The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (40 page)

‘Come on, get on with it. I’m waiting.’

As he started to grind he had his full weight on me so I could hardly breathe, hardly move, but only whimper with the pleasure of it, the pain of it – there would be blood later, I knew – murmuring in his ear, begging him not to stop, never to stop. As he came, I hissed ‘I hate you’ once more, twice more, over and over until he commanded me to stop and rolled away from me in exhaustion and disgust.

‘Jesus,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know what it is with you. You’ve got a serious problem.’

I sat up, my body sore and used but still craving contact with his. I pawed his hair, kissed his shoulders, rubbed myself against him like an animal. ‘The only problem I have is to get you to come to your senses …’ I smiled, purring now, pleased with myself, as pleased as I’d been on the day we met – and as confident of success. ‘Come on, you know you’d miss me too much if I never came back, admit it.’

He spun, incredulous, freeing himself from my touch. He was breathing heavily, the skin of his chest red from the friction of me. ‘Listen to me, will you: I’m not going to change my mind and we are not going to see each other again. Not like this.’

‘Well, I don’t accept that,’ I murmured, advancing once more. ‘You know you can do whatever you like with me, I don’t care about Pippa or anyone else who comes along, I just want to –’

‘Stop touching me!’ He shook me off a second time, springing unsteadily to his feet. ‘I think you should get out of here. I can’t bear to look at you any more.’

Hearing him, understanding at last, I could only stare at him, emptied of my soul, utterly laid to waste. ‘If that’s what you want,’ I said, choking.

‘It is. So stop making such a song and dance of it. Put your knickers on and go. Please.’

Humiliated, degraded, I did as he said. As I left, I was already crying tears of rage. ‘You will never lay a finger on me again as long as you live!’ I told him, shrieking. All
those months of immaculate control, not a syllable breathed to anyone, and now I had none left.

‘I have no desire to,’ Rob said, his voice cold and hateful, and he kicked the door shut behind me, not even sparing me a last glance.

He never looked at me again.

I blundered down the stairs sobbing, noticing Felicity at her open door but waving off her concern, dashing for the refuge of my own home, my perfectly feathered nest with all the space in the world for the chicks that refused to come.

‘Amber, stop, is something wrong … ?’

But I ignored her. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of the time she’d found me on the doorstep, ringing his doorbell over and over, desperate and demented, an
addict
.

She’d taken me into her flat on that occasion and made me a cup of tea, brought me a little packet of tissues and watched me mop my face. Only when I’d subdued the worst of the hysteria did she say anything worth listening to.

‘If you play with fire, you only end up having to cry enough tears to put it out.’

‘What is that, some sort of Chinese proverb?’ I’d asked. I was rallying by then, ready to excuse my distress with some fabrication or other, to give no more away than I already had.

‘You could call it a Lime Park proverb,’ Felicity replied.

I laughed it off. I laughed so sweetly she couldn’t help but laugh along with me, coming to the conclusion, I suppose, that I could take care of myself. I was a big girl. But
she made me finish my tea, look her in the eye, promise I was going to be all right.

Such a friendly street, Lime Park Road. So many doors held open in welcome, so much advice ready to be dispensed.

I prefer it here, in the forgotten little neighbourhood where our road links two suburbs, where we’re never quite sure which side of the line we live on.

Where people keep themselves to themselves.

It hasn’t been easy being a born survivor.

When I left Rob’s flat that terrible afternoon in January, I thought I would never recover, I thought his brutality was so unendurable I might have to kill myself. On and on I wept, thrashing and convulsing, like a baby torn from her mother, and though I had stopped before Jeremy left for his business trip – it was futile and self-destructive, it upset him and debased me – I had continued to
want
to weep. I had continued to want to die.

But then I discovered I was pregnant and the miracle of life being what I now know it is – a force capable of overriding crisis, of resetting time – I was cured at a stroke. It was as if nothing bad had ever happened to me and never would.

Until Jeremy came home from the airport and dropped his bomb. The house might have been split in two with its destructive force, the whole world burned black and airless. It was deadly – almost.

I was raped
: I ejected the words like vomit, the only ones that could have won me a reprieve. I think he recognized it as the solution as instinctively as I did; any other explanation
and we would have been adrift, whereas this course, unedifying though it was, was charted.

But instinct is ephemeral. Obviously I hadn’t thought the claim through, the risk it brought of exposure. I would have been better saying that a stranger had assaulted me. I was going to have to be ready to think on my feet if I was not to be undone – by the police, for instance.

How could Jeremy
not
have involved them? And yet in doing so he turned a convenient embellishment of the truth into a criminal offence; wasting police time or perverting the cause of justice, I was guilty of one of the two at least, perhaps both. Rob was not the one who got away with it,
I
was.

On the afternoon of the recorded interview, every false word felt ten times heavier than a true one. I think that was what made it possible to make my distress sound so real; it
was
real – only the source of it differed from the one they all accepted. It was a form of method acting, I suppose.

And my account of the attack itself was not so far removed from what had actually happened, it was simply a case of re-colouring it. When fiction tumbles out of you, you gain confidence from the interweaving with it of actual facts, just as I had during the course of the affair itself.
Rob made me a delicious coffee today
,
the beans were from El Salvador
, I’d say to Jeremy; or
Rob’s had a great new commission from his contact at the
Guardian … The truthful details are what make the broader lie sound authentic, plausible.

I got into a bit of a tangle with the business of his
hands. I’d somehow accounted for both of them before he’d had a chance to unzip his trousers and have his wicked way with me.
He pressed his mouth against mine to keep me quiet
: again, the lie comes out of the truth.

Poor Felicity. She told the police she’d heard me cry ‘You’ll never lay a finger on me again!’; she’d even heard that yelled ‘Stop!’ of mine and seriously considered coming upstairs to check that nothing was amiss. She’s another who’s found a way to me since my disappearance; she sent a letter care of Jeremy’s office telling me she has never been able to forgive herself for not intervening and will take her regret to her grave. She had an abusive husband when she was a young woman, she said, younger than me; she should have been wiser to the signs. She even admitted she’d had reservations about me during my time in Lime Park, that she’d made the mistake of sharing them with the monster himself. She deeply regretted that too.
I wish, like you, I’d had the courage of my convictions
, she wrote. Bless.

Poor Wendy, my specially trained officer, with all her exhortations to call her at any time, even when she was feeding her kids their tea or getting cosy with her husband at bedtime, to ask any question, unburden myself of any anxiety. More than once her sincerity almost felled me; all that radiant compassion, it was too much for a cheat and a liar like me.

Poor Rob. ‘He’s dug his own grave now,’ Jeremy said, and I nodded, happy to bury him alive so long as I was not down there with him spitting earth and fighting for air. But it was a false happiness, a short-lived victory. Being
asked to recount that revelation about the student rape claim was the nadir for me, for I knew as well as he did that if he hadn’t disclosed it to me I would not have thought of the solution myself.

Oh Rob, betrayed by the only woman you confided in, condemned by your trust in her. It would have broken my heart if I didn’t have a new claim on that organ. There are levels of duplicity and mine was the very lowest. I knew he would assume I’d done what I did for the same reason he’d been accused all those years ago: a woman scorned; in my case, a self-styled princess reacting in fury before bolting like the beggar she was. I would have liked him to know that it wasn’t that. I may have been rejected but I would have accepted it in time. I had no appetite for vengeance; I was only saving my marriage and safeguarding my future.

I wonder sometimes how far it could have gone if I hadn’t ended the investigation when I did, if I’d let it march onwards. Would I really have been prepared to send a man to prison to protect my own marriage, my pride? Of course I wouldn’t, it would never have come to that, not least because of those incriminating texts, and the ancient testimony of that shambles of a man Matt, not to mention his lowlife squeeze Lesley. No, I knew from the moment Jeremy phoned the police that I had to bring the formalities to a halt, I just didn’t know how or when I was going to be able to do it.

You know, I still think of Rob sometimes, so magnetic to the opposite sex, so natural a lover, too fearful to speak to another woman again. Except Pippa, of course. I
imagine she intuited his innocence quickly enough. She’s an intelligent woman and she knows what he’s capable of, the brink he won’t tip over, the lines he won’t cross. And if not her then
someone
will help him recover his mojo. Perhaps this Davenport woman, now she knows the truth. Or at least the part of it she’s interested in knowing.

No one knows the whole truth except me. Not even my husband. Especially not my husband.

Poor Jeremy. Hard though it may be to believe, given the enormous lie that separated us, I felt very close to him during those days in the hotel. Innocent casualty of men’s desires, gallant protector of one woman’s blamelessness: these were the roles that had bound us when we met and now they would bind us again. And I may not have been the victim of rape, but I was sufficiently damaged by the horrific mess I’d created for myself, and for him, that the symptoms must have been convincing even to the person who knew me best of all.

I didn’t like to dwell on the fact that ‘best of all’ equated to ‘not nearly as well as he thought’.

And do you know what he told me not so long ago? Just a few weeks before I was ‘attacked’, he’d had an anonymous tip-off that I was having an affair. He had one of his IT team trace its route and it turned out to have come from the server at my old agency. Imogen being on maternity leave, there were only two possible suspects still employed there: Helena and Gemma. No prizes for guessing which the originator must have been.

‘What did it say?’ I asked Jeremy.

‘I don’t remember the exact words. “You should keep a closer eye on your wife,” something like that. Not bad advice, in retrospect.’
Still
he blamed himself for not having protected me from the wolf next door.

‘Why didn’t you tell me at the time?’

He was indignant. ‘I had no intention of upsetting you with cowardly nonsense like that.’

My darling husband. How I wished I could reassure him that there would be no long-term psychological impairment; that he need not worry about my future sexual health or continue to book specialist counsellors to help restore my faith in man – in men. The only concern anyone needs have for me is in respect of stamina. Can I live with myself for the rest of my days if I have to perpetually play the victim? When I know I am anything but? Can I keep on spinning the lie?

Of course I can.

Yes, it was all going perfectly to plan – until
she
turned up. Christy Davenport.

By an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, Jeremy’s mother was visiting that morning and had taken Sienna for a walk around the park to give me a chance to nap. Even so, I almost gave the game away. That remark of hers –
You didn’t want to raise a family there
– almost had me sobbing on the spot. Bright and friendly once she knew Rob was not a violent criminal, she gestured directly to my stomach and made it explicit – ‘Well, congratulations on the baby’ – her mouth remaining open to ask the questions I had been
dreading: Who’s looking after her this morning? When was she born?
Shall I go back and foghorn the news to everyone in Lime Park?

‘Is it OK to tell Caroline?’ she said, on cue. ‘She’ll be
so
pleased.’

It was all I could do not to sink to my knees and wail as she prattled on. This was an out-and-out disaster. Even if I said I’d given birth prematurely the day before, it was still going to create doubt among the Lime Parkers: what sort of a rape victim renewed her sex life within days of being assaulted? No one would believe that. As for Rob, he of all people would know I’d think nothing of deceiving a stranger – after all, I’d lied to senior CID officers. And she’d tell him about the baby, I knew she would; she’d go back and become his confidante, if not his latest lover. ‘If it was
that
premature, why wasn’t she still in the hospital with it?’ he’d wonder. He’d have my address out of her in seconds.

Standing in that miserable little café, staring at her in horror, I was already rehearsing the conversation I’d have with Jeremy that evening, the one that began,
We have to move on. We have to change our name or he’ll come after me. This bloody woman is going to go back there and let the cat out of the bag …

Then she handed me the bangle and I lost my train of thought, for the sight of it produced an overwhelming sensory memory of Rob’s hands on my body, his mouth seeking mine, his feverish, unstoppable desire for me.

‘Keep it,’ I told her, scared I might faint.

Only her producing of the key ring restored my
strength, having that dragonfly charm in my hand again, tracing the pad of my thumb over the engraving:
Amber Baby
. It had been a gift from Jeremy when he’d presented me with a set of keys to his Battersea flat, a set of keys to my new life. Now, I could attach it to the keys to
this
one, even though it was poised to change once more.

‘Well, goodbye,’ Christy said. ‘Thank you for seeing me, I know it must have been hard. And I promise I won’t tell Caroline or anyone else that you’re pregnant. When is it due?’

It took me a few moments to absorb this. Stopping virtually mid-step, I stared stupidly at her, before glancing down at my stomach, comparatively svelte by recent standards but still noticeably swollen.

‘Not for ages, obviously,’ she added, keen to help out the gaping idiot in front of her. ‘You’re still tiny.’ She began to look a little anxious, as if she feared she’d insulted me by mistaking greed-induced weight gain for proof of reproduction. And then I got it: she thought I was at the
beginning
of my pregnancy. I was so absorbed in my own little world that I’d expected her to understand that I was carrying post-partum weight, but having seen or heard no evidence of a baby she’d made a different assumption.

‘That’s right,’ I said, at last. ‘It’s still the first trimester, we’re just getting used to the idea.’ And I gave her a warm smile, happy now to spare a little charm for her.

She blushed like a small child.

‘Christy?’ I added, just in time. My mind worked slower these days, but it was not totally atrophied.

‘Yes?’

‘You
can
tell Caroline – and the others. I’d like that. Tell them we’re both very happy.’

‘OK, I will.’ I could see that she was overjoyed, so giddy she was hardly able to get her purse open to pay for the tea. She was the kind of person who liked to know other people’s secrets – too dull to have her own, perhaps. ‘I’m sure they’ll be really pleased to know that everything’s worked out well for you, Amber.’

‘Yes,’ I said, turning to leave. ‘You can tell them it has.’