‘Yes. I’ll just wipe the surface.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’
‘Do you always make yourself at home like this?’
‘Do I?’ He looked surprised. ‘I don’t know.’
Frieda made a pot of tea and Harry Welles opened his briefcase and pulled out some papers that he put on the table in front of him, but he didn’t seem inclined to work. Frieda could feel him watching her as she stacked plates in the dishwasher.
‘What’s your job?’ she asked at last.
‘I’m a financial adviser. There, that usually shuts people up.’
‘What kind of people do you advise?’
‘All sorts. Some who are wealthy and want to know which offshore account to hide their money in, some who are struggling and can’t make ends meet. I look after a few charities. You wouldn’t believe what a mess people can get into with their money.’
‘I probably would.’
‘But you don’t. I mean, get into trouble with your own money.’
‘No.’
‘Of course not. I hear you’re a therapist.’
‘Yes.’
Often people responded to her profession with a jokey, nervous comment about what she was reading in their behaviour and manner, as if she had spooky X-ray vision. Harry Welles, propping his chin in his hands and looking at her, said, ‘Yes. I can see how someone would trust you.’ Then he added, with a casual ease, ‘Would you like to have dinner with me on Friday?’
Frieda handed him his tea. ‘All right.’
‘Good. Venue to be confirmed. What’s your email?’
She gave it to him and he jotted it down. Then he opened a folder, picked up a pencil, and started working. Frieda smiled to herself and attacked a particularly encrusted pan.
Thirty-one
Frieda made normal tea for herself – builder’s, mahogany brown – and green tea for Aisling Wyatt. When she handed the mug across, Aisling put her hands round it.
‘I feel I need to warm myself up,’ she said. ‘It’s so cold. I’ve felt it the whole winter. It’s been cold all the time. There were days when I’d walk along the river and I’d expect it to freeze. It used to freeze, didn’t it, hundreds of years ago? They’d skate on the Thames.’
‘And have fairs on it,’ said Frieda. ‘Festivals.’
‘It should have frozen this winter,’ said Aisling. ‘It was so bitter.’
She looked like a woman who got easily cold – thin and highly strung.
‘It’s because of the old London Bridge,’ said Frieda.
‘The old London Bridge? What did that have to do with it?’
‘It slowed the flow of the river,’ said Frieda.
Aisling looked around Frieda’s living room as if she were gradually thawing out and becoming aware of her surroundings. ‘It’s nice here.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’ve got lovely things. Like this.’ She picked up a green porcelain bowl. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘It was a present.’
‘Is this where you see your patients?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘Mostly I see patients at an office round the corner.’
‘Would you see me?’ said Aisling.
‘That wouldn’t be right because of the way we met. But why would you want to see me?’
‘Oh, just everything,’ said Aisling. ‘Because everything is a mess, because I haven’t got the life I thought I’d have, because I hate myself. Is that enough to be getting on with?’
All the time she was talking, Aisling wasn’t looking at Frieda. She looked into her tea, around the room, anything that would avoid eye contact.
‘It sounds to me as if you should talk to your doctor first,’ said Frieda. ‘But of course I could refer you to someone.’
Finally, Aisling looked directly at Frieda. ‘I suppose you don’t want to,’ she said. ‘That’s understandable. You’re working with the police. That’s your priority.’
‘I am working with the police.’
Aisling gave a bitter smile. ‘And I read about you in the paper,’ she said. ‘It looks like you’ve got troubles of your own.’
‘If I’ve got troubles of my own, why did you want to talk to me?’
‘When you asked me about Bertie, I thought you seemed sympathetic.’
‘And what do you think now?’
‘That girl in the story said you used her. Is that true?’
‘I was involved in rescuing her. But being rescued can be painful.’
‘Maybe what she meant,’ said Aisling, ‘is that you go into people’s lives and shake things up and then you leave and don’t take responsibility for what you’ve done.’
‘Is that what you feel I’ve done to you?’
Aisling took a sip of her tea, then placed the mug very carefully on the little table in front of her. ‘When I met Frank we were both working in the same firm. In the same department. If anything, I was probably doing slightly better than he was. Then we had Joe and Emily and, blah blah blah, suddenly I’m at home and he’s been promoted and I’m boring myself even saying the words, it’s such a cliché. You know, I’m not supposed to be boring. When I was at college, I was the person who found other people boring. If when I was twenty-two I’d been able to see myself at thirty-two, I would have … well, done something drastic. Run away to South America.’ Now she gave Frieda a challenging look. ‘I know that you’ll tell me to count my blessings. You’ll say I’ve got two lovely children, a beautiful place to live, it was my own decision and I’ve got to take responsibility for it. You’ll say that I must have subconsciously not enjoyed working in an accountancy firm and I’m just using the children as an excuse.’
Frieda put her own mug of tea on the table, untasted. ‘Tell me about Robert Poole,’ she said.
‘When Frank comes home and I show him things I’ve done in the garden or in the house, his eyes just glaze over. Bertie was different. He was interested, he had ideas. He also listened to my ideas.’ She paused, as if waiting for Frieda to speak, but Frieda stayed silent. She continued, almost as if she were talking to herself, ‘I never thought I’d feel like that again. I felt like I was being looked at. I know what you’re thinking.’
‘You probably don’t.’
‘You’re thinking that I must be feeling guilty for being a bad wife and a bad mother. Well, it’s not true. We made love when the children were out of the house. Emily’s at nursery school four mornings a week and she goes to a child-minder for three afternoons as well. And we’d make love in the children’s bedroom. That was partly practical. I would probably have worried about some kind of smell on the sheets and I’d have had to wash them every time and even Frank might have noticed something. But it was more than that. When we were lying naked in the children’s room, with their things around, their toys, I felt like I was saying, “Fuck off,” to all that, to the idea that that was who I was. I suppose that shocks you.’
‘No. Did you think about leaving your husband?’
‘Not really,’ said Aisling. ‘No, not at all. Anyway, the sex stopped after a while, although the feeling of intimacy didn’t. We talked about working together.’
‘Doing what?’
‘He had plans as a designer, gardens but interiors as well.’ Aisling smiled. ‘We walked around Greenwich and looked at people’s gardens. You could see that people have such a need for someone who can come into their homes and take responsibility and sort out their problems for them, so they can get on with other things. People have the money but they don’t know how to get what they really want. Anyone who comes up with a way to find these people can’t fail. So we talked about creating a business like that.’
‘Did you do anything more than talk about it?’
Aisling dropped the eye contact and gave a shrug.