In the evenings, in the boarding houses, Duncan would take a bottle out from his suitcase. He was never without one. He always offered Freda a “tipple.” She always refused. She had tried it once and it had made her insides heave. “Old Navy rum,” Duncan said. “Strip the paint off a battleship. That’s where I got a taste for it—in the rum old Royal Navy.”
Sometimes on these occasions, Vanda （who preferred port） said, “Tell us some of your war stories, then, Duncan,” with a strangely vulgar leer on her face, and Duncan would laugh and say, “Oo, will I buggery, love?” but then would proceed to regale them with the tale of how he’d gone down on HMS Formidable in 1915 in the English Channel before “popping back up again like a cork.” What was vulgar about that?, Freda wondered. She presumed that the cork story was a joke of some kind, or a magic trick. Duncan rarely mentioned the five hundred or so sailors who didn’t pop back up with him. The war was history, and history didn’t interest Freda, she’d had no part in it. She was vibrant with the present and hungry for the future.
Vanda had “lost her man” early in the war. Freda thought he must have been killed in battle, but Duncan said he’d run off to Barnsley with a barmaid. “Alliterative adultery,” he said.
“Big word,” Vanda said.
“Which one?” Duncan said.
On these companionable boarding-house evenings, sometimes in “the public lounge” in front of a hissing gas fire, but more often than not in the bedroom that Vanda and Freda shared, Duncan taught Freda to play cards, the pack laid out on the bedspread. He taught her how to cheat as well, which was even better—“cold stacking” and the “third card deal” as well as many other “tricks,” as he called them. She was a natural, apparently.
“Nimble little fingers,” Duncan said appreciatively. Freda was precocious, he told Vanda. Freda thought he meant “precious.” They played for matches. By the time they all parted company for the last time Duncan was heavily in debt to Freda. He would need to raid one of Kreuger’s warehouses to pay her back, he said. Kreuger was the Match King, he said. If she married the Match King, Freda wondered, would she become the Match Queen?
Vanda was skilled with cards, too, having learnt all kinds of tricks from her time as the magician’s assistant. She was willing to explain to Freda how you went about sawing someone in half （usually a woman） and also how you made someone disappear （also usually a woman）。 Very useful knowledge, in Freda’s opinion. “Misdirection,” Vanda said. “That’s the key.”
Vanda was happy to be a traitor to the secrets of the Magic Circle—“Punishable by death, probably,” she said cheerfully—but wild horses could not have made her divulge her age. （“A lady’s prerogative.”） Twenty-five, Freda guessed, although not to her face. “Double that and take away ten,” Duncan said.
And where was Freda’s mother in all this? More often than not, she could be seen teetering out to the Co-op with a jug and coming back with it filled with sherry “from the wood,” which makes it sound refined, when it was just a barrel with a spigot at the back of the shop.
Freda’s father, much older than her mother, died （“keeled over”） one day at work. He’d managed to sidestep the war because of his eyesight but was caught out by his heart when Freda was only five. “He was an old fuddy-duddy,” Gladys said, “all pipes and slippers, I don’t know what I was thinking,” although in fact she knew very well that she had been thinking about not having to trudge to work every day in Rowntree’s offices, which was where she had met Freda’s father, a widower “in management.” “Management” sounded rather grand to Freda’s ears. When she thought about her father, she smelt chocolate and tweed and tobacco. He used to bring home a bag of misshapen chocolates every week, a supply that was tragically cut off with his death.
Freda’s father was rarely awarded a name by Gladys now that he was in the afterlife. He was simply “your father” when Gladys spoke about him to Freda, or quite often “a pig,” awarding him in Freda’s eyes a mythic quality, as if he had come down from Mount Olympus especially to impregnate Gladys before absconding back to the divine regions. In Freda’s book of Greek myths, girls seemed to be in almost continual danger from being taken unaware by an over-eager Zeus in the form of a swan or a bull. Even an ant. Why not a pig?