After You Left(11)

If she didn’t leave the room, she would cry, and then she would have to tell him. Mark might be a little blind, but he wasn’t stupid. She’d had the dream again. And, as was always the case when it happened, she was beside herself for days after. It relentlessly haunted her. Only this time she was beside herself for new reasons altogether.

‘Can you take this away?’ Mark said to Tessie, who had come in the room to refresh the coffee. Then he added, ‘Please,’ because Mark was consummately polite.

‘Just your plate, sir?’ Tessie hovered, flummoxed by this break in their routine.

‘Everything.’ He swept a hand. ‘Mrs Westland is apparently on a hunger strike.’

Despite his claim, all those years ago, that he was attracted to her because she was the opposite of the girls from his ‘world’, she was sure that Mark had never managed to forget that he no longer lived at Blenheim Palace. That’s what she liked to call his family pile, just to put into perspective how privileged he was, just to remind him, when she felt he needed reminding, that most people didn’t come from this. She certainly hadn’t come from this. This wasn’t how normal people lived.

Tears were building. The weight of her secret was almost stifling her. How had she got here? She could only take quarter-breaths, tiny hypoventilations. Of course, if he saw her crying, he’d probably think she was just being melodramatic again.

I’m sorry I couldn’t do it . . .

How would she ever land on the right way to say it? She might be a writer, but she would never find words.

‘I’m not feeling too hungry. I think I might go back to bed.’ Her voice quivered at the end. She left the table somewhat abruptly. Tessie momentarily took her attention from the bacon platter, and Mark looked like he was about to say something – perhaps, Bloody hell, what’s wrong with you? – but changed his mind.

She walked into their bedroom, aware of the unsteadiness of her legs. Her actions yesterday had undone everything, and she was wrong about one thing: she couldn’t undo it again. She had allowed her will to be weak. But she had committed to her path, and now she had no choice but to stay with it, for all their sakes.

Her head thumped, and there was a small spasm under her right eye. The defeat registered itself with the weight of a physical one; she literally couldn’t emerge from under it, so there was no point in trying. She lay down on top of the eiderdown. She stared at the hairline crack in the ceiling, telling herself she had to get a grip, if for no other reason than to stop herself bursting. That’s how she felt. As though she was going to blow up. It was probably a couple of minutes before her heart rate returned to normal. She closed her eyes, and tried to go back to the dream; she just wanted to see him again, even if this was the only way.

It could have been one of several memories, really, but it was always this same one. Not of the first time she had set eyes on him in 1963, or the last, a few months ago. But the second.





1968.


Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom.

The Long John Baldry concert.

Four years after she had married Mark.

They had gone back up North to see her parents; usually she made the trip alone, but on those rare occasions that Mark came with her, she would take him somewhere she thought might impress him – to show off the North East in its best light. This time, she’d been determined to prove to him that Newcastle’s high-life was every bit as vibrant as London’s. She had such treasured memories of nights out at the Mayfair when she was eighteen years old, perhaps nineteen. She loved Long John Baldry. So it couldn’t have been more perfect that he turned out to be playing there.

She had never expected to see Eddy there.

In this dream she’d just woken from, she had time-travelled so impeccably to 1968. Every molecule of detail – she could see, smell, taste and feel everything that she’d seen, smelt, tasted and felt then, with crystal precision – even details she hadn’t consciously been aware of at the time. The blue cloud of cigarette smoke that drifted just above the coiffed heads of dancers moving with the slow tide of Baldry’s ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’. The citrusy tang of the rum and pineapple she’d spilled on the breast of her red halter dress. Mark’s mohair jacket grazing her bare arm. The way he would inch closer to ensure his arm kept contact with hers while he stood there, transported by Baldry’s hot-blooded ballad of regret. Every time she moved fractionally, he moved fractionally. She found herself shifting slightly to see if he would follow, and follow he did. Never had she been more aware of an arm, and of the pleasingly maudlin lyrics, and how easily they could quash her if she thought too much about them. And Baldry, all six-feet-seven of him, dressed immaculately in his dark suit and ruffle-front shirt complete with oversized black bow tie, standing almost reverently still in a hazy spotlight as he sang about his grief at the love he once cast away. His molasses voice and the gentle mime-like gestures of his left hand, combined with the steady entrancement of the slow-dancing couples, reflected a void in Evelyn, one which, until that very moment, she hadn’t even known existed.

She stood there, racked by overwhelming despair at this sudden new insight into herself. Then somewhere into the second repetition of the chorus, she was aware of a gaze. A gaze so hot on her, it reached from across the room.

She had to blink and look again. But, yes. It was him.