The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Johnny Cash,’ she allowed. ‘And Elvis, of course.’

  ‘Everyone likes Elvis,’ I agreed. ‘He must have been irresistible when he was young, don’t you think?’

  Morsel of cake poised at the end of her fork, she looked at me with interest. ‘No man is irresistible,’ she said.

  Chapter 9

  Christy, May 2013

  Well, that was interesting, she thought, as a couple she had not yet met but who she suspected might live at number 46 (and in which case had declined her drinks invitation with neither apology nor explanation) crossed the street outside the Davenports’ house just moments after having crossed towards it. Their dog, a long-legged creature with a coat like lambswool, pulled at the lead in resistance before tripping after them to nose the base of a cherry tree on the opposite kerb. Though it was drizzling and hardly the weather for lingering, the pair stood in obviously contrived conference, heads down, lips moving like those of extras on a film set, mouthing but not speaking. The man had his hands in his pockets and the woman reached suddenly to grip his right forearm, as if restraining it – restraining him.

  Very curious behaviour.

  It was 11 a.m., the time of day when the street was at its most peaceful, the only sounds those of pre-school children in the playground in the park, the commuters long gone. Since this man was usually among them, he must have a day off or be working from home.

  She imagined Joe hearing her thoughts and laughing: Who cares who works from home? It’s his business, not yours. She reddened, but did not move from the window.

  It was then that she saw a figure hove into view from the opposite direction, passing the gates of numbers 48, 46, 44 … it was the churl from the flat next door, Rob – it seemed too approachable a name for one so abrasive – presumably returning home from some rare public appearance (frightening small children, perhaps, though he hardly need leave the street to do that). As he neared his own gate he slowed sooner than Christy was expecting – he’d noticed the couple crossing in front of him, perhaps; would he heckle them as he had Felicity that time? – and came to a halt by the Davenports’ wall. To her great horror he lifted his big bushy chin and stared up at the very window where she stood spying. Even allowing for the helpful dazzle of sunlight on glass, she knew he had seen her: there was no mistaking that glare – stark, hostile, menacing. Pointlessly, too late, she slid aside, fingering the curtain fabric for comfort, relieved by the peripheral sight of him on the move again, pacing past her gate and into his own.

  Returning to her original position, she was in time to watch the couple from number 46 re-cross the road and head towards their own gate. To her surprise, it was now this other man who turned to glower – in Rob’s direction – before his wife scurried back to take his arm and usher him towards home. Though he exclaimed angrily, it was clear from his wife’s consoling demeanour that the expletive was not directed at her.

  Goodness. What had that been about? There had been genuine loathing in number 46’s expression.

  It was only when all parties were safely indoors and the pavements clear once more that Christy registered a detail that had been staring her in the face. The hands of the man from number 46, they had no longer been stuffed in his pockets as he stood at his gate, they’d been free, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides. And the right one, if she remembered rightly, had been bandaged across the knuckles, as it would be if sprained or badly cut. The kind of injury you might get, perhaps, from punching someone in the face.

  ‘What do you think it meant?’ she asked Joe that night. Admittedly, this was possibly not the first subject he wished to discuss on coming home exhausted at 11 p.m., but it was hands-down the most remarkable thing that had happened to her that day.

  ‘I don’t know, but I think you might be becoming a bit obsessed,’ he said, as amused by her indignation at this suggestion as by the idea that she should be so curious in the first place. He, by contrast, was detached, just as she doubtless would have been had she still been working, the hours spent at home dwarfed by those in the office and too scarce and precious to be squandered on an audit of the neighbours’ comings and goings. He had considerably more attention for the large glass of wine he’d poured himself before even uttering a greeting.

  ‘How can I be obsessed? I’ve never mentioned this couple before. I’ve never even met them.’

  ‘I mean with the street generally. It’s like Rear Window or something. You’ll be telling me you’ve witnessed a murder next.’

  Christy laughed. ‘I suppose I’m bored. Job-hunting when there aren’t actually any jobs doesn’t take up a lot of my day. My mind must be looking for some other occupation.’

  ‘You’re not in plaster like James Stewart,’ Joe pointed out. ‘You do have the use of your legs. You’re allowed to leave the house, you know.’

  Thanks to the adrenalin of shock following her redundancy, she’d been filled at first with extraordinary energy, cramming her days with meetings with old contacts and headhunters and choosing to overlook the terms they used to describe the job market – ‘very quiet’, ‘a bit dead’, ‘not as buoyant as we’d like’ – until one consultant, confiding that she feared for her own job, had actually begun crying in front of her. Then she believed them. She’d quickly resolved that this universal pessimism would need to be counteracted short term by domestic accomplishment if she was not to succumb to it and, though there was no DIY to be done, she could clean. The Frasers had made countless improvements but they had not had the power to repel dust and the parquet flooring showed every last mote. And then there was the immense kitchen and the three bathrooms (two of which they had not yet used) and the downstairs cloakroom … Yes, this could be a full-time job if she applied herself to it conscientiously.

  And didn’t allow herself to get too distracted every time she passed a window.

  ‘I wish I could afford a gym membership,’ she said. Fitness was the saviour of many an unemployed white-collar worker, everyone knew that, but even with Joe’s promotion she was not about to dive deeper into debt for the joining fee required by Lime Park Club, a luxurious facility next to the primary school with a tantalizing olive-green pool you could glimpse through the glass. (Even with Joe’s promotion … She was using that phrase more and more, his accomplishment somehow recast as not quite enough to save their skin. He didn’t deserve that.)

  ‘You could go running?’ he suggested. ‘That costs nothing.’

  ‘You know I hate running. It hurts and I give up.’

  ‘That’s not much of a motto,’ Joe said, grinning. ‘“It hurts and I give up”?’

  She tugged at the drawstring of her pyjama bottoms, as if to tighten them was to remove an inch from her waistline. (In the first week of her redundancy she had imposed the rule that she should remain dressed for Joe’s return from work, but she had soon abandoned this wifely discipline and now asked of herself only that she remain awake.) ‘OK, so I’m not going to be hired as an ambassador for British Athletics. I just want to be hired, Joe. By anyone.’

  ‘Something will come up soon. You’ve got an interview lined up for the week after next, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but according to the headhunter that agency has a reputation for pulling budgets just when they’re about to make an offer.’ That was how it was now, the consultants had told her, cutting short the joy she’d felt on hearing she’d made her first shortlist, albeit for a role junior to the one she’d just lost. Multiple interview rounds seemed to be standard now, and it took companies months to get through the process and make a decision.

  But at least she was online again. Having given up the ghost of the cut-price supplier, she’d called the market leader and within hours was making use of the fibre-optic cables installed in the Frasers’ day. She didn’t need to phone her mother to be told that false economy was never a good idea.

  ‘It’s a numbers game,’ Joe said, refilling his glass (already?). ‘Eventually, your number will be up.’

&
nbsp; She raised her eyebrows, amused. ‘Would you like to rephrase that?’

  ‘Enjoy the break while you can, that’s what I say.’ Though he was claiming to envy her, she could tell that he would rather jump off a bridge than be at a loss as she was. He had developed a subtle new gravitas since being promoted, she noticed; he’d leave in the morning as if eager to make his mark on the world and he’d return in the evening with the air of having made it. It was very attractive.

  She, on the other hand, was reduced to what was starting to tip alarmingly close to being a nosy neighbour. Just as well she hadn’t confessed that the first thing she’d done when dusting down her laptop was not to job-search but to google the Frasers. She wanted to find out who they were and where they were now; she wanted to see if they still existed.

  Well, Jeremy Fraser did, she had established that at once. Amber Fraser’s friend Imogen would not have found it hard to locate him, for he was a founding partner of a digital branding firm called Identico.UK, its Kingsway address given on the company website. His biography in the ‘Our People’ section was crammed with business achievements and yet it felt featureless, devoid of personal details, as if he himself, in spite of his expertise, defied branding. The photograph showed a man of about fifty with cropped grey hair, his expression one of self-important vexation, as though the photographer had interrupted him in conference with the prime minister.

  Of Amber Fraser there was only an archived biography of a junior media-buyer role she’d held years ago, along with a list of clients she had looked after; she’d had ‘special responsibility’ for projects co-partnered with Identico.UK, which if nothing else at least hinted at how she and her future husband had met. Christy supposed that her marriage could have been relatively recent, any earlier references presumably involving her maiden name, which Christy did not know.

  Just as Imogen had said, she had no Facebook or Twitter presence. How had she put it? She wanted to cut loose undesirables from the past … It was an interesting choice of words.

  To Christy’s great disappointment, there was no photograph.

  Well, at least they had ended their inauspicious reign as new kids on the block, for the couple who’d bought Felicity’s flat had now moved in. Having learned from her mistakes, Christy did not knock at their door and introduce herself, but posted a ‘New Home’ card through the letter box and left it at that.

  Soon after, on the first day of spring to contain the promise of summer, a voice called to her over the garden wall (gardening being this week’s activity to promote mindfulness) and when she climbed onto a tree stump to peer over she found a woman of approximately her own age, raven-haired, olive-skinned and – inevitably – pregnant, radiantly so.

  ‘Hi there, are you Christy? Thank you for your card!’ She introduced herself as Steph, distinguishing herself at once from the rest of the Lime Park Road population by making eye contact and smiling broadly. ‘Oh, and we found your note about the drinks party as well, but we hadn’t moved in then. Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Christy said, flashing to an image of Joe and her standing on either side of a tray of unused champagne flutes.

  ‘You’ll have to tell us what everyone’s like around here.’

  Christy hesitated. ‘I’m not sure I know myself yet. They keep themselves to themselves a bit.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Steph said. ‘I’ve been getting around that by accosting people in the street.’

  Given the tensions she’d observed, Christy wondered if this was the best strategy.

  ‘So far I’ve waylaid Joanne and Kenny at number 46’ – Christy made a mental note of the names of the couple she’d spied in that cryptic interaction with Rob – ‘and Caroline and Richard next to you. Caroline seems to be the unofficial social secretary of the street, doesn’t she?’

  So Caroline did preside, just as she’d suspected. ‘You’ve talked to her?’

  ‘Yes, I bumped into her with her kids in the park yesterday. She was really helpful.’

  ‘She was?’ Christy tried to keep the incredulity from her voice.

  ‘Even before I told her where I lived, she’d already filled me in on the local nurseries, primary school admissions, the lot. She said if it weren’t for the great schools, they’d have moved on by now. Liz was there as well. Her boys are so gorgeous. You know she’s a single mother?’

  ‘Ah.’ Christy knew she’d made a mistake with Liz in not welcoming the offspring with open arms. As Steph chattered on, it became clear that in a matter of days she had had far greater success in engaging the natives than Christy had in several weeks, which rather contradicted her suspicion that it was the street that was at fault. Christy could only put Steph’s advantage down to the fact of her pregnancy; I’m being punished for my lack of breeding, she thought, pleased with the joke if not the situation. That, well, it could only grow more painful by the day – if she allowed it to.

  ‘I find that no one turns down a pregnant woman,’ Steph continued. ‘We naturally attract advice givers, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘You’re not … ?’

  ‘No.’ Christy chose to interpret the question as the standard one of whether she had any children rather than whether she was expecting a baby, not as outrageous a suggestion as it sounded in light of the shapeless clothing she’d taken to wearing for her long days of domesticity. ‘It’s just me and my husband.’

  ‘In that big place?’

  ‘I know.’ All that square footage so marvelled at by their families as a luxury for two had come to be an uneasy abstraction for one woman (lugging a vacuum cleaner, generally), the rooms beyond recognition from the Frasers’ day. When they’d first viewed the house, she and Joe had admired item after item, the elegant little tables with jugs of fresh flowers, clusters of quirky, mismatching chairs, beautiful woven rugs at every step; by the time of their second viewing, most had been removed, but there had remained in the air itself the stamp of the Frasers, the scent of their wealth and style. Now, under the Davenports, there was no stamp, no scent, and Christy knew that if Steph asked for a tour she would be embarrassed to give it.

  Steph turned to survey her new territory. ‘Obviously we’d have loved to buy a whole house, but not with the prices on this street. You have to compromise on something, don’t you?’

  ‘You do.’ Staring her own compromise in the face, Christy tried to judge how many months pregnant Steph was; the bump looked solid and established. Soon there was going to be a tiny baby next door. How easy would it be then to suppress her desires?

  ‘Garden flats on this road hardly ever come on the market,’ Steph continued. ‘We’d been looking for months and months.’

  ‘I think it’s only our two properties that have been up for sale recently.’ Christy paused. ‘Did you happen to ask Felicity why she was moving out?’

  ‘Felicity?’

  ‘The woman who owned your flat before you.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. No, we never met, but the agent said she was getting too old to live on her own and was moving to the country to be closer to her daughter.’

  It sounded reasonable enough, though Christy remembered a perfectly sprightly woman manoeuvring with ease into her friend’s car; she’d looked to be in her early seventies, which was not elderly these days.

  ‘I wish I had met her, though,’ said Steph. ‘We’ve got a couple of questions about the boiler and the solicitor doesn’t have her new address or phone number.’

  Christy frowned. The fact of the Frasers and Felicity having put their houses up for sale at the same time was a plausible enough coincidence, but for neither to have left a forwarding address when they went, was that not remarkable? And what was more, both parties had moved out weeks earlier than they were legally required to, well in advance of their completion dates; having first-hand experience of the time-sensitive juggling act demanded of most Londoners vacating one property and installing themselves
in another, Christy knew this to be a highly unusual luxury.

  Steph tugged half-heartedly at a dried twig in her privet. ‘I have a horrible feeling the garden might end up being my department – when I can bend over again properly, that is. Felix is about as far from green-fingered as you can get, but kids need outside space, don’t they? And Rob’s offered to mow the grass, which I’ll definitely take him up on.’

  ‘Rob upstairs?’ Christy said doubtfully.

  ‘Yes, have you met him yet?’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen him.’ She decided to leave it at that. ‘Do you share the garden then?’

  ‘No, it belongs to the lower flat. But he’s always mowed the lawn, he says.’

  He must have done it as a favour to Felicity, Christy thought; before their dispute. The grass now was calf-height.

  ‘I should invite you all for a drink one evening, but to be honest, I’m in bed most nights by nine-thirty.’ She and Felix were both accountants, Steph said, working for the same Blackfriars-based firm. She asked Christy what she did and, when presented with the information, offered the standard platitudes, while Christy, in turn, felt the already-familiar sadness of having been dispossessed by the working world.

  ‘Well, if you’re still off when I go on maternity leave, we’ll have to have a coffee,’ Steph said.

  ‘That would be great,’ Christy said, meaning it. Steph was by anyone’s standards bright and friendly, exactly the sort of neighbour she’d hoped for. ‘Or if I’m back at work, one weekend, perhaps?’

  Another two months, she thought. I’ll be working again by July, surely. And maybe, by then, Rob will be cutting my lawn.

  The next time she saw him she astonished herself with a childlike explosion of indignation. Approaching each other at the park gates, they would have collided had she not scuttled aside at the last minute.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she cried, but he did not acknowledge her, let alone apologize, and she turned on her heel to hurry after him, damned if she wasn’t going to be treated civilly as Steph had been. That amiable exchange over the garden wall had reminded her she had every right to expect common courtesy from those who inhabited rooms just metres from hers. ‘Excuse me? It’s Rob, isn’t it?’