Reluctantly Home(36)
He reached to pick up the phone receiver, but Evelyn shot her hand out to stay his.
‘No, Julian,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve decided I want to keep the baby.’
Julian shook his head in disbelief. ‘But Evelyn. You are at the peak of your career. If you walk out now, there’s no guarantee that anyone will want you when you come back.’
Evelyn shrugged. The baby was more important to her than what she might be giving up, and was growing in importance with each passing day. If what he was saying was true, then she would just have to deal with that when she reached that point.
Julian’s head hit the desk and he moaned to himself.
‘I’m sorry, Julian,’ she said gently. ‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen and I really didn’t want to mess things up for you. But it did, and now I have to live with it.’
Julian looked up, and now Evelyn could see something else in his eyes; concern perhaps, or maybe pity.
‘I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend,’ he said.
Evelyn shrugged again. ‘I don’t,’ she replied.
The corners of Julian’s mouth turned down as he considered the other possibilities. ‘I didn’t have you down as a one-night-stand kind of girl,’ he said, his brow furrowed in confusion.
‘I’m not. This was . . .’
What was it? How was she supposed to describe what had happened to her? It wasn’t rape exactly. Whilst she hadn’t gone into the hotel room expecting what she got, she hadn’t run away, either. She was no ingenue. She knew these things happened to actresses all the time. She had just never imagined it would happen to her. It wasn’t right, what Rory MacMillan had done, but it was the way things were, and if having sex with him was what it took to secure the job in his show, then it appeared that was a price she’d been prepared to pay. That she’d got pregnant was just damned bad luck.
But something stopped her from telling all this to Julian. She had thought that maybe it was to protect her own reputation, or perhaps even MacMillan’s, but now she realised that her silence was tinged with something she hadn’t noticed before – shame.
‘This was . . .’ she continued. ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter what it was. The fact is I am pregnant and I want to keep the baby, so I can’t take the part. I’m sorry, but there you have it. My hands are tied.’
Julian sighed deeply. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure your mind is made up then I’ll make the calls.’
‘Thank you, Julian,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I’m sorry.’
She held out her hand, but Julian had already turned away and so she left him to his phone calls.
As she left the agency and headed out to the street, Evelyn knew it would be the last time she ever went there. Julian would take her off his books as she wasn’t available for work, and when she came back it was unlikely he would see her. She would need to find herself new representation. But for now, that wasn’t important. Now she had to pack up her stuff and get herself back to Southwold, back to Joan and the life she had fought so hard to escape.
21
Evelyn took a long, lingering look around her little room before she left it for the last time. The flat had never been much to write home about. It was cramped, cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, with shabby fixtures and fittings and a creeping damp issue, but it had been her world for the last five years and she had loved it. For all its failings, which were many and varied, it was what it represented that was important. The flat spoke of independence, a determination to succeed; dreams, if not quite fulfilled, then at least works in progress. Evelyn had left the safety of a world she knew behind and had pushed out on her own to make her fortune in a city where the pavements sparkled in the spotlights. She hadn’t exactly made a fortune, but she had managed to support herself without ever once asking for help, and that had made her proud.
But now she was going back, back to Suffolk, to the family house, to her sister. It felt like a retrograde step, a move in the wrong direction that discredited everything she had achieved so far. And not only that, she was taking with her the scent of scandal. She was pregnant, with no sign of a wedding band on her finger or a father for her unborn child. Such a situation might have been fairly commonplace and even acceptable in London, but where she was going it would shroud her in disgrace. Tongues would wag from one end of the town to the other. Ironically, Evelyn thought, she would be the most exciting thing to happen to the place in years.
In fact, if the whole situation weren’t so overloaded with complication, Evelyn would have been quite proud of the bomb she was about to drop on her former hometown. In other circumstances, she would relish the expressions on the faces of people from her past as they saw her expanding form and realised why she was suddenly back living with Joan in their parents’ house. Evelyn would have enjoyed flaunting both her bump and her status as a singleton.
But life wasn’t as straightforward as that. She was going to have to throw herself on the mercy of her sister, and so she would need to toe the line. It was clear that Joan was keen to add a gloss of respectability to her story. In one telephone conversation, she had suggested that Evelyn come up with some lie about her ‘husband’ dying unexpectedly.
‘It would be better all round, Evelyn, if we just pretended that you were a decent woman who had fallen on hard times,’ Joan had said.