After You Left(57)

He was unwittingly giving her the ‘out’ she needed, and yet it felt so wrong to take advantage of his naivety.

Can I tell him I’m going back for a visit and then leave him a letter? Or should I tell him when I get there that I’m not coming back? Just like Eddy said . . . Then another flaw in this plan dawned on her. Abandon him three weeks before Christmas! Why had I even thought of that? What kind of a person would be so cruel?

Suddenly, the logistics of leaving him bore down on her, her conscience crushing her until she could barely breathe.

Mark sighed and went back to his food. It didn’t help that he was giving her latitude. Although, if she was being unkind, Evelyn would have argued that in giving her options, Mark would never have expected she’d choose the one that he would have least approved of. Then he added, ‘If you do go, though, I’ll miss you terribly. You know that, don’t you?’

His words battered her. She could feel her thumb and index finger gripping her fork too tightly, tears trying to well up. He was rarely effusive with his affection. It was odd that he had chosen to be so now.

A few days later, after wrestling with all this, she walked into his study. He glanced up from his desk, looking happy to see her. ‘Mark, I’ve decided I do need to go back up North. Like you said. For closure. Just this one last time. And before Christmas.’ Her heart beat erratically. She was so unused to lying that she was convinced the truth must be telexing itself across her forehead for him to read.

Perhaps he need never know about Eddy. This thought suddenly landed on her. She could just say that she missed Lindisfarne too much, so she was going back there for good.

Her plan still kept changing, practically by the minute.

‘Do it then. If you must. Go.’

She could tell he was being gracious. ‘I don’t know why it can’t wait until the new year . . . But if it can’t, it can’t. I just hope this time when you come home, Evelyn, you’ll have settled matters, this thing, whatever it is, and I hope you’ll be more at peace with yourself.’ He had finished that sentence carefully. She wondered why.

‘Why am I not at peace with myself?’ she asked, quietly and without provocation. She was genuinely curious to know what he thought, given that he knew her better than anyone.

He pondered his answer, perhaps sensitive to the possible effect of it. ‘I don’t know. But you never are, are you? It’s not normal, Evelyn. But it’s the way you are. It doesn’t mean I love you any less, though.’

She stood there with her head bowed. She didn’t want him to see her tears.

They were tears of joy, tears of sadness, maybe tears of confusion. She didn’t know what they were tears of.



It was only when Mark had said she could go that Evelyn was unable to actually see it happening. Even though, up until that moment, it was all she’d been able to see. It was too good to be true. Eddy would lose his nerve. She would take ill, or get hit by a car. Something would come along to sabotage it.

It only became real and possible again once she had stepped out of the small travel agency on the busy Brompton Road holding her ticket.

Then Evelyn made her first mistake. She agreed to lunch at the Royal Academy with Serena Bailey, an editor friend from her early Cosmopolitan days, who had left the business when she’d given birth to her third son. Serena was the closest friend Evelyn had made in London, a wise, serious girl, who also had it in her to be disarmingly frank and fun. Evelyn had noticed something about herself: she could be on a high one minute, then, the next, plummet and doubt herself all over again. But today she was almost running away with her own elation. Still, though, she vowed to say nothing about Eddy.

And then there was wine. Then there was so much cosy chatter, and since her mother died, Evelyn hadn’t had a proper heart to heart with another female, and she missed it. Sometimes she caught herself wondering how she would ever exist without it. By going home, would she ever have a friend apart from Eddy again? Nearly everyone she’d known, she had lost touch with.

‘I’ve met someone,’ she said. Evelyn wasn’t the type to blurt out her business to people. There were friends you could never tell. Serena was one you could.

A forkful of tangy lemon flan was on its way to Serena’s mouth, but it never got there.

Evelyn tried not to concentrate on her expression. ‘A man from home. Someone I used to know,’ she said.

The fork was returned to Serena’s plate, set down, as though she was reluctantly finished with food altogether now. ‘You mean you’re having an affair?’

Evelyn searched Serena’s face for some evidence of reciprocated glee, but Serena watched her flatly: without judgement, but without joy.

Evelyn’s confidence slipped. ‘It’s . . .’ She talked to the flan on Serena’s plate. ‘That’s not what I’d call it. An affair.’

Why did I tell her? She thought about Eddy saying how he no longer wanted to feel shame. She hadn’t properly felt it until this minute. ‘It’s not like that at all, in fact. It’s someone who touched my life a long time ago. Someone who should have stayed in my life, if I hadn’t been so wilful. Someone I love.’

Serena made a doubting, sceptical face that was both friendly and slightly horrified. ‘Love?’

Evelyn gave her a brief account of the situation, recognising that, as soon as the story set sail, it was shipwrecked, as was she along with it. What had possessed her to betray Mark, Eddy and herself? Not that Serena even really knew Mark. But still . . . She had found that when it came to the telling of secrets, one person tells one person, then it’s a runaway train. Serena’s eyes didn’t light up. Not once. It wasn’t the reaction Evelyn had expected.