The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (29 page)

Joe and Yasmin were in complete agreement, a position all the more infuriating for their not having had the opportunity to speak to one another in almost a year.

‘I don’t want to hear this,’ Joe said, holding up a hand to silence her.

One look at his expression – not only derisive of her Rob-related theories but also cross with himself, as if it pained him to have to downgrade his opinion of her – and Christy took him at his word.

‘Joe’s right. If I were you I wouldn’t give this stuff another thought,’ said Yasmin’s pixilated mouth on the laptop screen. The audio, however, was unbroken: ‘When you’re back at work, you won’t believe how much time you spent thinking about it. Anyway, it’s obvious to me what’s been going on. This Rob guy had an earlier relationship that overlapped with the blonde and she can’t forgive him. Maybe some of the others on the street were great friends with her and didn’t like the way he treated her? You said she moved in and then she moved out, so she’s probably embarrassed to have come back. That’s why she sneaks in and out when she knows she won’t be seen. We’ve all been there.’

I
haven’t, Christy thought. ‘It’s more than that,’ she insisted. ‘He called it a nightmare and whatever it was it was bad enough for half the street to refuse to be in the same room as him. And don’t forget two households upped and left over it.’

‘So you say.’ Yasmin sighed and Christy knew she’d lost her last ally. ‘I think you need to forget about the rest of the street and concentrate on you. You and Joe.’

It wasn’t that Christy didn’t recognize good advice when she heard it; it was just that when your advisor was in another continent, turned on and off at your own technological whim, it was all too easy to choose to ignore it.

As September surrendered to October, the leaves on the neighbourhood limes grew yellower as the cherry trees began to blush. She was going to like autumn here, she decided.

In her fifth week of volunteering at St Luke’s, Christy was asked for the first time to take pupils in pairs rather than singly. The final pair of the morning, Leah and Zoë, were thrilled to escape class, and took every available opportunity to break from their reading and chatter.

‘Do you read much at home?’ Christy asked them, when she’d finally coaxed from them a page apiece.

‘Only books we get from school,’ Leah said. She was the more forthright of the two and of a more striking appearance, her hair honey-coloured and plaited to the elbow, brown eyes clear and large, almost bulbous. ‘We haven’t got any books at home.’

‘None at all?’

‘Not stories. There’s a cookery book in the kitchen.’

Christy was pleased to hear that; she wanted all families to conform to the Sellers ideal, the spines of their recipe books encrusted with icing sugar, the kitchen a chaos of treats stacked higgledy-piggledy in Tupperware.

‘But my mum dropped it in the sink,’ Leah added. ‘She never used it, anyway, not once. She doesn’t like recipes. She says they take too long.’

‘How about you, Zoë?’ asked Christy. ‘What books have you got at home?’

Zoë, shyer than her friend, glanced to Leah before responding. ‘Well, we’ve got
some
, I think, but my mum’s always too busy to read with me.’

‘What about your dad?’

‘I only see him once a week and he doesn’t help me with my homework. My mum says he’s got no brain.’

‘OK. I’ll help you then, and you can show your mums how well you read and really impress them.’

They liked that idea. ‘You’re really nice,’ they said, which made Christy feel ridiculously happy.

‘Who did reading with you last term?’ she asked them.

‘Milly’s mum,’ Leah said. ‘But she had to go and work in Tesco’s. Milly’s dad lost his job and now he’s depressed.’

Fathers tended to lack heroism in the children’s anecdotes, and Christy allowed herself a brief, reassuring image of Joe, the intrinsic decency of him and the potential he had to be a good parent, even though he wanted nothing less in the here and now and the last words he’d said to her on the issue were: ‘I don’t want to hear this.’

‘Now Milly can’t go on the trip to Hever Castle,’ Zoë added mournfully.

‘What a shame.’ Christy, identifying Milly as a pale-haired girl who was as quick to please as she was to flush, wished she had the spare cash to pay for her place on the trip. ‘I’m sure the family will get themselves back on their feet soon and Milly will be able to go on all the trips.’

‘Before Milly’s mum there was a naughty man who came,’ Leah said, speaking with the air of spilling a secret she could no longer reasonably be expected to keep.

Christy was startled. ‘Really?’

‘Don’t tell her, Leah!’ Zoë hissed. ‘Mrs Spencer said we’re not allowed to say!’

But Leah, a girl after Christy’s heart, had the conspiracist’s gene, right down to the surreptitious glances she was casting down the corridor and the furtive, breathless tone she now adopted to defy Zoë’s advice: ‘The police got him.’

‘Goodness.’ Christy knew she should be closing down a conversation like this, reporting it discreetly to Mrs Spencer out of the girls’ earshot and putting it from her mind, but she could not. On the contrary, she was encouraging it, urging the girls to say more, asking, ‘What did the naughty man do to get himself into trouble?’

‘My mum won’t tell me
literally
,’ Leah said, ‘but she said he wasn’t allowed in the school any more. Not
anywhere
on the premises. They changed the code on the gate. My mum told Mrs Spencer that her and all the other mums would keep us at home if he came back.’

‘
She
and all the other mums. I see.’ Christy was beginning to understand the need for the references and police clearances that she, the most casual of volunteers, had been asked to supply. ‘Better safe than sorry, I’m sure she did the right thing.’

‘He was a writer,’ Zoë said, evidently having decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. ‘But not stories like this.’ She gestured to the forgotten book on the desk between Leah and her, an innocent tale of kittens lost in the snow.

‘A journ’list,’ Leah said, pronouncing the word as if for the first time, and with these uncertain syllables came the initial symptoms of suspicion in Christy, an effervescence of adrenalin in the veins, a thinning of oxygen in her throat. Leah’s expression intensified, a child’s mimicry of adult consternation as she pronounced, ‘My dad said he would find
plenty
to write about behind bars.’

‘Behind bars? You mean he’s in jail now?’ Christy asked, shocked.

‘No, he’s not,’ Zoë said, but Leah was insistent.

‘My dad said he is. He said he can’t hurt anyone there because
everyone’s
bad in jail. It’s more likely
he’ll
get hurt.’

‘In jail, you’re not allowed to go for a walk or ride your bike,’ Zoë agreed. ‘You can’t play netball or go on the trampoline or anything good.’

‘You have to work in the kitchen,’ Leah said, confidently, ‘cooking horrible dinners for the other prisoners and mopping floors. But there wouldn’t be biscuits, would there?’

‘There might be
some
,’ Zoë said, ‘but not really good ones like gingerbread men.’

There was a brief diversion as the girls compared their preferred methods of tackling a gingerbread man, and to Christy’s shame it was she who steered the discussion back towards the subject of the bad man.

‘The police didn’t come to the school, did they?’

‘No,’ Leah said. ‘There was a lot of shouting one day and Mr Webber sent all the mums a letter.’

Mr Webber was the head. Christy had not yet met him but had glimpsed him once through the glass panel of his office door and been pleased to see a smiling, dynamic figure in place of the hunched, beleaguered cliché she had expected. She could just imagine his expression if he heard one of his volunteers encouraging
this
conversation.

‘We should get back to our reading,’ she said, and drew their attention to the open page in front of them. ‘Let’s see how the story ends.’

She had, however, one final question: ‘Just out of interest, girls, what was the man called?’

But who was she kidding? Even as they told her – voices in unison at last – she already knew the answer.

There was no reply at Caroline’s or Liz’s houses and so she tried Joanne, a member of the group she knew less well but who she was confident occupied a position in the inner circle.

She was taken aback when Kenny answered the door. Lime Park Road was a traditional place where, with the
exception of Rob, the only adults at home in daylight were female. Kenny was, she knew, a financial analyst, a regular on the same early train that Joe and Felix took into Blackfriars.

‘I’m working from home today,’ he said, and judging by his half-buttoned shirt and uncombed hair, he had not left the house all day (at least he was not in bunny slippers).

She couldn’t help glancing at his right hand, but it was months since she’d noticed the bandaging and the skin was of course long healed. By his side, his tall blond dog looked excited by her visit and when she reached to stroke its ears it pushed its nose into her palm, snuffling aggressively for treats.

‘
Poppy!
’ he warned.

‘I was hoping Joanne might be in,’ Christy said.

‘Sorry, she’s on a school trip, not back till five. The British Museum, I think she said.’

Which was probably where Caroline was too; the two families had younger children in the same year at Lime Park Primary and were class reps together.

‘Can
I
help?’ Kenny offered.

She had no doubt he could, but whether or not he
would
was a different matter.

‘It’s about Rob,’ she said, a little wildly.

Kenny’s face, flushed and friendly, dropped an inch. ‘That explains it then. You’d better come in.’

Having presumed she’d be led to the kitchen, she was surprised to be taken into the sitting room at the front, a space that was an exact match with her own and yet considerably more comfortable for sitting, with its deep
oatmeal sofas and nests of washed-linen cushions, its tranquil seascapes and trails of potted greenery. Taking a seat opposite Kenny, she had the sense of being interviewed, until the dog hopped onto the sofa next to him, sitting upright and alert, head angled exactly like its owner’s, and the sight of the two of them side by side was so comical she relaxed.

On a shelf behind Kenny, between a peace lily and a framed photograph of the kids, was Amber’s room scent, being used somewhat ambitiously as a bookend. Barely a centimetre of the liquid remained, the last drops of her ‘special touch’. Christy wondered if refills were available.

‘So what’s on your mind?’ Kenny asked.

‘Well, I’ve been volunteering at St Luke’s and the kids said something today about a “naughty” man called Rob.’

The police got him.

‘I’m fairly sure they meant our Rob,’ she added, and saw Kenny recoil slightly at her use of the possessive, ‘because I know he volunteered at a primary school in the past, he told me that himself, though he never said which one.’ Which, now she thought of it, was odd, given that he’d asked her directly which she’d been allocated and she’d clearly stated St Luke’s.

Kenny did not ask what the children had said, but a look of fleeting fury crossed his face before it was replaced by one of resignation. Did that mean he was willing to talk?

‘They said he wasn’t allowed in the school any more, had maybe even been in prison. Do you know if that’s true?’

Kenny sighed, enervated, his shoulders slumping visibly. Now the dog was the taller, neck erect, eyes alert; every few seconds its head turned towards the door, ears pricking, as if it suspected someone was out in the hallway but wasn’t convinced enough to go and investigate. ‘Believe me, Christy, I’d like nothing better than to tell you what I know, or what I think I know, but I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ Could this situation get any more maddening? The residents of Lime Park Road really had taken a vow of silence; they were not so much a circle as a sect. ‘Caroline says the same whenever I ask about him. I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you all so scared? There are a lot more of you than him. I don’t see how he’s been able to call the shots like this.’

There was a pause. Then Kenny surprised her by not shutting down the conversation and recommending she be on her way, but by asking a question of his own: ‘How do you
think
he’s been able to?’ And a lift of the eyebrows implied a level of exasperation that far exceeded her own.

‘He’s threatened you?’ she guessed. ‘You think he might hurt your families?’

It sounded a bit Mafia even as she said it.

‘Not the way you think, but yes. Wait here a second.’ Kenny rose and left the room, the dog scrambling in pursuit, and returned with two or three A4 sheets stapled together. He and the dog settled in their previous spots as if they were permanently assigned.

Able to see only the blank reverse of the document, Christy could do nothing but await whatever summary or excerpt he was prepared to share.

‘He sent us a letter,’ Kenny said. ‘Or rather his lawyer did.’

‘His lawyer?’

‘Yes. That’s what this is. A cease and desist letter, essentially.’

‘Cease and desist doing
what
?’

‘Slandering him. We have been warned not to repeat certain opinions and conjectures. If we do, he will sue us for defamation. So you see, we really
can’t
talk about it, however much we might want to. I can’t even show you this letter, because it sets out in detail what we’re supposed to have said and if you saw those passages then it would amount to a repetition of our alleged offence.’ To prove his point, he folded the letter in three and placed it out of her reach on the arm of the sofa.

Christy stared. At last, an explanation of the curious and sustained secrecy – not to mention the naked antipathy towards Rob Whalen: he had threatened them with legal action.
I think I’m allowed to say that
, Caroline had said.
I
will
deal with it
, he’d told Christy, though she’d been clueless as to how. Well, now she knew. She had an image of Richard Sellers under Rob’s window.
Thanks for the letter, mate …
It had been the Davenports’ second Monday in the house, and only days earlier she’d had that awkward set-to with Caroline, who by her own admission had had something on her mind.