Reluctantly Home(65)
Evelyn paused slightly before putting her hand out and pushing the handle down. The door swung open, and Pip’s heart fell still in her chest. The room was painted in a delicate pink. In the centre was a bed with posts attached to each corner, also painted pink, and over which white organza had been draped. A multitude of teddy bears and other unlikely creatures were resting on the pillow, each carefully placed as if they were having a conversation amongst themselves.
On the floor between the bed and the window was a single sock, white with the little embroidered pattern running up it that Pip remembered from her own childhood. It lay where it had been dropped decades before, slightly balled and without its partner. Pip didn’t think she had ever seen anything so poignant.
‘This is Scarlet’s room,’ said Evelyn, although the explanation was not required. ‘This is how she left it the day she died. It’s not a shrine to her memory, not like I imagine some people keep for their dead children. I leave it like this because it’s the last place on earth where a part of her still lives. When I come in here, I can feel her with me. Does that sound peculiar?’
Pip shook her head. She didn’t trust her voice not to let her down if she spoke.
‘My sister wanted to clear everything away after Scarlet died,’ Evelyn continued. ‘She said it was unhealthy to keep it all like this, to dwell on what was passed, but I wouldn’t let her. I’m so glad now that I held firm and stood my ground on that.’
Evelyn crossed the room and looked out at the gardens beyond.
‘You see that rose bed?’ She nodded to a circular flower bed in the garden next door. ‘That’s where it happened. That is where my child drowned. They filled it in, the pond, but I still see it every day, the place where my baby died.’
Tears welled in Pip’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She put a hand to her face to wipe them away. This was not her grief – she had no right to cry, just like she had no right to cry for the lost life of the boy. Yet the tears still came.
‘The damage done by sudden death is devastating and irreversible,’ Evelyn continued, her voice low and very calm as if she were preaching or delivering a sentence. ‘Attaching blame can only take you so far. Believe me, I know. Just because everyone says it wasn’t your fault doesn’t mean that you can move on. But you do owe it to yourself to try. You’re young, Pip, with your whole life ahead of you. You mustn’t let that one terrible moment blight your entire future. Yes, you’ll feel guilt. That’s only to be expected. It’s misplaced, but it’s unavoidable. But you can’t let it define who you are for the rest of your life. I let that happen to me. At the time, I couldn’t find any other way through the pain, but now I see that it might have been a mistake. I urge you to look at things differently and not to do what I did.’
Evelyn’s words confused Pip. Was she saying that she had felt some guilt for her part in Scarlet’s death, despite how it had come across in the diary? If so, then maybe the two of them had more in common than she’d thought. Their bond was not merely because neither of them had fitted into the place they had been allocated in life. There was this other, much bigger and more painful connection binding them.
But then again, Evelyn’s child had drowned under her care. Pip had knocked the boy down, but she had no responsibility for his being there in the middle of the road. Did that somehow make her guilt different to Evelyn’s? Was there a way to rank levels of guilt? Pip didn’t know what to think, but something about Evelyn’s calm yet intense grief superseded all that. It was this powerful sense of loss the two of them shared. Loss and pain. And at this moment, it made the connection Pip felt towards Evelyn stronger than anything she had felt with any other person since the accident. Even though she was as good as a stranger, Pip wanted to reach out and hold her, comfort her, and in doing so, be comforted herself. But she held herself back.
Instead, the two women stood shoulder to shoulder at the window and watched as a tortoiseshell cat prowled across the rose bed in search of easy prey.
39
‘So, tell me again who this woman is,’ said Nicholas as Evelyn stood in her hallway dusting down her coat.
Evelyn didn’t like his tone. It was laced with suspicions that she knew were entirely misplaced and that she should dispel for Pip’s sake, but at the same time she resented having to explain herself to her nephew. She was perfectly capable of forming her own judgements about people, and she definitely didn’t need them tainted by his dark imaginings.
‘Her name is Pip and she works in the charity shop. The one, might I add, where you abandoned my precious possessions without having first asked my permission to remove them from my house,’ she replied pointedly.
Evelyn was glad to see him squirm a little at this. He should squirm as well, causing all that heartache over the diary, but at least something good had come out of his interference. If he hadn’t taken the box to the charity shop then she wouldn’t have met Pip, and for that at least she owed him something. Not that she was about to tell him so.
She was grateful, though, that in his cack-handed way he had brought Pip into her life. In their two brief meetings, Evelyn had grown fond of her. She recognised something of herself in Pip’s self-contained confidence, which was, although a little battered and bruised, still there, shining from her like a flare. Her quiet determination to follow her own path despite all the obstacles placed in her way spoke to Evelyn, the old Evelyn at any rate, the one who had taken the train to London with only a tatty suitcase and a handful of banknotes hidden inside a sock. And Nicholas was not going to spoil this for her. She would defend this outing come what may.