After You Left(41)

‘You could have left it at the bit about So yes, I believe I am in love with you. I’d have been fine with that.’ I try to sound light again. He is right: I do try to find blemishes. Maybe because the quiet voice inside me would think that if my own father didn’t think I was worth sticking around for, then why would any man? But I hate that strain in myself. I hate anyone even knowing it exists.

He draws my face in, until it’s barely an inch from his own. ‘Let me repeat. I want you to know it in no uncertain terms. I am in love with you, Alice.’ He kisses me, slow and long. ‘Are you happy now?’

I’m tired of this conversation. ‘Happy enough.’





FIFTEEN


Evelyn

Holy Island. 1983

‘I’m leaving Laura.’

They were standing in Evelyn’s kitchen. It was almost the end of their week. A week of him working with her on the house as he sang along to the radio, and her smiling inwardly, listening to him; of Evelyn cooking for him, them eating in the garden, and kissing under the plum tree. Of their jaunts to various little villages along the coast, where they would wander in and out of tea rooms, or buy fish and chips in cartons that they would then sit and eat at the end of the pier, feeding the odd seagull with the scraps of batter – careful not to look too cosy in case they were seen and aroused suspicion. But the last few days had been heavily weighted with the threat of it all ending. It had muted all joy and all conversation. Now she could barely meet his eyes without the tears springing.

Evelyn was wearing one of her mother’s dressing gowns. They had made love. He had dressed again in his gardening clothes. He had clung to her like he knew he was going to lose her, and even though she was busying herself by making tea, she was still aware of the bleak absence of his body. The ghostly pencil-line around where his love had just been.

‘Eddy, you can’t possibly leave Laura! This is insane!’ She quickly abandoned the idea of making tea.

He searched her face, slightly stunned by her reaction, but she refused to look at him. ‘Evelyn, I can’t speak for you, or for how you feel, but I, for one, am not going back to the way things were. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than plod on with her after this.’

A flurry of panic went through her. At the idea of going back to Mark she felt only the blankness of impossibility. But, strangely, that didn’t mean she wanted to feel this way. She recognised they had crossed a bridge to somewhere that neither of them was truly prepared to find themselves.

‘You can’t do it on my account. I won’t let you break up your family for me!’

‘But I love you. I’ve never felt like this over anyone. Only you, Evelyn.’

She floundered, thinking, No! I have to downplay this! We can’t do anything rash! ‘Eddy, you practically married your first sweetheart! You don’t know if you could feel this way over someone else. You haven’t had enough women.’

‘You were my first sweetheart. Or, you should have been.’

‘We don’t know that we’d have worked.’

He looked at her in disbelief and frustration. ‘Why are you saying this?’ She had hurt him. ‘Do you honestly believe – after the time we have just spent together; after everything we have continued to mean to one another – that we wouldn’t work, Evelyn? Do you?’ He was searching her face, but she refused to meet his eyes.

When she wouldn’t answer, he said, ‘You can believe what you want, but I’m certain there’s a reason we had to meet again after all these years. And these last few days have proven this to be right. Tell me you don’t believe that this was fate?’

‘Even if all that’s true, Eddy, you have a family. A child. You belong to someone else. As do I.’

‘But we can change that! We have a chance! Evelyn, I want to do all the things with you that I should have been doing with you from the minute we met. I want to shop with you, go to the beach with you, fill up petrol with you, watch telly with you, plan holidays with you . . . I want to be able to be seen with you in public, without looking over my shoulder. I want to walk down the damned street with you, holding your hand. I want this affair word stricken from my mind. It’s beneath us. I don’t want to be ashamed. I only want to be proud of everything that exists between us.’ He was right in referencing how covert they’d felt they needed to be. How many times, when they were doing errands around town, had she wanted to stop and spontaneously kiss him? But she’d had to check herself. Despite them trying on the idea of being an item, it had been so depressingly tempered by the fact that they were both married to someone else. And, if anything, he had hated that more than her, and she hadn’t known that would be possible.

He held his head between both of his hands – this gesture of despair or silent panic she had seen before. After a moment, he looked up again. ‘I want you to be my wife. I want to see the outline of your body there in bed. And I want to see that outline of you change over the years, Evelyn. I want to be with you when I’m old and know that maybe it didn’t work out quite the way it should have, but at least I got forty good years with you – if I’m lucky enough to get that.’ He paused, his eyes buzzing around her face. ‘I want a life with you, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have that in this day and age. We’re not living in our parents’ era.’