After You Left(44)

‘Is he there?’ It just dawns on me. ‘Is he with you?’

‘What?’ he says, more in exclamation. ‘No. Of course not. I’m just . . .’

Conferring with my wife? Because she also knows something you don’t.

‘Look, it’s not my place. It’s got to come from him,’ he says. Then, surprisingly, after a moment or two, he adds, ‘You know what he’s like . . .’

And I think, Do I?

‘When things get on top of him, he tends to retreat. To think. It’s just his way. Perhaps that’s all he’s doing now.’

I remember Justin telling me about how, when he heard his dad had died, he ran away. He was only missing a few hours – he’d been hiding in a barn – but his mother had rung the police.

‘Is he ill?’ I ask.

‘Ill? My God. No, Alice. He’s definitely not ill.’

‘The men in his family all have health problems.’

‘He’s not ill, Alice. Okay? I’m sorry.’

I feel this conversation is about to burst into flames. I don’t mean to hang up on him; it just happens. It occurs to me to ring back and say, Please tell Dawn I hope her mother will be well. But the moment passes.





SEVENTEEN


‘The girls in this painting are more glamorous than the girls in the others.’ Martin is pointing to Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey: two sophisticated ladies sitting opposite one another at a small table in a restaurant. Something about the artist’s intent focus on the silence between them reminds me of tea with Evelyn, when she began to tell me her story, and, weirdly, of Justin and Rick talking in the rain.

Evelyn isn’t here today. Michael said she hasn’t been well. I remember how she seemed so changed that day, after she had finished describing her week together with Eddy. In a way, it has changed my thought process – made me ask myself some questions. Now I have been comparing Eddy’s love for Evelyn to Justin’s love for me, and finding it lacking. ‘He loved me so much that he could think of nothing except being with me,’ Evelyn had said. ‘He wanted to leave his marriage. He wanted me to leave mine. He loved me to the point where he had lost all reason.’ Her face had clouded. I’d thought she had been about to cry. I had felt so incredibly bleak, a quiet voice asking, Why didn’t Justin love me like that?

‘What happened?’ I asked her.

She pulled out her pretty handkerchief again. ‘I told him it was impossible. He had a family, and I had a husband who was my family . . .’ A half-finished piece of carrot cake sat on her plate, and she stared at it.

‘And that’s where it ended?’ I wanted to know so much more. She had managed to buy herself one week. But is that all it ever was?

Her hesitation held me riveted. ‘No. But that’s all I think I can manage to tell you today,’ she eventually said.

She looked desperately tired and wrung out suddenly. When I peeked at my watch, I saw that we’d been sitting there for two hours. No wonder she had seemed to fade into the pattern on the chair. Listening to her story had been like watching an engrossing film where you can barely bring yourself to press pause to take a toilet break.

‘I hope Evelyn is all right?’ I say to Michael now. ‘Perhaps you can give me her phone number so I can check on her later?’ What happened after that week? Had she returned home? I’m concluding she must have. I am fascinated by how much I want to know.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I am sure she’d love that.’

We stand in companionable silence, and eavesdrop on a conversation that Martin and Ronnie are having about the hats worn by the two women in the painting. Martin is telling Ronnie they are called cloche hats, which is amazing and absolutely right.

‘Where are Martin’s teeth?’ I ask Michael, just noticing they are missing.

‘Good question.’ He shrugs in that languid way of his. ‘Teeth can be a bit of a shared commodity at Sunrise . . . Whenever a set goes missing, they have a way of showing up in someone else’s mouth. In Martin’s case, whichever nurse identifies them first gets the prize of not having to bathe him for a week. He hates the tub.’

I gasp, then chuckle. ‘Oh no!’ There’s something oddly magnetic about Michael’s genuine, down-to-earth charm. I’m only really sensing the full force of it now. I can’t imagine him ever becoming angry or letting anything get to him. I bet he loves dogs and has no desire to go bar-hopping in Ibiza.

‘They just look more glamorous because the colours in the picture are bright,’ Ronnie says.

‘They’re not really even talking. Maybe they’re jealous of each other. Maybe it’s to do with the hats.’ Martin doesn’t sound quite so authoritative without his teeth. I smile.

‘You’re right about the colours, Ronnie.’ Michael winks at me again. ‘But I don’t think the women dislike each other. They’re just having a serious conversation. One they have to break up with long pauses.’

He never patronises his patients, I notice. He never oversimplifies things or implies they can’t understand. I’ve caught myself on the verge of doing it, and stopped myself, following Michael’s influence.

‘Apparently, a journalist who met the artist said Hopper was hopeless at small talk,’ I tell them. ‘He was supposed to be famous for his monumental silences. But like the spaces in his paintings, the emptiness was never really empty. It was weighted down with things that were best silently concluded rather than said.’ Michael smiles when I finish, and holds my eyes. It’s vaguely possible that he’s flirting with me, which is pleasantly flattering, and slightly bewildering to this new bride.