There was a silence broken only by Ethan’s slurping and the scraping of his spoon in the bowl. Frieda wondered whether to take the risk and decided she had to. ‘Were you …?’ she began.

‘Were you?’ said Veronica, with a smile.

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘It wasn’t the right time.’

‘It wasn’t the right time for me either,’ said Veronica. ‘But we had a brief … Well, I don’t know what the word for it is. Something. I wish I’d known the Sandy you were describing. The one I met was more complicated. He could be cruel, or perhaps indifferent is a better word for it. He’d been in a relationship and it had ended badly.’

Frieda felt suddenly cold. Had Sandy mentioned her name?

‘He hated talking about it. But sometimes I felt he was like someone who had been in a terrible car crash or suffered a terrible loss. Well, he had suffered a terrible loss and he wasn’t over it. In fact, I’d say he was stuck in it and didn’t even want to move on.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Frieda, painfully aware that almost for the first time she was saying something truthful. ‘That must have been hard for you. Being involved with a man who wasn’t emotionally available.’

Veronica said to Ethan: ‘You’re a lucky boy. Carla’s a clever woman, isn’t she?’

‘No!’ Ethan scowled at her.

‘He was such an intelligent man,’ said Veronica to Frieda. ‘He was intelligent about everything except his own life. He was drinking too much, he didn’t look after himself. He needed help and he wouldn’t be helped. It’s awful what we do to each other, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It is.’ Frieda liked Veronica and felt that they could have been friends in another life.

‘And what we can’t do. Sometimes it felt like I was standing by a lake watching a man drown and I couldn’t do anything about it.’ Suddenly Veronica Ellison’s expression looked vulnerable and touching. ‘I’m not normally that sort of person – I don’t like being helpless. Why am I telling you this?’

‘Because I’m a stranger.’

‘That’s probably it. Anyway, he’d just had an affair with someone else before me and he seemed to feel he’d behaved pretty rottenly, although he didn’t go into any details. He never went into details. I’m sure he was also seeing another woman while we were together. If you can call it together. And then, sure enough, he moved on. But even when he was doing it, I felt sorry for him, rather than angry. But that’s my problem, I suppose.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Frieda. ‘Unless having insight and being compassionate is a problem. Which, of course, it can be.’

Veronica raised her eyes and studied Frieda’s face. ‘Hmm,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You really didn’t sleep with him?’

‘No.’ Frieda didn’t lower her gaze. ‘As I said, it wasn’t the right time. And I wasn’t the right person for him.’ That, at least, had turned out to be true.

‘I think you would have been good for him. Someone not in his intellectual world. Someone grounded, sensible.’ She met Frieda’s gaze. ‘That sounds rude. It wasn’t meant to be.’

Frieda shook her head. ‘So at the end, when you last saw him, Sandy was sad, distressed.’

‘There was something else.’

‘What?’

‘I think he was scared.’

‘Oh. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why do you think he was scared?’

‘I just knew. I can’t explain.’

‘He didn’t actually tell you?’

Veronica frowned. ‘This is turning into an interrogation,’ she said.

‘Sorry. But had someone threatened him?’ Frieda persisted.

‘The police have asked me all of this already. I don’t know why I should go through it again with a nanny. Why does it matter so much? Sandy’s dead.’

‘It matters because someone killed him. Perhaps he knew he was in danger.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ve told you everything I know – though I don’t understand what you’re looking for. Now I need to go.’

Frieda lifted Ethan onto the floor. His hand was sticky and hot in hers.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it.’ Although in truth, apart from discovering that Sandy had perhaps been scared, she hadn’t got much further. All Veronica could tell her was what she had already known: that Sandy had been unhappy and his life had become in some ways dysfunctional.

‘It’s been such a shock,’ said Veronica. ‘For all of us.’

‘Yes.’

‘As a matter of fact –’ Veronica stopped, biting her lip.

‘What?’

‘I was going to say that a group of us are having a little memorial for Sandy this evening. We felt we had to do something. There can’t be a funeral yet because of the investigation.’

‘That sounds a good thing.’

‘It’s nothing formal. It’s at the home of his head of department. People will speak of their own particular memories of Sandy, perhaps one or two people will read things. I wondered if you might like to come.’

Frieda thought about Sandy’s sister, Lizzie, and of those friends of his she’d met and who would recognize her at once, no matter what she was wearing.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Who’ll be there exactly?’

‘A small group of us from the university and then a few other people who knew him and whom we knew how to get in touch with. Not his family, not that he had much family, and nothing intimidating.’ She smiled encouragingly at Frieda. ‘You wouldn’t need to say anything. But it might be good for you to hear other people remembering Sandy as well.’

‘Sandy,’ said Ethan, suddenly and loudly. ‘Where’s Sandy?’

Frieda leaned across and wiped his mouth comprehensively.

‘It’s kind of you,’ she said to Veronica. ‘I think that I’d like to come.’

Back at Sasha’s house, Frieda made Ethan a lentil salad, which he didn’t eat, and then played a game of hide-and-seek with him. It was true what she had said to Veronica: children really do view things differently. Ethan thought that if he couldn’t see her, then she couldn’t see him. He stood in the corner of the room with his hands over his eyes and she loudly tried to discover his whereabouts. Then he slithered under the table with his wooden animals and she could hear him talking to them, a bit bossy but confiding. When his voice stopped she peered under the tablecloth and saw he had fallen asleep, his hands clutching his miniature toys and his mouth half open. She gently pulled him out of his den and laid him on the sofa, pushing a cushion under his hot head and closing the curtains so his face wasn’t in the sunlight. She sat and watched him for a while, the breath puffing his lips and the flickering of his eyes in dreams. What was he dreaming of, she wondered, this mysterious little creature? What did he see when his eyes were closed?

When Sasha returned, Frieda was reading a book to Ethan. It was about lots of animals sitting on a broomstick and he knew it almost by heart and joined in with the words.

‘This is the sixth time I’ve read it,’ said Frieda, standing up. ‘If I try to read anything else, he holds his breath so that his face goes bright red. I was afraid he would pop. It’s amazing how much power a small child can have.’

‘But has he been all right?’ She bent to kiss Ethan but he wriggled free of her and disappeared under the table where they could hear him banging things.

‘He’s been good.’

‘You saved me.’

‘Hardly.’

‘I’ve taken tomorrow off – they think I’m going to a conference in Birmingham – so I can sort out childcare. I can hardly bear the thought of it. Beginning all over again with some stranger. I’d almost rather give up my job, but I don’t know if I’d cope with that – just being a mother, losing that structure and identity in the outside world. That’s what I’m really scared of: collapsing, going mad like I did before. I never want to go back to those days. I never want Ethan to see me like that. He must not.’

‘Perhaps you don’t have to bear it,’ Frieda said, after a pause.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can cover for a while. A week or two. Especially if you take some of the holiday you’re owed.’