Reluctantly Home(25)

She realised that she felt suddenly and inexplicably weary and she stifled a yawn, but Ted saw.

‘Boring you, am I?’ he asked, but he was smiling.

‘I’m sorry, Ted, but I’m so tired all of a sudden. I think I might head off home.’

‘Well, let me walk you back,’ he said, and she appreciated that he didn’t try to persuade her to stay. She felt almost overwhelmed by her urge to be at home in her bed. It wasn’t like her to pass up a social occasion but then again, she had been in an oddly pensive mood all day.

‘No funny business,’ he added. ‘Scout’s honour, but we can’t have you wandering about London in the dark on your own.’

Could Evelyn trust him? She thought so. They had been together for hours and he hadn’t as much as touched her knee.

‘That would be very kind,’ she said. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Should we say goodbye?’ he asked her.

Brenda and Jim were bouncing up and down in the middle of a bunch of revellers and looked like they wouldn’t be stopping for some time. Evelyn shook her head.

They stood up, Ted downing the last of his pint, and then skirted round the dance floor, down the stairs and out into the street. The air was chilly now, but the sky was clear and one or two determined stars were twinkling.

‘When I lived in Suffolk,’ said Evelyn as they set off towards the flat, ‘there were millions of stars. You could even see the Milky Way on a good night. I always feel a bit sorry for all the Londoners who have no idea what’s right above them.’

Ted shook his head. ‘I don’t need to know what’s out there,’ he said with a shudder. ‘And the countryside’s not for me. Far too much air.’

They laughed, and Evelyn let Ted slip his arm through hers as he had done when he’d escorted her to the pub earlier that day. Now, though, there was a kind of understanding between them and the rather frantic mood of before had been replaced by something akin to friendship.

‘Thank you for your company this afternoon,’ Evelyn said when they reached the door to the flat. ‘I very much enjoyed it.’

‘You are most welcome,’ he replied. ‘I had a nice time too. Could I have your phone number? Maybe we could meet again one afternoon, find another pub to waste some time in?’

Evelyn thought for a split second and then rattled off the number, which he wrote down on a till receipt using a stubby pencil that he pulled out of his coat.

‘It’s incoming calls only, though,’ she said with a wink, ‘so don’t be expecting me to ring you back.’

He left her at the door without even trying to kiss her and Evelyn found, to her surprise, that she was a little disappointed. She didn’t suppose he would ring. Men like him never did. Still, it had been a lovely wedding.





14


At last there was some progress on Into the Blue . The weeks since she had been given the part had dragged by and so, finally giving into the inevitable, Evelyn had been forced to get herself another job to tide her over; but as there was no need to be racing off to auditions she had found herself a civilised position temping in an estate agent’s office. She whiled away her time, between bouts of filing and sending out property particulars, fantasising about the house she would buy for herself once she had a steady income. Working in an estate agent’s was the perfect way to hone your dream life, it seemed.

When she left the office at half past five, Ted was waiting for her in the café over the road. They had taken to meeting up like this for a cup of tea at the end of their working days. As good as his word, Ted had rung her after Brenda’s wedding, and they had met up for a drink and a chat. There had been no suggestion that it was a date of any kind, and this suited Evelyn. It appeared to suit Ted, too, because things had quickly switched from pub to a contemplative cup of tea before heading off to their own lives for whatever their evenings held in store. This tended to be very little for Evelyn. She was finding the daily grind of an office job surprisingly exhausting, and was fit for nothing by 6 p.m. She wasn’t sure how Ted spent his evenings, but she tried not to be too curious if he didn’t want to tell her. The mutual benefit of their arrangement appeared to be good conversation and friendship.

Evelyn sidled across the road, dodging between cars without waiting for the little green man, and went into the café. Ted was at their usual table next to the window, two mugs of tea and a plate of malted milk biscuits set out before him. Sometimes they were shortbreads, or Rich Tea and, on one red-letter day, chocolate digestives. It all depended on what Sanjeet, whose café it was, had left over after the day’s trading.

Today Ted was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On other days he wore a jacket and tie, and occasionally the brown wedding suit. Evelyn assumed his clothes reflected the duties of his day but she never pried, asking simply, ‘Good day?’ as she sat down, to which he invariably replied, ‘Fair to middling.’ Generally, when she arrived he would be scouring the small ads in the London Evening Standard , and today was no different.

‘You never know what you might pick up from the small ads,’ he’d told her when she asked why he scrutinised the back pages of the paper so carefully. ‘It’s like a whole microcosm of London life right there in those little boxes.’

They had shared more of the detail of their lives with one another now. She knew that he lived with his mother in a flat on the seventeenth floor of a tower block in Hackney. He seemed to be her only carer.