The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (3 page)

‘Shares in a Bordeaux vineyard might be more appropriate. Better you go, babe, since you’ll be in the firing line once it starts. And you’re so much prettier than I am.’

‘I certainly am.’

Thus armed, I headed next door the following morning. Though I used the parallel garden paths, I could easily have shimmied through the hedge between the two front doors, for there was no dividing fence. I considered idly whether we should put one up, the wrought-iron kind that seemed to be the fortification of choice on Lime Park Road, rows of spears painted in Farrow & Ball Off-black. Warrior chic, Hetty would call it.

Number 38 had not been extended into the loft as ours had, or to the rear as ours was about to, and there were just two floors, each containing a good-sized flat of identical footprint. I tried the downstairs flat first. A woman who looked in her seventies came to the door, smiling and expectant. She had an iPad in her hands and in the background country music played.

‘I’m Amber Fraser,’ I began.

‘You’ve just moved in next door,’ she told me before I could tell her. ‘Felicity Boyd, pleased to meet you. I saw the vans on Friday. That was quite a convoy you had there.’

‘Wasn’t it? I’m not sure how we managed to fit so much into our old place. It was a bit of a shock when it came to boxing it all up.’ Or watching a team of professionals box it up for me, as had been the case.

‘Which is exactly why I would never dream of moving again,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m here for the duration. I couldn’t face the packing.’

‘Well, why would you need to move? We’re already loving it here. The park is beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘The daffodils!’ she agreed. ‘And there’ll be poppies soon too. They lasted for ages last year.’

‘Well, I
love
poppies.’

It was all rather jolly and I felt sorry to have to tell her that her flower-filled idyll was about to be destroyed. But when I began to detail the improvements she only exclaimed with pleasure – ‘How exciting for you!’ – as thrilled as if it were her own home set to be refurbished.

‘So, except for the kitchen extension, it’s nothing structural. If you’d like to come over for a coffee one day, I’ll show you exactly what we’re planning.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Of course, we’ll have a proper house-warming when it’s all done – champagne, the works. It will be such a good party you’ll all forget the horror that came before.’

She was delighted with the bottle I offered; I would give regular alms, I decided, pleased I had stocked up on hostess gifts on a recent trip to the West End. I got her to repeat her name before I went. I didn’t want one of those awkward situations where you call someone the wrong name for years on end or have to avoid using one at all
because you’re too embarrassed to admit you weren’t listening in the first place. (How mindful, how forward-thinking Amber Fraser could be, how dedicated to her new role as suburban homemaker and pillar of the community!)

When I pressed the bell for the upstairs flat there was initially no response and it was only as I was about to give up that there finally come a gruff male ‘Yep?’

‘Could I come up for a moment? I’ve just moved in next door and wanted to have a quick word.’

‘Huh?’

It was obvious he was irritated by the rude awakening and I smiled to myself, remembering a time when noon on a Sunday had been offensively early to me too.

‘Fine, come up,’ he added, and I heard him clear the phlegm from his lungs as he resigned himself to the nuisance of my visit.

I still think sometimes about that short walk up the stairs to his flat, one of those moments of sweet, ordinary innocence you don’t appreciate until it’s gone – like the liberty you take for granted in the minutes before you get in your car and run someone over.

It was as I turned onto the narrow landing that I saw him. He was tall and broad, black-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned; he was both young enough and old enough, both too much and not enough: in other words a police photo-fit of what I remembered as my type. He was also dishevelled, hung-over and entirely unrepentant of being in no fit state to greet his caller – in fact, he was still dressing as he stood in his doorway. He had his jeans on and his arms in the sleeves of his shirt – yesterday’s shirt,
I guessed, plucked from the floor – but he was looking down at the open front as if he couldn’t quite remember how buttons worked. He radiated Saturday night debauchery, reeked of it, and the yearning it evoked in me was startling in its violence, just how I imagine a ghost taking bodily possession. By the time I’d thought to stop it, it was too late.

‘Hi,’ I said.

He raised his gaze to me, doubtless expecting some middle-aged crone, and at once his fingers halted, hovering a while as if he might change his mind and undress again. It goes without saying that I’d made myself presentable before setting out on this errand, my hair soft and loose over pale cashmere shoulders, lashes long, lips baby-pink. I was as demure and clean as he was louche and unwashed, and I could have curled up and purred on the lap of the god of vanity to see his response.

‘Hi,’ he echoed, and in this single appreciative syllable I was able to detect that casual wickedness I’d found so addictive in the men I’d gone out with before I came to my senses and married Jeremy. He was so like them, in fact, that I almost gasped one of their names aloud in recognition (Pete! Phil! Or, briefly and most dangerously, Matt!). I knew his kind inside out, had no doubt that regardless of his day job (if he had one) he was in his own mind a rock star or a poet or both. What he was doing on a street like Lime Park Road I couldn’t begin to imagine, but, then again, since we were on the subject, what was
I
doing? Putting in high-end flooring with the aim of pushing an overpriced baby buggy back and forth across it,
picking the neighbours’ brains about school applications and piano lessons: was that really what I’d chosen for myself for
the rest of my life
?

I was momentarily speechless, frightened that I should suddenly be having these thoughts when I’d had no such ones for years.
Years
. Since the earliest days of being with Jeremy, I had only congratulated myself on my propitious and mature change of direction; I’d had no cold feet whatsoever, not a hint of a shiver. I’d managed my weakness for dissolute creatures like this one as you’d manage alcohol addiction or self-harming or any other disorder. I’d thought I was its master.

Why, then, was I relapsing now? Who
was
this man?

Clenching my toes inside my boots, I composed myself, heard my voice emerge in a low, cool purr: ‘I’m Amber Fraser, your new neighbour. In the Lockes’ old house?’

He did not reply, merely abandoned the intricacies of the shirt buttons once and for all to set about memorizing my face. I repaid the compliment, noting the length of his nose, the range of his thin mouth, a dark slash across the stain of an unshaven lower face. His eyes, under dense straight brows, were downturned at the outer corners, lids heavy with insolence.

‘Am I allowed to ask
your
name?’ I prompted.

‘You are,’ he mocked, giving it.

I had to ask him to repeat it because I hadn’t caught the words, and he cleared his throat to do so. ‘Rob Whalen.’ He looked up and down the length of me very candidly then, making me grateful, blasphemously grateful, for not yet being pregnant and for not gorging on biryani
takeaways or anything else that might jeopardize the narrow waist so vital in making sense of the dimensions above and below it.

I held out the bottle of wine. ‘Well, Rob Whalen, I’m sorry to get you out of bed. I just wanted to give you this.’

He took it from me, squinting at the label as if it emitted difficult bright light, before his lips parted, mouth broadening into a smile. ‘Looks like a nice one, cheers. But I might wait till later before I crack it open, know what I mean?’ He had a faint south London accent, the kind that had probably begun as an affectation and stuck, the tone sleep-roughened and seductive. Belatedly, those under-slept eyes turned suspicious. ‘Why are you giving
me
a gift? I don’t get it. If you’ve just moved in, shouldn’t I be the one with the offering? I could have brought you, what, a muffin basket? Or is that just in American films?’ He chuckled, pleased with himself. ‘How long before I’ve left it too late and you start suspecting me of darker motives?’

I thought then, He’s not into music or poetry, but film. That’s his passion; he’ll be writing a screenplay, dreaming of Academy Awards and a beach house in Malibu.

‘You don’t need to bring us anything,’ I said smoothly. (Actually, maybe I didn’t say ‘us’; maybe ‘us’ is a false memory.) ‘But I have to admit there
are
dark motives, on my part, anyway. You see, I came to warn you there’ll be building work starting first thing tomorrow and it will get a bit noisy. I don’t know what time you leave for work, but I want you to know I’ll be making sure everyone is careful about sticking to the hours permitted by the council.’

‘That won’t help me,’ Rob Whalen said. ‘I work from home.’

‘Oh, that’s not good.’ But already, criminally, I was thinking the opposite: that
was
good. He was at home all day, I was at home all day, we could get together and –

Stop!

‘I have a horrible feeling we’re going to make your life a misery then,’ I said. By then I had definitely introduced the plural; I could hardly conceal for long the fact of my marriage, even if I wanted to. ‘It’s going to go on for a few months, I’m afraid.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal. I usually have headphones on when I work. Or I take my laptop to the café in the park.’

‘What about your … ? Or do you live alone?’

When he said yes, he lived alone, I was thrilled. Girl-choosing-a-birthday-balloon-and-being-told-she-can-have-two thrilled. Girl-who-didn’t-already-have-a-mate-for-life-and-thought-she-might-just-have-met-him thrilled. (Was that Jeremy I could hear on the other side of the wall? Dragging a box up the stairs to our temporary marital chamber in the eaves?) Oh, how different it would all have been if Rob Whalen had answered instead, ‘This isn’t my place, I’m just staying with a friend before I leave for a flight this afternoon to start a new life in New Zealand.’

If he had, I’d – we’d – still be living in Lime Park now.

Because it was instant, my attraction to him, incontestable. And had it been one-way, just my craving him because I was entering a new bored-housewife phase and
was open to suggestion, it would have been possible – just – to conquer it. I had my pride; I would not have chased indifferent prey. But it was recognizably mutual, obscenely so. We were edging towards one another, millimetre by millimetre, not speaking, only staring. It was outrageous, indecent
already
.

‘Well, goodbye,’ I said, feeling myself frown as I turned to leave. I was confused, mildly nauseous. ‘Enjoy the wine.’

‘I’ll let you know,’ he drawled.

‘If it’s any good?’

‘No, when the misery starts. I’ll let you know and you can decide how you’re going to compensate me.’

This was candid even by my standards and I blushed as I went down the stairs. There was not the sound of his door closing, I noticed: he must have stayed in the doorway or come out onto the landing to watch me depart.

Behind Felicity’s door her music played.

With some effort, I composed myself as I scurried the few steps home. Jeremy was on the top floor, unpacking clothing and cramming it into a chest of drawers on the landing. The room at the back, our makeshift living room, was a jumble of furniture and boxes and items unpacked and displaced: shoes, underwear, a rogue table-tennis bat I hadn’t known we owned.

‘Did it go OK? What’re they like?’

‘Fine. Both really nice.’ And when his hands next became free I took one and gripped it in mine – as if that could stop the unstoppable, the brief knitting of fingers!

He paused to smile at me in indulgent surprise. ‘And?’

‘There’s an old woman with an iPad downstairs and a bloke with a hangover upstairs.’

Typically, he ignored the latter to seize on the former. ‘When you say old, what do you mean?’ As if somehow personally exempt, Jeremy was wryly amused by societal attitudes to ageing; it tickled him when I made blithe remarks about someone being over the hill.

‘Oh, seventy or something. Though she’s got the iPad, so I guess she must be quite with it.’

‘“With it”? You’re a bit young for an expression like that.’

‘I must have picked it up from you. I’m entering middle age prematurely. Thanks for that.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ Jeremy said.

How old was hard-living, hard-chested Rob Whalen? I wondered. My age, a year or two younger, perhaps. But he might have been ten years older for all it mattered, or twenty, for he was one of those eternal bachelors who were easy to catch and hard to keep, interested only in the pleasures of the present.

I swallowed hard.

Still with his hand in mine, Jeremy looked out of the window. Where the view from our old flat had contained the iconic Thames, here in Lime Park it was of an anonymous wedge of garden, complete with the children’s swings left by the Lockes. Trees whose type I could not hope to identify had yet to blossom, not persuaded by the city’s first attempts at spring. Next door, in Caroline Sellers’ garden, her children sprang about on a damp trampoline, their mouths circular with screams that our sealed
windows rendered silent, dreamlike. I pictured them rising to superhuman heights, clearing the wall in a perfect trajectory to land on the grass in the park, brushing themselves off completely unhurt.

‘The garden will be great for kids,’ Jeremy said, as he had when we viewed the house. ‘Looks like they’ve got three next door. The Lockes had three as well, didn’t they? The place is teeming with them. Maybe they put fertility hormones in the water.’

‘Urgh, what a horrible idea.’

He grinned as if he’d said something naughty, dirty, but he hadn’t and he never would. He couldn’t alter the cleanness of him, the neat and predictable well-brought-up wholesomeness of him. He was over fifty but he was boyish, and there were times, like when you’d just been confronted with your preferred type, your archetype, when boyishness was not an aphrodisiac.