After You Left(58)

‘I’m sorry,’ Evelyn eventually said, when she could no longer look at Serena’s disappointed face. ‘I should never have told you. It’s not fair. It somehow makes you invested in my choices and my mistakes, and that’s wrong.’ She didn’t know if she had told Serena because she was bursting to talk about him, or because she knew she’d have to tell someone eventually, so this was her test run.

‘But you’re seriously considering leaving Mark for this Eddy? Your husband, for this man you hardly know?’

‘I know enough.’ Evelyn’s tone had steeled, slightly. ‘I know more about him than I knew about Mark when I married him.’ The difference was, she’d always felt she’d known Eddy, and she hadn’t experienced that with Mark from the moment they had met.

But a little voice was saying, Go on . . . What do you really know about him, compared to Mark? When you cast aside bias, the truth was that if she had to list everything, beyond his upbringing, his dashed dreams and the fact that he was smitten with her, it would probably be a short list.

‘Have you thought of the life you’d be giving up? Once reality sets in and you’re back there, counting your pennies . . . Are you still planning on freelancing for the magazine? How would that even work when you’re so far away?’

Evelyn heard the blood pounding in her temples. Had she respected Serena’s opinion less, she might not have felt so discombobulated.

‘I can get a job in Newcastle.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Writing. Or anything. Or nothing. I can support myself. I have savings. I have a house.’

Serena looked almost pitying. ‘Evelyn, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s truly not my business, but haven’t you ever thought that he was just an infatuation? Every married woman wants to think she lights some other man’s fire, but that’s all it is: a kind of flattery we seek when our husbands start taking us for granted. In this case, you have a bit of a history with him. He was your unfinished business, perhaps. Maybe you were meant to have a little dalliance with him, a nice memory to carry you through life. But maybe you should leave it at that. Cut it off while it’s still a good memory. Accept you’ve been caught up in the nostalgia of it, but nostalgia, by definition, is a testimony of the past. It’s a memorial to things gone, Evelyn. And you can’t get back what’s gone, simply because you’re not meant to.’

She reached across the table and squeezed the top of Evelyn’s hand, which was lying, rather dead, on the table. Evelyn couldn’t move. She could only replay Serena’s words and try to stop her tears.

‘Perhaps you just need to be sensible and forget him, and remember how much you love Mark.’

Evelyn heard her gentle voice distantly. She stared at Serena’s slim hand lying there on top of hers. She told herself the conversation didn’t matter. But she knew that it did. That it would.



Three days before her flight up North, Evelyn set about composing her letter to Mark. He would read it after she had left. It was cowardly. But it was the only way she could it. She knew that if she saw the look on his face she wouldn’t go, and she didn’t want to run that risk. She had made a promise to Eddy now.

She tried to continue with a normal routine. But she was quietly saying goodbye. On the route she normally walked with Harry, she would absorb every detail of the park – trees, narrow walkways, horses on the bridle path – taking photographs in her mind. She stroked Harry extra fondly, and told him how she didn’t want him to fret for her, and then she cuddled him and wept into his soft fur. She lunched with friends, convincing herself that she would be in touch with them again. But she knew she wouldn’t. She would never be able to face their judgement, and they would judge her; she knew them well.

But she was convinced she was making the right choice. Or, if she wasn’t, the choice was made already.

On the day of Evelyn’s flight, December 17, the IRA set off a car bomb outside Harrods.

As the news broke, Evelyn was adding her last items to her suitcase: only her more practical clothes and footwear, plus the odd book, or photograph of her horse and the dogs bundled up in a nightdress. No sequined dresses from Harvey Nichols. No crystal perfume decanters. None of her Cartier jewellery, only her favourite inexpensive Murano glass earrings that Mark had brought her back from Italy; she treasured those.

She was in their bedroom with the radio on.

She heard the news bulletin without listening to it. A phone call to the Samaritans. An explosion. Christmas shoppers. Fear of an attack on Oxford Street. London on a high state of alert. Extensive damage.

Harrods. Mark had gone Christmas shopping. She had watched him retrieve his Harrods charge card from his desk drawer.

She tried to take a full breath, but it was trapped, like a bird that had flown into someone’s house and was panicking to get out. She tried to move, but her legs were lead.

There had been a bomb at Harrods. Mark was at Harrods.

There was a slackening sensation in her lower abdomen. She managed to pick up the phone. From the end of the bed, she rang the operator and asked for the store’s phone number. The muscles of her face quivered like a rabbit’s. She couldn’t get through when she dialled. She turned on the TV in the bedroom, and stood rooted there as she saw the full horror unfolding in Knightsbridge. Black smoke. Rubble. Smashed glass. Ambulances. Army vehicles. The walking wounded. Half-naked mannequins projecting like dead bodies out of the store’s windows. She searched every face in the crowd for Mark’s, imagining seeing him wheeled out on a stretcher. All this, while she was packing to leave him for another man.