Before she could lift her hand to knock, the door flew open and Josef charged through it, in his arms a pile of jagged planks. He swept past her on his way to the overflowing skip that, she now saw, stood on the road. He hurled his burden into it and returned, rubbing his dusty palms together.
‘What are you doing here? It’s Sunday.’
‘Sunday, Monday, who knows the day?’
‘I do. So does Reuben. I hope.’
‘Come in. He is on the kitchen floor.’
Frieda stepped in through the front door, not knowing what to expect after her last visit. She couldn’t restrain a gasp. It was obvious that Josef had been working here for some time. It wasn’t just that the stench of a life abandoned had gone, and in its place was an astringent smell of turpentine and paint, or that bottles, cans and crusted plates had been cleared away and curtains opened. The hall was painted. The kitchen was in the process of being dismantled – cupboards had been ripped out and a new frame to a door into the garden was in place. Outside, on the narrow strip of lawn, the remains of a bonfire smoked. And sure enough, there was Reuben, lying on the floor, halfway under a new porcelain sink.
Frieda was so surprised that for a moment she simply stood and stared at him, with his lovely linen shirt riding up over his stomach and his head quite out of sight.
‘Is that really you in there?’ she said at last.
The feet in their purple socks twitched and the body wriggled forward. Reuben’s face slid out of the sink unit and into view. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said.
‘You’ve been caught in the act. DIY? And on a Sunday afternoon. You’ll be washing your car next.’
He sat up, pulled down his shirt. ‘Not really DIY. Not as such. You know me: left to my own devices, I can’t even be bothered to replace a light bulb. I’m just helping Josef out.’
‘I should think so. Getting him to work on a weekend. Are you paying him double?’
‘I’m not paying him at all.’
‘Reuben?’
‘Reuben is my landlord,’ said Josef. ‘He gives me a roof and in return…’
‘He fixes it,’ supplied Reuben, getting to his feet, staggering slightly. Both men laughed, glancing at Frieda to see her reaction. It was a joke they’d obviously rehearsed.
‘You’ve moved in?’
Josef pointed towards the fridge, and Frieda saw a dog-eared photograph attached to it with a magnet: a dark-haired woman seated on a chair, with two small boys formally posed on either side of her. ‘My wife, my sons.’
Frieda looked back at Josef. He put a hand over his heart and waited.
‘You are a lucky man,’ she said.
He took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and handed one to Reuben, taking one himself. Reuben produced his lighter and lit them both. Frieda felt irritated. There was something about the two of them, some furtive triumph and naughtiness, as if they were two small boys and she was the bossy grown-up.
‘Tea, Frieda?’ asked Reuben.
‘Yes, please. Though you could at least offer me some of that vodka you’ve hidden under the sink.’
The two men looked at each other.
‘You’re here to spy on me,’ Reuben said. ‘See if I’m fit for duty.’
‘Are you?’
‘It’s the death of the father,’ said Reuben. ‘What you’ve always wanted.’
‘What I want is for the father to come back to work when he’s ready, and not before.’
‘It’s Sunday. I can drink on a Sunday and still go to work on a Monday. I can drink on a Monday and still go to work on a Monday for that matter. You’re not my handler.’
‘I make tea,’ said Josef, uneasily.
‘I don’t want tea,’ said Reuben. ‘English people always think tea makes everything better.’
‘I am not English,’ said Josef.
‘I didn’t particularly want to come here,’ said Frieda.
‘Then why come? Because you were told to? You were
‘How you run your own life is up to you, Reuben. You can drink vodka all day long and trash your house, that’s fine. But you’re a doctor. Your job is to cure. Some of the people who come to the clinic are very vulnerable, very frail, and they put their trust in us. You’re not coming back to work until you can be trusted not to abuse your power. And I don’t care how angry you feel with me.’
‘I feel angry all right.’
‘You feel self-pity. Ingrid’s left you and you think you’ve been treated badly by your colleagues. But Ingrid left because you’ve been serially unfaithful for years, and your colleagues have responded in the only possible way to your behaviour at the clinic. That’s why you’re angry. Because you know you’re in the wrong.’
Reuben opened his mouth to reply, then suddenly stopped. He groaned, lit another cigarette and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘You don’t leave a man a place to hide, do you, Frieda?’
‘Do you want a place to hide?’
‘Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone?’ He pushed his hands through his hair, which had grown past his shoulders during his enforced leave, so that he looked even more like a poet after a rough night. ‘No one likes to feel shamed.’
Frieda sat down opposite him. ‘Talking of which,’ she said, ‘I’ve done some things that I want to tell you about.’
He smiled at her ruefully. ‘Is this your
‘I want to talk something through,’ said Frieda. ‘If that’s all right.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Reuben. ‘It’s just completely unexpected.’
On the following Tuesday, Alan told Frieda a story. He didn’t speak in his normal way, correcting himself and going backwards and forwards in time, remembering things that he’d left out. He talked fluently, with few pauses, and there was a shape and coherence to his narrative. Frieda thought he must have practised it several times, going over and over it in his head before coming to her, removing all the uncertainties and contradictions.
‘Yesterday morning,’ he said, once he’d crossed and re-crossed his legs, rubbed his hands up his trouser legs, coughed several times in preparation. ‘Yesterday morning I had to go and check on a planning application. Although I’m on leave, I still drop in occasionally to sort things out in the department. There are certain things only I know about. It was over in Hackney, a converted office block near the Eastway. You know the area?’
‘It’s not really my part of London,’ said Frieda.
‘Things are a bit chaotic there with all the Olympic construction. It’s like a new city being jerry-built on top of the wreckage of an old one. And they can’t push the completion date back, so they’re just throwing more and more people at it. Anyway, after I’d finished there, I went for a walk. It was cold, but I felt like some fresh air, just to get my head clear. To be honest, going in to work at the moment makes me feel a bit rattled.
‘I walked along the canal, then turned off it and walked into Victoria Park. It felt like an escape, going somewhere different. There were quite a few people in the park, but no one was hanging about. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry: heads down, walking quickly, everyone with somewhere to go to except me, or that was how it seemed to me. I wasn’t really watching them, though. I sat on a bench for a bit, next to the bowling green. I was thinking about the last few weeks and wondering what lay ahead of me. I was quite tired. I’m always tired nowadays. Things were a bit blurred. I could see some of the cranes over towards Stratford and the Lee Valley Park. I got up and walked along between the ponds. There’s a bandstand there and a fountain. Everything looked abandoned and shut down for winter. I came out the other side, crossed the road and started looking into the windows of the shops. I looked at an antiques place – well, antiques is probably a bit of a grand word for it. Odds and ends mostly. I used to buy a lot of old furniture. I thought I had an eye for it. It pisses Carrie off. She wants me to get rid of the stuff I’ve got, not get anything new. But still, I like to look, see what prices people are asking. Anyway, there were some funny old places there. There was a hardware shop with mops and buckets and a
