The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (20 page)

‘Bins! Come on, isn’t it obvious it’s about the big secret everyone knows except us? The one that Caroline said was the reason they boycotted our party – to do with Rob? Don’t forget we had a note for him through our door smeared with shit, Joe!’

Joe’s brow knitted with irritation. ‘It was anonymous
and I refuse to take an anonymous letter seriously. That kind of thing is outside the rules of society.’

‘Maybe
he’s
the one outside the rules of society?’ Christy suggested, her exasperation growing. ‘It’s clear to me that he must have done something illegal.’

‘Illegal? Why would you think that? This email, it’s just a load of neighbours gossiping, by the look of it. What did you say was the book they’ve chosen?
Madame Bovary
, the most famous bored-housewife story of all time! You’re not actually going to this thing, are you?’

‘Of course I am! This is the first time I’ve been invited to anything. And just because they’re women and based at home doesn’t mean they’re bored housewives and a bunch of gossiping crones. “One of them had a go at the lollipop lady”! What kind of patronizing, misogynistic rubbish is that?’

Christy was starting to feel distressed. She was certain the old Joe would have been as curious – and as worried – as she was by this trail of clues regarding a neighbour. He would have been worried
because
she was worried. In a film plot, such perverse refusal to be interested would be evidence of guilt of some sort, but in the plot of their lives it was because he was exhausted. Seeing him shield his eyes, as if from some atrocity, she could tell he was thinking it would just be easier to go into the office (and that was saying something).

‘Maybe I am getting a bit overinvolved,’ she conceded. They rowed infrequently enough for the flare-up to have shaken her.

‘More than a bit,’ Joe said. ‘This stuff isn’t important, believe me.’

‘Why not believe
me
?’ she asked, her voice catching. ‘I’m the one in a position to know, I’m living here twenty-four-seven.’

‘Yes and it’s turning you into a crazy woman!’

She blinked, hurt.

‘I wish you could just find a job and put us all out of our misery,’ he added.

There was a taut silence, alarmingly reminiscent of the one that had fallen between Rob and her at the café table that time. But this was
Joe
, the venue their
marital bedroom
. She’d just caught herself thinking in terms of ‘the old Joe’; doubtless, he referenced ‘the old Christy’, too. Incredible to think that only a few months ago they’d been trading beams of disbelief over the top of champagne glasses about how wonderful life was, how it was too good to be true. How had they reached this impasse, this cliff edge?

She scurried back from it without a moment’s dilemma. ‘I want that as much as you do,’ she said, sitting on the bed. ‘I’m going for everything any of the recruitment guys suggest, I promise you. I’m not being fussy. After the summer, I’ll consider anything – literally: deep-sea oil driller, prison warden, whatever.’

Joe managed a half smile before sighing heavily. ‘It won’t come to that. Look, I think we need a change of scene. This is all getting a bit intense. How about we get out of town for the night?’

Immediately, Christy had an image of that tree-house hotel in the brochure sent to the Frasers: in the
photographs there’d been a huge white bed and fluttering organza drapes, a log burner and clusters of tea-lights. It was just a phone call away, but might as well have been a visiting land at the top of the Faraway Tree, so far beyond their means was it. Having during the past weeks experienced countless highs and lows, she now felt the lowest yet: desolation, deep and raw.

‘We can’t afford a night away,’ she said. ‘Not unless we borrow a tent.’ Which wasn’t so bad an idea if the decent weather held.

‘We’ll go to Mum and Dad’s. They’re around this weekend. Or your folks’?’

‘No thanks,’ Christy said, her smile rueful. ‘I can do without being quizzed on how soon we’re going to breed.’

‘What?’ Joe looked at her in a new way then, as if to say,
Ah, now I see what this is all about
, and then,
I don’t have time for this, not now
.

Bored housewives, broody women, Madame Bovary, he didn’t have time for any of them, and she was not so egocentric as to not be able to admit a certain sympathy for his position.

‘Let’s do a day trip,’ she suggested. ‘Get the train down to those woods near Chislehurst and go for a big walk.’

His feet poked from beneath the duvet, followed by an arm. ‘OK. But can we please not spend the whole time talking about your bonkers
Rear Window
plots?’

She swallowed her protests. ‘Fine.’

But if she was prepared to give up discussing them with him, she was not prepared to give them up altogether.
She had Yasmin, of course, but there was only so much a co-conspirator 6,500 miles away could contribute. She had the sudden inspiration that she could recruit Steph, who of all her new Lime Park acquaintances had struck her as the most like-minded (she was also, presumably, as in the dark as Christy). She must be about to go on maternity leave by now, so would be at home all day and in an excellent position to keep tabs on her upstairs neighbour.

But that was unfair: Steph was about to have a baby and would not be interested in the petty secrets of the street (even less so anything that might prove genuinely sinister). Besides, Caroline had confirmed that Rob was at the centre of the unnamed bad feeling, and Steph liked him, didn’t she – just as Joe claimed to.

No, the fact of the matter was that the old guard would not confess their secrets and the new guard had made up its mind that he was ‘one of the good guys’, a man whose only crime was to have forgotten to shave.

She was on her own.

September was a low time – and all the lower for the plunge not having been anticipated. At first I put my mood down to anticlimax, to the hangover after the party, not so much a Sunday slump as a restless ache that persisted day after day after day. I didn’t know then that it was in fact the beginning of an extended period of torment for me, its cause, I was slow to acknowledge, Rob.

Looking back, I see that the signs were present at our first liaison after the party.

‘So what were you up to last week?’ I asked, referring to his unprecedented time off from our arrangement (I was still arrogant then; it was fine for me, the married one, to disappear with my husband without a word of explanation, but
his
absences were different).

‘Oh, nothing much,’ he said.

‘You’re suddenly very mysterious.’

He shrugged. ‘Come on, you don’t
actually
want to know what I do when I’m not entertaining you, do you?’

‘Who said anything about entertaining me?’ I teased. ‘Maybe you bore me senseless.’

‘Oh I do, do I?’

‘As a matter of fact, you do – in one sense of the word, anyway.’

It was our standard patter but it was flat, had a going-through-the-motions ennui to it. And though the assignations that followed this one were as physically pleasurable as ever, there were strikingly fewer of them. The established protocol of our affair was that I would send a text to suggest a day (usually the next) and time to meet and he would, invariably, respond yes; suddenly he was responding no as often, pleading work out of town or urgent deadlines, evasive when I asked for specifics.

‘What is this,’ he’d say, ‘do you want a copy of my schedule?’

Good-humoured and yet offhand, it was how I imagined he would speak to his disposable dates, not
me
.

Naturally, I suspected Pippa’s hand in this new unavailability and blamed myself for having inadvertently given their romance the public blessing that had very likely helped him break the relationship pain barrier. Not that he ever mentioned her. He left that to me.

‘I hear we almost booked ourselves a double date,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Caroline and Richard’s dinner party on Friday.’

‘You and Jeremy are invited as well?’ And he was not quite quick enough to hide the flicker of excitement the suggestion aroused.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re not free. Dinner with clients.’

‘A shame. That would have been fun.’

I begged to differ. Seeing him ignore Kenny’s hapless colleague might have passed for sport, but watching him paw Pippa as he had at our party certainly would not.

A week or so after this exchange Jeremy and I ran into the two of them one evening on the Parade, stopping of course to say hello, and I was shaken by just how violently I disliked seeing them together again. Pippa was visibly in the process of falling in love with him (a truly ghastly thing to witness even when the object of desire is not your own lover), and he, if not reciprocating with quite the same depth of emotion, was plainly enjoying himself in a real way, as opposed to indulging in a fit of method acting for my benefit. As she chattered carelessly on about that dinner at Caroline’s, his fingers kept reaching to pet her: idle, territorial, just as they did me when we were in his bedroom, post-coital and relaxed.

‘Rob warned me about the swinging scene in this area, so I was a bit worried,’ she said, deadpan, and it was only when she began hooting like a demented owl that I was aware of my own shocked reaction.

‘Oh, I think you can be confident we all sleep with the right people,’ Jeremy told her, keen to participate in the fun, and when I glanced at Rob it was only to meet his profile as his face turned to Pippa’s, full of private mocking. Enraged, I lowered my head, concealing my displeasure from Jeremy, from
him
.

‘You can see what stage
they’re
still at,’ Jeremy said, when they’d strolled off hand in hand, not a backward glance between them. ‘
Swinging?
Can you imagine? Fine for some other lucky bloke, but what about me?’

Even flattery could not raise my spirits; it took every working neuron in my brain to direct the required smile to my lips.

I’m ashamed to admit I spent an indecent number of hours analysing this casual encounter. All of a sudden I was experiencing exactly the feelings I’d declared contraband in the first place, exactly the feelings Rob had never appeared to feel about Jeremy and me. I persuaded myself that the true cause for agitation was not jealousy per se but a fear that our arrangement could not continue for long if his new girlfriend was to go where others had been denied and be established as serious. (
She’ll already be plotting to move in with him … 
: those words of Gemma’s revisited me time and again; if anyone had a good instinct for a bad turn of events, it was she.) The number of variables would double, spontaneity would enter the equation as she became more confident about coming and going (what if he gave her a set of keys?), and as soon as they had any kind of pow-wow regarding relationship status she would understandably demand fidelity and he would inevitably be obliged to co-operate.

No, deceiving a contented husband was one thing, deceiving a brand-new girlfriend was quite another.

As September slithered into October, Jeremy and I had at last arrived at those once-faraway landmarks ‘after the summer’ and ‘when the house is finished’. And it
was
finished, to all intents and purposes: where once there’d been a large team in occupation, there remained only two decorators whose names never quite stuck but who’d
been hired by Hetty for their reputation for phenomenal speed. She herself had all but withdrawn from the project, needed only for a last visit or two to check the paintwork and to assess snagging, and I began slightly to fear the day when the nameless decorators would rinse their last paintbrushes and leave me too. I’d rarely been in the house on my own, and I had the sense that I didn’t know it well enough to be left alone with it. I suppose the Rob distraction had prevented me from bonding with my new home, from earning its protection.

As agreed, the subject of the baby was resurrected.

‘You haven’t mentioned it for a while,’ Jeremy said. ‘You haven’t gone off the idea?’

‘No, of course not,’ I lied. ‘I just thought not discussing it constantly might help make it happen. Like you said, let nature take its course.’

‘Looks like the course nature wants to take is not the one
we
want it to. Do you still want to see a specialist?’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘if you do.’

‘I do.’ Jeremy was typically resolute. ‘I’ll make an appointment then.’

I knew from every conversation I’d had on the subject that it was exceptional for the man to drive a project of this sort, but our dynamic differed from other couples’. Perhaps it was the age difference, perhaps the enduring perception that I was a free spirit and he my earthbound guide, but in our relationship it was Jeremy who pressed and I who yielded. He had pressed for marriage, he had pressed for the move to suburbia, and now it was he who would take on the task of pressing for a baby. I listened
with unexpected nervousness as he phoned the Harley Street clinic of choice and gave his details as the primary contact. I felt squeamish, suddenly, as if defined purely by my sexual activities; the thought of all that prodding and scraping and squeezing, the needles and the pills and God knew what else, made me cross my legs and wince.

Did I want to be a parent enough to sign up for all of that? Did I want to be a parent at all? The last time I’d cared to listen, my maternal instinct had been all but extinguished by rather more self-serving ones, and to chronicle my evolving position on the issue was only to confront horrible truths about myself. In the beginning I’d been agreeable to Jeremy’s suggestion, especially since it came with the side benefit of not having to work for a living; then, when the clear and present danger of Rob had reared its head, I’d been briefly keen, recognizing pregnancy as a cure for temporary insanity; but once we were under way, enmeshed, and I was used to living with the lunacy, I’d begun to have those thoughts of evasion and delay, thoughts that had only grown more appealing.

Now it was time to acknowledge my current position (and my sense that Rob was detaching from me in favour of Pippa made not a jot of difference to it): a baby meant the end of the affair, and I wanted the affair more than I wanted a baby.

Which I know sounds terrible, truly terrible.

‘Right, all set.’ Jeremy was off the line, phone still in hand. ‘Nine o’clock next Wednesday morning. We’ll meet with the consultant and do some tests.’ He reached to hug me and I surrendered willingly, enjoying the protective
strength of him, the knowledge that these decisions at least – if not any others – were going to be made for me.

‘OK?’ he asked, glimpsing my stricken expression.

‘The thing is, Jeremy, I know I said I was sure, but now that we’re doing this, I feel as if I don’t know what I want any more. I feel confused.’ It was as close as I would ever get to betraying myself to him.

‘I think that’s totally natural,’ he soothed. ‘It
is
confusing. It’s not what we thought was going to happen. But if we do start IVF or something like that, you have to remember that it won’t be forever. It’s only the means to an end. And whatever happens, whether we have six kids or none, we’re still
us
. We’re in it together.’

His tenderness made me want to cry. Jealousy was not the only emotion I’d granted entry of late; there was, too, the beginnings of guilt.

And about time too.

In fact, the consultation was as painless as it could be. The consulting rooms were opulent, the consultant, Mr Atherton, a man of about Jeremy’s age who possessed the same air of determined self-preservation (I supposed it followed that someone who could conjure life from thin air might also believe he had a stab at eluding death). He was matter-of-fact, candid on the subject of success rates, not least in respect of our ages: unsurprisingly, mine was still in the range that yielded high success, Jeremy’s more problematic, though ‘by no means disastrous’. The medical terms and acronyms were familiar to us from our investigations online – IUI, IVF, ICSI, donor eggs and so
on – the key word being one we both knew and understood well:
strategy
. There was no set of circumstances that could not be tackled with the right strategy, Mr Atherton assured us. It was a good line, I thought: ‘tackle’ was a very different word from ‘solve’, and the strategy could be, after all, to give up and get a dog.

I wondered what he would say if he knew I led a parallel sex life to the one I was detailing for the medical record.

‘So let’s get these tests out of the way and then meet again in a couple of weeks to look at the options,’ he said, handing us over to his worker bees. There were blood tests to establish hormone levels, a sperm sample from Jeremy, consent forms to sign and health histories to fill in. We left the clinic feeling optimistic, the issue unburdened rather than exposed.

Within days, Jeremy had heard from them and phoned me from the office to relay the news: ‘They’re sending full results in an email, but it’s basically good news: there’s nothing wrong technically. They suggest we keep on trying for another six months and then if it’s still not happening, report for our first cycle of IVF.’

‘Another six months?’ Having identified an unwillingness of my own to get the science under way, this nonetheless seemed a longer stretch than I would reasonably have expected Jeremy to allow. ‘We’ve already been trying for a year.’

‘I agree it’s frustrating, but Atherton knows our history and he suggests six months to be sure. You can see his point, especially given your age: better to take a bit longer and conceive naturally. You heard what he said: IVF is
stressful and exhausting and very expensive. This is a private consultant speaking, Amber. Think how easy it would be for him to take our money straight away and get on with it, with or without results. Instead he’s telling us
not
to have treatment – at least not yet.’

‘What about Clomid? I don’t need to take it?’

‘No, not necessary. You’re absolutely fine, there’s no need to stimulate egg production. Oh, but we do have to do all the healthy lifestyle stuff he talked about. Cut down on drinking, especially.’

‘Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.’ I pictured the bottle of wine Rob and I drank as a matter of course during our afternoon rendezvous: that would be hard to forgo. Instead I would have to give up the glasses shared with Jeremy.

‘The nurse is emailing me some stuff about optimizing. I’ll print it out and bring it home with me.’ He’d become both the expert and the administrator, as if he didn’t have a demanding enough job already. Meanwhile, I drifted about my perfect castle and admired my beauty in the mirror like the wicked queen, in a perpetual state of dread of the news that someone more beautiful had been sighted in the kingdom. I hung my head in shame to think how little I deserved Jeremy’s devotion.

‘Thank you for doing all of that,’ I said. ‘Handling all the phone calls and everything. I know I’ve got more time, but …’

‘It’s all right. I know you don’t like the way all of this makes you feel. You know, constantly trying.’

It was the first time he’d referred to the fact that I’d
enjoyed sex less in the last few months, and I was grateful he was not in the room to see my reaction face to face. Even
I
didn’t know if my fading ardour was owing to the chore of trying to conceive or to the fact that I was also sleeping with someone else, someone with a style that suited me better.

‘Let’s just relax for a bit, try and forget about it. What about going somewhere hot for Christmas and New Year? The Caribbean, maybe? Somewhere totally relaxing. I’ll see if I can take ten days.’

Not so long ago this suggestion would have thrilled me, especially as Jeremy demanded of his accommodation nothing less than complete luxury, but now I feared it would be utter torment for me to be away from Rob for this long, however exotic the location.