It was grotesque.
‘You’ve got a lot on your mind,’ Caroline said, which was kind of her since as far as she and the rest of the outside world were concerned I had precious little to worry about. Not only were there no school-related preoccupations to trouble me but there were also – that they knew of – no double life to schedule, no dual emotions to manage, no lines to keep from crossing. ‘I’ve got Richard’s mother here helping me for half-term, so why don’t we go and have lunch at Canvas? Shall we see if Rob wants to come?’
I tried not to look glum. ‘He’s still away in Hull, I think, at some conference.’
‘Really?’ Caroline looked doubtful. ‘He’s been away for ages. Conferences can’t last that long, can they? Maybe he’s back and holed up with Pippa?’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s always a bore when a chum falls in love, isn’t it?’ she sighed, and it was all I could do not to scream out my knee-jerk protest: He’s not in love, not with her! Then I remembered the faces of Imogen, Helena and Gemma, their horror when I – the charmed one, the beautiful one – had lost my cool in front of them, betrayed the existence of an ugly impulse they’d never before been permitted to glimpse.
‘Maybe that’s it,’ I said, mustering a smile. ‘Let’s go without him. Now tell me all about this school you want for Amelia. It’s the one on the bus route, right, so she can do the journey on her own?’
It was not long after this, when over a week had passed without his replying to a single one of my texts, that my frustrations regrettably got the better of me and I marched to the door of number 38 to confront him. I pressed my thumb down so hard that the flesh behind the nail turned white – as if relief could be found in the discordant grind of it, audible even through two solid timber doors. Audible to Felicity too, for it was she who eventually answered, luring me in for a cup of tea.
‘You know he’s not at home?’ she said, in that way she had of seeming to know both everything and nothing at once. ‘I’ve hardly seen him at all since the summer.’ And it was her words, rather than his silence, that gave me the strong sense that my days were numbered.
That night in bed, for the first time in a while, I put Jeremy off. Jeremy being Jeremy, he accepted this with a good grace.
‘All right, baby? Has someone upset you?’
‘I’m just tired,’ I said, furious with myself for wanting to cry.
‘It’s not to do with Imogen?’
In fact, my last meeting with her had distressed me, but not for the reason Jeremy thought. As I had been chalking up the days that separated me from my last contact with Rob, she had been counting the same ones down to the birth of her baby, and at last he arrived, a boy she and Nick named Frankie. Visiting, I had found the family settled in a nest of flowers and cards and balloons, puddles of cashmere at every turn, early learning apps flashing on every gadget: a nativity for twenty-first-century north London. The baby was pink and placid, Imogen besotted with him, and Nick in raptures with both of them, leaving me no choice but to coo and cluck exactly as etiquette demanded.
‘You are so lucky,’ I told them, beaming.
‘We know,’ they said, beaming back.
It was only when driving home that I had found myself in trouble, my thoughts having turned to the subject that had consumed me, coincidentally, for the same length of time as Imogen’s pregnancy – and in direct substitution for the bid for parenthood that I should have been prioritizing: my affair with Rob. Crossing the river into south London, I was torn limb from limb by dilemma, one minute rigid with the sudden clarity of what I’d been risking, of the imperative to safeguard my marriage without delay and make my current estrangement (as I characterized it) from Rob permanent; the next slumped in my seat with the despair of knowing he had only to snap his fingers and I would extend this ‘fling’ of ours, would go on extending it, craving it, as long as he allowed me to.
Because I had never been more obsessed than I was now.
The city streets spun by, navigated on autopilot, dark to human eyes.
I was lucky to get home without causing a collision.
Finally, after twelve days of silence, there was word. My phone suddenly signalled the arrival of several texts at once and one of them, to my delight, was from him:
‘Back in one hour. Be ready for me?’
It was 5 p.m., which meant a 6 p.m. rendezvous, a certain risk. Rob and I normally spent two hours together, but by 7 p.m. it would be cutting it fine for me to return and shower the scent of him off me before Jeremy arrived home from work with plans for dinner. But I was desperate (an overused word, but I think the right one here) and I decided I would do it. I would leave a note for Jeremy saying I was at the gym, then I’d break convention by showering at Rob’s and slipping back home later when I knew Jeremy was safely indoors.
I dressed with an unusual lack of refinement, taking no prisoners: stockings, high heels, a tiny black dress that was the sole remnant of my bachelorette wardrobe, unworn to date in my marriage and featuring the kind of neckline you could not wear on public transport without being molested (Matt’s favourite, if I remembered). Glancing down at my cleavage I experienced a moment’s doubt, for it was obscenely prominent and, while I might not be catching the bus, I did need to get from my door to Rob’s without attracting the eye of any neighbour. I decided I would cover myself with a dark coat buttoned up to the neck (he’d like that) and limit exposure by slipping through the hedge between our paths. If I were unlucky enough to encounter Felicity I’d tell her I was on my way out and simply follow through by walking to the station.
In the bathroom I leaned towards the mirror, outlining my lips and shading my eyelids, fanning my hair extravagantly over my shoulders. Beautification complete, I closed my eyes in anticipation, almost as seduced by myself as I was certain he would be in ten minutes’ time …
And then the unthinkable happened: I felt a stranger’s fingers on my hips, a thick arm scooping me roughly backwards, palms sliding crudely over the exposed skin of my breasts, lips on my bare shoulders and teeth nibbling, a tongue prodding …
‘Get off me!’ I screamed, my whole body clenched in terror, eyes screwed shut in shock and revulsion. My attacker must have come in through the garden gate and entered the house noiseless and deadly, and it struck me then with an instant, brutal lucidity that no one would have seen him, no one would know to rescue me. I was going to be raped, perhaps murdered too; I was thirty-five years old and I was going to die, no child to be remembered by, no professional accomplishment to leave to the world, no goodbye words, nothing!
Just a slut dead on a bathroom floor.
Amid a great tide of nausea, it occurred to me that this might not be random, I might know my assailant, and, hardly daring, I squinted at our reflections in the mirror.
‘Darling,’ Jeremy said, my scream having startled him into releasing me, his head jerking back as if struck with a fist. ‘I gave you a surprise, I’m sorry.’
‘Jeremy! I thought you were …’ I turned and fell against him, tears blurring my vision. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. I always hear you, you call out hello …’
‘I sneaked in. I wanted to catch you unawares.’ He took my wrist in his hand. ‘My God, your pulse is going crazy.’
‘You almost gave me a heart attack. I thought someone had broken in and attacked me.’
‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart.’
I felt the gulp in his throat as he recovered his composure.
‘Not a secret fantasy of yours then, clearly,’ he added.
‘No. I was really scared.’
Now I can’t see Rob: that was my first thought, and I could have beaten Jeremy’s chest with my fists in disappointment.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘You poor baby. But you obviously got my message …’ Eyeing the provocative outfit, he allowed his hands to begin roaming once more, tentative now, their muscles remembering the first rebuke, fearful of a second. ‘I thought we needed something new …’
‘You look fantastic, darling.’ He swivelled me gently and pressed against me from behind, his excitement unavoidable. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen this dress before, is it new? It’s incredibly sexy.’
‘I thought you’d like it,’ I murmured.
‘I certainly do. Do you think you’ve recovered from the shock yet … ?’
I didn’t want this with Jeremy. My body protested, though I knew I had to force it to comply. ‘I think so,’ I said.
I checked my phone afterwards, terrified that I’d imagined Rob’s name, willed it into being having plunged into the abyss that was hallucination, madness. But there it was, sitting in the inbox directly below the one from Jeremy:
‘Take it easy, Miss Amber. Lay off with the texts. Back tomorrow, can meet afternoon.’
I re-read Jeremy’s message. Be ready for me? It was not his usual style, certainly, but had I stopped to think about it then that question mark should have been a clue. Rob would not have used one. His would have been a command.
Chapter 19
Christy, August 2013
‘See? Not one, but two invitations,’ Joe told Christy, when one Saturday afternoon in early August the Davenports were invited to meet Felix and Steph’s new baby daughter. ‘I knew they would love you once they got to know you a bit better.’
He gave every impression of believing that her happiness was purely a matter of being greeted on the street with plausible cheer by an interchangeable cast of female neighbours – was this her status now?
Well, it had been good enough for Amber Fraser, she supposed.
It was a limpid, sun-drenched day as they closed the front door behind them, and she thought what a fundamental pleasure it was to feel the sun on her skin. A gentle silence had descended on Lime Park Road now that most of the families were away for the school holidays. Caroline and her children were among the escapees, spending a month at their second home in France; Richard flew over for weekends, apparently. She could only dream of such a leisured lifestyle, though she was the first to admit that sitting in an armchair and watching her neighbours from the window was ‘leisured’ by most people’s standards.
Her principal subject, Rob Whalen, had gone to ground in recent weeks (though she was fairly sure he wasn’t holidaying with the Sellerses), which at least spared her any further fracas of the kind that had occurred in the park café. She imagined herself ditching her sleuthing and spending the rest of the month sunbathing. The Frasers had left a rather nice pair of teak loungers in the garden shed; she should have had them out weeks ago, not moped about indoors, staging profitless stake-outs at the bedroom window. Still, better late than never, she thought, and took Joe’s hand in hers.
The main door to number 38 had been left ajar, and to their surprise Steph met them at the flat door before they could knock.
‘You must have good hearing,’ Joe laughed.
‘Come on in.’ Her voice was breathy, hardly audible, and Christy thought she must have a sore throat – until she remembered the same stage whisper from the times she’d visited friends with first babies, the underlying tension in a house where the survival of the collective hinged on the tiniest of its number not being woken from her nap.
‘Shhh,’ Steph added, finger to her lips.
Christy was keen to see the layout of the space that twinned their own ground floor. The kitchen, just across the hall from the front door, was tiny and to be converted later in the year into a second bedroom, Steph said sotto voce. Felicity’s old gold had been obliterated with matt white. The living room was at the rear, French doors opening onto a cracked concrete terrace with terracotta tubs of pink dahlias. Christy rather envied the family their compact space as it currently stood, but she chided herself for falling into the trap of thinking the grass greener on the other side of the fence. (Looking out at Steph’s and Felix’s garden, however, she saw the grass was greener, for she had somehow managed to let her own lawn turn yellow.)
‘We’re hoping to get planning permission next year for an extension,’ Steph added.
Goodness knew how she would ever cope with the noise of building works if conversation posed a threat to security. The bedroom door, closed on the resting child, drew regular sidelong glances across the hallway from the new mother, as if a direct gaze would set off air-raid sirens. Christy thought of Caroline’s bedtime yells and wondered when it was that a parent made the sanity-saving leap – soon, she hoped, for poor Steph’s sake.
Thankfully the situation resolved itself when the baby woke up spontaneously and Steph sprang up to tend to her.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said in her regular voice as she returned to display Matilda to her guests. ‘I think I’ve gone slightly mad.’
‘All in a good cause,’ Joe said gamely, and with a haste that stopped just short of impoliteness began engaging Felix about work, leaving Christy to admire the baby and ask Steph questions about the birth and her early days of motherhood.
I’m not envious, she told herself, eyeing the soft-skinned infant in her chalk-blue cotton Babygro, and yet she was. She knew the exquisite scratching feeling of it, the sensation of being presented with the answer before you’d asked the question. Alcohol would help, as it had in Caroline’s kitchen. She and Joe had brought with them the last remaining bottle of champagne from a case given to him in celebration of his promotion, but so far they’d been offered only tea, the making of it interrupted by Matilda waking. Now Steph seemed to have forgotten about refreshments altogether.
Just as Christy was wondering if she ought to offer to make the tea herself, there was a knock at the door.
‘That’ll be Rob,’ Felix told the Davenports, rising. ‘Steph’s already trained him not to ring the bell.’
‘It’s just so loud,’ Steph protested. ‘Matilda jumps out of her skin every time it goes.’
‘Poor guy,’ Felix said. ‘He won’t be allowed to sneeze in his own home at this rate.’
Poor guy was not how Christy would have put it. She felt herself stiffen as the man she least cared to see on this happy occasion made his lumbering entry and, astonishingly, kissed Steph on the cheek and offered her both a bottle of champagne and a box of the French macarons they sold at the patisserie on the Parade that Christy considered too expensive to set foot in. (This, at least, prompted recollection of earlier proposals of a drink, and soon both a pot of tea and flutes of champagne were produced.) Rob shook hands with the two men and took a seat next to Joe, only acknowledging Christy very faintly, as if she were an idea of a woman rather than an actual person sitting in front of him.
‘Please tell me I’ve missed the account of the birth,’ he said to Steph, and the quip seemed to alter the whole physicality of him. He was straighter-backed and not so inflated as Christy had thought; rather, broad and solid and masculine. She allowed herself a brief recollection of the pictures she’d seen of him in his ‘lithe panther’ incarnation, the shape of his skull under that hood of hair, the attractive bone structure beneath that brush of a beard.
Steph was giggling. ‘Yes, the grisly bit’s out the way, don’t worry.’
‘And how’s the bundle of joy? Come on, hand her over, I’d better have a go …’ And suddenly Matilda was in Rob’s arms, not setting about the wail of protest Christy privately willed, but staring in fascination at the face of her captor.
‘Aren’t you a natural?’ Steph cooed, delighted. ‘You haven’t got kids yourself, have you?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ Rob grinned.
Grinned? Bundle of joy? It beggared belief. To have offended his other neighbours to the point of being an outcast, to hav
e attracted vile letters, to have been so antagonistic towards Christy that she had come to regard him as her nemesis – and yet to be so unthreatening with the others in this room as to be invited to cuddle a newborn baby … where were his opaque statements about knowing or not knowing, his threats to punish gossiping harpies, his slurs on other people’s employment status?
Psycho, Christy thought, gulping her champagne.
‘Work going all right?’ Joe asked him, eyes skimming the baby’s downy head. It had not escaped her notice that he wanted no turn in holding Matilda.
‘Well, it’s not going entirely wrong,’ Rob said. ‘You?’
Joe grimaced. ‘Wish I could say the same, mate …’
As phrases like ‘baptism of fire’ and ‘sold down the river’ were bandied about, Christy tuned out from this tribal exchange, her attention muddied. She couldn’t relax now he was here, but was already rehearsing the complaint she’d be making to Joe when they returned home, already allowing indignation to rise for the denial he’d be sure to make that there’d been anything different in Rob’s treatment of her. You’re imagining it, he would say. It’s all in your mind. He’s a great bloke. And he would remind her that he for one had no truck with a vendetta.
Breaking presently from this fictional dialogue, she became aware that she was being discussed. ‘We had no idea it would be so tough,’ Joe was telling Rob. ‘The whole market’s dried up in the space of four months. Once you’re out, there’s no way back in. She’s tearing her hair out being at home. I thought she’d love the chance to be a domestic goddess, but she hates it.’
This was all rather franker on her behalf than Christy had ever allowed herself to be publicly, and she was both relieved to hear it and faintly offended by it. ‘I can’t hate something that doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a domestic goddess,’ she said in a level tone, thinking inevitably of Amber Fraser, the nearest to a deity Lime Park Road had produced to her knowledge.
‘There certainly isn’t,’ said Steph, who’d bolted a glass of champagne and now spoke with a fire Christy hadn’t seen in her before. ‘They should outlaw that ridiculous term. It’s horrible being in a state of suspension, isn’t it? If you just had a date when you’d start again, you’d be able to relax and enjoy the time off.’
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 23