French Nicci Read online

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  Later, I refused the offer of a lift home from my drunken friend who believed God was the Big Bang, and walked the mile from Poppy and Seb's to my flat in Clerkenwell. The cool, damp wind blew in my face, and my scar tingled faintly. The half-moon floated between 29 thin clouds, above the orange street-lamps. I felt happy and sad and a little bit drunk. I'd made my speech--about friendship helping me through, all of the trite, true phrases about valuing life more now--and eaten apple crumble. Made my excuses and left. Now I was alone. My footsteps echoed in the empty streets, where puddles glinted and cans rattled in gateways. A cat wrapped itself around my legs then disappeared into the shadows of an alleyway. At home, there was a message on the answering-machine from my father. "Hello," he said, in a plaintive voice. He paused and waited, then: "Hello? Kit? It's your father." That was it. It was two in the morning and I was wide awake, my brain buzzing. I made myself a cup of tea--so easy when it's just for one. A bag and boiling water over it; then a dribble of milk. Sometimes I eat standing at the fridge, or prowling around the kitchen. A slice of cheese, an apple, a bread roll past its sell-by date, a biscuit munched absentmindedly. Orange juice drunk out of its carton. Albie used to cook huge elaborate meals--lots of meat and herbs and spices; pans boiling over; strange misshapen cheeses on the window-sill; bottles of wine uncorked at the ready; laughter rolling and swilling through the rooms. I sat on my sofa and sipped the tea. And because I was alone, and in a maudlin kind of mood, I took out her photograph. She was my age then, I knew that, but she looked ludicrously young and long ago. Like a faraway child; someone glimpsed through a gate at the end of the garden. She was sitting on a patch of grass with a tree behind her, wearing frayed denim shorts and a red T-shirt. The gleam of sunshine was on her, dappling her bare, rounded knees. Her pale brown hair was long and tucked behind her ears, except for a strand that fell forward over one eye. A moment later, and she would have pushed it back again. She had a soft, round face, sprinkled with tiny summer freckles, and gray eyes. She looked like me; everybody who had ever known her always said that: "Don't you look like the image of your mother? Poor dear," they would add, meaning me, her, both of us, I suppose. She died before I was old enough to keep her 31 as a memory, though I used to try to edge myself back through the foggy early years of life, to see if I could find her there, on the bleached-out edge of recollection. All I had were photographs like this, and stories told to me about her. Everyone had their own versions. I had only other people's word for her. So it wasn't really my mother I was missing now, but the impossibly tender idea of her. I knew, because of the date my father had written punctiliously on the back, that she was already pregnant, though you couldn't tell. Her stomach was flat, but I was there, invisible, rippling inside her like a secret. That's why I loved the photograph: because although nobody else knew it, it was both of us together. Me and her, and love ahead. I touched her with my finger. Her face shone up at me. I still cry when I see her.

  2

  I have always been nervous of New Year's Eve. I can't make myself wholly believe in a fresh start. A friend once told me this meant I was really a Protestant rather than a Catholic. I think she meant that I trail my life behind me: my dirty linen and my unwanted baggage. Nevertheless, I wanted my return to work to be a new beginning. The flat was cluttered with all the things that Albie had left behind. It had been six months, yet I still had a couple of his shirts in the cupboard, an old pair of shoes under my bed. I hadn't properly thrown him out. Bits of him kept turning up, like pieces of wreckage washed up on a beach after a storm. That Sunday evening, I put on a pair of white cotton trousers and an orange top with three-quarter-length sleeves and lace around the neck, like a vest. I put mascara on my lashes, gloss on my lips, the smallest dab of perfume behind my ears. I brushed my hair and piled it, still damp, on top of my head. It didn't matter. He would come, and then a bit later he would go away again, and I would be in my flat on my own once more, with the windows open and the curtains closed and a glass of cold wine and music playing. Something calm. I stood in front of the long mirror in my bedroom. I looked quite steady. I smiled and the woman smiled back, raising her eyebrows, ironical. He was late, of course. He is 33 always just a bit late. Usually he arrives panting and out of breath and smiling and talking before the door is even half open, sweeping in on a gust of conversation, on the crest of some idea or other, on a boom of laughter. I heard him laugh before I ever saw him. I turned round, and there he was, delighted with himself, enviable in that, I thought at the time. He was quieter today; his smile was wary. "Hello, Albie." "You're looking very fine," he said, contemplating me as if I were an artwork on a wall that he hadn't quite made up his mind about. He leaned forward and kissed me on both cheeks. His stubble scratched my skin, my scar, his arms held my shoulders firmly. There was black ink on his fingers. I allowed myself to look at him, then stepped back, out of his embrace. "Come on in, then." He seemed to fill my spacious living room. "How have you been, Kitty?" "Fine," I said firmly. "I came and saw you in hospital, you know. When I heard. You probably don't remember. Of course you don't. You were quite a sight." He smiled, and put up a finger to trace my injury. People seemed to like doing that. "It's healing well. I think scars can be beautiful." I turned away. "Shall we get going?" We started in the kitchen. He took his special mushroom knife, with a brush on the end to flake away dirt, his fondue set with its six long forks, his ludicrous striped apron and chef's hat that he insisted on wearing when he was cooking, three cookbooks. Eel stew, I remembered. Passion-fruit souffl@e that had risen too much and blistered on the roof of the oven. Mexican tacos filled with mince and sour cream and onions. He ate with gusto too, waving his fork around and stuffing food into his mouth and arguing and leaning across the candles on the table to kiss me. Last Christmas he'd eaten so much goose and swigged it back with so much hearty red wine that he'd gone to the casualty ward thinking he was having a heart-attack. "What about this?" I held up a copper pan we'd bought together. "Keep it." 35 "Sure?" "Sure." "And all those Spanish plates that we--was "They're yours." But he took his dressing-gown, his South American guitar music, his poetry and physics books, his aubergine-colored tie. "I think that's everything." "Do you want a glass of wine?" He hesitated, then shook his head. "I'd better be getting back." He picked up his bag. "Funny old world, isn't it?" "That's it, then?" "What?" "Your epitaph on our relationship. Funny old world." He frowned at me. There were two vertical creases above his nose. I smiled to reassure him that it didn't really matter. Smiled when he got up to leave with his boxes, smiled when he kissed me goodbye, smiled as he walked down the steps to his car, smiled as he drove away. Now I was going to look ahead, not behind.

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  The Welbeck Clinic stands in a quiet residential street in King's Cross. When it was built in the late fifties, the whole point was that it shouldn't look like an oppressive institution. After all, it was going to be a building in which psychiatrists solved people's problems and made them happy and sent them back into the world. What was meant by not looking institutional was that it didn't look Victorian, with Gothic towers and small angled windows. Unfortunately the design was so successful and highly praised and prize-winning that it influenced the construction of urban primary schools, medical centers and old people's homes, and the Welbeck Clinic now looked very institutional indeed. Normally I didn't really see the building, just as I wasn't conscious of my own breathing. I went to it every day, worked and talked and studied and drank coffee there. But now, walking up the steps after weeks away, I saw that the building was middle-aged, the concrete stained and cracked. The door dragged on the stone step, scraping like fingernails as I pulled it open. I arrived at Rosa's office and she immediately came out and gave me a long hug. Then she held me back to contemplate me with a 37 semi-humorous expression of inquiry. She was dressed simply in charcoal slacks and a navy blue sweater. Her hair was quite gray now and when she smiled her face almost shimmered in all its fine wrinkles. What was she thinkin
g? When I had first met her, almost seven years earlier, I had already known her extraordinary work on child development. I'd occasionally been puzzled by this great expert on children who had never had children herself, and I sometimes wondered if the rest of us at the clinic were competing to be her cleverest son or daughter. There may have been something maternal about the way she presided over the Welbeck, but it wasn't necessarily wise to rely on a mother's softness and forgiveness. She had a steely objectivity as well. "We've missed you, Kit," she said. "Welcome back." I didn't speak. I just pulled a face that was meant to look affectionate. There were butterflies in my stomach; it felt like my first day at secondary school. "Let's go outside and talk," she added briskly. "I think it's cleared up. Isn't the weather funny at the moment?" We walked toward the garden at the back and Francis met us on the way. He was also dressed casually, in jeans and a dark blue shirt. As usual he was unshaven, his hair rumpled. He was a man who wanted to look like an artist rather than a scientist. When he saw me, he held out his arms and we had rather an awkward few seconds of walking toward each other before I could step into his embrace. "So good to have you here again, Kit. You're sure you're ready?" I nodded. "I need to work. It's just ... this bit is rather like getting back on a horse again after a fall." Francis pulled a face. "I'm glad to say I've never been anywhere near a horse. Best idea is not to get on one in the first place." It had rained earlier but now the sun was out and the wet flagstones glittered and steamed. The benches were sodden so we stood in a group self-consciously, like people who had just been introduced at a drinks party. "Remind me of today's schedule," said Rosa, for something to say. "This morning I'm going to see Sue." 39 Sue was an anorexic twenty-three-year-old, so thin she looked as if the light could shine through her. Her beautiful eyes were like brimming pools in her shriveled little face. She looked like a child, or an old woman. "Good," she said crisply. "Take it at your own pace. Let us know if there's any help you need." "Thanks." "There's one more thing." "Yes?" "Compensation." "Oh." "Yes. Francis is certainly of the view that you should consider legal action." "Open and shut case," said Francis. "It was even done with the policeman's own bloody mug, wasn't it? What on earth did he think he was up to?" I looked over at Rosa. "What do you think?" "I would rather hear what you think." "I don't know what I think. It was all so confused. You know that the Crown Prosecution Service ..." I tried to recall the wording of the letter I'd received his... declined to proceed against Mr. Doll. Maybe it was their mistake. Maybe it was my mistake. Maybe it was just an accident. I'm not sure what I'd be after." "About a couple of hundred grand, some of us reckon," said Francis, with a smile. "I'm not sure that Doll really meant to hurt anybody. He was just flailing around, panicking. He picked up the mug and smashed it against the wall, and cut himself, and then he cut me. He was a mess even before the police had finished with him. You know what happens to people in police cells. They go crazy. They kill themselves or fly at other people. I should have been prepared for that." I looked at Rosa and Francis. "Are you shocked? Do you want me to be angrier? Out for Doll's blood?" I shuddered. "The police beat him up pretty badly before throwing him into a cell. By the sound of it, they thought they were doing me a favor. They must be furious that he got off." "They are," said Rosa drily. "And it was Furth's mistake, though he will never admit to that, of course. And mine, too. Perhaps I wasn't concentrating hard enough. Anyway, I just don't see the point of 41 suing them. Who would it help?" "People should be held responsible for their mistakes," Francis said. "You could have died." "But I didn't. I'm fine." "Think about it, at least." "I think about it all the time," I said. "I dream about it at night. Somehow the idea of getting someone to compensate me by giving me money doesn't really seem relevant just now." "I hear what you're saying," said Francis, in a tone that made me want to tweak his nose.