PART 1 — FRIEDA
Five years of treatment and then three at once.
Rory, Lark and Mae, born at thirty-three weeks in the March, and it was a hard delivery and I was in that hospital nine days.
Roman cried in the corridor. I want that on the record because it was real.
We had agreed I would stop work. We agreed it properly, at a table, in 2023.
What we did not agree, and what I have gone back over about four hundred times looking for, is the other thing — the part where stopping work meant that every single thing inside the walls of that house became mine.
I was doing the washing four days after I came home.
And every time I said anything, it came back the same way.
“You’re at home. That’s what at home means.”
I kept the peace. That is the honest word for it and it is not a compliment to myself.
Then in the September he came into the kitchen and said:
“Right — me and the lads have booked Portugal. Ten days.”
I said, “What about me? We haven’t talked about any of it. I thought we’d do something as a family.”
And he laughed. Not nastily. That is the thing people get wrong. He laughed the way you laugh at a child asking for something silly.
“Have you earned a holiday though?”
“Roman. I’ve got three babies.”
He rolled his eyes.
“I work. I’m paying for mine. You don’t, so you haven’t. I’m going and that’s that.”
And he went. Case in the hall on the Thursday, taxi at five in the morning on the Friday.
I sat on the floor of that hall after the taxi went and I did not cry, and I have thought a lot about why not.
Then on the Monday I made one telephone call.
He came back ten days later, brown, in a good mood, and came through the front door with his case and his sunglasses still on his head, grinning.
And he got to the kitchen door and stopped.
There was a woman of about fifty-eight sitting at our table with a mug of tea.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Frieda. She starts Monday.”
“Starts what?”
“Forty hours. It’s already gone out of the joint account.”
And Frieda Oyelowo put her mug down, stood up, put her hand out and said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Falk.”
PART 2 — THE ARITHMETIC
Frieda is from an agency in Sheldrake and she has done this for twenty-six years.
Nights Monday to Thursday, days on a Friday. Forty hours.
Three thousand one hundred pounds a month. Direct debit, joint account, first one taken on the second, which was while he was in Portugal.
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