‘Christ,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘Russian,’ he said. ‘But good.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘What was bad in your day?’
Frieda took another sip of Josef’s vodka. It stung the back of her throat and then it spread hot through her chest. She told Josef about sitting on Olivia’s bathroom floor as Chloe knelt with her face over the lavatory, retching and heaving, even when there was nothing left to vomit out. Frieda hadn’t spoken much, just leaned across and gently touched her on the back of her neck. Afterwards she had wiped Chloe’s face with a cold flannel.
‘I didn’t know what to say. I just kept thinking what it would be like, when you’re sick and you’re vomiting, to have some older woman lecture you about drinking sensibly. So I didn’t say anything.’
Josef didn’t answer. He just looked into his glass of vodka as if there was a faint light in the centre of it and he needed all his concentration to see it. Frieda found it comforting to talk to someone who wasn’t trying to be clever or funny or reassuring. So then she told him about her visit to Alan. To her own astonishment, she heard herself telling Josef how she had previously gone to the police about him.
‘What do you think?’ Frieda asked.
Very slowly, with a care that had now become exaggerated, Josef filled her glass once again. ‘What I think,’ he said, ‘is that you shouldn’t think about it. It’s better not to think about things too much.’
Frieda sipped at the drink. Was this the third glass? Or the fourth? Could it be the fifth? Or had Josef been topping up the drinks so that it didn’t really count as separate drinks but instead one sort of elasticated drink that gradually grew? She was just starting to agree with the idea of not thinking when her phone rang. She was so surprised by what she had been about to say that she let it ring several times.
Josef looked puzzled. ‘You don’t answer?’
‘All right, all right.’ Frieda took a deep breath. She didn’t feel entirely clear-headed. She picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’
‘I love you.’
‘Who is this?’
‘How many women ring you up to say they love you?’
‘Chloe?’
‘I do love you, although you’re so stern and cold.’
‘Are you still drunk?’
‘Do I have to be drunk to tell you I love you?’
‘I tell you what, Chloe, you should go to bed and sleep it off.’
‘I’m in bed. I feel dreadful.’
‘Stay there. Drink lots of water through the night, even if it makes you feel sicker. I’ll call tomorrow.’ She put the phone down and pulled an exasperated face at Josef.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. You fix things. You are like me. Two days ago a woman rings me, someone I worked for. She is screaming. I get to her house. There is water bursting from a pipe like a fountain. There is five centimetres of water in her kitchen. She is still screaming. It’s just a simple valve. I turn the valve, I drain the water. That is you. There is an emergency, they phone you, you rush in and rescue them.’
‘I wish I was,’ said Frieda. ‘I’d like to be the person who knew what to do when someone’s boiler had broken or their car wasn’t working. That’s the sort of expertise that really makes things better. You’re the person who fixes the leaking pipe. I’m the person who’s hired by the company who made the pipe to come along and try to persuade the screaming patient not to sue them.’
‘No, no,’ said Josef. ‘Don’t say that. You’re being self… self…’
‘Conscious.’
‘No.’
‘Sabotaging.’
‘No,’ said Josef, waving his hands around as if he was trying to act out the meaning of the words he couldn’t find. ‘You are saying, “I am bad”, so that I say, “No, you are good, you are very good.” ’
‘Maybe,’ said Frieda.
‘Don’t just agree,’ said Josef. ‘You should argue.’
‘I’m too tired. I’ve had too many vodkas.’
‘I am working with your friend Reuben,’ said Josef.
‘He’s not necessarily my friend.’
‘Strange man. But he talks about you. I am learning about you.’
Frieda gave a shudder. ‘Reuben knew me best ten years ago. I was different then. How is he?’
‘I am making his house better.’
‘That’s good,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s probably what he needs.’
‘Do you want to tell me why it was so urgent to see me?’
Sasha Wells was in her mid-twenties. She was dressed in dark trousers and a jacket that seemed designed to disguise the shape of her body. Even so, and even though her dirty blonde hair was dishevelled, and she kept running her fingers through it, pushing strands out of her eye even when they weren’t in her eye, and though she was just a bit too thin, and though the fingers of her left hand were stained from cigarette smoking, and though she wouldn’t meet Frieda’s gaze except to give an ingratiating half-smile, her beauty was obvious. But her large dark eyes seemed to be apologizing for it. She made Frieda think of an injured animal, but the kind of animal that reacts to being injured not by fighting back but by curling up and retreating. Neither of them spoke for some time. Sasha was fidgeting with her hands. Frieda was tempted to let her have a cigarette. She was clearly desperate for one.
‘My friend Barney has a friend called Mick who says you’re great. That I can trust you.’
‘You can say anything you like,’ said Frieda.
‘All right,’ said Sasha, but so quietly that Frieda had to lean forward to make her out.
‘I take it you’ve already been seeing a therapist.’
‘Yes. I was seeing someone called James Rundell. I think he’s quite famous.’
‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve heard of him. How long have you been seeing him for?’
‘About six months. Maybe a bit more. I started just after I got my job.’ She pushed her hair away from her face, then let it fall forward again. ‘I’m a scientist, a geneticist. I like my work, and I have good friends, but I was stuck in a rut and I couldn’t seem to get out of it.’ She gave a little grimace that only made her more beautiful. ‘Bad relationships, you know. I was letting myself get messed around a bit.’
‘So why are you here?’
There was a long pause.
‘It’s difficult,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to say it.’
Suddenly Frieda felt that she knew what was coming. She thought of that feeling when you stand on the platform of an underground station when a train is coming. Before you hear anything, before you see the light at the front of the train, you feel a breath of warm air on your face, you see a piece of scrap paper flap around. Frieda knew what Sasha was going to say. She did something she couldn’t ever remember having done before in a therapy session. She stood up, stepped closer to Sasha and put her hand on the young woman’s shoulder.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. Then she sat back down. ‘You can say anything here. Anything.’
At the end of the fifty minutes, Frieda arranged a further session with Sasha. She took down a couple of phone numbers and an email address. She sat in silence for a few minutes. Then she made a phone call. Then another, longer, one; then a third. When she had finished, she put on a short leather jacket and walked briskly out and across to Tottenham Court Road. She hailed a taxi and gave an address that she had jotted down on the back of an envelope. The taxi made its way through the streets north of Oxford Street, then along Bayswater Road and south through Hyde Park. Frieda was looking out of the window but she wasn’t really paying attention. When the taxi drew to a halt, she realized she hadn’t been concentrating and that she had no real idea where she was. It was a part of the city she barely knew. She paid the driver and got out. She was standing outside a small bistro- style restaurant in what was otherwise a largely residential street of white stucco houses. The restaurant had small baskets of flowers hanging from the eaves. In summer people would be eating outside, but it was too cold for that today, even for Londoners.
Frieda stepped inside and was hit by the warmth, the low hum of talk. It was a small place with no more than a dozen tables. A man came over, wearing a striped apron.
