After You Left(37)

Then, through the rear-view mirror she saw him walk toward his van. She could feel the throbbing bass line of her heartbeat. He climbed into his vehicle. A moment or two later, he was following her.

Her hands sweated so much that she couldn’t grip the steering wheel properly. She drove across the causeway to the island with a daredevil quality loose in her. He followed close behind. She wound down her window and let the salt breeze dry the perspiration on the back of her neck. When she arrived on the island, she drove the short distance to her street, the car bump-bumping over the uneven road. His was the only vehicle behind hers now. Her stomach flipped like a dolphin.

As she walked up her path, her legs were like puppy legs, not quite going the way she wanted them to.

She successfully unlocked the door on her first attempt. He was so close behind her that she could feel his body heat. Then they were inside her kitchen. She stood in the middle of the floor, and felt his hands on her hips, his breath a warm draught on her neck. ‘Is it anything other than inevitable, Evelyn?’ he asked. ‘Because if it is, then tell me now and we won’t do this.’

But before she could answer, he spun her around and kissed her. It wasn’t very smooth. He dove in so quickly that he misaimed and got her nose. They both moved, and there was another collision of faces. But then . . . ‘Third time lucky,’ he whispered. Then he was kissing her smile.

It went from tender to hot in 1.67 seconds. Instantaneous acceleration. Exactly as she remembered. His hand at the back of her skull supported her head. The feel of his mouth – another man’s kiss – was stunning, intoxicating.

Eddy’s kiss.

His weight rocked her slightly off her feet. She reached up on her tiptoes to slide her arms around his neck, losing herself in the momentum of their passion, in the taste of him, in the feel of a different man’s body. Someone taller, broader, harder, more into her and in touch with her than Mark, on what felt like every possible level.

Eddy’s body.

She said his name. He said hers. They laughed. They had surprised themselves and each other. His gaze burrowed into her, touching chords of longing. She held on to him, clutching whatever part of him she could clutch, lost in the smell of his skin, his clothes, his body heat, the strength of him, his keen desire for her.

‘Evelyn,’ he said, after he’d carried her into her old bedroom. He picked open the fiddly buttons of her blouse and laid his hand on her rapidly beating heart. He looked moved, almost sad.

‘What?’

He gazed at her, appreciating her, like someone who was being given something he thought he didn’t deserve. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just overwhelmed.’

She entwined her fingers with his.

He made love to her in a way that she had never known, gently unwrapping her from her remaining undergarments, then bearing down on her with the sort of manly, territorial claim that she’d experienced only in some outlying fantasy world. Once or twice, the image of Mark tried to force an entry, but she pushed it away. While she was here with Eddy on Holy Island, this was another life she was leading.

This was what it was supposed to be like, she thought, after. She had been right in sensing something was missing. This was missing. They fitted like teeth on a zip.

‘You have an incredible heart-shaped face,’ he told her, stroking her jaw like you would a kitten’s. He’d said it before. The only description of herself that would ever matter. She was so moved to be feeling this intensity only now, at the ripe old age of forty, that tears rolled into her hair.

‘I wonder what my mother would think if she saw us lying here,’ she said, a long time later, after he had held her so closely that when she moved away from him slightly, her skin was saturated with their sweat.

‘I hope she’d think it was the way it had to be . . .’ he said, appearing moved by his own comment. ‘I think we’d make a good plot of a movie. Small-town girl marries rich man in the big city, then she falls for her old life and her old love: the poor man with the bad singing voice, whom she once stood up.’ He kissed her intermittently between speaking, like you might punctuate a long sentence with commas.

‘It’s a nice story. But it’s a fairy tale, isn’t it?’ She only meant it lightly. She didn’t want reality to rain down on them. Right now, she would do anything in her power to keep it at bay.

‘I’m actually the reverse of a fairy tale, aren’t I? Anyway, you’ve had the fairy tale already.’ He rolled on to his back, and stared contemplatively at the ceiling, slightly melancholy; she could feel the shift in his thinking – reality was pressing in despite their desire to exist only in a bubble. He looked at her, intently. ‘If I were a wealthy man, I’d love to give you everything you deserve, Evelyn. But I could really only provide you with a very simple life. Nothing like what you’re used to. It would be naive to promise you love as a substitute for all that.’

She didn’t need to ask herself if she was in love with him. It would have been a wasted exercise. She’d been in love with him from that very first day. Knowing it, as she knew it now, brought her mistake pressing either side of her head with monster-like hands – the mistake of having ever let him go. ‘Love is never a substitute, Eddy. Everything else is a substitute for love.’

He stroked her face again. She thought vaguely of the life she was used to, and only how utterly detached she felt from it, now that she was experiencing something greater than the sum of all her life’s parts. She touched his shoulder. Too much talking was going to shatter the fragile perfection of it, like blowing too near a dandelion clock. ‘Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, though. Can we keep it light?’