Frieda Klein 2 - Tuesday's Gone (23 page)

‘It’s completely unfair,’
said Reuben. ‘Everyone knows that. I mean everyone involved. Everyone who
matters.’

Frieda thought of Kathy Ripon’s
family, of everyone at the funeral. She swallowed hard. ‘I haven’t been
murdered,’ she said. ‘It’s just my reputation.’ She pointed a
finger at Reuben. ‘Don’t go quoting Shakespeare,’ she said
sharply.

He looked startled. ‘I wasn’t
going to.’

‘I’ll have a croissant,’
she said, although she didn’t think she could swallow a mouthful of it.

Josef ripped the photograph of Frieda out of
the paper and showed it to her. It was an old picture that had been taken for an
appearance at a conference a couple of years earlier. They must have got it online
somewhere. She saw one word of the caption: ‘reckless’. She spread jam on
the
croissant and cut it up but she didn’t eat any. She heard a
buzz of voices around her and heard herself responding from time to time and trying to
manage a smile. She looked at the little group and thought of them contacting each other
early on a Sunday morning and agreeing to come over, and she was touched by that. But
when they started to leave, she felt relieved. Then she thought of something. She
touched Jack’s sleeve. ‘Could you hang on?’ she said.
‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

‘What? Is something wrong?’

He looked apprehensive and ran a hand
through his hair, making it stick up in a peak. Frieda tried not to smile – he was in
his twenties, qualified as a doctor and training as a therapist, yet here he was, in his
horrible orange quilted jacket and his muddy trainers, looking just like a small boy
who’d been caught out in a misdemeanour.

‘No. I’ve a proposal for
you.’ Jack’s expression changed from anxious to eager. He bobbed from foot
to foot until she pointed to a chair. ‘Do you want more coffee?’

‘I’m OK. What is it?’

‘I’d like you to see Carrie
Dekker.’

‘Carrie Dekker? Alan’s wife?
Why? What’s happened now?’

‘As her therapist.’

‘Her therapist?’

‘You keep repeating what I’ve
just said.’

‘Me?’

‘Jack, you’re a therapist. You
have patients. That is your job. I’m asking if you would consider seeing Carrie.
She needs help and I think you could be good for her.’

‘You’re not just saying this to
be nice?’

Frieda frowned at him. ‘Do you really
think I’d recommend you to a woman in distress just to cheer you up? Anyway, she
might decide you’re not right for her.’

‘Yes, of
course.’

‘And you might decide, after the
initial consultation, that it wouldn’t work.’

‘Right.’

‘She’s in a state of shock. When
she thought Alan had left her, that was catastrophic enough, but now after what Dean did
to her …’

‘That’s too much for me,’
said Jack. ‘I don’t know how to deal with it.’

‘Yes, you do. And you can always talk
to me about it. I’ll see what she has to say.’

Jack stood up, zipping his jacket, pulling a
yellow and purple beanie over his disordered hair. ‘By the way,’ he said
suddenly. ‘Saul Klein.’

Frieda stood quite still. She felt as though
someone had hit her hard in the stomach. ‘What?’ Her voice sounded calm
enough.

‘Dr Saul Klein.
The
Saul
Klein. The one the hospital wing is named after. He’s your grandfather.’

‘And?’

‘But that’s just fantastic.
He’s a legend, a pioneer. Why didn’t you say?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Did you know him?’

‘No.’

‘It must be special,
though.’

‘Must it?’ Frieda felt very
cold, as if she was standing in an icy shadow.

‘So it runs in your family?’

Jack was clearly uneasy now. This
wasn’t going the way he had expected.

‘What does?’ she asked sharply,
and he looked disconcerted.

‘Being a doctor.’

‘My father
wasn’t a doctor.’

‘What was he?’

‘You’ll be late,
Jack.’

‘What for? I’m not expected
anywhere.’

‘Then I’ll be late.’

‘Oh. Right. I’ll be on my way,
then.’ He hovered at the open door, his scarf flapping and his face turning
blotchy in the raw air.

‘Goodbye.’

After he had gone, Frieda returned to her
chair by the fire and sat for several minutes, staring blindly into its leaping flames.
Then she picked up the newspaper and word by word, page by page, read the story. Then
she crumpled it into small balls and fed it into the fire.

‘How often do you see your
sister?’ Frieda asked.

She had met Rose Teale first a year and a
bit ago, when Rose still didn’t know if she even had a sister any more. Then, she
had been an anxious and guilty young woman, still haunted by the little girl she had
lost sight of on the way home from school and never seen again. She had felt
responsible, not just for the tiny Joanna, disappearing into thin air, but also for her
parents and their agony. Her mother had remarried and had two more children, but her
father had started drinking, sitting in his poky, grimy flat, surrounded by pictures of
his lost daughter, addled with whisky and sorrow.

She had seen her a few times since her
sister had been returned, and if anything Rose Teale was more tormented now than she had
been before. Joanna, who had been a tiny, knock-kneed, vulnerable, gap-toothed child
when she was taken, had come back unrecognizable. Their reunion had been a failure, and
Joanna had a robust, jeering contempt for Rose, for her parents, for the world they
represented.

‘Not very
often,’ said Rose. ‘She’s not keen to see me. I can understand
that,’ she added hastily, ‘given everything she’s been
through.’

‘Do you want to see her?’

Rose looked at her, biting her lower lip.
‘Honestly? Not really. I dread it. But I feel I should.’

‘Because she’s your
sister?’

‘Because she’s my sister.
Because of everything she’s gone through. Because …’ She stopped.

‘You still think it was your
fault?’

‘Yes, although I know everything
you’re going to say.’

‘Then I won’t say it. Have you
read her book?’

Rose shook her head. ‘I will, some
time,’ she said. ‘I feel I should know what she has to say.’

‘Do you have a copy?’

‘They sent me an early copy. There was
a note with it saying she wanted me to see it.’

‘Can I have a look?’

Rose appeared nervous. ‘I know from
the paper that she’s not very nice about you. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Frieda.
‘That’s not why I want to see it.’

The cover of
An Innocent in Hell
showed a silhouette of a tiny girl with her arms raised in appeal. In the background,
there was a lurid red pattern, suspiciously like flames. Frieda opened it. Under the
dedication (‘To all of you who have suffered, without hope of rescue’) was a
scrawled message: ‘To my sister Rose: with forgiveness and understanding, from
your little sister Jo-Jo.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Frieda.

‘It’s all right,’ said
Rose. ‘She means well.’

‘You think so?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

‘Really?
You’re going to read it?’

‘Yes. I’ll bring it back as soon
as I have.’

‘I’m in no hurry.’

‘Good. She’s lucky to have
you.’

Frieda didn’t want to read the book
in her house. She needed to be somewhere neutral. She thought of taking it to Number 9,
but even that felt too close to home. In the end she did what she had done a few times
before: she walked to Great Portland Street and got on the Circle Line, heading east.
She knew that to do the entire loop would take about fifty minutes, maybe an hour. It
was early on Sunday evening and the train was almost empty. There was a young woman
dressed in a pink tutu and a tartan jersey, who got off at King’s Cross, and an
elderly man who read the Bible, marking passages with a pencil, and stayed on until
Liverpool Street. After that, she was alone in her carriage until she reached Monument,
when a family got on for a couple of stops. Frieda made notes as she read
An
Innocent in Hell
, looking up occasionally as they reached a station to make
sure she didn’t miss her stop. The train nosed its way under the City – deserted
at the weekend, the streets empty and the tall buildings lit up but abandoned – then
Westminster and St James’s Park, the rich enclaves of Kensington, and finally she
was heading back towards her stop. She closed the book and emerged into the windy night,
deep in thought.

‘He made me feel attended to.’
The woman made a self-deprecating grimace. Although she had been visiting her sister and
her family in the south of France so recently, her thin face was pale and weary.
‘Less alone, I suppose you could say. He was a special kind of person.’

It was half past seven on Monday morning,
and Frieda was sitting in Janet Ferris’s kitchen with a cup of tea in front of
her. Outside, it was raining and the sky was a leaden grey. Janet Ferris was the
practice manager of a nearby GP surgery and had agreed to meet Frieda before work,
although she had said she didn’t think there was anything else to add to what she
had already told Yvette Long about Robert Poole. He had just been a neighbour, she said,
a very nice, very kind neighbour, whom she would miss.

The kitchen was small and had old-fashioned
floral wallpaper, red tiles and mismatched chairs round a brightly polished wooden
table. Frieda saw that everything was scrupulously clean. There were herbs on the
windowsill and a bowl of oranges on the work surface, next to a blue pot of hyacinths
whose fragrance filled the room. A charcoal drawing hung on the wall beside the small
white-painted dresser. A page cut out from a magazine was stuck to the fridge, with a
list of sustainable fish on it. A small transparent bird-box filled with seeds was
attached to the outside of the large window. Frieda had the sense of a self-sufficient,
frugal, virtuous life, where everything was in its place. She also took in Janet
Ferris’s ringless hands, her sad eyes, the worry lines on her
face, which was bare of makeup, the sensible clothes that hung off her slim frame,
camouflaging her. She had a voice that was soft, low and very pleasant to listen to.

Frieda nodded to the small tortoiseshell cat
curled up on a wicker chair under the window. ‘Is that his cat?’

‘Yes. I thought it was all right for
me to keep him. I don’t think there was anybody else to look after him.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t even know if he had
one. Bob used to call him the Mog. So that’s what I call him now: Moggie. It
didn’t seem right to change it.’

‘How long had Robert Poole lived
here?’

‘Mr Michkin would know exactly. About
nine months, I think.’

‘How did you two meet?’

A faint smile twitched her lips. ‘We
nodded at each other a couple of times, coming in and out of the house. And then one
Sunday morning – it must have been a couple of weeks after he moved in – he turned up
with a great big bowl of early summer strawberries. He said someone had given them to
him but he couldn’t eat them all, and would I like some?’

‘That was nice.’

‘Yes. I accepted, and then he said
that I could only have them on one condition: that I invited him in to share them. It
became a bit of a joke between us. Every so often he would turn up with something –
cherries, a tin of biscuits, a big wedge of cheese – and say I had to help him eat it.
The last time, it was mince pies.’

‘So he was a friend, not just a
neighbour?’

Bright spots appeared on Janet
Ferris’s cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t say that. It was just occasionally. But
it was nice.’

‘What did you talk about?’
Frieda was trying to keep her voice neutral. She sensed that Janet Ferris wanted to talk
to
someone, let out the shy and dammed-up feelings inside her, but
would only do so if she didn’t feel pressed.

‘I don’t know, really. Odd
things.’ Frieda waited. ‘I used to tell him what I was reading. I read a
lot. Victorian novels mostly. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and Mrs
Gaskell.’

‘Did he read a lot too?’

‘I’m not sure. I got the
impression he did – but I can’t remember him talking about specific books. I think
I used to talk more than him. Which is odd, because I’m not much of a
talker.’

‘So, books.’

Janet Ferris looked down at her hands, which
were thin, with blue veins and smooth, pearly nails. ‘He was easy to say things
to,’ she said, in a voice that Frieda had to strain to hear. ‘I once told
him I wished I’d had children. That it was my big regret in life. It was when he
brought the mince pies over. Just before Christmas. Christmas is a hard time. I have
lots of friends and I’m not alone on the day, but it’s not the same as for
people with families. I told him I’d always wanted children, and once I was with a
man and thought we’d have a family together. But it didn’t work out – and
then it was somehow too late. You know how it is – time slips by. You can’t say
when you’ve crossed the line into becoming a childless woman, but one day you
realize that’s what you are.’ She looked at Frieda. ‘Do you have
children?’

‘No. What did he say, when you told
him this?’

‘He didn’t try to tell me it
didn’t matter, which is what most people do. He talked about parallel lives. That
we’re accompanied by other selves, people we might have been, and how painful that
can be.’

Frieda felt as though something was shifting
in her mind, loosening. She had a sense of the dead man, sitting at this table,
listening to a lonely middle-aged woman talk of her
regrets.
‘Did you feel he was also talking about himself?’ she asked.

‘Maybe. I should have asked him. I
can’t believe he’s dead, someone like him. It hasn’t sunk in – though
sometimes I think about the empty floor above me, the space he used to be in. It
doesn’t seem real, though.’