Freya

Freya

by Anthony Quinn
Freya

Freya

by Anthony Quinn

eBook

$13.49  $17.99 Save 25% Current price is $13.49, Original price is $17.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

Set immediately after the end of WWII, Freya explores the lives and friendship of two british females at a time where gender roles were changing in England.

It begins on May 8th, 1945. The streets of London are alive with VE-Day celebrations. In the crowd, twenty-year-old Freya Wyley meets eighteen-year-old Nancy Holdaway. Freya's acerbic wit and free-wheeling politics complement Nancy's gentle, less self-confident nature, and what begins on that eventful day in history is the story of a devoted and competitive friendship that spans two decades.

This heralded novel follows the irrepressible lives of these young women. As Freya chooses journalism and Nancy realizes her ambitions as a novelist, their friendship explores the nuances of sexual, emotional and professional rivalries. They are not immune to the sting of betrayal and the tenderness of reconciliation.

Beneath the relentless thrum of changing times are the eternal battles fought by women in pursuit of independence and the search for love. Stretching from the war haunted halls of Oxford and the Nuremburg trials to the cultural transformations of the early 1960s, Freya presents the portraits of extraordinary women taking arms against a sea of political and personal tumult. Anthony Quinn has created an immersive story of female friendship and the self-discoveries that reveal the mysteries of the human heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609454166
Publisher: Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date: 10/08/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 560
Sales rank: 63,161
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Anthony Quinn is a British film critic and the author of four previous books including The Streets, short-listed for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize, and Curtain Call, a bestseller and pick for the Waterstones Book Club.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The bus, which had been snailing up Whitehall, had nearly come to a standstill in the crowd. On its side someone had chalked HITLER MISSED THIS BUS, a message whose defiance 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 and Edgar, on time for them. 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 — 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, some with their arms about a man, most of them in a company of their own. 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 — she felt it as a shock — 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 new 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 separating. Freya still believed it was in her power to engineer a rapprochement, and had announced her intention to come up for VEday 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 and 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 long 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 intently into the glass, as if she might read an intimation of the future there.

"Freya!" The voice cut through the air. It was Jean Markham, 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.

"Jean —"

"My, 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.

"Not seen her in ages and she telephoned me out of theblue 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.

"Hullo," she said, feeling the girl's slim palm.

"How 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 — 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.

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 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. "Only 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, "School leaver."

"How do you know her?"

"Oh, 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 — 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 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, excitable, 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 from the throng; once or twice she thought she'd 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.

Squinting into the distance again she caught a flash of russet hair that seemed familiar. Wasn't that the girl, Nancy, who'd been tagging along? She felt her steps quicken as she threaded her way through the tumult. As she got 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.

"Hullo there?" she said, touching the girl's shoulder.

She turned around. "Oh! Freya ... isn't it?"

Nancy's face had lit up in a show of relief: she might have been her only friend in the world.

"Where are they?"

"I don't know! One minute I was right behind them, the next —" 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 faced clinging to one another like shipwrecked mariners.

"Well this is a nice to-do," said Freya, with an amused half-snort. "Looks like Jean has given us the slip."

"Surely she didn't mean to?" Nancy asked, earnest dismay in her expression. Freya merely shook her head; it was beneath her to explain that she was joking. Just then a huge roar went up, and the crowds were sucked towards the middle of Whitehall like iron filings to a magnet. The bells, which had been pealing for hours, had stopped, and the air grew shrill with whistles and cheers. The ambling movement of bodies quickened into urgency. Ahead of them they heard a cry go up: "It's him — he's coming outside!"

Freya turned to Nancy, whose forlorn air made her feel of a sudden responsible. "Come on," she said, briskly putting her arm through the girl's. "Whatever else happens, we mustn't miss this."

Later they bought ginger beer at a stall and found themselves a bench in the Embankment Gardens. They had given up on finding Jean and the others. Nancy gazed out to the river, her free hand shielding her eyes against the sun. Freya, her whole body damp with sweat, peeled off her serge tunic. She had lost her hat in the crush to catch sight of Churchill.

"Well, that's one for the diary," she said, blowing a stray tendril of hair from her face.

Nancy nodded, then glanced at Freya. "Do you keep a diary?"

"No."

After a pause she said, "I'm awfully sorry about — well, being landed with me."

"Ha. It could be that you've been landed with me."

Nancy shook her head. "Oh no, Jean told me what an amazing friend you were."

"Is that so?"

"Yes, really! You don't believe me. Amazing was the word she used."

Freya returned an archly humorous look. "That's not the word I'm disputing. It was the 'friend' part."

"Oh ..." The girl looked at a loss again. "Sorry, I thought you were friends — from school —"

"Yes, we have that in common. Oh, I've known Jean for years, and I like her well enough — we've even corresponded a bit. But I'd say that we're friendly with each other, rather than being actual friends."

Nancy gave an anxious frown. "I'm not sure I understand the difference."

Freya leaned back, considering. "Well, I needn't have singled out Jean. I tend to keep a distance from people. At school I was not a popular girl."

"But in the Wrens," Nancy said, with a bright glance at Freya's uniform, "I imagined there'd be such camaraderie, the friends you'd —"

"I didn't join the Navy to make friends. I joined because there was a war on." That sounded rather off, she thought, and softened. "I had pals, of course. One or two of them I may keep up with."

She had joined the service (she explained) aged eighteen, and did a year's apprenticeship in Greenwich, then another year to qualify as a plotting officer. At Plymouth, where she was posted, they put her in charge of a watch that received information from coastal radar stations. She and her Wren ratings would do fifteen-hour shifts at a time reporting the position of shipping traffic as it appeared on their screens. By the summer of 1944 she was in the Operations Room recreating a panorama of the entire sea war in the North Atlantic.

"Crikey," said Nancy. "What a responsibility ..."

"I know. And the wonderful thing was — I was good at it. Whenever there was a captain visiting, or an admiral, I could give an assessment of the situation at any time. I mean, you always knew it was bloody dangerous —" She broke off and looked round at Nancy, whose round-eyed solemnity made her chuckle. "Perhaps I should save my war stories for another day. We're meant to be celebrating, aren't we?"

"Yes! What should we do?"

Freya stood up and put her hands on her hips in a businesslike way. "Hmm. My own inclination would be to find a pub somewhere and get blind roaring stinko."

Nancy met this proposal with a smile as wide and artless as a flag waving in the breeze. "Stinko it is!"

They decided — or rather, Freya decided — to walk along the river towards Victoria, where she knew a couple of likely places. On the way they passed strolling hordes of people in paper hats, singing, laughing, cheering; the mood of the afternoon, less giddy than in Whitehall, had held its holiday brightness. Freya, with an occasional sidelong glance, mused on the moment, two odd girls making a pair. It wasn't how she had envisaged the day. And yet she wondered if this chance encounter mightn't after all be a blessing.

Nancy seemed a decent sort. And she had such an interesting face ... Apparently she had come down to London a few weeks ago to start work at a publisher's. She'd got digs at a boardinghouse off the Tottenham Court Road. It wasn't very nice, but she would only be there for the summer in any event. She was going up to St. Hilda's, Oxford in the autumn, to study English.

"That's funny," said Freya. "They've offered me a place, too, at Somerville."

"Oh! I thought you were —"

"Too old?" she said with a smirk, and Nancy blushed on cue. "I'm twenty, as a matter of fact. I applied three years ago, and they deferred the place when I joined the Wrens."

Nancy gave a little disbelieving shake of her head. "Oh what marvellous luck! I won't know a soul there but you."

"Actually, I still haven't decided whether to go or not."

"But why would you turn down a place at Oxford?"

Freya gave a worldly little shrug. "After the Wrens I wonder if studying for a degree seems a bit — trivial."

Nancy looked rather crestfallen at that, so she didn't say anything more.

As they turned away from the river towards Victoria, the streets looked gaunt and tired. There were so very few cars; petrol rationing had seen to that. Bomb damage had left huge dusty gaps everywhere, and scaffolding patched the faces of buildings like screens around a fragile patient. In spite of the festival atmosphere the city felt shabby, haunted, makeshift. You couldn't imagine it ever returning to the place it once was. Freya began to wonder if the pub she was leading them to was still there, in any sort of repair. A cafe she used to frequent in Soho had taken a direct hit one night; she had felt it almost as a personal affront when she returned to the street and found it gone.

She felt her body tense as they turned the corner into Buckingham Palace Road, and then relax as the old Victorian pub with its fussy finials and spires sprang into view. On entering they found the place in a roar; Freya had a sense that every pub in London today would be the same. People stood three-deep at the main bar, and drinks were being passed over heads by a rowdy clientele. Off to the side a piano was accompanying a ragged chorus of voices singing "Roll Out The Barrel." The sawdust on the floor was damp with spilled beer.

"What'll you have?" Freya asked Nancy, once they had jostled their way to the bar.

"Erm ... a lemonade?"

Freya tucked in her chin, demurring. "You won't get stinko on that."

As Nancy dithered, Freya signalled to the barman. "Two pale ales, please."

They took their drinks and found a place to stand by a window of rippled glass. Freya swallowed a mouthful and looked around; it seemed that no matter what time you stepped into a pub you always had a lot of catching up to do with everyone else. People were tipping back the drink with a steady practised air, as if they'd somehow made it their occupation. The singers had done with "Roll Out The Barrel" and started on "Tipperary." She fished out a packet of Player's Weights from her tunic pocket and offered it to Nancy who, after a moment's hesitation, took one. They lit up, and Freya watched as the girl took an awkward sip of her cigarette and puffed, without inhaling.

"You've not smoked before, have you?"

Nancy grimaced. "Is it obvious?"

"You're not exactly Dietrich," she said drily. "Relax your fingers, like this. Don't bunch your hand. There — that's better."

"If my parents could see me now ...," Nancy said with a giggle.

Freya felt it was high time she asked. "What is that accent of yours?"

"Oh, well, Yorkshire, I suppose. Harrogate — but not the smart side."

Freya, unaware that Harrogate had any sort of "side," let alone a smart one, gave her an appraising look. There was barely two years separating them, yet it might as well have been ten. The war had done that: she had started in the Wrens as a girl, and come out of it a woman. Nancy, in contrast, with her ingenuous gaze and gawky demeanour, was practically a child still. Not her fault, but there it was.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Freya"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Anthony Quinn.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews