Thursday's Children (6 page)

‘Does she suspect anyone?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Karlsson looked troubled. ‘We can go back there together,’ he said.

‘You’d do that?’

‘I can talk to the local force. But look at the situation from their point of view: no crime has been reported, there is no evidence and no suspect. There’s another thing.’

‘What?’

‘Have you thought what all this will mean for you?’

‘Yes, I have. But this man is still out there. I don’t have a choice. Also, it’s time.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘There are things I’ve run away from all my life. My father’s death. My rape. Things that happened after. But it seems as though I’ve run in a perfect circle and I’m back with it again. In the thick of it.’ She touched Karlsson on the arm. ‘Don’t look so anxious. In my profession, this is what we call progress. I’m all right – I can do this
because
I’m all right.’

‘Is this all a problem for you?’ said Chloë. ‘Where’s your corkscrew? Answer the second question first.’

‘It’s in the drawer on the left-hand side of the cooker,’ said Frieda.

Chloë disappeared into the kitchen and there was a clattering sound. Frieda gently touched her temples. She could feel the beginning of a headache but at the moment it was even worse, like a little buzzing fly inside her skull. What she had told Karlsson was almost true. She had left his house with the determination to go home, get into bed and sleep, and if she couldn’t sleep then at least she would get into bed. But almost immediately her phone had rung and Chloë was saying she needed to see her now, absolutely this minute: could she come straight over? This,
Frieda thought, was the reason why getting a mobile phone had been a mistake, as was leaving it switched on. But she had always felt a duty of care to her niece, since she was a podgy nervous toddler, through her angry, chaotic teenage years. She was someone Frieda said yes to, and she did so again, with a sigh.

Barely five minutes after Frieda had arrived home, Chloë was at the door clutching a bottle of white wine. Now she re-emerged from the kitchen precariously clutching the opened bottle, two glasses and a small bowl. She placed them delicately on the table.

‘I found some peanuts in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’

‘Fine,’ said Frieda.

‘You know, I’ve always pictured this,’ said Chloë.

‘What?’

‘That one day it wouldn’t be just Auntie Frieda giving me a science lesson and looking disapproving. We’d be two friends meeting for a drink.’

Frieda couldn’t suppress a smile, even when Chloë poured much too much wine into the two glasses. She handed one to Frieda and raised her own. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘I just saw a news story that made me think of you.’

‘Does that mean it was some kind of murder?’

‘No, not at all. But it was about the brain. There are these people who’ve been in comas for years, but worse than comas – what’s that called?’

‘A deep vegetative state,’ said Frieda.

‘They’ve discovered they’re not complete vegetables, after all. They’ve managed to communicate. They ask them a question, and if the answer is yes, they should imagine
they’re playing tennis, and it shows up on a brain scan. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve been following the research.’

‘Isn’t that the most nightmarish thing in the world? Being trapped in your own brain and unable to move or talk or do anything, but still being conscious.’

Frieda took a sip of the cold white wine that Chloë had brought and thought for a moment. ‘A persistent vegetative state sounds quite restful. Maybe I could find a doctor who could put me into one.’

‘Frieda! You don’t mean that. Are you saying that for a joke?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘So what is the answer to my question?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one about whether me being with Jack was a problem for you.’

‘Why should it be a problem?’

‘It might be like two of your little babies suddenly growing up and having a relationship. I don’t know, it might seem like something incestuous.’

Frieda looked at her bright, restless niece, half girl and half young woman. She had watched her through her early years, through the turbulent adolescent ones. She had stepped in when her mother, Olivia, had seemed incapable of doing so. She had seen her in love with a tragic boy who couldn’t love her back. She smiled at her reassuringly. ‘I don’t feel that at all.’

‘Obviously, we met through you and it’s really interesting meeting someone who sees you in a different way. It’s quite funny, but Jack is so completely in awe of you. He’s like some schoolboy with a crush on his teacher.’

‘Chloë, you probably shouldn’t tell me that.’

‘He wouldn’t mind. And there’s nothing he’s told me about you that should embarrass you at all.’

‘I don’t think I was worried about that.’

‘That’s great. It was really important to me that it was no problem for you.’

Frieda felt she couldn’t let this go completely. ‘As I said,’ she began slowly, ‘if I have any concern, it’s that there’s quite a big age difference.’

‘Of course I’ve thought about that. You think about lots of things. That doesn’t mean they’re problems.’

‘I trust you,’ said Frieda. ‘But I don’t want you to get hurt.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Chloë. ‘You’re making too big a deal of it. That’s why I wanted to come and talk to you about it. Obviously I can’t talk to my mum.’

‘Maybe you should.’

‘It would be a complete and utter disaster. And most of my friends are too immature. I feel that you’re the only person I can really talk to about something like this. The point is, you don’t need to worry about us because so far we’re really just having a good time. And it really is a good time. In fact, the sex with Jack has been just wonderful. I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

‘Chloë …’ Frieda began feebly. She felt a desperate need to shut Chloë up but she was finding it difficult even to speak.

Chloë took another gulp of wine. ‘You clearly know that I’m not exactly a blushing virgin …’

‘Chloë …’

‘… but in the past, by comparison, it’s really just been
fumbling and groping and all a bit desperate, you know what I mean? With Jack it’s something completely different. It’s funny, because when you first meet him, he seems sweet and shy, but in fact he’s amazingly uninhibited. He’s really up for it, you know what I mean? It’s not like some angsty, anguished relationship, if that’s what you’re worried about. Really, we don’t talk that much at all at the moment. We spend most of our time in bed.’

‘Stop,’ Frieda finally managed to say, in a sort of gasp. ‘Stop. Enough.’

‘What?’ said Chloë, with concern.

‘I don’t think I should be hearing all of this.’

‘But isn’t that what you do all day?’

‘I’m not a sex therapist, Chloë. And especially not a sex therapist to my niece.’

‘Well, I can tell you, if there’s one thing we don’t need it’s sex therapy.’ She suddenly looked puzzled. ‘I thought you’d be the one person who would understand what I was feeling.’

‘I would love you to tell me what you’re feeling,’ Frieda said delicately. ‘It’s just that I’m not sure I need to know what you’re
doing
. Chloë, when I see patients in my consulting room, the deal is that they have the freedom to say anything at all, the things they’ve never been able to speak aloud. But the deal is also that what they say stays in that room. The same is true, maybe, about sexual intimacy. You can be free with someone because it stays as a secret between you and the other person. Not to be communicated to your aunt.’

‘That’s a bit boring,’ said Chloë. ‘With Jack I’ve just felt
how sex with one person can be a completely different experience. I thought it was something we could talk about.’

Frieda leaned across the table and touched Chloë’s hand with her own. ‘Jack might not want you to talk about this with me.’

‘You think you know Jack. But you don’t know him the way I know him. He’s not like you think.’ She sat up straight and put her glass down on the table with such firmness that some of the wine spilled. ‘Oh, well. If that’s what you want. But don’t you remember what it was like when you were my age? I bet the eighteen-year-old Frieda would have been a bit more unbuttoned about all this.’

Frieda put her own glass down. ‘It’s time for you to go. It’s late.’

Chloë got up and pulled on her jacket. ‘Well, that wasn’t a great success,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry you think so.’

‘If you reckon it’s all a great mistake, you should just say so.’

‘It’s clearly not a mistake,’ said Frieda. ‘I don’t see why it matters what I say.’

Chloë gave Frieda a last puzzled look. ‘Of course it does. It matters more than anything.’

When Chloe had gone, Frieda washed the glasses and put them away. She looked in the fridge and found some blue cheese, past its best, that she sliced on to crackers. Then she made herself camomile tea and had a long soak in the wonderful large bath that her friend Josef had installed for
her with Stefan’s help. Afterwards she got into bed and turned the light out. Instantly she knew that there was no chance of sleep, not for hours. In normal times she might have considered getting up and putting her clothes on, going out and walking somewhere through late-night London to wear her body out and still the voices in her head. But just now she didn’t want to leave her house. She lay and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of the events of the day, of what she had said to Karlsson, of what she hadn’t said to Chloë. She thought of the eager, happy, ridiculous face as she arrived. However, she had no intention of having an intimate discussion about sex with her niece.

So she lay there for hour after hour of a raw night, somehow having dreams without sleeping. From time to time she would look at the clock on the bedside table and see that another half-hour or hour had passed. Some people said that what you felt at four in the morning was the bleak, spare truth that you couldn’t face up to in the daytime. Others said it was just a symptom of low blood sugar and the feelings were sham and a delusion. For much of the night, though she was in a dark that seemed like it would never end, Frieda felt she was staring at the sun, a cold and joyless sun.

Somehow she must finally have slept because she was woken from uneasy dreams by a sound that seemed a horrible part of the dream, then turned into her front doorbell. She looked at the clock. A visit at this time of the morning could only be more bad news. She pulled a dressing gown around her and padded downstairs in her bare feet. She stood for a moment by the door, taking a deep breath,
delaying whatever was there for a few more seconds. Then she opened it.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

A man was standing outside, wearing a leather jacket, with a large shoulder bag. He looked tired and slightly sheepish and very concerned. It was Sandy.

‘This property,’ said the woman, ‘will be snapped up.’ She clicked her fingers expertly. Her name was Melinda. She had vermilion nails, thick peppery-blonde hair and natty brown boots, whose heels tapped briskly over the bare boards.

Sandy looked noncommittal.

‘Prime location. Recently renovated.’ Her voice followed them from room to room. ‘Double glazing. Concierge. En-suite bathroom. New boiler. No chain.’

Each room was bare and echoey, every wall freshly painted white. Frieda stood by the window, gazing out on to the street. It was drizzling, and people passed below under their umbrellas.

‘Are you buying together?’ asked Melinda.

‘No,’ Sandy and Frieda replied simultaneously.

‘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.’