Thursday's Children: A Frieda Klein Novel (Frieda Klein 4)

by Nicci French

  ‘It’s just me,’ added Sandy.

  She looked uncertain, not knowing how to read the situation. Frieda saw her eye dart to her wedding finger, bare of rings. ‘Well, it’s perfect for one person. Do you have any questions?’

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ said Sandy. He put his hand on the small of Frieda’s back. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was like a hotel room,’ he said, when they were out in the street. ‘Where next?’

  Next was Hampstead, and tiny. The pictures on the website were misleading. It was a bijou first-floor flat cleverly carved out of an inadequate space. There was a miniature kitchen, like a boat’s galley, and a shower room scarcely large enough to hold the shower. The chandelier of coloured glass and the capacious leather sofa gave the living room a claustrophobic feel. The bedroom was painted red and one wall was lined with mirrors.

  ‘Horrible,’ said Sandy, when the agent left them alone.

  ‘Creepy,’ said Frieda.

  ‘And expensive.’

  ‘It’s Hampstead. Look, you can see the Heath from here.’

  ‘Yes. You don’t need to look like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anxious.’

  ‘Was I looking anxious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I love you for coming back like this.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But it feels as if I’m being given no choice.’

  ‘You mean that you don’t want my sudden return to force you into a commitment you might not want to make.’

  She didn’t reply, just stared out over the green wilderness in the distance.

  ‘I know what I’m doing, Frieda. This is what I want. You’re as free as you ever were. But this was my wake-up call.’

  ‘But your job …’

  ‘It’s not a problem. There are openings here. What was I doing, living on the other side of the Atlantic from you? I realized what I always should have known – that there’s no point being with you if I’m away from you. After all –’

  ‘Done?’ asked the agent cheerily, coming into the room.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘No.’

  The big basement flat in Bermondsey was well within Sandy’s budget and, what was more, it had a garden that was large by London standards, with a little patio and a murky pond at the far end where they spotted a single mottled goldfish. But it smelt damp; the ceilings were high and the rooms dark, cold and comfortless.

  ‘I like the brickwork,’ said Frieda, trying to be upbeat.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s a fireplace you could open up.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘It needs work, of course.’

  ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I was sure the moment I walked through the door. You can weigh up all the pros and cons and practicalities, but first you have to fall in love.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘We did, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes. We did.’ Frieda touched him briefly on the cheek. ‘I’ve been wondering. Where are you going to live while you’re looking?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to move in with you. I’ll stay with my sister and spend time with you when I can. I’m going to buy a place, get a new job, and return to the life I shouldn’t have left in the first place.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Where next?’

  The flat in Clerkenwell was on the ground floor of a beautiful late-Georgian house. It was flanked by a few similar buildings, a fragment of a street that had otherwise long ago been bombed or bulldozed. As the young man showing them round explained, the owners had separated in the midst of renovating it. It felt as if they had just walked out, leaving their broken life behind them. Units were ripped from the kitchen floor; a partition wall had been half demolished; a cracked marble fireplace had been removed and was leaning against the wall. There were paint pots and brushes on a trestle table; a ladder in the middle of the living room; clothes spilling out of drawers in the bedroom; books in piles waiting to be claimed. But the rooms were large and light, with windows running almost to the floor and exposed beams. The back door led out to a tiny walled garden with a fig tree in the corner where the city suddenly felt miles away.

  ‘It was their project,’ said the agent, dubiously. ‘It’s got great potential.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Frieda, half in love with the place.

  ‘For someone else,’ said Sandy, firmly. ‘It would take years, and it’s not what I want to be doing with my time.’

  ‘What do you want to be doing with your time?’ asked Frieda, a little later, sitting in a café a few streets away, eating a hot buttered teacake and looking at the increasing rain outside, the leaves blown past the window like yellow rags.

  ‘Not plastering walls.’

  ‘Do you know how to plaster walls?’

  ‘I want to spend time with you.’

  ‘I suppose we could plaster the walls together,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘No. Other things need our attention.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you, Frieda.’

  She winced. ‘That makes me sound like an emergency.’

  They walked to the next property, which was between King’s Cross and Islington. Although it was only mid-afternoon, the light was beginning to fail. There were still weeks to go before the shortest day of the year, and Frieda thought of her own house waiting for her, the shutters she would close against the dying day and the fire she would light. They passed a busker, his hair wet and an open violin case containing just a few coins on the ground beside him. He wasn’t playing anything, but as they approached he passed his bow across the strings half-heartedly. Frieda threw in several more coins and he gave a small salute.

  The property they were viewing – they’d unconsciously started to adopt estate-agent vocabulary – was tall and narrow, a green front door and steep stairs with a worn carpet. The flat was on the two top floors. The agent fumbled with the keys to open the door and Frieda and Sandy walked swiftly through the rooms; the owners would be coming back in a quarter of an hour and, anyway, they’d seen too much of other people’s homes for one day. There was a living room with two big windows, a narrow kitchen leading off it. A study, just big enough for a desk and chair, that looked out over someone else’s wet garden with a silver birch tree and a green bench in it. And upstairs, a bedroom with a roof terrace. Sandy and Frieda pushed open the warped door and stepped out on to it, the rain blowing in gusts against their faces. They gazed out across rooftops, cranes and spires, the glittering lights of the great city dissolving into a streaming grey sky.

  ‘That’s St Pancras.’ Frieda pointed.

  ‘This will do just fine,’ said Sandy. ‘We can drink coffee up here in the mornings. Now let’s go home.’

  10

  The phone rang. It was Josef. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Of course I’m here,’ said Frieda. ‘I answered the phone.’

  ‘You are going out this evening?’

  ‘What?’ said Frieda. ‘No, I don’t think –’

  ‘Good,’ said Josef. ‘We bring food.’

  ‘We?’ Frieda began, but the phone had already gone dead.

  An hour later the bell rang. Frieda opened the door and Josef and Reuben were standing on the step. Both of them pushed past her. Frieda saw that they were carrying shopping bags. There was a smell of garlic, vinegar, a clink of bottles.

  ‘You’re going to have to stop doing this,’ said Frieda. ‘We’re grown-ups now. We make arrangements days ahead of time.’

  Josef laid the bags on the table and turned towards her. Frieda saw that he was wearing a dark jacket and a tie. He stepped forward and hugged her.

  ‘Hey.’

  Josef and Reuben looked around and saw Sandy coming down the stairs.

  ‘You are
welcome back,’ Josef said. He stepped forward and hugged Sandy and Reuben hugged Sandy, then Frieda. She felt a sudden nostalgia for the days when men shook hands. Middle-aged men seemed to have turned into schoolgirls. Reuben produced a bottle of vodka from one of the bags and Josef disappeared into the kitchen, returning with four shot glasses.

  Frieda gave a helpless shrug to Sandy. ‘He knows my kitchen better than I do,’ she said.

  Josef filled the glasses and handed them round. Reuben looked at Josef. ‘Say something.’

  ‘No,’ said Josef. ‘You say.’

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ said Frieda.

  ‘I speak,’ said Josef. He looked into his glass. ‘I was proud that you came to me. It was a trust. I do not want to just say words. Words which make me feel better but not you feel better. You go now and have bath in the bath I put into your house.’ He looked at Sandy. ‘And you if you want also with her. Or if she wants.’

  ‘Please, Josef …’ said Frieda.

  ‘We have food and drink and we prepare and in one hour we eat. But first …’ he raised his glass ‘… for a friend. Frieda.’

  Josef and Reuben drained their glasses. Sandy and Frieda took wary sips.

  ‘I will have a bath,’ said Frieda. ‘Alone. And thank you for this, but can we say that, from now on, we’ll plan these events in advance? With fair warning.’

  Josef turned to Sandy. ‘You relax. Drink. Go for walk. We prepare food.’

  Frieda found it difficult to enjoy her bath because of the sounds below her of dishes and pans. Something broke and she heard male voices shouting. She had an impulse to run downstairs and deal with whatever crisis seemed to be unfolding but instead she sank briefly below the surface of the water. Perhaps whatever it was that had broken wasn’t something of hers. And if it was, what did it really matter? After the bath, Frieda pulled on trousers and a shirt.

  When she came downstairs, her living room was transformed. It was mainly lit by the flickering candles that had been placed between the dishes that covered the table. There was a bowl of thick red soup with dumplings, there was something wrapped in cabbage, large sausages, pickled fish, beetroot salad, chopped potatoes, an unfamiliar kind of little mushroom, a huge wheel of bread, small pastries, a whole duck, rolled pancakes …

  ‘The wine isn’t Ukrainian,’ said Reuben. ‘I thought Australian was a bit safer.’

  ‘There is good Ukrainian wine,’ Josef protested. ‘But Reuben bought wine.’

  He gestured Frieda, Sandy and Reuben to sit around the table and spooned large helpings on to Frieda’s plate.

  ‘Whenever you feel a strong emotion,’ said Frieda, ‘you cook the food of your home.’

  ‘That is funny, no?’ said Josef.

  ‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s good to have food that is like a kind of memory.’

  Sandy picked up a rough-textured rissole and nibbled at it. ‘This is good. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Josef. ‘The woman in shop give me lots of choices. Pork, I think. Or sheep.’

  Everyone started to eat. Occasionally Josef named a dish or described or said what was in it but there didn’t seem the need to say much and Frieda liked that, or at least felt relieved. Reuben opened a second bottle of wine and started refilling the glasses. Frieda put her hand over her glass.

  ‘You know,’ said Reuben, ‘when someone does that, I’m always tempted to call their bluff and just pour the wine and keep on pouring until they move their hand out of the way.’

  ‘I’m so glad you didn’t try that,’ said Frieda, and then she noticed he was picking up his glass and looking reflective. ‘You’re not going to make a speech, are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m going to speak. If that’s allowed. First, I just want to say to you and Sandy that I’m sorry if we’ve ruined a romantic evening that you had planned.’

  ‘No,’ said Sandy. ‘This is nice.’

  He put his hand on Frieda’s leg, beneath the table.

  ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Reuben continued, ‘but I suppose I’m someone who believes – in fact, whose life depends on the belief – that you deal with things by talking about them. But you, Sandy, when Frieda told you, you got on a plane and came over. And Josef brought food. It’s like an offering, like something in the Old Testament. You know, Frieda, when you first told me, my first reaction …’ He paused. ‘No, my second reaction, was a kind of self-pity. I’d been your therapist, your supervisor, and you’d kept that from me. I don’t know whether that says something about me as a therapist or you as an analys– …’ Another pause. ‘Analysand. I can’t even say it properly. Or something about therapy. Sorry, this is becoming all about me. Again. But probably the best thing is to sit with friends, eat strange food, not say too much. Have you told anyone else?’

  ‘I told Sasha. And Karlsson.’

  ‘Good,’ said Reuben. ‘And that’s the end of the speech.’

  ‘But what will you do?’ said Josef.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandy. ‘What will you do?’

  Frieda looked down at her plate. The food was lovely, the sort of comforting food that, if you were hungry and if you had the right sort of mother, your mother would cook for you to soothe you and make you feel better.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What I planned to do is what I’ve done for twenty-three years, which is just to carry on, to stop him – whoever he was – having any power over me. Things feel different now. I know he’s still out there. But I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  There was a silence and the men exchanged glances.

  ‘When you start talking like that,’ Sandy said, ‘I have a feeling that something’s going to happen.’

  ‘Well, something is going to happen. I’m just not sure what yet.’

  Sandy pushed his plate away. ‘I’m busy tomorrow morning. Let’s go in the afternoon.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘To Braxton. I’ll drive you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Frieda was startled. Sandy looked at her with bright eyes, waiting. ‘But I need to make arrangements.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t just turn up.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘And my patients –’

  ‘It’s the weekend.’

  Frieda stared at Sandy. For more than twenty years this had been waiting for her. She should have known that she couldn’t escape.

  11

  ‘We need to find somewhere to stay,’ said Frieda.

  It was the first time she had spoken for a long while. They had driven out of London in silence, Frieda looking out of the window at the landscape flowing past her: places that were both familiar and yet strange, like things seen in a dream. A year and a half ago, she and Sasha had visited the church where her father was buried, but that was because she believed that her deadly stalker, Dean Reeve, had been there. They had not gone to Braxton; she had not been back there since the day she had left, when she was not yet seventeen.

  ‘So we’re not staying with your mother?’ said Sandy.

  ‘Why would I stay with my mother?’

  ‘Will you go and see her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind.’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere and then tomorrow you can go to the police station.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday,’ said Frieda.

  ‘I don’t think crime stops at weekends.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me anything before we get there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you realize how little I know about your past?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, for instance, I know you have an older brother called David, because he’s Olivia’s ex and Chloë’s father. Isn’t there another brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘His name’s Ivan.’ Sandy waited, until Frieda added reluctantly, ‘He’s younger than me and he lives
with his family in New Zealand.’

  ‘So you never see him.’

  ‘I never see him.’

  ‘And you never see David either, though he lives near Cambridge.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or your mother.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long’s it been?’

  ‘About twenty years.’ It had been twenty-three.

  ‘Is she so bad?’

  Frieda turned towards Sandy. Driving, he could sense rather than see her dark stare on him.

  ‘I’d rather not talk about it at the moment.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I need to concentrate.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Just concentrate.’

  She was looking at the fields and hedges, at the oak tree that brought back a flash of memory, remembering the way the sky was so large out here, pocked now with the first pale stars. At the canal glimpsed from the road, like a secret path leading back towards the city, the farmhouse half hidden between trees, the church spire in the distance. A scattering of modern houses, windows lit up in the gathering darkness. Light-industrial units. Pylons marching across the horizon. Like a face long pushed out of the mind, she remembered it all and saw what had altered and what had remained the same.

  As she gazed out of the window into the darkening landscape, she remembered faces, too, that she hadn’t seen for decades, young, cruel, anxious, cocky, beseeching. She brought their names to the front of her mind, to make them seem more solid and real, less of a figment of her suddenly surging imagination. It’s so strange, the things you remember, she thought: her first cheap cider, all the words of that poem by Robert Frost, the hairy legs of her biology teacher seen through her beige tights, Sallys Newsagent, whose lack of apostrophe had so irritated her father, one stickily hot sports day and the spring of the turf underfoot, the view from her bedroom window and ice flowers on the panes in winter, blowing on a grass blade held between her thumbs to make it whistle, swollen glands, someone crying. She saw her mother’s face, ironic and unmoved. Something else darted into her mind, swift, fugitive – she couldn’t hold it and it disappeared again.

  Braxton lay in a shallow valley so that the whole of it was visible as they approached, the last straggle of lights blinking on the hilltop ahead. Frieda was astonished by how small it was. She’d grown used to the endlessness of London: it was impossible even to say where it began and where it ended. Braxton was defined by the tilted bowl of the valley that contained it, and the river that ran through it. It was surrounded by large fields and clumps of woods, farms and quarries. In the distance, the orange glow of Ipswich illumined the night sky.