1 Oxford, England, Present Day #2
Freida had come to live in Oxford after following her first serious boyfriend here.
The boyfriend was now long gone (and, she maintained, blissfully forgotten) but her love affair with the city was still going strong and looked set to last. The two women had first met at a student party that Freida and the boyfriend had attended at Somerville College, where Lyssa had been studying English Language and Literature.
They had bonded instantly, and Lyssa often thought that they were living proof that opposites did indeed attract.
Where Freida was loud and bold and gregarious, she knew she was quiet, introspective and was never happier than when she had her nose in a book – either one she was reading or the one she was currently writing.
Whereas Freida was small and curvy, she was five feet eleven and slender.
Whereas Freida preferred a very short haircut, Lyssa hadn’t cut her hair in years, keeping it up in a ponytail on the top of her head, so that it swung down to the middle of her back.
Freida’s eyes were of a rich chocolate brown and full of warmth and humour, but her own eyes were dark blue and she had often been told that they gave nothing away.
Her husband Kyle had once told her that he could spend hours looking into them.
Now Freida sighed and noisily crunched the last of the crispbread that she’d used to scoop up the dip and licked her fingers supremely unselfconsciously, reminding Lyssa of a sumptuous feline. ‘So, I take it you’re going to go, then? To this posh lunch?’
‘Yes,’ Lyssa said firmly. ‘Apart from the fact that I can’t afford to turn down potential work, I’m really curious now.’
‘You do remember what that did to the cat, right? Oh well, I know better than to argue with you when you’ve made your mind up.
But do me a favour – call me just before you go inside and call me the minute you come out, yeah?
I’ll wanna know all the details. I bet this Elizabeth whoever-she-is is a seventy-year-old millionairess with masses of white hair and a facelift, who wants you to write about her psychic parrot who can tell the future by picking up certain tarot cards in its beak. ’
Lyssa laughed. It had been Kyle who had invented ‘The Most Out There Game’, whereby everyone had to come up with the most ridiculous scenarios for things. She’d then taught it to Freida and then Carter and Jason, her next-door neighbours of the last six or so years.
‘Nah, too tame,’ she mocked her pal now.
‘I bet she’s a tall, blonde bombshell and a Russian gangster’s moll who wants me to write a book so that she can encode secret messages in it, giving away bank details of some offshore account to her confederates on the sly – because, naturally, she’s really a spy for the Russian government and a turncoat. ’
‘Oh, naturally,’ Freida nodded solemnly. ‘And no doubt has some nefarious plan to abduct you and make you write to her dictation.’ She shrugged with faked nonchalance. ‘Oh well, even more reason to let me know you’ve escaped her clutches unscathed, then.’
Freida’s silly words came back to her the next morning as she walked along the High Street, making her smile. With the chimes of Carfax echoing behind her as she reached the doors of the restaurant, she couldn’t help but think that anywhere less dangerous was hard to imagine.
All around her, tourists wandered about taking photographs, whilst the famous swifts of Oxford screeched high overhead as they darted like tiny black arrows around the city’s dreaming spires.
It was another hot day, and she had worn her second-best summer dress, a long, floaty, mainly white creation with tiny embroidered forget-me-not blue flowers that contrasted with her raven hair and complemented her eyes.
She was wearing flat white sandals and the minimum of make-up.
She wanted to look presentable and professional but also feel comfortable, and it was not as if she was on a hot date or anything.
In fact, she was not at all sanguine that she would be meeting anyone at all and was quite prepared to be told that there was no reservation waiting for her inside.
She was proved wrong in short order, however, by the smartly dressed young man behind the lectern who ushered her into the main dining room and across to a discreet table in the corner.
The woman seated there and looking expectantly her way resembled neither a gangster’s moll nor an old lady with a psychic bird, but a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length curly brown hair and brown eyes that were no match for Freida’s.
She was, however, small like Freida, but much thinner, and had an air of nervous energy about her that was not exactly restful.
‘Hello, you must be Lyssa?’ she asked, popping up to shake hands.
Her grip was strong, and she really did shake Lyssa’s hand, briskly up and down, not merely clasping it lightly and then letting it drop, as so many people did.
It was perhaps because of this that Lyssa couldn’t help but notice that, though her hands were well maintained and her nail polish was a bright red that exactly matched her lipstick, the fingers themselves were nicotine-stained and unattractively bony.
‘Yes, and you must be Elizabeth?’
‘Yes, that’s me! Elizabeth Grainger. I’m so glad you could come – please sit down. Wine?’
Lyssa said no to wine but yes to a long cold lemon and lime with ice and settled herself at the table.
‘Please, take your time,’ her companion urged, handing over a menu and then fussing with a glass of mineral water.
She fidgeted constantly, reminding Lyssa of a canary in a cage, moving and flitting about, trying to find a way out.
She was dressed in a suit that screamed an expensive Italian or maybe Parisian maker that Freida would have been able to name in an instant, but which was beyond Lyssa, who tended to get most of her clothes from charity shops.
Lyssa opted for a salad option and once the waitress had delivered her drink and taken their orders, Elizabeth finally sat back a little and studied Lyssa thoughtfully.
‘I really have read a lot of your work, you know,’ she said earnestly.
‘I wasn’t joshing you or trying to get on your good side.
I did my research.’ She named a couple of Lyssa’s contemporaries, and their best-known books, but concluded, ‘In the end, though, I think you’re just right for what I had in mind. ’
Lyssa nodded happily but still warily. ‘I’m looking forward to hearing all about it,’ she prompted her hopefully, and Elizabeth smiled, revealing small, white but slightly uneven teeth.
‘In other words, get on with it, woman,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ she continued, before Lyssa could assure her that she’d meant no such thing. (Though, of course, she had.)
‘All right.’ Elizabeth took a deep breath. ‘If I said to you Amelia or Monty Montrose, what immediately springs to mind?’
Lyssa blinked, fighting down an all-too-familiar feeling of mild panic.
It had been just as she feared – the name rang only the faintest of bells.
Perhaps something of her consternation must have shown, for Elizabeth quickly waved her hand in the air in a wait-a-minute gesture and added, ‘Think 1960s pop culture.’
And with that, Lyssa had it. ‘Oh! Yes – she was, er, associated with that band . . . the Lucky somethings . . . I keep hearing a song now in my head . . . About frightened hearts . . .’
Elizabeth very tunefully hummed a few bars of a melody and Lyssa nodded.
‘Yes, that’s it. It’s coming back to me.
’ Although the 60s had been decades before her birth, a surprising number of the tunes from that era still lingered on into modern times, and not just the really famous ones from the likes of the Stones and the Beatles, but haunting songs like ‘Nights in White Satin’ by the Moody Blues, and of course, the iconic and unforgettable Procol Harum song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
And what with modern-day bands ‘remaking’ or ‘remixing’ the songs all the time, and with them popping up as advertising jingles or being given a new of lease of life when used as background music in films set in that era, she, like most of her generation, could probably name quite a few 60s hits.
‘Yeah, “The Frightened Heart” was the Lucky Cuckoos’ only number one hit,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but they had six hits in all. Then their lead singer died, and they never really recovered.’
Lyssa nodded. ‘Was he one of the casualties of rock ’n’ roll culture, or a car crash maybe . . . ?’
‘Oh, drugs, I’m afraid. Like so many of them,’ Elizabeth confirmed sadly.
‘We lost so many great talents that way back then. And then Monty went the same way; well, more or less. She was only twenty-three. She was my great-aunt, I think. Or grand-great aunt? I can never figure these things out.’ She took a deep breath.
‘Let’s see – Monty’s older sister was Raine Montrose (or rather Cadman after she got married), and she had only one child, Felicity; and Felicity is my mother. ’
Lyssa acknowledged how explaining that connection could be confusing.
‘Exactly,’ Elizabeth said, grinning. ‘Anyway, Monty never lived long enough to have children of her own, but Granny remembered her, and always talked about her with love and some anger. Mummy, as a child, was sort of fascinated by her, but then I suppose to a little girl, Monty must have seemed like a sort of larger-than-life fairy-tale figure. She was rather beautiful and very famous in her own right, you see – here, let me show you.’