Reluctantly Home(39)

Joan tutted. ‘I don’t know where else you think you’d sleep,’ she snapped.

‘Fine,’ replied Evelyn as evenly as she could manage.

She was back at home, and it was as if the last ten years had never happened.





22





2019


Pip stood on the opposite pavement and surveyed the Mountcastles’ house. Behind her the waves crashed on to the shore and the seagulls called, their plaintive cries whisked away by the breeze. The place hadn’t been hard to find. Jez had described the outside in enough detail that Pip could identify it pretty confidently. Now that she saw it, the house did ring a few distant bells. She probably had scurried past as a child, picturing all kinds of terrible truths about the women who lived inside, her imagination no doubt fuelled by Jez’s ghoulish stories.

These days the house looked shabby and unloved. Paint was peeling away from the window frames and the glass didn’t look as if it had seen a chamois leather for years. In fact, it was so dilapidated that it might have been empty but for a light burning in an upstairs window. Someone was there. But who?

Jez hadn’t been sure which sister had died in the accident, but Pip really hoped it was Joan. Wishing one sister dead over the other was an unworthy thought, but Pip’s affection for the chirpy, positive Evelyn grew with every diary post she read. Looking at the state of the house now, however, it was hard to believe it was the Evelyn of the diary who lived inside.

Pip wondered what could have happened to her to bring her so low. Maybe she had just had her spirit crushed by being trapped here and not being able to get back to her former life. There was a lesson in that, Pip thought, but she didn’t want to go there. Her situation was entirely different, she told herself. She wasn’t trapped like Evelyn had been. She had money and a job that she loved to go back to whenever she was well enough. Her stay in Southwold was temporary, just whilst she got herself together. Evelyn might still be here all these decades later, but that definitely didn’t mean she, Pip, would be. She was starting to sound desperate, even to herself.

She pushed the idea of getting stuck out of her head. It made for uncomfortable thinking, and instead she pulled her thoughts back to the house over the road and the reason she had come. There was only one way to find out if Evelyn Mountcastle was still living there and discover what had become of her. She was going to have to knock on the door and introduce herself.

Pip felt an unfamiliar flutter of something approaching excitement at the thought. She was almost halfway through the diary now, and was certain that she would like Evelyn Mountcastle if she met her. It wasn’t just the parallels she could see between their lives. There was something else about her: a drive, a thirst that Pip recognised in herself. If she knocked on the door and got her into conversation, she felt sure they would get along rather well.

But that would be an adventure for another day. It wasn’t even nine in the morning, and so far too early to call, and anyway, Pip wanted to get to the end of the diary before she relinquished it. She would come back when she had read the whole thing, explain who she was and then hand it over. Perhaps she could gather a little more information about Evelyn Mountcastle the actress in the meantime, see if she couldn’t get the old lady to invite her inside the house by employing a bit of flattery.

Judging by the state of the house, though, it didn’t look as if Evelyn had many visitors. That might be because visitors weren’t welcome, or just that there was no one to visit her. Pip wondered where Scarlet was now. Maybe she no longer lived locally. She indulged herself with a little fantasy that Evelyn’s daughter had also become an actress and picked up where Evelyn had left off. There would be a kind of neatness to that which appealed to Pip. It might also explain why the house looked so down at heel. Scarlet could be living in London or maybe she had moved abroad. Perhaps she had a job on a cruise ship entertaining the passengers. Pip smiled to herself as she invented a whole life for the little girl. Of course, she would be in her mid-thirties by now, which felt odd, as the little Scarlet who came dancing into Pip’s bedroom each night was still a child, not yet even old enough to be at school.

Pip had reached August 1983 in the diary now. She had been reading the entries after dinner, letting herself become absorbed in Evelyn and Scarlet’s simple lives. According to the diary, they led a quiet existence with very little happening to them on a daily basis, but, as well as complaints about how badly Joan treated them, the handwritten pages were also filled with Evelyn’s daily thoughts, some of which Pip didn’t properly understand.

Sometimes, when S is having her nap and I’m doing my household chores, I let my imagination roam back to how things might have been if she had never come along. Into the Blue is about to start its second season. It’s been a great success, just as I knew it would be. Julian must still be furious at all that lost commission! I think it’s so popular because the storylines aren’t just all car chases and drinking. They’re about real women and how they juggle their jobs with being wives and mothers. Ironic, really, seeing as that’s exactly what I can’t seem to do.

And I have to admit that the girl playing my part has made a decent job of it, even if I would have been better. I can’t think about that for too long, though, because it makes me cross. It’s so unfair. The only thing I did wrong was to be naive. Yet I’m the one who was punished and is still being punished to this day. He doesn’t even know that he has a daughter – not that I would ever tell him – but in my head, if I ever saw him again, I would make sure he knew how badly I’ve been treated.