Page 9 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“I’m meeting the archivist to ask exactly that, at two o’clock,” I said. I was also planning to go first to the History of Art library to borrow Walter Loftus’s classic, definitive biography of Oskar Erlich.
“Well, well, well,” a familiar voice boomed from across the hall.
We both looked up. Freddie Talbot.
He barreled over with his lunch tray, dropped down onto the bench, and pecked Athena swiftly on the cheek without ever quite breaking eye contact with me.
“Caroline,” he said, a little curtly.
“Freddie,” I replied, without warmth.
I had never understood Athena’s relationship with Freddie, her on-off boyfriend—although I’d never heard him use that word—of the past two years.
On paper at least, I suppose they were well-matched. Athena was charming, intelligent, gorgeous. She spoke at least five languages fluently—Greek with her father and half siblings, Russian with her mother, the French and Arabic she had picked up from her Lebanese nanny, and English at her international school. Freddie, a final-year vet student, was tall, well-built, and every bit as good-looking as she was, with a mop of sandy hair, freckles, an oddly appealing sports-flattened nose, and a strong jaw. He rowed for his college. He played rugby for the university.
He was also a complete arsehole. The kind of person you are never quite sure is going to acknowledge having met you before. Useless at making plans, or at least remembering them. Rude. Deliberately boorish. A liability when drunk, with a well-known habit of suddenly climbing up things: fountains, scaffolding, stationary Sainsbury’s trucks. The kind of twat who deliberately sets off fire alarms.
Pretty much their entire relationship, it seemed to me, was conducted between the hours of 11:00 p.m. (college bar kicking-out time) and whenever he skulked back from Athena’s room to his. More than once he had staggered in after some boozy dinner with his equally awful friends just to throw up in her sink and pass out. Every so often, he would publicly hook up with another girl in a nightclub, and there would follow weeks of recriminations and crying.
Whenever I had tried to talk to Athena about their relationship, she had made it clear that the situation was complicated, that Freddie was complicated, that I would not understand. Occasionally she would also drop unsubtle hints about their sex life. How passionate it was, how intense.
Something I had not noticed about Freddie before, or at least really registered, was the signet ring on his pinkie. Seeing me glance at it, he swiftly moved his hand under the table.
“Freddie,” I said, “can I ask about your ring?”
“My ring?” His expression, the tone of his voice, sought to suggest he had not even really been aware he was wearing a ring.
“Can I see it?”
Freddie hesitated. Eventually, Athena nudged him. Reluctantly, he brought his hand out from under the table and held it up for me. The ring had the same design on it as Juliette Willoughby’s necklace. The same elaborate eye design, exactly.
“Well, go on,” said Athena, nudging him again. “Tell her what it is.”
Freddie said nothing.
“It’s an Osiris ring,” explained Athena. “It means Freddie is a member of the Osiris Society.”
“The Osiris Society? What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s nothing,” said Freddie, with a scowl at Athena.
“It’s a drinking society,” said Athena, smiling back at him. “A secret drinking society.”
“It’s a dining society,” Freddie corrected, his scowl deepening. “We have dinners four times a term. There’s nothing secret about it.”
Having finished his lunch and pushed his plate away, Freddie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and checked his watch.
“Christ,” he said. “I’d better go. Got something to pick up from the vet school at one thirty.” Then with another peck on Athena’s cheek—and a little glance around to see if anyone had noticed—he was gone, leaving us his empty plate and tray to clear.
THE HISTORY OF ART library is on Scroope Terrace, a ten-minute walk from my college. I was approaching it when I heard the banging. Unable for a moment to tell which direction it was coming from, I finally spotted a dark blue car, parked facing in my direction—in the front were two men, the passenger screaming at the driver, so furious he was repeatedly punching the ceiling of the car, bouncing red-faced in his seat like Rumpelstiltskin. The driver was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, flinching occasionally. Then the angry man abruptly stopped yelling and took three attempts to get out of the car—kicking the door open so hard it swung closed on him again, catching the sleeve of his gray tracksuit on something and then storming off past me, muttering to himself, a man in his forties with glints of silver in his close-cropped hair.
Only as I got closer and I saw who was sitting in the driver’s seat did I realize whose car it was: Freddie’s. I was about to walk over, tap on the window, and check that he was okay when he started the car, swerved out into the traffic, and screeched off.
The strangest thing of all was his expression, one I had never seen on his face before. Freddie Talbot looked genuinely scared.
“The Fire”—an extract from Oskar Erlich: Man and Painter, by Walter Loftus (London: Faber & Faber, 1982)
The fire that killed Oskar Erlich and Juliette Willoughby broke out just after midnight on February 25, 1938.
