After You Left(19)

Alluding to the past this way implied it had mattered. She nodded. It was June. The funeral had been a week before Christmas. This was Evelyn’s second trip back North in seven months. ‘Of course,’ she said. He hadn’t wanted to see her at the funeral. After all these years, what she’d done must have still bothered him somehow.

‘I had better let you get on.’ She looked over to where his rake was standing in the soil.

His eyes remained on her for a second or two. ‘I still can’t believe I’m looking at you,’ he said. Then he gave her a somewhat sad smile, and turned to go back to his task.

‘We will not speak of him again,’ Evelyn had told her mother, after she’d asked Evelyn if she wanted her to send her Eddy’s wedding cutting from the newspaper. ‘Why would I want to see his wedding photograph?’ She had been aghast. And they hadn’t spoken of him again. Was this why her mother had conveniently neglected to tell her that Eddy was now her gardener? Because she was honouring Evelyn’s wishes?

When she closed the door, she realised she was trembling. In fact, she had to sit down for a moment.

Being in the home she grew up in always brought out Evelyn’s melancholic side. But never more so than now. Sometimes, she was so crippled by her nostalgia. She often wondered if it was because she’d never had children. Perhaps having other childhoods to focus on would have detracted her from thinking so much about her own.

The house was nothing special to anyone but Evelyn. It was a simple stone cottage with a red-tiled roof and a navy front door, in a quaint landscape of rolling fields, sheep, low tides and tea rooms. There was a lawn at the front, and opposite, a flower garden. In the summer, it was ablaze with colour and her mother always smelt of the plums she’d pick and stew from the tree that grew out back.

The Farne Islands lay off in the distance like sleeping hump-backed whales. And when the wind gusted, it played a song that drifted across the Cheviot Hills like a choir of ghosts. ‘What’s that strange noise?’ tourists would ask, and Evelyn’s best friend, Lorna, would make up all kinds of horror stories while Evelyn struggled to keep a straight face. Droves of tourists came to Holy Island in the summer: day-trippers to the Castle and the Priory who would leave before high tide, and others who were more intrigued by the island’s geography than its history, the concept of living somewhere that was stranded from the mainland twice a day. Every summer, someone would foolishly ignore tide tables, and Evelyn would chuckle to see the stranded cars nearly submerged in the sea. That is until she reached her late teens, and the isolation of the place felt more like fodder for dark novels, the kind written by virgin sisters from Yorkshire who suffered early deaths. Looking back, it was probably just a growing phase, but at the time, leaving had become her reason for being.

In the kitchen, she got up from the chair and dipped the blinds so he couldn’t see in. Eddy. In her garden. She still couldn’t put the two ideas together. Her mother had schemed this. Hadn’t she? Or had it just happened the random way that the improbable often does?

The house hadn’t been updated much over the years. The kitchen still sported the same Formica countertops and tatty linoleum flooring. There had been the odd addition of a washing machine and a monster fridge whose arrival in the family had caused a stir. The fridge had been replaced by a smaller, more efficient version, like the TV. But even the radio looked like some leftover antiquity that a certain type of person would be drawn to at a garage sale.

She turned it on now, jumped from Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’, to Rod Stewart’s ‘Baby Jane’, and then finally left it on Elton John’s ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’. Eddy looked up briefly toward the house when that song came on, and she wondered if he could hear it. She peeked through a slat of blind again, noting the dust on it. She was saddened to see the neglect that had fallen on the place now there was no one here to take care of it, just a friend of her mother who popped in once a week to keep a general eye on things, but she couldn’t be expected to dust.

Eddy was a quick worker. She could imagine him appealing more and more to her mother’s concept of the ideal man as he sweated it out there. After she had seen him again at the Mayfair, the force of the coincidence had possessed a kind of finality to it. I won’t ever see him again, she had thought. Improbabilities don’t happen twice.

She let the blind fall away from her finger. Even with the radio on for company, the house was eerily empty. Every room held a host of memories. She could recall the oddest details, the threads and weaves and tones that made up the tapestry of her childhood: the scratch on the word yearning on her father’s record of Mario Lanza singing ‘Be My Love’; the squeak of the floorboard by her bedroom door and how she’d tiptoe around it when she snuck home an hour past her curfew; the fading of the yellow flowers around the border of their oval dinner plates. Once or twice, she had been certain she’d heard her mother calling her name. She’d come close to replying, then caught herself in the agonising realisation that she was gone. She had convinced herself that coming back here after her death would be impossible to bear. And yet being back somehow helped her get in touch with herself. It always had.

She left the window, and put the things in the fridge that she was going to prepare for dinner. Local crab. New potatoes. A peach melba, because she could never get them this good in London. She was conscious of going about her tasks indoors as he went about his outside: the odd symbiotic domesticity of them. A thought sailed through her: If I had never left, this could have been my life.