The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Why don’t you want to be alone inside your head?’ Rob asked, a certain slyness to his tone. ‘You don’t like your memories of the bad old days?’

  I gave him a blithe smile. ‘Oh, the good thing about the bad old days is they killed enough of my brain cells for me to not have any memories.’

  He sniggered, went on sniggering.

  ‘What?’ I said, prodding him.

  ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ And he laughed proper delighted laughter. ‘All this time, I thought you were just messing with me.’

  Turning cold, I rubbed the bare skin of my upper arms, feeling the goosebumps. ‘Remember what?’

  ‘We met before. We had a one-night stand.’

  ‘No we didn’t,’ I said. ‘I would have remembered that.’

  ‘You can name every man you’ve slept with?’ He was watching me closely, his eyes full of mischief – or was it malice? Mischief, I decided.

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said, pouting; after all, I’d had my ‘One night, best forgotten’ motto (if you could call it that). ‘But I know I would remember you.’

  ‘I would have hoped so, but apparently not. Mind you, you had a big bag of coke with you – not a wrap, a fucking sandwich bag full. God knows where you’d got it.’

  I uncrossed my arms and held up a hand. ‘Don’t. I don’t want to hear any more. Nothing you say could surprise me, but I have a feeling it might depress me.’ I sighed, stretched, mourned just a little that first Sunday when I’d stood at his door and thought we were strangers. ‘Well, at least you’re not trying to blackmail me, which is something.’

  Rob looked at me in wonder. ‘Blackmail you? Why would I do that?’

  ‘One of my exes did.’

  Not long after that accidental meeting in the bar in Covent Garden, I’d had an email from Matt. Though I was fairly sure I’d mentioned neither my married name nor the name of the agency I worked for, he’d found me easily enough. He was strapped for cash, he said (no shit), adding, none too subtly: Does your new husband know? Does your new boss?

  At the time, Jeremy had been so consumed by a demanding new client I hardly saw him myself from one day to the next and, not liking to bother him with my upset, I found myself a lawyer. A woman after my own heart, or at least a woman after the same cash Matt hoped to extort, she promptly sent him a letter alleging attempted blackmail and threatening to contact the police if any further approach was made.

  ‘That’s the way to do it,’ Rob said approvingly. ‘What did he think he was going to get from you? It’s not like you’re a public figure, is it?’

  I settled onto the pillows. ‘I think he thought Jeremy was some kind of dotcom millionaire and that I had passed myself off as a virgin on our wedding night.’

  ‘What a moron. No one would believe that.’

  I smiled, head growing heavy, eyes drooping. I couldn’t let myself fall asleep: it was against adulterers’ rules. ‘We didn’t spend the night here, did we?’ I murmured, turning my face to his.

  ‘No. It was your place.’

  ‘In Old Street?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ His fingers were on me now, pushing between my knees and up my thighs, making the skin shiver. ‘Do you remember—?’ he began.

  ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘I honestly don’t want to know, Rob.’

  ‘OK.’ His mouth hovered over mine. ‘Then all I’ll say about that night is that you let me do whatever I wanted.’

  ‘Which is different from now how, exactly?’

  I closed my eyes, apparently not yet leaving after all.

  ‘You look amazing, Liz,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Perfect,’ I agreed. ‘Exactly to brief.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Liz said. Spots of colour bloomed on her cheeks as she registered our thrilled reaction.

  We were at my hairdresser’s in Chelsea, Caroline and I standing with a hand each on the back of Liz’s chair, our heads tilted identically in consideration of our third. Though we wore radiant chemical haloes of our own, haloes that would do necessary damage to our credit cards, it was Liz who was the undisputed archangel, her formerly disgraceful thatch having been shorn by a genius to a chic, gamine crop.

  ‘You look like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby,’ Caroline said.

  ‘I’d rather not be likened to a character in a horror movie, if you don’t mind,’ Liz laughed. ‘There was enough of that during the divorce.’

  ‘Jean Seberg then. Or Leslie Caron.’

  ‘Kate Moss, when she had her pixie cut,’ I said, settling it. I checked my watch. ‘We ought to get back for the school run, ladies.’

  For the purposes of my affair, I had made it my business to know these women’s schedules inside out. It wasn’t complicated; with children involved, their day ran like clockwork and I could easily avoid arriving at or leaving Rob’s house when I knew they’d be passing his gate on the way to Lime Park Primary (handily, the kindergarten their younger offspring attended was based at the school and the half-hour staggering of pick-up times meant they were away from the street for at least a full hour).

  ‘This has been the most amazing day, Amber,’ Caroline sighed, as we tumbled into the taxi, our heads turning in vain little impulses to catch our reflections in the window. ‘I can’t wait to see if Richard notices my highlights.’

  ‘I think he will,’ I said. She had confided to me earlier in the day that she and Richard had let a whole year pass without sleeping together, which had given us a no-brainer of a goal towards which to work. ‘Keep your hair loose over your shoulders, OK? No ponytail.’

  ‘No ponytail,’ she agreed, touching her butter-pale strands as if not quite believing that the head they were attached to was hers.

  I turned to Liz. ‘I think it’s only a matter of time now before you’re back in the saddle, too. Remember, the diet we discussed doesn’t apply to sex.’

  They both giggled.

  ‘What about Rob, Amber?’ Caroline exclaimed. ‘Do you think he could be a possibility for Liz?’

  ‘We shall have to see if he likes women with short hair,’ I said, safe in the knowledge that he in fact liked long, thick tresses that he could grip in tight handfuls and bury his groaning face into.

  I winked at Caroline. I was particularly keen to keep the street’s chief whip close, which was why I’d selected her as the third wheel I’d advertised to Jeremy, every so often suggesting coffee at the patisserie on the Parade. An unexpected fringe benefit was that I was enjoying curating the friendship between the two of them – unlikely enough for it never to have germinated in the decade they’d already been neighbours.

  ‘All this time we’ve lived a couple of doors apart,’ she said to him on one of those early dates à trois, ‘and we’ve not once had a coffee together before.’

  ‘Before the bad influence of Amber,’ he answered, his manner smooth, oh-so-amused.

  ‘I feel like I’m a student again. Just lazing around without a care in the world.’

  ‘That’s because she encourages everyone to ditch what they’re supposed to be doing so they can hang out with her instead. This is what it is to be the idle rich, Caroline.’

  ‘Hello? I am here,’ I said, laughing. ‘And feel free to get on with your more pressing tasks, both of you. I haven’t handcuffed you to your seats, you know.’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ Rob said, with just the proper trace of lasciviousness. He was an absolute master of tone, a born actor. ‘We’d like that, wouldn’t we, Caroline? A little bit of discipline in Lime Park.’

  She gave a snort of laughter. ‘I was only supposed to be getting Amelia’s cello tuned. The world won’t stop turning, will it?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Rob said. ‘It’s not as if you’re using it for firewood to barbecue her pet guinea pig. Enjoy the cello holiday while it lasts, that’s what I say. She could always practise that piece that’s complete silence. What was the composer called? John Cage, that’s it.’

  I loved how Rob knew these things.

&n
bsp; ‘I used to have a bit of a crush on him,’ Caroline confessed when we were alone.

  ‘On Rob? Well, he is very attractive, I don’t blame you.’

  ‘This was years ago, when we first moved in. I remember calling round to invite him to our house-warming and just standing there gawping at him – so embarrassing, like I’d never seen a man before! Actually, maybe I hadn’t for a while, not a young one. But he didn’t come if I remember rightly, and he’s been a bit of an unknown quantity ever since. It’s very exciting that you’ve managed to tempt him out so much.’

  Little did she know that I mostly tempted him in.

  She sighed. ‘Anyway, he would never have considered me, even without Amelia hanging off my boob. Then Rosie. Then Lucas.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Just as well, since you already have a husband – and a very nice one too.’

  ‘Oh, sure. It’s not the same, though, nice, is it? I know you and Jeremy have only been together a few years, but, I hate to say it, Amber, as soon as kids come along, everything changes.’

  I wondered what she would say if I confessed that things already had changed and in such a way that would make her hair curl. There was no doubt in my mind that she had no suspicion whatsoever of what was going on under her nose.

  ‘Anyway, who would want to shit on their own doorstep?’ she said, as if she still might be persuaded to bed Rob, all things considered. ‘It would be an insane risk.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘I would prefer to conduct my first extramarital affair from an apartment in Paris.’

  She took my hand in mock urgency. ‘Do it while you can, Amber, because I’m not sure the Eurostar is fast enough to get you there and back between school drop-off and pick-up.’

  ‘I might just take your advice,’ I said, winking.

  ‘Richard says Caroline’s telling everyone you’re a breath of fresh air,’ Jeremy said one evening at Canvas. He frowned at the menu, which did not alter frequently enough for us, constant customers that we were. He would probably have the Black Angus rib-eye again, and I would have the scallop starter as a main.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ I said over the top of my Bellini. ‘Are you having the steak again, darling?’

  I liked to see a man eat red meat.

  ‘I think I am, yes. Seriously though, Richard says you’re just what they need round here, someone with a bit of spark. You’re a real hit, baby.’ And he looked at me in that way he still did, as if I were always candlelit, always accompanied by the smoothest jazz melodies, and not just when we were in chichi restaurants. I watched as gentle emotions crossed his face – admiration, pride, a fleeting sense of wonder that he had ever had the luck to win me – chased by the more familiar ones of self-assurance and entitlement.

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ I said.

  Chapter 11

  Christy, June 2013

  Just when she should have been emerging from her post-redundancy fugue (and there’d been, she had to admit, a certain perverse pleasure in being in it), just when she was finally on the cusp of doing what she should have done weeks ago and begun supplementing her job hunt with regular scourings for volunteer work locally – anything to occupy her hours, to expand her activities beyond the stalking of empty rooms – she was struck down afresh.

  For the flu made no exceptions of the unemployed. It probably singled them out. Certainly it pardoned Joe.

  Now the torment really began. All the demons of Hades visited her at once: her glands swelled, her sinuses became blocked, her head ached and her skin burned. She sneezed, coughed, sweated, vomited, shivered and sobbed. When she dared look in the bathroom mirror she saw a woman a hundred years old, born an invalid, raised in confinement. She could remember no life before that of lying in bed and wishing either for a general anaesthetic or death itself, whichever could be administered the faster.

  ‘See if you can get someone from Dignitas to come and put me out of my misery,’ she told Joe one morning.

  ‘I’d forgotten what a terrible patient you are,’ he said, amused. ‘Come on, sit up. Here’s your lemon and ginger drink …’

  He was as devoted as any man absent sixteen hours a day could be. Their principle waking overlap being in the early morning, when he would bring her the ‘special’ hot drink his mother swore by and that she now swore at, she would dutifully prop herself up, overheated and malodorous, for his brief bedside visit. From her zone of flattened pillows and tangled sheets, the large bedroom looked too big for its few sticks of furniture, as if someone had burgled it as they slept.

  ‘Oh, I spoke to your grizzly bear last night,’ he said.

  ‘Rob?’ Even in her stupor, this was news enough to rouse her. ‘He’s not mine, urgh, what a grotesque thought.’

  ‘“Grotesque”? That’s a bit strong. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to hear he’s a perfectly respectable citizen. He’s a freelance journalist, works from home.’

  ‘I know that,’ Christy said. ‘I hear his music all day long.’

  ‘Oh dear. What kind is it?’

  ‘Blues.’

  Joe grinned. ‘Perfect for the prevailing mood, I would have thought.’

  ‘Did you ask him why he was so mean to me in the street?’ Christy demanded, but Joe seemed surprised by the question.

  ‘I very much doubt he was being deliberately mean.’

  ‘You didn’t hear the way he spoke to me! He swore at me, Joe. It was bordering on harassment.’

  Still cheerful, Joe lowered his voice as if they were in danger of being overheard: ‘I’m not sure you should go around accusing people of harassment.’

  ‘Why are you on his side? I’m your wife, you should be defending me!’ She set down the drink to blow her nose and use the nasal spray the pharmacist had recommended.

  Joe tried to straighten his face but his lips twitched and gave him away. ‘I’m just saying he seemed perfectly normal.’

  ‘Of course he was normal with you, you’re a man. He’s obviously some sort of misogynist bully.’ She paused, recalling Steph’s report of civility, before continuing unabashed. ‘I hate him. I wish we’d never moved next door to him.’

  Joe just patted her leg through the duvet as if to pacify an anxious pet; though gentler, fonder, it was fundamentally the same reaction as the beast’s (Take it easy, he’d said. Patronizing bastard). ‘Come on, so he’s not that sociable,’ he said reasonably. ‘What difference does it make to us? I don’t know why you care so much about him, or any of the neighbours – we’ve got plenty of friends of our own.’

  None of whom had visited her while she’d been ill. Yasmin was in KL, Ellen was on holiday, and other friends were either routinely working late or unwilling to risk debilitation from the lurgy themselves and earn a demerit from bosses who were, in this economic climate, universally feared. The other faction, the new parents, quite understandably had enough on their plate without worrying about a bout of flu in Lime Park. Only her mother had come. She was thirty-seven years old and only her mother had come. She began to feel very upset.

  ‘Remember what I told you Felicity’s friend said? I bet that was to do with him. I bet he drove her out with his antisocial behaviour.’ Her theories had had the perfect conditions in which to ulcerate during her days in bed. ‘And the Frasers. All three of them disappear off the face of the earth at the same time – it’s like they were abducted by aliens!’

  ‘Or by Rob, perhaps? Maybe he’s got them imprisoned in the attic!’

  Christy ignored his facetiousness. ‘And I told you about Caroline’s husband shouting up at his window, didn’t I? We’ve moved next door to a psycho, you wait!’

  But the lawyer in Joe rejected this wholesale. ‘Come on, this woman you’re quoting, what did she actually say? “This will all be behind you soon”? That could be to do with anything at all, a medical scare or a tragedy in the family. And if Caroline’s husband was screaming up at his window, doesn’t that suggest he’s the antisocial one, not Rob?’

  ‘Well, what a
bout Kenny punching him? He had to cross the road to stop himself doing it again! I saw it with my own eyes, he had to keep his hands in his pockets. Joanne had to restrain him!’

  Joe gazed at her, amazed. ‘I have no idea who Kenny and Joanne are, let alone why they should choose to cross the road and punch a third party. Seriously, Christy, you’ve never even talked to these people, have you? You don’t know the first thing about Rob or Felicity or the Frasers. Finish the drink and go back to sleep.’

  But sleep brought no respite during this period: she dreamed of pain, or continued to experience it as she dreamed, waking frequently, every inch of her sore and aching. Unless wedged upright, her nose would glue up and she’d have to breathe through her mouth, making it agonizingly dry, which would lead to nightmares about roaming post-apocalyptic wastelands in search of fresh water until she would wheeze and gasp herself awake.

  One night, half concious, she heard voices close by and thought at first that Joe had left the television on downstairs. Disorientated, it took a moment to realize the voices were coming from the other side of the wall, from Rob’s flat: a man and a woman were talking, arguing, judging by the sudden bursts of volume, and the woman sounded very distressed.

  ‘Joe!’ she hissed to him, asleep in the bed beside her. ‘Joe, listen! Something’s going on next door. I can hear someone crying.’

  Joe did not stir – he slept enviably heavily – and Christy shook him awake, rough with urgency. ‘Joe, I think we need to call the police!’

  ‘What?’

  Then, just as he was reluctantly surfacing, her own brain cleared and she realized she’d misunderstood: what she was hearing was in fact a couple making love. The woman was pleading in torment of a different kind. There was the low grumble of a male voice asking questions, overlapped by her saying, ‘Yes’, imploring him repeatedly, begging him to go on doing whatever it was he was doing.

  ‘I know it’s been a while, but are you really telling me you can’t recognize the sound of two people having sex?’ Joe said, voice slow with sleep.