After You Left(12)

Eddy.

She would never be able to say if he was with someone, or alone, what he wore, if he’d recently had his hair cut, or what he was drinking. Because all she knew, and all she would ever remember, was the way he was looking at her – his unending, unflinching, rebuking gaze – combined with the mesmerising undertow of Baldry’s gravelly, tear-jerking voice. Neither one could have singularly dismantled her like the force of the combination. It was a moment set apart from all others. She would come back to it years later, either dreaming or awake, and somehow she had known she would, right as it was happening.

Never did Eddy’s eyes leave hers for even one second, nor Mark’s sleeve stop touching her arm – not until Baldry’s last lyric, and the audience’s clapping. Then Mark shattered the spell by looking at her and smiling before breaking into applause himself. It was as though someone had suddenly turned up the volume and life was too loud. She gazed at her husband’s profile for a second or two after his attention had returned to the singer. Then, when her eyes were pulled back to Eddy, there was only the startling hollow of his absence.



She didn’t hear Mark leave for work. When she woke, it sounded like the rain had stopped, and the sun was trying to break through. Time felt as though it had shifted, and yet she was exactly the same. It hadn’t gone away. She had hoped she could have slept herself into an alternate reality. But she was still very much in this one.

The shock of finding him gone in the dream, before she’d had a chance to do anything, still lingered. She lay there for a while, trying to bridge the present with 1968. It must have been ages, because the rain started up again. Then she got up and walked across to the window. Tessie was fussing around in the next room. The place still smelt of breakfast. It always did, until dinner. The pavements of High Street Kensington below were slick, and people were shaking off their wet umbrellas as they backed up into shops and ducked into taxis. She wanted their life. She wanted anyone’s life but her own right now.

She went into her bathroom and splashed her face twenty times with cold water, mechanically counting each clap of her hands on her cheeks. Numbly, she stared at the sight of her freshened-up self in the mirror: a forty-year-old woman with a small face, pink-cheeked, eyelids slightly puffy. Back in the bedroom, she sat down at the writing bureau and reached for the pad of champagne-coloured Basildon Bond. The pen was like a foreign object between her fingers. She didn’t know how long she must have sat there, entirely debilitated by the task. Tessie had left, because the house had become eerily absent of sound – save for her heartbeat, which was overly loud in her ears, and the dull scratching of the pen on the paper as she wrote his name.

Eddy.

Tears plunked on to the page. The letter E had come out all jagged, and now it was smudged, too. She chose a fresh sheet, wiped her tears and tried to start again.

Eddy,

I’ve made a terrible mistake. I can’t do it, for everyone’s sake. I am so sorry.

There would have to be more. But this was enough to begin with.





SIX


Alice

Discovered something before wedding. Still trying to process. Need space.

I read his text once. Twice. Three times. The thought that he is still there . . . I scramble to type quickly before he goes again. Pick up the phone!

I am riveted to the small screen, unable to breathe. After about thirty seconds, up come the three little dots that indicate Justin is typing.

I wait, but nothing follows. The dots disappear.

Pick up the damned phone! I type, kneeling on the bed in a shaft of moonlight.

The dots appear immediately. But then just as quickly they go again.

My fingers hit all the wrong keys, and I have to keep backspacing and telling myself to calm down.

What’s going on? RU ill? Tell me! Please!

No, comes the instant reply. I’m fine.

Then what? My legs suddenly have a mind of their own. I am propelled off the bed into the middle of the floor, then I don’t know where to go. As I stand there, I realise I am juddering with nerves.

No more dots.

I don’t know why he’s doing this! Why? But if he’s there, responding at this hour of the morning, he’s open to having it prised out of him, or he wouldn’t have replied in the first place.

Where are you? I write again. Tell me!

I wait for a moment, then when nothing comes, I dial his number. It rings and rings and he doesn’t pick up. The water glass is on my bedside table. I pick it up and hurl it at the wall. The shock of it smashing is like fireworks. I’m convinced the entire building has heard it.

Then I see the three little dots again.

Whatever he’s writing is long. The dots seem to be there forever. I continue to stand in the same spot, half petrified. He’s telling me . . . I’m going to know . . . I want to look and can’t bear to look at the same time.

But then up pops, Will. Soon. Promise.

My heart sinks before almost stopping. Three words? That can’t be it. I gawp at the screen, aware of an urgency, a grasping need to know, to wrestle an explanation out of him. I wait for him to write more. But there is nothing.

After the possibility of him still being there subsides, I put the phone back on the bedside table, and go to the toilet, taking care not to step on the broken glass. It’s only when I come back into the bedroom that I remember the wedding photos.