One Saturday evening in July, Kenny and Joanne invited us to dinner and it was there that a curious episode took place, one that I should perhaps have paid closer attention to at the time. Rob had been invited, alongside the usual suspects – Caroline and Richard, Mel and Simon – and among the ageing, Conservative-leaning husbands he cut a youthful, louche figure. Moving of their own accord, my fingers played with the tips of my hair whenever he looked my way.
Clearly Joanne regarded him as her guest of honour. ‘Now you’re in circulation, Rob, you do realize the temptation is too great to resist, don’t you?’ she told him wickedly.
Seated at her side in a wicker tub chair in a conservatory so charming it had wisteria growing inside, he looked momentarily tamed. ‘What temptation?’
I got it before he did and smiled to myself. He’d been set up. In the kitchen, the farmhouse table was laid for ten.
‘Great,’ he drawled, ‘I look forward to meeting my match,’ and his gaze came to rest on my left hand, my long pearl-white nails tapping gently on Jeremy’s thigh, diamond glinting in the pink evening light. On the low table between us, already unboxed and lit, was the Diptyque candle I’d given Joanne on arrival (‘Ambre’, naturally. It sounded so sexy in French, but not nearly as sexy as in English, when Rob said it, into my open mouth, his breath pouring down my throat like liquid).
His date was the last to arrive, a little late after getting confused about directions. A colleague of Kenny’s called Caitlin, she was perfectly pretty but artfully low-key in her appearance, presumably in case Rob turned out to be a dud. I had no doubt that she’d be straight to the bathroom to make some adjustments once she’d identified the quality of the offering.
Instead, she took one look at him and went pale.
‘We’ve met before,’ he told the group in explanation, and the phrasing caused me to colour under my make-up. You let me do whatever I wanted … Well, evidently this girl had a better memory than I did. And since she’d surely have had no trouble finding the street had she been here before, I deduced that the venue for their one-night stand had been her place, not his. I appeared to be unusual in having been allowed into his bedroom, a logistical necessity of our affair and yet a distinction that pleased me.
‘You already know each other?’ Joanne said, disappointed.
‘We only met once,’ Caitlin said, and her neutral tone was belied by the anxious look in her eyes. She gulped at the Martini pressed upon her by Kenny and recoiled a little at its potency.
‘Years ago, wasn’t it?’ Rob said, nonplussed by the coincidence. Clearly, he was not a man whose girlfriends remained in his life once discharged from duty. Well, I could hardly condemn him for that: there was not a single man I’d been with whose number still darkened my phone contacts. ‘I’m not sure I would have recognized you, Caitlin.’
With your clothes on! thought the happily marrieds, exchanging significant glances.
Sadly, a repeat performance seemed unlikely that night, for the poor girl couldn’t handle the pace of suburban drinking: huge balloons of red wine followed the Martinis (Simon, known for his alcoholic capacity even in this company, managed the two in parallel), and she began complaining of feeling unwell almost straight away. No sooner had Joanne served the main course, a gargantuan fish pie swimming in cream and flecked, to my horror, with disintegrating boiled egg, than Caitlin had fled the table, Kenny in pursuit. It crossed my mind that he might be having an affair with her – it was of just this younger-co-worker cliché that Liz’s marriage had fallen foul – perhaps using the event as some sort of perverted game (it took one to know one). Glancing at Rob and noting his enthusiasm as he advised Richard on the expansion of his blues collection, I excused myself and headed to the cloakroom in the hall. I left the door ajar so I could hear Kenny and Caitlin talking by the front door.
My suspicion had been fanciful, it appeared. Though Caitlin was preparing to leave, plainly distraught, Kenny’s solicitations were nothing but comradely. ‘No, no, I understand. Of course I’ll say goodbye to everyone for you. This is awful, Caitlin, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
‘You couldn’t have known. But you see why I can’t stay? I don’t want to ruin your evening …’
‘Don’t give it another thought. Let’s talk about it on Monday, shall we?’
He turned from closing the door as I emerged from the loo, lipstick refreshed. His expression was troubled.
‘Are we one down?’ I said brightly.
‘So it seems.’
‘But it’s only ten-thirty, the party’s hardly started! Are you all right, Kenny?’
‘I’m fine.’ He smiled, gazing at me fondly. ‘How old are you, Amber, if I’m allowed to ask?’
‘Of course you are. I’m thirty-five.’
‘Exactly the same as Caitlin, then, but she’s a mess. I’m not saying it’s her fault, but she hasn’t made your choices, let’s put it that way.’
‘You mean in men? Oh, believe me, I’ve kissed plenty of frogs in my time, Kenny.’
‘Lucky frogs,’ he said, and his eyes dipped from my face to my breasts; he was a lovely guy, but he was only human.
‘Maybe Liz would be a safer bet if you’re making up the numbers,’ I suggested, linking my arm through his as we walked back to the kitchen. As one of my special cases, I liked her to be included.
‘Maybe,’ Kenny said.
At the table, which now resembled a frat party bar, loaded as it was with the spirits and liqueurs assembled to accompany Joanne’s Eton Mess, he said merely that Caitlin was ill and had decided to go home early to spare us her groans.
‘Oh God,’ Joanne said, ‘I hope it wasn’t the Parma ham.’
Rob said nothing, but he was the next to leave, which surprised me, given his constitution. I didn’t follow him out as I longed to and urge him to thrust me against the wall, tell me exactly what he thought of me.
‘What was all that about?’ Caroline asked, when just the eight of us remained. ‘I feel like I’m missing something here.’
‘I didn’t want to say in front of Rob, but Caitlin got very upset,’ Kenny said. ‘Whatever their fling was, it ended badly.’
‘What are the chances that they’d got together before?’ Mel exclaimed.
‘Pretty good if you ask me,’ I said. ‘That man goes through women like water. He’s forever telling me how he loves ’em and leaves ’em.’
It was true that I’d lost count of the dates Rob had mentioned during our months together; some he’d met through work, others locally, more still thanks to introductions made by friends and family. He didn’t bother with Internet dating because he didn’t need to: he was attractive, unmarried and solvent, hunted rather than hunter. It amused me – and flattered me, I admit – that I had outlasted so many of them, though of course I knew the psychology: he could relax with me because I made no emotional demands of him. With the others, he gave rein to what was a pretty standard phobia of commitment: the moment a woman wanted more, he remembered to tell her he wanted rather less. (The problem – and one that I had not adequately anticipated, certainly not at that stage – was that by enjoying my special privileges I exposed myself to the risk of developing proprietary feelings towards him.)
Kenny was frowning, drinking deeply from his wine glass. By the recycling bin there’d already grown an impressive forest of empties. ‘It wasn’t just that he ditched her a bit carelessly or anything like that. She seemed to be hinting that he got rough with her.’
‘Rough,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘You mean he hit her?’
‘Well, not –’ Kenny began, but I interrupted him.
‘Of course he didn’t.’ I spoke very firmly. ‘That’s ridiculous. Rob wouldn’t do that. Don’t you agree, Caroline?’
Caroline looked pained to have to disagree not only with her new best friend but also with the stylist responsible for putting her in the partially unbuttoned cheesecloth shirt-dress that had been drawing her husband’s eye all evening. It was a sp
ectacular upgrade from the flared jeans and shapeless Breton tops she’d favoured when we moved to the street, a pairing altered so rarely I’d taken it as official uniform. ‘You have to admit we don’t know him that well,’ she said to me, then, appealing to the group as a whole, ‘I mean, we’ve never met a girlfriend of his, have we? In years.’
‘I’ve always thought there was something slightly dark about him,’ Joanne said.
‘Nonsense,’ I told them all. ‘Quite apart from the fact that this took place a hundred years ago, he’s our friend and we should give him the benefit of the doubt. I know him as well as I know you, Caroline, and that’s good enough for me.’
As Caroline nodded, shame-faced, the others murmured their approval, impressed by my show of loyalty.
‘What exactly did Caitlin say, Kenny?’ I demanded.
‘Well, nothing specific,’ he admitted. ‘It was just implied.’
‘There you go. God, when I think of all the things old lovers might “imply” about me at a dinner party! I’d hope no one takes them seriously.’
That ignited the atmosphere again and soon spouses were freely repeating their other halves’ most unrepeatable moments. Mel, a discontented spouse if ever there was one, gravitated centre stage, her descriptions of Simon’s drunken buffoonery becoming subtly more vindictive and ending with the somewhat sinister line: ‘And that was when I decided just to leave him there to get third-degree burns.’
The party didn’t break up until the early hours. Jeremy and I left with Mel and Simon, their low-level squabbling as they staggered up the street soon obscured by the scream of a police siren in the distance. Across the road, a fox tore at one of Liz’s recycling bags and extracted a soup carton. I thought of all the children of Lime Park Road, asleep in their beds upstairs as the adults and lower mammals ran amok below.
‘It was good of you to defend Rob,’ Jeremy said, as we strolled down our path. ‘I’ve always found that unnerving, the way someone leaves the party and is immediately ripped to shreds.’
‘I guess we like to make little soap operas for ourselves. It doesn’t mean anything, you know.’ This last statement I made with a dangerously confessional sincerity, almost an apology. I had allowed myself to get very drunk this evening, not identifying my witching hour as I normally did, and had almost certainly been saved from potential trouble by Rob’s early departure.
Happily, Jeremy was three sheets to the wind himself. ‘It just makes me wonder what they say about me,’ he said.
‘Only wonderful things,’ I assured him. As he struggled to locate his key, I used mine, feeling the satisfying weight of the dragonfly charm as it knocked against my wrist bone. ‘I know what you mean, though, and to be honest I think I’d rather not know.’
Jeremy followed me through the open door. ‘Me neither,’ he said.
Chapter 13
Christy, June 2013
Joe had observed well when he’d joked about Rear Window; had they not been on skid row she would have ordered the film and studied it for tips. For Christy had found that, two further job interviews having to date yielded no offer and all new initiatives disposed of in a hectic show of efficiency each morning, she had a full-time job on her hands, after all – albeit one for which she did not get paid. She was a curtain-twitcher, a peeping Tom, a voyeur. She was going the extra mile every day without setting foot outside the house.
In her case, the stake-out was a fraying and sun-damaged armchair in the bay window of their old bedroom (the room was otherwise empty now, the footprint of their bed still visible in the pile of the Frasers’ plush vanilla carpet), but the fundamental situation was the same as Jimmy Stewart’s: she was interested in all her neighbours, but suspicious of just one.
Of course, Rob had not murdered anyone – not to her knowledge, not to date – but there had been another questionable incident since his threatening display in the café and it did involve a well-groomed blonde. She was his girlfriend, Christy gathered, or at least an established squeeze, since she arrived in the evening twice a week and departed in the morning just after the school-run mums had left the street (it just so happened that Christy took to her chair at about this time).
On the occasion in question, the blonde had been leaving the gate of number 38, her head bowed, when Rob had loomed up silently behind her and seized her roughly by the arm, spinning her forcibly to face him and causing her to shriek in alarm. At this suggestion of violence, Christy sprang to her feet and moved closer to the window, her breath coming quickly enough to mist the glass. But there was no real fear in the girl’s face, only query, even a note of exhilaration; evidently, she found his caveman handling to her taste. Indeed, there was no forgetting the way she – assuming it had been this same woman – had beseeched him in the dead of night that time, pleaded for satisfaction with an intensity Christy couldn’t be at all certain any lover had ever drawn from her.
Rob’s reasons for pursuing the blonde into the street were unclear, but the episode concluded with a long kiss, the first time Christy had witnessed any public affection between the couple.
As Joe had noted, she was not in plaster, she had the use of her legs, but when the kiss was over and the blonde at last permitted to walk on, Christy returned nonetheless to her seat.
Her curiosity about Rob Whalen was only stirred by a visit from Caroline Sellers. Though quite well again, Christy was still spending whole days indoors, and so it was that she padded to the door in leggings, a threadbare Slytherin T-shirt of Joe’s and her bunny slippers, the kind that not so long ago she wouldn’t have been seen dead in by her Lime Park neighbours (the kind that she shouldn’t have been wearing in the house at all, frankly, if she hoped to salvage her sex life). There on the doorstep stood Caroline, bearing a Tupperware container filled with dark lumps, and, extraordinarily, at the sight of Christy she smiled.
‘I bumped into your husband on his way to the station this morning,’ she said in her well-spoken, self-assured tones, ‘and he said you’d been very ill.’
‘Yes, but I’m much better now, thank you.’ Christy waited for Caroline to explain what it was she wanted. In spite of the smile, she knew better than to hope.
‘Can I come in?’ Caroline asked.
‘Sure.’ The monitoring of Rob’s movements had been suspended an hour earlier when he’d driven off in his car with the laptop and files that spoke of a work appointment. He’d sworn angrily to himself when his ten-year-old Peugeot didn’t start first time, which proved only that he could behave as unpleasantly to inanimate objects as he did to humans. She had not seen the blonde in three days, but that was not unusual.
She led Caroline into the kitchen, put the kettle on and gathered clean mugs, aware of her guest circling cautiously before she touched down on one of the Frasers’ steel-and-leather stools; marooned in a hard and glossy landscape with only her Tupperware to clutch to, she looked unexpectedly fragile.
‘I’m sorry if I offended you the first time we met,’ Christy said, bringing over the tea. ‘I was thinking aloud, got carried away. I shouldn’t have said what I said.’
Caroline considered this. ‘You’re sorry you offended me or you’re sorry if I was offended?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The implication of “if” being that you’re only sorry because I was offended, rather than sorry for what you actually said.’
Christy suppressed the urge to scream by taking a gulp of tea. Honestly, why were communications on this street so painful? To think that she’d expected greater sophistication than in New Cross! Now it seemed that she’d not appreciated simplicity in her neighbours when she’d had it.
‘Oh, forget it,’ Caroline said to her surprise. ‘Look, I know I haven’t been as friendly as I could have been since you moved in. I wouldn’t like to come to a new street and get into a row straight away. That day in the street, to be honest you caught me at a bad time. I had something on my mind. So I’d like to apologize as well. And it was rude of
us not to accept your invitation for drinks, I felt really bad about that.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t just you,’ Christy told her. ‘No one turned up.’
Caroline lowered her mug. In her other hand she still kept contact with the Tupperware – talisman, safety blanket, something – and, remembering the circling, Christy grasped at last that she was nervous.
‘It was too short notice, I guess,’ she added.
‘That wasn’t the reason,’ Caroline said quietly.
Christy looked up, the muscles between her eyebrows contracting. ‘What was it then?’
‘It was because we thought there might be someone else there who we didn’t want to see.’
Intuiting that ‘we’ meant a group larger than the Sellers family unit, Christy recalled Liz standing on her doorstep and asking, Who else will be coming? It was only after Christy had shared her guest list that she had declined her own invitation and gone immediately to Caroline’s door. Well, given all Christy had observed in the interim, it wasn’t hard to guess who the ‘who else’ was.
‘Rob,’ she said and, when Caroline nodded, ‘Why?’
Caroline gave a regretful smile. ‘I hope you’ll understand that it’s not possible for me to get into the details, but I can say that distressing stuff went on before your time and we’re all still a bit preoccupied with it. I’m really sorry if it’s made us come across as stand-offish. It hasn’t been anything personal towards you and your husband.’
‘What distressing stuff?’ Was it too simplistic to assume that this was also the information that Rob sought to protect? You obviously know, he’d said. She didn’t, but Caroline evidently did.
‘As I say, I can’t discuss it. I really can’t.’ It was clear by the way she raised her chin that she meant what she said; she was the type to pride herself on keeping her word.
‘Well, if it makes any difference to you, I loathe him anyway,’ Christy said, ‘and I have no problem saying why.’
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 17