Just Friends (17 page)

“Mmm,” said Freya. Where was that taxi?

“It’s taken me a long time to learn to trust again.” Bernard’s eyes were bleary with self-pity. “But with you, I feel there could be hope.” He reached across to place one moist hand on top of hers.

“I don’t think so.” Freya removed her hand. “I’m not looking for a long-term relationship at the moment.”

“Oh?” Bernard did not look as disheartened as she had anticipated. “Short-term is fine, too,” he leered. Then, with a portentous cough, he pushed out one leg from beneath the table, and twitched up his trousers to reveal an expanse of naked calf. “I apologize if my trousers are rather
short
—or my socks insufficiently
long
.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

“What?” Freya stared in disgust at the scurfy skin brindled with gingery hairs.

“I must say, I feel not unlike Malvolio in his ‘crossed garters.’ Ha, ha.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Freya said crossly. “Do put that horrible leg away. People are staring.”

Bernard gave her a waggish look. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

At that moment, Freya heard the words she had been waiting for. “Miss, your cab is here.” Unfortunately, so did Bernard.

“Are we going back to your dungeon?” He rubbed his hands. “Now could I do it, pat.”

“
We
are not going anywhere.” Freya threw some dollar bills on the table. “I am going home. Alone. You seem to have got some kinky idea about me. I don’t know why or how, but—”

“From you, of course!” Bernard was loudly indignant. “From your e-mail.”

“Keep your voice down. All I said was that I was tall and—”

“No, the second one. The hairy legs . . . the whip hand . . . artistic . . .”

At the next table Mr. Mobile Phone stared into space with an eavesdropper’s frozen concentration.

“You’ve confused me with someone else,” Freya snapped. So
that
was what he had meant by “invigorating encounters.” She rose to her feet and glowered down at Bernard. “I did
not
send you a second e-mail, and I am most definitely
not
interested in kinky sex. Or in William bloody Shakespeare, for that matter.”

“Zounds! You’re beautiful when you’re angry! Is this part of the punishment? I promise to be a good boy.”

“You’re sick, you know that? Good-bye!” Freya turned on her heel and strode toward the door, her cheeks hot with embarrassment. Heads turned curiously as she passed.

She heard the scrape of a chair behind her. “Wait!” Bernard shuffled after her, bleating pitifully, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”

As he spoke, there was a terrific clap of thunder outside. When Freya opened the door to the street she was confronted by a wall of water falling from the sky, as if a giant had upended a colossal bucket. Her cab glowed like a beacon of hope. She raced across the slick sidewalk before some bastard New Yorker could steal it.

“Drive!” she shouted, as she plunged inside. Her back was already drenched.

“You tell me where we’re going, and I’ll drive.” The cabdriver folded the newspaper he’d been reading with maddening nonchalance.

“Anywhere! Just drive!”

There was a rat-a-tat-tat on her window. A sodden Bernard loomed at her through the misty glass.

“Move it!” she shrieked.

“When shall we two meet again?” he called, running alongside the cab as it began to accelerate. “In thunder, lightning or in—?”

The cab shot into a gap in the traffic, drowning his words in the whine of the engine. Freya sank back damply against the seat and closed her eyes, thanking God for her deliverance. From now on she would be a better person, she vowed—kind, tolerant, forgiving, sweet-tempered.

“Quarrel with your boyfriend?” asked the cabdriver. She caught his snide smile in the rearview mirror.

“Just drive around the block, and shut up!” she told him.

Click-clack
went the windscreen wipers as Freya huddled in the backseat, watching the city lights come and go in a watery blur. She was cold and damp, and itched to hit something, hard. It was far too early to go home. Even if she didn’t care about interrupting Jack and Candace, the thought that they might pity her, or laugh behind her back, was unbearable. After Bernard, she didn’t want to go to a bar and submit herself to more male gropings. A cinema would at least be dry, but she hated watching films by herself, and she was too consumed by rage to sit still. Cat might be home, but Freya wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about the joys of the single life. Meanwhile, the meter crept steadily upward.

“Take me downtown,” she called out to the driver.

Half an hour later, dressed in a singlet and shorts retrieved from her locker, Freya had bicycled four grueling miles while remaining in exactly the same place. Sweat gathered at her temples as she vented the frustrations of the evening on the chrome-and-rubber machine. There were two other women in the gym, either glued to MTV or staring fiercely at their own toned reflections.
What are we all
doing
here
, Freya wondered,
with our fat-free bodies and our lonely lives, our two-hundred-dollar haircuts and our mobile phones that nobody calls?
God, another hill. Freya strained at the pedals until her sinews ached.

Now for the treadmill. She adjusted the setting and started walking at a fast, steady pace, pumping her arms, trying to obliterate the vision of Bernard’s moist mouth and yearning eyes. She should have stabbed him with one of her spiked heels—except he would have enjoyed that. Freya increased the speed and began to run. Fuelled by oxygen, her brain moved up a gear. What could have made Bernard suppose that she was into punishment? What was all that about a second e-mail?

Freya’s pace faltered, and she almost toppled backwards off the running machine.
Bloody Jack!
So that’s why her messages didn’t immediately show up on the screen; she’d blamed her own unfamiliarity with his computer, but the real reason was that he’d read them first—read them, doctored them, and invented his own replies. It wasn’t Bernard who’d sent the silly poem that had made her smile; it was Jack, making a fool of her. Freya upped the speed again, pounding the smooth, sliding rubber under her feet. Sweat poured down her body.
Just you wait, Mr. Jack Madison III.

“We’re closing now, miss. Time to go home.” A man in overalls, holding the hose of his vacuum cleaner, smiled kindly at Freya from the doorway of the exercise room.

After showering and changing, Freya found that her legs were trembling from exhaustion. She trudged to a coffee bar, ordered a cappuccino, mineral water, and three cinnamon doughnuts, and sat on a high stool at the window, watching the spatter and trickle of raindrops. Tonight had been a mistake. She’d been a fool to think she could find the perfect man, even a short-term partner, just like that. Even Jack, it seemed, had correctly decoded Bernard’s advertisement; though it was hard to understand why he should have wanted to play such a cruel joke on her. Anyway, who cared?

Freya leaned her head on her hand and stared into her coffee, eavesdropping on a conversation between two women behind her, evidently a mother and daughter. Their talk was desultory and mundane—gossip about family and friends, a delicious nonfattening recipe for chicken salad, whether the daughter should repaint her living room peach or yellow—but listening to them, Freya felt a pang of longing. For most of her life she had fantasized about having a real mother, someone who would love her unconditionally and listen to whatever nonsense she cared to pour out, who would tell her that she was beautiful and clever and give her refuge when she needed it. Sometimes she talked to her mother in her head.
What do you think?
she’d ask about some new boyfriend.
Is this how it was with you and Daddy?
But she didn’t have a mummy; she had a stepmother.

Freya had been thirteen years old when her father told her that he and his new friend Annabelle were getting married, and that they were all going to live in a big house in Cornwall. Her first reaction was simple astonishment. How could he want to change the unique perfection of their life together? For the last seven years, there had been just the two of them. In term-time she went to school while he researched and wrote his books in the large, untidy London flat, rescued from domestic chaos by a wiry Portuguese woman of unconquerable energy and good humor called Mrs. Silva. In the holidays they traveled together in Europe, visiting museums, churches, libraries and the homes of her father’s art historian friends. “You can come, too,” her father had told her, when she begged not to be left behind, “so long as you never complain of being bored.” And she hadn’t. Her father talked to her, took her to dinner with him, asked her opinion of buildings, food, people. He taught her to play chess and poker and solo whist, how to tell if an oyster was fresh, the meanings of
spinnaker
and
pantheon
. Sometimes he let her watch him shave, drawing clownish patterns in the foam with his razor to make her laugh. Freya learned how to pack her own suitcase, wash out her underwear in a hand basin, and to ask for the bill:
l’addition, il conto, la cuenta
. She learned not to disturb him when he was reading the newspaper, in the lavatory, writing in his notebook, or “thinking”—and
never
to ask if he was lost or had run out of money. They stayed in cheap
pensioni
with peculiar bathroom arrangements and scratchy toilet paper, in borrowed flats smelling of unfamiliar food, and occasionally in a grand hotel, where they would dress up and pretend to be royalty in disguise. “May I say, Princess Freyskanini, how exceptionally lovely you are looking tonight? Your shoe buckles quite dazzle the eye.”

There were women, of course. Her father was a handsome man. Freya had taken a certain pride in his conquests, knowing they could not last. For an unseen third accompanied them wherever they went, the memory of a loving, laughing woman who had risen early one morning to buy croissants for breakfast, failed to look the right way crossing the rue du Bac and died instantly under the wheels of a delivery truck. Years later, overhearing gossip, Freya understood that her mother had been in the early stages of pregnancy.

Annabelle, too, was a mother—of Natasha, aged three. Freya’s father explained that Tash had no daddy, just as she had no mummy, so they were joining up to make a new family. Freya, who loved her father more than anyone in the world, accepted it. At the Register Office in London she stood behind him clutching the stiff, wired handle of her bridesmaid’s bouquet and watched his blunt-tipped fingers, familiar as her own, slide the ring onto the hand of another woman.
So this is marriage.
Annabelle was very nice to her, but she was a brisk, definite person; Freya had the uneasy suspicion that she was about to be knocked into shape.

At first it was almost okay. There was the excitement of a new bedroom and a new house—an extraordinary house near the tip of Cornwall, big enough to get lost in, with a maze of a garden that fell in a green tumble to the shingly edge of the sea. To begin with, there had been nothing to object to about Tash, a portly three-year-old with a direct stare and a snotty nose. It was easy enough to outrun her, or hide from her tiny despotic presence.
Tash up! Tash banana! Mine!

Freya’s first shock had been Annabelle’s request, polite but firm, that she should knock before entering her father’s bedroom, now also Annabelle’s bedroom. Next was the decision to send Freya to boarding school, as no local school was deemed “appropriate.” Freya hadn’t complained; she hadn’t wanted to upset her father. For the same reason she endured Annabelle’s painful intrusiveness: How often was Freya washing her hair? Should she be watching so much television? Didn’t she need a bigger bra? It was Annabelle who now accompanied her father on his trips.

In Freya’s absence at school, Tash dominated the household. As the only child of a woman who had already suffered one tragic loss, and the stepchild of a man trying hard to pull his new family together, Tash was cosseted and indulged. She resented sharing the spotlight. At first Freya couldn’t believe that a small child could be so manipulative and malevolent. Tash crayoned all over her books, borrowed things from her room and hid them, and once broke an ornament of Swedish glass, a precious present from Freya’s mother—deliberately dropped it in front of her eyes. When Freya was angry, Tash would run to her mother and scream that Freya had hit her. Annabelle had words with Freya’s father, who took Freya aside, embarrassed, and suggested she should be nicer to her “sister.” Just at the time when Freya hit the gawky, self-conscious stage, here was an adorable toddler claiming everyone’s indulgence while Freya was expected to act like a grown-up. One holiday she returned to find that Tash had started to call her father “Daddy”—and he did not correct her. His betrayal was like a knife in her heart; the hidden wound festered and spread. Freya understood that the life she and her father had lived together—the easy companionship with no rules, no
need
for rules—was over for good. Instinctively she began to turn her gaze elsewhere. She studied hard, developed her own interests, retreated into secrecy. The summer she left school, she took an au pair job in New Jersey. The plan was that she would return in the autumn to start at university; instead, she had discovered New York, and stayed.