The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (2 page)

Christy grimaced. ‘Let’s not think about debt today. Let’s pretend we own the house outright.’

In reality, she would not forget as long as she lived that adrenalin-drenched sprint to pull together the finance for the house, how they’d tossed into the pot the proceeds of their flat, life savings and a loan from Christy’s parents (Joe’s had nothing to lend; her own, little enough to cause her guilt pangs for having had the nerve to take it), not to mention a mortgage brokered in haste by a friend of a friend and regarded thereafter by the couple as too horrifyingly colossal to be real. Even then, they’d fallen short, had had to resort to punishing forgotten credit cards to cover their solicitor’s fees.

‘Cash-poor’ didn’t scratch the surface of it.

And then there was the other sacrifice, agreed between the two of them in what already felt to Christy like a deal with the devil: babies. There could be none yet, not until one – or both – of them had been promoted. After all, you could decide to have a family any time, couldn’t you, but a house like 40 Lime Park Road was a rare and special thing and they might never have had this chance again.

Yes, they were agreed on it.

The arrival and unloading of their possessions the next day did not attract the curiosity they might have expected on a Saturday morning in suburbia. The street remained as deserted as it had been the day before, the atmosphere reminding Christy of that resettling of energy the morning after a party – a party so eventful that its highlights and lowlights could not yet be told apart.

‘Where are all the neighbours?’

‘It’s the Easter holidays, don’t forget,’ Joe pointed out.
‘They’ll all have houses in Cornwall or France or take their kids on amazing safaris.’

‘That must be it,’ Christy said, marvelling again that they should find themselves joining such an affluent group. Would they fit in? Their backgrounds, their accents, the fact that they even had to ask: would they pass muster in an area like Lime Park?

She hoped so. After all, part of her desire to live here was the idea of an established and sociable community; nothing
too
grand or exclusive, of course, but certainly something more substantial than the anonymous, interchangeable relationships of their previous neighbourhoods. And perhaps the first local convention to be observed was that it was up to newcomers to introduce themselves and not the other way around.

Waiting until a civilized hour the next day, she began with the adjoining house, number 38, which was divided into two flats. She tried the downstairs bell first. After some delay, there were reluctant footsteps within and a heavy-set middle-aged woman appeared at the door, politely putting Christy off before she could even open her mouth: ‘Felicity’s not here. She’s down in Dorset at her daughter’s. I’m just checking on the place for her.’

The place in question, glimpsed through the half-opened door, had polished oak floorboards and walls painted a rich Venetian yellow. Christy noticed on the hall table a stack of mail that suggested several weeks’ absence, as well as a beautiful hourglass bottle of scent.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said warmly. ‘We’ve just moved in
next door and wanted to say hello. So Felicity is the owner, is she?’

The woman eyed her with circumspection. ‘Yes, but not for much longer. She’s just agreed a sale.’

‘Really? Sounds like everyone’s moving out.’ But Christy knew it was not uncommon to find two properties side by side on the market at the same time; the appearance of one ‘For Sale’ sign on a street often encouraged neighbours to have their own houses valued. ‘Well, she might decide to stay after that piece in the paper on Friday,’ she joked. ‘It was quite a write-up.’

The woman did not smile. ‘Oh, believe me, no amount of money could keep her here.’

Christy was taken aback. ‘Sorry, I –’

‘In fact, I doubt you’ll see Felicity back here at all before she moves out for good.’

‘What do you mean? Why not?’

But the woman already had her hand on the door, ready to close it. ‘I’m afraid I have to go, I’m right in the middle of cooking …’

The kitchen was partially visible on the far side of the hall, its lights off and worktop cleared; there were no smells of cooking. In any case, hadn’t she said she was only here to check on the place?

‘Do you know if they’re in upstairs?’ Christy said, her tone persistently bright, though she addressed only a sliver of the woman as the door advanced towards her. And then it was in her face, clicking shut, causing her to step suddenly back.

Not a very promising start.

She rang the bell for the upper flat, but there was no reply.

In the front garden of number 40, Joe was spraying the Frasers’ immaculate topiary with a hose he’d found in their garden shed. ‘There was definitely someone in the upstairs flat a minute ago. I saw a dark-haired bloke at the window.’

‘Weird that he didn’t answer his doorbell.’

‘On the phone, maybe. What about the other side?’

But it was obvious there was no one in at number 42; the off-street parking bay had been empty since Friday.

Just then a man walked by their gate, a black Lab at his feet. Both human and canine eyes were cast determinedly to the pavement.

‘Hi there,’ Christy called brightly. ‘We’ve just moved in!’

The man didn’t glance up, the dog only briefly, and the two walked resolutely on.

Joe cracked up. ‘You can’t just shout out to random passers-by! He probably doesn’t even live around here.’

‘I saw him coming out of a house further up.’

‘Er, he could have just been visiting someone. He’s parked down there, see? The Volvo? Just wait till the neighbours come to us,’ Joe added, continuing his watering. The hose spat and hissed in his hand like a threatened animal. ‘It’s not like we’ve joined a commune, it’s just a regular street.’

The two exchanged a grin: it was certainly not regular by
their
standards.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed, ‘we’ve got years to get to know people. I’m just excited to see who else lives here.’

‘Well, don’t get your hopes up. Just because we live next door doesn’t mean we’re going to be best buddies … Damn!’ As he reached to twist free a dead shoot, the hose slipped and water shot at Christy, soaking her feet.

‘Urgh, it’s freezing!’

If this were a TV show, the Joe character would have squirted the hose upwards, soaked her to the skin, then she would have seized it and returned the insult, leading to shrieking and kissing and his lifting her over the threshold and chasing her upstairs to conceive their first child. But it was not TV and anyway they had their pact, didn’t they?

‘Coffee?’ she offered.

‘You’re not going to fire up the space-age monster?’

‘I was going to boil the kettle for economy-brand instant, actually.’ There was no way they could splurge on the imported capsules needed for the Frasers’ fitted appliance, assuming she could figure out how to operate the thing in the first place. ‘We might have to steal coffee from work from now on. Milk and loo rolls as well. We’ll take it in turns to evade suspicion.’

‘It might come to that,’ Joe said cheerfully.

Before heading indoors, Christy glanced up again at the neighbour’s flat, the overhanging bay visible above the dividing hedge. It was a dim day and there were no lights on, but Joe was right, there
was
someone up there.

She looked again at her wet feet and felt a shiver pass through her.

My name is Amber Fraser and I suppose you could call this a confession.

Of course, I don’t mean in a religious sense, or even a criminal one, but it occurs to me that if I were unlucky enough to be on the plane that crashed, the boat that overturned, the taxi struck by lightning, then there should be a written account of the truth available. God knows, Jeremy couldn’t be expected to give it. Sometimes I think he’s forgotten what the truth is, so committed is he to believing our lies.

My
lies.

The need for deception began almost as soon as we moved into the house on Lime Park Road. It was April 2012. I can’t believe it’s not quite eighteen months ago, not when my eyes in the mirror suggest a period closer to eighteen years, but I guess it’s always difficult to recognize your pre-revolutionary self, isn’t it?

We’d been living in an apartment on the river in Battersea and the move to suburbia was both serendipitous and carefully plotted: serendipitous in that Jeremy’s childless uncle had died suddenly and left him enough money to fund the purchase and renovation of a new
house, and carefully plotted in that we had been in agreement for some time that we would make the move as soon as I was ready to give up work. And now, at thirty-five, I was.

I can picture you wincing as you read this, checking that the date above really is from the twenty-first century: ready to give up work! What kind of a shameful throwback is she? But when your husband is wealthy enough for two and you have been selected in the first place for your youth and good looks, then I guess you are qualified to make staggeringly anachronistic statements like that (if not so easily forgiven). And some of my fantasies
were
very 1950s, I have to confess. I imagined myself soaking up the sun in the garden for hours on end, lying on one of those old art deco steamer chairs, a pile of magazines and a jug of daiquiris by my side – should the weather turn miraculously Wisteria Lane on us, that was. In Lime Park in drizzly south London the equivalent would be to laze in bed and then swim in the pool at the gym, mooch about the little boutiques on the Parade or lunch with fellow wastrels up in town. I know women who have done little else for years and, when challenged, they all say exactly the same: Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

But don’t worry, I wasn’t planning on doing nothing. We hadn’t bought a family house without intending to fill it with a family. First, I would oversee the renovations (or oversee the project manager who would oversee the renovations) and then I would have a baby. And even an indulged hedonist like me knew that looking after a baby was the hardest job of all.

By the time we moved in, Jeremy and I had been trying for several months to conceive. It wasn’t long enough for us to have investigated fertility treatments, but it was long enough to suspect that something was stuck that might need an expert to loosen it. He had had a girlfriend at university who’d become pregnant and so it stood to reason that the blockage was mine. Our amateur diagnosis was stress, of the work-related variety: somehow my media-buying job managed to be at once over-stimulating and completely stultifying. Without the commute, without the office politics, without the
work
, I could ease my body into a more fecund state; I could relax into the soft green bower of Lime Park and await impregnation.

As I say, the lies began almost as soon as we arrived that rain-splashed weekend in April. Now, when I think about it, it’s as if I’d become a different person by the Sunday from the one I’d been on the Friday, but I know that can’t be true. This wasn’t a case of life-altering epiphanies, it was simply a matter of the old me resurrecting – Amber Speed, party girl, hellraiser, law-breaker. I’d convinced myself she was dead, invoking her now and then with nostalgic regret, but I think I’d known all along she was not dead. She was merely sleeping off a hangover.

So, on the Friday, when I was still his devoted wife and the committed future mother of his children, Jeremy suggested we leave the new house and go for a walk in the park while it was still light. We used our private gate at the end of the garden, which like everything else in the property had not been painted this millennium. I was fond of that little gate. It was like having access to a generously
sized communal garden, one reason for the rising prices both of the houses themselves and, as Jeremy pointed out, the insurance premiums they carried.

‘I wonder if easy to get
out
also means easy to get
in
,’ he said, carefully clicking the latch shut behind us.

‘Oh, don’t be such a bore,’ I said, laughing. ‘Anyway, burglars would have to go through a hundred sealed boxes before they found anything worth stealing.’ We’d agreed there was no point unpacking ninety per cent of our belongings until the works were complete; within days the whole lot would be buried in dust. ‘They’d just give up and leave.’

‘Not if they hit the jackpot of your wardrobe,’ he said, hooking my hand under his elbow and squeezing the ends of my gloved fingers. ‘Then they’d be quids in.’

Quids in
: one of the many terms he used that reminded me of the difference in our ages. At fifty-one, he was sixteen years older than me.

‘They would.’ I pressed myself closer to him as we walked, resting my head on his shoulder and admiring the way my hair tumbled over his waxed jacket, shiny and vivid as spilled blood.

The park was a compact rectangle and a circuit took only ten or fifteen minutes along paths bordered with daffodils. It was one of those days when wet weather seems appealing, even romantic, when the rain is soft and the circumstances hopeful. There was a lovely corner of meadow where the grass had been allowed to grow wild, and I imagined settling there in warmer weather, whiling away whole afternoons with music or a book. Maybe, one day, I’d be taking a toddler there to romp. But that was a
long way off. In the meantime, I wondered if I’d be able to persuade more centrally based friends to join me or if they’d baulk at the train journey. Lime Park was not on the Tube and the overland service was chronically overcrowded according to Jeremy, who’d have no choice but to start using it daily from Monday. I’d need to make new friends locally.

‘It’s nice, this area, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought there was something special about it.’

‘Yes. It feels so much more relaxed out here. And secret, like we’re the only ones who know about it.’

In Battersea Park even in the soggiest weather you were in danger of being dragged underfoot by stampedes of runners, or stalled by the tourists who clogged its paths in that oblivious way of out-of-towners so intent on experiencing every local detail they forget there are natives with lives to get on with. Lime Park, I was to discover, was deemed too small to run around and too lacking in statuary for tourists. In spite of a recent regeneration programme, word had not yet spread and I wonder now if that atmosphere of secrecy, of removal, was a factor in the events that followed.

‘I hope there’ll be some fun to be had around here,’ I added.

‘Oh, I’m sure there will,’ Jeremy said. ‘Aren’t the sticks supposed to be more debauched than the centre of town?’

‘I think that’s only an urban myth. Or a suburban myth.’

‘Well, you’ll find the party people, darling, wherever they are.’

You see, I hadn’t changed
completely
from my earlier
libertine self, I was still known to be fun-loving and flirtatious. But the crucial thing was I was always faithful. Since Jeremy and I had become involved almost five and a half years ago, I had not for a moment considered encouraging another man, not even to remind myself that I could (conceited as it sounds, I
knew
how attractive I was; it was sort of the point of me). In any case, he was not the suspicious sort. He trusted me.

I trusted myself; it’s worth my remembering that.

Returning to the house, we toured the rooms once more and studied the plans of our designer, Hetty, for the kitchen extension and new bathrooms while reassuring each other that if it all became too much we would simply decamp to a short-term rental or hotel. We stayed up late, drinking champagne, before heading to bed in our temporary quarters at the top of the house. It was cold that night and a decent heating system had yet to be installed, so we piled on the blankets as if camping out in the open. We fell asleep touching.

I remember all of this because there was no premonition, not a whisper of an instinct to warn me that only two days later I would suffer a catastrophic malfunction.
I’d need to make friends locally
…
I hope there’ll be some fun
: how portentous the lines sound when I read them back, but I’d meant only that I hoped for amusement, a mild diversion every now and then, the company of someone who knew how to mix a decent cocktail and tell a good story.

But by Sunday I’d met him and at a stroke Lime Park had lost its innocence, those banks of rain-washed daffodils emblems of hope only in the most ironic sense. And
I can’t even blame him because I actively sought him out. There was no trap involved, no trick: he was a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

And I went right up to his door and asked him his name.

‘We need to speak to the neighbours before Monday,’ Jeremy said on the Saturday evening, our first full day as owners coming to a close. We sat with a takeaway curry at our tulip dining table in the kitchen that would within forty-eight hours become a demolition site. The outdated cabinets and appliances, the chipped floor tiles, even the newly fitted worktop (a token attempt at a pre-sale facelift that wasn’t fooling anyone, Hetty said, least of all her): everything would be in a skip the following week and we’d be cooking in a makeshift kitchen on the top floor. In reality, I’d skip lunch and we’d eat out most nights.

‘I haven’t seen a soul on that side,’ I agreed. By contrast, the family at number 42 had introduced themselves within hours of our arrival, at least the wife had, taking the lead in the self-confident, emphatic way you’d expect of residents of a road like this. She’d come to the door with a potted lily and home-made chocolate cake, exclaiming, ‘You
must
come for drinks as
soon
as you’re settled in! We’ve all been
dying
to meet you.’ She’d been gracious about the building works, too. ‘Oh, we expected that. No offence to Rachel and Tom, they were great friends of ours, but that kitchen was on its last legs and they didn’t touch the bathrooms the whole ten years they were there. I think they thought with young children anything new
would just get trashed …’ On she gossiped about our predecessors, who had gone off to Beijing in pursuit of the dragon dollar, before concluding, ‘Anyway, we’re not attached, are we, so the noise won’t be too bad for us.’

The ones it
would
be bad for were on our other side, number 38, our Siamese twin (I came in time to think of our master bedroom and its counterpart on the other side of the wall as conjoined hearts). A charm offensive was in order and I’d been keeping half an eye out for comings and goings, an opportunity to introduce myself, but so far no occupants had made themselves known or even been spotted at the window.

‘It’s flats, not a single residence,’ Jeremy said now, with a trace of superiority. ‘They probably rent.’

‘What, if you rent you can’t possibly come out and say hello?’ I scoffed. ‘You have to own a “single residence” to have any manners?
I
was renting when we met, remember?’ Naturally, I didn’t add that my last flat had been well known to council environmental officers owing to complaints about parties, and Jeremy conceded the point with a fond little tut. I challenged him increasingly these days, especially when he said anything snobbish or entitled like that last comment. Having married into comfort, I was able now to admit – and occasionally defend – my earlier experiences of the opposite. It was nothing that suggested we were drifting apart, you understand, but more a case that I was growing up and he was giving me the space to do so.

‘Anyway, they’ll have been out at work all day yesterday,’ I said. ‘The only reason – what was her name? Caroline
Sellers, that’s it – the only reason Caroline Sellers came by on a Friday was because she’s a stay-at-home mum.’

‘I hate that term,’ Jeremy said, wrinkling his nose. ‘As if they’re under house arrest with electronic tags around their ankles.’

‘Maybe that’s how it feels?’ I hoped there might be a different way of phrasing it by the time I became one – and, perhaps, a different way of
feeling
it. ‘Anyway, people will have been doing Saturday stuff today, or nursing a hangover after office drinks. I remember it well.’ I smiled, mock nostalgic. ‘Friday always was the best day of the week.’

Jeremy ladled another helping of biryani onto his plate; he was lucky with his metabolism and, while not vain, kept himself in the kind of shape you’d expect of a successful man with a younger wife. ‘You sound as if you wish you’d been there yourself, darling. You can always go back, you know. I have no wish to enslave you in domesticity.’ He looked at me, amused. ‘Make you
stay at home
. Or you could change careers? Retrain?’

I dismissed the very idea. Retrain? I’d never been trained in anything in the first place. Since I’d walked away from my job at Christmas I hadn’t regretted it for a moment; I wouldn’t have gone to Friday night drinks with my old colleagues if they’d been handing out tickets to the moon. ‘I’ll have masses to do here,’ I told him. ‘You’re right, though, we do need to warn the neighbours about the work starting. There’ll be a skip in the drive at eight o’clock on Monday morning.’

‘And builders do like to get straight on to smashing everything up,’ Jeremy said. ‘It’s the only part they seem to
enjoy. It’ll be bedlam by eight-thirty.’ He spoke with the relish of someone who knew the upheaval would be brutal but expected to experience it only second hand, passing through in the dark, silent hours to admire progress or admonish the lack of it.

‘We’ll go around tomorrow morning and take them a bottle of wine as a bribe,’ I suggested.