After You Left(20)

At one point, she looked in the mirror. The fine bones of her face, the green eyes accentuated by mascara – the only make-up she ever wore – dramatically curling up her lashes at the outer edges. Her heavy, dark eyebrows that gave her face stature, as an old boyfriend had once told her. She’d loathed them ever since. And there was something else – there was a slight flush to her cheeks. She looked alive again.

At exactly 4 p.m., he knocked on the door. ‘I think I’m all done for today.’ His eyes travelled over her face, over the top of her hair, as though the sight of her pleased him all over again. Years ago, when she had danced with him, she’d thought it would be futile trying to fall out of love with those eyes.

‘So you’ll be back in two weeks?’ she asked. His eyes were telling her that he still thought she was beautiful, and she felt herself blushing with the heat of them.

‘Yes. Of course. I imagine you’re going to be selling.’

She nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here. To spruce the place up.’ He had lurked in her mind on her wedding day. Not with repining and weeping, just with the irrevocability of closing a door that hadn’t even been properly open. She’d thought something similar when her mother had said he’d married. What will be, will be. Perhaps. But one thing’s for certain: we won’t be.

‘When are you heading back to your castle?’ he asked.

‘I don’t live in a castle.’

He continued to affectionately take stock of her. ‘I thought you married an earl.’

She tutted. He had always been a little fresh with her. ‘I didn’t marry an earl.’ Where was her wit when she needed it? To leave here was a mark of having bettered oneself, as though Northern England were somehow universally acknowledged by its inhabitants to be inferior to the rest of the country. It was a perception that the leaver could never live down, so there was no point in taking offence at it. ‘Do you think you could keep coming until I find new owners? Or should I get someone else?’ His presence was somehow reducing her to size, and she wasn’t familiar with feeling this small.

He frowned. ‘Why would you get someone else?’

‘No reason. Only if you want me to.’ She looked an inch or two past his head. He’d know she was being a little sparky with him.

When she met his eyes again he seemed a little disappointed in her. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ll see you again in two weeks.’

With that, he gave a curt nod and then was gone.





NINE


London. 1963

‘You have a delivery,’ Matthew, the cheeky young concierge, told her when she arrived on shift on the front desk at Claridge’s at 3 p.m.

On her twentieth birthday, Evelyn’s gran had pushed a tidy sum of her savings into Evelyn’s hand and said, ‘You can live your life or you can waste your life.’ She had squeezed her fingers tightly closed around Evelyn’s, like a clam. ‘Don’t waste your life.’

Her gran had always known her well. She had sensed a restlessness in Evelyn that didn’t seem present in other girls Evelyn’s age. Evelyn was world-weary of where she lived, given that she’d been visiting Newcastle bars since she was fifteen years old, and had tried on for size a variety of menial jobs that other girls seemed so satisfied with – hairdresser in training, hostess in a prim hotel restaurant, perfume demo girl in the region’s number one department store – jobs that she could never make fit. She should have gone to college, but grammar school had eluded her by a painfully narrow margin. She’d had some vague idea she’d quite like to write books, but whenever she’d voiced it, her family had scoffed at her, so she had learnt quite quickly to keep that sort of silly idea to herself.

As Matthew passed her the splendid bouquet of red and white roses, the knuckle of his index finger deliberately grazed her breast. To think she’d had a bit of a crush on him when she’d first arrived. She didn’t know what to do or say, so she pretended it had never happened. She clutched the flowers that burst with fragrance, anxious to open the small white card.

‘It’s from Mark Westland,’ Matthew informed her, petulantly, as though she should know the name. ‘Seems you’ve got yourself an admirer.’

‘What? Wish he’d sent them to you instead?’ she quipped. She was dying to ask him who Mark Westland was, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Walking into reception, she tore at the card, sensing the breathless weight of having been noticed by someone possibly important; the possible grand, great romance of it all. Since moving to London, into the flat-share of five girls that had been already set up before she’d even left the North, by the sister-in-law of a friend of a friend, her life hadn’t quite lived up to the hype she’d expected. It had so far been a lot of work for very little pay. Perhaps things were about to turn around.

Please have dinner with me this Saturday. Annabel’s. 7 p.m.

Yours, Mark Westland.

‘Yours, Mark Westland?’ Matthew put on a girly voice. He was craning to read over her shoulder.

‘Go away.’ She flapped him off. ‘It’s none of your business. You child!’

Matthew gave a mocking laugh, deliberately sweeping his eyes over her breasts again, as he stupidly blushed the colour of a beetroot. She suddenly despised him – all men. What right did they have to try to intimidate women and get away with it? Well, she despised all of them except, perhaps, for Mr Westland.