘Who told you?’ he said. ‘Alison?’ Perhaps it was a mistake to have left her in Calais. In Calais of all places… Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in Calais. Though she didn’t know any of the details about his parents—just that he wasn’t a Russian prince.
And then there was another shock.
‘I know that you… you once slept with her,’ Anselm said, hanging his head and looking at the floor. He made a strange little expectorant noise. ‘She told me.’
Now this was very strange. Why on earth had she done that? It just didn’t make sense.
‘I thought you were my friend, Fréderic.’
For a long time Freddy just stood there. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.
‘Please just leave.’
‘Anselm…’
The poker twitched.
‘My things?’
Still staring at the floor, Anselm nodded.
Freddy went upstairs and put his things into the khaki haversack. They fitted quite easily—he had few possessions. He wondered whether to try to speak to Alison on his way out; he was puzzled as to why she had told Anselm everything. There must be something he didn’t know about. Some factor he wasn’t taking into account.
He descended the stairs, with their steep mahogany handrail; the series of landings whose scurfy sash windows were filled with mature trees.
On his way out, he looked into the first-floor drawing room. Anselm was nowhere to be seen. The whole house, in fact, was eerily silent.
Outside in the twilight he shifted the haversack onto his shoulder and walked to the tube station. He had just enough money for the ticket to Russell Square.
*
While Freddy, haversack on shoulder, was taking his place in the ululating lift at Russell Square station, James was sprawled unsuspectingly on the sofa in Mecklenburgh Street wondering whether to nip out to the Four Vintners on Gray’s Inn Road for a half-litre of Jack Daniel’s or dark rum. Sitting forward, he stared for a few more seconds at the TV. All-weather racing from Wolverhampton, seedily floodlit. Encased in puffa jackets, the pundits held their microphones in numb hands, exhaling mist into the frore Midlands night. Without switching them off—merely silencing them—he jacketed and scarfed himself, leashed Hugo and went out into the street upstairs.
In spite of the many messages he had left since Sunday, he had still heard nothing from Katherine—a silence that seemed increasingly meaningful—and he was miserable. He had spent the day drifting through London like a wind-blown plastic bag. He had a solitary lunch at one of the Bangladeshi places on Brick Lane—one of the unpretentious ones up near the Bethnal Green Road end. Plastic cups, Formica table-tops. The sound of traffic from the door. When he had eaten, he wandered up to Victoria Park—vacant in the spring sunshine—and from there walked along the towpath. He passed the flat where he had once lived, on the other side of the black, sun-struck water. It was strange to see it now, someone else’s home. There was some unfamiliar outdoor furniture on the terrace—and how strong, as he stood there, was the sense of being shut out of the past! The sense of the evanescence of things, experience, time—no solider than the jellying light on the undersides of the bridges. The sense of time slipping very slowly away.
From the start, it seemed to him now, he had not felt enough. At the important moments, there was just an insufficiency of feeling. When she told him that Fraser had been in touch with her. When she told him, two weeks later, that she wanted to see Fraser. And when she said to him, in the half-light the next morning, ‘What do you think I should do?’ It was not that he thought he had failed, on those occasions and others, to express what he felt. He had just not seemed to feel enough when feeling was most needed. It troubled him, this sense that it was a failure of feeling, and not a failure of expression. A man unable to express his feelings. That was magazine normality, nothing to worry about. A man unable to feel his feelings. Well, that did sound worse.
He thought of the night they spent in that hotel in Cambridge, of how he had said, as they lay there next to each other, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ She sighed as if she wished he hadn’t said it, and several seconds elapsed, each worse than the last. It was a moment when he wished she was more able to pretend, when he wished she was not so painfully honest, so subject to the tyranny of the truth. She said straight out that she was not in love with him, and suddenly he felt very unsure of everything. What had he meant when he said, ‘I think I’m in love with you’? He did not seem to know. Had it been somehow speculative then? Had he just been seeing how it sounded? And then, while he was still wondering what he had meant, she said, ‘This isn’t what I expected.’ This presumably being the fact that he was in love with her. Or thought he was. Or said he was. Or said he thought he was.
In the morning they went to see her alma mater; she persuaded the porter to let them into the wide quad. When they had done that, they went for a walk. Something had stirred up the weather overnight. The tall trees were swaying. They walked up into a small wood, still in the browns and greys of its winterwear, loudly inhaling the wind on its hill.
There are memories that make his heart yurr-yurr like an engine struggling to start. Their setting is uniformly wintry. A few London afternoons of wintry exiguity. Thinking of them, he wondered why they had not been enough, why they had taken him only as far as that hedged, faint-hearted statement in the old-fashioned hotel in Cambridge, with its squeaky floorboards and its tired dried flowers. Something had failed. That was how he felt. Something had failed in him. (It was quite frightening.) The engine of his heart.