Thursday's Children by Nicci French

Author:Nicci French [French, Nicci]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718156992
Amazon: 0718156994
Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd
Published: 2014-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

24

Reuben only cooked four or five dishes and he served them in rotation. Frieda had eaten them all, over and over again. There was chilli con carne, lasagne, baked potatoes with sour cream and grated cheese. And tonight it was pasta with the pesto that he bought from the local deli. Frieda was only at Reuben’s house because he had blackmailed her. When she had said she couldn’t come, Reuben said, in that case, they would all come round to her house and bring the food and wine with them. ‘You know I’ll do it,’ Reuben said. Frieda did indeed know that Reuben would do it.

So she sat at Reuben’s table and ate the pasta and drank the red wine and looked at the photos of the baby on Sasha’s phone and listened to Josef talking about the flat he was working on over in West Hampstead, and Reuben opened a second bottle of red wine, then a third. A phone rang and everyone looked around and she realized it was hers.

‘Sometimes I leave it on by mistake,’ she said. She took the phone out of her jacket pocket and saw Sandy’s name. ‘I’ll just switch it off.’

‘Answer it,’ said Reuben. ‘It’ll be good practice for you.’

She walked away from the table and into Reuben’s living room. A window looked out on the unkempt back garden.

‘Is this a good time to talk?’

‘I’m at Reuben’s.’

‘With the gang?’

‘Why are you calling?’

‘It can’t end like this. You can’t just click your fingers and eject me from your life.’

‘I know that we need to talk, but not now.’

‘I’ve been going over and over everything. Was something going wrong that I wasn’t noticing? Was it something I did? Was I crowding you? Did you get scared of the intimacy?’

‘This isn’t the right time.’

‘It seems the right time to me. We’re actually speaking to each other at least. I’ve been trying to call you for days.’

‘We can’t do this over the phone.’

Sandy started to say something angrily, and after a few seconds of hearing his bitter, recriminating words, Frieda took the phone away from her ear and ended the call. She found herself looking at an Escher print on Reuben’s wall. It was a drawing of an impossible building in which people who were walking upstairs found themselves going down and people going downstairs found themselves going up. She took a few moments to compose herself, then went back into the kitchen. She found them talking, but they were like bad actors pretending to be talking. Frieda sat down and picked up her wine glass. Josef looked at Sasha. Sasha looked at Reuben. Reuben gave a shrug.

‘All right, everyone,’ said Frieda. ‘Say what you’ve got to say.’

Josef looked puzzled. ‘Is nothing.’

Frieda stared accusingly at Reuben.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘the point of an evening like this is that you can be with friends and eat good food, or at least some kind of food, and you don’t have to be hassled by people asking how you are.’

‘Which suits me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.