‘It’s in a complete state, why don’t you wait till there’s something worth seeing,’ I pleaded, but they persisted and insisted and I eventually relented. Since the kitchen was still off-limits, I tore off the tape around the sitting-room door, freed the sofas of their dust sheets and set up drinks in there. Having sealed the room off since the first day of the build, I’d forgotten how lovely it was with its grand bay, high ceilings and pale marble fireplace. When the new flooring went down and the decorating was done – Hetty had ordered limited-edition Ralph Lauren fabric from the States to upholster the window seat – it would be a beautiful and tranquil place to sit, but for now I made do with a jug of lilacs on the mantelpiece and a trio of my favourite Diptyque candles, the ones that Jeremy dropped into my lap every so often like tributes.
First, I showed them the garden.
‘Oh my God, it’s like a wood down at the bottom!’ Helena exclaimed. ‘It’s enormous!’
‘Only compared to the little courtyards in London,’ Gemma told her.
I didn’t bother to point out that Lime Park was London. This expression of awe at the space one could buy for the same money as a shoebox somewhere central (the subtext being that any stylish urbanite would prefer the shoebox), it was all part of the ritual enjoyed by those who’d lived their whole lives with the luxury of choice. They didn’t know they were born, these girls. ‘We’ve got our own little access gate to the park, look.’
‘You could let in secret admirers that way,’ Imogen giggled, not knowing she’d made a genuinely helpful suggestion.
‘How did you even find out about this area?’ Gemma said, speaking as if we’d chanced upon a remote hamlet not yet known to the folks at Ordnance Survey.
‘Jeremy’s always liked it around here,’ I said. ‘He knew it when there was an art school here, when he was at the LSE. He used to come to student parties here.’ My thoughts drifted to the girl he’d got pregnant at college, the nearest he’d come to being a father: perhaps she’d been one of the friends based down here, a long-haired art student with a fateful artlessness regarding contraception. Strange how life brought you full circle like that.
‘Will he be home this evening?’ Imogen asked. ‘You know how much we love our Distinguished Older Gent.’ This was their nickname for Jeremy and another tiresomely persistent part of the ritual: to remark on how attractive he was for his age – as if he were knocking on the door of seventy.
‘No, he has a partners’ dinner this evening. He sends his love.’
‘Is he always late?’ Helena asked. ‘Do you get lonely then, all the way out here?’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Listen to your questions! It’s not the middle of the moors, you know, it’s still the city. And I have new friends on the street if I’m bored.’
‘Talking of which, someone’s waving at us,’ Imogen said. It was, naturally, Rob’s window she indicated, his bedroom window, the mirror image of the first-floor room Hetty and I had earmarked for Jeremy’s study. (Actually, it was earmarked for the baby’s room, but I wasn’t about to tempt fate with pastels.)
‘That’s Rob,’ I said equably. I was so in control of myself you could have taken my blood pressure and found not the slightest deviation from the norm. ‘He works from home, so I see him a lot. We’ve become quite good chums.’
‘Straight or gay?’ Helena wanted to know.
‘Straight.’
‘Then what are you waiting for, get him to come and have a drink with us!’
‘I thought this was a girls’ night,’ I objected. But a pair of single women in their thirties who had not been heavily sedated were not about to pass up the opportunity to tussle over an unattached male, and when Rob drew up the sash and leaned out to call hello, I obligingly invited him to join us.
‘I can only stay for one,’ he said when he arrived. ‘I’m going out tonight.’ We were in the sitting room with our drinks, Rob positioned snugly between Helena and Gemma on the smaller of the two sofas. It entertained me hugely to see the predator turned prey, trapped between two competing hunters.
‘Doing anything special?’ Helena asked him, with an artificial, over-familiar charm that would have made me want to draw her aside and advise more successful strategies – had I not been using them on him myself.
‘Not if the first time we went out was anything to go by,’ Rob said with a wicked look, and they began playfully to scold him, demanding to know what kind of girl stirred so little spirit in a man – and, more importantly, what kind stirred more. I wondered if he was feigning indifference to his date for my benefit. There’d been several, I knew, since the trainee teacher; he was a womanizer all right, albeit one who didn’t have to try very hard. Did he sleep with other women on the days he slept with me? I tended to put Jeremy off on the nights following an assignation next door, though it wasn’t going to be possible to maintain that discipline long term. (Long term? Hadn’t I assumed we would last – at most – as long as the building works? Building works that motored along on schedule and, according to Hetty, were about to hit the pain barrier before easing downhill towards the home straight.)
We’d last met two days ago, our fourth liaison, as frantic and delicious as the others, as aerobic a session as any I’d get at the gym. ‘I went with Rob for a coffee in the café in the park,’ I’d told Jeremy in the evening, when he asked if I’d had a good day; I knew I would need to vary this to avoid coffee becoming a euphemism for fuck. ‘We’re going for lunch with Caroline next week and I have a feeling we might become a little trio.’
‘I’m glad you’ve got some local friends,’ he said, and now the girls were glad too.
‘He’s fantastic,’ Helena said, after he’d gone. ‘Don’t you just know he’d be great in bed?’
I joined Imogen in her protestations. ‘How can you possibly tell that after ten minutes?’ I said, with perfect primness, as if the thought had never crossed my mind. It was becoming clear to me that deception was purely a matter of confidence; one did not even need imagination.
‘Oh, he just has that vibe,’ Helena said.
He certainly did.
Left restless by him (weren’t we all?), she got to her feet to appraise the dimensions of the room, the huge bay window and glamorous fireplace, and then fixed me with good-natured accusation. ‘Trust you, Amber.’
‘Trust me what?’
‘To land on your feet like this. You deserve it, of course.’ It wasn’t cool to spell out what she meant: that when the four of us had first shared a corner of the office, we’d all been – at least for a brief period – single, each unsure of what the future held, and now I alone had everything, right down to the eye candy for a neighbour. If they only knew just how extensive my everything was.
‘We need a proper shot at him,’ she said, returning to the sofa and the indentation of our departed guest. ‘Can’t you have a house-warming and invite us all?’
‘I will, just as soon as the house is finished.’
‘When will that be?’
‘Soon. Late August probably.’ And for the second time in a matter of minutes the prospect struck me as undesirably close.
‘I didn’t think there’d be anyone like that down here,’ Gemma said.
‘Lucky I’m so thick-skinned or I could be offended by that,’ I said, pulling a face. I’d forgotten how by the end of the working week I’d used to tire of Gemma’s slyly critical commentary; meeting in this new context somehow accelerated that. While the others accepted the received wisdom that the beautiful bird catches the worm (early or late), she harboured ideas that it just wasn’t fair.
She looked at me with her signature half malice. ‘Rob reminds me a bit of that guy we ran into once. Obviously he’s much more attractive, but they have a similar look.’
I frowned. ‘Which guy?’
‘You know, in that bar.’ She sighed, casually forgetful. ‘You said you’d had a thing with him?’
There was a time when this could have applied to any
man in any bar, but my social life had been genteel enough since I’d known this group for me to be able to identify the match in seconds. ‘Oh, you must mean Matt.’
I’d forgotten they’d met. It must have been a couple of years ago now. Gemma and I had been in a bar in Covent Garden together when a shambling figure passed by our table, turning abruptly back and gesturing towards me with an unlit Marlboro.
‘Amber, is it you?’ His thickened voice betrayed the thousands of cigarettes he’d smoked before this one.
‘Matt,’ I said. I introduced him to Gemma. ‘He used to be my team leader when I worked in customer service,’ I told her.
She looked as if she knew exactly what sort of euphemisms they were.
Matt, meanwhile, was agog at my physical transformation. ‘I can’t believe it, you look so …’ But no adjective could be found to describe me adequately (‘clean’, I wanted to supply; ‘fully clothed’). ‘What are you doing these days?’
I gave him a breezy summary, lightly running French-manicured nails over the printed silk of my shirt. ‘Being fired by you turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me,’ I finished, beaming.
He looked not so much crestfallen at this remark as physically diminished by it. I’d heard a year or two after the hearing that his own career had not flourished in the aftermath.
‘How about you, Matt? You’re looking well, too.’ I was aware of Gemma’s incredulous expression and it made me want to giggle. The truth was he looked rough as hell. Though my age, he had not yet drawn the conclusion that there were only so many hundreds of times you could extend a night with drugs before it began to damage your skin, your hair, your youth. His clothes gave off that nauseating blend of stale cigarette smoke, human sweat and city grime, as if they hadn’t been changed after half a dozen nights out. He must still be tumbling straight from bed to work, then off to the pubs and clubs, and back to bed again in the small hours. Judging by his grey neck, regular showers were one of the many elements of a wholesome life he’d sacrificed. I had two a day now, one at the gym before work and one before sliding into bed with Jeremy in our Battersea bedroom high above the river.
‘Are you still in the same job?’ I asked.
‘No, I do bar work now. A place out in Walthamstow.’
Though Gemma recoiled fractionally at the words ‘bar work’ and ‘Walthamstow’, I smiled on. ‘And are you married yet?’
He put the cigarette to his lips, needing its touch, though of course he would have to wait until he was outside to light up. ‘Divorced. I married Lesley, but it didn’t last – obviously.’
I tilted my head, eyes blank. ‘Remind me who Lesley was?’
He stared. ‘Remember, she transferred from the Bristol call centre?’
‘That’s right. You were her team leader too, weren’t you? Well, good to see you again,’ I said, thinking just the opposite.
‘Who was that?’ Gemma asked, with fearful contempt, the moment he was out of earshot. ‘He smelled.’
‘An old manager of mine. We had a fling. He was slightly more fragrant then.’
‘Well, he’s not at all like Jeremy.’
The way she said this, prurient, almost thrilled, implied that Jeremy must surely be unaware of my previous lifestyle choices, whereas in fact I’d told him my story as soon as we’d met – or certainly enough of it for any romanticization on his part to be as much a kindness to me as to him. Between us we’d settled on the notion that I’d been some kind of wild child, a free spirit whom no one had been able to domesticate until he came along and stopped the rot.
Now, in my lofty sitting room in Lime Park, the scent of lilacs sweetening our nostrils, the others rushed to atone for Gemma’s latest slur. ‘Oh, she doesn’t mean everyone down here must be boring, Amber, especially not you! You could never be boring, you’ll totally make this the place to be …’
But I was far too pleased with myself to really care what Gemma thought. ‘I love it here,’ I told them. ‘And to be honest, when we moved in I thought myself it might be a bit dull, but it turns out I haven’t met a single dud.’ This was in fact quite true; yes, one resident had claimed the greater part of my attention, but the others were an agreeable bunch too. Among other dates in my diary was one to take Caroline and Liz shopping. (I had a plan to divert them to my hairdresser’s while we were at it, see if I couldn’t do something about those farmers’ wives’ haircuts.)
‘Have you noticed anything about Imogen?’ Gemma said, and all at once I became aware of an air of concealment, subterfuge in the group.
‘No, what?’
‘Look at her properly, go on!’
‘OK.’ But Imogen seemed exactly the same to my eye. Weight loss would be the usual cause for excitement of this pitch, but I couldn’t cite this when she looked, if anything, a little heavier than the last time I’d seen her; women tended to be intolerant of disingenuousness or bluff on this, if no other, subject. What then? We were too young for Botox, and news of anything surgical, like Helena’s breast enlargement, would have been aired long before the event, not after.
‘Is your hair shorter?’ I asked her. ‘You’re growing out your highlights?’
‘No, not that,’ Gemma said, answering for her, then offered a clue: ‘She hasn’t drunk any of her wine, have you noticed?’
‘Sadly,’ Imogen conceded.
‘Not sadly, Imogen! It’s awesome news!’
‘She’s pregnant!’ They sang it out, a chorus of hallelujahs, and I understood then something I hadn’t understood before: they all saw having a baby as the summit of female ambition, the solution to the puzzle of life, the cure for all disappointment. Did I? Well, apparently not, since I’d just been luxuriating in the notion that I had everything and yet had not included a baby in that reckoning. If I was honest, recently it felt as if I was using the idea of starting a family to justify my idleness; I’d said I wanted to so often it felt like a line in a play, uttered with perfect conviction every night and twice a week in matinees, but, in the end, the author’s thoughts, not mine. Was that the missing link in my otherwise seamless reinvention of myself? Was that the trapdoor by which Rob Whalen had entered?
Did I actually want a family?
I hugged Imogen. ‘That’s wonderful news, I’m so happy for you and Nick.’
‘And how about you and Jeremy?’ she said warmly. She was a really nice girl, far too sweet to preen or gloat. ‘Any luck yet?’
‘No, not yet. Maybe soon.’ And I glanced at Gemma as if to say, See, I haven’t got it all. And she looked back with a half smile as if to say, I already knew that.
That invitation to the Identico.UK summer party, the one at which Jeremy and I met: it had in fact been sent to her, the more senior contact, but she had passed it on to me in favour of a more promising function. She’d spent years imagining that if she had turned up that evening, she would now be me.
Poor Gemma. I almost felt sorry for her.
I’m aware how ridiculous I must have sounded, reporting all those conditions I made to Rob – no emails or phone calls, texts to be deleted immediately after being read – when the reality was there were none of the mousetraps of affairs between working people, none of the snatched lunch hours and self-consciously separate arrivals and exits. Schedules like ours were tailor-made for adultery: he was at home most of the time, free to work in the middle of the night for all it mattered to anyone else, while my day was unhampered by employment of any kind, my hours alone long and unmonitored. Hetty was in charge of the works, the builders accepted that my involvement was limited, if not purely decorative; in any case, they had my phone number should there be an explosion on the other side of the wall that I managed to miss. Jeremy didn’t get home till seven-thirty if he was lucky, and any change of plan was more likely to involve a delay thanks to an eleventh-hour pitch or some tedious client whim. Yes, I was having sex with another man a room away from our home, but it could just as easily have been a hotel room, a flat on the
other side of town. The miracle was we weren’t doing it every day. We paced ourselves.
‘This is great,’ Rob said one afternoon in June as I slipped lazily back into my underwear, wondering if I’d have time for a snooze in the relaxation room at the gym. He liked to watch me dress, which felt as erotic as undressing, an insolent scrutiny that might at any time lead to the suggestion that I stay a little longer. ‘Everything I want from a relationship with a woman, without having to have the relationship itself.’
I laughed, reaching for my dress. ‘If this is all you want from a relationship, then I pity your girlfriends.’
‘Do you now? That’s interesting.’ He thought about this, eyebrows drawn together, and I sensed a deepening of interest. Our conversation, conducted mostly in bed, had to date comprised detached, ironic banter between two determinedly dispassionate personae. ‘So what is it they want? What is it you want? I mean, what are the elements you get from Jeremy, apart from the obvious?’
I glanced up from strapping on my heels. ‘The obvious?’
‘Yes, the money. And don’t pretend you’d like him just the same if he was a bus driver living in a bedsit in Stonebridge Park.’
‘I might.’ I shrugged. ‘If I knew where Stonebridge Park was.’
He reached to tug at the hem of my dress – a prim-necked black shift with a less-than-prim mid-thigh skirt – and draw me back to the bed. ‘Come on, tell me what you get out of being married.’ He was genuinely fascinated, intent on discovery. Perhaps he wondered how he might win someone like me in full, I thought, and allowed myself a moment of thrilled arrogance.
‘OK.’ I perched on the edge of the bed, swung my legs up to get comfortable, thinking about his question seriously. ‘Security: that’s the cliché, but it happens to be true. Also, sharing things, making joint decisions, supporting each other when things aren’t going well, and celebrating together when they are.’ I looked away, embarrassed to sound sentimental, though not embarrassed to feel it. ‘Having someone to go home to or to come home to you. Not being alone in the dead of night, not being alone inside your own head.’
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 13