The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (23 page)

‘See? Not one, but two invitations,’ Joe told Christy, when one Saturday afternoon in early August the Davenports were invited to meet Felix and Steph’s new baby daughter. ‘I
knew
they would love you once they got to know you a bit better.’

He gave every impression of believing that her happiness was purely a matter of being greeted on the street with plausible cheer by an interchangeable cast of female neighbours – was this her status now?

Well, it had been good enough for Amber Fraser, she supposed.

It was a limpid, sun-drenched day as they closed the front door behind them, and she thought what a fundamental pleasure it was to feel the sun on her skin. A gentle silence had descended on Lime Park Road now that most of the families were away for the school holidays. Caroline and her children were among the escapees, spending a month at their second home in France; Richard flew over for weekends, apparently. She could only dream of such a leisured lifestyle, though she was the first to admit that sitting in an armchair and watching her neighbours
from the window was ‘leisured’ by most people’s standards.

Her principal subject, Rob Whalen, had gone to ground in recent weeks (though she was fairly sure he wasn’t holidaying with the Sellerses), which at least spared her any further fracas of the kind that had occurred in the park café. She imagined herself ditching her sleuthing and spending the rest of the month sunbathing. The Frasers had left a rather nice pair of teak loungers in the garden shed; she should have had them out weeks ago, not moped about indoors, staging profitless stake-outs at the bedroom window. Still, better late than never, she thought, and took Joe’s hand in hers.

The main door to number 38 had been left ajar, and to their surprise Steph met them at the flat door before they could knock.

‘You must have good hearing,’ Joe laughed.

‘Come on in.’ Her voice was breathy, hardly audible, and Christy thought she must have a sore throat – until she remembered the same stage whisper from the times she’d visited friends with first babies, the underlying tension in a house where the survival of the collective hinged on the tiniest of its number not being woken from her nap.

‘Shhh,’ Steph added, finger to her lips.

Christy was keen to see the layout of the space that twinned their own ground floor. The kitchen, just across the hall from the front door, was tiny and to be converted later in the year into a second bedroom, Steph said sotto voce. Felicity’s old gold had been obliterated with matt white. The living room was at the rear, French doors
opening onto a cracked concrete terrace with terracotta tubs of pink dahlias. Christy rather envied the family their compact space as it currently stood, but she chided herself for falling into the trap of thinking the grass greener on the other side of the fence. (Looking out at Steph’s and Felix’s garden, however, she saw the grass
was
greener, for she had somehow managed to let her own lawn turn yellow.)

‘We’re hoping to get planning permission next year for an extension,’ Steph added.

Goodness knew how she would ever cope with the noise of building works if conversation posed a threat to security. The bedroom door, closed on the resting child, drew regular sidelong glances across the hallway from the new mother, as if a direct gaze would set off air-raid sirens. Christy thought of Caroline’s bedtime yells and wondered when it was that a parent made the sanity-saving leap – soon, she hoped, for poor Steph’s sake.

Thankfully the situation resolved itself when the baby woke up spontaneously and Steph sprang up to tend to her.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said in her regular voice as she returned to display Matilda to her guests. ‘I think I’ve gone slightly mad.’

‘All in a good cause,’ Joe said gamely, and with a haste that stopped just short of impoliteness began engaging Felix about work, leaving Christy to admire the baby and ask Steph questions about the birth and her early days of motherhood.

I’m
not
envious, she told herself, eyeing the soft-skinned
infant in her chalk-blue cotton Babygro, and yet she
was
. She knew the exquisite scratching feeling of it, the sensation of being presented with the answer before you’d asked the question. Alcohol would help, as it had in Caroline’s kitchen. She and Joe had brought with them the last remaining bottle of champagne from a case given to him in celebration of his promotion, but so far they’d been offered only tea, the making of it interrupted by Matilda waking. Now Steph seemed to have forgotten about refreshments altogether.

Just as Christy was wondering if she ought to offer to make the tea herself, there was a knock at the door.

‘That’ll be Rob,’ Felix told the Davenports, rising. ‘Steph’s already trained him not to ring the bell.’

‘It’s just so loud,’ Steph protested. ‘Matilda jumps out of her skin every time it goes.’

‘Poor guy,’ Felix said. ‘He won’t be allowed to sneeze in his own home at this rate.’

Poor guy was not how Christy would have put it. She felt herself stiffen as the man she least cared to see on this happy occasion made his lumbering entry and, astonishingly, kissed Steph on the cheek and offered her both a bottle of champagne and a box of the French
macarons
they sold at the patisserie on the Parade that Christy considered too expensive to set foot in. (This, at least, prompted recollection of earlier proposals of a drink, and soon both a pot of tea and flutes of champagne were produced.) Rob shook hands with the two men and took a seat next to Joe, only acknowledging Christy very faintly,
as if she were an idea of a woman rather than an actual person sitting in front of him.

‘Please tell me I’ve missed the account of the birth,’ he said to Steph, and the quip seemed to alter the whole physicality of him. He was straighter-backed and not so inflated as Christy had thought; rather, broad and solid and masculine. She allowed herself a brief recollection of the pictures she’d seen of him in his ‘lithe panther’ incarnation, the shape of his skull under that hood of hair, the attractive bone structure beneath that brush of a beard.

Steph was giggling. ‘Yes, the grisly bit’s out the way, don’t worry.’

‘And how’s the bundle of joy? Come on, hand her over, I’d better have a go …’ And suddenly Matilda was in Rob’s arms, not setting about the wail of protest Christy privately willed, but staring in fascination at the face of her captor.

‘Aren’t you a natural?’ Steph cooed, delighted. ‘You haven’t got kids yourself, have you?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ Rob grinned.

Grinned? Bundle of joy?
It beggared belief. To have offended his other neighbours to the point of being an outcast, to have attracted vile letters, to have been so antagonistic towards Christy that she had come to regard him as her nemesis – and yet to be so unthreatening with the others in this room as to be invited to cuddle a newborn baby … where were his opaque statements about knowing or not knowing, his threats to punish gossiping harpies, his slurs on other people’s employment status?

Psycho, Christy thought, gulping her champagne.

‘Work going all right?’ Joe asked him, eyes skimming the baby’s downy head. It had not escaped her notice that he wanted no turn in holding Matilda.

‘Well, it’s not going
entirely
wrong,’ Rob said. ‘You?’

Joe grimaced. ‘Wish I could say the same, mate …’

As phrases like ‘baptism of fire’ and ‘sold down the river’ were bandied about, Christy tuned out from this tribal exchange, her attention muddied. She couldn’t relax now
he
was here, but was already rehearsing the complaint she’d be making to Joe when they returned home, already allowing indignation to rise for the denial he’d be sure to make that there’d been anything different in Rob’s treatment of her.
You’re imagining it
, he would say.
It’s all in your mind. He’s a great bloke
. And he would remind her that he for one had no truck with a vendetta.

Breaking presently from this fictional dialogue, she became aware that she was being discussed. ‘We had no idea it would be so tough,’ Joe was telling Rob. ‘The whole market’s dried up in the space of four months. Once you’re out, there’s no way back in. She’s tearing her hair out being at home. I thought she’d love the chance to be a domestic goddess, but she hates it.’

This was all rather franker on her behalf than Christy had ever allowed herself to be publicly, and she was both relieved to hear it and faintly offended by it. ‘I can’t hate something that doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a domestic goddess,’ she said in a level tone, thinking inevitably of Amber Fraser, the nearest to a deity Lime Park Road had produced to her knowledge.

‘There certainly isn’t,’ said Steph, who’d bolted a glass of champagne and now spoke with a fire Christy hadn’t seen in her before. ‘They should outlaw that ridiculous term. It’s horrible being in a state of suspension, isn’t it? If you just had a date when you’d start again, you’d be able to relax and enjoy the time off.’

‘That’s just it,’ Christy said, grateful for the insight that she’d somehow been unable to articulate these last months. ‘No matter how positive I try to be, there’s always this fear that no one will ever want me again.’ She stopped short of revealing any deeper deficiency, not only because
he
was listening but also because of the reason she was linked to these people in the first place: the valuable pile of bricks next door that bore her name. Who could reasonably complain of hard times when known to be the owner of such a large and beautiful house? ‘Anyway, I’ve found some voluntary work – helping in a local primary school with reading. I start next month.’

Finding a way to occupy herself, gaining a purpose beyond the domestic, it had been so easy in the end. Caroline had supplied the contact name and number, a meeting had taken place in the organization’s HQ and, police checks permitting, she would begin at St Luke’s Primary the first week of term. It was walking distance – just – and so would incur no travel expenses.

To her great surprise, it was Rob who responded first to her news, turning to her in a convincingly avuncular manner and saying, ‘I volunteered on that programme myself for a while. It’s very rewarding, more than paid work in a way. Primary-age kids are great.’

Christy felt the look Joe slid her way: how can he be the monster you say he is when he teaches underprivileged children to read?

‘Sounds like a good move, Christy,’ Rob added. ‘Best of luck with it.’

She almost fell off her seat to hear him speak her name, over the top of a baby’s head, no less, and with no trace of contempt.

‘Yes, I think I’ll enjoy it. I love kids. And it’s just short term,’ she said.

‘Oh, terms
are
short,’ he drawled. ‘At least they feel that way to the parents. The teachers and kids aren’t quite so sure.’

As the others laughed, Christy gaped. This was not simply an advance on their previous hostilities but a repudiation of them; it was as if their set-to in the café had never taken place, nor the argument in the street. Miracles will never cease, she thought.

‘Hey, Christy, you could get your pupils reading
Madame Bovary
,’ Joe suggested, joining in the fun. It was weeks since she’d seen him this chipper.

‘I think they might be a bit young for that,’ she said. ‘It will be
Harry Potter
, presumably.’ But she’d relaxed sufficiently to allow herself to reach for one of Rob’s
macarons
– the yellow one that she hoped would be lemon and not banana.

Rob turned to Joe, a trace of the old distrust in his face. ‘Why
Madame Bovary
, out of interest?’

‘That’s what the ladies of the Lime Park Road book
group have been reading,’ Joe told him. ‘Christy’s just joined their august circle.’

‘I’ve only been to one,’ she said, chewing (it
was
lemon). ‘They’ve stopped now for the school holidays.’

‘I never did read that,’ Steph said. ‘She’s unfaithful to her husband and then poisons herself, right?’

Christy remembered the group’s criticisms of this method of suicide; most had been able to cite their own preferred means of self-destruction, as if having given it full and uncompromising consideration.

‘Turns out it’s the number one adultery read in town,’ Joe said, winking at Felix. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the wives of Lime Park would ever think of playing away themselves.’

That was for her benefit, Christy thought, as had been ‘august circle’; he knew better than to trot out the bored-housewife cliché a second time. As Steph offered her another turn with Matilda, she felt again that forbidden hunger.

To her relief Rob left soon after. She noticed he had hardly started his glass of champagne and would have marked it as evidence of unsociability had he not been so manifestly sociable otherwise.

‘I feel terrible he might be being kept awake by Matilda’s crying,’ Steph told the Davenports.

‘I wouldn’t worry, the soundproofing’s much better from floor to floor than it is side to side,’ Joe said, and Christy knew at once the occasion he was thinking about.

‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll get his own back sooner or later,’
Felix said, beaming at them. ‘And you two will as well, I imagine.’

And Joe laughed uproariously, as if the idea were quite farcical.

‘You need a break,’ Christy told him later. Having extracted him from Felix’s and Steph’s before the baby’s bedtime could become an issue, she was perplexed to see him go straight to the fridge in search of alcohol, finishing a bottle of white wine before it was even eight o’clock. She hadn’t been keeping count, but she guessed he’d had at least three glasses of champagne next door by the time they’d left.

‘We can’t afford to go away anywhere,’ he said as he opened a second bottle with the carefree air of someone who had no need of further excursion, not when he’d discovered paradise in liquid form. ‘We both know that. It would be cruel even to dream.’

Having not even been out together for dinner since the night at Canvas to celebrate his partnership, they had of course not discussed the possibility of a summer holiday, a week by the pool somewhere hot, a pile of paperbacks between them, their preferred getaway of old. But
something
was needed – an extra day off, a decent night’s sleep, a change of scene. Slow season it may have been for other industries, but Joe was working the same gruelling hours as ever, the cumulative exhaustion causing him to function at a whole new level of chaos.