Love Notes for Freddie

by Eva Rice

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance; 20th Century Romance; New Adult Romance

Synopsis

Marnie FitzPatrick is a reclusive sixth-former with a dysfunctional family, and Julie Crewe is a disillusioned maths teacher who lives vicariously through the girls she teaches. This is the story of summer 1967, when the sun burned down on the roof of the Shredded Wheat factory, and a boy called Freddie danced to the records he had stolen. This is what happens when three people are bound together by something that can't be explained by any equation.

Release date: June 26, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

Marnie

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on to the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power. She was a Grit, of course, but I didn’t know that then. Just as I didn’t know that I was a Grit until what happened one Saturday afternoon, late in the Easter term of 1969; but I am going too far ahead.

It was the first time Miss Crewe had spoken to me without the rest of the class listening in. All of us went up to her study individually to receive the results of our end-of-term maths exam, taken five days previously. I recall that Rachel went in just before me and returned within minutes, holding up her unfortunate papers, all slashed about with Miss Crewe’s red biro. Even from the far side of the room I could see the column of crosses down the page, as though her work had been violated by some crazed lover, unable to leave just one kiss at the end of a letter. A languid, blonde, long-limbed rebel with a talent for painting abstract watercolours between punishments for sloppy prep, Rachel was hardly the sort to give a stuff. She ruled the school in between cigarette breaks.

‘Bad luck!’ called out Vanessa Simons, who was always sympathetic to beautiful people.

Rachel shrugged and floated across the room to her tuck box, from which she pulled out a half-eaten tin of peaches and a silver spoon – somewhat apt, as her family owned half of Hertfordshire. She flopped into the armchair next to the record player and ate.

‘You’re next,’ she said, nodding at me between mouthfuls.

I put down my magazine and stood up, oddly light-headed. For modesty’s sake, I pulled the lamb-to-the-slaughter face that seemed to be all the rage that day. Rachel looked at me and grinned, seeing through it.

‘You’ll be all right, FitzPatrick,’ she said sardonically. ‘You’re the only one of us she hasn’t got pinned as a complete imbecile.’

I shook my head in unconvincing objection, swung open the common-room door and walked towards Latimoore Wing, where Miss Crewe had her office, taking the short cut through the library, and – I might add – resisting the urge to skip. There was very little back then that made me happier than talking about maths, and I was quite happy to keep it that way. I knocked on the door of Miss Crewe’s room.

‘Come in, Marnie,’ came the voice from inside.

I remember that I tripped slightly and stumbled into her study, as though I had been listening in at the door and she had opened it suddenly from the other side. I felt myself blushing scarlet – an intense pulse of faint-making heat that I loathed, and in loathing only made worse.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

I stood in front of her desk and she laughed.

‘Sit down,’ said she.

‘Sorry,’ I repeated idiotically.

‘Nothing whatever to be sorry for,’ observed Miss Crewe, picking up my paper. And her accent – soft, Canadian, cool – floored me as it always did.

She was wearing a tight, orange angora sweater, and her long red hair had been flung up in a careless topknot. No make-up, but no need for make-up. Just that perfect pale skin and those freckles and that big mouth from out of which had come so much that had kept me so happy that term. She was without question the most beautiful woman I knew; I could happily have sat staring at her staring at my papers until the bell rang at the end of the school day.

‘Do you want to look at your result?’ she asked. She sounded terribly serious. For a second I baulked.

‘Did I fail?’

‘No. No, quite the opposite. Heavens, no. You didn’t fail, Marnie.’

‘Oh, good. Thank goodness.’

‘You didn’t get anything wrong,’ said Miss Crewe gently. ‘One hundred per cent. No errors at all.’

I gasped – my hand clamped to my mouth to hide my cry of delight. I stared at Miss Crewe, seeing the thrill of my achievement in her eyes. She laughed – a sudden, girlish sound – and I laughed too.

‘What do you mean, nothing wrong?’ I whispered.

‘See for yourself.’

I scanned my eyes down the pages, recalling the pleasure those two and a half hours of peaceful calculation had given me. A pen, full of black ink, forming numbers, symbols and letters on clean pages; infinitely more satisfying to me than any novel, any friendship, any boy.

‘This one,’ I said, pointing to question five with a shaking finger. ‘I thought perhaps I had got this the wrong way round—’

‘Ah, yes. A mistake made by every girl in your form,’ said Miss Crewe. ‘Except you.’

‘And the end bit of question ten,’ I said. ‘I thought you might want to see more of my working out—’

‘The fact that you didn’t need to show any working out was almost worth an extra mark in itself.’

I laughed again. These few minutes were the stuff of fantasy for me: this knowing-it-all-ends-well retrospective of my paper with the only other person in the school who liked numbers as much as I did. I wanted to go through every answer on all four pages, to ask Miss Crewe whether she would have reached the same conclusions the same way, to know whether she would have chosen the same winding routes through each sum that I had, but I knew there was no moment for that. There was never any time for what I wanted back then, just little snapshots of happiness that only came from this.

‘Mrs Carving says it’s the first time in seventeen years that a girl has achieved such a mark in a maths exam at this level,’ said Miss Crewe. ‘You are to be congratulated, Marnie. I’m very pleased with you.’

I felt tears shooting into my eyes, unstoppable. Blindly, I reached into my regulation grey tunic and fumbled for a handkerchief (only white, please, no lace, no frills, must be clearly labelled, etc.) and blew my nose. Miss Crewe let me run on like this for a bit, blowing and snuffling – all the while saying in a low voice how this boded very well for the rest of my maths A-level course, and how she was looking forward to what the months to come held for me.

‘Your parents will be delighted,’ she said, smiling.

‘Yes, perhaps they will,’ I replied, unconvinced. I wished she hadn’t mentioned them. Miss Crewe looked surprised.

‘Perhaps? There should be no doubt about it.’

‘Jukey doesn’t really care about academic stuff.’

‘Jukey?’

‘My mother. We’ve always called her by her nickname. Her real name is Joanna but she’s always been known as Jukey. Everyone calls her Jukey.’

Miss Crewe nodded briskly. I was giving away too much information, as usual.

‘Well, you’re home in two days for the holidays. I’ll write a note telling them how well you’ve done. They need to be aware of your talent.’

Talent! A word I had until then only associated with the more determined members of the sixth-form drama group and those who had achieved grade eight on the flute by the age of fourteen. Miss Crewe picked up a pen and made a note next to my name.

‘My stepfather thinks maths is a man’s subject,’ I blurted.

‘Oh yes?’

‘He’d prefer me to be studying the Romantic poets. He says keenness for numbers isn’t right in a woman.’

I was dumping Howard right in it, and I didn’t care.

‘My father thought that dancing was for fools. Didn’t stop me wanting to do it,’ said Miss Crewe dryly. ‘We’re not living in the Dark Ages, Marnie.’

I grappled with what she was saying. ‘Dancing? Miss Crewe, were you a dancer?’

She shook her head, as though irritated with herself – as though she had spoken someone else’s lines without meaning to. ‘Used to be,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a dancer. Before I was a teacher. When I was young.’

‘You’re not old,’ I cried. I desperately wanted more information, but Miss Crewe had a sudden agitation about her.

She picked up and put down a pile of papers, then coughed. ‘The point is that you may as well do what you want to do, because . . . well, because what’s the point, if you don’t?’

She patted her hair and looked out of the window with sudden distraction, a habit that she normally reserved to pass the time while goons like Caroline Shriver were trying to solve the simplest equations on the blackboard.

‘You’ve two brothers, haven’t you, Marnie?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I’ve a twin, Caspar. And James is a bit older than us. He’s just gone up to Oxford.’

‘Are either of them as interested in maths as you are?’

‘Gosh, no. Caspar’s practically incapable of reciting his three times table, but he’s the best looking, which probably counts for more than anything.’

Miss Crewe smiled at me. ‘Don’t kid yourself into presuming that, just because you’re good with numbers, you can’t have everything else. You can, you know, Marnie. Do you understand that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean – yes.’

She turned back to her list now, frowning with concentration. I sensed my time was up.

‘Marnie, please will you send Florence Dunbar in next?’

I nodded.

She looked at me. ‘I may see you later,’ she went on. ‘It’s the Lady Richmond Cup tonight, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Miss Crewe.’

‘You know, Marnie, of all the traditions that I was faced with when I arrived at this school, I think that struck me as the most bizarre. Members of the sixth form racing from one end of the pool to the other, in virtual darkness, holding lit candles and wearing nightdresses . . .’

‘My brother says we should charge the locals to watch, and that we’d have all the money needed for the new Science Centre within three minutes of opening the gates.’

‘He has a point,’ agreed Miss Crewe.

I went red again; I was talking too much.

‘Well, good luck to you, Marnie.’ Miss Crewe nodded at me.

‘Oh, I shan’t win. I’m a hopeless swimmer.’

‘I didn’t mean the swimming. I meant everything else. You’ve got every chance of succeeding. You’ve proved to yourself – and to me – that you’re capable of great things.’

‘Yes, Miss Crewe,’ I breathed.

I ran off to find Florence Dunbar, a lacrosse-playing dervish who was grinding her teeth in the common room in grim anticipation of her result, and then raced upstairs to the dorm. I had several hours before we had to meet up at the pool house for the Lady Richmond Cup. I couldn’t face telling everyone my mark, and just for a while I wanted my own company, my own thoughts, unaffected by the admiration, jealousy or resentment of those around me. I wanted to dream for a bit, and nothing more.

 

10

Miss Crewe

Trying not to stare too hard at his oddness, I watched him putting the needle on the record. He was displaying ritualistic behaviour – the tapping of his head, the muttering under his breath; it was plain to me that he was trying to keep control of the situation and not entirely succeeding. To add to the tension, Marnie was nervous – more nervous than him – and why wouldn’t she be? She had clearly gone loopy for this boy and, from the moment that I first set eyes on Freddie Friday, it was equally obvious to me why she had fallen for him. He was very arresting – thin as a rake and as romantically pale as new death with all that wavy dark hair and those rather haunted green eyes – nothing like the public-school boys that the St Libby’s girls tended to fixate on, with their clean, blond faces, rowers’ muscles, confident voices and prowess on the cricket pitch. This one was a curved ball and full of nerves with it.

The record crackled into life: ‘Aquarius’ from Hair, a song that reminded me of Florence Dunbar rather too much, as she had worn that album out with playing it on Saturday evenings in the Kelp common room. Freddie glanced over to me and I nodded and smiled, feeling ludicrous – a mother waiting for her son to play the recorder in a school concert. Please, I thought. Please, for all of our sakes, let him be good. Marnie’s eyes didn’t leave his face; she couldn’t have spelled out the way she felt any more obviously if she had unfurled a flag with a big red heart painted on both sides. Oh, God, Marnie, I thought. Don’t do it. Keep the flag rolled as tightly as you can. He closed his eyes, and I felt the music filling him from his toes up, illuminating his sallow cheekbones. I saw the match light up his veins, strike him, and he began to dance.

All right. Let’s just make it easy and say that my first thought was great relief: he was a dancer. He was good. All right, he was untrained, and that was very obvious – Jo, at his age, would have left him at the starting gate – but Freddie Friday had something. He used the space in the factory as though he had been told that, if he didn’t cover every bit of the floor, he would be fined; he had great rhythm and – as Eloise used to put it – his limbs behaved themselves, despite the clear lack of technicality. Once or twice he missed a step, tried something that didn’t work, and I could see his face falling. He was determined, I thought, but easily shattered. Sexy – yes – but at an impossible distance. It was hard to imagine anyone getting close to that body; it was too agitated, too nervy. Marnie plainly had no such problems with her imagination. She was looking at him without blinking, completely undone, smiling very slightly, not because she wanted to make him feel better, but because she couldn’t keep herself from the joy that he made her feel. It was happening to her, as it had happened to me. My heart sped up in a surge of sympathy. I felt quite faint, but then everything about the scene was discombobulating. My God, the smell in that place was strong! Even at this hour, and not even inside the actual factory itself, there was an alcoholic, wheaty punch in the air, and seeing someone dancing in a building that usually housed manual labourers, such industry, gave everything that was happening a surreal quality.

When the song finished, he didn’t come back to where we were. He just stood, his eyes closed, his shoulders hunched, breathing quite apart from us – almost as though he required different air. Where he had been as he danced, I didn’t know, but it was somewhere far from here. Marnie looked as though she couldn’t quite bear the space between us all, as though she might well collapse if he didn’t tell her that he loved her, which he was certainly a long way from doing. Eventually he looked up, walked back over to the record deck and lifted the needle. When he came towards us, his shoulders hunched forward, the freedom of the dance seemed forgotten; he was trapped again, just as I had been every time that I stopped moving.

‘He’s good, Miss Crewe – isn’t he? He’s really good?’ asked Marnie anxiously. She could see it and she was desperate to know that I could see it too.

I nodded, but that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted the whole line from me – she wanted me to be falling on to the club room floor with amazement, to cement her suspicion in truth. But the romance of it all was beyond me – I knew too much about dancers and what they were worth to gush over the boy. If Marnie was waiting for me to declare his genius, she was going to have a long wait. He was still a little breathless. I noticed immediately that his arms, despite being so thin, were a dancer’s arms. His face was set – I could see the rigid line of his jaw. A tooth grinder, I thought. Like me, he wouldn’t be a good sleeper, and would wake up with headaches. He bit his lip and started that tapping thing again on the side of his head. This time he muttered under his breath as he did it. Was he aware that he was doing it, or was it so much a part of him, such a habit, that he didn’t know it any longer? I didn’t like it.

‘I messed up a bit,’ he said. He looked beyond us, towards the door we had come through. I think part of him wanted us to leave him; he didn’t want us here.

‘A little,’ I said. ‘But messing up doesn’t matter. You’re very good.’

He looked down at his hands, then up again, and he couldn’t stop the smile on his face from spreading, even though I sensed he would much rather have kept it in check.

‘Wasn’t my best—’

‘How could it be? You’re far from your best. Your best is yet to come. But you’re a dancer. That’s the important thing. You want to dance in a company? How do you see yourself in five years’ time? If you were to dream.’

‘If I were to dream,’ he said, ‘I’d be in America. Broadway.’ He let out a loud laugh as he said the words, which startled me, and made me realize that he had never confessed this out loud to anyone.

‘Do you sing?

‘No. I don’t sing.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ I thought about Jo and his anxieties about his voice not being good enough.

‘I only ever wanted to dance. Eventually –’ he paused and looked carefully at me, as though testing how seriously I was taking him – ‘I’d like to choreograph. I want to create my own dance.’ He started tapping his head again. One two three four, one two three four.

He seemed to realize how far off this dream was, because he dignified its flightiness with a coda. ‘I’m way off this now. Way off. It’s a stupid dream. I work here. This is what’s real.’

‘Everyone has to start somewhere,’ Marnie said. ‘This is a start, isn’t it, Miss Crewe?’

Her words reminded me of Jo and Central Park. She was close to exploding into flames – her cheeks were flushed scarlet like those of a teething toddler; her longing for him was so strong that it was sending out little electric jolts into the air. Could he feel them? How could he not? Yet he seemed unmoved, unaware. I glanced at Marnie’s legs – strong, brown legs, lightly bruised on one shin – and felt that familiar spike of sadness.

‘Will you put the record on again, Marnie?’ I said calmly. I looked at Freddie Friday. ‘Will you do it all again?’ I asked him. ‘Just as you did.’

I was sounding too condescending, I thought. It was extremely hard to place this boy in my head; he was eighteen – barely a year older than the upper sixth at St Libby’s – and practically a man. Yet his vulnerability was palpable and as a result he seemed much younger than many of the girls in Kelp House. He nodded at me. Marnie was across the room in a flash, delighted to have been given a task. I watched her hands shaking as she started up the record once more, and the needle skidded before she got it under control.

I was shocked at how much the music was invading my senses, and my first response was one of fear. It did to me what it did to everyone – made me a sitting duck for those awful, unstoppable tidal waves of nostalgia. Music was the direct line to trouble, to opening up so much that I kept hidden, and, knowing this, I rarely listened to anything these days. It was safer that way, without the constant threat of intoxication. Marnie, I suspected, had never been touched by music before she had seen Freddie Friday dancing – it was one of the reasons that she had always had such excellent concentration in maths. Now it was doing to her what it had done to me. Stay technical, I thought. Don’t let anything else in.

‘You choreographed what you’re doing yourself?’ I asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘Who are the people you admire? Who are the dancers you love?’

He paused. ‘Who do you think?’

I sat back in my chair. ‘The way I see it, you’re dancing a mix of Gene Kelly and Mick Jagger.’

He tried not to smile, but he couldn’t help it. When he did, his whole face altered. I smiled back at him; it was impossible not to. That smile would bring an audience to its knees.

‘But it’s all you,’ I said slowly, realizing it myself as I said it. ‘The way that you’re moving is all yours.’

For half an hour, I worked with him. I showed him better ways to stretch and prepare his body before he started to dance, I raised his eyes, his arms, listened to him talking about the steps he was unsure of, corrected him when he had invented his own way of doing something that I could tell would lead to problems later on. Marnie sat a little apart from us, watching all the time. At first conscious of her presence, and that she had only ever seen me at school, had only known me next to a blackboard, I soon forgot that she was there – or rather, I forgot that there had been that distance between us. Freddie Friday’s need for knowledge was so intense that it shattered and then absorbed everything else around us. My worries – that I wouldn’t know what to say to him, that I would find explanation difficult – dropped away, became irrelevant.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said in that low, quiet voice of his, with its break in the middle, and I found myself lifting my own arms to show him, taking small, careful steps in time with the music to make clear what I was saying. My God, he was a fast learner.

‘Look,’ I said. I picked up his arms and placed them where I wanted them. ‘Like that. Not there – that’s a habit you have to break. There!’ I stood back. ‘If you can keep that shape when you turn—’

‘Show me,’ he said quietly.

This was the point where I should have spun and realized that there was no longer any pain in my hip, that just being with a dancer like Freddie had healed the agony – only it wasn’t like that, as life so rarely is. I spun around, a full circle – oh, yes, I managed that – but my legs, shocked and disapproving of my behaviour, were having none of it. Down I went, landing on the floor of the club room with a great thud, crunching my left hip and my leg. It broke me out of the dream – that was for sure. Marnie was next to me in seconds.

‘Oh, Miss Crewe! Are you OK? Can you get up?’ she asked. I could tell she was loath to touch me.

‘Shouldn’t have tried that,’ I said. I struggled to my feet. Tears waited impatiently under starter’s orders. I choked them back. Jesus! My whole body had gone rigid with shock; the pain was excruciating.

‘I told you I couldn’t dance any more,’ I said to Marnie. I tried a laugh, but it sounded like a strangled sob. It wasn’t the humiliation of falling – I was quite beyond that with teenage kids, even those as pretty as Freddie Friday and Marnie – but the reality of what had just happened was so hard to take. I had tried to move too much, and my body had refused. It was that simple.

‘You should sit down,’ said Marnie.

‘It’s all right,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I shouldn’t have tried that turn. I just wanted to show . . .’

My voice trailed off. Freddie Friday was standing a little beyond where I had fallen, and he was doing exactly what I had attempted to do, his eyes half screwed up in concentration.

‘The fall is optional,’ I said, trying to make a joke of it, and for a moment those words hung in the air. The fall is optional. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

Freddie stopped and bent down, catching his breath. Still the record player proclaimed the wonders of the universe in that damn song: ‘Harmony and understanding! Sympathy and trust abounding!’ Alexander would be horrified to know I had fallen, I thought. He would be fussing about calling a doctor and getting me a drink of water and should he walk me home? I was relieved that he wasn’t there.

Marnie opened her mouth, anxious to fill the silence. ‘I’ve got whisky,’ she said. ‘It’s in my brother’s hip flask. It’s good for shock, isn’t it? Would you like some?’

Is the Pope Catholic? I thought. Of course I wanted some, but drinking whisky in front of Marnie didn’t feel right at all.

‘Do you carry your brother’s hip flask everywhere you go?’ asked Freddie.

Marnie went very red. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was in the side pocket of the bag I’m using. By chance.’

She’s lying, I thought in surprise. I hadn’t spent this many years with teenage girls not to recognize the signs of untruth. Rachel Porter, I thought. Could it be that Marnie was still bearing the pain of that awful crash? She couldn’t be blaming herself for anything?

In any event, Freddie seemed to accept Marnie’s explanation, and why wouldn’t he? But he started tapping his head again; Marnie turned away quickly and marched over to her bag and pulled out the hip flask, opening it with telltale familiarity and shoving it in my direction. I could tell it embarrassed her to stand still with Freddie. She didn’t want to watch him filling spaces with the grinding, the tapping, the strange muttering that he seemed to employ as a matter of course. She needed me to step in with something, and I liked her too much not to.

‘Thank you,’ I said to her.

I felt the whisky warming into my hip. All I wanted to do was lie down on my coat, right there in the Shredded Wheat factory club room, and fall asleep. I could be packed into a paper packet and put into a box and sent off, and that didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

‘How many biscuits do they send out every day, anyway?’ I asked Freddie. I felt dream-ish.

‘They call them pillows,’ Marnie said in a low voice. She went red. ‘People always make that mistake.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Pillow. That’s nice. A good word.’

‘We’ve only twenty minutes,’ said Marnie, jerking us back to the present. She sounded worried, as well she should be. I was aware, in the way that all long-term teachers have a sixth sense for impending trouble, that none of us should have been using the factory like this. The last thing Freddie Friday needed was a drunk woman of twice his age, collapsed on the club room floor before the darts club arrived.

‘Shall we walk back into town?’ I suggested, ignoring the ironic guffawing from my left leg. ‘I could treat you both to an ice cream at the Stores?’

‘I’ve brought a picnic,’ blurted Marnie unexpectedly.

‘What do you mean?’ said Freddie. He looked confused, as though Marnie was speaking in code.

‘My mum sent me out with it,’ said Marnie. ‘It’s in my bag. It weighs half a ton.’

She looked deeply miserable suddenly, as though hearing herself as he would have heard her – ridiculous, childish. Personally, I was highly relieved. I could sit and eat, regain strength and think quickly about what to do. This was just the start, I knew that much immediately. But if Freddie wanted to dance, it would have to move forward soon. If I thought about it too hard, then I would run away. I had to act.

‘Cucumber sandwich?’ said Marnie, handing me a plump package wrapped in greaseproof paper.

‘Thank you, Marnie.’

She opened her mouth to say something and shut it again. She passed a sandwich to the boy, who ate like a savage, as though he had never seen food before.

‘Don’t they feed you at home?’ I asked, grinning at him.

‘Not enough,’ he said. He looked at Marnie with genuine gratitude. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘They feed me too much,’ offered Marnie in return. ‘Everyone in our house eats all the time – I think out of habit, more than anything else. It’s disgusting. Just one long sit-down at the dining table. And when you think of the starving in Africa . . .’

She went very red, and I rescued her. For the next five minutes, Marnie and I talked about St Libby’s and what had been happening since she left – keeping everything as superficial as we could. Marnie talked louder than usual, dropping a great deal of St Libby’s jargon into the conversation, wrongly thinking that it would make her seem more fascinating to him. In fact, the most interesting thing about Marnie FitzPatrick – her extraordinary mathematical ability – was something I steered clear of. It was more than likely that she didn’t want Freddie Friday to know of her ability with numbers. He dived into the next sandwich. I doubted that he wanted to hear me talking about Mrs Slade’s decision to introduce Italian to the curriculum the following term. I watched him as closely as I dared.

None of his features, taken individually, should have worked. . .