The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘Unlike me,’ I explained to Finn across the table, ‘Sarah and Clyde have stayed in London and are doing a real job.’

  ‘You shouldn’t do yourself down, Sam,’ she said, with feeling.

  Sarah laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Fiona,’ she said. ‘Sam is not generally famous for her English modesty and reserve.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s not modesty,’ I said. ‘The point is to be self-deprecating so that other people then step in and say how wonderful you are. It’s a way of inviting praise.’

  Finn shook her head with a wistful smile.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that most people are independent enough to look at what someone does and make up their mind about it for themselves. It’s too much trouble. People take you at your own valuation. If you say you’re good, most people will believe you. If you’re modest, they’ll agree with you.’

  Finn’s fervent statement was followed by a cavernous silence which was broken by Clyde.

  ‘And what do you do? And we don’t expect you to be modest about it.’

  ‘I’m writing a thesis,’ Finn said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s to do with the history of science.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You don’t want to hear all about my work.’

  ‘Yes, we do.’ Sarah insisted warmly. ‘Remember, we’re all licensed to boast about ourselves now.’

  Finn glanced across the table at me. I tried to think of some way to stop this disaster but everything that came into my mind seemed as if it would make matters worse. There was a long pause as Finn leaned over for the wine, filled her glass and then took a sip.

  ‘You really want to hear about this?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re on the edge of our seats,’ said Clyde.

  ‘Well, you asked for it. I’m writing a thesis on the taxonomy of mental disorders, using post-traumatic stress disorder as the principal subject.’

  ‘What does that mean when it’s at home?’

  Finn gave me the most imperceptible of winks across the table before she replied.

  ‘Basically, the question that fascinated me is the extent to which a particular pathology exists before it has been named. Has it been discovered, identified or invented? There have always been broken legs and tumours. But did Neanderthals suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after they had been in battle with their flint knives and axes?’

  ‘There was shell-shock after the First World War, wasn’t there?’ Clyde said.

  ‘Yes, but do you know where the term came from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They thought the explosions of the shells were causing physical damage to the nerves around the spine. The reason for this is that the condition was first given medical status after survivors of a Victorian rail crash presented symptoms of shock but no physical injuries. They assumed it was caused by the physical impact and called it “railway spine”. When similar symptoms were observed in the trenches, they assumed it was caused by Shockwaves from the shells. They needed to believe it was a version of the sort of thing they called injury. Maybe the soldiers were just displaying a natural response to the madness of fighting in the trenches. But then people with the power to do so call some of these forms of behaviour symptoms and call them a disorder and treat it in a medical environment.’

  ‘Do you think it’s an invention?’

  ‘That’s what Sam is investigating.’

  ‘How did you two get together?’

  ‘Someone in my department knew about Sam’s research. I’ve got a background in statistics and Sam had a spare room and it seemed a good idea for me to stay here for a while. I’m very lucky. I suspect that Sam’s work is going to redefine the subject and put it on a proper systematic basis for the first time. I’m just lucky to be tagging along with her for a bit.’

  Sarah looked across at me.

  ‘Fiona makes it sound fascinating. How’s the research going?’ There was a silence. ‘Sam?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How’s the research going?’

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away. Fine, it’s going fine.’

  ‘And she can cook as well.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feebly.

  ∗

  I absolutely wouldn’t let Finn do the washing-up. I sent her through to the living room with Clyde while I washed and Sarah dried.

  ‘How’s your book going?’

  ‘Not,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh dear – well, when you’ve written it, would you like me to have a look?’

  ‘That’d be great, except you might have to wait a long time.’

  ‘And how’s Danny?’

  ‘I don’t know really,’ I said, and to my horror I felt tears prick at my eyelids.

  ‘Are you two OK?’

  I shrugged, not wanting to trust my voice.

  Sarah glanced across at me, then meticulously polished off a spoon and put it in the drawer. ‘Fiona’s a real find,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said a bit gloomily.

  ‘She idolizes you, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Of course she does. I was looking at her during the meal. She looks at you constantly. She was echoing your expressions, your posture. After everything she said, she almost seemed to check with you, just for a fraction of a second, as if she needed to be reassured about your reaction.’

  ‘That sounds almost creepy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s common, isn’t it, with… er, teachers and pupils. It’s like patients becoming attached to their doctors. And it’s only for a short while.’

  Sarah raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Really? I thought she was helping with your project.’

  ‘She is for the moment, but this isn’t a permanent arrangement.’

  ‘I’m amazed you can manage without her.’

  Sarah and Clyde were leaving almost at first light, so after coffee and some shoptalk, they went up to bed. Finn was lying on the floor with a book.

  ‘That was extraordinary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I almost had a heart attack when Clyde starting asking you about your research.’

  Finn put down the book and sat up, her knees pulled close to her chest.

  ‘I felt awful for you,’ she said. ‘I just tried to think of anything I could to be convincing. I hope it was all right.’

  ‘All right? You made me want to read your thesis. I can’t believe how much you’ve taken in. You’re an amazing girl, Finn. Woman.’

  ‘It’s not me, it’s you, Sam. I’m just interested in you and your work. When Clyde asked me about what I was doing, I completely panicked for a second. Then, do you know what I did? I imagined myself as you and tried to say what you would say.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I wish I was as good at being me as you are,’ I said.

  I turned to go but Finn continued talking.

  ‘I want all this to go on, you know.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I love it. Don’t smile. I really do. I love you and I love being with Elsie and looking after her. I think Danny’s wonderful. And Michael… he saved my life, really. I’d be nothing without him. I don’t know what I could ever do to pay him back for what he’s done for me.’ She looked up at me, almost pleading. ‘I want it to go on and on.’

  It was a moment I had been waiting for and now I was relieved it had come. I knelt beside her.

  ‘Finn, it can’t. You have a life of your own. You have to go back into it, and soon. Look at yourself, you can do anything. You can do it.’

  Finn’s eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I feel safe here, in this house,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened of outside.’

  Twenty-Two

  The first time I met Danny was at a party, although as a rule I never meet anyone at a party except for people whom I already know. It was at that mellow, sozzled
stage of the evening when most of the guests have gone and the hosts are carrying glasses into the kitchen or emptying overflowing ashtrays, and the remaining guests are entirely comfortable, and the music is sweet and slow. The pressure to perform has dropped away, and you no longer have to be bright or have to smile, and you know the evening is at an end and suddenly you want it to go on a little longer. And Danny crossed the room, his eyes on me. I remember hoping that he wasn’t stupid, as if someone so handsome couldn’t be intelligent too, as if life is divided up fairly like that. Before he addressed a single word to me, I knew we’d have an affair. He told me his name and asked me mine; told me he was an unsuccessful actor and a quite successful carpenter, and I said I was a doctor. Then he said quite simply he’d like to see me again and I replied that I’d like that too. And then when I got back to my flat, and after I’d paid the babysitter and kicked off my shoes and looked in on a sleeping Elsie, I’d listened to the messages on my answering machine, and there was his voice, asking me to dinner the next day. He must have rung me as soon as I’d left the party.

  The point is, Danny doesn’t play games. He comes and he goes, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for days or even know where he is. But he’s always been straightforward with me; we quarrel and then we make up, we shout and then we apologize. He’s not devious. He wouldn’t keep away in order to teach me a lesson. He wouldn’t fail to telephone just to keep me waiting for him, just to make me suffer.

  For days, I waited for Danny to call me, I checked my machine whenever I came in. I checked that Elsie hadn’t knocked the receiver off its hook. When the telephone rang I’d feel as nervous as a teenager, would wait for its second or third ring before picking it up, but it was never Danny. At night I’d stay up long after Finn went to bed, because I thought he’d walk in through the door, quite casual, as if he’d never been away. I’d wake up in the dark and think he was there, my body alert with hope. I slept like a feather, fluttering into consciousness at any noise – a car on the distant road, wind in the trees, the unnerving hoot of an owl in the dark. There was never any reply when I called his flat, and he never left his own machine on. After nearly a week I called his best friend, Ronan, and asked him as casually as I could if he’d seen Danny recently.

  ‘Had another row, Sam?’ he’d said, cheerfully. Then, ‘No, I haven’t seen Dan. I thought he was with you.’

  I thanked him and was about to put the phone down when Ronan added, ‘While we’re talking about Dan, though, I’ve been worried by him lately. Is he OK?’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just that he’s been a bit, well, gloomy. Brooding. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, my love.’

  ‘When’s Danny coming again?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Elsie. He’s busy. Why, do you miss him?’

  ‘He promised to take me to a puppet show, and I want to show him how I can do cartwheels now.’

  ‘When he comes, he’ll be so proud of your cartwheels. Come here and give me a hug, a bear-hug.’

  ‘Ow, you’re hurting me, Mummy. You shouldn’t hold on so tight. I’m only little.’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  ‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

  ‘I don’t know. For God’s sake, Finn, don’t you go on about Danny as well. He’ll come when he bloody feels like it, I suppose.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Oh fuck, I’m going for a walk.’

  ‘Do you want me to…’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘Sam, your father and I wondered if you and Elsie and Danny would like to come over for the day next Sunday. We thought, well, that it was time we made the effort to get to know your young man better.’

  ‘Mum, we’d love to, that’s really nice of you, I appreciate it – but can I get back to you about it? Now’s not a good time.’

  ‘Oh’ – a familiar huffy tone of injured pride that gave me an unfamiliar, unwelcome rush of homesickness – ‘all right then, dear.’

  Not a good time.

  ∗

  I went around the supermarket like a fury, my head hurting after a long depressing morning spent interviewing secretaries in the hospital. Frozen peas. Bubble bath with a cartoon character I don’t recognize on the bottle. Fish fingers. Pasta in three colours. Tea-bags. Digestive biscuits and jammy dodgers. Fuck Danny, fuck him fuck him fuck him. Garlic bread. Sunflower spread. Sliced brown bread. Peanut butter. I wanted him back, I wanted him, and what should I do oh what should I do? Wings of chicken, oriental-style. Crisp green apples, all the way from the Cape, but that was O K nowadays. Three cartons of soup, lentil and spinach and curried parsnip, suitable for the microwave. Vanilla ice-cream. Pecan pie, heat from frozen. Belgian beer. I should never have moved to the country and I should never have taken in Finn. Cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese. Cat food in rabbit and chicken and salmon flavours and the fat face of a purring mog on the tin. Crisps. Nuts. Television dinner: serves one.

  The door was locked when I arrived home. I let myself in and called upstairs for Finn, but there was nobody there. So I unloaded all the shopping, pushed food into the already crowded freezer, filled up the kettle, turned on the radio, turned it off again. Then I took a deep breath and went in to my study to check the answering machine. Its little green eye wasn’t blinking: no one had rung me at all.

  But there was an envelope on my desk and it had my name on it. And – I put my hand on the wood of the desktop for a moment – the handwriting was Danny’s. He’d been here, come in while I was out and left a note so he wouldn’t have to say it to me. I picked up the envelope and turned it over, held it for a moment. There were two sheets of paper. The top one was his. The paper was grubby and smeared. There were few words, obviously written in haste, without care, but they were unmistakably his.Sam

  Goodbye. I’m sorry. I

  Danny

  That was it. His apparent attempt at self-justification had fizzled, and he hadn’t bothered even to complete it. My breath rose and fell in my chest. The desk was grainy under my hand. I put Danny’s letter carefully down. My hands were trembling. Then I looked at the sheet of paper beneath, a forest of blue loops and underlinings.Darling Sam – how very intimate she’d become, all of a sudden. Perhaps she felt almost sisterly towards me now, having run off with my lover – It’s a madness, I know. We couldn’t live without each other. – How touching, I thought, love like the magazines say that it can be; love as a landslide, a destiny, a madness. – I’m sorry to hurt you, so sorry. Love, Finn.

  I folded Danny’s pitiful scrawl and Finn’s letter back in the envelope and put it where it had been. Danny and Finn, Danny and Finn. I took the photograph of Danny, back to the camera and head turned towards it, caught unawares, and put it neatly in the drawer of my desk. I ran into Finn’s room. The bed was made, a towel neatly folded on the bed. I clattered down the stairs. One of Finn’s jackets, the navy-blue one, was missing. Was it some crazy joke that I wasn’t getting the point of? No. They had gone. I said it aloud as if it was the only way I could take in what had happened: ‘They’ve run away. Finn.’ I made myself say it. ‘Danny.’ I looked at my watch. In two hours Elsie would be back. The memory of her little body wrapped around Finn’s slim one, of her pale grave face tilted up towards Finn’s smiling one, her cartwheel practised nightly in preparation for Danny’s return, momentarily stopped me dead. Bile rose in my throat. I went to the kitchen sink, splashed cold water over my face and drank two glasses more. Then I returned to my study and picked up the phone and pressed the button three times.

  ‘Stamford Central 2243.’ There was a pause. ‘Chief Inspector Frank Baird, please. Well, get him then.’

  Baird arrived in less than half an hour, Angeloglou with him. They both looked agitated, solemn. They could hardly meet my eye. My fidgety mind suddenly fixed on the contrast between them. Baird large, his suit tight under the arms, red hair across a large head. Angeloglou w
as neater, his tie pulled all the way up against his collar, a full head of dark curls. How did he brush it? They seemed newly wary of me. I was transformed from a professional person to a jilted woman. And although they didn’t say it, they both clearly thought Danny was little short of criminal, running off with Finn. There wasn’t much I could say to them, the story was simple enough. Any fool could understand it. Angeloglou wrote some things down in a notebook, they read the letters that the two of them had left behind, and together we went to Finn’s bedroom and stared into the wardrobe. One shirt was left hanging among the clatter of empty hangers; no underwear; no shoes; nothing. The room had been left quite tidy, one twist of tissue in the waste-paper basket and the duvet folded back. I was quite tart with Baird. I’m afraid, but I think that he understood. Just before he left he stood in the doorway, twisting the plain wedding ring on his thick finger, flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘Miss Laschen…’

  ‘Doctor Laschen.’

  ‘Doctor Laschen, I’m…’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘But thanks, anyway.’

  I still had thirty minutes left until Elsie came. I tidied the kitchen, wiped clean the table and opened the window, because outside it had turned into a balmy spring day. I picked four orange tulips from my garden and put them in the living room. I ran into Elsie’s room and made her bed, turned down the sheet on it and put her balding teddy on the pillow. Then I rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for her supper. Sonic the Hedgehog spaghetti shapes; she loved those. And I’d bought that ice-cream at the supermarket. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and stared at the staring face that looked back at me out of the mirror. I smiled at myself and myself obediently smiled back.

  Elsie ate her Sonic shapes, and her ice-cream, and had Pocahontas bubbles in her bath. Then we played a rather forlorn game of charades and I read her three books. Then she said, ‘Where’s Fing?’

  What had I agreed with myself to say?