by Nicci French
‘I think they’ve finished.’ Reuben went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled, ‘Josef! Have you got a minute?’
A muffled shout came from upstairs and shortly afterwards Josef came down the stairs, his feet bare. When he caught sight of Frieda he looked uneasy.
Frieda walked back through Regent’s Park, her hands deep in her coat pockets. The cold northerly wind felt good, as if it was drowning her thoughts. After she had crossed Euston Road, she stopped at a shop and bought a bag of pasta, a jar of sauce, a bag of salad and a bottle of red wine. Back at her front door, she was fumbling for her key when she felt a touch on her shoulder that made her jump.
‘Alan,’ she said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I’m sorry. I needed to talk to you. I couldn’t wait.’
Frieda looked helplessly around. She felt like a wild animal that had been tracked back to its lair. ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘We have to stick to them.’
‘I know, I know, but…’
The tone was pleading. His duffel coat was wrongly buttoned and his hair was dishevelled; his face looked blotchy from the cold. Frieda had her key in her hand and it was hovering near the lock. She had many rules, but the absolute one, the inviolable one, was that she never let a patient into her house. It was always the patient’s fantasy, to get into her life, to discover what she was really like, to get a hold on her, to do to her what she was doing to them, to find out her secrets. But so many rules had been broken. She put the key in the lock and turned it.
‘Five minutes,’ she said.
He held his hand in front of him. Fingers turned to twigs. No one would want to eat him now. Dirty bare feet; they weren’t feet any more. They were roots creeping into the earth and soon he wouldn’t be able to move at all.
But they tore him up and they wrapped him round and he could feel his twigs snapping and his roots were stuffed into a sack and his mouth was stoppered up with soil and he was crammed into new darkness. They were taking him to market. This little pig went to market. Who would give a gold coin for him? He was gripped and picked up and he sank down further to the bottom of the sack and the voices grunted and said rude words and the witch shouted that Simon Said, Simon Said but Simon didn’t say anything because his mouth was shut and his voice was all gone now.
Bump, bump, bump. Then he was lying on something hard and there was a bang above him. The darkness was even darker and there was a new smell, oily and deep. He heard a loud cough, a splutter, a hum, which felt like the noise the witch-cat made when it dug its paws in and out of his sore skin, but louder. His body was bouncing up and down. His head was banging up and down on the hard surface.
Then he was still again. There was a click and he felt hard fingers pincer him through the sack, locking on to his shoulder, his soft thigh. He knew his body was falling apart because he could feel pain running through him like a river, into every crack of him. He didn’t know the word for ‘why?’ and he couldn’t remember the word for ‘please’. Nothing left. No Matthew left. Bumped along the ground. Cold. So cold. Cold like fire. There was something rattling and heaving and the voice grunted again and then suddenly he was being pulled from the sack.
Two faces in the gloom. Mouths opening and shutting. Simon Said no but he couldn’t speak. They were pushing him into a hole. Was it an oven, even though his fingers were twigs, were icicles, too sharp to eat? But it couldn’t be an oven because there was no heat, only a throbbing cold darkness. Mouth unravelled and he opened it but nothing came out. Only breath.
‘Make a sound and you’ll be cut into little pieces and fed to the birds,’ said the voice of the master. ‘Do you hear?’
Did he hear? He heard nothing now, except the sound of stone being dragged over earth and then it was black night and cold night and silent night and lost night and only his heart still spoke, like a drum under his stretched skin. I-am, I-am, I-am.
Chapter Twenty-nine
‘I saw Alan yesterday,’ said Frieda.
It was almost the first time she had spoken. When Josef had picked her up in his van, he had talked about Reuben and about work and about his family. When Frieda at last spoke, it was almost as if she were speaking to herself.
‘He is your patient, no?’
‘He came to my house. He found out where I lived and came to my house. I told him that if he was in trouble, he could get in touch any time. But he was meant to phone me, not knock on my door. It felt like a violation. If things had been normal, I would have sent him away. I would probably have stopped seeing him, referred him to someone else.’
Josef didn’t reply. He was steering his van across several lanes. ‘We take the motorway here, right?’
‘That’s right.’ Frieda moved her hands up in an involuntary gesture of self-protection as Josef swung his van into a gap between two lorries.
‘It’s OK,’ said Josef.
Frieda looked around. They were already at the beginning of a kind of countryside, frosty fields and lonely trees.
‘A violation,’ said Josef. ‘Like when I came to your house.’
‘That’s different,’ said Frieda. ‘You’re not my patient. I’m a mystery to them. They fantasize about me and quite often they fall in love with me. It’s not just me. It’s part of the job but you have to be careful.’
Josef looked across at her. ‘Do you fall in love also?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘You know everything about them, all their fantasies, their secret fears, their lies. You can’t fall in love with someone if you know everything about them. I don’t tell patients about my life and I don’t let them anywhere near my house.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I broke my rule,’ said Frieda. ‘I let him into my house, just for a few minutes. For once, I had to admit that he had a right to be curious.’
‘You tell him everything?’
‘I can’t tell him everything. I don’t understand things myself. That’s why we’re driving out here.’
‘So what you tell him?’
Frieda looked out of the window. Funny to live in a farm ten minutes out of London. She’d always thought that if she lived out of London it would be somewhere far away, somewhere that would take hours, days to get there. An abandoned lighthouse, that would be good. Perhaps not even abandoned. Could analysts retrain as lighthouse keepers? Were there still lighthouse keepers?
‘It was difficult,’ said Frieda. ‘I tried to make it as painless as possible for him. Maybe I was making it painless for me. But how painless can you be when you tell someone that you’ve found a brother he knew nothing about?’ She couldn’t tell how much Josef understood.
‘He was angry with you?’
‘He didn’t really react so much as go all still,’ said Frieda. ‘People are often shocked into a kind of strange calmness when you tell them really big things, things that change their whole life. I said there was more that I’d be able to tell him soon, but that the police might become involved again – although of course I don’t know about that. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the little boy or if everything has just got tangled up in my imagination. Anyway, I said I was sorry about that if it did happen, but that this time it was nothing at all to do with him. That’s a lot to deal with in one go.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I tried to get him to say something, but he didn’t want to talk. He put his head in his hands for a while. I think he might have been crying, but I’m not sure. He probably needs to go away and think about things, let them settle.’
‘He will meet his twin?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Frieda. ‘I keep thinking about it. I have this feeling that it won’t happen. Anyway, I think the issue for Alan is the guilt that he feels but doesn’t understand. It was when I told him I was going back to the police that he looked most shattered. It’s hard for him to face any more of that. It was better he heard it from me. I thought he might get angry with me but he seemed in a state of s
hock. He just left. I felt I’d let him down. My real job is to help my patient.’
‘You find the truth,’ said Josef, confidently.
‘There’s nothing in my job description about finding the truth,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s about helping my patient to cope.’
Frieda looked down at the route instructions she had printed out. It was all very simple. After another half-hour on the M11 they turned off and drove to a small village a few miles from Cambridge.
‘It must be here,’ she said.
Josef turned into a short gravel drive that led to a large Georgian house. The drive was lined with gleaming cars, so it was difficult for the van to squeeze through. ‘They look expensive,’ he said.
‘Try not to scrape them,’ said Frieda. She stepped out of the van and felt her feet sink into the gravel. ‘Do you want to come in? I could say you were my assistant.’
‘I listen to the radio,’ said Josef. ‘It makes my English better.’
‘This is great of you,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you.’
‘You will pay me by cooking a meal,’ he said. ‘An English Christmas meal.’
‘I think it would be better if I paid you, probably,’ she said.
‘Go in,’ he said. ‘Why are you waiting?’
Frieda turned and waded through the gravel to the front door. There was an elaborate Christmas garland on it. She pressed the bell but couldn’t hear anything, so she rapped on the door with the large brass knocker. The house shook with it. The door was opened by a woman wearing a long, elaborate dress. She had a welcoming smile on her face that faded as soon as she saw Frieda.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.
‘Is Professor Boundy here?’ said Frieda.
‘I’ll get him,’ said the woman. ‘He’s with our lunch guests.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Frieda stepped into the large hallway. She could hear a murmur of voices. The woman walked across the hall, her heels echoing on the wooden floor. She opened a door and Frieda glimpsed a group of people, men in suits, women in smart dresses. She looked around the large hall – on one side an ornate staircase curved upwards. In a niche in the wall there was a bonsai tree. She heard footsteps and turned to see a man coming towards her. He had grey hair swept back from his face and rimless spectacles. He was wearing a dark suit with a brightly patterned tie.
‘We’re about to sit down to lunch,’ he said. ‘Was there any reason we couldn’t have talked on the phone?’
‘Five minutes,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s all we need.’
He looked ostentatiously at his watch. Frieda found it almost amusing to be treated so rudely.
‘You’d better come into my study,’ he said.
He led her across the hallway to a room at the far end. It was lined with bookshelves except for a wall of french windows giving out on to a large lawn. A path led away from the house and culminated in a gazebo with a stone seat. He sat down behind a wooden desk. ‘Dick Lacey spoke very highly of you,’ he said. ‘He said you needed to see me urgently and that it wouldn’t wait. Even though it’s Christmas and I’m with my family. So I agreed to see you.’ He unfastened his watch and laid it on the desk. ‘Briefly.’
He gestured at an armchair but Frieda ignored him. She walked towards the window and looked out, considering how to begin. She turned round. ‘I’ve just had a strange experience,’ she said. ‘A patient of mine has certain family issues. One factor is that he was adopted. He was abandoned as a baby and knows nothing whatever about his adoptive family. He’s never made any attempt to find them. I don’t think he’d know even how to begin going about it.’
She paused for a moment.
‘Look,’ said Professor Boundy. ‘If this is about tracing relatives…’
Frieda interrupted him: ‘Certain things happened and I got the address of someone I thought might be connected to him. This isn’t the sort of thing that I do but I visited the house, unannounced.’ Suddenly Frieda felt almost embarrassed. ‘I find this bit difficult to explain. When I went inside the house, it was like being in a dream. I should say that I’ve been to Alan’s house. Alan’s my patient. When I went into this other house, I had this feeling: “I’ve been here before.” They weren’t identical, but there was something about one that reminded you of the other.’
She looked at Professor Boundy. Would he think she was insane? Would he laugh?
‘In what way?’ he said.
‘Some of it was just a feeling,’ said Frieda. ‘Both houses felt closed-up. Alan’s house was cosy, full of small rooms. The other house was like that but even more so, almost claustrophobic. It seemed to be shutting the light out. But there were other, odder, things in common. Both of them keep things in neat little drawers with labels on the front. There were even the strangest things in common. For example, I was startled to find that both of them had a stuffed bird on display. Alan had a poor little stuffed kingfisher and Dean had a stuffed hawk. It was uncanny. I didn’t know what to make of it.’
She looked at Professor Boundy. He was now leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed, staring at the ceiling. Was he just waiting for her to finish?
‘It was more than that,’ said Frieda. ‘It was like a dream. When I stepped into Dean Reeve’s house, it was like somewhere I’d been before, like going back somewhere you lived as a small child. You know you’ve been there but you don’t know why. It was a feeling both houses had, a hot, closed-in feeling. Anyway, I was there with his partner, or wife, and then he – Dean – arrived. For a moment I thought it was Alan and that he was leading a double life. Then I realized that Alan wasn’t just abandoned as a baby. He had a twin he didn’t know about.’
‘Abandoned because he had a twin,’ said Professor Boundy.
‘What?’
There was a knock and the door opened. It was the woman who had let Frieda in. ‘We’re just sitting down, dear,’ she said. ‘Shall I tell them you’re about to arrive?’
‘No,’ said Professor Boundy, without looking round at her. ‘Start without me.’
‘We can wait.’
‘Go away.’
The woman – evidently Boundy’s wife – looked at Frieda with an expression of suspicion. She turned and left without a word.
‘And close the door,’ said Boundy, in a loud voice. The door to the study closed gently.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Can I get you something? We’ve got some champagne open.’ Frieda shook her head. ‘What I was about to explain is that mothers would have twins that they were unable to deal with, so they would put up one for adoption. Or sometimes just abandon one.’ Boundy looked up at the ceiling again, then fixed Frieda with a gaze that was almost fierce. ‘So why did you drive all the way up to Cambridge to see me?’
‘Because of what I told you. I’ve been thinking about what it was that I saw when I went into the house. It felt a bit like magic, and I don’t believe in magic. I talked to Dick Lacey and I checked up on you and I learned that you’re specifically interested in twins who have been reared separately. Of course I know that’s a subject of considerable interest for the debate about nature and nurture. I’ve read papers about it. But what I encountered seemed beyond the range of science and reason. It felt more like an elaborate charade, some kind of mind trick being played on me. So I needed to talk to an expert.’
Boundy leaned back once more. ‘I’m certainly an expert,’ he said. ‘This is the issue: I’m interested in the role genetic factors play in the development of personality. Researchers have always been interested in twins, but the problem is that they generally share the same environment as well as the same genes. What we’d really like to do is to take two identical children, bring them up in different environments and see what the effect is. Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to do that. But sometimes, just sometimes, people do it for us by separating their twins at birth. These identical twins are perfect for us. Their genetic makeup is identical, so any variation must be
environmental. So we’ve been looking for these twins, and when we found them, we looked in great detail at their life histories. We gave them personality tests, medical examinations.’
‘And what did you find?’
Boundy got up, walked to the bookshelf and took out a book. ‘I wrote this,’ he said. ‘Well, co-wrote it. The ideas are mine. You should read it.’
‘But in the meantime,’ said Frieda.
Boundy laid the book on his desk almost reverently, then half sat on the desk edge. ‘Just over twenty years ago, I gave the first paper on our findings at a conference in Chicago. It was based on an assessment of twenty-six pairs of identical twins reared separately. Do you know what the response of my fellow professionals was?’
‘No.’
‘It was a rhetorical question. The response was divided between those who accused me of incompetence and those who accused me of dishonesty.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Frieda.
‘To take one example, one twin lived in Bristol and the other in Wolverhampton. When they were reunited in their late thirties, they discovered that they had both married women called Jane, divorced them and married women called Claire. They both owned miniature railways as a hobby, they both cut out savings coupons from the back of cereal packets, they both had moustaches and sideburns. Then there was a pair of female twins. One lived in Edinburgh, the other in Nottingham. One was a doctor’s receptionist, the other a dentist’s receptionist. Both liked to dress in black, both were asthmatic, both were so afraid of lifts that they took the stairs even in tall buildings. And so on and so on. When we examined non-identical twins, the effect disappeared almost completely.’
‘So why the accusations?’
‘Other psychologists just didn’t believe me. What was it that Hume said about miracles? Anything – fraud, human error, whatever – is more likely, so that’s what you should assume and that’s what people did assume. People stood up after my talk and said that I must have been mistaken, that the twins must really have known about each other. Or that the researchers went looking for resemblances and cherry-picked the evidence, the argument being that any two lives will probably have something odd in common.’