Freya by Anthony Quinn

seized the wine list and ordered the first bottle she recognised. She looked around the room, at the waiter’s retreating back, the carver with his trolley a few tables along, the anonymous couples facing one another, the dusty potted palms by the door, the limp brocade curtains, the smells of mediocre food being cooked – and felt a terrible crushing sadness. A line of poetry came to her –
Say not the struggle naught availeth
. But how mundane the struggle felt, after what they’d put themselves through, this effort to wrest back a semblance of normality; how feeble and dogged and lost we all are.
    â€˜Look, there’s partridge on the menu,’ her mother was saying. ‘I haven’t seen that since before the war.’
    The waiter had returned with the wine, and Freya watched impatiently as he uncorked and decanted it. ‘Would madam like to taste …?’
    â€˜No, just pour it,’ she said with a peremptory nod. The wine was barely in her glass before she had emptied it with great gulps.
    â€˜Someone’s thirsty,’ her mother said. ‘So what do you girls do when you’re not at lectures? There seem to be a lot of men around the place.’
    â€˜Nothing but,’ said Freya. ‘They’re either beer-drinking ex-servicemen or serious chaps in flannels smoking pipes. Though I did meet one quite presentable fellow at Balliol …’ Pleased to provoke their outraged laughter with the story of her staircase encounter with Robert, she was spurred on to a little comic embroidery. ‘When he started yarning about his scholarship I got rather fed up and dropped my gaze to what I’d just seen on display under his towel. I said, “I don’t know about a scholarship, but I suppose they might have given you an exhibition.”’
    Nancy, over her giggles, said, ‘I could never tell a story like that to my parents.’
    â€˜Nancy’s a Catholic,’ Freya jumped in, for her mother’s benefit. ‘That’s why she’s having the cod – fish on Friday!’ She turned to Nancy. ‘So you never talk about sex?’
    â€˜Freya,’ said her mother, more in weariness than warning.
    â€˜Well, no,’ said Nancy hesitantly, ‘but it’s not just that. We never really talk about anything … intimate. My parents wouldn’t know how. Most things, they’re either understood or they’re just undiscussed.’
    â€˜Do you have brothers and sisters?’ asked Cora.
    â€˜I have a younger sister, Miriam. She’s still at school.’
    â€˜That’s quite small for a Catholic family,’ observed Freya.
    Nancy nodded, and paused before replying. ‘My mother had another child, a boy. He was still a baby, not even a year old – one morning they found him dead in his cot. I was about eight, and didn’t understand what had happened. I was told that it was God’s will, but beyond that they never talked about it. If someone accidentally mentioned an infant dying a sort of blind went down – so it remains this terrible unspoken thing.’
    Freya kept a brief silence before saying, ‘If only people could talk honestly about painful things, instead of bottling them up. Wouldn’t it have been better if your parents had been open with you?’
    Nancy returned a shrug. ‘I think they must have talked to the parish priest about it. But I know what you mean – it might have helped us all if they’d been willing to sit down and talk. Instead, when the anniversary comes round the house is plunged into this gloom, though nobody will ever acknowledge it. So it goes on.’
    Freya exchanged a look with her mother that seemed to touch on their own familial turmoil: they would have to tread softly. The arrival of the food was timely, and the cloud which had been threatening dispersed. The partridge she had chosen was a bit stringy, but it was tastier than