by Nicci French
‘I’m just working stuff out.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Just stuff. Don’t look at me as if you can see through me. It makes me feel sick.’
‘Why?’
‘It makes my skin crawl.’
Frieda scrutinized Becky. Then she said, ‘I know this will make you feel even angrier, but I want you to think a bit about your language.’
‘What do you mean, my language?
‘Rubbish, shitty, crap, sick, skin crawling.’
‘So? They’re just words. Everyone uses words like that.’
‘It’s a language of disgust.’
‘So? Maybe I am disgusted.’
‘Why?’
‘Aren’t you going to ask me about my dad?’
‘Your father? Why?’
‘Mum said you’d want to know about him. She says that’s what it’s all about. She thinks I blame her for their divorce and let him off too lightly. She says that I can be furious with her because I know she won’t leave me like he did – because she’s stuck with me, for better or for worse, and that’s what motherhood is all about. Not being able to escape your nasty daughter. I didn’t ask to be born. She says I can’t face up to the fact that my dad went off with this other woman, but I know it anyway, and that –’
‘Hang on, Becky.’ Frieda held up her hand. ‘I don’t want to hear what your mother thinks.’
‘Why not? You’re only seeing me because you were best friends at school or something.’
Frieda opened her mouth to protest, then stopped herself. ‘That’s not the point at all,’ she said. ‘This is about you, Becky Capel, not about your mother and certainly not about the fact that she and I knew each other many years ago. You can tell me things and I won’t pass them on to her or anyone. You can feel safe here and you can say things that you feel unable to say to other people, because I’m a stranger.’
Becky turned her face away. There was a long silence.
‘I make myself sick,’ she muttered.
‘Do you mean that you literally make yourself sick?’
‘Both.’ She gave a choked laugh. ‘What do you call it? Metaphorically, that’s the word. My teacher would be proud of me. I literally and metaphorically make myself sick.’
‘Have you ever told anyone that before?’
‘No. It’s disgusting.’
‘Do you know why you do it?’
‘Food’s disgusting too. People taking gobbets of dead animal and bits of fish and mouldy cheese and dirty roots from the ground and putting them into their mouths and chewing them. And then swallowing so it all goes deep into their own bodies to rot away inside.’
Becky looked at Frieda as if to see the effect she was having. ‘Apples are all right,’ she continued. ‘And oranges.’
‘So you say you’re starving yourself because food disgusts you?’
‘I don’t like plums. I hate bananas. And figs.’
‘Becky …’
‘What? I hate this stupid conversation. Who cares what I eat? They’re starving all over the world and here one poor little rich girl is being sick because …’
‘Because?’
‘Because. Because nothing. It’s just a phase.’
‘And truanting from school.’
‘It’s boring.’
‘School’s boring?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So if school’s boring, what do you find interesting?’
‘I used to like swimming, especially in the sea when the waves are big. Swimming in the rain.’
Despite herself, Frieda felt the tug of an old memory, the grey North Sea and breakers surging towards her, shingle shifting under her bare feet. ‘But not any longer?’
‘I haven’t been for a bit. And now it’s nearly winter. I hate being cold. I get cold to my bones.’
Frieda was beginning to reply, when there was a rap at her front door. Maddie was on the doorstep, standing under an open umbrella, her cheeks pink and damp, a shopping bag in one hand.
‘Am I too early?’
‘Early for what?’
‘I thought the session would be over by now.’
‘It’s not a session, it’s a conversation.’
Maddie closed her umbrella and leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘What do you think?’ she half whispered.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What do you make of Becky?’
‘I think she’s a very intelligent young woman who’s sitting a few feet away from us, probably able to hear everything we say.’
‘But has she said anything?’
‘I’ll call or email you this evening. We can talk about it then.’
‘She’s going to be all right, isn’t she? You are going to help?’
A few hours later, Frieda sat in her study at the top of the house, listening to the rain on the roof and the wind against the windows. She sat for several minutes in deep thought and then she picked up the phone. When Maddie answered, Frieda could hear the eagerness in her voice.
‘I was hoping it would be you. Becky wouldn’t tell me anything about her visit to you. I hope she wasn’t surly.’
‘No. She wasn’t surly.’
‘Did you discover anything?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean by that. But I think your daughter needs help.’
‘That’s why I made her see you.’
‘I saw her today in my house for a chat – because you asked me to see her. I think she needs professional help.’
‘You make it sound so serious!’ Maddie gave an anxious, grating laugh. ‘I just need a bit of advice, someone to point me in the right direction. You can do that, can’t you? Get to the bottom of her moods and put her back on track.’
‘It’s important to keep clear boundaries. She needs to see a therapist, not someone who – in her eyes – is connected to her mother.’
‘You’re a therapist, aren’t you? As for being connected …’ Her tone changed, grew chillier. ‘We never really hung about with the same crowd, did we? So we needn’t worry about that.’
‘I’ll see Becky for a proper consultation,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ll make an assessment, and I’ll tell you what I think she needs, and I can recommend someone for her to see, although she would need to be involved in that decision.’
Maddie’s tone became warm again. ‘That’s lovely. But what do you mean by a proper consultation? It sounds a bit intimidating.’
‘It will be in my room in Bloomsbury. I’ll give you the address. It will last exactly fifty minutes. I’ll charge you seventy-five pounds.’
‘You’ll charge me?’
‘Yes.’
‘That seems a bit cold-blooded, I must say.’
‘I saw Becky today because I know you,’ said Frieda. ‘Next time I’ll see her as a patient. That means you must pay me, as if I were an electrician or a plumber.’
‘You’re being very stern. Is that how much you charge everyone?’
‘It’s an average fee. If you’re not in the position to pay that much, I’ll make a concession.’
‘I’ve got plenty of money, thank you, Frieda. That’s one thing Stephen did leave me with. It just seems rather odd, paying for a little favour.’
‘It’s not a favour any more. This is what Becky needs and this is what I do.’
3
Frieda took the tube up to Finsbury Park. She needed to clear her head. She walked along the edge of the park, then turned off on the old cutting that was like a secret green tunnel through Hornsey to the foot of Highgate Hill. Once it had been a railway line but now it had been abandoned to the trees and the dog walkers and the foxes. The yellow autumn leaves were everywhere, soggy under her shoes, blown around her face. There was a dank smell of decay, of mushrooms somewhere, though Frieda couldn’t see any. It felt like a time for change, for endings and beginnings. She was composing a sort of speech in her head when she was interrupted by the ringing of her phone. She looked at the screen. It was her old pupil, Jack Darg
an. She answered.
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Jack. ‘I’m always a bit shocked when you answer your phone.’
‘I’ve discovered that not answering the phone is even more complicated than answering it.’
‘I’ll need to get my head around that one.’
‘Is this about something?’
‘Can we meet?’
‘Has something happened?’
‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
Frieda felt a twinge of alarm. Jack usually rang her when he was in distress and he had periodic episodes of doubt about the whole idea of being an analyst.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.
‘No, no. And don’t start trying to guess.’
Frieda suggested he come round to her house later in the day but he insisted that he wanted to meet on neutral ground and named a pub, the Lord Nelson, that was just around the corner from her house. They would meet there in two hours.
Half an hour later she was sitting in a now-familiar upper back room of a Highgate terraced house, looking into the wrinkled, kind, shrewd face of her own therapist, Thelma Scott. Frieda took a deep breath and began the speech she had rehearsed on the walk over.
‘I’ve always found two difficulties with therapy, and they’re entirely different. One of them is starting, because you don’t want it or don’t think you need it, and the second is ending, because you’re addicted to it or you just don’t know how to bring it to a finish. It’s difficult to say, “Enough, that’s it.”’
‘And that’s what you want to say today, is it?’ asked Thelma, smiling but still grave. ‘Enough?’
‘Yes.’
‘What makes you feel that?’
‘We’ve been on a journey,’ said Frieda. ‘And I think we’ve come to the end. Or an end. I’m grateful. I really am.’
‘As you well know, Frieda, usually when patients end therapy, they do it gradually. It can take weeks or months.’
‘I don’t like goodbyes. Usually, I like to leave without saying goodbye at all.’
Thelma’s face wrinkled again. ‘If I was your therapist, I’d want to discuss that. Oh, hang on …’
Frieda couldn’t stop herself smiling. ‘You think I’m wrong?’ she asked.
Thelma shook her head slowly.
‘When you first came to see me – when was it? Eighteen months ago? – I wasn’t sure what therapy could do for you. I’d never seen anything quite like it. When you called me up wanting to see me, I knew you’d been attacked and almost killed. You’d obviously been through a severe trauma and needed some kind of help. But then, just before we began, you were also involved in a terrible incident where a man was killed, a close friend badly hurt. You told me how you had walked all the way home, twenty miles, covered with blood.’
‘It wasn’t my own blood.’
‘I remember you making that point to me, and I honestly wondered whether what you really needed was time in hospital.’
‘I was on fire,’ said Frieda, ‘and I didn’t know how to put myself out.’
There was a long pause.
‘I think the image you used is about right. Not the one about being on fire, though that may have been true last year. I mean the one about being on a journey. You’ve got to a station and it might be a good time to get off.’ She paused. ‘For a while, at least.’
‘Because it’s only a station on the way?’
‘We’ve talked a lot in this room and I think we’ve developed.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘I don’t think you’ve shed all the pain of the episode that made you seek me out. I think you’ve absorbed it, made it a part of you, learned from it. But maybe what you can’t put your finger on is that it involves all the things you never talked about with me: your past, your parents, where you came from.’
‘When I see patients, they generally talk about their childhood and their parents, and also about their lovers. I know I haven’t done that.’
‘No.’ Thelma regarded her. ‘But you’ve talked a great deal about Dean Reeve.’
‘It’s true. For everyone else, Dean is dead. The police think he’s dead. His ex-partner thinks he’s dead. His body – what people took to be his body, rather than that of his poor brother Alan – has been cremated and the ashes scattered. He used to be the media’s favourite villain but even that has faded. He’s gradually becoming forgotten, but not by me. For me he’s alive. He’s like a ghost, but he isn’t dead. He watches me, watches over me in a way. I feel like he’s out there and he’s waiting for something.’ Frieda saw Thelma’s expression and shook her head. ‘He’s not a figment of my imagination, not some kind of Freudian other. Dean Reeve is a murderer and he’s out there in the world.’
‘I don’t know about him being in the world, but he’s inside your head. He haunts you.’
‘He does haunt me. But he’s alive.’
‘Alive for you.’
‘No. He’s alive. Therapy can help me with my feelings, my fears about Dean, but it can’t help with that.’
‘So, you’re saying that you haven’t talked about your parents and your lovers because Dean Reeve gets in the way?’
‘I’ve actually been thinking about the past. The distant past, I mean. A couple of days ago a woman came to see me, someone who’d been in my class at school. She wasn’t a friend, I hadn’t seen her since we were sixteen years old, but she wanted me to talk to her daughter. I saw her yesterday, and I have this feeling about it. Something I can’t put my finger on.’
‘Try to put your finger on it.’
‘It felt like my past has come for me.’
‘Perhaps that’s a good thing.’
But Thelma thought she saw a sadness on Frieda’s face she hadn’t seen before.
‘I don’t see how it can be.’
When Frieda arrived at the Lord Nelson, Jack was already there. He didn’t notice her at first and she was able to take a proper look at him. He’s grown up, she thought. She’d first met him as a young medical student, nervous, argumentative, self-conscious and insecure. Now he looked his own man, even if his own man was dressed like a gypsy, with a patterned jacket over a purple shirt, black and white striped trousers and a multicoloured striped scarf. His tawny hair – usually an unruly mess – seemed to be arranged in a kind of quiff. She blinked and advanced, and as she did so, he turned and noticed her, flushed and suddenly looked much more like the old Jack. He offered to buy her a drink but Frieda only wanted tap water. Jack grumbled and put a slice of lemon into it. ‘That makes it a bit less boring,’ he said.
He bought himself a half of bitter and led the way to a table in the corner.
‘How’s work going?’ asked Frieda.
Jack shook his head energetically, like someone in a play shaking their head so that the people in the back row could see. ‘I can’t talk about anything like that,’ he said. ‘I had to see you face to face because there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘So tell me.’
Jack looked Frieda straight in the eyes. ‘I’m seeing someone.’
‘Okay,’ said Frieda, slowly. ‘Clearly I should say I’m happy for you but why all the fuss?’
‘Because the fact is, I thought I should tell you because it happens to be someone you know.’
‘Someone I know?’
‘Yes.’
Frieda felt slightly dazed, as if her brain wasn’t working properly. She ran through a sort of mental address book. Who could it possibly be? And in any case, whoever it was, why the big drama about summoning her and telling her like this? ‘All right, then,’ she said eventually. ‘Are you going to tell me or am I supposed to guess?’
‘I think you need some sort of explanation, Frieda, just because –’
‘For God’s sake, Jack, who is it?’
‘Frieda.’
She turned and saw her niece, Chloë, bright and cheerful. ‘Chloë, what are you …?’ But then she realized the truth and stopped.
‘Hello, lovely,’ Chloë
said to Jack, and he got up and they kissed and Chloë gave a murmuring sound. ‘So how is it going?’
‘I was about to tell her.’
‘Could you get me a drink?’ Chloë said. ‘A white wine.’ She turned to Frieda. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got my ID.’
The two of them watched Jack start to push his way ineffectually through the crowd to get to the bar. Then they looked at each other.
‘Chloë,’ said Frieda.
‘I know you’re going to find this weird.’
Frieda started to speak but Chloë interrupted her.
‘First, you’re my aunt and you’ve known me since I was born, and then you were virtually my surrogate mother, since my own mum is a complete waste of space –’
‘Chloë –’
‘And you spent all that time helping me. You basically got me through my science GCSEs single-handed. I just wish you’d done the same for my A levels, but that’s another story. And I’ve lived in your house and we’ve gone through all sorts of emotions together. And I know that Jack is like a son to you –’
‘A student, in fact.’
‘But people aren’t like that with you, Frieda. Everyone becomes a part of your family.’
‘I don’t think that’s right at all.’
‘What I’m saying is that this probably feels almost like incest to you and it must be even stranger because, really, you were the person who brought us together …’
‘Brought you together?’
‘By which I mean it was through you that the two of us got to know each other, and I’ll never stop being grateful to you for that because he’s so lovely. As you know.’
Frieda couldn’t immediately think of anything to say and when she was finally about to speak Jack arrived with Chloë’s white wine and sat down.
‘Is everything all right?’ he said nervously.
‘It’s fine. We’ve sorted it out.’ Chloë raised her glass. ‘To all of us.’ She took a gulp of her wine. Jack sipped his beer while giving Frieda a wary glance. Frieda left her glass sitting on the table. Chloë frowned. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’m trying to take it in.’
‘I know it’s difficult for you,’ said Chloë. ‘You probably think of me as if I’m, like, twelve years old or something. But I’m eighteen. This is legal. We’re not breaking the law.’
