41
Frieda walked along the empty street, carrying flowers. Sasha had dropped her off. She and Ethan were waiting in the little café where – it seemed years ago – she had met up with Lewis again. It was a little before seven in the morning and Braxton barely seemed to be stirring. In London, there would be people, cars, the sounds of radios and doors slamming. Here it was a dark, still dawn, only the street lamps lighting her way.
The churchyard was a dim space of huddled gravestones and ancient trees. The spire of the church rose through the fog. The moisture on the ground seeped through her shoes; she could see her breath curling into the air. She could only just make out the names of the dead as she walked between the graves and the carved angels. It took many minutes, bending down to trace inscriptions, clearing moss away from letters, before she found them both.
Bethany May, 1947–1983
Dearly Beloved Mother and Wife
And under it, in newer stone,
Sarah May 1973–1991
She lives in the hearts of all who loved her
Frieda cleared the weeds away from the small plots and then she put the flowers on the graves, in the little vases that were there. She would ask Eva if she would come once a month just to see that everything was tidy and put new flowers there. That was the kind of thing Eva would like to do. She would pick blooms from her own garden when it was spring and come here, in her long bright skirts and with her red hair blowing, and sit and weep for the friends she had lost.
The flowers had gone from Maddie’s house. Only a red cyclamen on the table remained. Maddie sat opposite Frieda and they drank tea together. She was wearing an old brown cardigan and faded jeans, no heels on her shoes, no makeup on her face.
‘I don’t know whether to hate you.’
Frieda considered this. ‘Would it make you feel better to hate me?’
‘I’m beyond feeling better. My daughter, my only child, is dead. I keep remembering her when she was tiny and happy, and then I remember all our rows, terrible, terrible rows. And I remember not believing her. I wake in the night and I see her face when she told me what had happened to her and I didn’t comfort her and hold her tight and tell her I would help her through. After that, what’s left to me? I have a failed marriage behind me, no job or real purpose, my so-called loved affair is over, my friends – well, look what’s happened to people I used to call my friends. But nothing really mattered, except Becky.’
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘You’re sure it was Ewan?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Ewan I’ve known since I was thirteen, who sat in my house, ate my food, rubbed my shoulders, made stupid jokes, mended my computer and fixed up my shower curtain, who comforted me when Becky died, cried at her funeral, whose children I know, whose wife is one of my closest friends?’
‘Yes. That Ewan.’
She closed her eyes and opened them again. ‘What happens now?’
‘You’ll be interviewed by the police. They’ve got busy now that it’s all too late. There’ll be journalists as well. Careful what you say to them.’
‘I don’t want to speak to any journalists. He tried to kill Max?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he raped you when you were sixteen?’
‘That was when it all began.’
‘And he has daughters of his own.’
‘That means nothing,’ said Frieda. ‘It may be that his own daughters becoming young women triggered him again. We can’t know. But don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of instant experts in the media explaining it to us.’
‘What will Vanessa do?’ said Maddie. Her face changed. ‘Do you think she knew? How could she not have known? But she was my friend, I trusted her – did she know, Frieda?’
Frieda hesitated. Should she say what she knew about Vanessa? ‘I’m not sure,’ she said at last.
‘Braxton,’ said Maddie. ‘This nice, safe town. Who would ever have believed it?’
Frieda thought of the witch who had been put to death a few hundred yards from here, all those centuries ago, in the place where Ewan had also been slaughtered. All those women over all the years, the vulnerable, the ones who didn’t belong, the outsiders. Punished for being different.
‘I never found it so nice,’ said Frieda.
Frieda had one more call she had to make, repelled and attracted at the same time. There was no answer at the front door, so she walked around the side and there she was, in a sturdy grey jacket and gardening gloves, cutting with secateurs at the ivy that covered the wall of the shed. Vanessa looked round. She gave no sign of surprise or shock. ‘I should call the police,’ she said.
‘I’ve just been with them.’
‘The girls are out with their aunt. They’re in a bad way. You’d better not be here when they get back.’
‘I won’t be.’
‘Did you come to gloat?’
Frieda looked at Vanessa and felt, This is what it was all about. This is why I came back. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘what really scares me is not what people like Ewan do. It’s what people like you do. He had these wires crossed, where sexual desire got fused with violence, but you let it happen. You enabled it and cleared up afterwards. There’ll always be people like Ewan. What makes it worse is that there’ll always be people like you and Chas and Jeremy, too, who stand back and let it happen.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Vanessa said.
‘Can I ask you one thing?’
‘What?’
‘Take your jacket off.’
‘My jacket?’
‘I was thinking about you, about sitting at your kitchen table, at the reunion party, and I realized that I’ve never seen your arms.’
Vanessa looked at Frieda steadily. Then she put the secateurs into her pocket and took the jacket off. Underneath was a rough green cardigan, which she unbuttoned and removed. She was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt. She unfastened the buttons at the cuffs and rolled the sleeves up above the elbow. She held her arms towards Frieda, as if making an offering. Frieda stepped closer and took hold of Vanessa’s wrists. Both arms were streaked with scars. Some were red, some raised off the surface in welts. Frieda could see from the wrinkles in the skin that some were years and years old. The faded scars were crossed and tangled in the more recent ones.
‘It won’t work,’ said Frieda. ‘It won’t make the pain go away. Or the guilt. In the end, they will overwhelm you.’
When Frieda left, Vanessa had rolled her sleeves back, put on the cardigan and the jacket and was hacking once more at the ivy, as if her life depended on it.
She went back to London and to her house for a couple of days. She saw five patients, including Joe Franklin, and no friends. She sat for a long while in her quiet study, drawing, thinking, pondering. She tried to draw Becky’s face but it became her own face when she was younger. She tried to remember Sandy’s face but it warped into Dean’s. She talked on the phone to Reuben, Sasha and Karlsson about what had happened but nobody could really understand how she had gone back to her past and found herself still alive in its rubble.