‘You could always get a lodger up here; you’d hardly notice they were there, would you?’ He was thinking, possibly, of the five-figure sum – pretty much all her parents had to spare – he’d lent them in that scramble to amass the funds for completion. ‘If you ever fall on hard times,’ he added good-humouredly.
‘I’ll remember that,’ Christy said.
Joe’s parents were united with hers in their stupefaction. ‘You’re getting a bit posh for us now,’ they told Joe, and Christy saw the flush of pride in their faces.
‘Oh, that’ll never happen,’ he said, grinning. ‘Will it, Christy? We’ll never crack the enigma of gracious living.’
‘Not while we’re with each other, anyway,’ she said. ‘Maybe in our second marriages?’ How she loved seeing their families together in the new house. She was already having visions of big noisy Christmases, everyone gathered in the living room like something out of It’s a Wonderful Life (there was a lot more furniture in these visions; as things stood, most of the family would have to cram together in the window seat).
‘What must this other couple have been like?’ Joe’s mother marvelled on entering one of their three glittering bathrooms, the master en suite (‘master en suite’: it was like a foreign vocabulary). ‘Were they Russian or something?’
Joe chuckled. ‘No, but Amber Baby had very expensive tastes.’
‘Amber Baby?’
‘That’s what we call her, don’t we, Christy?’
‘We do.’
Closer inspection of the dragonfly key ring had revealed the inscription ‘Amber Baby’ on the insect’s belly and had been immediately adopted by the Davenports. Christy, who could not imagine Joe even saying ‘Christy Baby’, much less having it engraved on a charm for her, though she knew exactly the type of woman who inspired the immortalization of intimate nicknames on trinkets she then discarded without a care. A different species altogether from her. ‘I’ll send the key ring on with the mail,’ she had told him, though she already had the faint suspicion that she was going to keep it.
‘Expensive tastes? You can say that again,’ said Joe’s mother. ‘I haven’t seen those taps in B&Q, have you? And what’s the bath made of?’
‘Copper,’ Christy supplied. ‘A vintage Mexican tub, the agent said.’
‘Who on earth would think to import a bath from Mexico?’ her mother asked.
‘Amber Baby,’ Joe and Christy chorused. ‘Insane, isn’t it?’ Christy added.
Even so, the insanity was surprisingly infectious. Standing in front of the mirror an hour earlier, she had found herself scrutinizing her discreetly pencilled eyes (‘honest brown’ was probably the most generous description of them, though they were not without a sparkle of their own) and sprouting dark roots with a vanity that was both uncharacteristic and – she would be the first to admit it – unwarranted. She’d even stood on tiptoe and straightened her spine; it was as if the Frasers’ mirror demanded proper respect of all whose reflections it granted.
‘Well, now we know how the other half live, eh,’ Joe’s father said, a phrase he used more than once that afternoon, exaggerating his accent for effect.
‘Yes, and apparently it’s without the Internet,’ Joe said. ‘At least it is for the foreseeable future. We’ve gone back to the nineties.’
‘We’re using a different supplier from the Frasers,’ Christy explained, thinking, For different read cut-price, ‘and I can’t get them to come out here for three weeks.’ Forty-five minutes she’d been held in the helpline queue the previous Tuesday morning, carefully avoiding Laurie’s eye when she patrolled, only to be told that an express service would incur a surcharge. Regular (slow) service was going to have to do. ‘Joe goes back to work tomorrow and I’m here on my own for a week,’ she added. ‘I’m quite looking forward to being cut off from the world.’
The group meandered into the garden. After a dim, overcast morning the sun had found a fault line in the cloud cover, causing them to screw up their eyes and make visors of their hands, cavers emerging from the underworld. Early spring in a well-tended garden, what a picture of new hope it was: the gleaming close-shorn lawn, the clutch of trees (identified by Christy’s mother as blackthorns) heavy with blossom, the pale flagstones gilded with sunlight. The four parents strolled the length of the path like visiting dignitaries on a town-twinning scheme, and peeked in turn through the gate into the park, surprising a spaniel sniffing on the other side.
‘The people before had young children, did they?’ her mother said, motioning to the set of swings.
‘I don’t think they did,’ Christy said. ‘At least there were no kids’ bedrooms when we looked around. The swings must be from the family before them.’
Her mother nodded, unconvincingly casual. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t bother tearing out something like that if there’s a fair chance you’d be needing it yourself at some point.’
‘You have to pour concrete,’ Joe’s father agreed. ‘It’s a right palaver.’
Though she chose not to look, Christy had no doubt the elders were exchanging glances, united in their expectations of a grandchild. She knew her own would have decided it was a done deal the moment she and Joe had gone begging for a loan (maybe their generosity had been in good faith: cash for babies!). Certainly the sight now of multiple spare bedrooms, a lawn for kicking a ball about, and those swings, semi-permanent and wholly symbolic, would only have served to strengthen the belief. How she hated to disappoint them all, hoped Joe wouldn’t decide to lay bare their postponement plan. Better if he hinted vaguely that they would be trying soon and then, when next quizzed, suggested it was taking a little longer than expected, just one of those things. His casual diminishment of it – even in this imaginary form – brought a lump to her throat.
After the tour they had coffee in the kitchen. Their old pine table looked completely wrong amid the Frasers’ state-of-the-art modernity and there was talk of sanding it and smartening it up with a coat of paint.
‘What’s this?’ her mother asked, spotting the hotel brochure that had come in the post for Amber Fraser. Since the acetate was already torn, Christy had thought it harmless to open it and leaf through the photographs. ‘Treetop Suites, I’ve heard about this hotel. It’s not far from Granny’s place in Sussex. Isn’t it extortionately pricey?’
Christy nodded. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not ours.’ She didn’t mention that she had read the letter that had come with the brochure: Dear Mrs Fraser, following your recent stay, we are delighted to confirm your automatic membership of the Treetops Club … It had made Christy think of the mile-high club; she imagined the Frasers in their luxury cabin under the canopy, lounging about in silk robes and cashmere slippers, feeding one another woodland-themed canapés before falling onto a bed strewn with apple blossom. Oh, Amber, baby …
She suppressed a giggle.
‘Shouldn’t you be forwarding any mail that’s not yours?’ her father said, ever the upstanding citizen.
‘Yes, I’ll send it on in the week with the rest.’
‘No point keeping it, anyway,’ Joe said, tossing the brochure aside with mock regret. ‘It’ll be a long time before we can even afford a drink at a place like that.’ He and Christy beamed at each other: incredible how quickly you could get used to being phenomenally in debt.
At the door, about to leave, her mother delivered her official verdict: ‘It’s a wonderful house, Christy. I see why you decided to risk everything to get it.’
And Christy accepted her congratulations in the who-dares-wins spirit in which the words were intended. After all, did anyone who dared win actually believe they might lose?
Did anyone who risked everything expect to fail?
Christy had met Joe at Cocktail Night in the union bar during their second year of university (the lowest-ranking of any to grace a Jermyn Richards CV). Delivering her White Russian to their table, he’d remarked on her sweet tooth and when she told him that he’d already discovered the most danger
ous thing about her, he’d laughed and said, Good, because he didn’t know how to cope with dangerous women. Perhaps that was why their attraction had been less a fireworks display than a quiet mutual ignition; neither having fallen in love before, they were not in a position to tip the other off as to what was happening between them, and only when they’d resurfaced did they understand that they had plunged.
Unlike other couples, they had developed no mythology around their early years together, nor around their respective childhoods. If hers had been unremarkable – the only child of a teacher and an assistant manager at a branch of Boots – then his might be described as a struggle. His father had worked for decades in recovery patrol for the AA, routinely absent on weekend and night shifts, while his mother raised four children and cleaned part-time for a chain of kitchen showrooms. The family home was – still was – a rented terrace on the east London–Essex border.
(Once, at a Jermyn Richards drinks, Christy had heard Marcus and another senior partner discussing Joe in terms such as ‘salt of the earth’ and a ‘genuine Londoner’, as if he’d been raised by pearly kings and queens, but she’d noted the affection in their voices.)
Physically, he was not striking, at least at first glance, being short and wiry and possessed of the kind of gentle colouring that would fade prematurely, but Christy knew herself well enough to understand that she did not have the self-confidence to handle a conspicuously attractive man – were she to have caught his eye in the first place, which history suggested she would not. Integrity, kindness, intelligence: those were the attractions that mattered to her, and Joe had them in such quantities that they glowed. And while he was not one of those people who had reinvented themselves so convincingly it came as a discombobulating experience to meet their parents, twelve years in a City law firm had nonetheless smoothed the accent somewhat and furnished him with most of the cultural references his colleagues had possessed from childhood. (She’d done her best to keep pace.)
Still, he’d suffered for his lack of an expensive education. Once the euphoria of winning the JR training contract had faded, he’d intuited swiftly that he had not made the cut as a one to watch. That decentness of his was no advantage; he was too useful a wingman in the ever-more dangerous flying environment that was Mergers & Acquisitions to ever be given a crack at lead pilot.
‘I’m starting to think I have to work twice as hard as them just to get the same credit,’ he said of his socially superior counterparts.
‘Now you know how it feels to be a woman,’ Christy told him.
It was not until the end of the first week that she had her first encounters with the neighbours – or, in the case of the guy upstairs, ‘sighting’ was a better definition. He was an unkempt figure, it transpired, and of indeterminate age: either young and out of condition or older and in condition, it was hard to tell with someone so bedraggled. His black hair was an overgrown thicket that obscured his eyes, and the rest of his features and neck were buried beneath a pelt of facial hair. Tall, almost towering, and heavy of gait, he was a bear of a man – but not the cuddly, protective kind; more the kind that came down from the mountain to rampage through your bins.
Christy was in the front garden, enjoying the novelty of weeding, when he came out of his house and paused at the gate, fishing in his jacket pocket for something or other, his back to her. He did not respond to her call of hello from barely ten feet away, and when he ignored a second, louder greeting, slipping away without so much as a glance over his shoulder, she seriously wondered if he might be deaf.
But of course he wasn’t deaf; he was just rude.
Oh dear. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a disappointment had not the woman on the other side been so cool with her the next day.
Caroline Sellers introduced herself when she and Christy were leaving their houses at the same time and came face to face on the pavement. Older than Christy by about five years, she gave an immediate impression of bluntness, short not only in stature but also in facial feature, nose a little flat, brow abbreviated, jawbone not quite strong enough. Ponytailed, heavily mascaraed and dressed in jeans, blazer and high-heeled ankle boots, she had the capable but burdened air of someone in middle management who regularly threatened to walk out of her job but never actually did.
‘Sorry I haven’t had the chance to say hello before,’ she said, and her voice was exactly what Christy had expected of her Lime Park neighbours: fine-grained accent, tone of utter dauntlessness. ‘We were away over Easter.’
‘Anywhere nice?’ Christy asked.
‘Just our place on the Ile de Ré. The kids went back to school this week.’
‘How old are they?’
‘Eleven next week, almost-but-not-quite eight and a half, and just turned four.’
Christy wondered why she didn’t just say eleven, eight and four.
‘Do you have any?’ Caroline asked.
‘No, it’s just my husband and me.’
This dismayed Caroline; you could see it in the slow slide of her half-smile, a perceptible withdrawal of warmth.
‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ Christy said, forgetting they were both on their way out, her own errand involving a trip to the hardware store on the Parade for light bulbs.
‘Thank you,’ Caroline said, ‘but I need to dash. I’m just picking up my youngest from school. He’s in kindergarten and finishes a bit earlier than the other two.’
‘Is it a local school they go to?’
‘Yes, Lime Park Primary, just behind the Parade.’
‘I’m going in that direction, as well. Maybe we could walk together and you can fill me in on the local gossip?’
This Christy said quite playfully and yet the other woman looked startled, almost insulted, by her suggestion. Suddenly she was digging in her bag and extracting a set of car keys; she had been going to walk (and why wouldn’t she, the school was ten minutes away?), but now she’d decided to drive.
‘You’re based at home, are you?’ she asked, apparently not entirely incurious.
Christy smiled. ‘No, I’ve just been off work this week to unpack and get the utilities sorted out. I thought I might need to do some decorating but the couple before us left the house in such perfect condition there’s nothing for me to do.’ When Caroline failed to react, Christy continued to voice her thoughts, forgetting this was not always the most successful basis for conversation: ‘We’re not online yet, either, and my phone doesn’t get a very good signal down here so I feel a bit cut off. I can’t wait to get back to work, to be honest. The street feels so dead. There’s no way I could do this full time …’ Too late she heard how the words might have sounded and felt her cheeks flush. ‘I didn’t mean … Well, maybe you don’t work and I didn’t mean it how it sounded.’
A week out of the office and already she was a gibbering idiot.
‘Excuse me, but I certainly do work,’ Caroline said, frowning rather fiercely. Her voice rang clear and confident in the quiet street, audible surely to anyone with an inch of open window. ‘I have three children under eleven and if that’s not work then I don’t know what is.’
‘Of course. I only meant –’
‘Real work, eh? A contribution to the Exchequer, something in the interests of society and not for my own selfish hormonal ends? Yes, I know what you only meant. Well, future taxpayers don’t raise themselves, you know.’
‘I …’ Christy’s face burned. She was not sure how this could have escalated so rapidly. Was this one of those unfortunate situations when you find yourself bearing the brunt of someone’s pre-existing frustrations? Had Caroline been criticized before and not had the opportunity to defend herself? ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said apologetically. ‘Forget I said anything.’
But Caroline only looked at her with exasperated disbelief, as if she could not credit that this was what had emerged from number 40. ‘You think very differently from Amber, I see,’ she said, as if that settled it.
‘Am
ber?’ In her confusion it took Christy a second or two to place the name. ‘Oh. I didn’t ever meet –’ she began, but it was too late, Caroline had turned from her to point her key fob at a nearby Mini, the lights of which began to flash as the locks released. Christy wondered how a family of five could fit into the tiny cabin, but then she remembered the enormous Audi on the drive. She and Joe had never owned a car in their lives, let alone two.
‘Bye,’ Christy called after her. ‘Another time, maybe?’ But the question was obliterated by the angry crunch of the car door closing.
Oh dear, she thought. So far she wasn’t seeing much evidence of the open-armed community she had so confidently expected of Lime Park Road. But there were plenty more fish in the sea, she told herself, and the law of averages dictated they couldn’t all have spines as prickly as this one.
Besides, she had dinner at Canvas to look forward to.
Joe had suggested it, Joe had booked it, and presumably Joe was also now going to explain how they would justify paying for it in the light of the crushing budget they’d drawn up together (if it didn’t permit good coffee, then it certainly prohibited meals in restaurants like Canvas).
She’d studied the menu on her way back from the hardware store and concluded that it was both intimidatingly fashionable (crab foam and grated bottarga – they’d not had those in New Cross) and toe-curlingly expensive. A starter equated to the pedal bin they needed for the ground-floor loo, while a main course might buy them blinds for one of the spare bedrooms, and yet there Joe was, ordering champagne, the bottle opened when she joined him and two glasses already poured.
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 4