After You Left Page 10

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘April.’ He smiled, proud. ‘She hates April. No one she knows is called April, you see. She likes to copy things she knows. I keep trying to tell her it’s always best to be different, but she’s too young to understand. She’ll get it one day, I suppose.’

  The heads of the fuchsia had been weighted down from all the rain; the flowers had been drooping like exhausted ballerinas. But now hosts of them were glissading and pirouetting in the breeze that blew across the Cheviots, a living painting of pink and white, and purple and red – shoulders low, heads high, in floating arabesques.

  ‘I was telling my wife that I’m working for Mrs Coates’ daughter, the one who ran off to London.’ He glanced at her boldly. ‘Of course, I didn’t mention that she was the girl who once stood me up and left me a wilted, withered, broken-hearted, bitter, distrusting mess.’

  She tutted at his exaggeration. ‘What did your wife say?’

  ‘She asked if you were pretty.’

  If only there was a way to stop a rampant blush when you felt it coming. ‘What did you tell her?’ The stray cat her mother used to feed, who was kept alive now by a kind pool of neighbours, meandered around Evelyn’s bare leg. Eddy watched.

  ‘I told her you were. And lovely on the inside, too.’ He met her eyes in a way that made her burn.

  She blinked. ‘You told her that?’

  His face burst into a smile. ‘No! But I did tell her you were pretty. Because it’s just the truth, isn’t it? It’s the first thing anybody would say about you.’

  She held his gaze until the bold intention of his stare made her look away.

  By the end of the week, they had done most of the rooms except her bedroom and the bathroom. It wouldn’t be long before she would be returning to London. When he came to her the following morning, he said, ‘I can’t work today. I have to run to Warkworth to deliver some garden plans for a builder. I’m meeting my friend Stanley there at eleven o’clock. He’s a plasterer, and I’m trying to set him up with some work. I wondered if you wanted to come for the ride.’

  He was wearing a new dark-red shirt. She couldn’t look at him for fear of giving away how happy she was to be asked. ‘Oh, well . . . How long would we be gone?’

  She glanced up and thought she saw a tell-tale flicker of optimism in his eyes. ‘Maybe an hour or so to run the errand, then I thought we could drive back slowly and stop somewhere for lunch.’

  She couldn’t fully breathe. He was oppressively bearing down on her with his obvious hope that she would say yes. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve got so much to do around here . . .’ She shook her head in feigned exasperation at all the imaginary tasks that were keeping her from accepting his invitation.

  ‘I think you should forget what you have to do and come with me. To compensate for standing me up all those years ago.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve made me a proposition I can’t refuse.’ She turned and went back into the house so abruptly the door almost slammed shut in his face. She caught him looking at her through the blinds. He gave her one of his telling, red-blooded smiles.

  She sat in his van while he talked to the men. On the radio, Heaven 17 was singing ‘Temptation’. She cranked it up, and pretended she wasn’t watching him. But it was a huge act. She couldn’t not watch him. She couldn’t stop marvelling at the quirk of fate that had brought them together again. Once or twice, one of the men – Stanley, she imagined – looked past Eddy’s head into the vehicle, perhaps wondering who she was, this woman sitting in Eddy’s van. She wondered what Eddy would say. The illicit tangle of it thrilled her.

  When he climbed back into the vehicle, he threw it into reverse. ‘Right then. I’m all yours now . . . My friend wanted to meet you, by the way.’ He shot her a glance. ‘He’s quite fascinated by our story.’

  ‘Do we really have a story?’

  He met her eyes again, briefly. ‘I quite think we do, Evelyn.’

  They drove slowly through the pretty village, past the galleries, boutiques, chocolate shops, bread shops and tea rooms, following carefully behind two young female riders on horseback. Evelyn admired their deportment. When she told him she hadn’t driven the coastal route in years, he immediately diverted course. Soon, theirs was the only vehicle on the road, and the sun shone, and Culture Club sang ‘Church of the Poison Mind’. She hummed along to it. His fingers tapped the steering wheel, and she stole glances at him. From time to time, he whistled along, and caught her looking at him and smiled. She was so comfortable with him, she almost forgot that she had spent most of her adult life with another man, that she even had another life.

  A person often meets his destiny on the road he took avoiding it. Who had said that? She couldn’t stop looking at his hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

  He parked the van parallel to the sand dunes, and Evelyn got out, stretched and raised her face to the sun. He had stocked a small box with beer and pieces of cooked chicken. In a separate bag was a stick of fresh bread. ‘You knew I would come!’

  He grabbed the box and a blanket. ‘Hoped.’

  They found a spot across the dunes, overlooking the vast, deserted yellow sand beach with Bamburgh Castle behind them. He shook out the blanket, and they cracked open two beers.

  ‘How did you really end up as my mother’s gardener?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, be honest. It’s not as though you need the work.’

  He lay on his back and stared at the sky. ‘There’s no big mystery. I’ve done some projects on Holy Island. I’d bump into her occasionally, and we would chat. Once, when your dad hurt his back, I helped secure their fence after a bad storm took it down . . . Then another time I brought her some peaches . . . She needed help after your dad died. I offered because it really costs me nothing to help people out a little bit.’

  He helped secure the fence? Brought her peaches! Her mother hadn’t breathed a word of this, and Evelyn didn’t know whether she was touched by it or infuriated. ‘Did you ever talk about me when you had these cosy little chats of yours?’

  ‘They weren’t cosy. But no. Never.’

  ‘Never?’ she laughed, slightly. ‘Why do I find that hard to believe?’

  ‘I asked if you were well. That’s all. She didn’t add any more and, well, I didn’t stick my nose in beyond that.’

  She couldn’t believe they’d had some sort of acquaintanceship, if that was the right word. She’d honestly just thought the first and last time her mother had set eyes on him had been that day he had come to take her on the date. ‘She liked you,’ she said, more in bewilderment than anything else. ‘She was really fond of you.’ Eddy this . . . Eddy that . . . His name, and how often it had come up, echoed with such significance now. How oblivious she’d been.

  ‘Maybe she felt sorry because I was the idiot she had to look in the eye that night and make up a story for. Or maybe she was used to covering for you when it came to boys. Maybe there were loads of teenagers whose hearts Evelyn had broken running all over Holy Island.’

  Evelyn remembered being in such a nervous tangle that day. Why had she agreed to go out with him so close to her leaving? Then, once she’d decided it had been the maddest idea in the world, there was no means of contacting him to tell him not to come. She had instructed her mother to say she’d had to work late. Her mother had tussled with her: she wasn’t Evelyn’s lackey, and it was no way to behave. But in the end, Evelyn had won by going into hiding in her bedroom, leaving her mother with no choice. She had heard the knock on the door, and stood there, in the middle of her room, bone-still and barely breathing, while she listened to his voice. The brevity of the conversation. The clicking of a door closed. With the idea of him leaving, and her never seeing him again, all her misgivings rushed at her; they beat in her, madly, along with her heart. But still she just stood there, paralysed by something she couldn’t even explain to herself. When she was certain he wouldn’t be
looking back, she crossed to the window and peeked from behind the curtains. Seeing him from behind as he walked to his car – his noble head, and confident, manly walk – brought a fresh reminder of all she was letting go. But he was gone now: she felt a tiny note of relief in that. She let the curtain fall away from her finger.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said, drawn back to the present, feeling desperately sad. ‘There really weren’t other boys. The young men, they were always such fast movers. They didn’t really have any way about them, any style . . .’ She curled up her nose, recognising it was something she’d thought back then, but she wasn’t so sure it had been true. ‘The ones that liked you just seemed to want to marry you and get you pregnant so you would live a life just like their mother’s.’ It had been an unkind assumption, and yet here she was still parroting it. She wondered why her mind had been so made up that way, why she’d needed to put down everything about where she’d come from, especially since she’d spent half her life pining to have it all back. ‘I wanted something more romantic than that. I just wanted more from my life than I felt they were offering.’

  ‘I remember standing at the altar, in my tuxedo, and feeling completely out of my comfort zone.’

  It took her a moment to realise he was reminiscing about how they had met.

  ‘Billy was fidgeting. I remember the tiny church and the white lilies. I remember looking around at all these girls, all these ordinary faces, and then I saw yours.’ He was looking into the distance, lost in the memory. She was fascinated by his expression. ‘You were wearing a black dress and a leopard-print pillbox hat, and your shoulder-length hair was flipped up, a bit like Jackie Kennedy, only prettier.’ He smiled a little. His voice had taken on a tender quality. ‘You had this fabulous dancer’s posture, and an incredible little heart-shaped face. I thought I’d never seen anybody more beautiful, and I couldn’t take my eyes off you, no matter how hard I tried. I almost forgot what I was doing there.’ He laughed, clearly amused by his younger self. ‘All I could think was how much I wanted it to be over so I could find a way to talk to you.’

  ‘I remember thinking, How can the bride be standing there knowing she was about to marry Billy and not be wishing it was you!’

  ‘Really? You were thinking that?’ He looked at her, sceptically.

  ‘Really. I was. What made you such a romantic, Eddy? The coal miner’s son from Newcastle?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was just twenty-five and smitten. You became my reason for why I was even at that wedding. The minute I saw you, I had my purpose.’

  ‘Better not tell your poor old groom that!’

  ‘He’d probably not care, anyway, given he’s on to his second wife.’

  ‘I remember you serenading me with The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, when you were supposed to be singing it to the newlyweds!’ She hid her face in her hands. ‘Oh dear! I wanted the ground to swallow me up!’

  He threw back his head, and she recognised his hearty laugh from twenty years ago. Recognised it at the core of her, as though the then and now were one.

  ‘You were completely drunk. It was terrible.’

  ‘Not true! I mean, I was terrible, but I wasn’t drunk. I was driving, remember? And I was enjoying watching you squirm.’

  ‘Okay, I stand corrected. But you did really embarrass me. I just thought, Oh my God, he’s way too extrovert for me! If he were my husband, I’d be so in the shadow of his humongous personality that I’d never get air!’ His bravery and his charisma and the way he’d belted the song out to her, with his surprisingly good voice, had made him massively fanciable, and she would never, ever, forget what it was like to be under the spell of attraction like that.

  ‘You were picturing me as your husband?’

  ‘Well, no. I was just assessing you from all potential angles.’

  ‘I think me singing that song to you instead of to them – about adoring each other until eternity – probably explains why they were divorced three years later.’

  She chortled.

  In her mind’s eye, she could see them dancing. The memory had been crisp for so long, then had distilled into these few fine-spun details that she would come back to in her quiet, questioning moments: the press of his fingers on her lower back; his grip on her right hand as his thumb gently stroked her clammy palm; his breath in intermittent draughts on the crown of her head.

  He propped himself on his elbows. ‘Do you ever think, If only . . . ?’

  ‘I try not to.’

  ‘I thought If only . . . for a long time, and then I saw you with your husband at the Mayfair.’

  She met his eyes again. ‘Let’s not talk about that night. It upsets me . . .’ She could hardly bear the reminder of how stupid she had been. ‘Tell me something nice. What would our date have been like? Tell me that instead.’

  He lay back on the sand. ‘I was going to take you to Lindisfarne Castle, to the private walled garden, for a picnic. You know, so you could pretend for a moment that you were the princess I saw you as being.’ He cast her a sideways glance. ‘My uncle was the caretaker, so I knew the owner was away. You’d have loved the view of the castle and the sea from the garden. It’s unique.’

  ‘You were going to break into private property, for me?’

  ‘It wasn’t really breaking in. It’s a garden.’ He smiled. ‘I wanted it to be something we’d remember. Because that’s how certain I felt that we’d have a future.’

  She ignored that, feeling herself buckle at the beautiful idea of it. ‘Well, it’s the best first date I’ve never been on.’

  They looked at one another. All the possibilities of what might have been hung there between their gazes, in glorious torment. Eventually, she forced herself to break it. ‘What’s Laura like?’

  He shrugged, and seemed to think. ‘Laura’s a good person. She’s a good mother. We get along well, I suppose, as friends.’

  ‘So you’re happy?’ The beer had made her brave.

  ‘There was a time, yeah. I suppose we must have been to get married, mustn’t we? But we change, don’t we?’

  She was lying on her side, propping up her head with a hand, and absorbing his face like an artist who would later paint him from memory. He kept glancing at her thigh, where her dress had ridden up slightly. ‘I knew her before I met you. I started seeing her again shortly after I lost you.’

  ‘You didn’t lose me. We didn’t even go on a date.’

  ‘Oh, I felt I did.’ He held her eyes for a moment, poignantly. ‘With everything in me, I felt I had lost you, Evelyn. I married her the year I saw you again at the Mayfair Ballroom – just a few months before, actually. She really wanted to be married, and I could tell my father was thinking I wasn’t going to get it together, because I always got the impression he was disappointed in me. I think this was my way of showing him my stripes.’ He snickered, sadly. ‘Plus, I thought a lot about her, obviously.’

  He caught her expression, and pulled a resigned smile. ‘There was a time when I’d have done anything to make Laura happy. But then you realise that all your trying really doesn’t change anything between you. You’ve become a certain way. There’s no romance, no passion . . . The man, you know – he’s the hunter. He likes to hunt . . .’ He faltered, as though embarrassed by his rambling. ‘Even with his wife . . . Some of that needs to be kept alive. Sometimes, I think she doesn’t even register I’m a member of the opposite sex. I try to tell myself, well, we’re good friends. But it still doesn’t feel like it’s enough.’ He looked at her frankly, and she could see all the disappointment backed up in his eyes. ‘The mad thing is, I’ve had to reach my mid-forties before I’ve really known who I am, before I’ve had the guts to be my own person.’

  She loved him saying all this, loved his candour, loved his priceless sapphires. She could gaze at them for ever.

  ‘Have you ever had an affair?’

  He looked genuinely surprised. ‘An affair? No, of course not. It has never occurred
to me.’

  ‘But you must get women after you.’

  ‘But I’m not after them.’ He dismissed the subject. ‘There were a few baby issues that put a strain on us. Miscarriages. The women in Laura’s family had difficulty carrying girls. We gave up trying for a while. Then out of the blue, Laura gave birth to a girl. I’m sure if we hadn’t had April, we’d not have stuck it. We make it work for her. And she’s all the more special because we thought we were never going to have her.’ He glanced at her quickly. ‘But we’re not really setting her a good example by staying in a loveless marriage, are we?’ He shrugged, as though life had burst one too many of his bubbles.

  She could feel the frustration emanating off him. She sat up and stared at the sea as he was doing. It twinkled for them. Or so it felt. Everything about the day felt sparkling to her. They were revealing tiny chips of their innermost disappointments to each other. She loved it.

  ‘What about you, Evelyn? How happy are you? If it’s okay for me to ask.’ His eyes seemed to demand her honesty.

  No one had asked her this before. It definitely wasn’t a question that would have crossed Mark’s lips, even if it had ever crossed his mind. ‘Mark’s a good man. I love him dearly. But I suppose, if I were to be honest, there’s something missing, even though I feel traitorous in saying that. Some days, you can forget about it and focus on all that’s good about your life. But it catches up with you once in a while.’ She shrugged, abashed by her confession. ‘But maybe that happens in every marriage.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like to think that some people are just right for each other and they stay that way, and it never occurs to them that they could be happier with anyone else.’

  Would that have been us? she wondered.

  ‘I’m trying to remember the beginning. It’s so hard to recall how we thought and felt so far back. I’m not sure if I ever felt right with Mark, or if I just really wanted to. In some ways, I think your memory is a combination of your reality and your dreams.’ Sometimes, events ascribed to her past were like reflections on water; they might have existed, or she could have imagined them.