The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish

Author:Louise Candlish
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781405919869
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-20T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Amber, 2012

September was a low time – and all the lower for the plunge not having been anticipated. At first I put my mood down to anticlimax, to the hangover after the party, not so much a Sunday slump as a restless ache that persisted day after day after day. I didn’t know then that it was in fact the beginning of an extended period of torment for me, its cause, I was slow to acknowledge, Rob.

Looking back, I see that the signs were present at our first liaison after the party.

‘So what were you up to last week?’ I asked, referring to his unprecedented time off from our arrangement (I was still arrogant then; it was fine for me, the married one, to disappear with my husband without a word of explanation, but his absences were different).

‘Oh, nothing much,’ he said.

‘You’re suddenly very mysterious.’

He shrugged. ‘Come on, you don’t actually want to know what I do when I’m not entertaining you, do you?’

‘Who said anything about entertaining me?’ I teased. ‘Maybe you bore me senseless.’

‘Oh I do, do I?’

‘As a matter of fact, you do – in one sense of the word, anyway.’

It was our standard patter but it was flat, had a going-through-the-motions ennui to it. And though the assignations that followed this one were as physically pleasurable as ever, there were strikingly fewer of them. The established protocol of our affair was that I would send a text to suggest a day (usually the next) and time to meet and he would, invariably, respond yes; suddenly he was responding no as often, pleading work out of town or urgent deadlines, evasive when I asked for specifics.

‘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

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