After You Left Page 6

  ‘There’s something about it. It’s haunting,’ Michael says. ‘You feel like she’s been away and she longs to go back.’

  ‘It’s the way she’s looking up at the house.’ Martin pretends to look through the camera lens he’s making with his hand. ‘The house is on high, and she’s looking up at it. It means a lot to her.’

  I’m amazed how surprisingly tender and astute their observations are, and how moved we all are by the enigmatic Christina and her attachment to her house.

  ‘Christina has lost something that she still wants,’ Evelyn says, gravely. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible curse. And unfortunately, like a lot of us, she hasn’t learnt the art of letting go.’

  I think of the concept of letting go, the idea of me having to let go of Justin. Or the thought of him having already let go of me . . . It calls to mind an image of a person freefalling through time and space, without a parachute.

  ‘I think she’s really sad.’ Ronnie wipes his brow in distress. ‘There are a lot of burdens on her.’

  ‘Wyeth said he found in people the fugitive quality of life and the inevitable eventual tragedy,’ I tell them, with quiet reverence. ‘Someone who wrote about him said that when you look at his work you have to listen to the eloquence of things unsaid.’

  We all fall silent, paying respect to Christina, listening for the eloquence.

  ‘She looks like she’s seeing something that doesn’t exist.’ The voice comes from behind. We all seem to have forgotten about Eddy.

  He comes and stands right behind us. He’s the tallest among us, but so thin for his build. Yet his voice is strong and sure of itself.

  ‘She’s seeing her memories,’ he says. ‘A lot of things happened in that house. Things that mean a lot to her.’ He taps his temple.

  Evelyn gasps quietly, and a hand flies to her mouth. We all seem to notice. Michael looks at me as though to say Eddy has just put the sun back in Evelyn’s sky. I find myself curiously spellbound.

  ‘He’s right!’ The whites of her eyes have turned watery and red. ‘Christina did something a long time ago, something that had terrible consequences.’ She looks right at me; I am held fast by her intensity. ‘She has lived her entire life wanting to put it right.’

  I want to say, What? What did she do? But, of course, it would be entirely inappropriate. I can’t help thinking that Evelyn isn’t talking about Christina; she’s talking about herself.

  I glance at Michael, and give him a slightly shrinking smile.

  EIGHT

  Evelyn

  Holy Island. June, 1983

  At first, all she saw was the back of his head. He was on the other side of the vast laurel tree that divided two sections of the garden. His white van was parked right outside her mother’s gate. It was the first thing she had noticed when she rounded the corner hugging a plastic bag of groceries like a baby because its handle had snapped; she’d just had to pick a week’s supply of tins and vegetables from the middle of the road.

  He always came on Tuesdays, her mother had told her. The naturalness of his name on her mother’s lips during their long-distance phone calls had rubbed off on her; she felt like she knew him herself. But she wasn’t feeling sociable. She was no longer used to the introspective lens of small-town Northern England. There was something buffering about the anonymity of London, the steady revolutions of her social life there, her ability to pick and choose whom she talked to, and when.

  He clearly didn’t hear her when she opened the gate. Only when the sound of her feet announced her arrival did he look up.

  When she saw his face, her ability to react, even to breathe, was somehow put on hold. He was standing fifty feet away, wearing a red shirt, in the process of cutting back a clematis. The stray grey tabby cat her mother had been feeding lay washing itself on the lawn, methodically pulling down its left ear with its left paw. She was aware of the film-camera precision of her eyes, her keenness to observe every last detail of this extraordinary surprise.

  He swiped the back of his hand across his cheek. A smile started, then stopped itself. ‘Evelyn,’ he said, sounding as taken aback as she felt. She thought he swayed slightly, with the force of the surprise.

  ‘Eddy.’ His name came out as a croak. In all her mother’s mentioning of Eddy, Evelyn had never once connected him to Eddy. She placed a hand on her heart as the unlikely reality of it sunk in. ‘Good heavens!’

  For a moment, all he could do was stare at her face. Then his gaze dropped down her from head to toe. In the glare of his scrutiny, she felt too done-up in her burgundy velvet pedal-pushers and black studded boots from a rookie designer called Jimmy Choo, which she had purchased from a Saturday market in Liverpool Street. Eddy’s rake was planted in the soil next to him, and there was a lawnmower beside a heap of newly cut grass. Despite her still being suspended in a state of shock, Evelyn’s eye for peripheral detail was sharper than ever.

  He hadn’t changed. Not that she’d have imagined he would in the fifteen years since she’d last seen him at the Long John Baldry concert at the Mayfair Ballroom.

  ‘You look good,’ he said, clearly both charmed and reduced by the sight of her. ‘Better than good, actually.’ He laughed a little, out of his depth, and she now knew that he really was as shocked as her.

  She was inwardly flustered at the compliment. He was still truly handsome; in fact, he redefined the adjective. He was tall and fit and tanned. So unlike Mark, who was average height, lean-limbed and pale, as if he had been constructed out of cigarettes. Eddy still had a full head of black hair, and his eyes were the colour of sapphires. But he’d always possessed some other appeal that couldn’t be attributed to looks alone. It was something she felt in the core of her, rather than something she saw. She couldn’t really have described it then, all those years ago, and she couldn’t now.

  ‘You look much the same too, Eddy. I’m just . . . !’ She laughed, nervously. ‘I’m not sure how this . . . I thought you worked for the shipyards, but here you are, in my mother’s garden . . . A gardener?’ None of this made any sense. In all their conversations, her mother had never let on. Evelyn truly couldn’t fathom it.

  She had a feeling she’d been toyed with. It was like her mother to derive some pleasure from imagining the two of them might meet again one day – through her. Somewhere, up there, Evelyn was sure she was looking down and relishing this.

  He was unflappable. ‘I did work for the shipyards. I was laid off. Made some changes.’

  It’s a shame it’s not summer. Then you’d have met Eddy. Her mother’s words when she had come back in the winter to nurse her through cancer. It was said in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way. Still Evelyn hadn’t connected it. If she’d had a penny for all the Eddys she’d known, she’d have filled a jar.

  They were stuck in an awkward moment where neither seemed to know what else to say.

  She found herself laughing again, slightly. Not because this was funny. Purely because she was still astonished. ‘Look, I need to put this down.’ She had just remembered the bag was nearly falling apart. She struggled to the door, forgetting where her key was. All her memories of how they met – that day, at a wedding she wasn’t even meant to attend – were rushing at her, and she felt the need to still them because they were so overwhelming.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, and felt in her pocket, balancing the decrepit bag of groceries on one arm. She could sense his gaze on her bottom, which brought back the memory of when they had danced, his fingers pressing the small of her back. Those fingers she could still feel hours after he’d removed them.

  ‘I’m very sorry about your mother,’ he said, as she missed the lock with the key. She didn’t go through life feeling fluttery when men looked at her. In fact, the sensation was entirely foreign to her. ‘Mrs Coates was a good woman. We used to have our chats, you know.’

  She nodded, quickly. She couldn’t talk about her mother. The grief was too fresh. And she certainly didn’
t want to talk about their chats. She was still smarting that she had cooked this up. Her mother had never thought that Mark was right for her. She said he was too measured and mature. Besides, her mother had no respect for office types. Real men worked with their hands, like Evelyn’s father. It didn’t seem to matter that virtually everything Evelyn had was thanks to Mark being exactly the type that her mother disparaged. It was an argument Evelyn had had many times with her, but one she could never win.

  By the time she had got the door open, Eddy had walked down from the top of the garden and was standing close behind her.

  ‘If you want to know, I’m as surprised to see you, as you are me,’ he said.

  She turned around and met his eyes again. Those eyes she’d had such a hard time forgetting. Thankfully, they weren’t tinged with the same terrible reproach as they had been fifteen years ago in the Mayfair Ballroom, when she’d last seen him. But then again, she knew he’d married. Her mother had seen it in the local newspaper, and had made a point of telling her.

  ‘Oh, I’m not so sure about that!’ she chided. ‘Given you were obviously in some sort of cahoots with my mother.’ She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  ‘I wasn’t in cahoots with anyone.’ He sounded mildly affronted. ‘She needed a gardener, so I’ve been helping out.’

  Evelyn couldn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘I never expected you to walk in the garden gate, Evelyn, if that’s what you’re thinking. I can promise you. Not in a million years.’

  She had placed the groceries on the table, and turned to look at him. He wiped soil from his cheek, with his knuckle. She glimpsed his wedding ring. ‘I never expected to see you again, to be honest. I avoided your mother’s funeral. I thought it best, even though I would have liked to have been there. I hope you understand.’

  Alluding to the past this way implied it had mattered. She nodded. It was June. The funeral had been a week before Christmas. This was Evelyn’s second trip back North in seven months. ‘Of course,’ she said. He hadn’t wanted to see her at the funeral. After all these years, what she’d done must have still bothered him somehow.

  ‘I had better let you get on.’ She looked over to where his rake was standing in the soil.

  His eyes remained on her for a second or two. ‘I still can’t believe I’m looking at you,’ he said. Then he gave her a somewhat sad smile, and turned to go back to his task.

  ‘We will not speak of him again,’ Evelyn had told her mother, after she’d asked Evelyn if she wanted her to send her Eddy’s wedding cutting from the newspaper. ‘Why would I want to see his wedding photograph?’ She had been aghast. And they hadn’t spoken of him again. Was this why her mother had conveniently neglected to tell her that Eddy was now her gardener? Because she was honouring Evelyn’s wishes?

  When she closed the door, she realised she was trembling. In fact, she had to sit down for a moment.

  Being in the home she grew up in always brought out Evelyn’s melancholic side. But never more so than now. Sometimes, she was so crippled by her nostalgia. She often wondered if it was because she’d never had children. Perhaps having other childhoods to focus on would have detracted her from thinking so much about her own.

  The house was nothing special to anyone but Evelyn. It was a simple stone cottage with a red-tiled roof and a navy front door, in a quaint landscape of rolling fields, sheep, low tides and tea rooms. There was a lawn at the front, and opposite, a flower garden. In the summer, it was ablaze with colour and her mother always smelt of the plums she’d pick and stew from the tree that grew out back.

  The Farne Islands lay off in the distance like sleeping hump-backed whales. And when the wind gusted, it played a song that drifted across the Cheviot Hills like a choir of ghosts. ‘What’s that strange noise?’ tourists would ask, and Evelyn’s best friend, Lorna, would make up all kinds of horror stories while Evelyn struggled to keep a straight face. Droves of tourists came to Holy Island in the summer: day-trippers to the Castle and the Priory who would leave before high tide, and others who were more intrigued by the island’s geography than its history, the concept of living somewhere that was stranded from the mainland twice a day. Every summer, someone would foolishly ignore tide tables, and Evelyn would chuckle to see the stranded cars nearly submerged in the sea. That is until she reached her late teens, and the isolation of the place felt more like fodder for dark novels, the kind written by virgin sisters from Yorkshire who suffered early deaths. Looking back, it was probably just a growing phase, but at the time, leaving had become her reason for being.

  In the kitchen, she got up from the chair and dipped the blinds so he couldn’t see in. Eddy. In her garden. She still couldn’t put the two ideas together. Her mother had schemed this. Hadn’t she? Or had it just happened the random way that the improbable often does?

  The house hadn’t been updated much over the years. The kitchen still sported the same Formica countertops and tatty linoleum flooring. There had been the odd addition of a washing machine and a monster fridge whose arrival in the family had caused a stir. The fridge had been replaced by a smaller, more efficient version, like the TV. But even the radio looked like some leftover antiquity that a certain type of person would be drawn to at a garage sale.

  She turned it on now, jumped from Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’, to Rod Stewart’s ‘Baby Jane’, and then finally left it on Elton John’s ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’. Eddy looked up briefly toward the house when that song came on, and she wondered if he could hear it. She peeked through a slat of blind again, noting the dust on it. She was saddened to see the neglect that had fallen on the place now there was no one here to take care of it, just a friend of her mother who popped in once a week to keep a general eye on things, but she couldn’t be expected to dust.

  Eddy was a quick worker. She could imagine him appealing more and more to her mother’s concept of the ideal man as he sweated it out there. After she had seen him again at the Mayfair, the force of the coincidence had possessed a kind of finality to it. I won’t ever see him again, she had thought. Improbabilities don’t happen twice.

  She let the blind fall away from her finger. Even with the radio on for company, the house was eerily empty. Every room held a host of memories. She could recall the oddest details, the threads and weaves and tones that made up the tapestry of her childhood: the scratch on the word yearning on her father’s record of Mario Lanza singing ‘Be My Love’; the squeak of the floorboard by her bedroom door and how she’d tiptoe around it when she snuck home an hour past her curfew; the fading of the yellow flowers around the border of their oval dinner plates. Once or twice, she had been certain she’d heard her mother calling her name. She’d come close to replying, then caught herself in the agonising realisation that she was gone. She had convinced herself that coming back here after her death would be impossible to bear. And yet being back somehow helped her get in touch with herself. It always had.

  She left the window, and put the things in the fridge that she was going to prepare for dinner. Local crab. New potatoes. A peach melba, because she could never get them this good in London. She was conscious of going about her tasks indoors as he went about his outside: the odd symbiotic domesticity of them. A thought sailed through her: If I had never left, this could have been my life.

  At one point, she looked in the mirror. The fine bones of her face, the green eyes accentuated by mascara – the only make-up she ever wore – dramatically curling up her lashes at the outer edges. Her heavy, dark eyebrows that gave her face stature, as an old boyfriend had once told her. She’d loathed them ever since. And there was something else – there was a slight flush to her cheeks. She looked alive again.

  At exactly 4 p.m., he knocked on the door. ‘I think I’m all done for today.’ His eyes travelled over her face, over the top of her hair, as though the sight of her pleased him all over again. Years ago, when she had danced with him, she’d thought it would be futile trying to fall out
of love with those eyes.

  ‘So you’ll be back in two weeks?’ she asked. His eyes were telling her that he still thought she was beautiful, and she felt herself blushing with the heat of them.

  ‘Yes. Of course. I imagine you’re going to be selling.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. To spruce the place up.’ He had lurked in her mind on her wedding day. Not with repining and weeping, just with the irrevocability of closing a door that hadn’t even been properly open. She’d thought something similar when her mother had said he’d married. What will be, will be. Perhaps. But one thing’s for certain: we won’t be.

  ‘When are you heading back to your castle?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t live in a castle.’

  He continued to affectionately take stock of her. ‘I thought you married an earl.’

  She tutted. He had always been a little fresh with her. ‘I didn’t marry an earl.’ Where was her wit when she needed it? To leave here was a mark of having bettered oneself, as though Northern England were somehow universally acknowledged by its inhabitants to be inferior to the rest of the country. It was a perception that the leaver could never live down, so there was no point in taking offence at it. ‘Do you think you could keep coming until I find new owners? Or should I get someone else?’ His presence was somehow reducing her to size, and she wasn’t familiar with feeling this small.

  He frowned. ‘Why would you get someone else?’

  ‘No reason. Only if you want me to.’ She looked an inch or two past his head. He’d know she was being a little sparky with him.

  When she met his eyes again he seemed a little disappointed in her. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ll see you again in two weeks.’

  With that, he gave a curt nod and then was gone.

  NINE

  London. 1963

  ‘You have a delivery,’ Matthew, the cheeky young concierge, told her when she arrived on shift on the front desk at Claridge’s at 3 p.m.