[I read this 2016 novel in its three parts, writing about each one before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
22 April 2026
Part I—At Swim, Two Girls Chapters 1-9 (of 12)
I don’t quite know why Quinn has a cute variation of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds as the title of this first part. Except, like that novel, it’s focused on the lives of students, at least one of whom wants to be a writer. At first, it isn’t Freya herself, the 21-year-old who delayed going up to Oxford so she could be an officer in the Wrens for two years. It’s her point of view we follow throughout, and added to the confidence of her class is her complacent feeling of superiority over the younger students. She’s grateful for the experience and maturity her wartime experience has brought her, and finds Oxford very tame after it. It’s Nancy, whom she met almost accidentally during the London VE Day celebrations, who wants to be a novelist. In the summer of 1945, before they both go up to Oxford, Nancy makes the mistake of sending the manuscript of her first novel to Freya. And Freya critiques it, too honestly.
At first, writing seems to be only a minor theme. But I suspect this is Quinn being cute again, because at the point I’ve reached—it’s taken 120-odd pages for us to get here—Freya is flying off to a writing assignment she’s set up for herself at the Nuremburg Trials. No, I don’t believe it either. But Quinn has decided to help his flawed heroine by way of a combination of happy accidents. The first is the accident of her birth. Her father, a famous and well-off portrait painter, has been commissioned to cover the trials as a war artist. This means that if she can persuade him, he can be her pretext for being there, as his uniformed assistant. Who would bother to do proper checks? The problem is, he doesn’t want her there. It’s May, she’s supposed to be preparing for her exams, and postwar Germany will be grim for a young woman. Luckily—thanks, Anthony—her father’s new mistress admires her grit, or whatever, and twists his arm. Or whatever. So, having told a pack of lies about a sick mother to get permission for a week off, she’s on her way.
There have been other lucky circumstances. A man she fancies works for the student paper, The Cherwell, and he had asked her to write something literary. Luckily, again, she’s met Nat Fane, a wannabe Anthony Blanche from Brideshead Revisited, complete with foppish clothes and, he thinks, an elegant wit. He had put on a lot of drama productions at his minor public school and, it seems, he is already garnering a reputation as a promising actor and budding impresario. Her article about him, which Quinn offers to us verbatim, writes itself. And there’s another piece of luck, because Fane has invited the most famous critic on Fleet Street to give an interview at the Union. He gives Freya, who is very persistent, some good advice about seizing the day. Use any lucky breaks you get, but be aware that usually you have to make your own luck. (I’m paraphrasing, but hold on to that thought.)
The invitation to meet Erskine has come about because she’s now firmly in Fane’s good books—he had loved the article, and one evening she goes along with his predilection for mutual spanking. Is he gay? The critic, James Erskine, certainly is, and eyes up all the talent. Not only Nat, but Alex, the Cherwell writer she’d met accidentally when she first arrived at Oxford Station. He’s unavailable, not only to Erskine but to Freya too. He has someone back in Edinburgh, and I’ll be very surprised indeed if Alex isn’t lying when he pretends it’s a woman. He’s very uncomfortable even with friendly conversations about his private life.
This is the other big topic in the novel. Not homosexuality in particular, but sex in general. Quinn is writing for literary-minded readers, people who get the overt references to Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen. She’s the one who wrote about how the war led to more open sexual encounters (I wrote about Bowen’s The Heat of the Day some years ago), and it strikes me Quinn wants to remind us too robustly that sex didn’t really only begin in 1963. The supposedly sophisticated Freya, for instance, lets the rather ordinary Robert Cosway get her into bed at the first attempt, which strikes me as unlikely. Quinn wants us to understand that Freya isn’t new to this game, so why shouldn’t she let Robert have his fun? And he’s attractive enough, in his way, so she doesn’t let it stop her that she knows full well that her supposed best friend is carrying a torch for him. (Freya’s own phrase, later.) She, Freya, has done what Nancy accuses her of when she finds out, got in first not because she really wanted Robert, but because she could. She’d pretended it would be OK, because Nancy would never find out. She’s like that, Freya, overestimating her own sophistication. Quinn isn’t hiding this from us, but nor am I convinced that he’s deliberately setting markers of her troubling weaknesses. He seems to forgive his heroine too easily.
There are a few other things I’m not convinced about, but maybe it will be better to leave them until I’ve finished Part I. I’ll write more then.
Chapters 9-12—to the end of Part I
Any surprises? No. If anything, Quinn carries on uploading more powers on to Freya. Who’s the chief hacker in The Matrix who does this for Neo and the others? In this book it’s Anthony Quinn doing it for Freya. OK, I’m exaggerating… but unlike Nancy, who has always worked hard at her writing, Freya emerges almost fully formed and only needs helpful nudges from her kindly author to finish her off. Not that she’s actually there yet at the end of Part I. But we know for certain she’s on her way, as we read the article she gets published in The Chronicle, a favour she’d wheedled from the normally impenetrable James Erskine. She gets by with a lot of help from her friends, added to that God-given ‘power’ of hers. Yes, it’s that word again, used by Jessica Vaux, the reluctant interviewee she’s gone to Nuremburg to track down. I feel some authors rely too much on their readers simply accepting that their characters have, to change the metaphor, some special stardust. On the evidence we see, in Freya’s case, our credibility has to be rather stretched. OK, it’s not quite The Matrix, but don’t things rather fall into her lap?
Not exactly, of course. There are very few successful people who will let it be implied that they didn’t work very hard indeed to get where they are. In Freya’s case, her big carpe diem moment involves her telling a few lies, risking a university career she doesn’t care about, and relying on Daddy to buy her a plane ticket. Is it an astonishing thing she’s doing? Up to a point—there can’t have been many young women in the 1940s daring enough to do what she’s doing. It’s high-strength chutzpah—but also self-centred and showing no regard for how her stunt will affect other people. When she stays an extra weekend in Germany to interview her heroine properly, it’s her father who is first to confront her with her selfishness and lies. Is she any more thoughtful or caring of others than, say, Nat Fane?
This is the forcefulness and, let’s face it, the arrogance, that is so unappealing in her right from the start. That’s the point, I’m sure. Quinn wants us to see her flaws, the ones she’ll need to work on if she’s to make her way in a competitive, male-dominated world. I’ve already written that she’s nowhere near to being fully-finished as she makes her way to Nuremburg, and maybe even Quinn thinks he’s let her have too easy a time of it. Those awkward home truths she has to face, first from her father and then others after her return home, seem to be his way of showing that, yes, she is having to learn the hard way. But not too hard. It strikes me she feels only the slightest pang about the hurt she’s caused, especially to her mother. (The university had phoned her to ask after her health, when Freya is late returning.) She isn’t too worried about the university authorities, and tells herself her tutor will get over her disloyalty. Being sent down will let her get on with her career two years earlier.
Maybe Quinn still feels he hasn’t given her a sharp enough rap on the knuckles. She had assumed Robert would be keeping the bed warm for her for when she got back from Germany, buts there’s no sign of him—until he sees him with a woman he’s treating as someone who’s much more than just a friend. Serves her right after what she did to Nancy… who is a bit taken aback by Freya’s cavalier approach to everything.
So, is this going to be a genuine Bildungsroman, with Quinn carefully taking us through how Freya develops gradually from the brash, self-assured, rather privileged young woman, who isn’t nearly as mature as she thinks she is, into a properly rounded adult? In the year since VE Day she’s had some lucky breaks, and made some fortunate discoveries about her own qualities. Is she going to be quick enough to realise that she can’t rely on lucky breaks and charm forever? Her impulsiveness and love of risk—and never mind the consequences—are what make her who she is.
Part II—The Public Image
Another subtitle, another literary reference, a Muriel Spark novel from 1968. Go figure—because although time has leapt forward, it’s only by eight years, to 1954. And so much for any slow accretion of wisdom in our heroine. As far as I can tell, Freya might have aged—she’s nearly 30 now—but otherwise she seems the same as she was at 21. Those rough edges we thought might have been smoothed down a little are all firmly in place. Quinn deals with her career since 1946 in a single paragraph, starting with how her profile of Jessica Vaux ‘had cracked open a door at the Chronicle through which she had eagerly darted. In the week of her twenty-second birthday she was taken on as a junior reporter, and though the hours were long and the work unglamorous she never showed herself less than willing. More profile work came her way. Her steely line of questioning sometimes got her into trouble – “insolence” was the usual complaint – but her copy never came up short for spirit.’ This is typical of Quinn’s way of telling us what to think about his protegee. If ‘feisty’ had been in the comfortable mid-20th Century Oxbridge lexicon Quinn favours, that’s what she would be.
I still don’t like her. Unsurprisingly, by the end of Part II she’s fallen out with her long-time lover, with Nancy—who, she thinks, might be the real ‘love of her life’—and has resigned from her job at a Guardian-style newspaper. It’s her 30th birthday, but we only believe it because Quinn is telling us. Plus ca change? Nope. It’s always la meme chose with Freya. But how has it come to this? Why does she think she’s had enough of London once and for all? Because she’s Freya? Maybe, but Quinn wants us to think there’s more to it than that. He makes stuff happen, including a tortuous bit of plotting—the first in the novel—that hinges on the homosexuality of one of Freya’s Oxford friends. Can you guess who it is yet? Of course you can.
And I might as well say it… I don’t like Quinn’s world-building either. He appears to have decided that the best way to create the London of 1954 is to pretend he’s there, not as a 21st Century author but as someone living and breathing the attitudes of the era. I mentioned the comfortable Oxbridge lexicon, but Quinn writes almost entirely in Freya’s own mid-20th Century middle-class idiolect. I remember my attention snagging on the way Freya thinks of Robert having lost his ‘homely’ Mancunian accent. This is a perfectly common thing for authors to do, to inhabit the mindset of his main character…
…but there seems to be no distance between him and his heroine. He never interrogates the degree to which her qualities are the product of her privilege. A private education, some of it in a Summerhill-type liberal school, enough money never to have to worry about it, knowing people who can help her along in life. When her father’s second wife mentions the lovely house near Florence owned by an aunt of hers, I don’t think we’re supposed to bat an eyelid. It’s like being in an Ian McEwan novel, where nobody ever meets anyone not of their own class unless through some necessary plot business. In McEwan’s Enduring Love, the main character needs to buy a gun, and to get one he has to pass an uncomfortable afternoon in an unconvincing demi-monde of the author’s creation. In Freya, it’s about her having to use her charm on a supercilious, demanding Soho photographer in order to get at a former contact of his who is blackmailing her friend. Alex. She’d recently reconnected with him and, by sheer chance, it’s just when he’s reached a point of desperation. It’s lucky he bumped into her… but that’s a plot thread I’ll need to come back to.
To rewind to the start of Part II. Freya is now working for a photo magazine called Frame, a (slightly) up-market version of Picture Post. Its glory days are over—the war and its stories are just a memory, and a weekly magazine can’t keep up with television. Sales are falling, and Freya has ideas for boosting it. A new kind of photographer is emerging, and she has an invitation to Jerry Dicks’s opening night. He sounds like an edgier version of David Bailey, taking what sound like very noir-ish celebrity photos. Their subjects don’t always seem to welcome the frank gaze of Jerry Dicks’s lens, and he sometimes uses his waist-high Rolleiflex to catch them unawares. It’s as though he, like Freya, can see that the stuffiness of the 50s will soon give way to something more interesting. But, of course, the editor of Frame is unimpressed. And, after she’s left the sinking ship, so is the editor at the Envoy—until Freya is to finally able use that power of hers to persuade him.
She gets her interview, through a mixture of her usual pushiness at the opening night—she can’t seem to help just making people notice her, bless her—and a helpful, no-nonsense muse of his called Hetty Cavendish. It’s a good job Hetty is there, making her way by being useful to the fast set in and around Soho. Which includes, of course, Nat Fane. Don’t get me started on how every single one of Freya’s Oxford friends is able to make a big mark in London. Nat, Robert, Nancy, Alex. They are all in the public eye—or the eye of the chattering classes, some more willingly than others. Nat, who turned out to be no actor, is getting on in theatre by way of directing and writing. (The details are vague.) He has married an actress, far less interesting than himself, but with real talent and family money. She now has the chance to make more in America—but can he bear to be separated? What do you think? He was starting to find himself under her shadow in London.
And then there’s Nancy. I’ve heard Freya described as an English My Brilliant Friend. No, it isn’t, beyond the fact that it’s about two women friends in the mid-20th Century. There are two very rounded characters in Ferrante’s novel, and in Quinn’s there’s only one. Nancy’s role seems not to be about being fully rounded at all, but to be at Freya’s service in her painfully slow development as an adult. It isn’t that she’s the tortoise to Freya’s impulsive hare, she’s much too clever for that. It’s really that Nancy is thoughtful and… and what? Everything that is the opposite of Freya. She doesn’t let herself be taken to bed by her best friend’s crush, she doesn’t lie, she doesn’t speak before thinking through the consequences. Quinn could have taken pains, as Elena Ferrante does, to make sure the reader gets a very full picture of everything about the main character’s friend. He chooses not to, so she rarely appears in more than one dimension, very much as Freya sees her.
In 1954, Freya is sharing a cheap two-bedroomed flat with Nancy, and we see on the first page how it is. Freya is freezing in bed, a grey dawn showing through the gap in the curtains that Freya hasn’t fixed yet. She gets into bed with Nancy, a girlish habit she’s got into recently. Nancy, of course, is pleased, and it does nothing to dispel Freya’s opinion of their unequal relationship. Freya is definitely in charge, meeting interesting people and appearing regularly in print. Nancy works in an entry-level job in publishing, whose only advantage is that it’s a useful environment for an aspiring novelist. She gets letters back from different publishers all the time, all of them rejections.
But in a novel like this, in which an author puts everything on hold for eight years except for a few job changes, a lot has to happen in the six months allocated to this middle section. Not in any order… beside the pool at that house in Fiesole, Freya watches Nancy opening a telegram. She’s so shocked, Freya wonders who’s died. Obviously, we guess it’s about her novel being accepted and, finally, Freya realises Nancy is her own woman now. We already know, because Freya has noticed, that Nancy has changed in other ways: ‘the gawkiness of her Oxford days had melted away, replaced by a voluptuous, long-limbed ease.’ My goodness. Freya couldn’t be happier for her friend… except she detects ‘a tiny quiver of dismay stirring below her own mood. It came of an awareness that this moment would mark the first step in Nancy’s eventual detachment from her – from her influence. … The moment was coming, not yet, but soon, when the apprentice would leave behind the tutor entirely.’
Meanwhile, when Freya starts at the Envoy, she finds Robert Cosway, of all people, already there. He’s recently moved from a provincial paper, and now they’ll be working in the same office. He sent Freya flowers, welcoming her before she’d even got the job, and leaving his note unsigned. What’s his game? He mentions his upcoming divorce pretty early on… but it isn’t Freya he pursues, it’s Nancy. How times have changed since Oxford—but Nancy is a much more attractive prospect now than she was then, and no doubt she’ll be much less trouble than Freya. But this is Freya’s story, so we know what a blow it is to her not that Robert has gone for her friend, but that her friend is going to leave her alone in the flat. Freya has a fairly long-term lover, Joss from Frame, but it’s petering out. Sure, he’s going to be putting on a massive birthday bash for her in his Hampstead garden, but even that causes a row. Jump-in-with-both-feet Freya hates the way he sees it, she thinks, as a real milestone in her life: ‘you’re being so fucking patronising. Did it ever occur to you that I might have different priorities? What about getting my first salaried job, or my first cover story on the magazine – aren’t they milestones?’ Fine. But it’s pretty crude compared to the cutting-edge feminism in the third and fourth volumes of My Brilliant Friend. Anybody could write this stuff.
But this isn’t the development that causes her to give up everything. For that, Quinn has to perform some pretty violent plotting manoeuvres. He’s already set a couple of things up, firstly Robert’s presence as a more openly ambitious hack than Freya. Meanwhile, bubbling away in the background is something of an anti-homosexual witch-hunt in public life, with a high-profile trial giving everyone plenty to chew on. Freya and Nancy seem to be the only ones unfazed by anyone’s sexuality. Jerry Dicks is gay and, along with his dreadful reputation in other ways, it doesn’t help him with the established media. It’s one reason why Freya has to fight so hard to get an agreement to publish an article about him.
Then, entirely unconnected with this, Alex meets Freya accidentally and invites her to dinner at his place. He had told her at Oxford that he was doing secret work in the war, and now he has a high-profile security job in Whitehall. During dinner, he tells her all about himself. ‘Jan’, his long-term lover back in Edinburgh, should really be pronounced as a Czech man’s name. Ah. Jan returned to Czechoslovakia suddenly some time ago, and now Alex is doing all he can to find where he has disappeared to. Freya is tremendously moved by the depth of friendship implied by his openness with her. And it connects with the arguments she’s been having at work about how The Envoy should be taking a stand against interference in men’s private lives. OK, this is plausible enough…
…until, only a week later, Alex calls her, and when they meet he almost begs her for an urgent loan of £300. That’s £7,000 or $10,000 in today’s values and, of course, she hasn’t got it. Alex looks as though he’s been sleeping in his clothes, and Freya is sympathetic. But, in that way she has, she almost immediately makes a cynical judgment about his motives. ‘“So that was a few days before you invited me to dinner—” and killed the fatted calf for me, she thought … “– and gave me the lowdown on what you were up to at Oxford – all that guilt and secrecy. Now I see why you told me.”’ When he protests that he did it because he sees her as a friend, she’ll have none of it. ‘Yes, a friend you could immediately put the bite on. All those years of silence, then you invite me to dinner. I’m surprised you didn’t ask me for the money there and then – why wait another five days?’
Empathy? Don’t make me laugh. Meanwhile, there’s a rumour going around that somebody in Whitehall might soon be under investigation for spying. We know it will be to do with Alex—all that stuff about a Czech lover who’s disappeared—but, when this is confirmed and he stands trial, he’s proved innocent. But he’s gay, so that’s the end of everything for him. And guess who had been the investigating journalist, the one who missed the party of the year so he could write up his scoop on Saturday night? Freya, realising that she’d got it wrong about Alex, can’t believe what Robert, now her best friend’s boyfriend, has done. She will never forgive him. And if her best friend is collateral damage—how could she possibly be a friend to her enemy’s wife-to-be?—so be it.
Umm… She decides—as in, is carried away during a row—to make it a resigning issue that her editor’s won’t explicitly condemn the ruin of a good man because of his sexuality. And we’re supposed to believe this. It’s 1954, for God’s sake, but Freya still hasn’t matured enough yet to realise that there are simply some battles she isn’t going to win. What a burden it must be for her, to be so far ahead of the times in her liberal thinking—so far, in fact, that she can’t believe that the rightness of her opinions doesn’t carry any sway at all. Idiot. Maybe she’ll have grown up a bit in Part III, although I’m not holding my breath.
Part III, That Girl
Not a literary reference, but an early 1960s version of the earlier ‘It girl’. And no, it doesn’t refer to Freya, despite the up-to-the-minute gamine haircut she decides to have when she gets back to England in 1962. Back from Rome, as if it matters, where she’s spent eight more years doing this and that, and not growing up one little bit. We’re to believe that eight years out of the loop haven’t adversely affected her career prospects at all. Anthony Quinn clearly expects us to take it as a given that she’ll be able to walk straight back in, and she does. I can’t remember what particular chance encounter furnishes her with a good enough story to prove she hasn’t lost it, and by now I don’t care. It was no doubt brought about either by sheer good fortune or insider information, combined with her usual pushiness.
She’s already in post at some other fictionalised newspaper by the time she meets Chrissie Effingham, the new face of the 1960s. She really is stunning, and surrounded by an entourage of hangers-on and never far from her manager. But she has the down-to-earth, girl-next-door attitudes we recognise from Twiggy later in the decade. And Quinn would have us believe that there’s more to Freya than pushiness. She can’t help hitting it off with Chrissie, which you can believe if you want to, and at another event she meets Ava, Chrissie’s equally stunning Black friend from way back. Later still, and extraordinarily in her short career, Chrissie seeks Freya out without her manager giving her permission, and… and I found the next bit easier to believe. When Freya tells Chrissie she’s pregnant—Quinn had to throw something into the mix, so why not that?—it’s the 20-year-old woman with the looks of a schoolgirl who gives the 37-year-old some comforting, motherly advice.
I’m telling you all this because, reader, Chrissie becomes a key component of the story. Is she the main plot engine of Part III? She might be, because… well, I’ll come back to that. But for now, Quinn is satisfied to give us plenty of cosy details about how she likes knitting, likes her old Bromley friends more than anyone she’s met since, and how easily she connects with Freya. She doesn’t trust most of the men surrounding her, and that’s definitely a win with Freya. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, what of Nancy? We’re to believe that not only the hot-headed Freya, living no doubt her own dolce vita in Rome, nor the ultra-sensible and tolerant Nancy achieving stolid success in London, has ever got around to seeking a reconciliation. Later, when they are talking again—not that the path to that happy outcome isn’t a bumpy one—Nancy gives a half-baked explanation of why she didn’t write that doesn’t sound like her at all. Maybe Quinn thinks that his cast of second-string, one-dimensional characters don’t need to be consistent, so long as he can keep his plot-drivers in play.
And in the end, the plot is straightforward melodrama. To get them back on the road to reconciliation, first Quinn has to get Robert Cosway back into Freya’s line of vision. He makes it easy for himself by making him a shadow cabinet minister—I’m not making this up—with the easy-going charm of a particular kind of self-serving politician. Freya meets him at a party or some other get-together in the London circle they both move in, with editors, artists, influencers like Nat Fane and the rest… and she hasn’t lost any of her fury at his betrayal both of Alex and of his supposed liberal views. He thought he was rooting out a spy, he protests, but that’s just the sort of excuse a man like him would look for. He gave his own career a big boost by outing poor Alex’s homosexuality, she reminds him and… and he decides to give up on her for now, and talks to somebody else instead. But Chrissie is at the same event, and it seems it isn’t the only time that she and Robert find their paths crossing. Might the rumour be true that Robert has made sure his and Chrissie’s paths have often crossed, and not only at public gatherings?
Whatever, Robert is in the business of being everybody’s friend, and soon Freya gets a letter from Nancy inviting her to a get-together at their house. (There might have been some extra steps to get to this point, but never mind.) She goes, and… Nancy is as gracious and tolerant as you would expect. But, Freya surmises, all is not well in the Cosway household. Nancy, of course, is the model of discretion and diplomacy, perhaps not even being honest with herself about Robert’s blatant ambition and smiling ruthlessness. But Quinn makes it as easy for the reader as it is for Freya to realise that, successful novelist that she now is, this is no equal partnership. And they don’t have children—a fact that takes on some significance when Nancy realises immediately, despite her best efforts to hide it, that Freya is pregnant. She assumes that Freya won’t actually have the child, and her guess is correct. Nancy, ever the tactful one, doesn’t judge…
…but she later tells Freya she took it for granted she would abort because she always runs away when things get difficult. She only comes out with this, and a few other home truths, after Freya has decided to sabotage the friendship by behaving like a 21-year-old, yet again. She accuses Nancy—plot driver alert—of betraying their friendship in a kind of revenge, through wilfully caricaturing her in her most recent novel.
Freya hadn’t known whether to be touched or suspicious when she discovered that Nancy had dedicated the novel to ‘FW’, definitely her although, being Freya, she pretends Nancy might have meant somebody else. But as she reads, ‘towards the end of the book, she came across a line of dialogue: “Stella has at least one attraction, you know – that bold way of saying exactly what she’s thinking. Sometimes before she has even properly thought.” The words hit Freya with the force of a slap. She knew that line; she had read it years before, almost word for word, in Nancy’s diary. Only then it was a comment about her, Freya, her best friend. She was stricken. That Stella, this odd, vexing, emotionally incontinent creature, could have sprung from somewhere other than Nancy’s imagination hadn’t occurred to her. But now the appalling suspicion took root that the woman was actually a version of herself. And the dedication, “For F.W.”, seemed to bear it out.’
Stella is one of the main reasons for the success of the novel, because she’s so attractive in spite of her impulsiveness and tendency to get into scrapes she’s landed herself in. (Is this Anthony Quinn telling us how to think about his own heroine? It doesn’t work for me.) Right, says Freya—naturally, it’s not the only thing she’s angry about—that’s it. Despite Nancy’s best efforts to convince her that Stella is an invention, an amalgam of many people and that revenge was the last thing she had in mind, the friendship’s over, again.
I’m tired of writing about her now. To tie up the friendship thread, Quinn needs another kick in the plot. He kills off Chrissie to add a whodunit element that offers him all sorts of possibilities. First, it’s a big blow for Freya, and for a while it’s all about her, as usual. Chrissie was the first woman since Nancy that she had ever bonded with, and the fact that she had been disappointed that Freya was going to abort the child puts her in a spin. Chrissie’s death comes on the day of the appointment with the abortionist, and Freya can’t face it. She’ll sort it out later—and, of course, we know exactly what will really happen. But there’s something else…. Chrissie has died of an overdose of the sleeping drugs she’s on, and Freya finds this hard to believe. Cue all kinds of details emerging, drip by drip. Ava tells her Chrissie hadn’t been on her own, and that it wasn’t the caretaker at Chrissie’s flats who discovered the body, it was her. And she’d heard a row going on when she’d phoned Chrissie earlier, but she had decided to leave them to it. Then she’d changed her mind, too late.
Why am I telling you this? It’s the creakiest of plots, but it’s what Quinn has to resort to. Ava explains that it was Chrissie’s manager’s routine to invite his cronies to a party at Chrissie’s, but that this time Chrissie definitely wasn’t interested. Freya’s tame photographer has a photo of another woman at the party, dressed like a call-girl—lucky he was there—and Freya has a lead. After days of asking around the woman’s haunts, showing local sex workers the photo (with the wrong name attached for a little added plot business) Freya finds her. She is happy to talk, and Freya can establish exactly what must have happened. Chrissie had been in bed with a certain politician, the woman says, but the arrival of her manager and the hangers-on had ruined their private evening and led to the row. And, presumably, enough of an upset (and booze, despite not usually being a drinker) for Chrissie to get mixed up about her illegal downers. And uppers. Verdict: death by misadventure.
The woman verifies that the politician is Robert, of course, and it later emerges that after the death, Chrissie’s manager had agreed to keep his presence hushed up. But Freya has a witness now, and has still not forgotten Robert’s treacherous betrayal all those years ago. She meets him in a private place, and he’s pretty sure she’s about to spill all the beans. His promising political life is over—and, as an added complication, so will be his role as the party’s biggest campaigner against the racism of the Tories. Because, y’see, nobody’s all bad. Beneath the smarmy exterior and serial adulterer—Chrissie is definitely not the first—there’s a man who wants to do some good.
What’s a dedicated journalist to do? Nancy is no doubt going to remain loyal to Robert—go figure—which means that her own friendship with her will surely come to an end forever. This has only recently been restored, I’ve forgotten how—and cemented when Nancy is on hand to save Freya’s life. They had been on a short break in the lovely Cotswolds cottage a friend of Freya’s father has lent them—It’s that kind of world they live in—when Freya starts to bleed. The pregnancy ends in a bloody miscarriage, and the doctor Nancy has found arrives just in time to get her to hospital for a massive transfusion.
Jesus. Somewhere along the line, Freya decides she’s got to let Nancy know that she, Nancy, is the only person in the world that she has ever loved. She does it with a kiss on the mouth… and Nancy isn’t ready for it. She doesn’t squirm away in embarrassment, but she lets Freya know, tactfully and kindly because she’s that sort of girl, that she doesn’t feel the same way at all, And she won’t be leaving Robert. Speaking of whom—after her private meeting with him, Freya has told Nancy all about his involvement with Chrissie, and that he could be seen as being implicated in the death. And by the end of that conversation, Freya has decided to sit on the story. Robert’s career is safe and, it seems, so is his marriage.
Except. The novel ends with Freya moving into a house just next-door to the one she’s been renting in Islington. Her father has bought it for her—as I said, that’s the world they live in—and she’s in the middle of getting everything out of one place and into another. There’s stuff in storage from Rome somewhere as well, so there’ll soon be plenty of nice things in the house… but, of course, Freya is on her own. Maybe Quinn wants to give her a taste of what maturity feels like, when an adult has time to consider the consequences of a life lived on impulse and a solid sense of entitlement.
Don’t be ridiculous. Nancy arrives to tell Freya she’s left Robert. Oh, it occurs to one of them, might she stay with Freya until she finds her own place? Or, even better, might she not simply move in? Freya isn’t going to put her under any pressure to become her life partner, she would have her own room… what could be more agreeable? As Freya goes out to get them some tea from the local café—she has nothing in the house to offer Nancy, obviously—she puts on their record, the one they danced to on the night of VE Day. Aw, bless. And the novel raches its longed-for end. ‘She pictured Nancy on the top floor, her head back against the wall, while the song drifted up the echoing house, keeping time. She wondered how long it would take her to recognise it.’
Recognise what, exactly? I couldn’t possibly speculate.
We can read it for you wholesale 