“Miss Sherbourne?”
“The Vanbrugh Academy of Dance.”
“Yes, of course, I know her well. So…a dancer, eh?” he said. Then he quizzed her about what experience she had and she said, “Oh, quite a lot, Mr. Varley. In the provinces, of course,” she added nonchalantly. It seemed a good idea to get that particular drawback out of the way.
She removed a folder from her handbag—a handbag that was soon to play a part in Freda’s downfall. In her role as treasurer, Freda kept both their money and Mrs. Ingram’s jewellery in Vanda’s old bag, as there was no safe hiding place in the boarding house in Henrietta Street. The bag had a long strap and Freda wore it, bandolier-style, across her body. Anyone trying to snatch it in the street would have had to fight her to the death for it.
The folder that she removed from this precious bag also contained the portfolio of her most recent stage photographs. She passed it to Owen Varley, who laid it down on his desk without looking at it. Freda began to recite a list of some of the productions she had been in, but she didn’t even get as far as a Babes in the Wood three years ago, when she had played the usual maypole-dancing village child. Freda would have made a much better job of Gretel than the actress they chose. （She was twenty-five!） She was stopped by Owen Varley saying, “You’re a chirpy little thing, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“If you could just lift your skirt for me, Flora.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your legs, Flora. Let me see your legs, dear.”
Well, Freda reasoned, perhaps it wasn’t so odd to want to see a dancer’s legs. Dancers were all about legs, without them you couldn’t dance, could you? And things were probably different in the West End. So, somewhat tentatively, she raised her skirt to her knee. Plenty of women in London were wearing their skirts as short as this, she thought.
“Higher, dear. A bit of thigh, please.”
Freda didn’t really think of herself as having thighs. They were just legs, top to bottom.
“That’s it, Flora. A bit higher. Don’t be shy, we’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
And as a frog will remain passively in the pot as the water around it grows hotter, so Freda’s skirt gradually crept uncomfortably higher, like a slow-moving theatre curtain. At least no tentacle was touching her, she thought.
“Splendid,” Owen Varley muttered. He was growing red in the face. “Now your blouse, dear.”
“My blouse?” Freda thought that she must have misheard. He was Management, for heaven’s sake.
“Yes, your blouse, your top. Off with it, dear. I need to see your assets.”
Freda faltered. The metropolis, she thought, and undid the top button. The water was reaching boiling point. She fingered the second button and then said, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Mr. Varley.”
“Don’t be a silly girl. Come along now.”
“No.”
He heaved his great bulk up from the chair and Freda gasped in horror at the sight of his unfastened trousers. Vanda’s “dangles” suddenly seemed a frivolously inappropriate term for what looked like uncooked giblets. What had he been doing behind that desk? She turned to leave, to jump from the pot, but he was astonishingly agile for a man of his size and before she could reach the door he had ambushed her, pressing her up against the wall, the whole enormous weight of his body squashing her so that she couldn’t even breathe.
To her surprise, Freda’s thoughts strayed unexpectedly to, and then landed and settled on, Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic martyr in York who had been pressed to death—she had been laid beneath a door and then large stones had been piled on top of the door. Freda only knew this story because the Ingrams were Catholic. In her experience, only Catholics tended to be interested in martyrs. The door was from Margaret Clitherow’s own house, an odd detail that had always interested Freda. She would have preferred to have been smothered by a front door, any front door, than the elephantine bulk of Owen Varley.
“Come on, now,” he spluttered as he grappled with her clothes. Freda could feel his fat, cold fingers fumbling all over her, places he shouldn’t go. Mr. Birdwhistle’s assault on her defences seemed paltry compared to this. She was violated, Freda thought, a word that she hadn’t previously known was in her vocabulary.
“Be a good girl,” Owen Varley grunted. He sounded as though he was choking.
One of them would die. He would either have a heart attack as he groaned and convulsed as if in pain, or Freda would suffocate from the lack of air. A martyr to fame and fortune.