Thursday's Children (22 page)

‘I don’t care about being remembered.’

They collected Jack from the garden. His shoes were clogged with mud and his face pale with cold. Frieda saw with satisfaction that he had pulled up several plants along with the weeds. ‘You didn’t have to,’ she said.

‘She’s quite scary.’

‘Some of that’s her brain tumour. The rest is her. Come on, Josef’s collecting us in his van at the bottom of the road.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Chloë. She still looked dazed. ‘What about Jack’s car?’

‘You can pick that up later. I thought you might want to go to the coast.’

‘It’s quite cold and it’s getting dark.’

‘That’s when the sea is at its best.’

Frieda directed Josef until they were driving along the side of a broad and widening estuary where boats were tipped on the mud of a low tide. In the dying light, all colour seemed to have leached away. Eventually they turned into a gravel drive and drew up outside a long white building that stood alone, looking out on to the estuary as it flowed into the grey-brown sea.

‘Sea View Nursing Home,’ read Jack, from the sign. ‘Well, that’s true anyway.’

‘Why are we here?’ asked Chloë. ‘I’ve had enough of old people for one day.’

‘I thought you could go for a walk along the coastal path and I’ll come and join you when I’m done here.’

‘Who are you visiting?’

‘The father of someone I used to know.’

‘This day,’ said Chloë, ‘hasn’t really turned out the way I was expecting.’

‘There’s a lovely little inn a couple of miles away, and after this I’ll buy us all a meal there.’

‘That sounds better.’

Frieda turned from them and went up to the main entrance. She was struck by how hot and clean and over-lit it was, and how quiet, almost as if nobody was there at all.
Her footsteps rang out. She walked up to the reception desk and pressed a bell.

A woman came out of a side door, carrying a mug. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I was hoping I could see Mr May.’

‘Robbie? Is he expecting you?’

‘No.’

‘It’s quite late for visiting.’

‘I won’t stay long.’

‘I’m sure it will be all right. He doesn’t get many visitors, poor lamb. But now he’s had two in one week! What did you say your name was?’

‘I didn’t, but it’s Dr Frieda Klein.’

‘Are you family?’

‘I used to live round here, many years ago. I was a friend of his daughter’s.’

They walked up the broad stairs and along the landing until they came to a door that the woman pushed open.

‘Robbie,’ she said, putting her head into the room. ‘Robbie, there’s a lady here to see you. That’s right. Her name is Frieda.’

Robert May had a round pink face and a smooth bald head. He was wearing a soft green jersey and baggy trousers, with slippers on his feet, and had a blanket across his lap and a book of crossword puzzles on the table beside him. He looked very cosy.

He examined her in mild puzzlement. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’

‘It was many years ago. I hope you don’t mind me coming like this, out of the blue. I was a friend of Sarah’s.’

He gazed at her with his blurred blue eyes. ‘You knew my Sarah.’

‘I only just found out that she’d died.’

He gave a sad chuckle. ‘You’re a bit late with your condolences, dear.’

‘I know. But I am sorry. Truly sorry.’ Frieda pulled a chair from the side of the bed and dragged it across so she was opposite him. ‘I liked her a lot,’ she said. ‘I went riding with her a few times.’

He smiled. Everything about him was soft and muted, as if he’d been rubbed away by time and grief. ‘Sarah loved horses. Whenever I see one, I think of her.’

‘You never married again after your wife died?’

‘No. I was sixty-one when Sarah … did that. To be honest, I had all the stuffing knocked out of me.’

‘Because she killed herself?’

‘She must have known that by killing herself she would be killing me too.’

‘Did you have no warning?’

‘She got very sad sometimes. Weepy. About her mother, problems at school. But she was a teenager. I thought it would pass.’

‘Were there people she talked to – apart from yourself, I mean?’

If Robert May was surprised by any of Frieda’s questions, he didn’t show it. He passed his fingers slowly across the gleaming dome of his head, then said, ‘She had friends, of course. That girl with red hair.’

‘Eva.’

‘Eva, yes. She was nice. And there were others. I forget their names. Mr Hollesley was very good to her as well.
Took an extra interest. He came to our house quite a few times to help her with her work. He told me he thought she would go far, with that extra bit of support.’ He smiled to himself, not bitterly but sorrowfully. ‘Go far,’ he murmured. ‘And now my girl’s buried in the churchyard a few miles from where she was born, next to her mother.’

‘Did you ever think,’ asked Frieda, not knowing how to put it less bluntly, ‘that she might not have killed herself?’

‘That’s what the man asked.’

‘The man?’ Frieda remembered what the woman at Reception had said about two visitors in one week.

‘Just the day before yesterday someone was here asking about my Sarah.’ He gave his soft chuckle. ‘I’m quite in demand.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I’m not quite sure. I think he was from Social Services or something. Just checking up on me. I told him he’d arrived a bit late in the day. He was very nice.’

‘But he didn’t tell you his name?’

‘He might have done but I can’t remember.’

‘What did he look like?’

He didn’t seem put out by the questioning. ‘I’m not very good at noticing things like that. Average. Not thin and not fat, not small and not tall. Short, greyish hair. Nice brown eyes. They reminded me of Sarah’s eyes. He said I might have another visitor, and here you are.’

So Dean had got here before her. Dean, with his nice brown eyes. Sweat prickled on her forehead. He wanted her to know he had been here.

When she got up to go, Robert May stopped her. ‘One thing you can do for me, if you’d be so kind.’

‘Of course.’

‘Their graves. I never get there now.’

‘You’d like me to visit them?’

‘Would you?’

‘I’d be glad to.’

‘Put some flowers there. Tell them they’re from me. I don’t want them to go thinking I’ve forgotten.’

Later, after Jack and Chloë had gone, Frieda went away to the shed with her phone. It took an hour and a half of being moved from person to person and waiting in virtual queues, but finally she was put through to someone who could help her. No, they couldn’t tell her if her voicemail had been accessed. But, yes, she could change her password.

It was the middle of the night, three o’clock, maybe, or four, and Frieda was awake. It was a steely, clear wakefulness that was different from anything in the daytime. Sleep seemed impossible. It was as if falling asleep was a skill she had entirely lost. If she had been in London she would have got out of bed and dressed herself, gone outside and walked down to the river or up along Regent’s Park or into the maze of streets that led east or west. Here in Suffolk, the lanes and footpaths were utterly dark. She would have needed a torch even to step outside. She could have walked into Braxton but it was too small, too familiar.

She had sometimes told her patients that the middle of the night was a bad time to think about your life and your problems. That was one reason why she got up in the middle of the night. The streets and lights and noises and smells of the city, the cold air of the very early morning, they were a way of controlling her thinking, of calming it, damping it down.

But now she felt as if she was walking in her own head, picking up ideas and memories, looking at them, examining them, arranging them, putting them aside. She thought about what had happened to her in the dark in Braxton, less than a mile from where she was lying. And what had happened? She made herself name it. Say it aloud. ‘Rape.’ It sounded strange in the darkness, as if someone else was saying it.

Frieda had had two patients who had been raped. She started to think about what they had said about it, then stopped herself. She mustn’t deflect it on to someone else, not now, not here in the dark. What did she – Frieda Klein – think about it? What had she thought about it at the time? She had been at that painful moment of having left her first boyfriend and being involved with her complicated, hopeless, lovable second boyfriend. And then this had happened, that strange mixture of violence and ghastly intimacy, of threat and monstrous desire. In a strange way, what was most important was not the act itself but what was in your head and what was in his head.

That was what had haunted her afterwards as well. It was like being loved and hated at the same time, caressed and assaulted. In fact the caresses, the stickiness between her thighs, were themselves the worst kind of obscene assault. And then, after seeing it through her eyes, seeing it a second time through his eyes: the sense of power, of having marked her, taken possession of her, taken something from her. Even if it wasn’t true, the suspicion that he – that unknown he – would believe it, and believe it for ever. She could see that clearly now. But what had her sixteen-year-old self thought? Frieda suddenly felt as if she was in a room full of people and all the people were herself, at different ages. They shared memories and habits but, even so, they sometimes found it difficult to communicate with each other. And there, in the distant corner, was her sixteen-year-old self, the Frieda who had been raped, alone and in the dark, and then not believed. Frieda wanted to get to her to question her, reassure her, but it was as if there were too many people in the way.

Lying in the dark she thought of something, something she mustn’t forget. She switched on the light and the sudden glare made her eyes ache. She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket and found a pen and a crumpled piece of paper. She wrote on it, then switched the light off and within a few minutes she was asleep.

At breakfast, Eva was in a blurry, sleepy, amiable post-sexual state. She needed to bubble-wrap several boxes of plates and bowls for a shop in Theberton but she seemed in no hurry to make a start. Josef was already outside, up a ladder, clearing gutters at the side of the house. Frieda was starting to feel like an intruder. Was it possible that this could turn into something serious? Well, what business was it of hers? She took a sip from her mug of black coffee. The mugs and the plates had all been made by Eva and had a pleasing roughness and unevenness, each one a slightly different shape. But the mugs were awkward to drink out of, with little rough patches and sharp edges. She put her hand into the pocket of her jeans. She could feel the piece of paper she’d written on in the night.

‘You said something, Eva,’ Frieda began cautiously. ‘I wanted to ask you about it.’

Eva was spooning her homemade marmalade on to two large slices of toast. She paused. ‘What?’

‘You were talking about me when we were teenagers. Apparently you have the impression that I was still a virgin when I left Braxton.’ In her head she could still hear her own sixteen-year-old voice crying out that she was a virgin. Her futile effort to make the man feel sympathy for the girl he was violating.

‘Everything seems to be about sex at the moment,’ said Eva, cheerfully, and bit off a large piece of toast.

‘Still,’ said Frieda, ‘it seems a funny thing to remember, after all these years.’

‘I suppose it’s the sort of thing that would stick in the mind. Most of us were madly trying to pretend we were more experienced than we were. We were saying we’d done things we hadn’t done, and enjoyed things we hadn’t really enjoyed and that we were in control of things that actually terrified us. So, if somebody in the group actually said they were a virgin, that was a big deal.’

‘But I didn’t say it because it wasn’t true.’

‘Well, no harm done. I’m not sure if I believed it or not.’

‘Who said it to you? It wasn’t me.’

Eva looked thoughtful and puzzled.

‘You know how it was. We talked so much rubbish. Someone would tell someone something who would tell someone else and probably half of it was made up.’

‘But in this case, who told you? I really want to know.’

‘Frieda, it was more than twenty years ago. I can’t remember who whispered what to whom.’

‘You must remember something. Was it a girl? Was it a boy?’

‘It was definitely a girl. I would never have talked to a boy about something like that.’

‘So which girl?’

‘Honestly, Frieda, I’m sorry this ever came up. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just girls giggling about each other.’

‘Please.’

Eva looked flustered. The playfulness was gone now. ‘I
don’t know. I don’t remember. But it must have been Maddie or Vanessa or one of the girls. What I do remember is I was always scared about not being with the group because I knew how we talked about absent girls when I
was
there. It seemed funny then, but it doesn’t seem funny now.’

Maddie looked as if she’d bitten something unpleasant. ‘What are you up to, Frieda? In some strange way, is this all about you?’

‘I know it sounds strange,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s something that people were saying about me and I need to know where it came from.’

Maddie took a deep breath. ‘Are you being serious? You’ve come here because you want me to remember what people were saying about your sex life when you were a teenager?’

‘I’ve got a reason for it.’

‘I’m sure you have.’

‘I’ll explain it to you later. But for the moment I need you to remember anything that you can.’

‘The answer is no. With all due respect, your sex life was not a subject of discussion between me and my friends. Nobody told me that you were or weren’t a virgin. I knew you had a boyfriend and I knew who he was and what Lewis was like, so I drew my own conclusions. Is that what you wanted to know?’

‘Thank you. Have you thought any more about who might have known that Becky was planning to go to the police?’

Maddie nodded slowly to herself and drew a deep breath. ‘I told Greg.’

‘Greg Hollesley.’

‘Yes.’

‘You and he are lovers.’

‘Were,’ said Maddie. The fight seemed to have gone out of her. ‘All of that’s over now. I don’t think it ever meant much to him. I was just convenient. But he was nice to me and made me feel good about myself at a time when I felt crap. Now – well, now I can’t believe I’ll ever want to look at a man again, or buy a pair of shoes again, or gossip with friends again.’

‘He was at the funeral.’

‘Oh, yes. He always does the right thing,’ Maddie said drearily.

‘How much time did he spend with Becky when you and he were involved?’

‘No time. I don’t think Becky knew anything about him.’ She looked sharply at Frieda. ‘If you’re thinking it was him, that’s just crazy.’

‘Why?’

‘Crazy,’ repeated Maddie. ‘He’s a head teacher. He lives in London. He didn’t know Becky. He’s a successful, sane man who knows which side his bread is buttered and who’s always in control. Of course it’s crazy.’

But he comes to Braxton regularly and he lived here when I was a teenager, thought Frieda. ‘You say he knew Becky was going to the police.’

‘I think I told him.’

After she had left Maddie’s house, Frieda had to lean against the wall for a few seconds to gather herself. Going to people she had known as a teenager, the people she had left behind,
and asking them what they had been saying or not saying about her sex life was like being publicly flayed. But she had to make herself do it. It was almost all she had.

When she knocked at Vanessa’s door it was even worse. Ewan answered. Well, why shouldn’t he? It was his house. He greeted her warmly and led her through to the kitchen, and then Charlotte was there as well, apparently finishing off a late breakfast. Vanessa gave her a mug of coffee – the third or fourth she’d had that day – and sat her down at the rustic kitchen table, but the atmosphere was a bit constrained and awkward. Frieda felt like an intrusive relative who had got into the habit of dropping round just a little too often.

‘You’re going to ask me about the timeline,’ Ewan said.

‘I wasn’t, really.’

‘We can probably do something,’ Ewan said doubtfully. ‘But it was such a long time ago. And drink had probably been taken, among other things.’

‘What timeline?’ said Charlotte.

‘It’s just something long in the past,’ said Ewan. ‘It’s not something that would interest you.’

Vanessa came and sat next to Frieda. ‘Is this about anything in particular?’ she asked.

‘There was actually something I wanted to ask you,’ said Frieda.

‘What?’

Frieda gave the tiniest flicker of her eyes towards Charlotte. ‘In a minute,’ she said.

‘Charlotte,’ said Vanessa. ‘Have you brought your washing down?’

‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ said Charlotte. ‘Are you
going to talk about grown-up things that aren’t suitable for me to hear?’

There was a terrible moment of silence, the sort of silence when you were waiting for a crash or an explosion.

‘I did want to ask your mother something,’ said Frieda. ‘In private. But we can go somewhere else.’

Charlotte suddenly looked embarrassed and vulnerable. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I need to go anyway.’ She picked up her mug and the remains of her muffin and left the kitchen.

‘I assume I can stay?’ asked Ewan, jovially.

Frieda flinched slightly in spite of herself but she was beyond that kind of shame now. So she asked Vanessa the question she’d asked Maddie. Vanessa looked at Ewan, who had turned red, shrugged and shook her head.

‘What a funny thing to ask,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t remember anything like that.’

Frieda stood up. ‘That’s all I came for. Sorry for intruding.’

‘Any time,’ said Vanessa. ‘Let me see you out.’

Frieda started to protest but Vanessa walked with her to the front door, opened it, then stepped outside with her and shut the door behind them. It was a bright morning, but blustery and cold. Frieda looked with concern at Vanessa, only dressed in one of the thin, loose cardigans she always wore.

‘I’ll only be a minute,’ said Vanessa. ‘You know, Frieda, you’ve really stirred up old memories.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, no, I didn’t say it was a bad thing. It’s just that …’ She looked around. ‘I never expected when I was young that the silly, awkward things you did would somehow stay awkward. You never really get over them.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Frieda.

‘You’re a therapist. I thought you specialized in people talking about their past.’

‘No, I mean I don’t understand why you’re saying that now.’

Vanessa looked around again, as if she was worried someone might see her. ‘The answer I gave you inside wasn’t quite right.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Things got a bit messy back then, didn’t they? We got up to all sorts of things.’

‘Vanessa, what’s this about?”

‘There was a party a week after the Thursday’s Children concert. What I remember is that Ewan and I had had a tiff about something stupid and I was there on my own.’ She paused. She seemed uncertain about how to continue.

‘Yes?’

‘It was all a bit vague. I was out in the garden with, well, with Chas.’

‘Go on.’

‘He was talking and talking. He was stoned. We probably both were. And he tried to get me to kiss him, he kept trying, wouldn’t take no for an answer. I probably did kiss him a bit. It’s not something I’m very proud of.’

‘And?’

‘I think he may have talked about girls who pretend to be experienced and aren’t really. And he may have mentioned your name. I feel awful saying this to you, but you asked.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you can see why I couldn’t say this inside.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not that it’s a big, terrible secret but it wasn’t my greatest moment.’

‘So it was Chas Latimer who said it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘Frieda, how can that possibly be good?’