After You Left Page 9

  I was completely taken aback – by his sincerity, by the look on his face, by everything. He’d stopped me from having a meltdown. I was suddenly fonder of him and felt more affinity for him than anyone should have a right to, considering we were strangers until a couple of hours ago.

  ‘Justin MacFarlane . . .’ He addressed himself again, which made me grin because it was a strange quirk of his, and it had only been a few hours, but I was already getting an idea of his quirks. ‘You don’t meet girls like this one every day. So the pressure is on to ensure you don’t say something to put her off you – like grill her about her family and put her on the spot.’

  ‘Multi-layered, you said?’ It just came back to me. ‘Like I’m a German pastry.’

  His face lit up. ‘It’s another compliment. I’m clearly crap at giving them.’

  Our eyes did a little dance again. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. If he would want a debate on that topic first, too! Or if he would say, Justin MacFarlane, do you think this is the right time to kiss her? As I looked at his face, I pictured it. That electric rush when his face would move in and my eyes would involuntarily close. And then I would feel his lips, the slightly fuller bottom one, and the top one with the small vertical scar that lined up with his right eye tooth. I wondered how he got it, and if I would be able to feel it with my tongue.

  He was watching me, full of suspense. I didn’t know what to say; didn’t know how to not disappoint him. Perhaps because I always tried to make such a good impression with men, I decided that, this time, I’d just be myself, and see what happened. ‘Justin, I’m going to be honest. I’m caught in this strange place of wanting more of you, yet feeling like I’ve had enough. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met. And I don’t know if this is a good thing or a not-so-good thing. Or maybe it’s just a new thing.’

  He went on watching me. His expression didn’t change. ‘Well,’ he said, after a while. ‘Why don’t we leave it at, It’s just a new thing? I think that sounds more promising.’

  When he walked me home, he pressed a lengthy, gentle kiss on my cheek. At this point, I had zero idea if I would ever see him again. Perhaps he was just being gracious. It might well just go down as the weirdest ‘first and only’ date in history. Yet even though the thought of inviting him in for a passionate tumble was appealing, it felt like the fastest way to ruin possibility.

  ‘How did you get that scar?’ I pointed to his top lip.

  He suddenly looked besieged by me, as though he’d bestowed much greater significance on the question than I had intended. He touched his lip. ‘I fell on some glass when I was a little boy.’

  ‘Aw! I suppose your dad must have made you all better, though?’

  ‘He did, actually.’ He looked wistful suddenly. ‘I remember him telling me it was okay to cry, because I had a thing about not crying back then, apparently. And that was all it took. As soon as he said that, I bawled my eyes out, because deep down it hurt like hell.’ He smiled deeply into my eyes. Words petered away, and we were held there in the suspenseful, wondrous liveliness of our chemistry, of what would happen next.

  After a moment or two, he said, ‘Alice, I feel like I should be coming on to you in a seriously big way . . . I’m running a bit fast and loose with you.’

  ‘But you’re just not that into me?’

  ‘No, I am definitely that into you. But my instincts are telling me to slow down or I’ll spoil it.’ He kissed my cheek again, fractionally closer to my lips this time, then when I opened my mouth to speak – to tell him those had been my thoughts exactly – he popped a kiss there. It was neither brief nor prolonged. But I would think about it so many times after, relive the loose and lovely choreography of it.

  ‘So even though I might kick myself later,’ he said, ‘I think I’m just going to follow my instincts.’

  He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and I was aware of everything, every last detail, as all this played out – a heightening of my senses. ‘Goodnight, Alice,’ he said. ‘And if you can stand having me do it, I’ll ring you some time tomorrow when I’m at work and we’ll formulate our next plan of attack.’

  ‘Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.’ I was only half teasing.

  ‘I never say anything I don’t mean,’ he said.

  ELEVEN

  His face takes up half of my computer monitor. His mugshot from the ‘Partners’ page of his law firm’s website. His eyes are locked into mine. I can’t stop staring at them. The real Justin is nothing like this photo, which has an imperturbable, even slightly slick, quality to it – something about his smile. I told him to change the picture. Of course, he completely disagreed, and said he had bigger things than that to worry about.

  The gallery was quiet today. I click off the Internet and delete my history – evidence of my pathological time-wasting. I have visited this page too often today. I am addicted to his face. Because it’s after 5 p.m., I’m able to wander guilt-free into the Hopper/Wyeth room to visit my solitary soulmates.

  I am scarcely in there ten minutes when I hear my name. When I swing around, Evelyn is walking toward me, all smiles.

  ‘Maybe I need to find you a job here!’ I greet her with a kiss, which feels surprisingly natural to me.

  ‘I take the bus into town three times a week. I volunteer at the charity shop on Monday afternoons. There’s only so much looking in shops that a person can do. So I’m taking the opportunity to come and see Christina while she’s still here.’ She sits on the bench beside me, opposite Christina.

  ‘How are the fellows?’ I ask. She’s impeccably dressed in a lemon, knee-length coat – the kind a young Newcastle reveller with an evolved sense of style would wear, rather than the Queen.

  ‘No worse, I suppose.’ She sounds defeated, and I am already able to recognise that this is a little unusual for Evelyn.

  ‘How’s Eddy? Do you think he remembers his visit here and how he spoke about Christina and her house?’

  She shrugs her tiny, square shoulders. ‘I’d like to think it means progress. Or, at the very least, that he takes something comforting away from it. Something that lives in him longer than we might believe.’

  ‘You want it to be more than just a moment.’

  Sometimes, the way she looks at me, I think I’ve said the wrong thing.

  ‘You shouldn’t minimise moments, Alice. Our whole life is made up of them. It shouldn’t always be the big, dramatic events that make you sit up and take notice. The value of your life is in all the unexceptional details.’ She looks at the painting of Christina staring longingly at her home. ‘Christina knows that.’

  I find it fascinating how she talks about Christina as though she were real. But then again, Christina had lived. She had been an ordinary person whose conflict – perhaps prosaic at that – just happened to be captured here in oil paint for eternity.

  ‘The object of her heartbreak,’ Evelyn says.

  I stare at the one clump of mascara that’s gluing up some of her eyelashes. ‘You mean Christina’s house? I’ve never imagined a house could break someone’s heart. It’s usually a man, isn’t it?’

  I am back in the heat of Evelyn’s scrutiny again. I wonder if she always looks at people too deeply and for too long.

  Then she glances down at my wedding ring hand, at the simple platinum band. ‘I hope you have a good man in your life. I hope you got it right the first time. Because we all want that, don’t we? Time advances, we have opportunities for better education, better jobs, a greater say in national politics, yet the love of the right man is still the thing we want more than anything else, even though we’re supposed to be more self-sufficient than that.’ Her eyes move swiftly back to the painting, as though she had never made that brief foray into personal territory.

  ‘And if I haven’t got it right the first time?’ The image of Justin’s smile on that website blazes in my mind again.

  ‘You’ll survive,’ she says. ‘We all do. Though it often doesn’
t feel like a very nice way to be living. We only realise that surviving is an achievement once we’re old. When we’re young, we feel we were meant for more obvious triumphs.’

  ‘Did you get it right the first time, Evelyn?’ I wonder why it is that I find myself so curious about her.

  For a moment, I’m sure she’s not going to answer. She dips into her bag and pulls out a white cotton handkerchief with pink embroidered edges, then just holds it, tightly, in her slightly trembling left hand. ‘That’s such a very difficult question. To say I didn’t would be desperately unfair to someone I loved. And in a way, it wouldn’t even be true.’ She meets my eyes, steadily. ‘There are so many different aspects to love that render it all so very complicated. And sometimes you are just simply . . . torn.’

  I think about this. The words for everyone’s sake come back to me. I stare at her miraculously unblemished little white hand holding the pretty handkerchief.

  ‘You know what I discovered a very long time ago?’ Evelyn’s eyes have shifted to Christina again.

  I am aware of how surprisingly keen I am to hear what Evelyn has discovered.

  ‘If you want to be in love, you have to accept that you run the risk of having your heart broken in such a way that it’s almost impossible to mend. Some of us can live quite happily without that wretched experience. But some of us can’t. We have to put ourselves through it to feel we’re alive. We thrive in the extremes of unparalleled joy and abject misery. What we can’t much tolerate is the middle ground.’

  Evelyn looks distantly across the room, in unfinished thought. ‘I suppose what I’m saying to you is you have to take your love story, and you have to take how it ends, too. It’s called life.’

  I know she isn’t talking about me, per se, but she might as well be. ‘Did you have a love story that ended, Evelyn?’ I’m fairly certain she was talking about Eddy.

  Evelyn doesn’t answer. I feel bad. Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to force intimacy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, at last. ‘I have a story, and it’s definitely about love. But in some ways it hasn’t ended yet.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I say.

  She looks in her bag for something, and pulls out a small Polaroid. She hands it to me.

  ‘Good heavens! I haven’t seen one of these in years!’ I can’t help but smile at the black-and-white image with its thick white border. ‘What is it?’ I ask. The picture quality is poor.

  ‘Christina’s house.’

  I wonder if Evelyn is just one of those people who enjoys being mysterious. But for a moment I believe it might be Christina’s farmhouse, that Evelyn has some strange connection to the painting, or to Wyeth. Perhaps she’s going to say she’d been Wyeth’s lover, or Christina’s cousin, or that she had lived there, in Cushing, Maine, not far from the weather-beaten farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. In my longing to believe something, I might be inclined to believe anything.

  But it isn’t Christina’s house, though there’s a similarity in the atmosphere and content of the two images. It’s a picture of a small stone cottage with a dark front door. In the background, at the top of the attractive garden, a slightly built girl with long, dark hair stands casually and unsmilingly, with her hands behind her back.

  ‘Is that you, Evelyn?’ Like Christina, the girl has a woeful aura about her. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ I’m so touched and flattered she would show me this! I can’t help but think, Ah, maybe one day I’ll be like Evelyn – alone and desperate for someone to tell a hand-me-down story to. ‘Is it where you lived, Evelyn, before you moved away? Where you grew up?’

  ‘How did you know I moved away?’ Her cat-like green eyes widen in amazement.

  ‘Just the way you look. The way you speak. Everything about you says you don’t really belong here.’

  ‘But I do! I very much belong here! I always did. Even when I left here, I was pulled back. Just like Christina. The way she’s staring at that house – I can fully relate to that feeling, because that has been me my entire life!’

  She looks so zealous. I hope I haven’t upset her.

  ‘Do you ever feel highly nostalgic for your upbringing, for things gone?’ she asks. ‘Nostalgic to the point where you can barely recover from the ache?’

  I realise I’m not required to answer.

  ‘Nostos. Algia. Means homecoming. Pain and suffering. Some doctors believe nostalgia is a neurological disease. Did you know that? You see, we long to go back, but we can’t because the past didn’t actually exist. It’s only a composite of what we remember, and, of course, it’s always the “feel-good” memories we hang on to. We filter out the negative ones.’ She nods briefly to the painting. ‘That’s what Christina is doing.’

  ‘Where was your picture taken, Evelyn?’ I ask her.

  ‘Holy Island, where I grew up. Back then, I’d decided living on a tidal island was the singular most depressing thing on earth. So I moved to the part of the country that Northerners love to hate.’ She smiles. ‘I was a journalist for a publication in London. Do you know a magazine called Cosmopolitan?’

  I place a hand on my chest. ‘Good heavens! You wrote for Cosmo?’

  ‘Yes. When it first launched in the UK. In 1972.’

  ‘That must have been so exciting, and glamorous! Impressive back then, too.’

  ‘I wrote a book as well. A novel.’

  ‘You wrote a novel? Seriously? Was it published? What was it about?’ This woman is an endless revelation.

  ‘Of course it was published!’ Evelyn seems surprised by my surprise. ‘It was about, well, let’s just say, moral dilemmas and the difficult choices we make for love. Maybe you will read it one day, if I ever find the one remaining copy.’

  I’m flattered she implies our acquaintanceship may have longevity. ‘You’re an intriguing lady, Evelyn. I’d absolutely love to read your book.’ I briefly touch her hand. ‘Do you ever think that sometimes you have to meet people for a reason?’

  Evelyn seems beguiled by me again. ‘I do. Everything happens for a reason. It’s not a cliché, I can promise.’

  I smile. ‘I like that idea.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make it any less painful. Not when you make the wrong choices in your personal life.’

  She’s on the brink of saying more. I’m dying to say, What choices that were so wrong? But I’m not sure I dare go there. Am I finding myself caring about an elderly woman’s troubled love story as a distraction? Or is it to gain some kind of corresponding clarity about my own?

  I give her back the photograph. ‘It’s beautiful, Evelyn. I’m very happy you showed it to me.’

  ‘This is where it all started,’ she says. She stares at the photograph the way you might study something that’s slightly mystifying to you. When she looks up, her lovely green eyes are flooded with tears.

  ‘Where what started, Evelyn?’

  I scrutinise her pale face, but she is gone now, gazing off into the distance, like someone searching for that childhood best friend she never forgot. I’m not even sure she’s heard me.

  Then, after a moment or two, she says, ‘Where I met him.’

  ‘Who?’ I ask, already feeling I know the answer.

  ‘Eddy,’ she says. ‘Though I’d met him long before then. I suppose what I’m saying is this garden is where something began that would change the course of our lives, and I don’t know that either of us was quite prepared for it.’

  She glances at me now. ‘I’ll tell you, if you’d like.’

  ‘I would love that.’

  She looks at her watch. ‘But you are probably due to go home now.’

  I think of that lonely flat and another long night of my own company ahead. ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I have nothing to rush home for. Would you like to go get a cup of tea?’

  She smiles. ‘That’s a wonderful idea.’

  TWELVE

  Evelyn

  Holy Island. 1983

  He came to her shortly after nine every morning. The weath
er had answered his prayers; it had poured down virtually every day.

  She had chosen sage-green paint for the kitchen, and a rich cream for the rest of the main floor. He would do the detail, then she would apply the roller in long strokes. He gave her lessons in the proper way to do it. Once, his hand rested briefly on her upper back while they assessed her progress, and she registered that it was the first time he’d touched her in twenty years.

  They talked a lot about their childhoods, their not especially happy school days, his dreams of playing professional football that ended when his dad lost his job in the pit closures. ‘My dreams didn’t matter when you couldn’t pay the rent. I went into the shipyards as an apprentice, but then, of course, that was another one of the North East’s industries that came to a sad end. So I decided to try gardening.’ He ended it there. ‘Tell me about your life in London,’ he said. ‘I’d like to try to picture you . . .’

  She told him about where they lived, about their country home, the gardens, her writing job, dance classes, friends and their gossipy lunches. She told him how she skied mainly because Mark had insisted she learn, and she went sailing, even though she found nothing enjoyable about being bossed around on a boat. He laughed. ‘I can’t imagine anybody bossing you around, Evelyn. You’re a force to be reckoned with.’

  One day, when the sun broke out, she made them a lunch of local speciality crab sandwiches and a beer. They ate in the garden, and talked about dreams again. Nat King Cole sang ‘Unforgettable’ on the radio. Eddy told her about how he was going after a large contract for the civic green space.

  ‘I thought you were happy with your job the way it is? Don’t you employ four men and look after the hospital grounds and a local park?’

  ‘Yes. But my wife wants a better house and more clothes, plus I’d like to give my daughter a better life. I’d hate her to ever have to give up her dreams to support us, like I had to do. I could never let that happen.’