After You Left(17)

‘Christina was paralysed,’ I tell them. ‘She had a problem with muscle deterioration. You can see how frail her arms are.’ I draw with a finger around Christina’s elbow joint. ‘She was a lonely figure, whom others might have felt sorry for, but he obviously saw something heroic in her.’

‘She was paralysed?’ Martin looks bemused. ‘Well, in that case, if she was ready to crawl all that way up to the house, she must have really wanted to go back there.’

‘I love how they put such a positive spin on things,’ Michael whispers to me.

‘Christina lived there all her life,’ I add. ‘Her nostalgia for her home practically seeps out of the canvas. It’s like a kind of scenery all of its own.’

‘I love that!’ Evelyn looks at me suddenly. She is examining me as though I’ve said something massively enlightening. ‘A kind of scenery . . .’ She smiles. ‘Well, one thing is true of life. You never forget your home and where you came from. I can attest to that.’ She lowers her eyes and seems sad for a moment.

‘There’s something about it. It’s haunting,’ Michael says. ‘You feel like she’s been away and she longs to go back.’

‘It’s the way she’s looking up at the house.’ Martin pretends to look through the camera lens he’s making with his hand. ‘The house is on high, and she’s looking up at it. It means a lot to her.’

I’m amazed how surprisingly tender and astute their observations are, and how moved we all are by the enigmatic Christina and her attachment to her house.

‘Christina has lost something that she still wants,’ Evelyn says, gravely. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible curse. And unfortunately, like a lot of us, she hasn’t learnt the art of letting go.’

I think of the concept of letting go, the idea of me having to let go of Justin. Or the thought of him having already let go of me . . . It calls to mind an image of a person freefalling through time and space, without a parachute.

‘I think she’s really sad.’ Ronnie wipes his brow in distress. ‘There are a lot of burdens on her.’

‘Wyeth said he found in people the fugitive quality of life and the inevitable eventual tragedy,’ I tell them, with quiet reverence. ‘Someone who wrote about him said that when you look at his work you have to listen to the eloquence of things unsaid.’

We all fall silent, paying respect to Christina, listening for the eloquence.

‘She looks like she’s seeing something that doesn’t exist.’ The voice comes from behind. We all seem to have forgotten about Eddy.

He comes and stands right behind us. He’s the tallest among us, but so thin for his build. Yet his voice is strong and sure of itself.

‘She’s seeing her memories,’ he says. ‘A lot of things happened in that house. Things that mean a lot to her.’ He taps his temple.

Evelyn gasps quietly, and a hand flies to her mouth. We all seem to notice. Michael looks at me as though to say Eddy has just put the sun back in Evelyn’s sky. I find myself curiously spellbound.

‘He’s right!’ The whites of her eyes have turned watery and red. ‘Christina did something a long time ago, something that had terrible consequences.’ She looks right at me; I am held fast by her intensity. ‘She has lived her entire life wanting to put it right.’

I want to say, What? What did she do? But, of course, it would be entirely inappropriate. I can’t help thinking that Evelyn isn’t talking about Christina; she’s talking about herself.

I glance at Michael, and give him a slightly shrinking smile.





EIGHT


Evelyn

Holy Island. June, 1983

At first, all she saw was the back of his head. He was on the other side of the vast laurel tree that divided two sections of the garden. His white van was parked right outside her mother’s gate. It was the first thing she had noticed when she rounded the corner hugging a plastic bag of groceries like a baby because its handle had snapped; she’d just had to pick a week’s supply of tins and vegetables from the middle of the road.

He always came on Tuesdays, her mother had told her. The naturalness of his name on her mother’s lips during their long-distance phone calls had rubbed off on her; she felt like she knew him herself. But she wasn’t feeling sociable. She was no longer used to the introspective lens of small-town Northern England. There was something buffering about the anonymity of London, the steady revolutions of her social life there, her ability to pick and choose whom she talked to, and when.

He clearly didn’t hear her when she opened the gate. Only when the sound of her feet announced her arrival did he look up.

When she saw his face, her ability to react, even to breathe, was somehow put on hold. He was standing fifty feet away, wearing a red shirt, in the process of cutting back a clematis. The stray grey tabby cat her mother had been feeding lay washing itself on the lawn, methodically pulling down its left ear with its left paw. She was aware of the film-camera precision of her eyes, her keenness to observe every last detail of this extraordinary surprise.

He swiped the back of his hand across his cheek. A smile started, then stopped itself. ‘Evelyn,’ he said, sounding as taken aback as she felt. She thought he swayed slightly, with the force of the surprise.

‘Eddy.’ His name came out as a croak. In all her mother’s mentioning of Eddy, Evelyn had never once connected him to Eddy. She placed a hand on her heart as the unlikely reality of it sunk in. ‘Good heavens!’