The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (17 page)

‘I’ve always thought there was something slightly
dark
about him,’ Joanne said.

‘Nonsense,’ I told them all. ‘Quite apart from the fact that this took place a hundred years ago, he’s our friend and we should give him the benefit of the doubt. I know him as well as I know you, Caroline, and that’s good enough for me.’

As Caroline nodded, shame-faced, the others murmured their approval, impressed by my show of loyalty.

‘What exactly did Caitlin say, Kenny?’ I demanded.

‘Well, nothing specific,’ he admitted. ‘It was just implied.’

‘There you go. God, when I think of all the things old lovers might “imply” about me at a dinner party! I’d hope no one takes
them
seriously.’

That ignited the atmosphere again and soon spouses were freely repeating their other halves’ most unrepeatable moments. Mel, a discontented spouse if ever there was one, gravitated centre stage, her descriptions of Simon’s drunken buffoonery becoming subtly more vindictive and ending with the somewhat sinister line: ‘And that was when I decided just to leave him there to get third-degree burns.’

The party didn’t break up until the early hours. Jeremy and I left with Mel and Simon, their low-level squabbling as they staggered up the street soon obscured by the scream of a police siren in the distance. Across the road,
a fox tore at one of Liz’s recycling bags and extracted a soup carton. I thought of all the children of Lime Park Road, asleep in their beds upstairs as the adults and lower mammals ran amok below.

‘It was good of you to defend Rob,’ Jeremy said, as we strolled down our path. ‘I’ve always found that unnerving, the way someone leaves the party and is immediately ripped to shreds.’

‘I guess we like to make little soap operas for ourselves. It doesn’t mean anything, you know.’ This last statement I made with a dangerously confessional sincerity, almost an apology. I had allowed myself to get very drunk this evening, not identifying my witching hour as I normally did, and had almost certainly been saved from potential trouble by Rob’s early departure.

Happily, Jeremy was three sheets to the wind himself. ‘It just makes me wonder what they say about
me
,’ he said.

‘Only wonderful things,’ I assured him. As he struggled to locate his key, I used mine, feeling the satisfying weight of the dragonfly charm as it knocked against my wrist bone. ‘I know what you mean, though, and to be honest I think I’d rather not know.’

Jeremy followed me through the open door. ‘Me neither,’ he said.

Joe had observed well when he’d joked about
Rear Window
; had they not been on skid row she would have ordered the film and studied it for tips. For Christy had found that, two further job interviews having to date yielded no offer and all new initiatives disposed of in a hectic show of efficiency each morning, she had a full-time job on her hands, after all – albeit one for which she did not get paid. She was a curtain-twitcher, a peeping Tom, a voyeur. She was going the extra mile every day without setting foot outside the house.

In her case, the stake-out was a fraying and sun-damaged armchair in the bay window of their old bedroom (the room was otherwise empty now, the footprint of their bed still visible in the pile of the Frasers’ plush vanilla carpet), but the fundamental situation was the same as Jimmy Stewart’s: she was interested in all her neighbours, but suspicious of just one.

Of course, Rob had not murdered anyone – not to her knowledge, not to date – but there
had
been another questionable incident since his threatening display in the café and it
did
involve a well-groomed blonde. She was his girlfriend, Christy gathered, or at least an established squeeze,
since she arrived in the evening twice a week and departed in the morning just after the school-run mums had left the street (it just so happened that Christy took to her chair at about this time).

On the occasion in question, the blonde had been leaving the gate of number 38, her head bowed, when Rob had loomed up silently behind her and seized her roughly by the arm, spinning her forcibly to face him and causing her to shriek in alarm. At this suggestion of violence, Christy sprang to her feet and moved closer to the window, her breath coming quickly enough to mist the glass. But there was no real fear in the girl’s face, only query, even a note of exhilaration; evidently, she found his caveman handling to her taste. Indeed, there was no forgetting the way she – assuming it had been this same woman – had beseeched him in the dead of night that time, pleaded for satisfaction with an intensity Christy couldn’t be at all certain any lover had ever drawn from
her
.

Rob’s reasons for pursuing the blonde into the street were unclear, but the episode concluded with a long kiss, the first time Christy had witnessed any public affection between the couple.

As Joe had noted, she was not in plaster, she had the use of her legs, but when the kiss was over and the blonde at last permitted to walk on, Christy returned nonetheless to her seat.

Her curiosity about Rob Whalen was only stirred by a visit from Caroline Sellers. Though quite well again, Christy was still spending whole days indoors, and so it was that
she padded to the door in leggings, a threadbare Slytherin T-shirt of Joe’s and her bunny slippers, the kind that not so long ago she wouldn’t have been seen dead in by her Lime Park neighbours (the kind that she shouldn’t have been wearing in the house at all, frankly, if she hoped to salvage her sex life). There on the doorstep stood Caroline, bearing a Tupperware container filled with dark lumps, and, extraordinarily, at the sight of Christy she smiled.

‘I bumped into your husband on his way to the station this morning,’ she said in her well-spoken, self-assured tones, ‘and he said you’d been very ill.’

‘Yes, but I’m much better now, thank you.’ Christy waited for Caroline to explain what it was she wanted. In spite of the smile, she knew better than to hope.

‘Can I come in?’ Caroline asked.

‘Sure.’ The monitoring of Rob’s movements had been suspended an hour earlier when he’d driven off in his car with the laptop and files that spoke of a work appointment. He’d sworn angrily to himself when his ten-year-old Peugeot didn’t start first time, which proved only that he could behave as unpleasantly to inanimate objects as he did to humans. She had not seen the blonde in three days, but that was not unusual.

She led Caroline into the kitchen, put the kettle on and gathered clean mugs, aware of her guest circling cautiously before she touched down on one of the Frasers’ steel-and-leather stools; marooned in a hard and glossy landscape with only her Tupperware to clutch to, she looked unexpectedly fragile.

‘I’m sorry if I offended you the first time we met,’
Christy said, bringing over the tea. ‘I was thinking aloud, got carried away. I shouldn’t have said what I said.’

Caroline considered this. ‘You’re sorry you offended me or you’re sorry if I was offended?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The implication of “if” being that you’re only sorry because I was offended, rather than sorry for what you actually said.’

Christy suppressed the urge to scream by taking a gulp of tea. Honestly, why were communications on this street so painful? To think that she’d expected greater sophistication than in New Cross! Now it seemed that she’d not appreciated simplicity in her neighbours when she’d had it.

‘Oh, forget it,’ Caroline said to her surprise. ‘Look, I know I haven’t been as friendly as I could have been since you moved in. I wouldn’t like to come to a new street and get into a row straight away. That day in the street, to be honest you caught me at a bad time. I had something on my mind. So I’d like to apologize as well. And it was rude of us not to accept your invitation for drinks, I felt really bad about that.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t just you,’ Christy told her. ‘No one turned up.’

Caroline lowered her mug. In her other hand she still kept contact with the Tupperware – talisman, safety blanket,
something
– and, remembering the circling, Christy grasped at last that she was nervous.

‘It was too short notice, I guess,’ she added.

‘That wasn’t the reason,’ Caroline said quietly.

Christy looked up, the muscles between her eyebrows contracting. ‘What was it then?’

‘It was because we thought there might be someone else there who we didn’t want to see.’

Intuiting that ‘we’ meant a group larger than the Sellers family unit, Christy recalled Liz standing on her doorstep and asking,
Who else will be coming?
It was only after Christy had shared her guest list that she had declined her own invitation and gone immediately to Caroline’s door. Well, given all Christy had observed in the interim, it wasn’t hard to guess who the ‘who else’ was.

‘Rob,’ she said and, when Caroline nodded, ‘Why?’

Caroline gave a regretful smile. ‘I hope you’ll understand that it’s not possible for me to get into the details, but I can say that distressing stuff went on before your time and we’re all still a bit preoccupied with it. I’m really sorry if it’s made us come across as stand-offish. It hasn’t been anything personal towards you and your husband.’

‘What distressing stuff?’ Was it too simplistic to assume that this was also the information that Rob sought to protect?
You obviously know
, he’d said. She didn’t, but Caroline evidently
did
.

‘As I say, I can’t discuss it. I really can’t.’ It was clear by the way she raised her chin that she meant what she said; she was the type to pride herself on keeping her word.

‘Well, if it makes any difference to you, I loathe him anyway,’ Christy said, ‘and I have no problem saying why.’

Caroline’s eyes widened.

‘He’s horrible and rude and he tries to play with my mind.’ Aware that this did not sound entirely rational, Christy continued in any case: ‘He harassed me in the park café last week. It was awful.’

‘Harassed you?’ Caroline looked alarmed. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Well, maybe not harassed, exactly. But he plonked himself down at my table as if he owned the place, just glaring at me, really trying to intimidate me. Then he accused me of gossiping, said he would “deal with it” if I did it again. I didn’t know what he was on about. Honestly, it would have been funny if he weren’t so … malevolent.’

‘Malevolent,’ Caroline repeated, frowning. ‘That’s an interesting word.’

Christy watched her. ‘All of you, you said.
All of you
said no to our invitation just in case
he
said yes? Did you put it to the vote or something?’

Caroline sighed. ‘Not quite, but we co-ordinated.’

And to think Joe had mocked her for conspiracy theories!

‘And some people did genuinely have other plans,’ Caroline added, with a glimmer of humour.

‘Well, he didn’t come,’ Christy said, ‘so you could have “co-ordinated” to come here. It might have been fun.’

Caroline nodded, contrite. ‘I really am sorry, but we couldn’t take the risk.’

Christy was at a loss as to what to make of this strange exchange. Doubtless the collective antipathy towards Rob had also been the cause of Caroline’s husband having rung his doorbell so hard he would have raised the dead,
the issue he’d been so impatient to discuss the same one Caroline was now determined to evade. What had Rob done? Clearly something more quantifiable than the general churlishness
she
had been subjected to. She imagined drug-fuelled parties with ear-splitting music or one of those burglary rings she’d read about in the papers where an insider would rent a flat in an affluent area and then tip off his accomplices the moment one of his neighbours drove off for the weekend.

‘I thought it must have been something to do with the house,’ she said, ‘something the Frasers did that upset you all. Planning permission or problems with the renovations. You must have thought I was mad turning up that time and demanding to know what the problem was.’

Caroline kindly chose not to answer this directly. ‘There’s never been a problem with the house. It’s the nicest on the street now, look at it …’ She at last relinquished her Tupperware box to run her fingers over the sparkling quartz worktop; she touched it gingerly, as if it had diamonds set in it.

‘Please tell me what this is about,’ Christy said, not to be sidetracked by compliments to an eye for interior design that was not even her own.

But Caroline was standing firm. ‘I honestly can’t. I shouldn’t even have said as much as I have. But I feel terrible that you might have taken this whole’ – she paused to find the word that would give the least away – ‘
atmosphere
personally.’

Christy suddenly remembered Steph’s report of Caroline and Liz being friendly and helpful.
Even before I told her
where I lived
… ‘So you’re saying you’d have done the same with Steph and Felix if it had been their party?’

‘I think we would have had to, yes.’

Even with their new membership to the parents’ club, Christy thought. This
was
serious. ‘The thing is, Caroline, there’ve been other things to do with Rob besides the way he treats me. Hate mail came through our door by mistake. It wasn’t signed, but it was addressed to him. Should I be worried for our safety?’

‘No,’ Caroline said firmly. ‘The best thing you can do is not give it another thought. Let’s have our tea and talk about something else, shall we? Here …’ She snapped open the lid of the box. ‘I brought you some brownies. They’re a family speciality. Can you taste properly again? When Richard had the flu he said everything tasted of metal. It went on for
months
. I thought he’d never overeat again.’

Having seen Richard Sellers’ apple-shaped build for herself, Christy did not comment, but reached dutifully for a brownie to work on her own. They’d plainly been made by infants and God only knew what bodily fluids had been rubbed by young fingers into the mixture, but she ate it anyway to show willing. After all, sugar had been her trusted friend long before Caroline Sellers decided to have a change of heart. Munching, she thought how nice it was to feel liked (or at least not disliked) and to be included again (or at least not excluded), and it wasn’t just because she was unexpectedly based at home, as Joe thought, it was because she was human and, these last dislocated weeks, she had been nothing so much as
lonely
. Lonely like she’d been before she
went to college and met Yasmin in her first year, and then Joe the next. She reached for a second brownie.

‘Well,’ Caroline said, watching with approval as she chewed, ‘
this
is a first within these four walls.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Christy. Surely this couldn’t be the first time the street’s ‘unofficial social secretary’ had set foot in number 40.

‘The woman of the house eating my baked offerings, I never thought I’d see the day! Rachel certainly never did.’

‘Rachel?’

‘Rachel Locke – she lived here before the Frasers. She had a gluten intolerance. And then Amber, well, she didn’t have any allergies or anything like that, but she
never
ate cake. The kids were always baking her cupcakes, they
loved
her, but she just used to nibble a bit of the icing and keep them for Jeremy.’

‘Why didn’t she eat them herself?’

‘Of course, you never met her, did you?’ Caroline said, smiling.

‘No.’

‘Well, if you had you’d know she had an
amazing
figure, the best you’ve ever seen. Jaw-dropping, men-walking-into-lampposts sexy. And she was
very
disciplined about it. She and Jeremy used to go to Canvas for dinner all the time and she told me she only ever ate a starter. And she drank of course, so she needed to save calories for that. Do you know what she said to me once? She said she would eat when she was old, and sleep when she was dead, but she would never knowingly turn down a cocktail.’

‘Goodness,’ Christy said.

Caroline sipped her tea, duly warming up. ‘She used to hint at all kinds of depravities in her past, like there was
nothing
she hadn’t tried, no taboos, do you know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’ Amber Fraser sounded like a remarkable character, which was perhaps why Caroline was as eager to discuss
her
as she was reluctant to talk about Rob. ‘The two of you were friends?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘Yes, we got quite close, actually. Oh, she was
so
great, a breath of fresh air on this street. We all had a bit of a crush on her, men
and
women. She was naughty and sweet at the same time, you know?
So
generous to everyone, always giving lovely presents, really kind-hearted. I remember Liz was at a low ebb after her divorce and Amber took us shopping one day, got her a new haircut. She
saved
her in that one day and she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. She was just being Amber. It was exciting to know her, like having a celebrity next door, but without the paparazzi – or the ego. She was actually quite humble, I thought, considering how she looked. Or maybe
democratic
is the word. She treated everyone just the same.’