The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (16 page)

And where was I in this catastrophized tableau? Hiding in the wardrobe or under the bed, my clothes clutched to my naked body, a high-heeled shoe left behind, just visible from the door?

As I say, it didn’t bear thinking about.

‘
Another
cake?’ exclaimed Felicity, standing at her open door. ‘You’re spoiling me.’

All those names Rob had listed, the names of the neighbours who adored me: hers had not been included.

‘It’s the least I can do,’ I said. ‘Victoria sponge, this time – I took a chance.’

‘You
do
have a guilty conscience, don’t you?’

‘Not that guilty,’ I said with a giggle, ‘otherwise I’d have baked it myself.’

‘But you don’t have a kitchen yet,’ she said kindly.

‘I do, actually. That’s what I came to say: downstairs is all finished now, so it’s just the bathrooms to go. I probably don’t need to tell you what a relief it is to see light at the end of the tunnel.’

‘That
is
good news.’ Felicity urged me towards the living room, saying, ‘I have my friend Vanessa here. Go and say hello while I fetch you a cup of tea.’

The friend was in her late fifties, heavy enough for her smile to be engulfed by the flesh of her face, and dressed from head to toe in an ill-advised putty-grey. Rising from her seat, she eyed me with the air of having been sidelined by her own kind, stirring in me the instinct to take her in hand and transform her future. (Wouldn’t
that
be a worthier use of my time than deceiving my husband?) I wondered if she might be the depressed one with whom Felicity went walking; perhaps I should go with them one of these days, be their little cheerleader.

‘Amber lives next door,’ Felicity explained to Vanessa, joining us. By now, she knew not to cut any cake for me, but automatically planted a plate with a large slice on her friend’s lap. The cream oozed over the line of jam, the sponge springy and yellow; it put me in mind of an open wound.

Her gaze still fixed on me, Vanessa moved her fingers
blindly towards the cake as she spoke. ‘So you’re the one who … ?’

‘Who keeps bringing me these delicious offerings,’ Felicity finished for her. ‘Can you believe my luck, Nessy?’

Though my brow remained smooth, I frowned internally: what had Vanessa been about to say before Felicity interrupted her?
You’re the one who sneaks upstairs twice a week to have sex with your neighbour …
But I knew better than to put the words into their mouths (that was what the cake was for). I knew better than to let paranoia take hold.

‘I’m the one they all hate,’ I said amiably. ‘They have voodoo dolls of me they stick pins into every morning at eight o’clock when the drilling starts up again. And I don’t blame them, either.
I
would hate me too.’

‘Oh, you know that’s not true,’ Felicity said. ‘I’ve never known anyone so popular; she has adoring fans coming out of her ears, Nessy, just look at her!’

‘I can see,’ Vanessa exclaimed, as if in the presence of Angelina Jolie. She scooped the overflowing cream with her finger before noticing the fork Felicity had supplied. As she gripped it, coincidentally at exactly the moment Felicity picked up hers, I had the peculiar image of the two of them coming at me with their tiny weapons, jabbing at my arms and legs, forcing a confession from me.

‘And what about that enormous bouquet of flowers I saw being delivered to your house a few days ago?’ Felicity continued. ‘There must have been two or three dozen red roses – the poor deliveryman could hardly stand up under their weight.’

‘They were from Jeremy. My husband,’ I added, for
Vanessa’s benefit. ‘It was our wedding anniversary.’ There’d been other lavish gifts, too; jewellery, shoes, another brace of my favourite candles, as well as indulgent praise over a champagne dinner for my medal-deserving fortitude during the building works. (‘I must admit, I’d thought you’d be tearing your hair out by now,’ he’d said. ‘But you’ve been quite stoic.’ Stoic? The poor darling.)

‘How many years have you been married?’ Vanessa asked.

‘Five. We had a whirlwind romance so I can’t remember us
not
being married.’

‘He’s a very nice man, your husband,’ Felicity remarked. ‘Strikes me as a one in a million.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said.

‘I’m glad
you
think so.’

I stared at Felicity. Had she actually said that? She couldn’t possibly have, could she? I checked Vanessa’s expression – unruffled, lips dusted with icing sugar, eyes on her plate – and decided that I must have hallucinated.

‘I hear you met my friend Gemma the other day.’

‘Oh yes,’ Felicity said. ‘A very cross sort of girl, isn’t she?’

‘Was she rude to you? I’m sorry. She’d come out of her way to see me and was probably frustrated I wasn’t in.’

‘She was insisting she’d heard your phone in my flat or Rob’s, but I told her you were probably at the gym.’

‘Yes, I was,’ I said. ‘Thank you for being so helpful, Felicity.’

‘You’re very welcome. I would have invited her in to wait but, as I say, she was a bit bad-tempered.’

Well, praise the Lord for Gemma’s surliness, I thought.
There was still hope that Felicity had missed any clues to impropriety on the day in question, but Gemma, were she to have been granted access to number 38, most certainly would not.

Felicity had been right about the guilty conscience. I drank my tea much too quickly, almost scalding the roof of my mouth, before pleading a lunch date with a friend in town.

‘She’s everywhere, this one,’ Felicity told Vanessa, as I left.

Indeed I was, a social butterfly no less – I had nothing better to do, after all – and during those summer months Jeremy and I were constantly at soirées on the street. Other than at large gatherings it was rare that we overlapped with Rob, but whenever we did I sensed that he relished seeing me out of context rather more than I did him.

One Saturday evening in July, Kenny and Joanne invited us to dinner and it was there that a curious episode took place, one that I should perhaps have paid closer attention to at the time. Rob had been invited, alongside the usual suspects – Caroline and Richard, Mel and Simon – and among the ageing, Conservative-leaning husbands he cut a youthful, louche figure. Moving of their own accord, my fingers played with the tips of my hair whenever he looked my way.

Clearly Joanne regarded him as her guest of honour. ‘Now you’re in circulation, Rob, you do realize the temptation is too great to resist, don’t you?’ she told him wickedly.

Seated at her side in a wicker tub chair in a conservatory so charming it had wisteria growing
inside
, he looked momentarily tamed. ‘What temptation?’

I got it before he did and smiled to myself. He’d been set up. In the kitchen, the farmhouse table was laid for ten.

‘Great,’ he drawled, ‘I look forward to meeting my match,’ and his gaze came to rest on my left hand, my long pearl-white nails tapping gently on Jeremy’s thigh, diamond glinting in the pink evening light. On the low table between us, already unboxed and lit, was the Diptyque candle I’d given Joanne on arrival (‘Ambre’, naturally. It sounded so sexy in French, but not nearly as sexy as in English, when Rob said it, into my open mouth, his breath pouring down my throat like liquid).

His date was the last to arrive, a little late after getting confused about directions. A colleague of Kenny’s called Caitlin, she was perfectly pretty but artfully low-key in her appearance, presumably in case Rob turned out to be a dud. I had no doubt that she’d be straight to the bathroom to make some adjustments once she’d identified the quality of the offering.

Instead, she took one look at him and went pale.

‘We’ve met before,’ he told the group in explanation, and the phrasing caused me to colour under my make-up.
You let me do whatever I wanted …
Well, evidently this girl had a better memory than I did. And since she’d surely have had no trouble finding the street had she been here before, I deduced that the venue for their one-night stand had been her place, not his. I appeared to be unusual in
having been allowed into his bedroom, a logistical necessity of our affair and yet a distinction that pleased me.

‘You already know each other?’ Joanne said, disappointed.

‘We only met once,’ Caitlin said, and her neutral tone was belied by the anxious look in her eyes. She gulped at the Martini pressed upon her by Kenny and recoiled a little at its potency.

‘Years ago, wasn’t it?’ Rob said, nonplussed by the coincidence. Clearly, he was not a man whose girlfriends remained in his life once discharged from duty. Well, I could hardly condemn him for that: there was not a single man I’d been with whose number still darkened my phone contacts. ‘I’m not sure I would have recognized you, Caitlin.’

With your clothes on!
thought the happily marrieds, exchanging significant glances.

Sadly, a repeat performance seemed unlikely that night, for the poor girl couldn’t handle the pace of suburban drinking: huge balloons of red wine followed the Martinis (Simon, known for his alcoholic capacity even in this company, managed the two in parallel), and she began complaining of feeling unwell almost straight away. No sooner had Joanne served the main course, a gargantuan fish pie swimming in cream and flecked, to my horror, with disintegrating boiled egg, than Caitlin had fled the table, Kenny in pursuit. It crossed my mind that he might be having an affair with her – it was of just this younger-co-worker cliché that Liz’s marriage had fallen foul – perhaps using the event as some sort of perverted
game (it took one to know one). Glancing at Rob and noting his enthusiasm as he advised Richard on the expansion of his blues collection, I excused myself and headed to the cloakroom in the hall. I left the door ajar so I could hear Kenny and Caitlin talking by the front door.

My suspicion had been fanciful, it appeared. Though Caitlin was preparing to leave, plainly distraught, Kenny’s solicitations were nothing but comradely. ‘No, no, I understand. Of course I’ll say goodbye to everyone for you. This is awful, Caitlin, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

‘You couldn’t have known. But you see why I can’t stay? I don’t want to ruin your evening …’

‘Don’t give it another thought. Let’s talk about it on Monday, shall we?’

He turned from closing the door as I emerged from the loo, lipstick refreshed. His expression was troubled.

‘Are we one down?’ I said brightly.

‘So it seems.’

‘But it’s only ten-thirty, the party’s hardly started! Are you all right, Kenny?’

‘I’m fine.’ He smiled, gazing at me fondly. ‘How old are you, Amber, if I’m allowed to ask?’

‘Of course you are. I’m thirty-five.’

‘Exactly the same as Caitlin, then, but she’s a mess. I’m not saying it’s her fault, but she hasn’t made your choices, let’s put it that way.’

‘You mean in men? Oh, believe me, I’ve kissed plenty of frogs in my time, Kenny.’

‘Lucky frogs,’ he said, and his eyes dipped from my face to my breasts; he was a lovely guy, but he was only human.

‘Maybe Liz would be a safer bet if you’re making up the numbers,’ I suggested, linking my arm through his as we walked back to the kitchen. As one of my special cases, I liked her to be included.

‘Maybe,’ Kenny said.

At the table, which now resembled a frat party bar, loaded as it was with the spirits and liqueurs assembled to accompany Joanne’s Eton Mess, he said merely that Caitlin was ill and had decided to go home early to spare us her groans.

‘Oh God,’ Joanne said, ‘I hope it wasn’t the Parma ham.’

Rob said nothing, but he was the next to leave, which surprised me, given his constitution. I didn’t follow him out as I longed to and urge him to thrust me against the wall, tell me exactly what he thought of me.

‘What was all that about?’ Caroline asked, when just the eight of us remained. ‘I feel like I’m missing something here.’

‘I didn’t want to say in front of Rob, but Caitlin got very upset,’ Kenny said. ‘Whatever their fling was, it ended badly.’

‘What are the chances that they’d got together before?’ Mel exclaimed.

‘Pretty good if you ask me,’ I said. ‘That man goes through women like water. He’s forever telling me how he loves ’em and leaves ’em.’

It was true that I’d lost count of the dates Rob had mentioned during our months together; some he’d met through work, others locally, more still thanks to introductions made by friends and family. He didn’t bother
with Internet dating because he didn’t need to: he was attractive, unmarried and solvent, hunted rather than hunter. It amused me – and flattered me, I admit – that I had outlasted so many of them, though of course I knew the psychology: he could relax with me because I made no emotional demands of him. With the others, he gave rein to what was a pretty standard phobia of commitment: the moment a woman wanted more, he remembered to tell her he wanted rather less. (The problem – and one that I had not adequately anticipated, certainly not at that stage – was that by enjoying my special privileges I exposed myself to the risk of developing proprietary feelings towards him.)

Kenny was frowning, drinking deeply from his wine glass. By the recycling bin there’d already grown an impressive forest of empties. ‘It wasn’t just that he ditched her a bit carelessly or anything like that. She seemed to be hinting that he got rough with her.’

‘Rough,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘You mean he hit her?’

‘Well, not –’ Kenny began, but I interrupted him.

‘Of course he didn’t.’ I spoke very firmly. ‘That’s ridiculous. Rob wouldn’t do that. Don’t you agree, Caroline?’

Caroline looked pained to have to disagree not only with her new best friend but also with the stylist responsible for putting her in the partially unbuttoned cheesecloth shirt-dress that had been drawing her husband’s eye all evening. It was a spectacular upgrade from the flared jeans and shapeless Breton tops she’d favoured when we moved to the street, a pairing altered so rarely I’d taken it as official uniform. ‘You have to admit we don’t know him that
well,’ she said to me, then, appealing to the group as a whole, ‘I mean, we’ve never met a girlfriend of his, have we? In
years
.’