In the lobby of JR’s riverside building near St Paul’s, she texted her arrival to Joe and sat on one of the rigid low-backed sofas set at modishly irregular angles under grand marble pillars, surrounded by walls of ‘real’ art, as she thought of it (the Frasers had had real art, too). The firm, she knew, occupied only cramped space on the less prestigious side of the building, the side that overlooked the service lane, but even so, in her current mood she was as intimidated as if she’d been summoned to Buckingham Palace. As she waited for Joe to come down, she scanned the passing faces as if seeing human beings for the first time; how preoccupied everyone was, intent to the point of blankness, neutered by professionalism. She felt invisible, irrelevant, expelled.
Mostly, she felt scared. Since leaving university sixteen years ago she had not once been out of work, starting as a secretary to her first account director, back when account directors had secretaries, and progressing with a steady if unspectacular momentum that had brought her to the point of being the natural choice to cover her latest director’s maternity leave. Correction: it had brought her to the point of being the natural choice to be made redundant. And now what? The economy was still in recession; manifestly, jobs like hers were being eliminated, not advertised. And yet the house –
Joe appeared then from one of the noiseless mirrored lifts, face alight at the sight of her, which was a small, sweet consolation never more gratefully taken.
‘I’ve lost my job,’ she announced, standing, and saw in his eyes how startled he was.
‘How much notice?’
‘Three months, but they’ve offered payment in lieu. I might as well take it and spend the time looking for something else.’ However Laurie liked to spin it, however Colette might later dress it up, she’d be leaving with very little compensation.
‘Agreed.’ He took her hand. ‘Sit down. You’re upset.’
She sank back onto the sofa. ‘What are we going to do, Joe? We can’t afford the mortgage without my salary. We could barely afford it with my salary.’ She could hear the panic rising in her throat and strangling her vowels; she could feel the blunt, kneeing sensation of desperation inside her ribcage as she gazed at him. Until now, until Lime Park, she had been the fixed one, the supporter and soother, he the ambitious hothead whose dashed hopes required gentle resurrection, and yet here she was having the irrational – and entirely unhelpful – thought that if he were to die or leave her she would not be capable of navigating the world without him. She would be adrift.
‘We can still just about manage it,’ he said, with a decent improvisation of command.
She shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think we can. I need to get another job straight away. But there’s nothing in advertising, I know that for a fact. Once you’re out, that’s it. I’ll have to retrain or start again at entry level, something completely different … How could I have assumed I was safe? I knew I went too far with the house stuff. I even left a client meeting one day to take a call from the mortgage broker – if I’d had any idea …’ Any idea that they were raising a fortune they’d have no hope of repaying for a house that would soon be repossessed. ‘God,’ she added, remembering that their new Internet provider had yet to live up to its name, having failed to turn up on the allotted day. ‘We’re not even online yet and my phone barely gets a signal in the house. How will I look for a job without basic communications?’
‘Don’t think about any of that yet,’ Joe said. Her hand was still in his and he drew it closer to him, as if to reel her ashore, the current having carried her in uncharted directions. ‘You’re shocked,’ he added gently. ‘That’s completely normal. Try not to panic. Plenty of couples survive on one salary and so will we.’
‘Do they have our colossal mortgage, though? Did they lose their minds and swap their tiny affordable flat for an enormous unaffordable house on a street where everyone hates them?’
Joe just smiled. ‘Nobody hates us. Now I’m really sorry, but I have to go back up before I …’ He stopped mid-sentence, eyes vague. Before I get the chop as well, he’d been going to say. ‘You head home, go for a walk, have a bath, try to relax. We’ll talk about this properly tonight.’
‘OK,’ she said, though she knew he most likely wouldn’t be home till eleven, by which time she hoped to be unconscious – there was nothing to be gained from extending a day like today, and already the oblivion of sleep was more tempting than any of the activities he had suggested. As she watched him walk back to the lifts, the sheer complicated bewilderment of their two intersecting fortunes lanced her with a sadness that almost made her cry out. It was as if she thought she’d never see him again.
Ferreting in her bag, she found half a tube of fruit pastilles and popped one onto her tongue like a pill, enjoying the brief, fraudulent comfort of sugar.
Her phone pinged: a text from Ellen.
‘Where did you go?’
Not ‘What happened?’ They all knew then; already, everybody knew.
She replied: ‘You safe?’ Unfair – and too late – to reflect that Ellen had joined the agency six months after she had.
‘So far,’ Ellen responded. ‘Are you coming back in?’
‘No. On way home.’
Disorientated, she made for the line that took her to her old flat in New Cross, before changing trains and heading towards Lime Park.
The wisteria was out. It joined the upper bays of numbers 38 and 40 like bunting strung for a street party. The air smelled clean and cut-grass sweet, like proper countryside air from early childhood – until the bin lorry came belching along, braking right outside the Davenports’ gate.
‘It’s just a setback,’ Joe told everyone, which was exactly the word Marcus used to use when Joe had been passed over – again – for partnership. And there was some comfort in noting that that had been just a setback, albeit one that had lasted several years.
They had had their proper talk. As Joe had explained, he was entitled to no share of equity in his promotion, but his basic salary had increased sufficiently to cover – by a hair’s breadth – their stupendous monthly mortgage payment and utility bills (it would help if they could survive till autumn without turning the heating on), and other essentials like his season ticket. Her parents had agreed to defer the private loan payments until she found another job. No one wanted them to starve.
‘Now might be the time to get pregnant,’ her mother said, inevitably, though she was kind enough to wait until their second conversation since the redundancy before doing so.
‘I’m not sure I should be considering having a baby on the basis that I’ve been fired and have no income,’ Christy said mildly, but right at the outset she knew she was in fact arguing against herself; the mother’s role was to voice the thoughts that the daughter was duty-bound to suppress.
Thoughts such as: ‘Perhaps you should have done it when Joe was keen? Years ago, do you remember?’
Of course she remembered. They had been in their late twenties when, influenced by nothing but instinct, Joe had briefly campaigned to start a family early and Christy, having finally made an upward job move following two sideways ones, had dissuaded him. The dynamic had not been without a certain satisfaction on her part. She’d felt strong-minded and pioneering, delighted not to be one of those women who issued ultimatums to their partners or got pregnant accidentally on purpose. Now she wondered how she could have allowed a fleeting moment of career confidence to have so defining an impact.
‘You’d have all the kids in school by now,’ her mother went on in her gently relentless way (‘all’? How many did she have in mind?), ‘and you’d just have to get on with it, redundancy or not, there’d be no choice in the matter. If you ask me, all choice does is give you more time to think of reasons not to get on with it.’
Christy sighed. In emotional conversations like this she could do no better than to echo Joe’s rationalism. ‘Mum, I’ve just lost my job and it really doesn’t feel like I have an awful lot of choice to do anythi
ng but devote myself to finding a new one. When I do, I’ll think about the next step.’
‘Fine. Well, I’m sure it’s not anything you haven’t discussed already yourselves.’
‘We discuss it all the time,’ Christy lied.
Just a setback, she recited silently. She was out of work but she was not faced with the wolf at the door quite yet. She could sense it in the undergrowth but she had not yet caught a glimpse of its tail.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I have got the right place, haven’t I?’
‘You have, yes, but the Frasers don’t live here any more.’
On her doorstep stood an unknown caller, a woman with a baby, this one not a neighbour but a friend of Amber Fraser. She was about Christy’s age, though Christy was faintly aware of having developed the habit of deluding herself that any new mother who crossed her path must surely be older than she was. The child was five or six months old, she judged; a chunky boyish armful with a downy head and wise eyes, he followed their conversation as if understanding every word spoken.
‘But I’ve come all the way from north London,’ the woman protested, as breathless as one who’d undertaken the voyage barefoot and scarcely made it to her destination alive, though she dangled car keys in plain sight. ‘It doesn’t make sense. When exactly did they leave?’
‘I’m not sure of the date,’ Christy said, ‘but they’d already gone when the house came on the market.’
‘But why? Amber said nothing to me about moving. They’d just moved in. They were going to raise a family here.’ She sent a narrow gaze over Christy’s shoulder as if expecting to see the Frasers chained to a radiator, gagged and helpless.
Christy nodded in patient agreement. She decided not to air her and Joe’s speculation about financial overreaching and terminal illness. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know why. I didn’t ever meet them. When did you last see them?’
There was a heavy sigh, as if the woman could not possibly be expected to recall such complicated information. ‘January, it must have been. They came up for lunch one Sunday. And now it’s May. It’s been at the back of my mind that I haven’t heard from her in ages. We normally text and I thought she must have lost her phone, but now I’ve discovered she’s closed her email account as well.’
‘What about Facebook?’
‘She isn’t on it. Nothing like that.’
‘That’s unusual,’ Christy remarked. Having come to imagine Amber Fraser as the model on the Vogue postcard (‘more Notting Hill than Lime Park’), she considered her exactly the type to post frequent visual evidence of her superior genes and enviable lifestyle. Indeed, Christy had planned, when back online, to google it.
‘She joked there were too many undesirables in her past and she wanted to cut them loose,’ said the friend, then, as if regretting this indiscretion, hastened on: ‘Anyway, I’ve asked the rest of the girls and they haven’t heard from her either. We thought she must be holed up with the flu or something.’ She stood for a moment, puzzling. ‘Was that Rob from next door I saw when I was pulling up? Heading to the park gates? He might know where she’s gone.’
‘I don’t know who you saw,’ Christy said, stating the obvious, ‘but the man who lives next door is a big guy, dark hair. Mid thirties.’
‘That’s him. Rob.’
So that was what he was called. Though she’d had no further sightings of him since the morning of Felicity’s departure, Christy had heard movements on the other side of her bedroom wall, the murmurs and sudden crescendos of television, sporadic bursts of music. The main door was seldom used more than once a day. She supposed he must be some sort of recluse.
‘He looks dreadful,’ said her visitor. ‘I didn’t recognize him at first and when I called his name he didn’t react, but it was him and he definitely knows me. We’ve met two or three times.’
‘He’s quite rude,’ Christy agreed. She wasn’t sure if she should be alarmed – or ashamed – by how eagerly she had set about gossiping, stockpiling the snippets this woman was supplying for analysis later.
‘Well, he didn’t used to be rude.’ The woman’s face creased in fresh bewilderment. ‘He used to be really good fun. What’s going on around here? Where on earth is Amber? Why hasn’t she told us her new address?’ With each unanswered question she was becoming increasingly distressed, her little boy looking on in fascination.
‘Why don’t you try one of the other neighbours,’ Christy suggested. ‘Did you ever meet Caroline or Liz?’
‘Yes, both of them! Which are their houses?’
Out of curiosity, Christy accompanied her to their doors, but neither woman was at home. ‘They must be picking up their kids from school,’ she said, noticing the time. She had quickly become versed in the rhythms of Lime Park Road, the brief frenzies of the school runs, the staggered departures and returns of the commuting adults.
‘I remember there was a retired lady Amber was chummy with,’ said the friend, straining for a name. ‘Lived downstairs from Rob?’
‘That must be Felicity,’ Christy said. ‘But she’s moved as well, I’m afraid.’
‘She has? She’d been here for donkey’s years. God, this is really starting to freak me out!’
‘Aren’t there any family members you can get in touch with?’ Christy asked, aware that she was making it sound as if the Frasers were dead. ‘Or colleagues?’
‘I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with Amber’s family. And she left work a year and a half ago, months before I did. That’s how we became friends, you see, through work.’
‘What about her husband? Might he be in the same job?’
At last the frown lifted. ‘That’s a good idea. Right, yes, I’ll try Jeremy’s office.’ Thus resolved, she smiled at Christy for the first time and turned to her car, a sky-blue Fiat 500 with a ‘Baby Onboard’ sticker. Christy imagined nursery rhymes playing on the stereo as they drove home, or perhaps an early-learning CD of times tables or Mandarin. ‘If you hear from her, would you tell her Imogen and Frankie came to visit?’
‘Of course.’
Christy watched from the gate as Imogen buckled Frankie into his car seat and started the engine, craning over her shoulder as she pulled away, as if not quite trusting that she’d got the right house.
As if not quite believing a word Christy had said to her.
Chapter 8
Amber, 2012
‘You look very nice,’ Hetty said, in that faintly accusatory way women of similar rank and attractiveness pay one another compliments. She’d noticed my blow-dry and make-up, incongruously glamorous in our chaotic encampment upstairs but much too time-consuming to have been left till after the meeting. The scheduling, while inconvenient, was deliberate: it would give me something to report to Jeremy later, something other than my primary activity of the day.
‘I hope you’re not distracting the team too much,’ Hetty added, only half playfully.
‘Oh, I’m keeping out of everyone’s way, don’t worry.’ I pretended to study the spreadsheets she offered, updated meticulously for our meetings, and to listen when she said important things like, ‘That bloody company in Milan, you know, the console for the main bathroom? I must have mailed them twenty times and they still haven’t given me a delivery date’ or ‘There’s a problem with the cloakroom towel rail. It’s out of stock, with an eight-week wait.’
I couldn’t have given a monkey’s about consoles and towel rails, but made notes nonetheless. I couldn’t rely on my memory today.
‘Want to get a sandwich when we’re finished?’ Hetty asked. ‘I’m not meeting my Richmond client till three.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve been invited next door for lunch.’
It was quite touching how delighted she was by this. ‘You’re really settling in, aren’t you? How long have you been here now? Silly question! Six weeks, the same as the works. Well, I’m not surprised you’re already so popular. You and Jeremy must be great neighbours, all that wine you keep handi
ng out; it’s more than most would do, believe me. And I have to say you’re my easiest clients by far.’
I imagined we were: a husband who had yet to attend a meeting, and a wife with a consuming new interest that dated from the very day she might have started to get under everyone’s feet.
‘This is my number,’ that first text had said, sent in front of Jeremy’s eyes at the Sellerses’ party. A second followed later in the evening, containing one word: ‘When?’
And I’d responded, Jeremy at the other end of the sofa, massaging my bare feet with his thumbs as he watched a third successive episode of Nurse Jackie:
‘Tuesday at 1?’
‘Yes.’
How thrillingly fast it had come around. It was five to when Hetty left; after a typically uncompromising examination of progress downstairs, she packed up her files and fired up her red Beetle convertible at the kerb, gamely driving into the damp spring day with the roof down. When living in Battersea and absorbed in the planning stages of the project, I’d looked forward to our meetings, to the rush of each new idea, the elation of green-lighting another lavish selection. But now I couldn’t wait to see her indicate left at the junction and disappear from view.
There was no lunch. Wine, yes. In the neighbourly spirit so praised by Hetty, I took a bottle with me in case he had none – though he didn’t seem the type to run a dry home. I’m not a sociopath: I couldn’t do this sober.
We stood at the counter of his unmodernized open-plan kitchen and took our first complicit sips. The blinds to the street were pulled low, sheer enough to create an artificial twilight in the room. I had never in my life been more conscious of two bodies: the pulses and twitches and shrugs and blinks, the beginnings of sweat on skin and saliva on lips.
‘I’m glad the drone isn’t too bad in here,’ I said, thinking how far away my house seemed from this side of the wall. It was going to be easier than I’d anticipated to cast it from my mind – and the marriage it contained.
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 9