There was no reply at Caroline’s or Liz’s houses and so she tried Joanne, a member of the group she knew less well but who she was confident occupied a position in the inner circle.
She was taken aback when Kenny answered the door. Lime Park Road was a traditional place where, with the exception of Rob, the only adults at home in daylight were female. Kenny was, she knew, a financial analyst, a regular on the same early train that Joe and Felix took into Blackfriars.
‘I’m working from home today,’ he said, and judging by his half-buttoned shirt and uncombed hair, he had not left the house all day (at least he was not in bunny slippers).
She couldn’t help glancing at his right hand, but it was months since she’d noticed the bandaging and the skin was of course long healed. By his side, his tall blond dog looked excited by her visit and when she reached to stroke its ears it pushed its nose into her palm, snuffling aggressively for treats.
‘Poppy!’ he warned.
‘I was hoping Joanne might be in,’ Christy said.
‘Sorry, she’s on a school trip, not back till five. The British Museum, I think she said.’
Which was probably where Caroline was too; the two families had younger children in the same year at Lime Park Primary and were class reps together.
‘Can I help?’ Kenny offered.
She had no doubt he could, but whether or not he would was a different matter.
‘It’s about Rob,’ she said, a little wildly.
Kenny’s face, flushed and friendly, dropped an inch. ‘That explains it then. You’d better come in.’
Having presumed she’d be led to the kitchen, she was surprised to be taken into the sitting room at the front, a space that was an exact match with her own and yet considerably more comfortable for sitting, with its deep oatmeal sofas and nests of washed-linen cushions, its tranquil seascapes and trails of potted greenery. Taking a seat opposite Kenny, she had the sense of being interviewed, until the dog hopped onto the sofa next to him, sitting upright and alert, head angled exactly like its owner’s, and the sight of the two of them side by side was so comical she relaxed.
On a shelf behind Kenny, between a peace lily and a framed photograph of the kids, was Amber’s room scent, being used somewhat ambitiously as a bookend. Barely a centimetre of the liquid remained, the last drops of her ‘special touch’. Christy wondered if refills were available.
‘So what’s on your mind?’ Kenny asked.
‘Well, I’ve been volunteering at St Luke’s and the kids said something today about a “naughty” man called Rob.’
The police got him.
‘I’m fairly sure they meant our Rob,’ she added, and saw Kenny recoil slightly at her use of the possessive, ‘because I know he volunteered at a primary school in the past, he told me that himself, though he never said which one.’ Which, now she thought of it, was odd, given that he’d asked her directly which she’d been allocated and she’d clearly stated St Luke’s.
Kenny did not ask what the children had said, but a look of fleeting fury crossed his face before it was replaced by one of resignation. Did that mean he was willing to talk?
‘They said he wasn’t allowed in the school any more, had maybe even been in prison. Do you know if that’s true?’
Kenny sighed, enervated, his shoulders slumping visibly. Now the dog was the taller, neck erect, eyes alert; every few seconds its head turned towards the door, ears pricking, as if it suspected someone was out in the hallway but wasn’t convinced enough to go and investigate. ‘Believe me, Christy, I’d like nothing better than to tell you what I know, or what I think I know, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ Could this situation get any more maddening? The residents of Lime Park Road really had taken a vow of silence; they were not so much a circle as a sect. ‘Caroline says the same whenever I ask about him. I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you all so scared? There are a lot more of you than him. I don’t see how he’s been able to call the shots like this.’
There was a pause. Then Kenny surprised her by not shutting down the conversation and recommending she be on her way, but by asking a question of his own: ‘How do you think he’s been able to?’ And a lift of the eyebrows implied a level of exasperation that far exceeded her own.
‘He’s threatened you?’ she guessed. ‘You think he might hurt your families?’
It sounded a bit Mafia even as she said it.
‘Not the way you think, but yes. Wait here a second.’ Kenny rose and left the room, the dog scrambling in pursuit, and returned with two or three A4 sheets stapled together. He and the dog settled in their previous spots as if they were permanently assigned.
Able to see only the blank reverse of the document, Christy could do nothing but await whatever summary or excerpt he was prepared to share.
‘He sent us a letter,’ Kenny said. ‘Or rather his lawyer did.’
‘His lawyer?’
‘Yes. That’s what this is. A cease and desist letter, essentially.’
‘Cease and desist doing what?’
‘Slandering him. We have been warned not to repeat certain opinions and conjectures. If we do, he will sue us for defamation. So you see, we really can’t talk about it, however much we might want to. I can’t even show you this letter, because it sets out in detail what we’re supposed to have said and if you saw those passages then it would amount to a repetition of our alleged offence.’ To prove his point, he folded the letter in three and placed it out of her reach on the arm of the sofa.
Christy stared. At last, an explanation of the curious and sustained secrecy – not to mention the naked antipathy towards Rob Whalen: he had threatened them with legal action. I think I’m allowed to say that, Caroline had said. I will deal with it, he’d told Christy, though she’d been clueless as to how. Well, now she knew. She had an image of Richard Sellers under Rob’s window. Thanks for the letter, mate … It had been the Davenports’ second Monday in the house, and only days earlier she’d had that awkward set-to with Caroline, who by her own admission had had something on her mind.
‘You said “our offence”? Caroline and Richard got this letter as well, did they?’
‘All of us did. Jo and me, Caroline and Richard, Mel and Simon, Liz.’
Practically everyone in the photograph – bar Felicity and the Frasers. She and Joe really had touched down in the middle of a civil war. But why had it begun? What were the conjectures that had so offended Rob that he’d instructed a lawyer?
Just then the dog let out a single gruff bark, startling her, and tore out of the room at unnatural speed. Kenny called after her: ‘Poppy! There’s no one there! Of course I don’t believe for a moment he ever would sue,’ he added, returning to Christy. ‘That’s the difficulty in defamation cases – they tend to spread exactly what the person is trying to suppress – but I’m sure you understand we don’t want to take the risk. People lose their homes in legal costs alone, and we would be looking at damages as well if we lost.’
Rob had adopted a pseudonym, Christy thought; his career had already been affected by this, letter or not. He had a case and these people knew it.
‘Just because we live in these houses, it doesn’t mean we’re millionaires,’ Kenny added.
‘No.’ She of all people understood that. ‘Thank you for telling me this. I wish I’d known before, I would never have put any of you in such a difficult position. Poor Caroline … I’ve been so nosy.’
‘Which is understandable. She won’t think any the worse of you, I’m sure. But I seriously advise you to stay out of it, Christy. Don’t discuss this man with anyone, certainly not with your pupils at St Luke’s. You really don’t want to get one of these letters.’
‘Joe’s a lawyer,’ she said. ‘He might be able to advise you all.’
‘Is he a defamation lawyer?’
‘No.’
‘Well, Rob’s apparently managed to get one of the leading ones in the UK on a no-win no-fee basis. A friend of th
e family, we heard. He’s been very aggressive about it and if he chooses to, he will take this as far as it can go.’
‘So you’ve decided it’s better just to pretend he no longer exists?’
‘Not quite so extreme as that, but yes – to not provoke him further.’
Kenny and the dog returned her to the door. It was as it closed on her that a thought opened, a rare sensation of revelation: that post she had never sent on, the white envelope in the desk drawer at the top of the house … Maybe Amber Fraser had been sent a lawyer’s letter too, a letter that ‘set out in detail’ what the neighbours believed Rob had done.
Well, if she had, Christy was mere minutes from discovering just what it said.
Chapter 26
Amber, January 2013
It was about 4.15 p.m. when I began crying.
I cried from the moment I fled his flat, shrieking over my shoulder, ‘You will never lay a finger on me again as long as you live!’ and crashing the door shut before he could reply.
I cried as I thundered down the stairs, paying no heed to Felicity’s face in her doorway, her calls of concern, not caring if I slammed the front door behind me and brought a shudder to the very foundations of the place.
I cried as I let myself into my own house and bolted upstairs.
I was still crying when Jeremy came home from work that evening. I simply could not stop. And the more I alarmed myself by not having the power to cease, the harder I cried.
‘What are you doing up here?’ he said, finding me huddled under the duvet in the guest bedroom at the top. I hadn’t wanted Rob to hear me sobbing through the wall of the floor below.
‘Why was the front door double-locked?’
‘I locked myself in,’ I whimpered.
‘Why? Are you crying? What is it, darling? What’s happened?’ He was becoming distraught himself, anxious to comfort me, bewildered by my hysteria. Then he saw the trace of blood on the bed sheet and of course he assumed I was upset because my period had started. I let him believe this was the cause.
‘I can’t bear it …’ I vacillated between not being able to stand his presence and clinging to him like a child. ‘There’s no point any more …’
‘Sweetheart, you mustn’t say these things. Everything will be all right. Everything you want will happen.’
‘No it won’t. I hate myself.’
‘You’re not to blame for this, you haven’t done anything wrong …’
But I only cried harder. Powerless, he lay down with me, stroking my head like a baby’s.
I stayed in bed for days, emerging from the covers only to use the bathroom. Quite simply, my life had ended. Jeremy, convinced it was about our failure to conceive, was prepared to weather this collapse; it was almost as if he’d been expecting it all along. He worked from home when he could, brought me books I couldn’t read, flowers and candles I couldn’t smell, food I couldn’t eat.
‘Why don’t you come back to our bedroom?’ he said on the fourth day. ‘There’s a TV in there, or you can sit in the chair and look out of the window.’
‘I sleep better here,’ I lied.
‘I don’t like being in separate bedrooms.’
‘You come up here then.’
This he did. At the top, under the eaves, it was just as it had been when we first moved in. I still remembered the contentment of those two nights. Two nights! That was all I’d had in Lime Park with my husband before I met him.
‘I wish I could take time off,’ he said, ‘take you away somewhere …’
‘We’ve just come back from holiday.’ My voice was small and toneless. ‘I want to stay here, anyway.’
‘The thing is, I have that conference in Germany next week. I’m one of the speakers, I don’t think I can cancel.’
‘I don’t want you to cancel.’
He gazed at me, at a loss. ‘Felicity called round,’ he said, finally. ‘She’s worried about you, said she heard you on Tuesday when you were upset and tried to check on you before I came home, but you didn’t answer the door.’
‘What did you tell her?’ I asked.
‘I said you’re laid up for a few days with that bug I had.’
I seized on this with what little energy I had. ‘Maybe I have caught your bug. That must be it.’
But Jeremy wasn’t buying it. ‘You seem depressed, baby, really low. Maybe we should get you to the doctor?’
‘No!’
‘I know it’s tough on you, one of your best friends having just had a baby. You feel like it should have been you. Maybe we should go back to the clinic earlier than agreed?’ But the suggestion seemed to pain him and I knew he was thinking about work. Flu had kept him away, then our holiday in the Caribbean, and now he was overloaded; the last thing he needed was a string of medical appointments he hadn’t accounted for. This breakdown of mine was trouble enough, and even in my trough of wretchedness I felt sorry for him.
‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘I’m happy for Imogen. It’s … I … I can’t explain.’
‘You don’t have to explain,’ Jeremy soothed. ‘Not to me. I understand everything you’re feeling. I just wish I knew how to make it better for you.’
I swallowed, failing to stem a fresh onslaught of tears. ‘You can’t. No one can.’
It was heartbreaking that he was so unconditionally loving. I didn’t deserve it; I didn’t deserve him. And yet I had never needed him more.
Several things happened next and in rapid succession, so rapid it’s not easy now to get the chronology exactly right.
First, I stopped crying. Any longer and the tears would have disfigured me, eroded my skin like the tide and left watery scars behind.
Jeremy flew off for his work trip; at the time I was too inebriated with misery to register where, but I know now it was Frankfurt, a digital conference of which Identico.UK was a minor sponsor. He remained reluctant to go even as the taxi waited outside, especially when I rejected his scheme of having Caroline supervise me in his stead (as with Felicity, I refused to take my friend’s phone calls or answer her pleas through the letter box), but I insisted. He needed a break from me, whether he knew it or not.
He’d been gone two days – maybe three – when I discovered I was pregnant.
I hadn’t taken a test since mid December, tired of the repetitive disappointment, done with the incessant monitoring of the workings of my menstrual system, as if my body existed for medical science and not to live its life. I’d had a period in early January, but that could happen; we experts knew that. I remembered Rob’s remark that I’d put on weight, and guessed I must have already been pregnant then. All factors considered, I calculated that I must have conceived in late December, probably on our holiday in Jamaica – a second honeymoon indeed.
I longed to share the news with Jeremy, but knew that after everything we had endured together a revelation this sweet needed to be made face to face; however, we spoke on the phone several times a day and I could tell he was overjoyed to hear an improvement in my spirits. And what an improvement it was! It was as if a partition had been slotted between past and present – a partition made of reinforced steel, impenetrable to all known forms of pain – and all at once my skies cleared, my world was back on its correct axis. My affair and its traumatic conclusion might have taken place five years ago for all its relevance to my future, a simple paradise in which all my emotions would be redirected to my husband and child. The idea that I’d ever doubted I wanted a baby was risible, the result of some hormonal imbalance caused by obsession.
So transformative was the discovery that I was even able to watch from the bay window in the master bedroom as Rob moved Pippa into his flat, and not hurl a chair through the window at him, scream at him the terrible names he had earned. Instead, I contented myself with flinging his amber bangle across the room, tracking the metallic scrape of it across the tiled floor of the en suite before letting the partition absorb all further fury, all received injury – all common sense. Since
our final meeting, I’d heard from him just once, when he’d texted the day after, asking, ‘No hard feelings?’ I had read the words repeatedly in disbelief and rage. It was the only message from him I kept. I did not respond.
Finally, I thought, as I heard Jeremy’s taxi pull up outside the house that Tuesday night in late January, clenching my fingers to my palms with joy, warmed on that sub-zero winter’s night by new blood in my body.
‘Finally,’ I said to him, pressing a glass of champagne into his hand as he settled on the bar stool next to me.
‘Wow,’ he said. His joy at having found me restored to full health was inexplicably short-lived; he drank deeply from the glass, like … like a man who’d been given bad news.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ I prompted, beaming. ‘I know it’s been tough recently, but we got there in the end, didn’t we?’ I shuddered slightly at what might very well have been lost before we did. ‘Jeremy, what is it?’
‘I’m … I’m surprised,’ he said, at last.
‘Why? You always said it would happen naturally, didn’t you? As I say, it’s been a bit of a slog …’
‘A slog?’ He was looking at me strangely, but awash once more with elation I misread that strangeness. I thought he must be thinking that sleeping with his beautiful wife could never be labelled so crudely; I thought that for all those months when I’d been in two minds, so too must he. Now we’d got what we wanted, there was a fear that we’d never wanted it enough in the first place. It was doubt, cold feet, a perfectly natural reaction. Imogen and Nick had probably felt it too.
‘I know how you’re feeling and I’m just the same, but it’s –’
He interrupted me. ‘Stop, Amber, please. You need to listen to me.’
‘OK.’
That was when he told me a secret of his own.
‘I’m infertile.’
‘What?’
Immediately he looked like a different person, and I saw in his eyes that I did too. In that instant neither of us knew the other any longer. We were both imposters.
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers Page 30