After You Left(64)

We sit in silence for a while. I try to grapple with it all. Then he says, ‘Do you have something I can drink? A beer? Anything.’

‘Sure.’ I go to the fridge and pull out a beer. I am caught in that hellish place of disowning him and still caring about him: disowning him because I think he’s wrong, and frustrated that I can’t change his mind. I open the beer and hand it to him. Our fingers meet as he takes it. ‘Did you eat?’

‘Not since lunch.’

‘Do you want me to make you a sandwich?’

‘No. Thanks.’ He looks perplexedly at the printing on the can, and passes it between his hands as if it’s a foreign object. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you hearing all this. I am not proud of the way I handled this, and how you’ve been hurt in the process. You must believe that.’

I don’t know what to say, what response I can possibly make. ‘So what are you going to do, Justin? How do things proceed from here?’

He looks right at me, quite calm now. Calm, but distant again. ‘Well, I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m going to release you of me. I am sure you’ll meet someone else, and one day you’ll have a family with this person. And I’m sure in time you’ll realise this was for the best.’

‘But I don’t want to be released of you.’ Tears roll down my face. I fly my hand up, but can’t stop them.

‘I know. But you have to let me do what I think is right.’

I study him, wordlessly. There’s nothing more either of us can say.





TWENTY-EIGHT


Evelyn

London. 1983

‘What is it, Ev?’

Evelyn was lying on the sofa like an alabaster sculpture, with her head turned away from him. She was staring vacantly at the fire.

‘Look at you. You’re so pale.’ He hovered over her, stymied by the sense of his own helplessness. ‘You’ve got me very concerned. What is wrong?’

Mark always worried about his wife. Someone had once told him that happiness is something you feel only when you’ve given up focussing on its absence. But Mark wasn’t sure Evelyn could ever be happy. Mark was convinced that Evelyn was depressed and it had come to some sort of head.

She looked at him, without really seeing him.

‘What is the matter? Please tell me. You’ve not been the same since yesterday, since the bomb.’ They had shared that pinprick of time, when she had suddenly caught sight of him, and he had caught sight of her, and his heart had somehow taken flight. Her face had been full of love for him in a way that he didn’t think he’d seen before. Her eyes had glistened with tears. And it was then that he had realised how lost he would be if he were ever to be without her.

And yet, as he stood here, he could almost see her brain composing words. Words that would hurt him. He hoped she wouldn’t speak them. He feared something, and yet he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.

He sat down in the leather chair opposite the fireplace, unable to take his eyes off her. Christmas was coming. He just wanted Evelyn happy for Christmas. She usually loved this time of the year – and he had always loved the pleasure she had taken in decorating their tree and ordering all their festive treats; she was like a child. ‘What’s got you looking like this, Evelyn? Tell me. You can tell me anything, you know that.’ He said it, but it wasn’t true. Then a horrible thought occurred to him: what if she is ill?

She slowly swung her legs around so that she could sit up properly. It seemed to take her a moment or two to orientate herself. She was ill. He was sure of it. She was going to give him horrible news. Suddenly, he saw his life unfolding without her. But that was the thing. It didn’t unfold. It stopped. He couldn’t see a future without Evelyn.

‘There’s something I never told you,’ she finally said. ‘Something you’re not going to want to hear . . .’

She was dying. He would always remember: Evelyn told me the terrible news right before Christmas. He could already see the funeral: the cathedral, all his friends. Nineteen eighty-FOUR. His first year as a widower. All these tomorrows rushed at him, blinding him like he had just stepped into a blizzard.

‘I met a man when I was back home,’ she said. ‘My mother’s gardener. Someone I knew years ago. We had an affair.’

He was sure he could actually feel the blood leaving his body. If he had been standing, his legs might have given out. His first thought was that he had misheard. His second was relief that she wasn’t dying. His wife had slept with a gardener? Was that what she’d just said?

Maybe he wasn’t hearing straight.

But he knew he was hearing straight.

And then it came to him. ‘I knew,’ he said, gazing at the floor. The pattern on the rug blurred, its sharp colours mingling through the glaze of his tears. Harry was lying on the rug between them, warming himself in front of the fire without a care in the world, just like Mark wanted to be. Happily married to a happy wife at Christmas, without a care in the world. ‘What I mean is,’ he said when he could speak again, ‘I suppose I suspected.’

Had he? Well, perhaps not exactly that. But he’d always suspected that he would never be able to keep her; his time to lose her would come. Her spirited independence had attracted him to her years ago, and he would never have wanted to change anything about her, but he had hoped that, over time, she would have become slightly more stable. She had a good life – he’d tried to give her everything he could – and yet she seemed to long for the past more than she enjoyed the present, and he’d always known he could never give her that. He plucked absently at the edges of the dark-green throw that was strewn over the arm of the chair. He had a habit of fiddling with things when he got nervous. A habit from his boyhood. He used to have a slight stammer, too. But he had conquered that because people mocked him and he hated being mocked.