Reluctantly Home(66)

‘Pip has kindly returned the diary to me,’ Evelyn continued, ‘and today she is going to take me out for a walk, which I am very much looking forward to.’

Nicholas was shaking his head. ‘But every time I ask if you’d like to go out, you knock me back,’ he said sulkily.

This was true.

‘Let me take you instead, Aunt Evelyn,’ he said, although without much enthusiasm. ‘We can leave a note on the door for this charity woman. Tell her that you’ve changed your mind.’

‘But I haven’t changed my mind,’ objected Evelyn. ‘I want to go out with Pip. And she’ll be here in a moment, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to get ready.’

Nicholas still looked unconvinced. ‘Well, I shall stay with you until she arrives,’ he said, clearly disgruntled that his half-hearted offer had been spurned. ‘So I can make sure she’s kosher.’

Evelyn tutted loudly. ‘Of course she’s “kosher”, as you so indelicately put it. What do you think she’s going to do? Push me off the pier?’

An expression settled on Nicholas’s face that suggested this was exactly what he was thinking, but he had the good sense to keep his opinions to himself.

Evelyn pulled on her coat. It was a trench coat, the kind that had been quite fashionable some years back, but it now looked a little grubby. In the pocket her fingers found a balled-up silk scarf, which she unravelled with a flick of her wrist. She expected moths to come flying out, but there were none. Lifting the silk to her nose, she breathed in cautiously. The scarf smelled a little musty and faintly of a perfume she used to wear before such things became unimportant to her, but it wasn’t bad. Standing in front of the hallway mirror, she tied it around her head and immediately felt more glamorous. She wasn’t quite Audrey Hepburn, but she didn’t look too unpresentable.

There was a knock on the door. Nicholas went to answer it, but she stopped him in his tracks with a glare.

‘This is my house and I shall answer my own door, thank you very much.’

Nicholas fell back, admonished. Evelyn stepped to the door and opened it wide, without even using the chain. She could feel Nicholas’s irritation at her flagrant breaches of his security protocol, but she didn’t care.

Pip was on the doorstep dressed in her ubiquitous jeans and some sort of baggy top. Evelyn despaired of young people. Where was their sense of style? No one ever seemed to make any effort with their appearance these days, opting instead for comfort, which was all very well but not in the least attractive.

‘Morning,’ said Pip brightly.

Was it Evelyn’s imagination or did she look a little better today? The dark rings around her eyes were still there, but her cheeks looked to have more of a bloom to them.

‘Good morning, Pip,’ replied Evelyn. ‘Have you met my nephew, Nicholas? He seems to think that you wish me ill will.’

Pip looked confused and then horrified as she shook her head vehemently. ‘Mr Mountcastle,’ she began, ‘I can assure you that you have no reason to . . .’

Evelyn put up a hand to stop her. ‘I’ve told him all that,’ she said. ‘So, shall we go? If I don’t return, Nicholas, you may assume that Philippa Rose here has buried me in a sand dune.’

‘I’m just looking out for you,’ said Nicholas in a tone that might have been taken for petulance.

‘And I’m grateful,’ Evelyn called back over her shoulder.

The sky outside was blue, but there was a bracing wind whipping up across the sea and Evelyn stood for a moment to breathe it in. It had been a while since she had had the salty air in her nostrils and her lungs, and it felt good but also a little overwhelming to be out in so much space. Was that how agoraphobia began, she wondered? Would that have been her fate? Well, she wasn’t having any of it. Now that she was finally back outside, she felt neither panic nor dread. It merely reminded her of how amazing the place where she lived was, and made her feel slightly ashamed that she had forgotten. In fact, standing outside her house looking out across the wide ocean to the horizon beyond, it felt good to be alive, which was something she hadn’t managed to feel for a long time.

Pip seemed in no hurry to get going and was waiting patiently at her side until she was ready to move on. Evelyn nodded at her. It seemed there was more at stake here than just a walk, but she couldn’t quite grasp what it was. Tiny green shoots of something new, maybe, and not just for her. She hoped Pip was feeling this embryonic connection between the pair of them as well.

They crossed the road so they could wander along the wide promenade that ran alongside the beach.

‘Shall we walk along to the pier?’ asked Pip. ‘Is that too far?’

Evelyn was horrified that anyone should have to ask her if she could manage the couple of hundred yards from her front door to the pier but then, when she thought about it, it wasn’t such a ridiculous question. She had no idea how far her legs would carry her any more, it being so long since she had last put them to the test. That said, she was feeling confident.

‘I think that’ll be fine,’ she said to Pip with a reassuring smile. ‘And when we get there, we can have a restorative cup of tea and a sticky bun before we set out on the return journey.’

‘Do you need anything else?’ Pip asked tentatively. ‘Would you like to take my arm?’