The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (8 page)

‘We’re very lucky to have such sociable new neighbours,’ I agreed.

‘I like your Rob.’

‘
My
Rob? Hardly. But me too. He’s funny, kind of naughty.’ I nuzzled Jeremy’s shoulder a little and he squeezed me closer.

‘He doesn’t normally turn up to these things, Richard says, but look how the women are all over him. He could take his pick.’

‘Maybe he already has?’ I said. ‘Liz, I reckon.
She’s
certainly up for it.’

‘Not with that barnet,’ Jeremy said, making me laugh. ‘Mind you, she’s not the only one who looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.’

‘I know. Maybe that’s why they’ve all got their wellies on,’ I said.

He snorted and, attracted by the sound, Richard approached with a bottle of bubbly, vapour trailing like breath from a living creature’s throat.

‘Having fun?’ he asked, replenishing our glasses.

‘Oh yes!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s the most
wonderful
party, Richard. You must let us thank you by taking you and Caroline to lunch at Canvas next weekend.’

As Jeremy and Richard beamed at the suggestion, I happened to catch Rob’s eye and we nodded with the casual recognition of new acquaintances.

It was all so effortless, so natural. You’d think I’d been born to betray.

Not quite a month after the move to Lime Park, Christy was called to Laurie’s office for an unscheduled meeting. She arrived to find that her director hadn’t yet finished her previous meeting: Colette, the agency’s head of HR, was still sitting there, notes in front of her, mug of tea half full.

‘I know this isn’t the greatest timing,’ Laurie said, ‘you’ve just moved house and everything …’

Christy automatically glanced down at Laurie’s abdomen, careful to keep her expression affable. A committed fan of the structured dress, Laurie was today loosely draped in brushed cotton, her complicated neckline nothing more than a distraction, a red herring if Ellen was right.
That
was why Colette was present: just like last time, they were going to demand extra work of Christy for no additional pay. Her noble intentions having faded somewhat in recent weeks, she wondered if she should make a stand and negotiate an increase. Even with Joe’s promotion they needed every extra penny they could get.

‘It’s been confirmed that we have to cut staff by twenty per cent,’ Laurie said, and so confident had Christy been of the lines to come that there was a delay in understanding what was in fact being said here. And now Laurie
appeared to be giving her the option of taking the money and running, no humiliating consultation period to endure.

‘It could be a blessing in disguise,’ she said in a hopeful tone.

‘In what way?’ Christy enquired.

‘I just meant it would give you time to sort out your new house.’ Laurie looked injured, which was rich given that she was the one dishing out the painful news. ‘There must still be masses to do. You can break the back of the decorating.’ These were statements, not suggestions, and made with an air of victory. She was necessarily forgetting what Christy had told her about having inherited a show home; number 40 Lime Park Road was no blank canvas, but a masterpiece that had come glazed and framed and tied with a bow.

Colette said nothing; she merely witnessed.

‘I have to think about this,’ Christy said. ‘It’s so out of the blue.’ But hadn’t she known in some God-fearing, subterranean sense that this was
exactly
what had been going to happen?

She’d sacrificed more than a baby to get herself a house on Lime Park Road.

Pausing only to collect her bag, she fled the building and dialled Joe’s number from the street. ‘I have to see you,’ she breathed. Approaching the entrance to the Tube station, she saw it was only a little after ten, the ticket hall still swarming with tardy commuters and early-bird tourists. Her disposal had been the first business of Laurie’s day. ‘Can you meet for a few minutes?’

‘Only if you’ve got time to come here,’ Joe said.

Relieved of her job and all of a sudden frighteningly, nonsensically, possessed of all the time in the world, she set off for the office where he’d worked since he was a trainee in his mid twenties. He’d been a late starter then, the oldest of the year’s intake, having worked two jobs to fund the conversion course, and yet now when she pictured him it was like watching a child set out on some careless sun-drenched adventure. He – they – had had no sense of the stormy skies ahead.

She corrected herself:
his
sky was still blue, he was a partner now. Then she reminded herself that married people – best friends and fellow adventurers – stood under the same sky, if necessary sharing an umbrella … and she abandoned the metaphor to the roar and clatter of the Underground.

In the lobby of JR’s riverside building near St Paul’s, she texted her arrival to Joe and sat on one of the rigid low-backed sofas set at modishly irregular angles under grand marble pillars, surrounded by walls of ‘real’ art, as she thought of it (the Frasers had had real art, too). The firm, she knew, occupied only cramped space on the less prestigious side of the building, the side that overlooked the service lane, but even so, in her current mood she was as intimidated as if she’d been summoned to Buckingham Palace. As she waited for Joe to come down, she scanned the passing faces as if seeing human beings for the first time; how preoccupied everyone was, intent to the point of blankness, neutered by professionalism. She felt invisible, irrelevant, expelled.

Mostly, she felt scared. Since leaving university sixteen
years ago she had not once been out of work, starting as a secretary to her first account director, back when account directors
had
secretaries, and progressing with a steady if unspectacular momentum that had brought her to the point of being the natural choice to cover her latest director’s maternity leave. Correction: it had brought her to the point of being the natural choice to be made redundant. And now what? The economy was still in recession; manifestly, jobs like hers were being eliminated, not advertised. And yet the house –

Joe appeared then from one of the noiseless mirrored lifts, face alight at the sight of her, which was a small, sweet consolation never more gratefully taken.

‘I’ve lost my job,’ she announced, standing, and saw in his eyes how startled he was.

‘How much notice?’

‘Three months, but they’ve offered payment in lieu. I might as well take it and spend the time looking for something else.’ However Laurie liked to spin it, however Colette might later dress it up, she’d be leaving with very little compensation.

‘Agreed.’ He took her hand. ‘Sit down. You’re upset.’

She sank back onto the sofa. ‘What are we going to do, Joe? We can’t afford the mortgage without my salary. We could barely afford it
with
my salary.’ She could hear the panic rising in her throat and strangling her vowels; she could feel the blunt, kneeing sensation of desperation inside her ribcage as she gazed at him. Until now, until Lime Park,
she
had been the fixed one, the supporter and
soother, he the ambitious hothead whose dashed hopes required gentle resurrection, and yet here she was having the irrational – and entirely unhelpful – thought that if he were to die or leave her she would not be capable of navigating the world without him. She would be
adrift
.

‘We can still just about manage it,’ he said, with a decent improvisation of command.

She shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think we can. I need to get another job straight away. But there’s nothing in advertising, I know that for a fact. Once you’re out, that’s it. I’ll have to retrain or start again at entry level, something completely different … How could I have assumed I was safe? I
knew
I went too far with the house stuff. I even left a client meeting one day to take a call from the mortgage broker – if I’d had
any
idea …’ Any idea that they were raising a fortune they’d have no hope of repaying for a house that would soon be repossessed. ‘God,’ she added, remembering that their new Internet provider had yet to live up to its name, having failed to turn up on the allotted day. ‘We’re not even online yet and my phone barely gets a signal in the house. How will I look for a job without basic communications?’

‘Don’t think about any of that yet,’ Joe said. Her hand was still in his and he drew it closer to him, as if to reel her ashore, the current having carried her in uncharted directions. ‘You’re shocked,’ he added gently. ‘That’s completely normal. Try not to panic. Plenty of couples survive on one salary and so will we.’

‘Do they have our colossal mortgage, though? Did they
lose their minds and swap their tiny affordable flat for an enormous unaffordable house on a street where everyone hates them?’

Joe just smiled. ‘Nobody hates us. Now I’m really sorry, but I have to go back up before I …’ He stopped mid-sentence, eyes vague.
Before I get the chop as well
, he’d been going to say. ‘You head home, go for a walk, have a bath, try to relax. We’ll talk about this properly tonight.’

‘OK,’ she said, though she knew he most likely wouldn’t be home till eleven, by which time she hoped to be unconscious – there was nothing to be gained from extending a day like today, and already the oblivion of sleep was more tempting than any of the activities he had suggested. As she watched him walk back to the lifts, the sheer complicated bewilderment of their two intersecting fortunes lanced her with a sadness that almost made her cry out. It was as if she thought she’d never see him again.

Ferreting in her bag, she found half a tube of fruit pastilles and popped one onto her tongue like a pill, enjoying the brief, fraudulent comfort of sugar.

Her phone pinged: a text from Ellen.

‘Where did you go?’

Not ‘What happened?’ They all knew then; already, everybody knew.

She replied: ‘You safe?’ Unfair – and too late – to reflect that Ellen had joined the agency six months after she had.

‘So far,’ Ellen responded. ‘Are you coming back in?’

‘No. On way home.’

Disorientated, she made for the line that took her to
her old flat in New Cross, before changing trains and heading towards Lime Park.

The wisteria was out. It joined the upper bays of numbers 38 and 40 like bunting strung for a street party. The air smelled clean and cut-grass sweet, like proper countryside air from early childhood – until the bin lorry came belching along, braking right outside the Davenports’ gate.

‘It’s just a setback,’ Joe told everyone, which was exactly the word Marcus used to use when Joe had been passed over – again – for partnership. And there was some comfort in noting that that
had
been just a setback, albeit one that had lasted several years.

They had had their proper talk. As Joe had explained, he was entitled to no share of equity in his promotion, but his basic salary had increased sufficiently to cover – by a hair’s breadth – their stupendous monthly mortgage payment and utility bills (it would help if they could survive till autumn without turning the heating on), and other essentials like his season ticket. Her parents had agreed to defer the private loan payments until she found another job. No one wanted them to starve.

‘Now might be the time to get pregnant,’ her mother said, inevitably, though she was kind enough to wait until their second conversation since the redundancy before doing so.

‘I’m not sure I should be considering having a baby on the basis that I’ve been fired and have no income,’ Christy said mildly, but right at the outset she knew she was in fact
arguing against herself; the mother’s role was to voice the thoughts that the daughter was duty-bound to suppress.

Thoughts such as: ‘Perhaps you should have done it when Joe was keen?
Years ago
, do you remember?’

Of course she remembered. They had been in their late twenties when, influenced by nothing but instinct, Joe had briefly campaigned to start a family early and Christy, having finally made an upward job move following two sideways ones, had dissuaded him. The dynamic had not been without a certain satisfaction on her part. She’d felt strong-minded and pioneering, delighted not to be one of those women who issued ultimatums to their partners or got pregnant accidentally on purpose. Now she wondered how she could have allowed a fleeting moment of career confidence to have so defining an impact.

‘You’d have all the kids in school by now,’ her mother went on in her gently relentless way (‘all’? How many did she have in mind?), ‘and you’d just have to get on with it, redundancy or not, there’d be no choice in the matter. If you ask me, all choice does is give you more time to think of reasons
not
to get on with it.’

Christy sighed. In emotional conversations like this she could do no better than to echo Joe’s rationalism. ‘Mum, I’ve just lost my job and it really doesn’t feel like I have an awful lot of choice to do anything but devote myself to finding a new one. When I do, I’ll think about the next step.’

‘Fine. Well, I’m sure it’s not anything you haven’t discussed already yourselves.’

‘We discuss it all the time,’ Christy lied.

Just a setback, she recited silently. She was out of work but she was not faced with the wolf at the door
quite
yet. She could sense it in the undergrowth but she had not yet caught a glimpse of its tail.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I
have
got the right place, haven’t I?’

‘You have, yes, but the Frasers don’t live here any more.’

On her doorstep stood an unknown caller, a woman with a baby, this one not a neighbour but a friend of Amber Fraser. She was about Christy’s age, though Christy was faintly aware of having developed the habit of deluding herself that any new mother who crossed her path must surely be older than she was. The child was five or six months old, she judged; a chunky boyish armful with a downy head and wise eyes, he followed their conversation as if understanding every word spoken.

‘But I’ve come all the way from north London,’ the woman protested, as breathless as one who’d undertaken the voyage barefoot and scarcely made it to her destination alive, though she dangled car keys in plain sight. ‘It doesn’t make sense. When exactly did they leave?’

‘I’m not sure of the date,’ Christy said, ‘but they’d already gone when the house came on the market.’

‘But why? Amber said nothing to me about moving. They’d just moved
in
. They were going to raise a family here.’ She sent a narrow gaze over Christy’s shoulder as if expecting to see the Frasers chained to a radiator, gagged and helpless.

Christy nodded in patient agreement. She decided not to air her and Joe’s speculation about financial overreaching and terminal illness. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know why. I didn’t ever meet them. When did
you
last see them?’

There was a heavy sigh, as if the woman could not possibly be expected to recall such complicated information. ‘January, it must have been. They came up for lunch one Sunday. And now it’s May. It’s been at the back of my mind that I haven’t heard from her in ages. We normally text and I thought she must have lost her phone, but now I’ve discovered she’s closed her email account as well.’

‘What about Facebook?’

‘She isn’t on it. Nothing like that.’

‘That’s unusual,’ Christy remarked. Having come to imagine Amber Fraser as the model on the
Vogue
postcard (‘more Notting Hill than Lime Park’), she considered her exactly the type to post frequent visual evidence of her superior genes and enviable lifestyle. Indeed, Christy had planned, when back online, to google it.