The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (9 page)

‘She joked there were too many undesirables in her past and she wanted to cut them loose,’ said the friend, then, as if regretting this indiscretion, hastened on: ‘Anyway, I’ve asked the rest of the girls and they haven’t heard from her either. We thought she must be holed up with the flu or something.’ She stood for a moment, puzzling. ‘Was that Rob from next door I saw when I was pulling up? Heading to the park gates?
He
might know where she’s gone.’

‘I don’t know who you saw,’ Christy said, stating the obvious, ‘but the man who lives next door is a big guy, dark hair. Mid thirties.’

‘That’s him. Rob.’

So that was what he was called. Though she’d had no further sightings of him since the morning of Felicity’s departure, Christy had heard movements on the other side of her bedroom wall, the murmurs and sudden crescendos of television, sporadic bursts of music. The main door was seldom used more than once a day. She supposed he must be some sort of recluse.

‘He looks dreadful,’ said her visitor. ‘I didn’t recognize him at first and when I called his name he didn’t react, but it
was
him and he
definitely
knows me. We’ve met two or three times.’

‘He’s quite rude,’ Christy agreed. She wasn’t sure if she should be alarmed – or ashamed – by how eagerly she had set about gossiping, stockpiling the snippets this woman was supplying for analysis later.

‘Well, he didn’t used to be rude.’ The woman’s face creased in fresh bewilderment. ‘He used to be really good fun. What’s going on around here? Where on earth is Amber? Why hasn’t she told us her new address?’ With each unanswered question she was becoming increasingly distressed, her little boy looking on in fascination.

‘Why don’t you try one of the other neighbours,’ Christy suggested. ‘Did you ever meet Caroline or Liz?’

‘Yes, both of them! Which are their houses?’

Out of curiosity, Christy accompanied her to their doors, but neither woman was at home. ‘They must be picking up their kids from school,’ she said, noticing the time. She had quickly become versed in the rhythms of Lime Park Road, the brief frenzies of the school runs,
the staggered departures and returns of the commuting adults.

‘I remember there was a retired lady Amber was chummy with,’ said the friend, straining for a name. ‘Lived downstairs from Rob?’

‘That must be Felicity,’ Christy said. ‘But she’s moved as well, I’m afraid.’

‘She has? She’d been here for donkey’s years. God, this is really starting to freak me out!’

‘Aren’t there any family members you can get in touch with?’ Christy asked, aware that she was making it sound as if the Frasers were dead. ‘Or colleagues?’

‘I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with Amber’s family. And she left work a year and a half ago, months before I did. That’s how we became friends, you see, through work.’

‘What about her husband? Might he be in the same job?’

At last the frown lifted. ‘
That’s
a good idea. Right, yes, I’ll try Jeremy’s office.’ Thus resolved, she smiled at Christy for the first time and turned to her car, a sky-blue Fiat 500 with a ‘Baby Onboard’ sticker. Christy imagined nursery rhymes playing on the stereo as they drove home, or perhaps an early-learning CD of times tables or Mandarin. ‘If you hear from her, would you tell her Imogen and Frankie came to visit?’

‘Of course.’

Christy watched from the gate as Imogen buckled Frankie into his car seat and started the engine, craning over her shoulder as she pulled away, as if not quite trusting that she’d got the right house.

As if not quite believing a word Christy had said to her.

‘You look very nice,’ Hetty said, in that faintly accusatory way women of similar rank and attractiveness pay one another compliments. She’d noticed my blow-dry and make-up, incongruously glamorous in our chaotic encampment upstairs but much too time-consuming to have been left till after the meeting. The scheduling, while inconvenient, was deliberate: it would give me something to report to Jeremy later, something other than my primary activity of the day.

‘I hope you’re not distracting the team too much,’ Hetty added, only half playfully.

‘Oh, I’m keeping out of everyone’s way, don’t worry.’ I pretended to study the spreadsheets she offered, updated meticulously for our meetings, and to listen when she said important things like, ‘That bloody company in Milan, you know, the console for the main bathroom? I must have mailed them twenty times and they
still
haven’t given me a delivery date’ or ‘There’s a problem with the cloakroom towel rail. It’s out of stock, with an
eight-week wait
.’

I couldn’t have given a monkey’s about consoles and towel rails, but made notes nonetheless. I couldn’t rely on my memory today.

‘Want to get a sandwich when we’re finished?’ Hetty asked. ‘I’m not meeting my Richmond client till three.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve been invited next door for lunch.’

It was quite touching how delighted she was by this. ‘You’re really settling in, aren’t you? How long have you been here now? Silly question! Six weeks, the same as the works. Well, I’m not surprised you’re already so popular. You and Jeremy must be great neighbours, all that wine you keep handing out; it’s more than most would do, believe me. And I have to say you’re my easiest clients by far.’

I imagined we were: a husband who had yet to attend a meeting, and a wife with a consuming new interest that dated from the very day she might have started to get under everyone’s feet.

‘This is my number,’ that first text had said, sent in front of Jeremy’s eyes at the Sellerses’ party. A second followed later in the evening, containing one word: ‘When?’

And I’d responded, Jeremy at the other end of the sofa, massaging my bare feet with his thumbs as he watched a third successive episode of
Nurse Jackie
:

‘Tuesday at 1?’

‘Yes.’

How thrillingly fast it had come around. It was five to when Hetty left; after a typically uncompromising examination of progress downstairs, she packed up her files and fired up her red Beetle convertible at the kerb, gamely driving into the damp spring day with the roof down. When living in Battersea and absorbed in the planning stages of the project, I’d looked forward to our meetings, to the rush of each new idea, the elation of green-lighting
another lavish selection. But now I couldn’t wait to see her indicate left at the junction and disappear from view.

There was no lunch. Wine, yes. In the neighbourly spirit so praised by Hetty, I took a bottle with me in case he had none – though he didn’t seem the type to run a dry home. I’m not a sociopath: I couldn’t do this sober.

We stood at the counter of his unmodernized open-plan kitchen and took our first complicit sips. The blinds to the street were pulled low, sheer enough to create an artificial twilight in the room. I had never in my life been more conscious of two bodies: the pulses and twitches and shrugs and blinks, the beginnings of sweat on skin and saliva on lips.

‘I’m glad the drone isn’t too bad in here,’ I said, thinking how far away my house seemed from this side of the wall. It was going to be easier than I’d anticipated to cast it from my mind – and the marriage it contained.

‘Nice try, but we both know they’re on their lunch break,’ Rob said. ‘You can’t trick me, Miss Amber.’

‘No, I can only distract you from the pain.’

I’d wondered if I’d be bashful when it came to it, perhaps even shocked into retreat, but it transpired I was neither.

‘What about these rules,’ he reminded me, turning serious.

‘They’re not rules, just conditions. And pretty obvious ones.’

‘OK, pretty obvious conditions. Tell me.’

If he was serious, then I was severe, as severe as I’d
ever been in my life before, because this was not a joke to me and could at no point be allowed to become one. ‘This must be totally secret,’ I began. ‘If you think there’s any possibility whatsoever that you might confide in someone, especially a neighbour, then tell me now and I’ll leave before there’s anything worth confiding.’

He snorted, already prepared to mock. ‘Men don’t confide. Don’t you know anything about us? I rather got the impression you did.’

‘Not confide then. Brag, after a few drinks. Make claims, indulge in innuendo.’

‘I see you’ve studied your thesaurus.’

I raised my eyebrows, stared him down. ‘Just give me a yes or no, for God’s sake.’

‘Fine, I promise not to brag after a few drinks or make claims or indulge in innuendo.’ He grimaced. ‘I feel like I’m swearing an oath here.’

‘You are,’ I told him. ‘If either of us is ever accused, we must deny it categorically. Even if someone says they’ve seen us with their own eyes, we have to convince them they were hallucinating. No wavering, no hints, no telling just one person and swearing them to secrecy, only to have them do exactly the same with the next person.’

‘We just covered confidentiality,’ he said, impatient to get these preliminaries over with. ‘That’s all understood.’

‘When we see each other outside, we need to act the same as before, as if the friendship is progressing naturally. Like at Caroline’s drinks. That’s the first giveaway, suddenly ignoring each other, not mentioning that we’ve seen each other.’

‘So we mention we see each other, just not what we choose to do together.’

‘Exactly.’
What we choose to do together
… But it was more imperative than choice, it was an elemental command. ‘You need to be friendly with Jeremy too. He knows you work from home, and I’ll tell him we have lunch or coffee sometimes, you’re my new chum. We
will
have lunch occasionally, and when we do I’ll invite Caroline to witness how normal we are together. We’ll have a house-warming at some point, too, and you’ll need to attend, even if we hate each other by then.’

‘We won’t hate each other.’ The fingers of his left hand, resting on the worktop, jerked suddenly and my skin quivered as if to their touch.

‘No phone calls,’ I said, speeding through my mental list. I had spent hours on it, applying myself to it as if my life depended on it. (My life, as I knew it, as I valued it,
did
.) ‘No emails. No notes through the letter box.’

‘How –?’

‘Texts. But only dates and times, deleted as soon as they’ve been read. Nothing suggestive. Definitely no images.’

‘You’re extremely thorough,’ Rob said. ‘Like a barrister prepping a witness for trial.’

But a barrister would not begin to unbutton her top, as I did now. ‘If either of us wants to stop, the other accepts without question. No tears, no emotions, no love.’

‘Agreed.’ He was watching my fingers, transfixed. ‘I’ve never had to submit to this transactional bit before.’

‘I wouldn’t call it a transaction.’

‘What is it then?’

‘I don’t know.’ I took his glass from his hand and placed it out of reach. ‘Maybe a blow to the head?’

We kissed, at first savagely as if the wait had been in years, not weeks, him pressing me against the worktop until I cried out that it hurt, and then in a longer and more painstaking style on the sofa. Being kissed by him was like being liquidized, being prepared by a chef for consumption; whenever I caught sight of any of my limbs I was amazed to see them in their original solid form. And then, indecently quickly, entirely without romance, we had sex, the first of what would be many times, and he was exactly as I had intuited he would be: forceful, demanding, unstoppable. You wouldn’t want to change your mind midway, I thought, as he locked my wrists together above my head, his grip painful, unyielding, but then I
didn’t
want to change my mind. My mind had been set the day we met, in the first ten seconds.

As our groans became less easy to control, the builders resumed their crashing next door and we were saved.

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I asked him, later. We were in the bedroom by then, window closed on birdsong, curtains drawn on the brightening afternoon, both flushed from our exertions: the very picture of daytime adultery. I was not sure how I preferred him to answer the question. On the one hand it made us even and reduced the likelihood of him demanding more from me than I could offer, but on the other it introduced another variable into the equation that I could live without.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘No one in particular, anyway.’

I touched his face, fingers curious rather than tender, sorry only in the most remote way for those girls of no ‘particular’ appeal. ‘But you do see people?’

‘Of course I do.’ He yawned. ‘You’re not the only one who finds me overpoweringly attractive. I have a date tonight, actually.’

‘Who is she?’

‘The cousin of a mate. Fresh to these parts from Gloucestershire. She’s going to teach in a secondary school in Tower Hamlets, poor sod. She won’t last five minutes.’

‘In the job or with you?’

‘Both, probably.’

I giggled. ‘And that’s why your friend thought of you? Because you know about education?’

‘People like a literal connection when they fix you up.’

‘Do they? Aren’t opposites allowed to attract any more?’

‘Oh, I think it’s better that they don’t,’ he said.

There was no need to pretend
we
were opposites: we were cut from the same cloth all right.

‘How did you and Jeremy meet?’ he asked.

‘Through work. I was invited to a summer party thrown by his company.’

‘He was married to someone else at the time, was he?’

I prodded his chest in protest. ‘You see me as a husband stealer?’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘He was single,’ I said. ‘A legitimate candidate.’

‘A middle-aged bachelor,’ Rob said, ‘aka a sitting duck.’

‘Yes, just like you’ll be one day soon.’

He seized my hand, nibbled at the fingertips, bringing
his teeth together just far enough to avoid causing pain. ‘I bet he couldn’t believe his luck when you walked in. Not only unbelievably hot, but a stand-up comedian as well.’

I smiled, retrieved my fingers from his mouth and forked the damp tips through his hair, mapping the bones of his skull. ‘You’d have to ask him that. But he did propose very quickly, it’s true.’

‘And what about you? What did you think when
he
walked in?’

‘I thought he was great,’ I said. ‘I still do.’

‘But?’

‘But nothing.’ I said this with a certainty that did not have to be simulated, naked though I was in the clutch of a man I hardly knew. ‘I knew what I wanted and I was delighted that I’d found it so quickly.’

‘What was “it”?’

‘A committed relationship with a proper grown-up. I’d done the crazy passion thing too often – you know, meet someone in a bar and tear each other’s clothes off. Only realize afterwards that they’re a drunk or a lunatic or married. All three on one memorable occasion.’ As I paused to register his amusement, I had the distinct sense that he was testing me. A less experienced lover would be all too easily outplayed by this man, I thought; for him, artlessness was a purely female failing. ‘It was time to be sensible and think about the future,’ I added.

‘Did you ever wonder if you might have sold yourself a bit short?’

I frowned.

‘No offence to the silver fox,’ he said, ‘but a girl who looks
like you do, barely thirty then, you could have had anyone. One photo online and they would have been queuing up.’

‘Maybe they would, but I didn’t want them, I wanted him. I
still
want him.’ I stretched my arms and flexed my elbows, easing aching shoulders, and Rob brought his face very close to mine. His breath was hot and short, in close rhythm with my own.

‘Why this then?’ he murmured. ‘You missed the crazy passion.’

It wasn’t a question and I could hardly deny the truth of it. ‘I didn’t know I did,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised to discover that I do. This is the first time I’ve done this.’

‘You’ve never been tempted before?’

‘Never.’

He didn’t need to ask why he was different, why
we
were; he accepted our coupling exactly as I did, as being animal, primordial. For us, the suffering was never going to be in the complications it caused; the suffering could only ever have been in its denial.

He drew away from me, head next to mine on the pillow, and we both gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Is it true you two are trying to have a baby?’

So news in Lime Park travelled fast, door to door, ear to ear, and efficiently enough to remain accurate. That was worth keeping in mind.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s the most important condition of all.’

‘Condoms?’

‘Don’t run out. I can hardly be found to have any in my possession when they’re strictly contraband next door.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ He paused, turned to look at me. ‘How often are we going to meet?’

‘I suppose it will depend on how busy we are.’

‘I’m not that busy at the moment. Work’s dried up a bit lately, to be honest.’

‘And I haven’t got a job at all, as you know. So I may be texting you quite frequently. Keep your phone charged.’

Rob chuckled, eyeing me with admiration. ‘You’re very cool about all of this.’

I didn’t blink, immobilized for a second or two by the euphoria of being the object of his desire. ‘I have to be,’ I said.

And to myself:
If I lose my head, I’ll lose everything.

When Jeremy came home that first time, I braced myself for the haemorrhages of guilt, steadying myself on the door frame as I welcomed him home in case I trembled. Don’t cry, I thought. Don’t blurt. Instinctively I understood that if I could survive this first occasion I would be safe.

‘Let’s see the latest damage, then,’ he said, passing me by to enter the building site.