After You Left(35)

‘You should have got married in your own church,’ her mother reprimanded her. ‘That’s what brides do. They marry in their own home town.’ Her mother was right. Evelyn regretted that all her life.



‘You’d better get home before the tide strands you here,’ she said to Eddy, as his van turned down her street. It was a little like déjà vu. It had almost happened this way before.

He parked at her front door, and there was a moment when they both just sat there.

Conflicting thoughts sailed through her head. You only get one life. Do unto others as you’d be done by. No regrets. She placed her hand on the door handle, but couldn’t move it. She knew he was experiencing a similar dilemma. A strange and unsettling traction existed between them; she needed to break it, but was powerless.

‘Evelyn,’ he said, very quietly.

At what point had she already crossed a line? When she had held his eyes in the Mayfair Ballroom, in the presence of her unsuspecting husband? When she’d allowed him to help paint the house?

Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t make a good life complicated. Be honourable to Mark because that’s who you are. A decent person.

She was palpably aware of her heartbeat, of his leg just inches away from hers, his left hand on the wheel, the way he kept clenching and unclenching his fingers.

‘Evelyn,’ he said again, this time more assertively. ‘I need to hold you again. I can’t know you went back to London and I didn’t get to do that.’

She could hear her pulse: a loud whishing in her ears, so distracting that she wasn’t sure if he had said it or if she had imagined it. She opened her mouth to reply.

Yes was poised to come out.

But then she saw Mark’s kind face, and her life, and their home, and his trust.

‘No,’ she said, and then, ‘I’m sorry! I can’t do this!’

She dove out. As her foot met the pavement, she stumbled and twisted her ankle slightly. She hobbled quickly for the refuge of her house, registering the tingling pain and the embarrassing melodrama. Her rejection of him weighed on her like an albatross around her neck. She could feel his gaze attaching itself to her, could feel the enormity of his regret. When she quickly glanced back, he was still sitting there. His hands were clutching his head as though he was having some sort of brain burst.

I mustn’t look, she thought. I can’t bear it.





THIRTEEN


He didn’t come the next day, or the next. She made trips over to the mainland to buy groceries and cat food, pay bills, to peruse the windows of the estate agencies – anything to keep busy. One afternoon, she went back to Bamburgh and sat in the exact same spot where she had sat with him, wondering why she lived her life always trying to recreate things.

There was a man on the beach with his son. She watched the little boy run full throttle to the water and then stop short before it touched him. Sometimes, she missed being a mother so deeply that she had to just fold in on herself and let the anguish of the lost opportunity roll over her. Maybe a baby would have made her more settled, more content, given her less time on her hands to think about herself. I want that man to be Eddy, and that little boy to be our child, she thought, in rampant desperation, recognising the drama of it – how it had all suddenly stepped up. Her common sense was telling her to get a grip; she had a different life to this alternate one she suddenly thought she wanted, and it would be best that she went back to London and got on with living it.

By day four she was going insane. She rang Mark and listened to his voice. There had been a family gathering with all his nephews. The youngsters were tiresome in their mischief. Their friends, the Bradbury-Coombs, had done the dastardly thing of popping in unexpectedly when Mark was in the middle of his dinner. His meal was entirely ruined. He thought they’d never leave. Timothy Bradbury-Coombs drank nearly all his Scotch. Mark told her how dire the weather was, and how the Tube workers might be going on strike again.

She could have been talking to an occasional friend or a second cousin. If anything, it left her feeling guilty that she failed to miss him or to hugely long to see him. ‘Do you think you would mind if I stayed on here a bit? There’s still so much to do . . .’

There was a pause. Then, ‘Do? What, for instance?’

‘Well, painting. And I was thinking about the floors—’

‘Floors?’

The lie lay in her conscience like a tumour. She had never deceived Mark, other than to tell him the shop had lost his dry-cleaning, to avoid confessing she’d forgotten to have Tessie send it in.

‘I thought you were just freshening the place up, Ev. Not rebuilding it from the ground up.’ There was a petulant note in his voice.

‘I thought we said I’d stay here for as long as needed.’ She was feeding him a lie that he would recognise as a manipulation.

‘You said you would extend your ticket if you had to – yes. But I honestly didn’t think you’d have to.’ Mark had a way of appealing to her higher conscience for the right thing to prevail. When she didn’t answer, he asked, ‘Well, how much longer do you think you need?’

She heard the emptiness. The abandoned puppy. Despite his age and his accomplishments, there was a part of Mark that had stayed a little boy. He missed her like a child would miss his mother.

‘Perhaps another week.’