The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  ‘That’s just it,’ Christy said, grateful for the insight that she’d somehow been unable to articulate these last months. ‘No matter how positive I try to be, there’s always this fear that no one will ever want me again.’ She stopped short of revealing any deeper deficiency, not only because he was listening but also because of the reason she was linked to these people in the first place: the valuable pile of bricks next door that bore her name. Who could reasonably complain of hard times when known to be the owner of such a large and beautiful house? ‘Anyway, I’ve found some voluntary work – helping in a local primary school with reading. I start next month.’

  Finding a way to occupy herself, gaining a purpose beyond the domestic, it had been so easy in the end. Caroline had supplied the contact name and number, a meeting had taken place in the organization’s HQ and, police checks permitting, she would begin at St Luke’s Primary the first week of term. It was walking distance – just – and so would incur no travel expenses.

  To her great surprise, it was Rob who responded first to her news, turning to her in a convincingly avuncular manner and saying, ‘I volunteered on that programme myself for a while. It’s very rewarding, more than paid work in a way. Primary-age kids are great.’

  Christy felt the look Joe slid her way: how can he be the monster you say he is when he teaches underprivileged children to read?

  ‘Sounds like a good move, Christy,’ Rob added. ‘Best of luck with it.’

  She almost fell off her seat to hear him speak her name, over the top of a baby’s head, no less, and with no trace of contempt.

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll enjoy it. I love kids. And it’s just short term,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, terms are short,’ he drawled. ‘At least they feel that way to the parents. The teachers and kids aren’t quite so sure.’

  As the others laughed, Christy gaped. This was not simply an advance on their previous hostilities but a repudiation of them; it was as if their set-to in the café had never taken place, nor the argument in the street. Miracles will never cease, she thought.

  ‘Hey, Christy, you could get your pupils reading Madame Bovary,’ Joe suggested, joining in the fun. It was weeks since she’d seen him this chipper.

  ‘I think they might be a bit young for that,’ she said. ‘It will be Harry Potter, presumably.’ But she’d relaxed sufficiently to allow herself to reach for one of Rob’s macarons – the yellow one that she hoped would be lemon and not banana.

  Rob turned to Joe, a trace of the old distrust in his face. ‘Why Madame Bovary, out of interest?’

  ‘That’s what the ladies of the Lime Park Road book group have been reading,’ Joe told him. ‘Christy’s just joined their august circle.’

  ‘I’ve only been to one,’ she said, chewing (it was lemon). ‘They’ve stopped now for the school holidays.’

  ‘I never did read that,’ Steph said. ‘She’s unfaithful to her husband and then poisons herself, right?’

  Christy remembered the group’s criticisms of this method of suicide; most had been able to cite their own preferred means of self-destruction, as if having given it full and uncompromising consideration.

  ‘Turns out it’s the number one adultery read in town,’ Joe said, winking at Felix. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the wives of Lime Park would ever think of playing away themselves.’

  That was for her benefit, Christy thought, as had been ‘august circle’; he knew better than to trot out the bored-housewife cliché a second time. As Steph offered her another turn with Matilda, she felt again that forbidden hunger.

  To her relief Rob left soon after. She noticed he had hardly started his glass of champagne and would have marked it as evidence of unsociability had he not been so manifestly sociable otherwise.

  ‘I feel terrible he might be being kept awake by Matilda’s crying,’ Steph told the Davenports.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, the soundproofing’s much better from floor to floor than it is side to side,’ Joe said, and Christy knew at once the occasion he was thinking about.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll get his own back sooner or later,’ Felix said, beaming at them. ‘And you two will as well, I imagine.’

  And Joe laughed uproariously, as if the idea were quite farcical.

  ‘You need a break,’ Christy told him later. Having extracted him from Felix’s and Steph’s before the baby’s bedtime could become an issue, she was perplexed to see him go straight to the fridge in search of alcohol, finishing a bottle of white wine before it was even eight o’clock. She hadn’t been keeping count, but she guessed he’d had at least three glasses of champagne next door by the time they’d left.

  ‘We can’t afford to go away anywhere,’ he said as he opened a second bottle with the carefree air of someone who had no need of further excursion, not when he’d discovered paradise in liquid form. ‘We both know that. It would be cruel even to dream.’

  Having not even been out together for dinner since the night at Canvas to celebrate his partnership, they had of course not discussed the possibility of a summer holiday, a week by the pool somewhere hot, a pile of paperbacks between them, their preferred getaway of old. But something was needed – an extra day off, a decent night’s sleep, a change of scene. Slow season it may have been for other industries, but Joe was working the same gruelling hours as ever, the cumulative exhaustion causing him to function at a whole new level of chaos.

  Earlier in the week, in search of personal documents needed by the administrator of the literacy programme, Christy had entered their makeshift office at the top of the house to find a mound of old newspapers and documents on the desk; it was as if some vandal had just emptied a dustbin onto it and walked away. Picking through the drifts she gathered that Joe had opened his work bag and dumped the contents, in need of a document or his phone but too frantic to search methodically.

  Among the discarded material was the package of letters for the Frasers that he’d assured her he would post to their solicitor all those weeks ago; it must have been weighing him down on every walk to and from the train station and yet he’d evidently not noticed.

  Well, it was far too late to forward it now, she thought, reopening the package and looking once more at the items. It was embarrassing to send it on so late in the day and expose their utter hopelessness (after all, they’d been efficient enough in getting in touch about the roof and extorting money for it, hadn’t they?). In any case, it was mostly junk mail. She looked a final time at the brochure for the tree-house hotel, symbol of the summer holiday they could never afford, and was able now to picture the Frasers’ faces in place of the models’ in the image, Amber stretched out on the deck, feline and contented in the deep green shade, Jeremy alight with adoration as he watched her from the open doors.

  In the end, she disposed of it all, even the postcard (‘Sorry, Hetty, whoever you are …’) – with the exception of one item: the ‘Private & Confidential’ letter in the plain white envelope. This she separated and slipped into the desk drawer. I won’t open it, she thought, as if that justified the crime of keeping someone else’s mail – deliberately now, as opposed to absent-mindedly as Joe had been guilty of.

  ‘I’ll see if we can go to my gran’s,’ she told Joe now, inspiration striking. ‘Her place might be free for the bank holiday weekend because she usually goes up to Mum’s for her birthday.’

  And so it was arranged that they would spend the August long weekend in Christy’s grandmother’s bungalow in East Sussex, a bus ride from the coast. In the event, swimming things were dusted down in vain, for the sun was blotted by a persistent dense grey that transformed before long into a great British downpour.

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to be admiring our tans,’ Joe said, as they huddled on the sofa under a crocheted blanket and watched a wildlife documentary on television. He had spent the first day asleep, the second letting off steam about Jermyn Richards, and the third insisting he couldn’t bear to hear himself complain a mom
ent longer. Only by the Monday was he good company again.

  ‘I wonder what our Lime Park friends would say about our holiday accommodation,’ Christy laughed. There was a certain irony in having left a grand house with state-of-the-art heating to huddle together in a bungalow with ancient radiators they didn’t like to turn on for fear of boosting a pensioner’s gas bill. This time last year the Frasers had opened their house to their neighbours, held a summer party that they’d planned to repeat this very weekend. Instead, the house stood empty, the street’s residents scattered around rural France. ‘I’d far rather be here than where they are,’ she added defiantly.

  ‘Me too,’ Joe said. ‘I had a text from Rob yesterday and he says it’s as silent as the grave on Lime Park Road this weekend. They’re all still in the Dordogne or wherever they go to eat their body weight in cheese.’

  In spite of having just had identical thoughts herself, Christy started. ‘You had a text from Rob?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had his number!’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Joe looked at her with amusement. ‘Come on, don’t tell me you still suspect him of criminal activities?’

  Christy flushed. Away from home, her various speculations about Rob – and indeed the entirely unexplained hostility on the part of Caroline and her circle – struck her as being as melodramatic as they must have been to Joe all along (it seemed the change of scene had been as crucial for her psychological health as for his). And she had to concede that if there’d been a crime, an actual illegality, it would surely be in the public domain, and yet search after search had yielded nothing.

  ‘I never said that,’ she muttered.

  Joe laughed at her discomfort. ‘Oh, that’s right, he just stands accused of sleeping with his attractive blonde girlfriend.’

  ‘Joe!’

  ‘You know, I bet that’s who sent that ridiculous note, some ex-boyfriend of hers? These things are always to do with sexual humiliation.’ Joe watched the rainwater sheeting down the windowpane in pleasing rhythm, like a water feature fed by a pipe. ‘God, I take it back. I would rather be in the Dordogne. Burning to a crisp, swimming in the river. There is a river there, right?’

  Christy ignored the question. ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rob, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Christy!’

  ‘I want to know. Did he mention me?’

  ‘Of course not, why would he? It was just about the football, I think.’ He sighed. ‘He’s just a normal bloke, when are you going to admit it?’

  In the interests of marital harmony, she met him halfway. ‘I admit he was less satanic last time.’

  ‘Fine. Less satanic will do for now.’ Joe stretched and flung off the throw. ‘Shall we go out for dinner tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think we should,’ she said, their constantly swelling overdraft never too far from her thoughts.

  ‘The pub and fish and chips, then? Seriously, if we can’t afford a pint, we might as well kill ourselves now.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Brit,’ she said, casting Lime Park and its residents from her mind. For now, at least.

  On Tuesday morning Joe returned to London on the early commuter train, but it made sense for Christy, who had no office to commute to, to follow on a cheaper service. Unsure whether or not she had intended to do so all along, she filled her spare hours by taking a bus to the edge of Ashdown Forest, to a village whose name she had memorized long ago. As she entered the reception of Treetops Suites, any sense of her own unravelling sanity was purely fleeting.

  ‘I wondered if I might be able to look around one of the tree houses? I’m researching possible hotels for my honeymoon.’ She had slipped her wedding band into her purse in anticipation of this lie. On her left wrist, Amber Fraser’s bangle felt like more than the adornment it was; it was the wristband that admitted Christy to the club she’d always dreamed of joining.

  ‘Of course.’ The receptionist beamed in that way people did when weddings were mentioned; a cynic would say it was the prospect of overcharging, an idealist that love brought out the best in all of us. ‘I’ll see if anyone’s free to give you a tour.’

  Five minutes later, clutching the rate card you’d be forgiven for thinking had been misprinted, Christy followed the duty manager through the paved woodland trail from which steep stairways led to the tree houses. They climbed the one named ‘Silver Birch’.

  It was remarkable how high it felt up there – almost like having taken flight – the world and its weight no longer her concern (that was a welcome feeling). The suite itself caused her to draw breath. The furniture and fabrics were luxurious, all Egyptian cottons and Thai silks, she’d known that from the brochure, but what the photographs had not evoked was the smell, of wood freshly felled and of the forest itself, green and fresh and alive. On the other side of the vast picture window, the leaves rippled, tens of thousands of them in that framed square, fragmenting the world. It seemed to Christy this was that rare sort of place that comforted and cleansed, where you could hide not only from other people but also from your worst self.

  Again, she touched the amber bangle.

  Her waiting guide sought to move her on. ‘Let me show you the outdoor hot tub, Miss Davenport.’

  Clearly the romantic centrepiece, the large tub was on a raised portion of the rear terrace, encircled by potted trees, an outdoor lantern evidently the only illumination. It was like a sacrificial dais. As her guide murmured about al fresco massage treatments, Christy turned to rest against the glass barrier, closing her eyes as the cloud broke and light poured between the branches onto her skin. For several seconds she stood in perfect stillness, sun-kissed, spotlit, special.

  ‘So what did you think?’ the receptionist asked when Christy returned to thank her.

  ‘I think it’s a real possibility,’ she said.

  Only on the bus to the train station did it occur to her that not once during her tour had she imagined Joe and herself in the tree house, on the big white bed, in the bubbling hot tub, wrapped in robes as they sipped their bespoke cocktails on the veranda. She’d imagined only the Frasers.

  It was almost as if she’d expected to find them there.

  Chapter 20

  Amber, 2012

  Come November, I could avoid the truth no longer: for whatever reason, Pippa or otherwise, Rob had marginalized me. I needed to redress the balance of power as a matter of urgency and my only choice as I saw it was to upgrade my package, to offer him an enticement that had been previously out of bounds.

  Thus resolved, I told him that Jeremy would be away for work in early December and proposed we use the opportunity to go away together for the night. ‘Twenty-four hours together, doing whatever you like.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ he said, which was neither the biting-my-arm-off enthusiasm I would have liked nor the outright rebuff I had dreaded.

  ‘I’ll book somewhere suitable.’

  ‘I’m not sure you know the meaning of the word,’ he chuckled, and I ignored the suspicion that his mockery lacked its old inflection of admiration. I would arrive at the hotel early, I decided, to prepare myself, set the scene; he would soon be reminded that this was a mutual enthrallment.

  ‘But, hang on, isn’t this an infringement of the terms and conditions,’ he teased. ‘Going away, being seen together?’

  ‘The terms and conditions are different off-site,’ I said. ‘And no one will see us, don’t worry about that.’

  This last was literally the case, for I booked a hotel with tree-house suites where room service was delivered by dumb waiter, eliminating the usual eyewitnesses in such situations; if we arrived and left separately we would not be seen together by a soul – except maybe an owl or some other passing woodland creature. As an additional precaution, I insisted the booking must be in my name only, telling the hotel it was a surprise for my partner. I booked treatments for myself in the morning and instructed Rob to arri
ve in the afternoon.

  As for Jeremy, I told him I craved a change of scene and planned to go alone to a spa. Worried by my recent low spirits, he agreed it would be a nice treat after living in a building site all those months and an excellent way to revive my flagging commitment to healthy living (there had recently been a cocktail night with the Lime Park Road book group that had sorely tested his indulgence of my not-so-occasional flouting of Atherton’s rules). He kindly resisted pointing out that it might have been more logical for me to go while the works were actually in progress, since we now had a house that resembled a hotel, with bathrooms as glossy as any my five-star facility was likely to offer.

  ‘You’ve had a tough time, baby,’ he said. ‘You go off and relax.’

  I gave him the hotel’s details in the full knowledge that he wouldn’t bother making a note of the name, much less think to phone me there on any line but my mobile.

  Poor Jeremy. The Amber he’d married would have wept to look into the future and see him as a cuckold, a patsy, a chump – and herself as a heartless deceiver.

  Only obsession stopped me from weeping now.

  It did not begin well. When Rob arrived, overnight bag slung over his shoulder, he appeared reluctant to set it down, muttering about the lane closures and temporary lights encountered on his journey, all but announcing to me that he wished he hadn’t come. Soft-footed and cautious, he assessed the dimensions of the place like an animal scanning for predators.

  A waiting game, then. Fine. I sighed to myself, admiring my blood-red manicure as I let the suite work its magic on him, just as it had me when I’d checked in, skittish and uncertain for my own reasons. Nestled forty feet aloft in the oaks, the windows overlooked by no one, it was a hideaway that might have been conceived expressly for adulterers: wood burner and acacia-scented candles, ice-cold champagne and gleaming glassware, a hot tub both discreetly screened and exhilaratingly open to the elements. But wherever you were in the place, all roads led to the huge bed, the morning view from which would be of the rising sun.