Free The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish Page B

handle one object or another and comment. Among the knick-knacks was the little hourglass bottle Christy had seen on the hall table when she’d paid her call. The friend plucked this from its box and appeared to be suggesting it be discarded, but Felicity shook her head, fingered the bottle as one would an irreplaceable keepsake.
    ‘It will all be behind you soon,’ the friend said – if Christy heard her correctly – and Felicity was nodding, glancing about her with the air of a survivor.
    After the removals team had pulled off – casual, without indicating, as if transporting potatoes and not the collected treasures of a woman in her dotage – Felicity’s companion took the wheel of the Honda and waited with the engine running as Felicity emerged from her gate for the final time. She stood looking towards the house, pale eyes blinking, and Christy averted her gaze to allow her departing neighbour her private last moments with the home she was giving up.
    When she next looked, she saw that some sort of scene was developing in the street below, one that involved the man from the upstairs flat trying to say goodbye to Felicity, or to say
something
, but whatever it was, it was upsetting her. As she held out a hand, palm flat as if to warn him off stepping closer, her friend rolled down the car window and screamed out, ‘Hey! You keep away from her! Do you hear me?’
    This hostility was easily loud enough for Christy to hear from behind a pane of glass, but the man ignored it, protesting instead to Felicity, ‘I’ve tried to explain to you, why won’t you listen? I didn’t do anything!’ His armsgesticulated frantically, even after he’d finished speaking; he was a wild creature, volatile, capable of anything.
    ‘Please, Felicity, just talk to me!’ With another explosive gesture, he turned side-on to the house, dislodging the heavy drape of hair to reveal a bruised left eye and cheekbone. Someone must have punched him, Christy thought, and it wasn’t all that hard to see how it might have happened if
this
was how he behaved.
    With the implication of violence came the thought that she ought to go down there and see if there was anything she could do to keep the peace – or hustle Joe out of the shower and into action. But before she could act, the rotund man she’d seen yelling up at the window on Monday morning had appeared and begun remonstrating with the offender himself.
    ‘Fuck you,’ the bear told him, but he did at least retreat, blundering down his pathway towards the front door.
    Felicity, plainly distressed, fled to her friend’s car without a word to either man, leaving the second neighbour alone on the pavement as she slipped into the passenger seat and closed the door between them. As the car pulled away, with all the urgency of a getaway vehicle, her companion could be seen speaking animatedly, her features hot with outrage, and Christy could tell from Felicity’s slumped shoulders that she was very shaken by what had just happened. How awful to have to leave your home in this way, to have your private goodbyes ambushed!
    Who
was
this horrible man? This man who might no longer be Felicity’s neighbour but was most assuredlytheirs? Hearing the crashing footsteps and slammed door that signified his withdrawal to his cave, she found that she was breathing harder than usual.
    At last, the second neighbour turned away, his expression troubled but weathered, almost as if he were a bouncer and skirmishes of this sort routine. Clearly there’d been some adjustment to his attitude since that display of passion earlier in the week. Christy watched him go down the path of number 42, from which she deduced he was Caroline’s husband.
    ‘They’ve obviously had a serious falling-out,’ she told Joe, when he emerged from the shower to her breathless eyewitness account. Though she’d moved from the window, her eyes returned to it as she spoke, as if to a screen.
    ‘Who has?’
    ‘Felicity and the