His mother had a bright blue raincoat and red hair; she was easy to spot. But today she wasn’t at the gates with the other mothers, and most of the children had already left. He didn’t want Mrs Clay to make him wait in the classroom, not again. It wasn’t allowed but he knew the way home and, anyway, he’d meet her before he got there, running along with her hair coming loose because she was late. He sidled towards the gate. Mrs Clay was looking at him, but then she had to blow her nose; she covered her whole wrinkly face with a big white handkerchief, so he slipped out. Nobody saw him go. There was a pound coin lying in the road in a shallow puddle and, glancing round to make sure it wasn’t some kind of joke, he picked it up and rubbed it with the corner of his shirt. If his mother didn’t meet him before then, he would buy sweets at the corner shop or a packet of crisps. He looked up the road but still couldn’t see her.
Chapter Thirteen
For a long time now, Frieda had learned to organize her life so that it was as serene and dependable as a waterwheel, each section dipping through experience and rising up again. So the familiar days went round and round with a sense of defined purpose: her patients came on their allotted days, she saw Reuben, she met friends, she taught chemistry to Chloë, she sat by her fire and read or drew little sketches with a soft pencil in her attic study. Olivia believed that order was a kind of prison that prevented you experiencing things, and that recklessness and chaos were expressions of freedom, but for Frieda, it was order that allowed you the freedom to think, to let thoughts into the space you had created for them, to find a proper name and shape for the ideas and feelings that were lifted up during the days, like silt and weeds, and by naming them, in some sense lay them to rest. Some things wouldn’t rest. They were like muddy clouds in the water, stirring beneath the surface and filling her with unease.
Now there was Sandy. They ate and talked and slept together, and then Frieda went home without staying the night. They were starting, in a way that was complicated, disturbing and exciting, to get entangled with each other, finding out about each other, exploring each other, offering confidences. How far was she going to let him into her life? She tried to imagine it. Did she want to become a couple, wandering around like mountaineers who were tied together?
Last night Sandy had stayed at her house for the first time. Frieda didn’t tell him that nobody else had stayed the night there since she’d bought it. They had seen a film, eaten a late meal in a little Italian restaurant in Soho, and then they had gone back to hers. After all, it was so close, it made sense, she had said, as if it was a casual decision not a momentous step. And now it was Sunday morning. Frieda had woken early, while it was still quite dark. For one moment, before she remembered, she had felt a jolt of alarm at seeing the figure beside her. She had eased herself out of bed, showered and then gone downstairs to light the fire and make herself a cup of coffee. It felt odd, dislocating, to have someone else there to start the day with. When would he go home? What if he didn’t?
When Sandy came downstairs, Frieda was opening the bills and official correspondence that she always left to the weekend.
‘Good morning!’
‘Hi.’ Her tone was abrupt and Sandy raised his eyebrows at her.
‘I can go now,’ he said. ‘Or you can make me a cup of coffee and I’ll go.’
Frieda looked up and smiled grudgingly. ‘Sorry. I’ll make you coffee. Or –’
‘Yes?’
‘Usually on Sunday mornings I go to this place round the corner for breakfast and the papers, and then go to the Columbia Road market to buy flowers, or just to look at them. You can come along, if you’d like.’
‘Yes, I would.’
Frieda usually had the same breakfast on Sunday – a toasted cinnamon bagel and a cup of tea. Sandy ordered a bowl of porridge and a double espresso from Kerry, who was trying to keep a professional expression. When she caught Frieda’s eyes she raised her eyebrows in approval, disregarding Frieda’s scowl. But Number 9 was already filling up and neither Kerry nor Marcus had much time for them; only Katya was at a loose end, wandering between tables. Every so often, she stopped by Frieda and Sandy’s and put her index finger into the bowl of sugar to suck.
There was always a stack of newspapers by the counter. Frieda collected several of them and put them in a pile between them. She had the sudden alarming sense that they had been transformed over the past few days into a settled couple – one who went to functions together, who spent the night together, who rose on Sunday morning to read the papers in companionable silence. She took a large bite of bagel and then a gulp of her tea. Was it such a bad thing?
This was often the only time during the week that Frieda read the papers from cover to cover, and for the past few weeks she had been so caught up by Sandy that perhaps she had let her world shrink to her work and to him. She said as much to him now. ‘Although maybe it doesn’t matter, to be cut off from what’s happening in the world every so often. It’s not as if I can do anything about it. Like not knowing if shares have risen by a point or not matters. Or –’ she picked up one of the papers lying open and pointed to a headline ‘– that someone I don’t know has done something terrible to someone else I don’t know. Or a celebrity I haven’t heard of has broken up with another celebrity I haven’t heard of.’
‘That’s my guilty pleasure,’ said Sandy. ‘I … Hang on, what’s up?’
Frieda wasn’t paying attention. She was suddenly absorbed in a news story she was reading.
Sandy leaned over and read the headline: ‘Little Mattie Still Missing: Mum’s Tearful Plea’. ‘You must have heard about it. It’s only just happened. It was all over the papers yesterday.’
‘No,’ murmured Frieda.
‘Think of what the parents must be going through.’
Frieda looked at the photograph across three columns of a young boy with bright red hair and freckles, a lopsided grin on his face, and his blue eyes looking sideways towards whoever was behind the camera. ‘Friday,’ she said.
‘He’ll probably be dead by now. I feel sorry for the poor bloody teacher who let him go. She’s become a hate figure.’
Frieda didn’t really hear what he was saying. She was scanning the story about Matthew Faraday who had slipped out of his Islington primary school unnoticed on Friday afternoon and been last seen going towards the sweetshop a hundred yards or so away. She picked up another paper and read the same story again, a bit more colourfully written, with a sidebar by a profiling expert. She picked up each paper in turn – it seemed every angle had been covered. There were pieces about the parents’ agony, the police investigation, the primary school, the reactions of the community, the safety of our children today.
‘What a strange thing,’ Frieda said, as if to herself.
It was raining and there weren’t many people in the flower market. Frieda was glad of the rain. She liked the feel of it in her hair and she welcomed the street’s emptiness. She and Sandy walked past stalls selling great bunches of flowers and plants. It was only the middle of November but already they were selling things for Christmas – cyclamen, sprigs of holly, hyacinths in ceramic bowls, wreaths for front doors and even bunches of mistletoe. Frieda ignored all of these. She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable.
The wind was flapping the awnings of the stalls. Frieda stopped to buy a large bunch of bronze chrysanthemums. Alan Dekker had dreamed of a son with red hair. Red-haired Matthew Faraday had vanished. Eerie, but meaningless. She pushed her face into the damp fragrance of the flowers and took a deep breath. End of story.