The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (14 page)

I winked at Caroline. I was particularly keen to keep the street’s chief whip close, which was why I’d selected her as the third wheel I’d advertised to Jeremy, every so often suggesting coffee at the patisserie on the Parade. An unexpected fringe benefit was that I was enjoying curating the friendship between the two of them – unlikely enough for it never to have germinated in the decade they’d already been neighbours.

‘All this time we’ve lived a couple of doors apart,’ she said to him on one of those early dates
à trois
, ‘and we’ve not once had a coffee together before.’

‘Before the bad influence of Amber,’ he answered, his manner smooth, oh-so-amused.

‘I feel like I’m a student again. Just lazing around without a care in the world.’

‘That’s because she encourages everyone to ditch what they’re supposed to be doing so they can hang out with her instead. This is what it is to be the idle rich, Caroline.’

‘Hello? I
am
here,’ I said, laughing. ‘And feel free to get on with your more pressing tasks, both of you. I haven’t handcuffed you to your seats, you know.’

‘More’s the pity,’ Rob said, with just the proper trace of lasciviousness. He was an absolute master of tone, a born actor. ‘We’d like that, wouldn’t we, Caroline? A little bit of discipline in Lime Park.’

She gave a snort of laughter. ‘I was only supposed to be getting Amelia’s cello tuned. The world won’t stop turning, will it?’

‘Exactly,’ Rob said. ‘It’s not as if you’re using it for firewood to barbecue her pet guinea pig. Enjoy the cello holiday while it lasts, that’s what I say. She could always practise that piece that’s complete silence. What was the composer called? John Cage, that’s it.’

I loved how Rob knew these things.

‘I used to have a bit of a crush on him,’ Caroline confessed when we were alone.

‘On Rob? Well, he
is
very attractive, I don’t blame you.’

‘This was years ago, when we first moved in. I remember calling round to invite him to our house-warming and just standing there gawping at him – so embarrassing, like I’d never seen a man before! Actually, maybe I hadn’t for a while, not a
young
one. But he didn’t come if I remember rightly, and he’s been a bit of an unknown quantity ever since. It’s very exciting that you’ve managed to tempt him out so much.’

Little did she know that I mostly tempted him
in
.

She sighed. ‘Anyway, he would
never
have considered me, even without Amelia hanging off my boob. Then Rosie. Then Lucas.’

I smiled at her. ‘Just as well, since you already have a husband – and a very nice one too.’

‘Oh, sure. It’s not the same, though,
nice
, is it? I know you and Jeremy have only been together a few years, but, I hate to say it, Amber, as soon as kids come along, everything changes.’

I wondered what she would say if I confessed that things already
had
changed and in such a way that would make her hair curl. There was no doubt in my mind that she had no suspicion whatsoever of what was going on under her nose.

‘Anyway, who would want to shit on their own doorstep?’ she said, as if she still might be persuaded to bed Rob, all things considered. ‘It would be an insane risk.’

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘I would prefer to conduct my first extramarital affair from an apartment in Paris.’

She took my hand in mock urgency. ‘Do it while you can, Amber, because I’m not sure the Eurostar is fast enough to get you there and back between school drop-off and pick-up.’

‘I might just take your advice,’ I said, winking.

‘Richard says Caroline’s telling everyone you’re a breath of fresh air,’ Jeremy said one evening at Canvas. He frowned at the menu, which did not alter frequently enough for us, constant customers that we were. He would probably have the Black Angus rib-eye again, and I would have the scallop starter as a main.

‘That’s sweet,’ I said over the top of my Bellini. ‘Are you having the steak again, darling?’

I liked to see a man eat red meat.

‘I think I am, yes. Seriously though, Richard says you’re just what they need round here, someone with a bit of spark. You’re a real hit, baby.’ And he looked at me in that way he still did, as if I were always candlelit, always accompanied by the smoothest jazz melodies, and not just when
we were in chichi restaurants. I watched as gentle emotions crossed his face – admiration, pride, a fleeting sense of wonder that he had ever had the luck to win me – chased by the more familiar ones of self-assurance and entitlement.

‘Glad to be of service,’ I said.

Just when she should have been emerging from her post-redundancy fugue (and there’d been, she had to admit, a certain perverse pleasure in being in it), just when she was finally on the cusp of doing what she should have done weeks ago and begun supplementing her job hunt with regular scourings for volunteer work locally – anything to occupy her hours, to expand her activities beyond the stalking of empty rooms – she was struck down afresh.

For the flu made no exceptions of the unemployed. It probably singled them out. Certainly it pardoned Joe.

Now the torment
really
began. All the demons of Hades visited her at once: her glands swelled, her sinuses became blocked, her head ached and her skin burned. She sneezed, coughed, sweated, vomited, shivered and sobbed. When she dared look in the bathroom mirror she saw a woman a hundred years old, born an invalid, raised in confinement. She could remember no life before that of lying in bed and wishing either for a general anaesthetic or death itself, whichever could be administered the faster.

‘See if you can get someone from Dignitas to come and put me out of my misery,’ she told Joe one morning.

‘I’d forgotten what a terrible patient you are,’ he said, amused. ‘Come on, sit up. Here’s your lemon and ginger drink …’

He was as devoted as any man absent sixteen hours a day could be. Their principle waking overlap being in the early morning, when he would bring her the ‘special’ hot drink his mother swore by and that she now swore
at
, she would dutifully prop herself up, overheated and malodorous, for his brief bedside visit. From her zone of flattened pillows and tangled sheets, the large bedroom looked too big for its few sticks of furniture, as if someone had burgled it as they slept.

‘Oh, I spoke to your grizzly bear last night,’ he said.

‘Rob?’ Even in her stupor, this was news enough to rouse her. ‘He’s not
mine
, urgh, what a grotesque thought.’

‘“Grotesque”? That’s a bit strong. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to hear he’s a perfectly respectable citizen. He’s a freelance journalist, works from home.’

‘I know
that
,’ Christy said. ‘I hear his music all day long.’

‘Oh dear. What kind is it?’

‘Blues.’

Joe grinned. ‘Perfect for the prevailing mood, I would have thought.’

‘Did you ask him why he was so mean to me in the street?’ Christy demanded, but Joe seemed surprised by the question.

‘I very much doubt he was being deliberately mean.’

‘You didn’t hear the way he spoke to me! He swore at me, Joe. It was bordering on harassment.’

Still cheerful, Joe lowered his voice as if they were in danger of being overheard: ‘I’m not sure you should go around accusing people of harassment.’

‘Why are you on his side?
I’m
your wife, you should be defending
me
!’ She set down the drink to blow her nose and use the nasal spray the pharmacist had recommended.

Joe tried to straighten his face but his lips twitched and gave him away. ‘I’m just saying he seemed perfectly normal.’

‘Of course he was normal with
you
, you’re a man. He’s obviously some sort of misogynist bully.’ She paused, recalling Steph’s report of civility, before continuing unabashed. ‘I hate him. I wish we’d never moved next door to him.’

Joe just patted her leg through the duvet as if to pacify an anxious pet; though gentler, fonder, it was fundamentally the same reaction as the beast’s (
Take it easy
, he’d said. Patronizing bastard). ‘Come on, so he’s not that sociable,’ he said reasonably. ‘What difference does it make to us? I don’t know why you care so much about him, or any of the neighbours – we’ve got plenty of friends of our own.’

None of whom had visited her while she’d been ill. Yasmin was in KL, Ellen was on holiday, and other friends were either routinely working late or unwilling to risk debilitation from the lurgy themselves and earn a demerit
from bosses who were, in this economic climate, universally feared. The other faction, the new parents, quite understandably had enough on their plate without worrying about a bout of flu in Lime Park. Only her mother had come. She was thirty-seven years old and only her mother had come. She began to feel very upset.

‘Remember what I told you Felicity’s friend said? I bet that was to do with him. I bet he drove her out with his antisocial behaviour.’ Her theories had had the perfect conditions in which to ulcerate during her days in bed. ‘
And
the Frasers. All three of them disappear off the face of the earth at the same time – it’s like they were abducted by aliens!’

‘Or by Rob, perhaps? Maybe he’s got them imprisoned in the attic!’

Christy ignored his facetiousness. ‘And I told you about Caroline’s husband shouting up at his window, didn’t I? We’ve moved next door to a psycho, you wait!’

But the lawyer in Joe rejected this wholesale. ‘Come on, this woman you’re quoting, what did she actually say? “This will all be behind you soon”? That could be to do with anything at all, a medical scare or a tragedy in the family. And if Caroline’s husband was screaming up at his window, doesn’t that suggest
he’s
the antisocial one, not Rob?’

‘Well, what about Kenny punching him? He had to cross the road to stop himself doing it again! I saw it with my own eyes, he had to keep his hands in his pockets. Joanne had to restrain him!’

Joe gazed at her, amazed. ‘I have no idea who Kenny
and Joanne are, let alone why they should choose to cross the road and punch a third party. Seriously, Christy, you’ve never even talked to these people, have you? You don’t know the first thing about Rob or Felicity
or
the Frasers. Finish the drink and go back to sleep.’

But sleep brought no respite during this period: she dreamed of pain, or continued to experience it as she dreamed, waking frequently, every inch of her sore and aching. Unless wedged upright, her nose would glue up and she’d have to breathe through her mouth, making it agonizingly dry, which would lead to nightmares about roaming post-apocalyptic wastelands in search of fresh water until she would wheeze and gasp herself awake.

One night, half concious, she heard voices close by and thought at first that Joe had left the television on downstairs. Disorientated, it took a moment to realize the voices were coming from the other side of the wall, from Rob’s flat: a man and a woman were talking, arguing, judging by the sudden bursts of volume, and the woman sounded very distressed.

‘Joe!’ she hissed to him, asleep in the bed beside her. ‘Joe, listen! Something’s going on next door. I can hear someone crying.’

Joe did not stir – he slept enviably heavily – and Christy shook him awake, rough with urgency. ‘Joe, I think we need to call the police!’

‘What?’

Then, just as he was reluctantly surfacing, her own brain cleared and she realized she’d misunderstood: what she was hearing was in fact a couple making love. The
woman was pleading in torment of a different kind. There was the low grumble of a male voice asking questions, overlapped by her saying, ‘Yes’, imploring him repeatedly, begging him to go on doing whatever it was he was doing.

‘I know it’s been a while, but are you really telling me you can’t recognize the sound of two people having sex?’ Joe said, voice slow with sleep.

‘But that’s his living room, isn’t it?’ She didn’t say how she knew this, that in the weeks prior to her confinement she’d sometimes lingered on the pavement across the street and noted the flickering of a TV screen or the closing of blinds in bright afternoon sunshine.

‘I haven’t got a clue what room it is,’ Joe muttered, ‘I don’t have a floor plan of his home. But he can use any one he likes, can’t he?’

Christy said nothing. Now that the begging had ceased, the effects of pleasure sounded perfectly conventional, whimpers and groans rather than screams, until the inevitable crescendo that made her flinch with embarrassment.

‘Stop being a pervert,’ Joe said, admirably easy-going given the circumstances. ‘Go back to sleep.’ And he moved away from her, right to the edge of his side of the bed, burrowing easily back into his own sleep and leaving her to fester. What had he just said,
I know it’s been a while
? He was right. Since they’d moved into the new house and he’d been promoted, there’d been less time, less energy. Was this … was this going to become an
issue
?

There was laughter now from next door, and the faint
insistent beat of music. She reached for the radio alarm on the cabinet next to her, anything to return her mind to this room, this house, this life, but in pressing a series of wrong buttons she managed only to disable it. Heaving herself from bed, she tried to locate her iPod on the chest of drawers, her fingers prodding at objects in the dark. They rested on her wooden jewellery box, the lid half open thanks to a muddle of beads spilling over the sides. Remembering the hidden bangle, she extracted it and returned to bed with it in her hand. Lying there, hot and tangled in the damp sheet, she ran her fingers over the clasp, over and over, as if comfort, or even remedy, were to be found in it.

Back on her feet, she was seized by the first desire for action she’d felt in weeks – more than desire: compulsion, an irresistible sense of urgent mission. Obeying with single-minded zeal, she set about transferring the contents of their bedroom, item by item, to the room at the back, until at last the master bedroom stood empty and the modest spare at the rear had been reconstructed in its image. She was still very weak and it took most of the day to accomplish the switch.

‘What on earth have you done?’ Joe asked, when he came home – for the first time in a while before 10 p.m. – and found her slumped on the bed, curtains open to the lightless park, the low dark skies.

She beamed at him, excited. ‘I’ve moved things around. I thought we’d sleep in here now.’

Joe looked neither convinced nor impressed by this
reconfiguration. ‘But the master bedroom’s got Amber Baby’s million-dollar en suite.’

‘You can still use it, if you prefer,’ she told him. ‘I thought I’d just use the main bathroom. It’s got a bigger shower. Anyway, I’ve moved all the toiletries and towels, so you don’t have to do anything.’

Still he gazed about the room, as if puzzling over an optical illusion. ‘How did you manage to move the bed on your own? It’s solid wood.’

‘I turned it on its side and inched it along the carpet.’ This had been the feat of which Christy was most proud; her muscles atrophied following her ten days in bed, she’d had to rest frequently during the bed’s voyage down the passageway. ‘You should have seen it, it was like towing a cruise ship through the Panama Canal,’ she added. It was a relief to have rediscovered her sense of fun, even if Joe appeared to be having trouble connecting with it.

For when he retraced her route he was genuinely displeased. ‘You’ve wrecked the walls, Christy, look at all these marks!’

‘No I haven’t. And if I have it will give me something to do to repaint them.’

‘Better not to have damaged them in the first place, don’t you think? I bet this paint is some high-end heritage stuff that costs a bomb. Maybe you could check in the shed to see if the Frasers left a pot.’ He squinted at her as if suddenly uncertain of her psychological health. ‘This is crazy,’ he said, at last. ‘I honestly don’t understand why you’ve done this. The bedroom at the front is easily
the nicest and now it’s just going to be a useless empty space.’

‘I thought we could make it into an extra living room,’ Christy said. ‘I’ll put that armchair from downstairs by the window. This room is much cosier and it’s private, it overlooks the garden and the park. And there’s no traffic noise.’

‘There’s no traffic noise at the front either. We’re on a residential road with a speed bump every ten metres.’ He remained standing by the door, as if to step into the room would be to yield to her madness. ‘Seriously!’

Waiting for his exasperation to run its course, Christy wondered if he’d made the connection to the noise that
had
disturbed her, in which case he might reasonably point out that if Rob’s living room was at the front, then logically his bedroom must be at the back, right alongside where she’d now moved theirs. What was the sense in that when presumably the majority of his sexual activities took place in there? The answer was that at the rear they were separated by the twin cavities of staircase and landing on either side of the dividing wall, surely enough to deaden the most enthusiastic cries. And it worked both ways: she didn’t want
him
hearing
them
(though – here was that thought again – there had been precious little so far for him to have overheard).

‘Fine,’ Joe said at last. ‘If it makes you happy. It’s just somewhere to sleep.’ For him, he meant, passing through the room as he did between leaving the office in the late evening and returning to it first thing in the morning.

‘Yes, sleep – and other things,’ she said, in a new, lighter tone, and he looked at her with a marked absence of desire that was both dismaying and a relief. She had not changed out of her pyjamas for her removals antics, though he might have given her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she’d been in regular clothes for most of the day before getting ready for bed early. Neither was an especially alluring conclusion.

‘Are we eating anything tonight?’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Did you have a chance to go to the supermarket?’

‘No. I’ll go tomorrow. We can cobble something together for dinner.’ And she could see very well that it might look odd for her to have exhausted herself with furniture removals and yet overlooked their empty fridge. Did other partners at JR have meals cobbled together by a spouse dressed in greying pyjamas?

Possibly not.

To celebrate being back in the land of the living, she decided to go to the café in the park for the rare pleasure of decent coffee made by someone else and drunk in the company of fellow human beings as opposed to cushions. As she accessed the park by their private gate and looked back at the rear aspect of their house – high and solid, its windows shining – she felt her natural joie de vivre rise once more. It may have been by the skin of her teeth, but she still owned this house. She wondered if the astonishment of it would ever fade.