He spun abruptly, causing her to come to an immediate standstill if she was to avoid a clash a second time, and bore down on her with an unnerving glower. All that hair created a barrier, which was, she could only assume, the purpose for its having been grown in the first place. His eyes, however, were easy enough to read: bleak, wary, expectant of irritation. And there was a bruise, at least the last faded remnants of one. She wondered what he would say if she mentioned Kenny’s name, that bandaged hand she’d noticed, and felt a shiver of fear.
‘What?’ He took a step closer and she caught his smell, earthy, damp, male.
She swallowed, grappling for the right key. ‘I wanted to introduce myself properly. Christy Davenport. I’ve just moved into the house next door. Did you ever get our note? We invited you for drinks, but we didn’t hear back from you.’
‘Don’t know anything about it.’ Though his voice was soft, no more than an undertone, it was sullen, unrepentant.
‘I posted the card myself. We’re at number 40, the Frasers’ old house? I don’t know if you knew them very well?’
‘Is there a particular reason you’d like to know?’ He scowled now, wariness replaced by naked antipathy.
Though taken aback, Christy did not show it. She knew a bully when she met one and had no intention of serving herself up as his victim. ‘No, of course not, it’s just a friendly question.’
The scowl deepened. ‘Well, you’ve picked the wrong man. I’ve got no interest in “friendly questions”, especially when I’m the subject of them.’
‘You’re not the subject of any questions,’ she protested.
‘Yeah, right.’ He spat the words at her in disdain. ‘That’s fucking credible.’
‘Credible?’ (Fucking credible?)
There was a tense silence, during which she had the idea he might actually strike her. She wished her chest were not heaving so visibly. ‘Look, whatever your problem is, it’s nothing to do with me and it would be nice if you could speak to me with a little more respect since we’re new neighbours.’
‘Take it easy,’ he said, as if it were she who was out of order – more than that, deranged, causing him to calculate the most effective means of withdrawal from a dangerous situation. ‘I think you’re getting yourself a bit worked up, love.’
Love? Though his face rearranged itself more favourably, there was a subtle attitude of cruelty to his expression, as if it entertained him to toy with her.
Courtesy and respect forgotten, she cried, ‘Oh, screw you!’ and turned from him in indignation, marching past her own house and down the Sellerses’ path, her pulse throbbing painfully. Rob did not pursue her, of course, he couldn’t have cared less; by the time she’d reached the door of number 42 he’d doubtless already cast her from his mind.
At the second ring, Caroline Sellers came to the door, one hand dangling a scorched Cath Kidston double oven glove. ‘Hello?’ She looked doubtful that the interruption was going to be worth her dereliction of domestic duties.
‘I won’t keep you long, Caroline, I know you’re very busy, but I have a question, one question, and I’d be very grateful if you would answer it.’
‘OK,’ Caroline said.
‘Is there something I should know?’
Caroline just stared at her in mild horror.
‘I mean, about my house? Is there something wrong with it, something our search didn’t pick up on that’s caused bad feeling? Did the Frasers drive everyone mad with their building works? Because there has to be a reason why people are being so weird with us.’
It was necessary, that plural, though she was under no illusions as to its dishonesty, for Joe remained untroubled by the Lime Parkers’ lacklustre welcome; he said he had no desire to socialize with a whole new group when he barely had the time (or the finances) for the old one.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your house,’ Caroline said at last, her energy as contained as Christy’s was unstable. ‘And everyone was perfectly civilized about the renovations. The Frasers handled it very sensitively.’
There was a child’s cry from inside the house, followed by the sudden appearance of a sticky-faced boy at Caroline’s side, his hands groping her clothing as he pleaded to get back to the chocolate crispy cakes they were making. As if to signal the end of the exchange, Caroline slipped her free hand into the other pocket of the oven glove and crossed her arms, giving the appearance of having been put in a straitjacket. ‘Look, maybe we can talk another time, but right this minute I’m a bit …’ She was being tugged backwards; there were three children now, Christy saw, possibly four. One was Rupert; did that mean Liz was here too?
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘you don’t have time. Future taxpayers and all that.’ And having apparently lost all sense of the decorum she demanded of others, she turned from her neighbour and left the premises without saying goodbye.
As soon as she got home she went to her laptop and typed ‘land registry’ into the search bar. An easy succession of pages later and there it was, the price paid data for 40 Lime Park Road. The Frasers’ purchase had been registered in April 2012, their own in March 2013; the Frasers had been in residence for three weeks short of a year. Not only that, but they had paid more for the house than they’d sold it for. Percentage-wise, their loss was tiny, but given the six-figure sum they must have invested in the refurbishment, it did not, as Amber’s friend Imogen had so starkly pointed out, make any sense at all.
‘You still have no blinds on the windows? After six months?’
In a welcome reunion Skype with Yasmin, Christy couldn’t help noticing similarities between her friend’s temporary apartment in a high rise of ex-pat apartments in the Far East and her own permanent ‘dream’ home. The general effect was of luxury – immaculately finished walls, lakes of pristine flooring, door after door promising spacious zones beyond – but the details were missing. The bits that made the space home; the soul.
‘No,’ Yasmin said, laughing. ‘There’s nothing to hide behind when I’m spying on my neighbours.’
To Christy’s great relief and pleasure, Yasmin had responded to her speculation about her new neighbours with all the sympathy – and keenness to pry – that Joe preferred not to demonstrate.
‘It all sounds very suspicious. If I were you, I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth and phone this Fraser guy at his office. I can’t believe you haven’t done that already.’
‘But what would I say? “I’m incurably nosy and demand to know why you sold your house at a loss and disappeared off the face of the earth”? It’s none of my business.’
‘So what? Explain that you’re struggling to settle in. Ask him what you asked oven-glove lady: is there anything wrong with the house?’
‘He’ll think I’m mad,’ Christy said.
‘Then let him!’
Ending the call, she sat at the kitchen table for all of sixty seconds before pulling up the Identico.UK website and locating the contact details. Her fingers tapped in the number for the main switchboard.
‘Identico.UK?’
She inhaled, throat as dry as if she’d breathed in sand. ‘Jeremy Fraser, please.’
There was a moment of terrified anticipation as the call was put through – should she really be doing this without having consulted Joe? – but the sensation dissolved in an instant when a second female voice came on the line. For this was one of those discreet, apologetic women who tended to be used for acts of diplomacy, such as the breaking of bad news: ‘You’re looking for Jeremy, I hear? Can I help?’
‘Er, no, I need to speak to him directly,’ Christy said.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. He’s on a sabbatical at the moment.’
She hadn’t expected that. ‘What sort of a sabbatical?’ she asked boldly.
The woman paused. ‘It’s a long-service award. Can I take your name? I’m sure someone else here will be happy to look after you.’
‘No, it’s Jeremy I wanted. How long will he be away for?’<
br />
‘I don’t know for sure, but a little while longer, certainly. Who shall I say called?’
‘No one. Thank you.’ Christy rang off, fingers already emailing Yasmin with an update.
And though she couldn’t say why, she was faintly relieved to have ended the exchange none the wiser.
Caroline Sellers had been mistaken: there was something wrong with the house, as a subsequent spell of wet weather soon revealed. A leak in the roof had saturated the wall of the front room at the top and the plasterboard was bowing. Joe poked a hole into it and collected the dripping water in a bucket, which Christy was responsible for emptying twice daily (at last, structure to her day!). Roofers came and quoted sums the Davenports couldn’t possibly afford, while the insurance company declined to have any involvement, which came as no surprise since they’d scrimped on their policy.
In a fit of exasperation, she phoned to complain to the solicitor who’d handled their conveyancing, but he as good as told her the house had been a bargain and she’d be well advised to quit while she was ahead.
‘But shouldn’t the Frasers have declared it on the forms if there was something structurally wrong?’
‘Not if they didn’t know about it. It would have been for your surveyor to pick up on and if he didn’t draw it to your attention then he can’t have thought it significant. Perhaps the damage is new?’
Christy seemed to remember that the surveyor had not had access to the roof the day he called. She and Joe had galloped on with the purchase regardless. ‘The roofers say it’s old storm damage,’ she said stubbornly.
‘Well, be that as it may, I’m afraid your options are limited. All I can do is contact the vendors’ solicitor and express your concerns.’
‘Don’t get cross,’ Joe told her, later. ‘We’ll work something out. Dad said he’d ask around for a cheap roofer who might come south.’
‘I just feel so frustrated, Joe.’
‘It’s all part of having a house and not a flat. There’s no management company to do this boring stuff for us. No need to stress out.’
She sighed. ‘Yasmin says it’s part of the emotional process of redundancy. There are stages, like grief. This stage is anger. Next comes paralysis, apparently – I’m looking forward to that.’
‘I see.’ Joe looked at her with interest, perhaps the faintest tinge of caution. ‘Who is it you’re angry with? Me?’
‘Of course not!’ she exclaimed. ‘Never think that.’
‘Who then? Laurie, I suppose?’
There was a pause. ‘I think myself,’ Christy said.
Awed by its elemental power, she sought to exhaust her anger by the simplest means at her disposal: cleaning. The master en suite was the latest to succumb to her furious scrubbing, though Lord knew how you were supposed to clean copper. (After pricing the tub online and finding it had cost not hundreds of pounds but thousands, she had seriously contemplated removing and selling it: that would pay for the bloody roof repairs.) The position of the tub under the window made it awkward to reach the strip of floor tile behind it, but such was her mood she refused to be beaten, and on her knees, at full stretch, she poked a damp cloth at the last elusive patch. There was a sudden scratching sensation, a hard object lodged against the skirting board, and with some effort she managed to hook it and slide it towards her.
It was a bangle. She took off her rubber gloves and turned it over in her palm, rubbing away the dust to find a beautiful narrow silver band with a clasp made of two interlocking pieces of amber. There was no engraving, but it was not hard to guess its owner.
After trying it on, first on one wrist and then the other, Christy took it into the bedroom and placed it in her small jewellery box, covering it with a skein of beads so Joe wouldn’t notice it.
Two days later, the solicitor rang her back. ‘I’m happy to report that the Frasers’ solicitor has been authorized by his client to pay for your roof repairs. If you would email me the invoice, I’ll pass it on.’
‘Really?’ Christy was amazed. She had never for a moment expected such a fortunate outcome.
‘Evidently Mr Fraser wishes to pre-empt any sort of dispute. But his goodwill is on the condition that any issues that arise from now on are agreed to be your responsibility.’
‘Of course.’ Christy said, humbled. ‘Can I have his new address so I can write to thank him?’
‘I’m told he prefers not to make direct contact on the matter.’
‘But I have some mail for him and his office says he’s taken a sabbatical.’
‘Then I suggest you post any items to this office and I’ll forward them to his representative.’
With this the solicitor ended the call.
When she reported their windfall to Joe, he was reserved in his praise. Maybe it was her guilty conscience, but it was almost as if he thought she’d done something dishonourable, that she’d deliberately conned the Frasers.
‘I’ll send a nice thank you with the redirected mail,’ she promised.
‘You mean we’ve still got that?’ He frowned at her. The lines on his forehead were scored deeper these days. ‘I thought you’d sent it on ages ago? There could be something important in there, Christy.’
She had no excuse; certainly not that she’d been too busy.
‘I’ll send it from the office if you like. I know you might be too angry or paralysed to remember.’ The frown was gone and he was smiling at her now, even reaching for a hug. Somehow she had had the luck to marry the world’s most forgiving man.
‘Thank you.’ Bundling the mail into a package for him, along with a note of grateful thanks to the Frasers, she noticed the letter to Amber Fraser in the white envelope with the stamp of ‘Private & Confidential’. Seeing it again, she felt a surge of desire to keep it, just as she had the key ring and now the amber bangle. She laid it aside for a moment, filled with a kleptomaniac’s elation. Then, at last, she slipped it with the others into Joe’s work bag.
The cheque for the roof came not long after, signed by Jeremy Fraser. Ashamed by then, Christy wished she were in a position to rip it up and forget it.
But she was not. And the roof, at least, would be fixed.
Chapter 10
Amber, 2012
I know I’ve made it sound like I used to be some sort of junkie slut, crawling home on my hands and knees, living by my wits, but it wasn’t nearly as squalid as that. I held down a job, I paid my rent. At the risk of coming off like one of Felicity’s country music legends, I had a heart and I trusted its truth. But I’d left home for London soon after my eighteenth birthday and by the time I was in my late twenties I’d been partying pretty much uninterrupted for over a decade. I’d reached the point where I was becoming less discerning about who I drank with, who I slept with, whose unlicensed taxi I clambered into on the rare occasions I went home alone at the end of the night.
And I was in danger of wrecking my appearance. Twenty-nine was young on paper but it was starting to look old in the mirror. Another year of hard living and I’d lose my shine altogether.
The end of the era came in sadly predictable form: an office affair turned sour. I won’t go into it in detail – there’s no space here for that story – but the bones are that I’d had a one-night stand with my line manager, Matt, and had decided it should remain just that, one night, best forgotten, naively believing that I would be able to carry on in my job without interference (after all, he wasn’t the first man I’d dallied with in that team). But Matt wanted an encore and turned vindictive, issuing a series of warnings before dismissing me and forcing me to take the matter to a tribunal. It was expensive and humiliating and even before I arrived for the hearing I knew that, regardless of the panel’s decision, I was not going to have the stomach to return to work and spend another minute in his company.
‘You should have gone back,’ Jeremy told me later, ‘even if it was just for a few weeks. It’s the principle of the thing. It sends a message to other men who think it’s accept
able to harass their female colleagues.’
‘Maybe I would have if I’d known you then,’ I sighed. But I’d been alone, I had lacked the support of a man like him, of any man frankly, and so I’d made the decision to walk away.
In any case, I was ready to make my life over. It is an exhilarating thing to change your industry, your friends, your wardrobe, your ways. I would have liked to have changed my address too, but a move from the studio flat I rented in Old Street proved too complicated and so I simply stopped answering the doorbell. I got a new mobile phone line, which put paid to the calls that came when the doorbell went unanswered, and I closed my Facebook and email accounts, truly a liberating exercise in itself. Three months passed without my drinking or smoking, which broke the back of the latter habit if not the former. I eliminated illegal substances, with no exceptions.
No sooner was I settled in my new media-buyer job than I’d met Jeremy at the Identico.UK summer party. That same night I went home and sobbed tears of gratitude at the memory of his gentleness and his certainty – qualities not combined in my previous beaus of choice – and at the prospect of having those qualities in my future life. For, unlike his predecessors, Jeremy was not in thrall to experience but a beneficiary of it; he’d stepped off the ride long ago. His idea of a good night was to stretch out on his sleek grey-wool Ligne Roset sofa with a box set and a decent bottle of wine.
And soon it was mine too, along with civilized outings with a new set of workmates, outings that involved cocktails in smart hotel bars and taxis booked in advance. No one smoked, no one did drugs, no one screamed in the street or wept on the night bus or took home the last man she’d laid eyes on – bewildered, unfocused 3 a.m. eyes.
We were nice girls.
It was this particular set of girlfriends who’d been clamouring to visit us in our new house in Lime Park from the moment we’d moved in. We’d invited very few guests, preferring to meet in central London until the house could be officially unveiled.
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 12