‘Really? You’re going to read it?’
‘Yes. I’ll bring it back as soon as I have.’
‘I’m in no hurry.’
‘Good. She’s lucky to have you.’
Frieda didn’t want to read the book in her house. She needed to be somewhere neutral. She thought of taking it to Number 9, but even that felt too close to home. In the end she did what she had done a few times before: she walked to Great Portland Street and got on the Circle Line, heading east. She knew that to do the entire loop would take about fifty minutes, maybe an hour. It was early on Sunday evening and the train was almost empty. There was a young woman dressed in a pink tutu and a tartan jersey, who got off at King’s Cross, and an elderly man who read the Bible, marking passages with a pencil, and stayed on until Liverpool Street. After that, she was alone in her carriage until she reached Monument, when a family got on for a couple of stops. Frieda made notes as she read An Innocent in Hell, looking up occasionally as they reached a station to make sure she didn’t miss her stop. The train nosed its way under the City – deserted at the weekend, the streets empty and the tall buildings lit up but abandoned – then Westminster and St James’s Park, the rich enclaves of Kensington, and finally she was heading back towards her stop. She closed the book and emerged into the windy night, deep in thought.
Twenty-six
‘He made me feel attended to.’ The woman made a self-deprecating grimace. Although she had been visiting her sister and her family in the south of France so recently, her thin face was pale and weary. ‘Less alone, I suppose you could say. He was a special kind of person.’
It was half past seven on Monday morning, and Frieda was sitting in Janet Ferris’s kitchen with a cup of tea in front of her. Outside, it was raining and the sky was a leaden grey. Janet Ferris was the practice manager of a nearby GP surgery and had agreed to meet Frieda before work, although she had said she didn’t think there was anything else to add to what she had already told Yvette Long about Robert Poole. He had just been a neighbour, she said, a very nice, very kind neighbour, whom she would miss.
The kitchen was small and had old-fashioned floral wallpaper, red tiles and mismatched chairs round a brightly polished wooden table. Frieda saw that everything was scrupulously clean. There were herbs on the windowsill and a bowl of oranges on the work surface, next to a blue pot of hyacinths whose fragrance filled the room. A charcoal drawing hung on the wall beside the small white-painted dresser. A page cut out from a magazine was stuck to the fridge, with a list of sustainable fish on it. A small transparent bird-box filled with seeds was attached to the outside of the large window. Frieda had the sense of a self-sufficient, frugal, virtuous life, where everything was in its place. She also took in Janet Ferris’s ringless hands, her sad eyes, the worry lines on her face, which was bare of makeup, the sensible clothes that hung off her slim frame, camouflaging her. She had a voice that was soft, low and very pleasant to listen to.
Frieda nodded to the small tortoiseshell cat curled up on a wicker chair under the window. ‘Is that his cat?’
‘Yes. I thought it was all right for me to keep him. I don’t think there was anybody else to look after him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t even know if he had one. Bob used to call him the Mog. So that’s what I call him now: Moggie. It didn’t seem right to change it.’
‘How long had Robert Poole lived here?’
‘Mr Michkin would know exactly. About nine months, I think.’
‘How did you two meet?’
A faint smile twitched her lips. ‘We nodded at each other a couple of times, coming in and out of the house. And then one Sunday morning – it must have been a couple of weeks after he moved in – he turned up with a great big bowl of early summer strawberries. He said someone had given them to him but he couldn’t eat them all, and would I like some?’
‘That was nice.’
‘Yes. I accepted, and then he said that I could only have them on one condition: that I invited him in to share them. It became a bit of a joke between us. Every so often he would turn up with something – cherries, a tin of biscuits, a big wedge of cheese – and say I had to help him eat it. The last time, it was mince pies.’
‘So he was a friend, not just a neighbour?’
Bright spots appeared on Janet Ferris’s cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t say that. It was just occasionally. But it was nice.’
‘What did you talk about?’ Frieda was trying to keep her voice neutral. She sensed that Janet Ferris wanted to talk to someone, let out the shy and dammed-up feelings inside her, but would only do so if she didn’t feel pressed.
‘I don’t know, really. Odd things.’ Frieda waited. ‘I used to tell him what I was reading. I read a lot. Victorian novels mostly. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and Mrs Gaskell.’
‘Did he read a lot too?’
‘I’m not sure. I got the impression he did – but I can’t remember him talking about specific books. I think I used to talk more than him. Which is odd, because I’m not much of a talker.’
‘So, books.’
Janet Ferris looked down at her hands, which were thin, with blue veins and smooth, pearly nails. ‘He was easy to say things to,’ she said, in a voice that Frieda had to strain to hear. ‘I once told him I wished I’d had children. That it was my big regret in life. It was when he brought the mince pies over. Just before Christmas. Christmas is a hard time. I have lots of friends and I’m not alone on the day, but it’s not the same as for people with families. I told him I’d always wanted children, and once I was with a man and thought we’d have a family together. But it didn’t work out – and then it was somehow too late. You know how it is – time slips by. You can’t say when you’ve crossed the line into becoming a childless woman, but one day you realize that’s what you are.’ She looked at Frieda. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No. What did he say, when you told him this?’
‘He didn’t try to tell me it didn’t matter, which is what most people do. He talked about parallel lives. That we’re accompanied by other selves, people we might have been, and how painful that can be.’
Frieda felt as though something was shifting in her mind, loosening. She had a sense of the dead man, sitting at this table, listening to a lonely middle-aged woman talk of her regrets. ‘Did you feel he was also talking about himself?’ she asked.
‘Maybe. I should have asked him. I can’t believe he’s dead, someone like him. It hasn’t sunk in – though sometimes I think about the empty floor above me, the space he used to be in. It doesn’t seem real, though.’
‘He understood loneliness. Do you think he was lonely?’
‘Perhaps. Or an outsider.’
‘Do you know where he was at Christmas?’
‘I was in Brighton, with my cousin’s family. I think he said he was going away for a day or so – but I don’t know. He was here when I got back.’
‘Did you ever meet his friends?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I never saw anyone else go to his flat at all. He went out quite a lot. He was often away for days at a time.’
‘So you don’t know if he had family, close relationships, love affairs?’
‘No. He never said and I didn’t ask. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.’
‘And you don’t know if he was straight or gay?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he liked women. He was …’ She frowned. ‘I’m sure he liked women,’ she repeated.
‘Why?’
Janet Ferris blushed. ‘Just the way he was.’ She lifted her empty mug to hide her confusion. ‘He was a bit of a flirt – not in a crass way, just to make you feel special.’