The Sudden Departure of the Frasers (38 page)

At this, tears sprang to Amber’s eyes, all her previous vehemence dissolved. Her temperament was evidently changeable, even fragile. She pushed aside the tea, as if unable to contemplate it a moment longer, or perhaps to clear the decks between them. ‘Fine. Let’s sort this out. If I answer your question, will you give me your word that you will never contact me again? Like you said before?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you won’t tell anyone where you found me, especially not him?’

‘Yes. Does that mean he did it?’

‘It means there’s nothing to be gained by us seeing each other again. I’m sure you can appreciate that?’ Amber gazed at her, her sudden personal appeal making Christy sting with self-consciousness, her cheeks flame deeper.

‘Yes,’ she repeated, contrite.

‘Good. Listen to me, Christy, you must forget what you think you know and you must ignore any rumours you hear from now on. None of it is true. It was all a misunderstanding. Rob Whalen is not going to harm you or anyone else on the street – and that is my honest opinion.’

To her alarm, Christy felt a great swelling of relief, a flooding close to ecstasy. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Amber was rising from her seat. ‘Now, I’m sorry, but I really do have to go.’

Christy stood too, suddenly longing to express her thanks by saying something generous or gracious. ‘Well, congratulations on the baby, anyway. Is it OK to tell Caroline? I hope you don’t mind, but she told me you and your husband had been trying. She’ll be
so
pleased.’

She regretted these remarks as soon as she’d made them – relief had made her overfamiliar. Many women loved to share their experience of pregnancy and motherhood, common gender often being the only ticket required, but Amber Fraser was plainly not one of them. She looked frankly appalled. Perhaps when it took so long to get there, casual discussion of it felt like tempting fate. It occurred to Christy also that when you were celebrated for your figure, for your flawless beauty, it was perhaps harder to come to terms with the physical changes of motherhood.

‘It’s OK,’ she said hastily. ‘Forget I asked. And I’m sorry to make you talk about the past. You have my word you won’t hear from me again.’ She wondered if she ought to offer a handshake to demonstrate her sincerity, and the awkward beginnings of one reminded her of the bangle on her wrist – a last shot at salvation. She unclasped it and held it out to the other woman. ‘Before you go, I brought this for you. I found it in the en suite, it had fallen behind the bath.’

But again she had misjudged, because Amber only stared at the bangle with a strange, sad horror. ‘Keep it,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘Are you sure? That’s very kind.’ It meant something to Christy to have an object of Amber’s not by accident (or theft), but by design. A gift. ‘Oh, there’s a key ring as well. The estate agent had it. It has your name engraved on it. Here …’

This the other woman did take, pocketing it with obvious gratitude.

After thanking her once more for agreeing to see her, Christy fumbled in her purse for the right coins to pay for their tea. When she turned around again, Amber Fraser had disappeared from sight.

I told Jeremy about Christy Davenport’s visit the moment he came home from work. I’d had all day to adjust my mindset – and Lord knows I needed those hours of preparation, for I am not a mental gymnast these days, can only marvel at my previous feats of guile.

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ he said, taking the glass of wine I offered, and sitting opposite me at our tulip table. It was quite a squeeze in that tiny kitchen, but we were used to the shuffling and manoeuvring by now, the little collisions that invariably encouraged him to embrace me and tell me how proud of me he was. ‘You told her he didn’t do it, of course?’

‘Of course. That’s the official line. I don’t want her to be too scared to set foot in her own home.’

‘Let’s hope she really
doesn’t
have anything to fear.’

But he did not look terribly worried, not as he once would have been. Time and distance have made him less concerned about the risk Rob Whalen poses to the female population of Lime Park. These days Jeremy prefers the idea that the man
simply wouldn’t dare
, not after his last brush with the law; he favours that over the possibility that such tendencies might be serial.

‘What was she like?’ he asked.

‘Kind of neurotic. But it was hard to tell when I was in shock at finding her on my doorstep. And she was so persistent.’

‘She
must
have been, to find us in the first place.’

‘She got the address through your work, she said.’

He frowned. ‘I don’t see how when ninety per cent of the staff don’t know it. Oh well, we can’t stop people googling, can we? The whole world’s a private detective these days. You have to change your name to really start again.’

I nodded. I had not ruled out that possibility. ‘You know, I got the impression she had feelings for him.’

(And I, of all people, could identify the signs.)

‘She’s married, though, right?’ Jeremy said. ‘It was a couple who bought the house, as I remember.’

(As if a marriage certificate was any immunization against
him
.)

‘Yes. I’m not saying she’s acted on it – maybe she’s not even aware of it yet. It’s just … the way she reacted when I said he was innocent, it was more than just relief. It was like I was giving her permission or something.’ I shuddered.

Jeremy sipped his wine, watching me. ‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Try not to worry. We always knew one of them might turn up. But we should be safe so long as she doesn’t go spilling our address to any of the others.’

‘Thank God I didn’t invite her into the house,’ I said.
‘She would have been impossible to get rid of, and your mother would have come back during the time we were talking, for sure.’

‘Why
didn’t
you invite her in?’ Jeremy asked. ‘You can’t have known what she was going to say.’

‘I don’t know. It was just an instinct.’

‘A good one. You’re a born survivor.’

‘I hope so.’ At sudden sounds of activity from the monitor positioned between us, I groaned, not so much in complaint as in expression of bodily exhaustion. ‘Already? It’s only been forty-five minutes!’

‘I’ll go,’ Jeremy said, happily. ‘I hoped she might wake up.’

In the time it took me to stretch my arms and ease my aching spine, he was back. ‘Here she is!’

‘Oh Jeremy, what are you doing bringing her down? Look at her, she’s wide awake!’

‘Of course she is. She thinks she’s missing out. Like mother like daughter, eh?’

‘Come here, darling.’ I smiled, reaching for the little imp. So beautiful! This is a child who will be forgiven
anything
.

Two weeks ago, on the 20th of September, Sienna Fraser was born. That’s right, another redhead: to our indescribable relief, she looks just like me.

‘A ginger kitten,’ Jeremy said, when he first cradled her by my hospital bed. ‘It’s apparently a real advantage to be born at the beginning of the school year,’ he added, and I knew he was going to be a splendid father. Who cared if
she didn’t have his genes? She would have his love and that was the only thing that mattered.

(We’ve already talked about trying for a second with a sperm donor.)

If I sound as if I’ve become sentimental in my old age, I have to concede that I sort of
have
. I’ve learned that too much time, too much choice, was not good for me, and now I have less of both I’m twice as contented.

I’ve even spent time with my mother and, believe it or not, almost enjoyed it, another agreeable side effect of conception and its unique power to reboot the system – or was it some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome at work? Either way, in the latter month of pregnancy, when I didn’t want to risk running into anyone I knew, in particular anyone from Lime Park (it wasn’t as if the population was legally confined to its postcode), I needed to leave town. And what more unlikely place to find me than with my own family?

I spent my days practising parenting skills on my brothers’ kids, able to hand them over to their mothers or my own the moment I tired. I ate, I slept, I passed the time in easy conversation. As the days went on, I no longer despaired at my poor luck in getting the parents I did, but saw in my mother’s face
her
wonder at producing a daughter like me. It’s nice to feel you’ve made someone proud, especially after a period of – how can I put it? –
dubious
behaviour.

It was also an opportunity to hone my story about the dates. Right from the moment we left Lime Park, Jeremy
and I had lied about the baby’s due date, quoting a late-October one that, should Jeremy’s paternity ever be challenged, would cast doubt on the possibility of a mid-January conception. (Only a court order would wring a DNA test from us now, and even then I think we’d skip the country first.) Privately, Jeremy of course anticipated
mid
October, nine months after January 15th.

I alone knew to expect an early bird. I’d had my suspicions from the moment Jeremy confessed his infertility, but these had been confirmed only when I presented myself for my first hospital appointment. Conceived in the first week of December, Sienna was in fact due in early September.

Did I say her middle name is Fern? A little nod to her woodland beginnings. Because the terrible – and, you could say, wonderful – fact is that she was conceived in love, not hate, at least on my part, for it was the night in the tree house that it must have happened. We’d been too intoxicated to take proper care, to notice a tear in a condom, to use one every time. It had been an exceptional night in all senses, my mind had tricked my body – or was it the other way around? – into thinking Rob was my partner, the one I’d selected to father my child. I had thought I loved him. As for the pregnancy test taken soon after in December, it must have been falsely negative; if I’d conceived fewer than ten days earlier, the hormone levels would not have been detectable.

(And in those concerns about the DNA test that I’d shared with Jeremy, I’d withheld one crucial anxiety, the one that drew from me the deepest shudder of all: if
linked by the defence with the baby’s inevitably ‘early’ birth, proof of Rob’s paternity was going to be excellent evidence that we’d been having a sexual relationship
before
the date of the incident.)

Luck was on my side: I presented small throughout the pregnancy and Sienna was overdue by two weeks. I insisted on an NHS birth, knowing the understaffing and general institutional chaos would make it easier for me to maintain that my dates were the correct ones. Where possible, I attended appointments without Jeremy.

‘It can’t possibly be as far along as you think,’ I would say to the midwife, always good-natured, never too forceful. ‘My husband and I hardly saw each other in December. We’ve always thought late January was when it happened.’

‘Not a chance,’ would come the reply. ‘But the important thing is you’re progressing well. What’s a few weeks between friends?’

I suppose it’s possible that mine was not the most dysfunctional set of circumstances she’d been privy to in her career.

After the birth, any concerns Jeremy voiced about Sienna being premature were dismissed by harried staff who could see for themselves that she’d been born at full term; fortunately for me, the postnatal unit is a rare realm in which men’s opinions do not matter.

The handful of relatives who’ve met Sienna have been told she was born ‘a little early’. Her birth weight was light, so it hasn’t been an impossible falsehood. (‘Amazing how quickly they fatten up,’ said my mother-in-law Katherine, when she met her. ‘You must have very good milk,
Amber.’) People tend not to challenge you when there’s no obvious reason for dishonesty, and we’re so used to being vigilant about what we say, both to family and to the few new acquaintances we’ve made on the street, that the lie has come to feel like the truth.

In any case, sobriety keeps me focused. I couldn’t drink alcohol during the pregnancy and don’t intend to start again now. It’s the new Amber: temperate, discreet, self-sacrificing.

As far as she’s concerned, January the 15th never happened.