Friday on My Mind (13 page)

Almost immediately Frieda asked herself, with a kind of horror, what she had done. Absconding, fleeing from the police, leaving all her friends, living among strangers, cut off from her own life: that was one thing. But this felt much worse. She was walking along the pavement with a two-year-old boy who didn’t belong to her. His father had left him and his mother was almost in a state of collapse. Yet there he was, his warm little hand in hers, entirely trusting. She could be taking him away from his home never to return and there would be nothing he could do about it. And he was so fragile. He could fall over. He could run into something. He could run out into the road. She tightened her grip as a bus passed and she felt the wind blowing against them in waves.

‘Ow,’ Ethan said, and she loosened her grip, just a little.

He was small and helpless and there were about another twelve or thirteen years before he would be able to look after himself. She thought of her niece, Chloë. Make that fifteen or sixteen years. How did any child manage to get through to adulthood?

‘What’s that?’ said Frieda, pointing.

‘Bus,’ said Ethan.

‘What colour is it?’

‘
Red
,’ he said, in an assertive, contemptuous tone, as if the question were insultingly easy.

‘We’re going to play a game,’ said Frieda. She wasn’t exactly sure if two-and-a-bit-year-olds knew how to play games, but she had to try something. ‘You’re going to call me “Carla”.’ There was no answer. She wasn’t even sure if he had heard her. ‘Ethan, can you call me Carla?’ His attention was entirely fixed on a man who was walking towards them leading – or being led by – four dogs, each of a different breed and a different size. Frieda waited until they had passed.

‘Carla,’ she said. ‘Can you say that? Go on.’

‘Carla,’ said Ethan.

‘That’s really clever. My name is Carla.’

But Ethan seemed already bored by the idea, so Frieda pointed out a bicycle to him and a bird and a car, and quite soon she was running out of objects so she was relieved when she saw the green archway ahead at the entrance of the Three Corners Garden Centre. She had never noticed it before. It was set slightly back from the road, next to a large shop selling bathroom fittings. The entrance was a narrow driveway but, behind, it opened up on both sides into a mews area that, a hundred and fifty years earlier, must have been stables.

‘What we’re going to do,’ said Frieda, ‘is find the best flower that we can and we’re going to bring it back as a present for your mummy. Is that a good idea?’ Ethan nodded. Frieda looked around and saw, with some alarm, a section of ornamental trees and climbing flowers. ‘A little flower,’ she added. ‘A really little one.’ Then she knelt down, so that her face was at the same height as Ethan and whispered to him, in what she hoped was a playfully conspiratorial tone, ‘What’s my special name? My name in our special game?’

Ethan frowned in intense concentration but said nothing.

‘Carla,’ said Frieda. ‘Carla.’

‘Carla,’ he said.

She stood up, put on her glasses. Where were the roses? She walked across to a dreadlocked, tattooed, multi-pierced girl, who was wielding a hose along a line of pots. Ethan looked up at her in fascination. She pointed to the far side, where the space was bounded by a high wall. Frieda and Ethan went across; she saw nobody, so they moved slowly along the rows of roses. They were named after characters from English history and TV celebrities and old novels and stately homes and current members of the Royal Family.

‘Carla?’ said a voice.

Veronica Ellison was a striking woman: her blonde hair was pulled back off her face, and she was wearing royal blue leggings, wedge trainers and a loose white T-shirt. She looked summery and fresh. She was regarding Frieda with an appraising expression that Frieda found disconcerting. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought through how she was actually going to do this. The woman hadn’t sought her out. There was no reason why she would want to talk to a stranger about Sandy, even if she had anything significant to say.

‘Dr Ellison?’

Veronica Ellison smiled at Ethan. ‘Is this your son?’

‘He’s called Ethan,’ Frieda said. ‘I look after him.’

‘Not much fun for him here,’ said Ellison. ‘Has Carla brought you to this boring gardening centre, Ethan?’

Ethan looked up at her sternly.

‘Frieda,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘He’s at a funny age,’ said Frieda.There was a pause. It was entirely up to her to make this work, she thought. ‘It’s very good of you to see me,’ she said. ‘I needed to talk to someone who knew Sandy. I’ll only be a few minutes.’

Veronica paused, obviously wondering whether she had the time for this. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There’s a little café here. Shall we grab a coffee?’ She looked at Ethan. ‘And they do very nice ice cream.’

Ethan didn’t answer. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then back again.

‘Does someone need the toilet?’ said Veronica.

‘What?’

‘I mean Ethan,’ said Veronica. ‘I’ve got a three-year-old nephew. I recognize the signs. There’s a toilet in the café.’

‘I was just about to take him,’ said Frieda, feeling like the most incompetent nanny in London. She wondered about the chances of her getting Ethan back to Sasha alive and basically uninjured. She took him into the ladies’ toilet and went through the complicated process of unfastening his dungarees and hoisting him onto the bowl, then redressing him and getting him to wash his hands. Back in the café, Veronica had ordered two coffees and a bowl of ice cream with two scoops: strawberry and chocolate. She had taken over, Frieda saw. That was good. She arranged a cushion on the bench so that Ethan could sit and help himself. Within a few seconds, the ice cream was partly in his mouth and partly around his face. Veronica contemplated him.

‘When I see a child, like Ethan, I partly want one of my own and I partly think it would just be too much of a burden.’

‘It has its compensations.’

‘You must think so, looking after other people’s children for a living. Do you find that satisfying?’

‘It’s what I do,’ said Frieda. She thought about her consulting room, the people who came there with their troubles, and here she was, a fake nanny with a false name, wearing tacky, alien clothes and feeling her way into an appropriate manner. ‘Children keep you seeing the world differently,’ she added. ‘That’s what makes it interesting, constantly surprising.’

‘I can see that. But it must be hard work.’

‘I like hard work. I need purpose – everyone does,’ said Frieda, firmly, knowing at the same instant that she sounded too like her old self.

A gleam of interest appeared in Veronica’s eyes; she sipped at her coffee and looked at Frieda. ‘I don’t quite understand you, Carla.’

Frieda was worried that Ethan might correct her again but although his eyes widened suspiciously, his mouth was too full of ice cream. ‘Why?’

‘You seem to have your hands full but then you somehow track me down. What for? What do you want from me exactly?’

Frieda took a breath. This was it. ‘I knew Sandy. He was kind to me at a difficult time of my life. For a while we were friends of a sort and then we lost touch with each other. Then I read in the paper about what happened to him. I felt … I felt I needed to talk to someone else who knew, who’d known him at the end.’

‘Why?’

‘The Sandy I knew was calm and happy and in control. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen to him.’

‘I was just his colleague,’ said Veronica. ‘I was working on a project with him.’

‘What sort of project?’

‘It’s technical,’ she said dismissively. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘But do you recognize the Sandy I described?’

Veronica visibly hesitated. She was clearly deciding whether she could really commit herself to this. ‘What were your words? Calm? Happy?’

‘And in control. Someone who knew his place in the world.’

‘He helped you, you say.’

‘Yes.’ Frieda paused, but seeing that Veronica was waiting for her to elaborate, she said: ‘He helped me by allowing me to be myself.’

As was happening so often now, she had a sudden vivid flash of Sandy as he had once been, brimful of confidence and love. She saw the smile he turned on her. It was perhaps more painful to remember him happy than to recall him grim, angry and wretched. It almost took her breath away, the memory of what they had once had.

Veronica shook her head. ‘I liked him a great deal,’ she said. ‘He was kind. I saw that in him. He was the cleverest person I ever worked with. But he …’ She took a deep breath. ‘Things were complicated.’

There was a silence broken only by Ethan’s slurping and the scraping of his spoon in the bowl. Frieda wondered whether to take the risk and decided she had to. ‘Were you …?’ she began.

‘Were
you
?’ said Veronica, with a smile.

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It wasn’t the right time.’

‘It wasn’t the right time for me either,’ said Veronica.
‘But we had a brief … Well, I don’t know what the word for it is. Something. I wish I’d known the Sandy you were describing. The one I met was more complicated. He could be cruel, or perhaps indifferent is a better word for it. He’d been in a relationship and it had ended badly.’

Frieda felt suddenly cold. Had Sandy mentioned her name?

‘He hated talking about it. But sometimes I felt he was like someone who had been in a terrible car crash or suffered a terrible loss. Well, he had suffered a terrible loss and he wasn’t over it. In fact, I’d say he was stuck in it and didn’t even want to move on.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Frieda, painfully aware that almost for the first time she was saying something truthful. ‘That must have been hard for you. Being involved with a man who wasn’t emotionally available.’

Veronica said to Ethan: ‘You’re a lucky boy. Carla’s a clever woman, isn’t she?’

‘No!’ Ethan scowled at her.

‘He was such an intelligent man,’ said Veronica to Frieda. ‘He was intelligent about everything except his own life. He was drinking too much, he didn’t look after himself. He needed help and he wouldn’t be helped. It’s awful what we do to each other, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It is.’ Frieda liked Veronica and felt that they could have been friends in another life.

‘And what we can’t do. Sometimes it felt like I was standing by a lake watching a man drown and I couldn’t do anything about it.’ Suddenly Veronica Ellison’s expression looked vulnerable and touching. ‘I’m not normally that sort of person – I don’t like being helpless. Why am I telling you this?’

‘Because I’m a stranger.’

‘That’s probably it. Anyway, he’d just had an affair with someone else before me and he seemed to feel he’d behaved pretty rottenly, although he didn’t go into any details. He never went into details. I’m sure he was also seeing another woman while we were together. If you can call it together. And then, sure enough, he moved on. But even when he was doing it, I felt sorry for him, rather than angry. But that’s my problem, I suppose.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Frieda. ‘Unless having insight and being compassionate is a problem. Which, of course, it can be.’

Veronica raised her eyes and studied Frieda’s face. ‘Hmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You really didn’t sleep with him?’

‘No.’ Frieda didn’t lower her gaze. ‘As I said, it wasn’t the right time. And I wasn’t the right person for him.’ That, at least, had turned out to be true.

‘I think you would have been good for him. Someone not in his intellectual world. Someone grounded, sensible.’ She met Frieda’s gaze. ‘That sounds rude. It wasn’t meant to be.’

Frieda shook her head. ‘So at the end, when you last saw him, Sandy was sad, distressed.’

‘There was something else.’

‘What?’

‘I think he was scared.’

‘Oh. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why do you think he was scared?’

‘I just knew. I can’t explain.’

‘He didn’t actually tell you?’

Veronica frowned. ‘This is turning into an interrogation,’ she said.

‘Sorry. But had someone threatened him?’ Frieda persisted.

‘The police have asked me all of this already. I don’t know why I should go through it again with a nanny. Why does it matter so much? Sandy’s dead.’

‘It matters because someone killed him. Perhaps he knew he was in danger.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ve told you everything I know – though I don’t understand what you’re looking for. Now I need to go.’

Frieda lifted Ethan onto the floor. His hand was sticky and hot in hers.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it.’ Although in truth, apart from discovering that Sandy had perhaps been scared, she hadn’t got much further. All Veronica could tell her was what she had already known: that Sandy had been unhappy and his life had become in some ways dysfunctional.

‘It’s been such a shock,’ said Veronica. ‘For all of us.’

‘Yes.’

‘As a matter of fact –’ Veronica stopped, biting her lip.

‘What?’

‘I was going to say that a group of us are having a little memorial for Sandy this evening. We felt we had to do something. There can’t be a funeral yet because of the investigation.’

‘That sounds a good thing.’

‘It’s nothing formal. It’s at the home of his head of department. People will speak of their own particular memories of Sandy, perhaps one or two people will read things. I wondered if you might like to come.’

Frieda thought about Sandy’s sister, Lizzie, and of those friends of his she’d met and who would recognize her at once, no matter what she was wearing.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Who’ll be there exactly?’

‘A small group of us from the university and then a few other people who knew him and whom we knew how to get in touch with. Not his family, not that he had much family, and nothing intimidating.’ She smiled encouragingly at Frieda. ‘You wouldn’t need to say anything. But it might be good for you to hear other people remembering Sandy as well.’

‘Sandy,’ said Ethan, suddenly and loudly. ‘Where’s Sandy?’

Frieda leaned across and wiped his mouth comprehensively.