The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  ‘What is this,’ he’d say, ‘do you want a copy of my schedule?’

  Good-humoured and yet offhand, it was how I imagined he would speak to his disposable dates, not me.

  Naturally, I suspected Pippa’s hand in this new unavailability and blamed myself for having inadvertently given their romance the public blessing that had very likely helped him break the relationship pain barrier. Not that he ever mentioned her. He left that to me.

  ‘I hear we almost booked ourselves a double date,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Caroline and Richard’s dinner party on Friday.’

  ‘You and Jeremy are invited as well?’ And he was not quite quick enough to hide the flicker of excitement the suggestion aroused.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re not free. Dinner with clients.’

  ‘A shame. That would have been fun.’

  I begged to differ. Seeing him ignore Kenny’s hapless colleague might have passed for sport, but watching him paw Pippa as he had at our party certainly would not.

  A week or so after this exchange Jeremy and I ran into the two of them one evening on the Parade, stopping of course to say hello, and I was shaken by just how violently I disliked seeing them together again. Pippa was visibly in the process of falling in love with him (a truly ghastly thing to witness even when the object of desire is not your own lover), and he, if not reciprocating with quite the same depth of emotion, was plainly enjoying himself in a real way, as opposed to indulging in a fit of method acting for my benefit. As she chattered carelessly on about that dinner at Caroline’s, his fingers kept reaching to pet her: idle, territorial, just as they did me when we were in his bedroom, post-coital and relaxed.

  ‘Rob warned me about the swinging scene in this area, so I was a bit worried,’ she said, deadpan, and it was only when she began hooting like a demented owl that I was aware of my own shocked reaction.

  ‘Oh, I think you can be confident we all sleep with the right people,’ Jeremy told her, keen to participate in the fun, and when I glanced at Rob it was only to meet his profile as his face turned to Pippa’s, full of private mocking. Enraged, I lowered my head, concealing my displeasure from Jeremy, from him.

  ‘You can see what stage they’re still at,’ Jeremy said, when they’d strolled off hand in hand, not a backward glance between them. ‘Swinging? Can you imagine? Fine for some other lucky bloke, but what about me?’

  Even flattery could not raise my spirits; it took every working neuron in my brain to direct the required smile to my lips.

  I’m ashamed to admit I spent an indecent number of hours analysing this casual encounter. All of a sudden I was experiencing exactly the feelings I’d declared contraband in the first place, exactly the feelings Rob had never appeared to feel about Jeremy and me. I persuaded myself that the true cause for agitation was not jealousy per se but a fear that our arrangement could not continue for long if his new girlfriend was to go where others had been denied and be established as serious. (She’ll already be plotting to move in with him … : those words of Gemma’s revisited me time and again; if anyone had a good instinct for a bad turn of events, it was she.) The number of variables would double, spontaneity would enter the equation as she became more confident about coming and going (what if he gave her a set of keys?), and as soon as they had any kind of pow-wow regarding relationship status she would understandably demand fidelity and he would inevitably be obliged to co-operate.

  No, deceiving a contented husband was one thing, deceiving a brand-new girlfriend was quite another.

  As September slithered into October, Jeremy and I had at last arrived at those once-faraway landmarks ‘after the summer’ and ‘when the house is finished’. And it was finished, to all intents and purposes: where once there’d been a large team in occupation, there remained only two decorators whose names never quite stuck but who’d been hired by Hetty for their reputation for phenomenal speed. She herself had all but withdrawn from the project, needed only for a last visit or two to check the paintwork and to assess snagging, and I began slightly to fear the day when the nameless decorators would rinse their last paintbrushes and leave me too. I’d rarely been in the house on my own, and I had the sense that I didn’t know it well enough to be left alone with it. I suppose the Rob distraction had prevented me from bonding with my new home, from earning its protection.

  As agreed, the subject of the baby was resurrected.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned it for a while,’ Jeremy said. ‘You haven’t gone off the idea?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I lied. ‘I just thought not discussing it constantly might help make it happen. Like you said, let nature take its course.’

  ‘Looks like the course nature wants to take is not the one we want it to. Do you still want to see a specialist?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘if you do.’

  ‘I do.’ Jeremy was typically resolute. ‘I’ll make an appointment then.’

  I knew from every conversation I’d had on the subject that it was exceptional for the man to drive a project of this sort, but our dynamic differed from other couples’. Perhaps it was the age difference, perhaps the enduring perception that I was a free spirit and he my earthbound guide, but in our relationship it was Jeremy who pressed and I who yielded. He had pressed for marriage, he had pressed for the move to suburbia, and now it was he who would take on the task of pressing for a baby. I listened with unexpected nervousness as he phoned the Harley Street clinic of choice and gave his details as the primary contact. I felt squeamish, suddenly, as if defined purely by my sexual activities; the thought of all that prodding and scraping and squeezing, the needles and the pills and God knew what else, made me cross my legs and wince.

  Did I want to be a parent enough to sign up for all of that? Did I want to be a parent at all? The last time I’d cared to listen, my maternal instinct had been all but extinguished by rather more self-serving ones, and to chronicle my evolving position on the issue was only to confront horrible truths about myself. In the beginning I’d been agreeable to Jeremy’s suggestion, especially since it came with the side benefit of not having to work for a living; then, when the clear and present danger of Rob had reared its head, I’d been briefly keen, recognizing pregnancy as a cure for temporary insanity; but once we were under way, enmeshed, and I was used to living with the lunacy, I’d begun to have those thoughts of evasion and delay, thoughts that had only grown more appealing.

  Now it was time to acknowledge my current position (and my sense that Rob was detaching from me in favour of Pippa made not a jot of difference to it): a baby meant the end of the affair, and I wanted the affair more than I wanted a baby.

  Which I know sounds terrible, truly terrible.

  ‘Right, all set.’ Jeremy was off the line, phone still in hand. ‘Nine o’clock next Wednesday morning. We’ll meet with the consultant and do some tests.’ He reached to hug me and I surrendered willingly, enjoying the protective strength of him, the knowledge that these decisions at least – if not any others – were going to be made for me.

  ‘OK?’ he asked, glimpsing my stricken expression.

  ‘The thing is, Jeremy, I know I said I was sure, but now that we’re doing this, I feel as if I don’t know what I want any more. I feel confused.’ It was as close as I would ever get to betraying myself to him.

  ‘I think that’s totally natural,’ he soothed. ‘It is confusing. It’s not what we thought was going to happen. But if we do start IVF or something like that, you have to remember that it won’t be forever. It’s only the means to an end. And whatever happens, whether we have six kids or none, we’re still us. We’re in it together.’

  His tenderness made me want to cry. Jealousy was not the only emotion I’d granted entry of late; there was, too, the beginnings of guilt.

  And about time too.

  In fact, the consultation was as painless as it could be. The consulting rooms were opulent, the consultant, Mr Atherton, a man
of about Jeremy’s age who possessed the same air of determined self-preservation (I supposed it followed that someone who could conjure life from thin air might also believe he had a stab at eluding death). He was matter-of-fact, candid on the subject of success rates, not least in respect of our ages: unsurprisingly, mine was still in the range that yielded high success, Jeremy’s more problematic, though ‘by no means disastrous’. The medical terms and acronyms were familiar to us from our investigations online – IUI, IVF, ICSI, donor eggs and so on – the key word being one we both knew and understood well: strategy. There was no set of circumstances that could not be tackled with the right strategy, Mr Atherton assured us. It was a good line, I thought: ‘tackle’ was a very different word from ‘solve’, and the strategy could be, after all, to give up and get a dog.

  I wondered what he would say if he knew I led a parallel sex life to the one I was detailing for the medical record.

  ‘So let’s get these tests out of the way and then meet again in a couple of weeks to look at the options,’ he said, handing us over to his worker bees. There were blood tests to establish hormone levels, a sperm sample from Jeremy, consent forms to sign and health histories to fill in. We left the clinic feeling optimistic, the issue unburdened rather than exposed.

  Within days, Jeremy had heard from them and phoned me from the office to relay the news: ‘They’re sending full results in an email, but it’s basically good news: there’s nothing wrong technically. They suggest we keep on trying for another six months and then if it’s still not happening, report for our first cycle of IVF.’

  ‘Another six months?’ Having identified an unwillingness of my own to get the science under way, this nonetheless seemed a longer stretch than I would reasonably have expected Jeremy to allow. ‘We’ve already been trying for a year.’

  ‘I agree it’s frustrating, but Atherton knows our history and he suggests six months to be sure. You can see his point, especially given your age: better to take a bit longer and conceive naturally. You heard what he said: IVF is stressful and exhausting and very expensive. This is a private consultant speaking, Amber. Think how easy it would be for him to take our money straight away and get on with it, with or without results. Instead he’s telling us not to have treatment – at least not yet.’

  ‘What about Clomid? I don’t need to take it?’

  ‘No, not necessary. You’re absolutely fine, there’s no need to stimulate egg production. Oh, but we do have to do all the healthy lifestyle stuff he talked about. Cut down on drinking, especially.’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.’ I pictured the bottle of wine Rob and I drank as a matter of course during our afternoon rendezvous: that would be hard to forgo. Instead I would have to give up the glasses shared with Jeremy.

  ‘The nurse is emailing me some stuff about optimizing. I’ll print it out and bring it home with me.’ He’d become both the expert and the administrator, as if he didn’t have a demanding enough job already. Meanwhile, I drifted about my perfect castle and admired my beauty in the mirror like the wicked queen, in a perpetual state of dread of the news that someone more beautiful had been sighted in the kingdom. I hung my head in shame to think how little I deserved Jeremy’s devotion.

  ‘Thank you for doing all of that,’ I said. ‘Handling all the phone calls and everything. I know I’ve got more time, but …’

  ‘It’s all right. I know you don’t like the way all of this makes you feel. You know, constantly trying.’

  It was the first time he’d referred to the fact that I’d enjoyed sex less in the last few months, and I was grateful he was not in the room to see my reaction face to face. Even I didn’t know if my fading ardour was owing to the chore of trying to conceive or to the fact that I was also sleeping with someone else, someone with a style that suited me better.

  ‘Let’s just relax for a bit, try and forget about it. What about going somewhere hot for Christmas and New Year? The Caribbean, maybe? Somewhere totally relaxing. I’ll see if I can take ten days.’

  Not so long ago this suggestion would have thrilled me, especially as Jeremy demanded of his accommodation nothing less than complete luxury, but now I feared it would be utter torment for me to be away from Rob for this long, however exotic the location.

  Imagine if you were going away with him, not Jeremy, whispered the wicked queen.

  ‘I’ll look at some options,’ I said.

  In the meantime the progression of Imogen’s pregnancy – she was only a few weeks from her due date when the group next met – struck me as a visual representation of the time Jeremy and I had already indulged in ‘relaxing’. Fresh confusion assailed me: was I really pleased it was taking us so much longer than we’d expected?

  Certainly the girls perceived the delay as an out-and-out tragedy.

  ‘Shouldn’t you at least have your name down already?’ Imogen asked when we gathered at her flat in Islington, depot now to an array of baby-related deliveries. Seeing all the boxes stacked up and half opened reminded me of the weekend we’d moved into Lime Park Road, and it seemed now like an ancient, unspoiled time. Pre-Rob; prelapsarian indeed.

  ‘She’s right, Amber, aren’t there long waiting lists for IVF?’ Helena said.

  ‘Not where they’ll be doing it,’ Gemma said, smilingly snide, and for once I turned on her, tired of her begrudging brand of friendship.

  ‘Have a bit of sympathy, can’t you? Who cares who’s paying and who isn’t, who’s waited ten minutes and who ten years? The end result is the same for all of us – at least I hope it will be. Or don’t you think Jeremy and I deserve a baby for some reason?’ I was breathing hard, red mist rising fast, obscuring all sense. ‘Go on, Gemma, why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind? Are you annoyed I didn’t set you up with Rob? It’s not my fault he seems to have chosen this Pippa woman! Don’t you think I –’ I stopped, gasping, right on the precipice of saying too much and giving myself away.

  To a woman they looked utterly shocked. Gemma flushed deeply and stammered an apology, unprecedented in the years of our acquaintance. As I sat on my hands to stop myself from fidgeting, I saw Helena and Imogen exchange an anxious glance.

  It was the first public sign that I was starting to fray.

  Chapter 17

  Christy, July 2013

  Arriving at number 42, Flaubert in hand, just before eight on the evening of the book group, Christy found herself in the eye of the storm that was the Sellers children’s bedtimes. As Caroline ushered her into the hallway a small girl slid down the stairs on her bottom and announced that she wasn’t at all sleepy and should therefore be allowed to put the light back on and get out her Sylvanian Families collection. A second girl had complaints to make about a sleeping brother’s heavy breathing, and these she foghorned from the top of the stairs, causing the first girl to object, the boy to awaken and start crying, and Caroline to yell for everyone to shut up and bloody well get back into bed or they’d be late for school the next morning and the teacher would call the police. There was no one else there yet, not even Richard Sellers back from the office.

  ‘Did I get the time wrong?’ Christy asked.

  ‘Oh, no one ever makes the actual start time,’ Caroline said, tossing a wet towel up the stairs with impressive aim. ‘You can see how hard it is to get these evil goblins into the land of Nod, especially when school’s about to break up. It’s not even dark yet, how can it possibly be night-time, it’s illogical – that’s what you’re dealing with, Christy. The same thing’ll be happening in every house on the street.’

  Except number 40.

  ‘Would it be better if I went home and came back later?’

  ‘God, no, stay now you’re here, you can help me with the nibbles. Let’s go and have a glass of wine. I’m officially off duty, whether the other residents of this house choose to accept it or not.’

  Christy followed her into the kitchen. It was the first time she’d been inside the Sellerses’ home (or any
of her new neighbours’, for that matter) and it almost broke her heart to see the child-centric chaos of it, the items of school uniform draped over the chairs, the infantile drawings pinned on the walls, including an enormous framed portrait entitled ‘My Mummy by Rosie Sellers, 2F’ in which Caroline was missing nose, ears and eyebrows. A large notice asked ‘Have You Cleaned Your Teeth and Washed Your Face?’ while a chart displayed the merits attained in a bid for a puppy.

  Christy drank deeply of it, a traveller unaware of the life-threatening acuteness of her thirst until presented with a freshwater lake. How clinical her own house by comparison; there was no escaping the worst word of all: soulless. We should have stayed in our flat, she thought, feeling sudden and actual panic. We weren’t ready for this. We should have realized the child is more important than the square footage. Her mother was right, no house was worth the sacrifice. What did Steph say that time? You have to compromise on something, don’t you? Well, she thought, we’ve compromised on the wrong thing, any fool can see that. I’ll talk to Joe tonight, I’ll tell him what I want.

  ‘Any luck on the job front?’ Caroline said as she tackled ‘nibbles’ by tearing open small bags of what looked like infants’ packed-lunch snacks and mixing them together in a large bowl. (‘I used to make more of an effort,’ she shrugged by way of explanation.)

  ‘Not yet,’ Christy said, ‘and it’ll be completely dead over August. I’ve decided to look for something voluntary just to keep busy. I’ve set aside tomorrow to sort it out.’ (‘Set aside’ from what? Her long days of advising the Treasury on economic policy?) ‘I thought I’d start at the library, look at the noticeboard there and find out what the local forums are.’