The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (12 page)

‘I see.’ Joe looked at her with interest, perhaps the faintest tinge of caution. ‘Who is it you’re angry with? Me?’

‘Of course not!’ she exclaimed. ‘Never think
that
.’

‘Who then? Laurie, I suppose?’

There was a pause. ‘I think myself,’ Christy said.

Awed by its elemental power, she sought to exhaust her anger by the simplest means at her disposal: cleaning. The master en suite was the latest to succumb to her furious scrubbing, though Lord knew how you were supposed to clean copper. (After pricing the tub online and finding it had cost not hundreds of pounds but thousands, she had seriously contemplated removing and selling it:
that
would pay for the bloody roof repairs.) The position of the tub under the window made it awkward to reach the strip of floor tile behind it, but such was her mood she refused to be beaten, and on her knees, at full stretch, she poked a damp cloth at the last elusive patch. There was a sudden scratching sensation, a hard object lodged against the skirting board, and with some effort she managed to hook it and slide it towards her.

It was a bangle. She took off her rubber gloves and turned it over in her palm, rubbing away the dust to find a beautiful narrow silver band with a clasp made of two interlocking pieces of amber. There was no engraving, but it was not hard to guess its owner.

After trying it on, first on one wrist and then the other, Christy took it into the bedroom and placed it in her small
jewellery box, covering it with a skein of beads so Joe wouldn’t notice it.

Two days later, the solicitor rang her back. ‘I’m happy to report that the Frasers’ solicitor has been authorized by his client to pay for your roof repairs. If you would email me the invoice, I’ll pass it on.’

‘Really?’ Christy was amazed. She had never for a moment expected such a fortunate outcome.

‘Evidently Mr Fraser wishes to pre-empt any sort of dispute. But his goodwill is on the condition that any issues that arise from now on are agreed to be your responsibility.’

‘Of course.’ Christy said, humbled. ‘Can I have his new address so I can write to thank him?’

‘I’m told he prefers not to make direct contact on the matter.’

‘But I have some mail for him and his office says he’s taken a sabbatical.’

‘Then I suggest you post any items to this office and I’ll forward them to his representative.’

With this the solicitor ended the call.

When she reported their windfall to Joe, he was reserved in his praise. Maybe it was her guilty conscience, but it was almost as if he thought she’d done something dishonourable, that she’d deliberately conned the Frasers.

‘I’ll send a nice thank you with the redirected mail,’ she promised.

‘You mean we’ve still got that?’ He frowned at her. The lines on his forehead were scored deeper these days. ‘I
thought you’d sent it on ages ago? There could be something important in there, Christy.’

She had no excuse; certainly not that she’d been too busy.

‘I’ll send it from the office if you like. I know you might be too angry or paralysed to remember.’ The frown was gone and he was smiling at her now, even reaching for a hug. Somehow she had had the luck to marry the world’s most forgiving man.

‘Thank you.’ Bundling the mail into a package for him, along with a note of grateful thanks to the Frasers, she noticed the letter to Amber Fraser in the white envelope with the stamp of ‘Private & Confidential’. Seeing it again, she felt a surge of desire to keep it, just as she had the key ring and now the amber bangle. She laid it aside for a moment, filled with a kleptomaniac’s elation. Then, at last, she slipped it with the others into Joe’s work bag.

The cheque for the roof came not long after, signed by Jeremy Fraser. Ashamed by then, Christy wished she were in a position to rip it up and forget it.

But she was not. And the roof, at least, would be fixed.

I know I’ve made it sound like I used to be some sort of junkie slut, crawling home on my hands and knees, living by my wits, but it wasn’t nearly as squalid as that. I held down a job, I paid my rent. At the risk of coming off like one of Felicity’s country music legends, I had a heart and I trusted its truth. But I’d left home for London soon after my eighteenth birthday and by the time I was in my late twenties I’d been partying pretty much uninterrupted for over a decade. I’d reached the point where I was becoming less discerning about who I drank with, who I slept with, whose unlicensed taxi I clambered into on the rare occasions I went home alone at the end of the night.

And I was in danger of wrecking my appearance. Twenty-nine was young on paper but it was starting to look old in the mirror. Another year of hard living and I’d lose my shine altogether.

The end of the era came in sadly predictable form: an office affair turned sour. I won’t go into it in detail – there’s no space here for
that
story – but the bones are that I’d had a one-night stand with my line manager, Matt, and
had decided it should remain just that, one night, best forgotten, naively believing that I would be able to carry on in my job without interference (after all, he wasn’t the first man I’d dallied with in that team). But Matt wanted an encore and turned vindictive, issuing a series of warnings before dismissing me and forcing me to take the matter to a tribunal. It was expensive and humiliating and even before I arrived for the hearing I knew that, regardless of the panel’s decision, I was not going to have the stomach to return to work and spend another minute in his company.

‘You should have gone back,’ Jeremy told me later, ‘even if it was just for a few weeks. It’s the principle of the thing. It sends a message to other men who think it’s acceptable to harass their female colleagues.’

‘Maybe I would have if I’d known you then,’ I sighed. But I’d been alone, I had lacked the support of a man like him, of any man frankly, and so I’d made the decision to walk away.

In any case, I was ready to make my life over. It is an exhilarating thing to change your industry, your friends, your wardrobe, your
ways
. I would have liked to have changed my address too, but a move from the studio flat I rented in Old Street proved too complicated and so I simply stopped answering the doorbell. I got a new mobile phone line, which put paid to the calls that came when the doorbell went unanswered, and I closed my Facebook and email accounts, truly a liberating exercise in itself. Three months passed without my drinking or smoking,
which broke the back of the latter habit if not the former. I eliminated illegal substances, with no exceptions.

No sooner was I settled in my new media-buyer job than I’d met Jeremy at the Identico.UK summer party. That same night I went home and sobbed tears of gratitude at the memory of his gentleness and his certainty – qualities not combined in my previous beaus of choice – and at the prospect of having those qualities in my future life. For, unlike his predecessors, Jeremy was not in thrall to experience but a beneficiary of it; he’d stepped off the ride long ago. His idea of a good night was to stretch out on his sleek grey-wool Ligne Roset sofa with a box set and a decent bottle of wine.

And soon it was mine too, along with civilized outings with a new set of workmates, outings that involved cocktails in smart hotel bars and taxis booked in advance. No one smoked, no one did drugs, no one screamed in the street or wept on the night bus or took home the last man she’d laid eyes on – bewildered, unfocused 3 a.m. eyes.

We were nice girls.

It was this particular set of girlfriends who’d been clamouring to visit us in our new house in Lime Park from the moment we’d moved in. We’d invited very few guests, preferring to meet in central London until the house could be officially unveiled.

‘It’s in a complete state, why don’t you wait till there’s something worth seeing,’ I pleaded, but they persisted and insisted and I eventually relented. Since the kitchen was
still off-limits, I tore off the tape around the sitting-room door, freed the sofas of their dust sheets and set up drinks in there. Having sealed the room off since the first day of the build, I’d forgotten how lovely it was with its grand bay, high ceilings and pale marble fireplace. When the new flooring went down and the decorating was done – Hetty had ordered limited-edition Ralph Lauren fabric from the States to upholster the window seat – it would be a beautiful and tranquil place to sit, but for now I made do with a jug of lilacs on the mantelpiece and a trio of my favourite Diptyque candles, the ones that Jeremy dropped into my lap every so often like tributes.

First, I showed them the garden.

‘Oh my God, it’s like a wood down at the bottom!’ Helena exclaimed. ‘It’s enormous!’

‘Only compared to the little courtyards in London,’ Gemma told her.

I didn’t bother to point out that Lime Park
was
London. This expression of awe at the space one could buy for the same money as a shoebox somewhere central (the subtext being that any stylish urbanite would prefer the shoebox), it was all part of the ritual enjoyed by those who’d lived their whole lives with the luxury of choice. They didn’t know they were born, these girls. ‘We’ve got our own little access gate to the park, look.’

‘You could let in secret admirers that way,’ Imogen giggled, not knowing she’d made a genuinely helpful suggestion.

‘How did you even find out about this area?’ Gemma
said, speaking as if we’d chanced upon a remote hamlet not yet known to the folks at Ordnance Survey.

‘Jeremy’s always liked it around here,’ I said. ‘He knew it when there was an art school here, when he was at the LSE. He used to come to student parties here.’ My thoughts drifted to the girl he’d got pregnant at college, the nearest he’d come to being a father: perhaps she’d been one of the friends based down here, a long-haired art student with a fateful artlessness regarding contraception. Strange how life brought you full circle like that.

‘Will he be home this evening?’ Imogen asked. ‘You know how much we love our Distinguished Older Gent.’ This was their nickname for Jeremy and another tiresomely persistent part of the ritual: to remark on how attractive he was for his age – as if he were knocking on the door of seventy.

‘No, he has a partners’ dinner this evening. He sends his love.’

‘Is he always late?’ Helena asked. ‘Do you get lonely then, all the way out here?’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Listen to your questions! It’s not the middle of the moors, you know, it’s still the city. And I have new friends on the street if I’m bored.’

‘Talking of which, someone’s waving at us,’ Imogen said. It was, naturally, Rob’s window she indicated, his bedroom window, the mirror image of the first-floor room Hetty and I had earmarked for Jeremy’s study. (Actually, it was earmarked for the baby’s room, but I wasn’t about to tempt fate with pastels.)

‘That’s Rob,’ I said equably. I was so in control of
myself you could have taken my blood pressure and found not the slightest deviation from the norm. ‘He works from home, so I see him a lot. We’ve become quite good chums.’

‘Straight or gay?’ Helena wanted to know.

‘Straight.’

‘Then what are you waiting for, get him to come and have a drink with us!’

‘I thought this was a girls’ night,’ I objected. But a pair of single women in their thirties who had not been heavily sedated were not about to pass up the opportunity to tussle over an unattached male, and when Rob drew up the sash and leaned out to call hello, I obligingly invited him to join us.

‘I can only stay for one,’ he said when he arrived. ‘I’m going out tonight.’ We were in the sitting room with our drinks, Rob positioned snugly between Helena and Gemma on the smaller of the two sofas. It entertained me hugely to see the predator turned prey, trapped between two competing hunters.

‘Doing anything special?’ Helena asked him, with an artificial, over-familiar charm that would have made me want to draw her aside and advise more successful strategies – had I not been using them on him myself.

‘Not if the first time we went out was anything to go by,’ Rob said with a wicked look, and they began playfully to scold him, demanding to know what kind of girl stirred so little spirit in a man – and, more importantly, what kind stirred more. I wondered if he was feigning indifference to his date for my benefit. There’d been several, I knew,
since the trainee teacher; he was a womanizer all right, albeit one who didn’t have to try very hard. Did he sleep with other women on the days he slept with me? I tended to put Jeremy off on the nights following an assignation next door, though it wasn’t going to be possible to maintain that discipline long term. (Long term? Hadn’t I assumed we would last – at most – as long as the building works? Building works that motored along on schedule and, according to Hetty, were about to hit the pain barrier before easing downhill towards the home straight.)

We’d last met two days ago, our fourth liaison, as frantic and delicious as the others, as aerobic a session as any I’d get at the gym. ‘I went with Rob for a coffee in the café in the park,’ I’d told Jeremy in the evening, when he asked if I’d had a good day; I knew I would need to vary this to avoid coffee becoming a euphemism for fuck. ‘We’re going for lunch with Caroline next week and I have a feeling we might become a little trio.’

‘I’m glad you’ve got some local friends,’ he said, and now the girls were glad too.

‘He’s
fantastic
,’ Helena said, after he’d gone. ‘Don’t you just
know
he’d be great in bed?’

I joined Imogen in her protestations. ‘How can you possibly tell that after ten minutes?’ I said, with perfect primness, as if the thought had never crossed my mind. It was becoming clear to me that deception was purely a matter of confidence; one did not even need imagination.

‘Oh, he just has that vibe,’ Helena said.

He certainly did.

Left restless by him (weren’t we all?), she got to her feet to appraise the dimensions of the room, the huge bay window and glamorous fireplace, and then fixed me with good-natured accusation. ‘Trust you, Amber.’

‘Trust me what?’

‘To land on your feet like this. You deserve it, of course.’ It wasn’t cool to spell out what she meant: that when the four of us had first shared a corner of the office, we’d all been – at least for a brief period – single, each unsure of what the future held, and now I alone had everything, right down to the eye candy for a neighbour. If they only knew just how extensive my everything was.

‘We need a proper shot at him,’ she said, returning to the sofa and the indentation of our departed guest. ‘Can’t you have a house-warming and invite us all?’

‘I will, just as soon as the house is finished.’

‘When will
that
be?’

‘Soon. Late August probably.’ And for the second time in a matter of minutes the prospect struck me as undesirably close.

‘I didn’t think there’d be anyone like that down
here
,’ Gemma said.

‘Lucky I’m so thick-skinned or I could be offended by that,’ I said, pulling a face. I’d forgotten how by the end of the working week I’d used to tire of Gemma’s slyly critical commentary; meeting in this new context somehow accelerated that. While the others accepted the received wisdom that the beautiful bird catches the worm (early
or
late), she harboured ideas that it just wasn’t fair.

She looked at me with her signature half malice. ‘Rob
reminds me a bit of that guy we ran into once. Obviously he’s
much
more attractive, but they have a similar look.’

I frowned. ‘Which guy?’

‘You know, in that bar.’ She sighed, casually forgetful. ‘You said you’d had a thing with him?’

There was a time when this could have applied to
any
man in
any
bar, but my social life had been genteel enough since I’d known this group for me to be able to identify the match in seconds. ‘Oh, you must mean Matt.’

I’d forgotten they’d met. It must have been a couple of years ago now. Gemma and I had been in a bar in Covent Garden together when a shambling figure passed by our table, turning abruptly back and gesturing towards me with an unlit Marlboro.

‘Amber, is it you?’ His thickened voice betrayed the thousands of cigarettes he’d smoked before this one.

‘Matt,’ I said. I introduced him to Gemma. ‘He used to be my team leader when I worked in customer service,’ I told her.

She looked as if she knew exactly what sort of euphemisms
they
were.

Matt, meanwhile, was agog at my physical transformation. ‘I can’t believe it, you look so …’ But no adjective could be found to describe me adequately (‘clean’, I wanted to supply; ‘fully clothed’). ‘What are you doing these days?’

I gave him a breezy summary, lightly running French-manicured nails over the printed silk of my shirt. ‘Being fired by you turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me,’ I finished, beaming.

He looked not so much crestfallen at this remark as
physically diminished by it. I’d heard a year or two after the hearing that his own career had not flourished in the aftermath.

‘How about you, Matt? You’re looking well, too.’ I was aware of Gemma’s incredulous expression and it made me want to giggle. The truth was he looked rough as hell. Though my age, he had not yet drawn the conclusion that there were only so many hundreds of times you could extend a night with drugs before it began to damage your skin, your hair, your youth. His clothes gave off that nauseating blend of stale cigarette smoke, human sweat and city grime, as if they hadn’t been changed after half a dozen nights out. He must still be tumbling straight from bed to work, then off to the pubs and clubs, and back to bed again in the small hours. Judging by his grey neck, regular showers were one of the many elements of a wholesome life he’d sacrificed. I had two a day now, one at the gym before work and one before sliding into bed with Jeremy in our Battersea bedroom high above the river.