The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (22 page)

Rejoining the conversation, she found it had progressed: one of the women’s husbands was being discussed and found wanting. ‘I suppose I just have to accept that I’m married to a fucking moron,’ Mel said, and Christy couldn’t imagine speaking of Joe in this way; even if they had begun to argue a little lately, it was nothing like
that
.

‘Aren’t we all,’ Liz said with bitterness. ‘That’s why some of us decided
not
to be any more.’

Joanne pulled a consolatory face. ‘I’m lucky with Kenny. He’s no trouble.’ This caused a quick glance between Caroline and Liz, which Christy guessed had to do with the hand injury. Was the scuffle with Rob not common knowledge then? (If indeed there had been any scuffle; sometimes she forgot what she knew and what she only thought she knew.)

As faint praise failed to save Mel’s husband from his damning, the one called Sophie remembered the newcomer by her side and broke away to say, ‘So you’re in the Frasers’ place, right?’ And she reached to touch Christy’s wrist, exclaiming, ‘What a beautiful bangle! Is that amber?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Christy gave a guilty start, twisting the bangle so the clasp was not visible, the narrow silver band sliding innocently over her wrist bones onto her hand. She’d meant to take it off before spending the evening with Amber’s friends.

‘I
love
amber. Where did you get it?’ Sophie asked, speaking into a sudden hush, for the others had allowed their conversation to lapse, Mel and her maligned spouse evidently forgotten. It was because the word ‘amber’ had been mentioned, Christy realized.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘On holiday somewhere, I think.’ Self-conscious now she had everyone’s attention, she resorted to the more comfortable role of questioner: ‘So did Amber Fraser ever come to your book group?’

To her surprise, at this the women broke into a delighted uproar. Exactly as she’d found with Caroline, the subject of Amber-in-residence was not only fair game but also everyone’s decided preference. Glasses were drained, wine replenished and the atmosphere became almost festive.

‘Yes and no,’ Caroline explained to Christy. ‘The first few times we invited her she pretended she was busy, and then when she finally did agree to come, do you know what she did? She insisted we do it at her place,
your
place, but when we all turned up she’d hired this guy to make
cocktails for us. She said, “Why read when we can carouse?” That was such an Amber word, wasn’t it? “Carouse”.’

‘It was,’ Liz agreed. ‘I’d completely forgotten she used to say that!’

‘Oh my God, it was
carnage
that night,’ said Sophie. ‘Like a hen night.’

‘I couldn’t get my key in the door when I got home,’ Joanne confessed. ‘I had to shout through the letter box to wake Kenny up to let me in. The dog was going berserk.’

‘Her copy of the book was still in the bag from the shop, do you remember?’ Caroline said. ‘She hadn’t even opened it.’

‘That’s right,’ Mel said, ‘it was the new Ian McEwan. She said she’d got the low-down on the plot from Jeremy.’

‘And when he came home he was annoyed because she was supposed to be following some clean-living programme to help with getting pregnant. And there she was, knocking back these lethal mojitos.’

‘I don’t think he minded
really
, do you? She could get away with
murder
, he was so besotted.’

‘Any man would have been. Anyway, ridiculous, don’t you think? If you had to be sober to get pregnant there’d be a population crisis!’

‘There would in Lime Park, anyway.’

With this the conversation took a feverish turn: the conceptions of the women’s own babies, the shortcomings – or absences – of their sex lives since, the galling way attractive younger men now looked straight through them
in the street or, worse, treated them with scrupulous respect, as if reminded of their own mothers. Having longed to be accepted, Christy now felt rather relieved to be outside of their shared realm of experience.

‘I’d almost prefer to be ignored,’ Sophie said, becoming angry, ‘than patronized in my own street.’

‘I totally agree.’

‘Me too.’

‘I didn’t know there
were
any young men on Lime Park Road,’ Christy interjected, a sly attempt to get one of them to mention Rob, but she was too late because Liz had become tearful at their talk of waning desirability (her ex-husband had just become engaged again, Mel whispered; to someone much younger from Sales).

‘Why are the decent ones
always
married?’ Liz asked, with tipsy theatricality. ‘Why can’t
I
meet a Jeremy Fraser?’

In the absence of a satisfactory answer to this (Jeremy Fraser was, after all, married too), the group decided instead that it should turn its attention at last to the book.

‘Did anyone manage to finish it?’ Caroline asked brightly. ‘The print was really small, wasn’t it?’

But they’d all been far too busy to read more than the first few chapters. All except Christy, who opened the discussion with a rather faltering precis of Flaubert’s plot, all too aware that the minds of the women in the room remained on the dramas of their own lives.

Well, what can I say? It was my mistake and mine alone to believe that honeymoons could last forever – and I don’t mean only with Rob, I mean with
everyone
on Lime Park Road. That glorious giddying sensation of being at the centre of everyone’s attention, the sunshine in which they queued to bask: it passed that autumn as garden gates were closed, curtains drawn and folk began to hibernate.

Just as Rob had once warned, school concerns dominated the community. Even Caroline became distracted by applications, her elder daughter Amelia now preparing for senior school entrance exams. Out for the campaign came the old jeans and nautical tops, though she did at least grasp the importance of getting her highlights refreshed. As for Joanne, who had a son in the same class as Amelia, so all-consuming was
her
obsession that she was temporarily to be avoided. Once I even saw Felicity cross the road to elude her, while Kenny could be seen to roll his eyes as his wife paused at their gate to exchange war stories about private tutors with yet another antsy parent.

Ironically, the only neighbour who could be prised from the subject of education was the education
journalist himself – if I was lucky enough to get an audience with him, that was.

For Rob continued to give me the runaround. Oh, it was classic stuff, I see that now, unworthy of Amber Speed, much less Mrs Fraser, but the unedifying truth was that the more he waned the more I waxed. I waxed
because
he waned. And the fact that this was no deliberate strategy on his part, that he was oblivious to the effects of his casual neglect, just strung me out all the more.

I began to have anxiety dreams. Not for me the mutant monsters and slasher-film plots of normal nightmares, but the real players in my life, the actual backdrops, distorted and dangerous: Rob with Pippa at our party, making love on the carousel, faces strained in rapture; Jeremy ninety years old and emaciated, tottering towards me with a newborn baby in his fragile grasp; Gemma on the screen of every computer and television in the land, announcing my guilt, mocking my beginnings.

It was
grotesque
.

‘You’ve got a lot on your mind,’ Caroline said, which was kind of her since as far as she and the rest of the outside world were concerned I had precious little to worry about. Not only were there no school-related preoccupations to trouble me but there were also – that they knew of – no double life to schedule, no dual emotions to manage, no lines to keep from crossing. ‘I’ve got Richard’s mother here helping me for half-term, so why don’t we go and have lunch at Canvas? Shall we see if Rob wants to come?’

I tried not to look glum. ‘He’s still away in Hull, I think, at some conference.’

‘Really?’ Caroline looked doubtful. ‘He’s been away for ages. Conferences can’t last that long, can they? Maybe he’s back and holed up with Pippa?’

‘Maybe.’

‘It’s always a bore when a chum falls in love, isn’t it?’ she sighed, and it was all I could do not to scream out my knee-jerk protest:
He’s not in love, not with her!
Then I remembered the faces of Imogen, Helena and Gemma, their horror when I – the charmed one, the beautiful one – had lost my cool in front of them, betrayed the existence of an ugly impulse they’d never before been permitted to glimpse.

‘Maybe that’s it,’ I said, mustering a smile. ‘Let’s go without him. Now tell me all about this school you want for Amelia. It’s the one on the bus route, right, so she can do the journey on her own?’

It was not long after this, when over a week had passed without his replying to a single one of my texts, that my frustrations regrettably got the better of me and I marched to the door of number 38 to confront him. I pressed my thumb down so hard that the flesh behind the nail turned white – as if relief could be found in the discordant grind of it, audible even through two solid timber doors. Audible to Felicity too, for it was she who eventually answered, luring me in for a cup of tea.

‘You know he’s not at home?’ she said, in that way she had of seeming to know both everything and nothing at once. ‘I’ve hardly seen him at all since the summer.’ And it was her words, rather than his silence, that gave me the strong sense that my days were numbered.

That night in bed, for the first time in a while, I put Jeremy off. Jeremy being Jeremy, he accepted this with a good grace.

‘All right, baby? Has someone upset you?’

‘I’m just tired,’ I said, furious with myself for wanting to cry.

‘It’s not to do with Imogen?’

In fact, my last meeting with her
had
distressed me, but not for the reason Jeremy thought. As I had been chalking up the days that separated me from my last contact with Rob, she had been counting the same ones down to the birth of her baby, and at last he arrived, a boy she and Nick named Frankie. Visiting, I had found the family settled in a nest of flowers and cards and balloons, puddles of cashmere at every turn, early learning apps flashing on every gadget: a nativity for twenty-first-century north London. The baby was pink and placid, Imogen besotted with him, and Nick in raptures with both of them, leaving me no choice but to coo and cluck exactly as etiquette demanded.

‘You are so lucky,’ I told them, beaming.

‘We know,’ they said, beaming back.

It was only when driving home that I had found myself in trouble, my thoughts having turned to the subject that had consumed me, coincidentally, for the same length of time as Imogen’s pregnancy – and in direct substitution for the bid for parenthood that I
should
have been prioritizing: my affair with Rob. Crossing the river into south London, I was torn limb from limb by dilemma, one minute rigid with the sudden clarity of what I’d been risking, of
the imperative to safeguard my marriage without delay and make my current estrangement (as I characterized it) from Rob permanent; the next slumped in my seat with the despair of knowing he had only to snap his fingers and I would extend this ‘fling’ of ours, would go on extending it, craving it, as long as he allowed me to.

Because I had
never
been more obsessed than I was now.

The city streets spun by, navigated on autopilot, dark to human eyes.

I was lucky to get home without causing a collision.

Finally, after twelve days of silence, there was word. My phone suddenly signalled the arrival of several texts at once and one of them, to my delight, was from him:

‘Back in one hour. Be ready for me?’

It was 5 p.m., which meant a 6 p.m. rendezvous, a certain risk. Rob and I normally spent two hours together, but by 7 p.m. it would be cutting it fine for me to return and shower the scent of him off me before Jeremy arrived home from work with plans for dinner. But I was desperate (an overused word, but I think the right one here) and I decided I would do it. I would leave a note for Jeremy saying I was at the gym, then I’d break convention by showering at Rob’s and slipping back home later when I knew Jeremy was safely indoors.

I dressed with an unusual lack of refinement, taking no prisoners: stockings, high heels, a tiny black dress that was the sole remnant of my bachelorette wardrobe, unworn to date in my marriage and featuring the kind of neckline
you could not wear on public transport without being molested (Matt’s favourite, if I remembered). Glancing down at my cleavage I experienced a moment’s doubt, for it was obscenely prominent and, while I might not be catching the bus, I did need to get from my door to Rob’s without attracting the eye of any neighbour. I decided I would cover myself with a dark coat buttoned up to the neck (he’d like that) and limit exposure by slipping through the hedge between our paths. If I were unlucky enough to encounter Felicity I’d tell her I was on my way out and simply follow through by walking to the station.

In the bathroom I leaned towards the mirror, outlining my lips and shading my eyelids, fanning my hair extravagantly over my shoulders. Beautification complete, I closed my eyes in anticipation, almost as seduced by myself as I was certain he would be in ten minutes’ time …

And then the unthinkable happened: I felt a stranger’s fingers on my hips, a thick arm scooping me roughly backwards, palms sliding crudely over the exposed skin of my breasts, lips on my bare shoulders and teeth nibbling, a tongue prodding …

‘Get off me!’ I screamed, my whole body clenched in terror, eyes screwed shut in shock and revulsion. My attacker must have come in through the garden gate and entered the house noiseless and deadly, and it struck me then with an instant, brutal lucidity that
no one would have seen him
, no one would know to rescue me. I was going to be raped, perhaps murdered too; I was thirty-five years old and I was going to die, no child to be remembered by,
no professional accomplishment to leave to the world, no goodbye words, nothing!

Just a slut dead on a bathroom floor.

Amid a great tide of nausea, it occurred to me that this might not be random, I might know my assailant, and, hardly daring, I squinted at our reflections in the mirror.

‘Darling,’ Jeremy said, my scream having startled him into releasing me, his head jerking back as if struck with a fist. ‘I gave you a surprise, I’m sorry.’

‘Jeremy! I thought you were …’ I turned and fell against him, tears blurring my vision. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. I always hear you, you call out hello …’

‘I sneaked in. I wanted to catch you unawares.’ He took my wrist in his hand. ‘My God, your pulse is going crazy.’

‘You almost gave me a heart attack. I thought someone had broken in and attacked me.’

‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart.’

I felt the gulp in his throat as he recovered his composure.

‘Not a secret fantasy of yours then, clearly,’ he added.

‘No. I was really scared.’

Now I can’t see Rob
: that was my first thought, and I could have beaten Jeremy’s chest with my fists in disappointment.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘You poor baby. But you obviously got my message …’ Eyeing the provocative outfit, he allowed his hands to begin roaming once more, tentative now, their muscles remembering the first rebuke, fearful of a second. ‘I thought we needed something new …’

‘What?’ My brain tangled and turned; it took a full thirty
seconds for me to process the misunderstanding, the whole while submitting to his groping.
He
had sent the text, not Rob. I’d been so determined to see what I wanted to see that I’d selected the wrong one and made Jeremy’s words Rob’s. ‘Yes,’ I said miserably. ‘I got your message. I was just getting ready.’

‘You look fantastic, darling.’ He swivelled me gently and pressed against me from behind, his excitement unavoidable. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen this dress before, is it new? It’s incredibly sexy.’

‘I thought you’d like it,’ I murmured.

‘I certainly do. Do you think you’ve recovered from the shock yet … ?’

I didn’t want this with Jeremy. My body protested, though I knew I had to force it to comply. ‘I think so,’ I said.

I checked my phone afterwards, terrified that I’d imagined Rob’s name, willed it into being having plunged into the abyss that was hallucination, madness. But there it was, sitting in the inbox directly below the one from Jeremy:

‘Take it easy, Miss Amber. Lay off with the texts. Back tomorrow, can meet afternoon.’

I re-read Jeremy’s message.
Be ready for me?
It was not his usual style, certainly, but had I stopped to think about it then that question mark should have been a clue. Rob would not have used one. His would have been a command.