After You Left(10)

But it isn’t Justin. It’s an old pal from Uni who works in Athens. Her idea of keeping in touch is copying me in on unfunny jokes, chain invitations to recipe swaps and YouTube videos of spaniels who polish glass doors and empty the rubbish.

I am fully awake now, though. Before I can talk myself out of doing it, I find the last text message he sent me and begin typing.

Talk to me. This is not fair. There’s nothing you can tell me that’s going to hurt me more than I already am.

But I’m not so sure it’s true.

I stare out of the window, aware of the long darkness, and the slightly jagged rise and fall of my breathing. A moment or two later, Justin is typing a reply.





FIVE

Evelyn

December 18, 1983

The newspapers were full of the story. Six people dead. Seventy-five injured. Mark was seated at the opposite end of the polished walnut dining table, with only his large hands visible around the expanse of the Sunday Times.

‘The bloody IRA rang the Samaritans thirty-seven minutes before the blast! They warned them they were going to do it! So no one seems to know what took the police so long! Murderers! Daring to bomb Harrods on a Saturday right before Christmas! When will this reign of terror end?’

He hadn’t really noticed her this morning. Hadn’t noticed the change in her. Hadn’t looked twice and detected anything that might hint at the turmoil inside her, the unstoppable thrashing of contradictory impulses in her head. Mark never noticed. That was why it was so easy to hide things from him.

I’m sorry, I don’t know how to tell you this. I have had a change of . . .

Plan? Heart? Mind?

‘I thought we might go out to dinner tonight.’ He was looking at her from around his newspaper, as though fondly enticing her back from another land.

She still hadn’t touched any of her breakfast. She heard his voice distantly. She was aware of an out-of-body sensation. Whoever was sitting there in the Queen Anne chair was just a shell, and she, the contents of the shell, was across the room, off-camera – an onlooker seeing herself as a stranger would see her: an attractive, properly composed wife eating breakfast in a room with a high ceiling, where the air was scented with fresh coffee and kippers.

‘What do you think?’

But Evelyn wasn’t following the question. Evelyn was gone. She was back home on a tidal island battered by north-easterly winds. A young girl. A loner who could waste entire mornings stamping over grassy dunes that banked a gunmetal-grey sea, humming popular melodies, dreaming of a fanciful stranger who would take up residence at Lindisfarne Castle; who would peer out of his window and see her playing aeroplanes across the pastureland, arms outstretched, the thin sleeves of her dress flapping like birds’ wings. A stranger who would think to himself, Now there is this castle’s next queen.

‘Evelyn? Are you even listening to me?’ The affectionate despair.

But Evelyn was being propelled by the air. She was levitating with possibilities, gliding like the puffins, blackbirds and terns that made their home on the island’s north shore, where she would wander and dream. She was dreaming again now. Seeing it for how it could all be again. And yet there was the harsh grounding, the pulling down to earth with strong hands, the indomitable forces of her reality.

I don’t know how to tell you this. I have had second thoughts.

She stared at the polished silver place setting laid out by their housekeeper, Tessie – the morning pomp of their breakfast table – aware that the tears were ready to come, and she chanted in silent pleas, Don’t let me cry. I must not cry. Mark must never know.

‘Evelyn?’ he said, a fraction impatient. ‘I’m asking you if you’d like to dine out tonight.’

She looked at him, somewhat blankly, then shook her head. ‘I don’t want to think about dinner, Mark. We’re just having breakfast.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, bewildered.

The matter? The matter was she couldn’t properly draw a breath. The anxiety, the dilemma, had twisted her; her windpipe was wrung dry. She met his eyes, searched his face, but it wasn’t his face she was seeing. She would never look at him and see him again, which was so unspeakably sad. There was only one face she would ever see.

He returned to his newspaper with a sigh. ‘I just imagined we might go out and celebrate the fact that I’m still alive, that’s all. But, then again, perhaps you wish I wasn’t still alive. I can never tell with you.’

Last night was there so freshly – the choice she had made. She could still undo it. She could just tell him right here and right now. Instead, she said, ‘Don’t make light of it, Mark. You were there, shopping along with all those other terrified people. It could have very easily been you. Sometimes, you don’t realise how lucky you are. You sail through life . . . You shouldn’t take it for granted.’

He was looking at her with a mix of adoration and frustration. ‘Yes, Evelyn, my darling. You’re right. I was there. It could have been me. But it wasn’t me, was it?’

‘We’ll see,’ she said, a beat or two later. ‘About dinner.’

‘For heaven’s sake. What’s to see?’ He was looking at her as though she always managed to be two people: the one he knew inside out, and loved, and this other who was a work in progress that he never bargained for.