The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (30 page)

‘You said “our offence”? Caroline and Richard got this letter as well, did they?’

‘All of us did. Jo and me, Caroline and Richard, Mel and Simon, Liz.’

Practically everyone in the photograph – bar Felicity
and the Frasers. She and Joe really had touched down in the middle of a civil war. But why had it begun? What were the conjectures that had so offended Rob that he’d instructed a lawyer?

Just then the dog let out a single gruff bark, startling her, and tore out of the room at unnatural speed. Kenny called after her: ‘
Poppy! There’s no one there!
Of course I don’t believe for a moment he ever
would
sue,’ he added, returning to Christy. ‘That’s the difficulty in defamation cases – they tend to spread exactly what the person is trying to suppress – but I’m sure you understand we don’t want to take the risk. People lose their homes in legal costs alone, and we would be looking at damages as well if we lost.’

Rob had adopted a pseudonym, Christy thought; his career had already been affected by this, letter or not. He had a case and these people knew it.

‘Just because we live in these houses, it doesn’t mean we’re millionaires,’ Kenny added.

‘No.’ She of all people understood that. ‘Thank you for telling me this. I wish I’d known before, I would never have put any of you in such a difficult position. Poor Caroline … I’ve been so nosy.’

‘Which is understandable. She won’t think any the worse of you, I’m sure. But I seriously advise you to stay out of it, Christy. Don’t discuss this man with anyone, certainly not with your pupils at St Luke’s. You really don’t want to get one of these letters.’

‘Joe’s a lawyer,’ she said. ‘He might be able to advise you all.’

‘Is he a defamation lawyer?’

‘No.’

‘Well, Rob’s apparently managed to get one of the leading ones in the UK on a no-win no-fee basis. A friend of the family, we heard. He’s been very aggressive about it and if he chooses to, he
will
take this as far as it can go.’

‘So you’ve decided it’s better just to pretend he no longer exists?’

‘Not quite so extreme as that, but yes – to not provoke him further.’

Kenny and the dog returned her to the door. It was as it closed on her that a thought opened, a rare sensation of revelation: that post she had never sent on, the white envelope in the desk drawer at the top of the house … Maybe Amber Fraser had been sent a lawyer’s letter too, a letter that ‘set out in detail’ what the neighbours believed Rob had done.

Well, if she had, Christy was mere minutes from discovering just what it said.

It was about 4.15 p.m. when I began crying.

I cried from the moment I fled his flat, shrieking over my shoulder, ‘You will never lay a finger on me again as long as you live!’ and crashing the door shut before he could reply.

I cried as I thundered down the stairs, paying no heed to Felicity’s face in her doorway, her calls of concern, not caring if I slammed the front door behind me and brought a shudder to the very foundations of the place.

I cried as I let myself into my own house and bolted upstairs.

I was still crying when Jeremy came home from work that evening. I simply could not stop. And the more I alarmed myself by not having the power to cease, the harder I cried.

‘What are you doing up here?’ he said, finding me huddled under the duvet in the guest bedroom at the top. I hadn’t wanted Rob to hear me sobbing through the wall of the floor below.

‘Why was the front door double-locked?’

‘I locked myself in,’ I whimpered.

‘Why? Are you crying? What is it, darling? What’s
happened?’ He was becoming distraught himself, anxious to comfort me, bewildered by my hysteria. Then he saw the trace of blood on the bed sheet and of course he assumed I was upset because my period had started. I let him believe this was the cause.

‘I can’t bear it …’ I vacillated between not being able to stand his presence and clinging to him like a child. ‘There’s no point any more …’

‘Sweetheart, you mustn’t say these things. Everything will be all right. Everything you want
will
happen.’

‘No it won’t. I hate myself.’

‘You’re not to blame for this, you haven’t done anything wrong …’

But I only cried harder. Powerless, he lay down with me, stroking my head like a baby’s.

I stayed in bed for days, emerging from the covers only to use the bathroom. Quite simply, my life had ended. Jeremy, convinced it was about our failure to conceive, was prepared to weather this collapse; it was almost as if he’d been expecting it all along. He worked from home when he could, brought me books I couldn’t read, flowers and candles I couldn’t smell, food I couldn’t eat.

‘Why don’t you come back to our bedroom?’ he said on the fourth day. ‘There’s a TV in there, or you can sit in the chair and look out of the window.’

‘I sleep better here,’ I lied.

‘I don’t like being in separate bedrooms.’

‘You come up here then.’

This he did. At the top, under the eaves, it was just as it had been when we first moved in. I still remembered the
contentment of those two nights.
Two nights!
That was all I’d had in Lime Park with my husband before I met
him
.

‘I wish I could take time off,’ he said, ‘take you away somewhere …’

‘We’ve just come back from holiday.’ My voice was small and toneless. ‘I want to stay here, anyway.’

‘The thing is, I have that conference in Germany next week. I’m one of the speakers, I don’t think I can cancel.’

‘I don’t want you to cancel.’

He gazed at me, at a loss. ‘Felicity called round,’ he said, finally. ‘She’s worried about you, said she heard you on Tuesday when you were upset and tried to check on you before I came home, but you didn’t answer the door.’

‘What did you tell her?’ I asked.

‘I said you’re laid up for a few days with that bug I had.’

I seized on this with what little energy I had. ‘Maybe I
have
caught your bug. That must be it.’

But Jeremy wasn’t buying it. ‘You seem depressed, baby, really low. Maybe we should get you to the doctor?’

‘No!’

‘I know it’s tough on you, one of your best friends having just had a baby. You feel like it should have been you. Maybe we should go back to the clinic earlier than agreed?’ But the suggestion seemed to pain him and I knew he was thinking about work. Flu had kept him away, then our holiday in the Caribbean, and now he was overloaded; the last thing he needed was a string of medical appointments he hadn’t accounted for. This breakdown of mine was trouble enough, and even in my trough of wretchedness I felt sorry for him.

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I’m happy for Imogen. It’s … I … I can’t explain.’

‘You don’t
have
to explain,’ Jeremy soothed. ‘Not to me. I understand everything you’re feeling. I just wish I knew how to make it better for you.’

I swallowed, failing to stem a fresh onslaught of tears. ‘You can’t. No one can.’

It was heartbreaking that he was so unconditionally loving. I didn’t deserve it; I didn’t deserve him. And yet I had never needed him more.

Several things happened next and in rapid succession, so rapid it’s not easy now to get the chronology exactly right.

First, I stopped crying. Any longer and the tears would have disfigured me, eroded my skin like the tide and left watery scars behind.

Jeremy flew off for his work trip; at the time I was too inebriated with misery to register where, but I know now it was Frankfurt, a digital conference of which Identico.UK was a minor sponsor. He remained reluctant to go even as the taxi waited outside, especially when I rejected his scheme of having Caroline supervise me in his stead (as with Felicity, I refused to take my friend’s phone calls or answer her pleas through the letter box), but I insisted. He needed a break from me, whether he knew it or not.

He’d been gone two days – maybe three – when I discovered I was pregnant.

I hadn’t taken a test since mid December, tired of the repetitive disappointment, done with the incessant monitoring of the workings of my menstrual system, as if my
body existed for medical science and not to live its life. I’d had a period in early January, but that could happen; we experts knew that. I remembered Rob’s remark that I’d put on weight, and guessed I must have already been pregnant then. All factors considered, I calculated that I must have conceived in late December, probably on our holiday in Jamaica – a second honeymoon indeed.

I longed to share the news with Jeremy, but knew that after everything we had endured together a revelation this sweet needed to be made face to face; however, we spoke on the phone several times a day and I could tell he was overjoyed to hear an improvement in my spirits. And what an improvement it was! It was as if a partition had been slotted between past and present – a partition made of reinforced steel, impenetrable to all known forms of pain – and all at once my skies cleared, my world was back on its correct axis. My affair and its traumatic conclusion might have taken place five years ago for all its relevance to my future, a simple paradise in which all my emotions would be redirected to my husband and child. The idea that I’d ever doubted I wanted a baby was risible, the result of some hormonal imbalance caused by obsession.

So transformative was the discovery that I was even able to watch from the bay window in the master bedroom as Rob moved Pippa into his flat, and not hurl a chair through the window at him, scream at him the terrible names he had earned. Instead, I contented myself with flinging his amber bangle across the room, tracking the metallic scrape of it across the tiled floor of the en suite before letting the partition absorb all further fury, all
received injury – all common sense. Since our final meeting, I’d heard from him just once, when he’d texted the day after, asking, ‘No hard feelings?’ I had read the words repeatedly in disbelief and rage. It was the only message from him I kept. I did not respond.

Finally
, I thought, as I heard Jeremy’s taxi pull up outside the house that Tuesday night in late January, clenching my fingers to my palms with joy, warmed on that sub-zero winter’s night by new blood in my body.

‘Finally,’ I said to him, pressing a glass of champagne into his hand as he settled on the bar stool next to me.

‘Wow,’ he said. His joy at having found me restored to full health was inexplicably short-lived; he drank deeply from the glass, like … like a man who’d been given
bad
news.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ I prompted, beaming. ‘I know it’s been tough recently, but we got there in the end, didn’t we?’ I shuddered slightly at what might very well have been lost before we did. ‘Jeremy, what is it?’

‘I’m … I’m surprised,’ he said, at last.

‘Why? You always said it would happen naturally, didn’t you? As I say, it’s been a bit of a slog …’

‘A slog?’ He was looking at me strangely, but awash once more with elation I misread that strangeness. I thought he must be thinking that sleeping with his beautiful wife could never be labelled so crudely; I thought that for all those months when I’d been in two minds, so too must
he
. Now we’d got what we wanted, there was a fear that we’d never wanted it enough in the first place. It was doubt, cold feet, a perfectly natural reaction. Imogen and Nick had probably felt it too.

‘I know how you’re feeling and I’m just the same, but it’s –’

He interrupted me. ‘Stop, Amber, please. You need to listen to me.’

‘OK.’

That was when he told me a secret of his own.

‘I’m infertile.’

‘
What?
’

Immediately he looked like a different person, and I saw in his eyes that I did too. In that instant neither of us knew the other any longer. We were both imposters.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, my breath quickening. ‘The clinic said we were in perfect health.’

‘They said that
you
were, yes.’ Jeremy closed his eyes, rubbed his fingers into the sockets so violently I worried he’d drive his eyeballs right into his brain. He reopened them only with reluctance, the whites startlingly bloodshot, and made fleeting contact with my gaze. ‘But I lied about my results. The fact is they showed that there is no possibility of my fathering a child.’

‘Then they must have made a mistake,’ I said, with all the bravado I could muster. But he did not consider this, and nor had I realistically expected him to. We looked at each other, silent, stricken. ‘Why didn’t they bring us back in to talk about it?’ I added.

Jeremy fingered the stem of his glass on the counter, eyeing the fizzing liquid as if it had been concocted expressly to mock him. ‘They tried to. They strongly recommended a consultation to discuss next steps, and I said we’d call when we had absorbed the news. I haven’t called back.’

I stared. All the joy of the last few days had been lost in a catastrophic nosedive and now my thoughts were tearing away, deserting the scene of the crash. ‘So they didn’t say take another six months?’

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ My voice cracked. For all my own sins, I still felt sinned against – and by the one person who had never done anything but adore me. But as Jeremy looked straight at me, new emotions crossed his face, dark, terminal ones never before expressed towards me. As long as I live, I never want to repeat that feeling, the feeling of watching your own fall from grace in the eyes of your most ardent champion.

And in his voice: not disappointment, nothing so mundane, but defeat,
annihilation
. ‘I think that pales into insignificance compared with what
you
didn’t tell
me
. You’ve slept with someone else, clearly.’

I didn’t reply. The partition was rising once more, freeing the terrible memory of what had happened at my final meeting with
him
. In gushed the pain, as relentless and searching as liquid, until at last I bit into my lower lip and lowered my eyes in affirmation.

‘Am I allowed to know who?’ Jeremy asked, his tone dismal.

I gave a whimper. ‘I can’t tell you.’

‘I think I ought to know who the father of your child will be.’

He was speaking as if I belonged to this other man now, as if I were no longer his. It frightened me, it wasn’t what I wanted, it wasn’t what I’d
ever
wanted, even when
in the grip of my fever for Rob. I imagined divorce, destitution, a rock-bottom life. I began to cry.

‘I can’t,’ I repeated, weakly.

‘Do I know him?’ Jeremy asked, cold, desolate, out of reach.
Barren
. ‘At least tell me that.’

‘It’s not what you think,’ I said.

‘How can it
not
be what I think, Amber?’ The way he said my name, it was almost with nostalgia; he was already in mourning for the woman he’d loved.

I was sobbing hard by now, tears spilling hot on my skin, and I knew I was going to have to tell him. I took a step forward and reached for him with a feeble, shaking hand that no longer felt like my own.

‘Because it’s not,’ I said.