The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (5 page)

‘Anywhere nice?’ Christy asked.

‘Just our place on the Ile de Ré. The kids went back to school this week.’

‘How old are they?’

‘Eleven next week, almost-but-not-quite eight and a half, and just turned four.’

Christy wondered why she didn’t just say eleven, eight and four.

‘Do you have any?’ Caroline asked.

‘No, it’s just my husband and me.’

This dismayed Caroline; you could see it in the slow slide of her half-smile, a perceptible withdrawal of warmth.

‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ Christy said, forgetting they were both on their way out, her own errand involving a trip to the hardware store on the Parade for light bulbs.

‘Thank you,’ Caroline said, ‘but I need to dash. I’m just picking up my youngest from school. He’s in kindergarten and finishes a bit earlier than the other two.’

‘Is it a local school they go to?’

‘Yes, Lime Park Primary, just behind the Parade.’

‘I’m going in that direction, as well. Maybe we could walk together and you can fill me in on the local gossip?’

This Christy said quite playfully and yet the other woman looked startled, almost insulted, by her suggestion. Suddenly she was digging in her bag and extracting a set of car keys; she had been going to walk (and why wouldn’t she, the school was ten minutes away?), but now she’d decided to drive.

‘You’re based at home, are you?’ she asked, apparently not entirely incurious.

Christy smiled. ‘No, I’ve just been off work this week to unpack and get the utilities sorted out. I thought I might need to do some decorating but the couple before us left the house in such perfect condition there’s nothing for me to do.’ When Caroline failed to react, Christy continued to voice her thoughts, forgetting this was not always the most successful basis for conversation: ‘We’re not online yet, either, and my phone doesn’t get a very good signal down here so I feel a bit cut off. I can’t wait to get back to work, to be honest. The street feels so dead. There’s no way I could do this full time …’ Too late she heard how the words might have sounded and felt her cheeks flush. ‘I didn’t mean … Well, maybe you don’t work and I didn’t mean it how it sounded.’

A week out of the office and already she was a gibbering idiot.

‘Excuse me, but I certainly
do
work,’ Caroline said, frowning rather fiercely. Her voice rang clear and confident in the quiet street, audible surely to anyone with an inch of open window. ‘I have three children under eleven and if
that’s
not work then I don’t know what is.’

‘Of course. I only meant –’

‘Real work, eh? A contribution to the Exchequer, something in the interests of society and not for my own selfish hormonal ends? Yes, I know what you
only
meant. Well, future taxpayers don’t raise themselves, you know.’

‘I …’ Christy’s face burned. She was not sure how this could have escalated so rapidly. Was this one of those unfortunate situations when you find yourself bearing the brunt of someone’s pre-existing frustrations? Had Caroline been criticized before and not had the opportunity to defend herself? ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said apologetically. ‘Forget I said anything.’

But Caroline only looked at her with exasperated disbelief, as if she could not credit that
this
was what had emerged from number 40. ‘You think very differently from Amber, I see,’ she said, as if that settled it.

‘Amber?’ In her confusion it took Christy a second or two to place the name. ‘Oh. I didn’t ever meet –’ she began, but it was too late, Caroline had turned from her to point her key fob at a nearby Mini, the lights of which began to flash as the locks released. Christy wondered how a family of five could fit into the tiny cabin, but then
she remembered the enormous Audi on the drive. She and Joe had never owned a car in their lives, let alone two.

‘Bye,’ Christy called after her. ‘Another time, maybe?’ But the question was obliterated by the angry crunch of the car door closing.

Oh dear, she thought. So far she wasn’t seeing much evidence of the open-armed community she had so confidently expected of Lime Park Road. But there were plenty more fish in the sea, she told herself, and the law of averages dictated they couldn’t
all
have spines as prickly as this one.

Besides, she had dinner at Canvas to look forward to.

Joe had suggested it, Joe had booked it, and presumably Joe was also now going to explain how they would justify paying for it in the light of the crushing budget they’d drawn up together (if it didn’t permit good coffee, then it certainly prohibited meals in restaurants like Canvas).

She’d studied the menu on her way back from the hardware store and concluded that it was both intimidatingly fashionable (crab foam and grated bottarga – they’d not had those in New Cross) and toe-curlingly expensive. A starter equated to the pedal bin they needed for the ground-floor loo, while a main course might buy them blinds for one of the spare bedrooms, and yet there Joe was, ordering champagne, the bottle opened when she joined him and two glasses already poured.

‘I know what this is about,’ she said, smiling. She was damned if she was going to spoil the lovely gesture. And what a beautiful restaurant it was! No wonder every table was taken, the atmosphere one of unbridled jubilation:
everywhere you looked there was vivid colour, from the fresh-lime shade of the sculpted vinyl chairs to the sparkling fuchsia of the teardrop glass chandeliers and the garden greens and ocean blues of the canvases that crowded the walls. Each table had a tangle of wild flowers for its centrepiece, and Christy reached to touch the petals to check that they were real, to check that
this
was real. ‘It’s about celebrating our milestones, isn’t it? And I completely agree that the house is –’

‘Christy,’ he interrupted, and she saw how excited he was, possibly even a little drunk already. ‘It’s not the house. I’ve got some other news.’ He paused in a way she recognized as being less for effect than to overcome his own disbelief. ‘I’ve been made partner.’

She stared. Partner: the longed-for promotion he’d been warned by Marcus to not yet expect, even when two younger associates had been successful, leading Christy privately, treacherously, to interpret ‘not yet’ as never.

‘Not equity,’ he added, ‘I’ll be capped on what I earn, but still it’s –’

Now it was she who interrupted: ‘But it’s
incredible
, Joe! Wow, congratulations!’ And as he recounted the day’s events for her, heat suffused her body, the heat of joy. Just as she’d thought they’d had their share of fortune, here was more of it – and fortune of the sort that might take the edge off their financial pressures, too.

‘What are you thinking?’ Joe said, their glasses refilled.

‘I’m thinking we can maybe buy some furniture for all those empty rooms. And we need shelving and waste-paper baskets as a matter of urgency.’

‘Those are the kind of extravagant romantic gestures I like to hear.’

They grinned at each other. ‘Actually, I was thinking something else as well,’ she admitted. ‘You know the other day, when we moved into the house?’

‘When you convinced yourself we were squatters about to be picked up by the police?’

‘Yes, but after that. I was thinking I’d never seen you look so pleased with yourself.’

‘Pleased with
us
,’ he corrected her. ‘It’s all coming together, isn’t it?’ He raised his glass with an easy flourish, as if he’d been born to celebrate success.

‘Like we’re getting all our good luck in one go!’

‘Well, it’s supposed to come in threes, so maybe there’s even more.’

‘I think that only works with
bad
luck, doesn’t it?’ Christy said, her eyes widening in mock trepidation.

They demolished their meals. They’d chosen the same for both courses – salmon terrine followed by rack of lamb, give or take the Canvas bells and whistles – which happened almost every time; they had long ago agreed that this was absolutely fine and didn’t make them in any way a boring couple. It was the first well-cooked food they’d eaten for weeks, neither of them having a reputation for culinary prowess, especially not when paired with thrift.

But anything would have tasted ambrosial that evening. When Joe’s attention was stolen briefly by a phone call from Marcus, she was overcome by an urge to share his news with other diners, scanning the tables for familiar faces, though of course she hardly knew a soul in Lime
Park. That will change, she thought; in a year’s time, we’ll look around this room and know we belong.

‘So what did you do today?’ Joe asked, all hers again.

‘Oh, I wasn’t nearly as successful as you. Among other things, I inadvertently offended a neighbour.’

He smirked. ‘Who was it? Not the hairy one you told me about yesterday?’

‘No, not him. The woman from the other side. Caroline, she’s called.’ Christy explained what had happened, how her blunder had caused the woman to storm off.

‘She sounds a bit oversensitive,’ Joe said. ‘She’ll be one of those crazy leopard mothers, I bet.’

‘
Tiger
mothers.’

‘That’s it. Living through her children, no sense of the wider world. They didn’t have them in New Cross, but they roam freely among us in Lime Park.’

‘I think you’re right.’ The pang Christy felt at the ease with which he aligned himself to the child-free was minimal, hardly a pang at all. Their income was about to increase, after all; the right time for a baby might come sooner than they’d planned.

Maybe that would be their third piece of luck.

‘I’m back to work on Monday,’ she reminded him. ‘Hopefully I can make it up to Laurie for having been so useless this past month.’ The uncompromising nature of Joe’s job meant that it had been she who’d borne the lion’s share of the phone calls and emails demanded of the expedited house-purchase process.

‘I thought Ellen covered for you?’

‘She did, but all it takes is one little remark from the
client. And Laurie’s been a bit unpredictable since she came back from maternity leave.’

‘Rather be at home being a tiger, d’you think? Well, I bet you weren’t half as bad as those girls who sit at their desks planning their weddings. We’ve got one at JR. Photographers, dress fittings, flowers, that’s all you hear her talk about. I swear she’s going to get a formal warning if she doesn’t lay off.’

‘Easy to say when you’re the groom.’ Christy seemed to remember she’d organized most of
their
wedding. ‘But I’m glad to hear such liberties are being taken even at Jermyn Richards.’

Joe raised his glass in salute. ‘Even at Jermyn Richards.’

And with the last of the champagne they touched glasses once more.

I’m not a fool. I know it must be a stretch to understand how I let it happen. It doesn’t stack up, it doesn’t make sense – I see that. And if I’ve given the impression that Jeremy and I didn’t love each other, then I’ve done us both a disservice, because we certainly did.

So how on earth can my behaviour be explained (I would never suggest justified)? I’ve sought no advice, naturally, but a few theories of my own have surfaced, informed by the psychology articles I’ve read in magazines. One, I wanted to test Jeremy’s love because even after five and a half years together my rise to affluence and security still struck me as too good to be true. Two, I was inherently self-destructive and an act like this was inevitable, a question not of if but when, and my accessory in betrayal could have been any neighbour, any colleague, any passing sucker. Three, it could have been no one but him because what we had was chemistry in its most primitive form, an unstoppable life force. I could have been married to the King of England and it would still have happened.

What I
do
know is that I didn’t do it lightly. It wasn’t a case of waiting for Jeremy to leave the house on Monday
morning and slipping straight next door, shedding my clothes as I took the stairs, an animal in season. No, after that first encounter, I did my best to defy divine decree. Not once did I flick my eyes to the windows of 38B or take a step towards his door. I met other Lime Park residents and was democratically warm and friendly, which wasn’t difficult given how welcoming the community was. I lost count of how many neighbours came by to introduce themselves those first few weeks – ‘Welcome to Lime Park Road!’ they’d cry, as if we’d landed on some tropical island renowned for the openheartedness of its natives – or the times I answered the doorbell to be presented with flowers or a bottle of wine.

I self-consciously applied myself to my new house, to the builders, to the deliveries that arrived several times a day. And there were constant meetings to occupy me, either formal catch-ups with Hetty or impromptu confabs with the builders about some hitch or other.

‘Isn’t this exciting?’ Hetty said as she surveyed the deliveries stacked in the master bedroom, our designated stockroom during the build. Her eyes danced as she unpacked a shipment of hexagonal glass tiles from Italy, destined to bring iridescent magic to our en-suite shower enclosure. ‘We’re finally under way after all that planning!’

‘Very exciting,’ I agreed.

‘You seem a bit shell-shocked, Amber. Don’t be demoralized by the dust. People
always
get demoralized by dust.’

‘I’m not demoralized,’ I said.

I was, however, driven out. The ground floor was a construction site, a dirt pit, scheduled to encroach before
long on the floors above when work began on the bathrooms, and the place was as insufferably noisy as we’d feared. By the beginning of the third week, I’d all but given up and started doing what I’d only joked I would: leave everything to Hetty and the team and spend my days off-site. I joined the local gym, which was a convenient walk through the park and had its own pool and spa; I familiarized myself with all the retail opportunities within walking distance and drove to adjoining neighbourhoods to do the same there; I met my old colleagues in town for lunch, keeping at bay their requests to see the new house (‘It’s hell. You’ll need hard hats. Let’s wait till the weather’s better and we can sit in the garden’). I was a stay-at-home mum in a home that wasn’t habitable and with no children to put in it.

A fourth theory: the illusion of homelessness, combined with my abandonment of my job, had dislocated my value system. I was unmoored, a rolling stone poised to drop into the first dark hole in its path.

And the first dark hole just happened to be next door.

I next saw him in the café in the park; it was our fourth week in Lime Park. Of course, I recalled his saying he went there sometimes to work and so I had mostly avoided it as a venue for my daylight loafing, but this was Friday and my resolve was weakening. I remember thinking, Jeremy will be home this evening and we’ll be together for the weekend and that will buy me two more days of grace. I had the naive idea that the longer I was able to stave off the inevitable, the less inevitable it would become.

Rob was sitting at a quiet corner table with his laptop
in front of him, eyebrows beetled low in concentration, left hand tapping at the tabletop rather than the keyboard. As soon as I spied him I began intoning,
He hasn’t seen you … Don’t go over …
But of course ten seconds later I was making sure he
had
seen me, calling out ‘Hello, again!’ and going right on over.

He lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Well, if it isn’t the new kid on the block. Miss Amber.’

He’d remembered my name, of course; the ‘Miss’ was for his own amusement.

‘That’s me. Hard day at the office?’

‘Certainly is.’ He grinned up at me – he had good straight white teeth; I’d pictured them as stained, the teeth of a feral creature – and seeing how pleased he was to find me in front of him I felt myself ignite.

‘What is it you do?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘I knew it! I said to Jeremy that’s what you must be.’ I had said nothing of the sort, but what I had done was strike a deal with myself that if I were to meet Rob again (
if?
), I would introduce Jeremy’s name into the conversation within the first two minutes.

‘Jeremy’s the silver fox you’re married to?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘He’ll be pleased with that first impression.’

‘What, that he’s a silver fox or that you’re married? Is either impression false?’

‘Oh, we’re definitely married,’ I said, answering the question he was actually asking. My gaze was level; given how out of practice I was, I was impressively slick. ‘It will be five years in July, in fact.’

‘Congratulations.’

I motioned to his laptop. ‘So you’re working on a screenplay, right?’

This tickled him. ‘Wrong. I write about education. I freelance for the papers and a couple of news sites.’

‘Education?’

‘No need to sound so disappointed.’

‘It’s not disappointment,’ I said truthfully. ‘It’s fear of the exposure of the wasteland that was
my
education. In this conversation you’ll be the only one who’s disappointed.’ By now I seemed to have slipped into the seat opposite him and a waitress was standing at my shoulder, ready to take an order. I had almost forgotten we were in a café, a public place. Don’t order anything, I told myself, but of course when I opened my mouth I asked for a cappuccino. ‘In a takeout cup,’ I added, clawing back a little sanity.

‘And what do
you
do?’ Rob asked. He eyed my workout gear, snug and glossy as a second skin, my damp hair knotted high on my head, cheeks flushed. ‘Synchronized-swimming teacher, right?’

He was mimicking my speech, mocking me, and I loved it. As a rule, educated, middle-class men treated me with politeness, even awe. Only highly confident ones teased like this, ones with an indecent number of conquests under their belt.

‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘Until last Christmas I was a media buyer.’ I named the agency, but he was as blank as anyone outside the industry would be. How pathetically our working worlds shrink the moment we depart from them. Not only did I not miss mine in the slightest but when I
thought of the old gang at their desks, when I compared their continuing ten-hour-a-day graft with my new idleness, I felt merely pity. ‘I’m taking a career break to oversee the works on the house. I’m an overseer.’

‘You can do that from the gym, can you?’

‘Sure. It’s not as if I’m knocking down walls and plumbing in toilets myself. And I have a project manager who handles the day-to-day stuff.’

‘The day-to-day stuff,’ he echoed in parody. ‘So you’re not the overseer at all. You’re the plantation owner.’

‘The plantation owner’s wife,’ I admitted without a trace of apology (and quick to congratulate myself on the second reference to Jeremy too).

‘Well, I’ve seen it all happening. Your Eastern European slaves. It’s a bit like the Shard going up.’

‘Oh yes. But without the vertigo.’

He considered me with unconcealed appetite, clearly impressed with the quality of my banter, not to mention the close-fitting top. Slowly, he pushed down the lid of his laptop. ‘You don’t seem the usual Lime Park type, Amber, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I don’t mind at all. And
you
are?’

‘Not any more. I’m pre-gentrification and too lazy to leave. I was here long before the private-school families and City boys. But there was a time when I
was
the type.’

‘I see. Well, I’m very much post-gentrification. I had to be gentrified myself before the move to a respectable neighbourhood like this could even be considered.’

‘Really?’ He grew more curious still. ‘You’re the product of a Pygmalion project, are you?’

‘I certainly am. But you can never really change a low-born. Take me to the races like Eliza and the guttersnipe will show herself soon enough.’

He nibbled at a thumb, nail in the groove between his front teeth. ‘I don’t see you as a guttersnipe, I must admit.’

‘Not any more, sure.’ My coffee arrived and I brandished the white plastic spoon that came with it. ‘But I was born with one of these in my mouth, so you can imagine how chuffed I am to have switched to silver.’

He laughed. ‘Not everyone’s so honest about their humble beginnings.’

‘I find that silly,’ I said. ‘After all, the less you begin with, the more reason you have to be proud of your achievements.’ Quite what my achievements were, I couldn’t say offhand, but I could see that with every minute I was becoming more fascinating to him and that was accomplishment enough for now.

‘Well, I’m plastic spoon by choice,’ he said, his gaze lingering on the sizeable diamond on my left hand. I had a disconcerting image of him sliding it off with his teeth. ‘I consider it my moral duty to lower the tone of our upwardly mobile street. Neither my flat nor I are in any way modernized.’

‘Unreconstructed. I like that.’ This was verging on farce: I couldn’t have been more flirtatious if I’d sat in his lap and unzipped my top, pressed his face into my cleavage.

‘This obsession with renovation,’ he went on, leaning towards me very slightly, just close enough for the edges of our breath to meet, ‘I don’t understand it. What is it with ripping everything out and starting again? Every time
someone moves in they replace the kitchen and the bathroom and maybe the windows. Then the same happens again a couple of years later. I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a skip in the street with German basins in it.’

‘German?’ I giggled.

‘Or Italian, Swedish, wherever. And it’s all completely intact, some of it in mint condition. Not exactly in tune with the recycling zeitgeist, is it?’

I thought of the worn but perfectly serviceable oak cabinets being torn out of my kitchen as we spoke to make way for the costly and high-maintenance bevelled-glass replacements that our successors might very well loathe.

‘So you’re our resident eco-warrior, are you?’ I said.

‘Not at all. I’m just not an arrogant twat.’

My eyes went very wide precisely as his narrowed, and neither of us blinked. It was an interesting moment, in which I guessed he anticipated the rebuke that he’d gone too far, but I made it clear with my gaze that he could never go too far, not with me. And that was that, the dynamic was established: we were each as bold as the other, each as damned.

I sipped my coffee as I watched him cast about for a change of subject, a half step back. ‘Have you met Felicity yet?’ he asked.

‘Yes, she seems like a character.’

‘Oh, she is. She’s a big Glen Campbell fan. If the drilling gets too much, she’ll blast you back with “The Wichita Lineman”.’

‘I don’t know it,’ I admitted.

‘You’ve never heard any Glen Campbell?’ He began murmuring a melody, presumably a line from the song he’d mentioned, and it felt like a siren call, drawing me to my death and releasing me only when it faded, which it soon did as he began chuckling at his own foolishness. ‘It’s too early in the day for karaoke. But gen up, if you want her onside.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

Together we strolled the short distance home, our stride slow to the point of reluctance. We used the main park gate; only Felicity had access to the private gate for number 38, Rob told me, and I was not yet ready for him to set foot in my house or garden. We arrived at our front gates to find the usual dust cloud billowing from my open front door, the drone of power tools beyond. Two builders leaned against the skip, smoking, and I called hello, noticed Rob clock the appreciative stares I received in return.

‘You really are living in there,’ he said, grimacing, ‘while all of this chaos is going on.’

‘Yep. Most of the rooms are sealed off, but we’ve set up a temporary flat at the top. The dust still gets up there but it’s not nearly as bad as on the floors below. I’ve lived in worse conditions.’

‘I imagine you have. How long is it going to take?’

‘Four months and then another one for decorating.’

Five months during which I’d be displaced for most of the day, in need of refuge, consolation, distraction. And the first offer was about to be made, in broad daylight, in earshot of others.

‘The builders won’t be knocking off for an hour or two,’ he said. ‘Want another coffee at my place? It’s a lot quieter on the other side of the wall.’

I looked up at the mouth that issued this invitation – or challenge, as we both knew it to be – and I wanted that mouth on my skin, kissing and sucking and grazing, making greedy contact with every part of my body. ‘I would love one,’ I said, at last, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t. There are some deliveries I need to chase up and then I’m meeting my husband in town for dinner.’

‘All right,’ he said, and the look he gave me was almost admiring, letting me know that he was impressed that I had the self-discipline for such gamesmanship.

‘See you around,’ I said, over my shoulder, casual, non-committal.