by Nicci French
‘Wait here,’ said Frieda to Josef.
She went into the living room. The television was on with the volume turned down. She went up the stairs and into Juliet’s bedroom. There was a smell of abandonment and neglect. Juliet was lying in bed, her hands gathered beneath her throat, her hair awry, her usually immaculate face smudged with old makeup. She was awake, staring glassily at the ceiling.
‘Hello,’ said Frieda.
Juliet didn’t answer. She gave a single dry blink. Frieda could almost hear the brush of her lashes on her cheek.
‘Are you all right?’
She gave a laugh that was almost a gasp, but she still didn’t take her gaze from the ceiling. ‘That’s funny. I’m dying, or had you forgotten?’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I have a growth in my brain.’
‘I know.’
Juliet turned her face and fixed Frieda with a harsh, bright gaze. ‘Why did you come back?’
‘We can talk about that later. Tell me what’s wrong.’
‘I was all right before you came. Now I’m dying.’
‘You were dying before I came,’ Frieda began, but then stopped. What was the point? ‘Are you in pain?’ she asked instead.
‘Sometimes,’ Juliet said, in a fierce, low voice. ‘Sometimes, Frieda, it’s better not to know. Not to know about your brain tumour, or your husband, or what your friends think, or what happened to your daughter when she was sixteen. I don’t want to know.’
‘But –’
‘I don’t want to. Rubbing my nose.’ She looked a bit startled by the phrase. ‘I’ll start dribbling soon,’ she said, ‘and talking gibberish.’
‘I’d like to talk to you about your health regime and what the doctors have told you –’
‘I don’t want to.’ She cut Frieda off. ‘I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to talk to you. You just trail disaster in your wake.’
That was so close to what Frieda thought about herself that she didn’t respond, just pressed the base of her nose between her finger and thumb and waited for her feeling of helpless anger to subside.
‘Go away,’ said Juliet. She gave a half-sob, like a retch. And then she said, in a voice that sounded unlike her usual one, ‘Fuck off and leave me in peace.’
Frieda stared at her in astonishment: she had never heard her mother swear. Juliet herself seemed surprised.
At that point, Frieda’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She took it out and saw it was an unknown caller.
‘Answer it,’ said Juliet.
She heard a hoarse voice she didn’t recognize.
‘Frieda?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Lewis. Lewis Temple.’
Frieda spun on her heel away from her mother’s eyes, and looked out of the window now where the rain was splashing against the panes.
‘Someone told me you were back,’ he said. Back, as if it had always been her destiny to return one day. ‘And that you’d asked after me. So I got your number from them and thought I’d ring.’
Eva, thought Frieda, wryly. Or maybe Vanessa; even Ewan. Although Lewis hadn’t been strictly a part of their group (he was older than all of them, druggier, poorer), this was Braxton, where everyone knew everyone else and where news was blown around the town by the hot wind of gossip.
‘Can I call you back in a couple of minutes?’ Frieda asked.
‘Why not? It’s been twenty-three years, what’s a few minutes more matter?’
Frieda switched the phone off and turned back to her mother. ‘Can I get you something?’ she asked. Juliet shrugged. ‘Some tea, perhaps. And when did you last eat?’ Again, the shrug and the hostile stare. ‘I’ll get you some tea and toast then.’
‘Go away, Frieda.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right.’
She went into Juliet’s small study and called Lewis back.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What happens now?’
‘Do you want to meet?’
There was a silence. She heard a match rasp against its box, his deep intake of breath, and could see him drawing smoke deep into his scorched lungs, his cheeks hollowing, flakes of tobacco on his lower lip.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘When?’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m on my way to a call-out. But I can always make a diversion. For old times’ sake.’
Downstairs, she found Josef standing at the sink, washing dishes. He looked contented and at home.
‘We’re going,’ said Frieda.
‘We only just come now.’
‘I know. But she doesn’t want me here. And there’s something I need to do. Someone I’ve arranged to meet. You can drive back to London. I’m really grateful, Josef.’
He shook his head. ‘I stay.’
‘There’s no room in my shed. It’s tiny, for one person.’
‘I stay here.’ He gestured at the kitchen. ‘Make things nicer for your sick mother.’
‘She’s not in a good mood, Josef.’
‘I stay and cheer her. Make soup with barley. You come back later.’
‘But you’ve never even met her!’
‘I stay,’ he repeated.
Frieda gave up.
She had arranged to meet Lewis in the coffee shop that she had gone to after her visit to the police station. It wasn’t really Lewis’s kind of place. He would hate the chocolate-box landscapes on the walls, and he had never been one for tea and scones. She arrived before him. The woman who had served her before was there again and recognized her at once. Frieda ordered a pot of tea and cake to go with it.
Three women bustled through the doorway, carrying shopping bags, their hair damp from the rain. Then a gaunt man with peppery hair and a pale face meshed with lines entered, letting the door slam behind him. He was wearing a long overcoat and had a scarf wrapped several times round his neck. Frieda thought he looked like a cross between an artist and a homeless person. He glanced around him, his eyes flicking from table to table until they came to rest on Frieda. Then he smiled.
Later, Frieda tried to separate out the emotions that had run through her when she understood that this stooped, meagre man was Lewis. She felt a kind of sorrow at what the years had done to him. She remembered him as he had been the last time she’d seen him, strong and gorgeous with his shock of hair and his white teeth, his dandyish second-hand clothes. She saw herself through his eyes, middle-class, well-off, entitled Frieda Klein, sitting in this comfy little establishment with a cup of tea in her hand. She tried to keep her expression neutral. ‘Thanks for coming out like this. You must be wet through.’
‘Are we going to talk about the weather?’ He raised his eyebrows mockingly at her and sat down, not taking off his coat or scarf and stretching out his legs in their balding corduroy trousers. She felt he was making a self-conscious display of his shabby clothes, his creased face, his poverty, and daring her to react.
‘How have you been?’
‘You mean, since we last met?’ He gave his laugh again. She could practically hear his lungs crackling. She wondered what drugs he took now. When she had known him he’d experimented with anything that came his way; an oblivion-seeker. His recklessness had, she supposed, been part of his glamour. Now he just looked worn out, bashed about by life.
‘I suppose so.’
‘You first. Though you look as though you’ve done just fine.’
‘I’m a psychotherapist now.’
‘I’m an electrician.’
‘You were always good at science. I live in London.’
‘I live here, nearby.’
‘So you never did get to leave?’
‘Not yet.’
Frieda beckoned the waitress over. ‘Tea?’ she asked Lewis.
He grimaced. ‘OK.’
‘Cake?’
‘No cake, Frieda.’
The way he said her name brought his young self back to her.
For a moment she sat in the dazzle of memory.
‘My mother is dying,’ she said.
‘Is she? I’m sorry. How she hated me, though.’
‘She thought you were leading me astray.’
‘Ah, well, maybe I was. Though I always thought you were the leader. I just followed you, anywhere.’
They smiled at each other suddenly. It was odd, thought Frieda, how she felt more comfortable with this damaged man than with the other characters from her past.
‘I’m going to be here on and off,’ continued Frieda. ‘I wanted to make contact with people I used to know.’ She didn’t like misleading Lewis, but thought of Becky and pressed on. ‘There are things in the past that trouble me.’
‘Unfinished business.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why did you run away?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Who did you run away from? Your old ma? Your dead dad? Me? Was it me?’ He lifted his eyebrows. She saw he had a miniature puckering scar running down from the corner of one eye. A fight, perhaps; a fall.
‘Maybe from all of those.’ And more, she thought.
‘You never explained.’
‘I don’t think I had the words.’
‘So you went your way and I went mine.’
The tea arrived and they waited until the woman serving them had gone away again.
‘Things had unravelled a bit,’ said Frieda, carefully.
‘Whatever that means.’
‘I’ve been wondering.’ She could think of no way to approach this subtly. ‘Shortly before I went away, someone broke into our house.’ She couldn’t recall exactly what the pretext had been for the police investigation. ‘Do you remember?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Or, at least, I have a dim memory. But, then, I’ve had a few run-ins with the police over the years.’ He smiled; his teeth were crooked. ‘Maybe it’s all merged. What kind of break-in?’
‘Someone got into the house,’ Frieda said. Footsteps in her room, the breath on her face, the television downstairs.
‘What’s that got to do with you leaving?’
‘I wanted to know if you remembered. I’ve been thinking about everything, trying to get things clear. That concert everyone went to: Thursday’s Children.’
Lewis looked at her vaguely. ‘It’s no use asking me to remember little things like that,’ he said, self-mocking. ‘How do I know what I was doing twenty-something years ago? I’ve destroyed most of the brain cells I used to have.’
‘You used to love that band.’
He broke into a little hum that Frieda supposed was from one of their songs, then stopped and frowned at her.
‘I was going to go with you,’ she continued. ‘It was the biggest thing to happen in Braxton since, well, since the witch was burned probably. But we had a violent row just before.’
‘We had lots of those.’
‘This was the worst.’
‘What was it about?’
‘I can’t remember. I know that we said terrible things to each other.’ She had a sudden flashback: Lewis standing opposite her, his fist clenched and his boy’s face contorted with fury and distress. ‘So I stormed off and went home to bed.’
‘And I went to the concert without you.’ He was suddenly subdued, almost wretched. ‘I remember that like it just happened.’
‘Do you remember the concert itself?’
‘A few bits, but it’s all tangled up. I remember you, though. Little things. That bike ride we went on. You made jam sandwiches with stale white bread and we climbed up a rock and looked out over the sea and ate them, and I rolled a joint and there were seagulls diving down at us. It was nice. One of those nice days that stay with you.’ He gave a little shake of his head, like someone getting rid of an unwelcome thought. ‘And I remember you saying to me once that nobody’s meddling could come between us. We were stronger than that.’
‘Did I?’
‘Then you buggered off.’ He snapped his fingers in the air. The three women looked up from their table curiously. ‘I remember that too. One day you were kissing me in the cemetery, and then you were refusing to have anything to do with me, for no reason I could understand, and then you were gone. You could have been a dream, except I kept one of your shirts. I used to smell it and think, Where the fuck are you, Frieda bloody Klein?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Frieda. She was gazing at him steadily.
‘Then, bit by bit, you faded. And now here you are. I’ve no idea why you wanted to see me again.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the time before I left and I wanted to work out what happened exactly. What did you make of my friends?’
He stared at her. ‘What is this? I was eighteen, nineteen. You were, what? Sixteen? I hope you were sixteen.’
‘When I left I was.’
‘Did I like your friends?’ He mimicked her voice; his tone had turned hostile. ‘Not much, if you want to know. Jeremy from the posh school, who was still in love with you and glowered at me as if he wanted to do something terrible to me, that creep Chas whatever-his-name-was.’
‘Latimer.’
‘That’s the one. What kind of name is that? And that other one, clowning around.’
‘Ewan?’
‘Ewan. Yeah. And that girl he was with. God, it’s all coming back to me. And Maddie – was that her name? Always trying to get the boys to fall in love with her. Big eyes, nice tits.’ He wanted to anger her, but she didn’t react. ‘She didn’t like you much, did she?’
‘Probably not.’ And even less now, she thought.
‘And ginger Eva,’ he said. ‘But I liked Eva.’
‘She told me.’
‘Did she?’ That laugh again: it made him seem sad and run down. ‘If she could see me now! Poor Eva.’
‘Why do you call her that?’
‘She loved me, God help her, or thought she did, and I loved you, and you – well you didn’t love anyone, really, did you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You loved your dad, that’s what. None of us really stood a chance.’
Frieda looked at the abstract picture opposite her, the one that looked like a Turkish rug. Was that true?
‘I should go,’ he said. ‘Things to do. Sockets to fit, circuits to mend.’
He shifted in his seat, patted his pockets as if he was checking for his phone, his keys.
‘Did you marry?’
‘Yes. And then I did it again.’
‘And now?’
‘I wasn’t much of a husband, as it turned out.’ He wasn’t smiling any more, but looking at her through narrowed eyes. ‘Every time I got something I wanted, I destroyed it.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘A boy. Fifteen. I was just a kid when his mother got pregnant and she was even younger. It was all a mistake but, God, I fell in love with him when he was born. I don’t see him as much as I want. His mother won’t let me.’
‘Why?’
‘You know. The usual stuff.’
‘Drugs?’
‘And my general badness of character. Though I don’t think I’ve ever been like that with Max. He was always my second chance. But she was angry and wanted to punish me and I don’t blame her. You know how it is.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Ah, well. Life.’ He shrugged his shoulders, thin under the heavy coat. ‘And you’re on your own.’
‘Why do you say that?’ said Frieda, thinking of Sandy’s face when she was telling him that it was over.
‘You’ve got the look. Maybe you always did.’
Lewis stood up and so did she. She didn’t know how to say goodbye to him. He gave her a nod.
‘See you then,’ he said, nonchalant. Then, as he was leaving, he said, ‘I used to dream about you and wake up crying. I hope that doesn’t start again.’
When Frieda stepped into her mother’s house she had a shock: it was as if she had stepped into the wro
ng room. The reek of illness and neglect was gone. The surfaces looked not just cleared and ordered, but scoured. She walked through to the kitchen. The plates were stacked in rows by the sink. There was a smell of lemon and disinfectant. And she saw the lower half of Josef’s body, the faded jeans, the scuffed heavy work shoes. The upper half was in the cupboard under the sink. She nudged his foot. Josef edged his way out, stood up and rinsed his hands under the tap.
‘Now the water goes through,’ he said.
‘I thought you were just going to make some soup.’
‘Is problem?’
‘No, it’s good. It’s what her children should have done.’
He pulled a dismissive face. ‘Just while I was waiting.’
‘Now it’s time to go.’
‘But first you say goodbye to your mother, no?’
Frieda felt like she was fifteen years old again. ‘All right.’
Her mother was in bed, half asleep. But the clothes had been folded and arranged; even her hair had been brushed. Frieda leaned close to her mother’s face. ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few days.’ Her mother murmured something. ‘What?’
‘That man. That Russian.’
‘What about him?’
‘From the council.’
‘He’s not from the council. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘He comes every day. He takes things.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘He’s stealing.’
‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Frieda. She stood up and left the room.
In the van, Frieda suddenly remembered the envelope that Eva had thrust into her hand as she was leaving. It was square and pale pink and had spidery looped writing on the front, like an old woman’s. She didn’t recognize it.
She unstuck the gummed flap and slid out the glossy greetings card inside. There was a picture of lilies on the front. She frowned and opened the card, her eyes drawn first to the card’s message, written in baroque font. ‘With deepest sympathy’, it read. Under this, in the same spidery, precarious writing as was on the envelope, she read:
