The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (15 page)

She chose a table with a view of the meadow, the long grass painted with pale feathery strokes, vivid yellow
buttercups dotted atop; in the foreground rose a bank of papery dark orange poppies, shivering in the breeze. She felt as if she’d been released from a kidnapping. Seeing friends gathered at tables in twos and threes reminded her how keenly she missed colleagues, colleagues and friends, and she texted Ellen and two friends who’d gone to ground since having babies: ‘Missing you, come and see our new house!’

When one replied at once, promising a visit the following week, Christy felt her mood lift once more. It would have been better to have a proper house-warming, she thought, but the expense was prohibitive and in any case their abortive drinks party made her fear another shunning. Once was disappointing; twice might break her spirit.

She took out her book. She’d rediscovered in recent weeks the pleasure of reading, and had brought with her
Rebecca
from the library. However, she’d barely finished a page when she became aware of a familiar figure at the counter: Rob. Typical! She allowed herself a treat for the first time in weeks and here was her nemesis to spoil it. Clearly he was not quite the recluse she’d thought. She couldn’t hope to concentrate on her book now, only on him, monitoring his movements peripherally as he fished for change and nodded thanks for the coffee (like him, tall and unsweetened). Well, at least he was just getting takeout.

She had of course by now googled him. Stymied previously by her lack of basic information – ‘Rob’ and ‘Lime Park’ had unsurprisingly produced nothing – she found
that the addition of a surname and an occupation to her keywords generated an image straight away. There he was, in clean-shaven form, but wearing the all-too-familiar arrogant sneer: Robert Whalen, freelance journalist. He appeared to be an education specialist, not what she had expected, but then you didn’t need a
Blue Peter
personality to write about the broader context of schooling. There were pieces in the broadsheets about school league tables and private tutors, a report on the recent NUT conference, a profile of a former education secretary who was making himself unpopular with the present one by being a cult hero of trainee teachers. His style was dry and precise, with very little allowance for humour. No surprise there, she thought.

He had no website and his social media accounts were restricted. Odd for a journalist; you’d have thought he’d want to be readily contactable.

All at once, so suddenly it caused her to start, he was approaching her table, stopping at the sight of her and moving past only with an audible exhalation of irritation. He was staying then, and this was his regular spot – well, tough luck, she thought,
she
had it today. About to return to her page, she was aware of him suddenly doubling back and bearing down on her a second time, standing over her without uttering a word, and, to her great confusion,
joining
her. Not even gesturing for permission, he simply placed his cup on the table, waiting for her to look up and acknowledge him. This she did unsmilingly, eyebrows raised. As silence stretched between them, a flush began to creep through her cheeks. He, however, was perfectly
at ease, tilting himself backwards on the rear legs of his seat as if he had all the time in the world.

‘Can I help you?’ she said at last, and made a point of not closing her book.

He ignored her question to ask one of his own in the same mildly sinister undertone he’d used in the street: ‘So
you
don’t work either, I take it?’

‘“Either?”’ she repeated coldly, supposing he must mean Caroline and the other stay-at-home mums on Lime Park Road. ‘I was made redundant, if you must know. I’m job-hunting. I’ve been up for several positions, but …’ She stopped, not wanting to detail her losses to this man; her failings.

But he passed over this information in any case, utterly careless of her circumstances. There was another silence, strained on her part, openly provocative on his if his sneer was anything to go by. She reminded herself that it was
he
who had imposed himself on
her
; she was not duty-bound to lead the conversation.

His bruised eye appeared to have healed.

‘So you obviously know,’ he said presently, his gaze now so intense it was causing her stomach to knot.

‘Know what?’

‘You know exactly what.’

Her brain, yet to be restored to full capacity, struggled with this. Had he somehow sensed her that night she’d overheard him having sex? Might he even have heard that wild accusation she’d made to Joe that he had influenced Felicity’s and the Frasers’ decisions to sell up? In spite of her guilt and embarrassment, she felt a flare of triumph.
So there
was
something to know; her new neighbours
did
have something to hide – at least this one did. She said nothing, but looked steadily back at him, seeing in his eyes a heightened sense of the previous belligerence: a malignant kind of pride, a resolute superiority.

At her failure to respond, his gaze narrowed. ‘Oh, come on, Christy.’ The way he said her name was deeply unpleasant, the way someone might identify a household pest before selecting the right poison to kill it, and she felt the last of her cool leave her.

‘Look, I don’t know what and I don’t want to know.’ She did want to know, of course she did, but she could not bear to have him staring at her a moment longer, dominating her.

‘I saw you with her friend,’ he said, as if she had not spoken.

‘Whose friend? You mean Felicity’s?’

Giving a mean little laugh, he brought the front legs of his seat back to the ground in a sudden motion that made her jump. ‘Well, if you really don’t know, then I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell you.’

‘Fine,’ Christy said, adding eventually and in as steadfast a tone as she could muster, ‘I don’t remember asking you to join me. Please leave me alone.’

‘With pleasure.’ He leaned in, clenching his takeaway cup so tightly she feared the lid would pop off and send an eruption of scalding coffee into her face. ‘But let me just say this: if I hear you’ve been spreading false information …’

‘About what?’ Christy gulped.

‘I repeat: if I hear you’ve been spreading false information, I
will
deal with it.’ He did not elaborate and the threat felt all the more menacing for being unspecified.

He got to his feet, apparently unperturbed by this exchange, and as he strolled away she thought, Who do you think you are? How dare you threaten me? What is your problem?

And, most pressingly:
What do you not want me to know?

The following Monday, long after Joe had left for work and the postman had dropped his latest round of bills and statements she dared not open, she heard the rattle of the letter box a second time, followed by the soundlessness that denoted a flyer dropping to the doormat. Engrossed in her new daytime TV favourite – a property show in which neighbours purged one another’s junk, not a problem
she
suffered from – she forgot about it until she was leaving for the library later in the day. That was when she saw the folded paper on the doormat. Opening it, she gasped at the sight and smell of dried excrement, smears of which did not quite obscure a message, written in black ink in capitals.

SCUM. WE DON’T WANT YOUR TYPE IN LIME PARK. FUCK OFF BEFORE WE MAKE YOU.

Legs going soft, breath coming quickly, she dropped the note and made her way into the sitting room and onto the sofa. She’d known they hadn’t exactly made the best
impression on their neighbours, but they didn’t deserve
this
vitriol. And anonymous, too. Then it dawned on her: it had to be from Rob. He was the only one who hated her, had as good as said he perceived her as some sort of threat to his privacy. And it made sense of what Richard Sellers had yelled up at the window: ‘Thanks for the letter, mate. Nice way to treat your friends!’ Did he make a habit of this then, delivering poison to his neighbours? What kind of a person smeared excrement on his correspondence? He must be unhinged. She’d been right to fear him – and Joe had been wrong.

She wanted to ring Joe and tell him so, but thought she might be sick if she stood up. In any case, there was no satisfaction in being right, not when it meant you were in danger.

Only when she advanced on wobbly legs to bolt the front door and saw the offending item still lying there on the doormat did she think to look at the other side of the paper. Retrieving it, careful not to touch the brown stains, she turned it over.

There was a name scribbled across the paper on the half that must have landed face down. The name was not hers or Joe’s. It was Rob’s.

Rob Whalen.

Not
from
him, then, but
to
him.

Evidently, it had been shoved through the wrong door. Had there been others like it that had gone through the right one? Her thoughts turned first to Felicity, who’d shared a front door with Rob and who’d left in a hurry, unable to bring herself to speak to him even to say
goodbye. Had she too picked up notes like this? If so, they had to have been terrifying to an older woman living on her own.

Only then did she think of Rob himself. Much as she happened to dislike the man, this was one piece of mail she had no intention of forwarding.

‘Tell me more about how you grew up,’ Rob said, one July afternoon. Such was the emphasis on other aspects of our friendship, we had reached this juncture knowing almost nothing of each other’s early lives. Assuming, of course, I hadn’t shared my life story with him when we’d first met years ago. (It seemed unlikely.)

‘I’m not sure there’s much to tell,’ I said, not meeting his eye – owing to a lack of interest in the subject rather than any desire to conceal the truth. But there wasn’t a great deal to look at in his bedroom, with its workaday bachelor’s furnishings and near-absent decoration; by then I knew its corners and contours by heart, its tricks of light and shadow – everything but the view from the window, for I could not risk Felicity or another neighbour looking up from the garden and seeing me there. ‘It was a typical broken home, I suppose. Not much money, not much mercy.’

‘Mercy?’ He repeated the word with wonder. ‘That’s an interesting quality for a child to care about. Do you mean you were hurt? Physically?’

I looked at him then, searching for a trace of compassion in his face and grateful to find it. ‘Not me, no.’

‘Who then?’

‘My mother. By my father, and then by one of her next partners as well. She certainly knew how to pick ’em. I’ve had no contact with him for years. Jeremy’s never met him.’

‘How old were you when he left?’ Rob asked.

‘Seven or eight by the time he went for good. He came and went for years. He was an idiot, but violent, which made him a scary idiot. And he was very tall, so he seemed like an ogre to me.’ I flashed then to the old sensation of seeing him looming in the doorway; not fright so much as sadness that a good day had turned bad – again. ‘You know, it’s awful but when I think about him now I can’t think of a single thing to admire about him.’ I gazed at Rob, aware that my lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘No doubt that’s affected how I deal with men.’

‘You seem to deal with them with consummate ease,’ he said.

‘Now, sure, but there’ve been a few years of trial and error.’

He smiled. He was pleased, I guessed, to consider himself outside that category and yet surely he represented both trial and error by anyone’s standards.

‘So you had a stepfather after that?’

‘Two. Mum never got married again, but there was a baby with the first one and another two with the second, all boys. I’ve got three half-brothers. They still live close together, all have kids of their own even though they barely pass as adults themselves, and they still rely totally on her. Their girlfriends do too.’

(For the record, my mother keeps occasional contact by phone, but is apt to get hysterical when we meet and I have found the best solution has been for
me
to visit
her
; that way I have control of exit arrangements. Recently, for reasons I will get to shortly, I’ve seen more of her and, mellowing in my old age perhaps, have enjoyed her company and appreciated her advice.)

‘The last time I checked, there were six grandchildren and five girlfriends or ex-girlfriends involved,’ I told Rob. ‘If you set foot in that flat I guarantee that within five minutes you will be clutching a baby and listening to my mother complain about how exhausted she is. It’s the free-breeding underclass. There’s never enough thinking through of consequences.’

He laughed, eyebrows raised. ‘“Free-breeding underclass”? I’m not sure you’re allowed to say things like that!’

‘You are if you come from it, and I do.’

He considered this. His own background, I gathered, was solidly, unremarkably middle class and I assumed that his aversion to a committed relationship was through choice, not parental example. Looking at his complacent expression, I wondered for the hundredth time why it was that some people were set a gruelling and relentless steeplechase through life even before they’d learned how to walk while others got to coast around the track in glorious sunshine with a lackey running alongside to keep them fanned and watered.

‘Do you help them out?’ he asked.

‘You mean financially? Sure. But funds get gobbled up
very quickly in that clan and you soon learn not to send good money after bad.’

‘So you wouldn’t ever go back into the fold?’

‘I’d rather die,’ I said truthfully.

‘That bad.’ He regarded me as if in a new light; he was thinking, I guessed, how my humble origins ‘explained’ me, but I could see that he was puzzled, too, by the illogical nature of it. For shouldn’t I be protecting the fruits of my ascendancy with a zealot’s single-mindedness, not imperilling it with a roll in the hay with him?

But he was nothing if not arrogant, and his interpretation, I could tell, was that my recklessness was the ultimate form of flattery – and no less than his due.

Maybe he was right. Maybe, like Elvis, he was irresistible.

‘I noticed you didn’t mention kids that time,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘In your list of things you want from marriage.’

‘Oh, children go without saying. You know we’re trying.’ I paused. Whatever else he drew from me that afternoon, I wasn’t letting him within a mile of
that
vulnerability. ‘But when I have them I don’t want their childhood to be …’ I fished for the word. ‘I don’t want it to be
ordinary
.’

‘In my experience, most people who grow up with everything say they would rather have had ordinary.’

I grimaced. ‘They
think
they would, but they don’t mean real ordinary, they mean snuggling up in matching onesies to watch their favourite Disney movie, cute little puppy for a hot water bottle. Real ordinary is your mother struggling and striving and falling asleep every night in an
exhausted stupor. Or staying awake worrying if the eviction order’s on its way or whether the man coming home drunk is going to slap her around. Real ordinary is no money, no privacy, no education, no future.’

‘What an idyllic picture you paint of family life,’ he said, but mildly, no longer amused. ‘Well, you needn’t worry, because it won’t be like that for your kids. The silver fox will see to that. And
you
couldn’t be ordinary if you tried.’

‘You just mean how I look.’ It scared me sometimes to think what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been born pretty – a freak beneficiary of the cherry-picked highlights of two average sets of genes, making me considerably more appealing looking in conventional terms than either of my parents in their prime, and a different species, frankly, from my half-brothers. I might not have had the opportunity to escape, or I might have escaped, failed and been forced to return, which would have been far worse than not having left at all.

When I turned, I saw Rob had taken my remark seriously and had raised himself onto a bent elbow to study me. ‘No, much more than that. I don’t know how you’ve reinvented yourself, but you’ve done a superb job. You’re a one-off.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ I smiled then, rolling from his grip, covers pushed away, subconsciously giving him the opportunity to admire me.

‘You should. You’re one of those women you read about in novels but who don’t usually exist in real life. Just when you think she’s a sociopath she opens the lid on a well of feminine vulnerability.’

I laughed, delighted enough to do it properly, loudly, heedless of Felicity or whoever else might hear through walls or ceilings (there was no crime in laughing, was there?). ‘Did you really just make that up on the spot?’

‘Of course I did. I
am
a writer. A bad one, admittedly, and with no plans to venture into romantic fiction.’

‘Well, thank you. It’s a great relief to know I only
seem
like a sociopath.’

‘That’s only to me,’ he admitted. ‘You’re considered sweet and unaffected by everyone else. The whole of Lime Park Road is in love with you, from what I can gather: Caroline, Liz, Joanne, Mel,
all
the men …’

His observation was correct. If the women had taken remarkably little effort to win over, the men had required none. Joanne’s husband Kenny was becoming a particular fan. One recent weekend I’d strolled past his house with Liz, both in the short summer kaftans I’d picked out for us in the boutique on the Parade, surprising him as he worked in his front garden. He’d been practically stuttering with excitement at the sight of our bare legs and it was all we could do not to howl with laughter.

‘All the men except you,’ I pointed out.

‘I’m subject to restrictions, remember?’

‘You certainly are.’

We smiled at one another in easy silence.

‘You’ll end this, won’t you,’ he said, at last, ‘the moment you get pregnant?’

And I remember the question particularly for the response it elicited, definitive and startling:
Yes, but hopefully that isn’t going to happen
… Those were the words that
sprang immediately, treacherously, to mind, blindsiding me with their violence.

‘Of course I will,’ I told him, betraying not a flicker of this and even raising an eyebrow, as gleeful and wicked as he expected. ‘And if
I
don’t, Jeremy will.’

‘Ha ha.’

But something had been said that afternoon, and we exchanged a look that was unusually tender for us before we put our clothes back on and went our separate ways.

Normally, when I was in Rob’s flat, I turned my phone to silent, just in case one of the builders called and, hearing it through the wall, got it into his head to come and find me. The kitchen complete by then, they’d moved upstairs to the bathrooms, their tools and voices more audible than ever to my first-floor neighbour, which presumably meant
we
were also more audible to them. (If the workmen ever had any suspicions of impropriety, they certainly didn’t share them with me and, thankfully, they never saw Jeremy to get the chance to share them with him.)

Later, I would continue the habit of silencing my phone; the house was rarely empty, what with decorators, cleaners, people hired to do all the things I had neither the skill nor the will to do myself, but could continue to ‘oversee’ from elsewhere.

But we all make mistakes, which meant, inevitably, there came cause to regret an oversight of my own. One Thursday in July, Rob and I were in his bedroom as usual, windows closed and music on to camouflage any errant moans, but I’d left my phone in his kitchen and failed to
turn off the ring. It was a proper summer’s day, the London heat brash and insistent, and his living-room windows were open to the street. When I finally recovered it I found I’d missed three calls from Gemma.

As soon as I was home I called her back.

‘I came to visit you,’ she said, ‘but you weren’t in.’

I halted mid-step. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was at the gym all afternoon.’

She made a noise of contemptuous dismissal that I chose to ignore.

‘Didn’t the guys let you in so you could wait?’

‘No, no one answered the door, which was why I was calling you.’

‘They must have turned off the electricity so the bell didn’t work. What a shame. Are you still in the area?’ I asked, pleasantly.

‘No, I’m back at my place now.’

‘Not working today?’

‘Of course I’m working, Amber, I work every day. That’s what a full-time job is, remember?’ She gave a snort of dissatisfaction. Gemma belonged to that tribe of women who liked to make those who didn’t work for a living feel morally inferior while at the same time secretly craving just such a sabbatical for themselves. I supposed the two behaviours must be linked.

‘I remember only too well,’ I said easily. ‘So how did you happen to be down here?’

‘I was in Wimbledon for a meeting and it wasn’t worth going back to the office, so I thought I’d hop on a bus and swing by your place, see how the house is going.’

‘It’s really coming on.’ I started to report in fastidious detail guaranteed to bore less long-suffering (or envious) types than her off the phone, but she was having none of it and had soon interrupted me.

‘It was weird, but when I rang your number I could hear your phone going.’

‘Well, it can’t have been mine.’ I pictured my phone on Rob’s kitchen counter, mere feet from the yawning windows. ‘It must have been someone else’s.’

‘No, I tried three times and I heard it each time. It was like it was coming from the house next door, Rob’s place. I even called up to the window, but no one heard me. I went to ring the bell, but the old woman downstairs came out and told me he wasn’t in.’

The hairs on my arms rose at this first warning of proper danger: I’d already said I’d been at the gym, I couldn’t now change my mind and say I’d been next door. Nor could I make up a story about losing the phone since I was speaking into it now. As for Felicity covering for us, had she been fortuitously mistaken or had she known what she was doing? It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘How peculiar.’ Only then did my brain fully engage. Remembering Gemma’s interest in Rob (she’d had no problem recalling his name, she’d casually ‘hopped’ on a bus from Wimbledon, which was quite a distance away and not a direct route), I put two and two together: she’d come not to see me so much as in the hope of seeing
him
.

Comfortable now, I set about handling this misunderstanding. ‘Well, never mind, we’ve managed to connect now. Listen, talking of Rob, I’ll be sending invitations to
our party soon. You’ll definitely come, won’t you, Gem? He’ll be there, and he was still single last time I checked …’

She agreed she was looking forward to it, and at last I was able to guide the conversation to the safer ground of Imogen’s pregnancy, the news that she was expecting a boy. All proceeded predictably after that and the incident was never mentioned again, but it alarmed me immensely to think of her standing under Rob’s window while he and I caroused in his bedroom twenty feet away. And how easily the scene might have differed: what if she
had
rung the doorbell and, not getting a response, decided to wait? Or what if Felicity had let her pass, saying, ‘I heard Amber on the stairs earlier, why don’t you go on up and try the door?’

Or, worse, what if Jeremy
did
come home early one of these days and heard my phone, hunted it down like a malfunctioning smoke alarm. Finding himself at Rob’s door, hearing sounds of life inside – hearing my laugh – noting how long it took Rob to answer and that he was only half dressed when he did, what would he think?