The Sudden Departure of the Frasers

by Louise Candlish

  Seeming to follow her thoughts, he reached for her hand, his grip steady, reassuring. ‘I just want to be alone in an empty house. No phones, no voices, no emails, nothing.’

  ‘OK,’ she said again, for she did understand. He needed the cure of silence, seclusion, sleep. ‘I’ll go out for the day. I’ll call and check on you,’ she promised.

  ‘Thank you.’ And as he slid back under the duvet, his eyes were already glued shut.

  ‘I’ve got things I can do,’ she added, to herself.

  One such thing was to ring Identico.UK and verify Caroline’s suggestion that Jeremy Fraser had returned to the office from his sabbatical. She studied once more his staff photograph on the company website before travelling into town and stationing herself, Standard in hand, outside his building near London Bridge station in good time for the evening office exodus.

  When he appeared, thirty minutes later, it was as much of a shock as any other she’d encountered these last days; in fact, she was immobilized by a surge of adrenalin at the sight of his lean, silver-haired figure detaching itself from the clot of workers exiting the revolving doors and striding in the direction of the station. After months of embedding herself in the Frasers’ mystery, she carried with her a healthy reserve of credulity, a readiness to accept anything about them, however outlandish: a change of appearance or even identity, as if they were MI6 operatives kidnapped by the enemy and not, as had emerged, an unusually popular couple of Lime Park residents who’d happened to have a neighbour from hell.

  For Jeremy Fraser had re-entered the world physically unaltered by the crisis, his well-cut lightweight navy coat falling elegantly over his suit, his gait erect, almost noble, which helped keep him in view once she’d stopped gaping and started following. But as he moved with the homebound herd towards the Underground entrance, through the barriers and down to the platform, it became clear that she was woefully out of practice in the choreography of the London rush hour, had completely forgotten her steps. Reaching the Northern Line platform in time to see him swallowed by the doors of a northbound train, she was lucky not to be trampled underfoot.

  When the train slid by, she snatched a glimpse of him in profile, still and expressionless.

  Returning home, there were no signs of life in the houses on either side of hers, all the windows cold and unlit. The mood on the street was reminiscent of nothing so much as the day she’d arrived, when she’d almost felt the dust settling around her – from an explosion she had not yet dreamed of. Letting herself in, she felt sudden fright at the wholeness of the quiet, and with it incredulity at herself for having taken Joe at his word and left him for hours in some post-traumatic fugue. But, dashing upstairs, blood pounding, she found him just where she’d left him, in their bed, unconscious and serene. He was breathing quite normally, even snoring a little, and she leaned to kiss him very softly on the forehead.

  Downstairs, she cooked herself a plate of pasta and watched television alone, much as she had every weekday night for the last six months.

  The next day, up, clothed and apparently untroubled, Joe announced that he wanted to visit his parents to tell them his news. Once more, he preferred to be without her company. Christy phoned him three times to assess his mental state before, judging it sound (sounder than hers), she applied herself to her own errand. Returning in good time to the Identico.UK office building, she was determined to stalk more effectively this time. She’d been too self-conscious yesterday; given the rush-hour multitudes, she could tail Jeremy Fraser at quite close quarters and remain undetected. She’d dressed this time in work clothes and felt herself moving differently in them, striving to belong once more as she attached herself to her mark, matching her pace to his and keeping him always within touching distance. In the confines of the Northern Line train, the two of them stood in the same aisle, not quite close enough for her to read the emails he thumbed through on his phone. When the train was held in a tunnel, her own impatience escalating with that of the collective, he remained utterly cool, almost grave. As others turned and sighed and complained, he was fixed on his task, a man who had learned not to look up. She glimpsed the background image on his screen: a smiling redhead.

  At King’s Cross, he left the Northern Line and switched to an overland commuter train. It was uncomfortably crowded and, separated from him by almost the full length of the carriage, Christy feared she would miss him making his exit. But several stops up the line, the crush subsided, he was still there and when at last he stepped towards the doors, she did the same.

  They were about as far away from Lime Park as you could get within the limits of the city.

  He walked from the station through a succession of residential streets at a pace far faster than her natural one, clearly a man with something – someone – to hurry home to, before at last approaching one of a row of pretty workman’s cottages on a road so far from the station it must have been equidistant to the next one up the line.

  As he let himself into number 223, she cursed the lengthening nights, for the moment the door closed again there was nothing to see, only curtains drawn at every window.

  After waiting half an hour or so, she returned to the station and made the long journey home. Joe, in front of the television with a beer, was happy to see her. He told her that his parents had reacted to his news with a compassion that had surprised him. Christy, however, would have expected no less: when your parental ambitions were exceeded to the extent that theirs had been, there was likely an element of relief in being presented with evidence of ordinary human frailty. (‘It’s not like I’m really in trouble,’ Joe said. ‘Not like Rob.’)

  In turn, she told him that her meeting with a new headhunter had gone well and that she’d met Ellen for a quick drink after work. In truth, of course, there’d been no meeting and Ellen had scarcely been in touch since the two women had ceased to occupy adjoining desks. Christy would be lying if she said she hadn’t – predictably, no doubt – contrasted that indifference with the concern of Amber Fraser’s former colleague Imogen, who long after the two had parted ways professionally had crossed town with a young baby in search of her missing friend.

  ‘Perhaps today’s meeting will lead to something and you’ll be earning again soon?’ Joe said. She could not begrudge him his air of joyful abdication; she could not protest the logical equation of one Davenport’s unburdening of responsibility with the other’s stepping forward to claim it.

  ‘I hope so.’ And fictitious meeting or not, she was hopeful about a final-round call-back, even if it did involve psychometric and aptitude tests (these, she feared).

  She fetched herself a beer and joined her husband on the sofa.

  ‘There’s been more drama here,’ Joe said.

  ‘What, with Rob?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him all day. No, a huge argument in the street between Joanne and Liz, in front of the kids and everything.’

  ‘Joanne and Liz? But they’re really good friends.’

  ‘That’s what Joanne thought too, but it turns out Liz has been having an affair with her husband.’

  Christy was flabbergasted. ‘Kenny.’

  ‘You won’t believe how it came out. Their dog had been hoarding some piece of underwear, a bra I think, and, here’s the scandal: it wasn’t Joanne’s. She confronted Kenny and he confessed. Seriously, you couldn’t make it up.’

  Christy recalled her visit two days earlier: Poppy! There’s no one there! Had Liz been in the house then? (Perhaps Christy’s interruption had led to the stealing of the bra.)

  ‘Do people really do this?’ she asked Joe. ‘Have affairs in their own homes, right under their partner’s nose?’ She remembered too the dog hairs on Liz’s chaise longue; no doubt there’d been plenty of clues if she’d been following that particular whodunnit.

  ‘Maybe they use the spare room? I don’t know. But anyway, Joanne’s thrown him out – or at least he left. And Caroline knew, from what I could gather, so Joanne is upset with her as well
. I watched it all from the window upstairs, like Jimmy Stewart. I was just going up for a nap after I got back from Mum’s. I had a superb view. I can see now why you got so obsessed.’

  ‘I got obsessed because there was something serious going on,’ Christy reminded him, but not sharply. ‘I can’t take all of this in,’ she said, and sighed, emptying her lungs of another day’s emotions. They sat for a minute or two without speaking, faces turned to the TV screen. Then she said, ‘Do you sometimes think, Joe, that if you compare the contents of your mind now with the days before we moved in, there’s nothing the same? It’s like everything we used to know was deleted and a whole new life’s worth of stuff entered in its place.’

  ‘I know what you mean, yeah,’ Joe said.

  She waited. The next suggestion could only come from him.

  ‘We’re going to have to sell this place, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘It was lunacy to buy it. Someone must have been spiking our food.’

  Christy took a mouthful of beer. ‘I’ve been thinking about that today. I wondered about a lodger, like Dad joked about in the beginning? But then I thought that wouldn’t bring in enough money. So why don’t we rent out the whole house for six months, or even a year, while we decide what to do?’

  Joe cocked his head, interested. ‘That might work. Rent somewhere ourselves for half of what we get for here, so we’re covering mortgage and rent?’

  ‘I think we’d be lucky just to cover the mortgage – think how enormous it is. Why don’t we see if we can move in with my parents for a little while? We could leave the furniture, lock up all our personal stuff in one of the rooms at the top. It wouldn’t be for long. I could commute in for interviews and the rest of my St Luke’s sessions. I don’t want to let them down.’

  What she was suggesting was humiliating, but she, for one, was becoming practised in the absorption of humiliation. In the end, the world didn’t stop turning because you’d lost. Perhaps it had always been inevitable, she thought; perhaps the house was destined to be one of those cursed plots, the ones you found on every high street where businesses came and went and nothing ever seemed to stick. ‘It’s not like either of us is never going to work again,’ she added. ‘It’s just short term.’

  ‘It would buy us a few months,’ Joe agreed, readily enough for her to know that if he’d take the in-laws over the law then he really wasn’t going to return to corporate life. ‘I’ll phone some lettings agents tomorrow.’

  It might be a relief to leave, she thought. If the Frasers could downsize to a small cottage in the back of beyond, then so could they. Lime Park Road was for families, stable families in which the adult roles were clearly defined and the life philosophies undivided (the occasional extramarital affair notwithstanding).

  ‘Joe, I think having a family is more important to me than having this house,’ she said, surprising herself as much as him with her directness. It was heartbreaking to think how long she’d not said it when in the end it was only a few words, just one short statement of preference. ‘I know you don’t agree, and that’s fine, and I know there are more important things for us to worry about …’ She paused, corrected herself: ‘Maybe there aren’t more important things to worry about, maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. Anyway, it’s only fair that you know how I feel.’

  Joe was silent, his fingers toying with the remote control. He did not look at her. ‘All of the partners at work, the married ones, they’ve all got the house and the children. I’m not sure how it hasn’t worked that way for us.’

  ‘I don’t know. But I don’t think it matters; we don’t have to be like them and do everything in the right order. This is us. This is our order.’

  He was nodding again, in the committed way of a man hoping to convince himself. ‘They’re all captive, Christy, every single one of them. I don’t want to breed in captivity like them.’

  ‘Breed in captivity or breed at all?’ she asked, her heart quite still.

  ‘Breed in captivity,’ he said. He paused, at last looking at her. ‘But in the wild, sure.’

  Christy smiled. She wondered at her own lack of anxiety today in this perilous situation of theirs. Perhaps it was because of Joe’s obvious equilibrium, the sense of peace that – unhelpfully – could only properly be identified as having been missing now it was restored. Or perhaps it was because of her other unresolved preoccupation, the second reason why a departure might be required. The question was, would that departure be temporary or permanent?

  Well, tomorrow she would know, one way or the other.

  ‘When did you change your hair?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh.’ She touched the ends, faded now according to the Frasers’ all-seeing mirror to an undesirable shade of washed-up crab. ‘I did it myself to save money.’

  Joe shut down the TV and flung the remote to the far corner of the sofa. ‘Let’s go out for dinner,’ he said. ‘To Canvas. We haven’t been there since the first week. It’s a disgrace.’

  Her eyes bulged as her stomach responded with a groan. ‘I’m not sure that’s the most appropriate option for two unemployed debtors.’

  ‘I don’t think another hundred pounds is going to make much of a difference, do you?’

  ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing bankrupts say,’ she said, but she was smiling as she went upstairs to change.

  The following morning at eleven, when Joe was making his first enquiries at the rental agent on the Parade and when Jeremy Fraser would be well into his second meeting of the day, Christy retraced the route to the far-flung suburb beyond the North Circular and presented herself at the Frasers’ door. Of course Amber Fraser might very well be out at work herself – who knew what had changed in their circumstances besides their address – but Christy understood by now that it didn’t matter, because she would keep on coming until she had the answer to her question. She would buy herself a season ticket.

  As she raised her hand to ring the bell, she felt on her wrist the reassuring weight of the bangle, worn on this occasion to remind her to give it back to its owner; out of sight, in her bag, it would more likely be forgotten.

  The door opened and Christy drew breath. Finally. The woman standing before her was incontrovertibly Amber Fraser, you could tell by the long strands of glossy red hair that had freed themselves from her ponytail and by the smooth milk-pale face that had only lucky angles to it, the bone structure of the born beautiful. She’d gained a little weight since Caroline’s photograph had been taken, and was casually dressed in leggings and a ribbed grey sweater, her skin devoid of make-up. Having always pictured her as she’d looked in the photo, painted and bewitching, Christy took a moment to adjust to the more workaday version in front of her.

  ‘Hello, can I help you?’ Her voice, pitched low, was small and wintry, with no discernible accent. Her large eyes remained narrowed. There was the curious sense of her having made efforts to minimize her own impact on the senses of others.

  ‘I’m Christy Davenport,’ Christy said, too nervous to smile. ‘My husband and I bought your house on Lime Park Road back in March.’

  While not having expected to be welcomed with open arms, she was genuinely startled by Amber Fraser’s reaction: aversion, fear, the undisguised impulse to slam the door in her caller’s face. It made Christy think of Felicity’s friend, the way the door had come towards her even as she continued to speak. March? It might have been the nineteenth century for how removed it felt from the here and now. She felt a tug of sorrow for the lost promise of those few short months.

  Impressively quickly, Amber recovered control of her facial muscles. The door remained open. ‘Can I ask how you found me?’

  ‘Through your husband’s work.’ Christy was reluctant to admit that she’d tailed the man in the manner of one of those people you read about in the papers who ended up having restraining orders taken out against them, and was grateful that Amber accepted her answer in its abbreviated form. She did not, however, go so far as to invite her visitor in, apparen
tly determined to conduct this conversation on the doorstep, which brought to mind Christy’s other recent doorstep exchange with Rob.

  Rob and Amber: now she was face to face with Amber she could see it, how they might be considered similar, how they might be mutually attracted; in fact, it was so easy to see as to have been predetermined, written in the stars.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Amber asked. ‘Is there another problem with the roof?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask you about a situation with a neighbour.’

  Amber’s already defensive bearing clenched visibly. ‘Which neighbour?’

  ‘Rob Whalen.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘I know, I understand. But I believe you made an allegation against him?’

  ‘I have no intention of getting into that.’ Amber’s words came with a formidable firmness for someone so quietly spoken.

  ‘Please.’ Christy wrung her hands, her face, in the habit now of supplicating herself. ‘Please. I swear I’ll keep coming back, you won’t get rid of me.’

  ‘Is that some sort of threat?’ If Amber perceived it as such, then she made it clear with her eyes that she would meet it head-on. Christy remembered one of Caroline’s confidences: It wasn’t like she’d led a charmed life. She’d had her adversities, had seen off challengers before.

  ‘It’s a vow,’ Christy said earnestly. ‘Please, just talk to me now, just this once, and I promise you won’t hear from me again.’

  Amber frowned, closed her eyes and exhaled heavily as if to rebalance herself by some learned ritual. Only when she opened her eyes again did she part her lips to speak. ‘Wait here.’

  As she turned into the hallway, evidently to pluck a jacket from the hook and slip her feet into boots, she was silhouetted in profile and Christy noticed an unmistakable swelling of her abdomen. Then she was pulling the door closed and ushering Christy back down the path. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can talk privately.’