‘You’ve decided.’
‘We’ve decided.’
‘It’s been so quick,’ said Frieda. ‘A month ago, you barely knew him.’
‘I know – but don’t look so worried. I want you to be glad for me.’
‘I am glad.’
‘I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life, or so happy. If it had been only a week, I’d still be certain. I’m going to move in with Frank and I’m going to have a baby. My whole life is changing.’
‘You deserve your happiness,’ said Frieda, sincerely. And she thought of Sandy in America. He seemed very far off now. Sometimes she could barely remember his face or the sound of his voice.
‘Thank you.’
‘I can’t knit.’
‘You don’t need to knit.’
‘Or baby talk.’
‘No, I can’t imagine you baby-talking.’
They laughed, then grew serious again. Sasha took Frieda’s hand in hers. ‘You are my very dear friend,’ she said, and her large eyes swam with tears.
‘You’re hormonal already.’
‘No. Without you, I don’t know what would have become of me.’
‘You’d have been fine.’
‘I don’t think so. But, Frieda – are you all right?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I worry about you. We all worry.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘Will you promise to tell me if there’s anything wrong?’
But Frieda changed the subject. She couldn’t make that promise.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Josef looked at the notebook Frieda handed him.
‘And I’ve got some phone numbers,’ said Frieda. ‘From the stickers on the side of the phone box.’
‘So I phone the number,’ said Josef.
‘I know it’s a big thing to ask. But if I phoned, they’d get puzzled hearing a woman’s voice and I’d have to explain things and it probably wouldn’t work.’
‘Frieda, you say that already.’
Frieda took a sip from her cup. The tea was cold. ‘I suppose I feel guilty asking you to phone up a prostitute. In fact a number of prostitutes. I’m grateful to you for doing it. You’ve already done so much.’
‘Too much, maybe,’ said Josef, with a smile. ‘So I call now?’ Frieda pushed her mobile across the table. He took the phone. ‘We take the French teacher.’ He dialled the number and Frieda couldn’t stop herself wondering whether he’d done this before. Over the years, several of her patients had talked of using prostitutes, or fantasizing about using prostitutes. At medical school, she had been at parties, once or twice, where a stripper had turned up. Was that the same thing or something completely different? ‘Get over it,’ she remembered a red-faced medical student shouting at her. ‘Lighten up.’ Josef was writing something in the notebook. The instructions sounded complicated. Finally he handed her the phone.
‘Spenzer Court.’
‘Spenser,’ said Frieda.
‘Yes. And it is by Carey Road.’
Frieda looked at the index of her A – Z. ‘It’s a few streets away,’ she said. ‘We can walk.’
A gateway at the end of Carey Road led into the council estate. The first block was called Wordsworth Court and they went along a ground-floor level, consisting of lock-up garages and giant steel bins. Frieda stopped for a moment. There were split bin bags strewn about, a supermarket trolley lying on its side, a broken TV that had probably been thrown from an upper level. A woman in a full veil was pushing a pram along the far side.
‘You know, I never understood places like this,’ she said, ‘until, one time, I was in a hill town in Sicily and I suddenly did. That was the idea about this sort of estate. It was going to be like the little Italian town that the architect had spent his holiday in, full of squares where children would play, and there would be markets and jugglers, and hidden passageways where people could bump into each other and gossip and go for evening strolls. But it didn’t quite work out.’
‘Is like Kiev,’ said Josef. ‘But these not so good when is twenty degrees cold.’
They reached Spenser Court and walked up a staircase to the third floor, picking their way through old food cartons. They went along the balcony. Josef looked at the notebook and then at the flat in front of him. The window next to the door was barred, but also broken and blocked from the inside with plasterboard.
‘Is here,’ he said. ‘Is difficult to be in mood for the sex.’
‘That’s the way it’s always been. In London anyway.’
‘In Kiev also.’
‘We need to be calm with her,’ said Frieda. ‘Reassuring.’
She pressed the doorbell. There was a sound of movement from inside. Frieda glanced at Josef. Did he feel like she did? A strange nausea and guilt about what was going on in the city where she lived? Was she just being prim or naïve? She knew the ways of the world. Josef looked calmly expectant. There was a fumbling sound, then the door opened a few inches and Frieda caught a glimpse of a face behind the taut chain: young, very small, lipstick, bleached hair. Frieda started to say something but the door slammed shut. She waited for the chain to be unfastened, the door opened properly, but there was silence. She and Josef looked at each other. Frieda pressed the doorbell again but there was no response. She leaned down, pushed the letterbox open and peered through. Something was blocking her view.
‘We just want to talk,’ she said. There was no response. She handed her phone to Josef. ‘Try calling her. Say who you are.’
He looked puzzled.
‘Who I am really?’
‘Say you’re the man who made the appointment.’
He called and waited.
‘Leave message?’ he said.
‘No, don’t bother. She probably thought we were from Immigration or the police or someone who meant trouble.’
‘Is you.’
‘What?’
‘Is you. She see woman, she think we do something to her.’
Frieda leaned on the balcony railing and looked down. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘This was a stupid plan. I’m so sorry I dragged you out here for nothing.’
‘No. It’s not nothing. I keep your phone. You give me the map. I walk you back to café, you sit have nice tea and a cake. I will come back in one hour.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that, Josef. It’s not right. And it’s not safe.’
Josef smiled at that. ‘Not safe? With you not protecting me?’
‘It feels wrong.’
‘We go now.’
When they got back on to Carey Road, Frieda took some banknotes from her purse and gave them to him. ‘You should ask them if they know a girl called Lily Dawes. Lila. That’s what she mainly called herself, I think. I wish I had a picture to show them but I don’t know how to get one. Give them twenty pounds anyway, and another twenty if they tell you anything. Does that seem enough? I don’t know about these things.’
‘Is OK, I think.’
‘And be careful.’
‘Always.’
Frieda left him there. After a few moments she glanced back and saw him talking on the phone. She went back into the café and ordered another cup of tea but didn’t touch it. What she really wanted was just to rest her head on her hands and sleep. She felt she should read, or think about something. She took the sketch pad out of her bag and spent twenty minutes making a sketch of the great plane trees in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She couldn’t get them right and told herself that she would go back there soon and do it from life. She put the pad away and looked around the café. There was a couple sitting at a table by the door. She met the eye of the man, who gave her a hostile look, so from then on she just stared in front of her. When she felt a touch on her shoulder she started as if she had been asleep but she was sure she couldn’t have been. It was Josef.