After You Left(67)

Well, not a great many times. But perhaps right now.

There was a tiny coil of gold tinsel on the carpet that Harry must have carried from the tree. He stared at it and said a silent prayer. Please don’t let her ever leave me.

He had turned very still. Harry came over and nudged his hands.

‘I’ll leave if you want me to,’ she said. ‘If you’d done this, I don’t know if I could have stayed with you. So I’ll completely understand if that’s what you wish me to do.’

He played this back to himself. It seemed that the decision was his. He didn’t know if this was genuine on her part, or a strategy. He suspected it was genuine, because she looked too indifferent to have a strategy.

‘You want me to tell you to leave, so that you can go to him and feel easy in your conscience. That’s what I’m guessing.’

‘I’m not going to him. He has a wife and a daughter. If I go, I split up his family, and the one who would suffer most would be his child.’

He was slightly relieved to hear about this child. In fact, thank heavens there was a child! Evelyn did have a conscience. It was one of the things he’d always admired about her. ‘I’ve known for a very long time that you weren’t happy, Evelyn.’ He stroked the dog’s ears, and once again tried to picture life without her and felt intensely sad – sadder than he’d ever imagined. ‘I think you have mastered a way of being happy with your unhappiness, if that makes any sense. And I have just come to accept that this is how you are. And I’ve still loved you, despite it.’

She stared at him while he said this. It seemed he only ever told her he loved her when perhaps he sensed he was losing her. She felt he was coming back to her, and she to him. This evolution of theirs touched her soul. All this, to end where we started – or to start where we almost ended.

‘But I will say this. If you love him more, and he makes you happier than you think is in you to be with me, then you should be with him. I won’t stand in your way.’ What was he saying? ‘Or . . . if you feel you can forget about him and go on, then I shall forget about him and go on, too.’ He stopped talking to the dog’s ears and met Evelyn’s eyes. If choices were a set of scales, he certainly hoped he had weighted this one in his favour. ‘But I’m not going to try to win you back. I’ve been on similarly futile missions like that with you in the past. Trying to win a part of you that isn’t even available to be won.’ But he knew that if she stayed, he would never stop trying to show her that it had been the right choice.

I want to live two lives, she thought. One with Eddy that’s taken afresh without a history of disappointment. And this one, with nothing more to learn, and all its comfortable headway already made. I love two men, and I’ll probably end up with neither of them, the way I am behaving.

‘As I’ve said, I don’t want to leave. Unless you want me to go.’

They were being exceptionally polite and considerate. One of them ought to have turned it less civilised – and she might have craved that in the past: a rational discussion that would have progressed to the level of fighting baboons. But now she was glad of it.

Mark sat back in the chair and crossed his legs at the knee. His stomach let out a jungle-like growl that even made Harry pep up from the trance he was in from having his ears tickled.

It was 7 p.m. Usually, they would be eating dinner, then watching his favourite television programmes, which she didn’t care for: This Is Your Life, Benny Hill, and Sale of the Century.

She knew this was what he’d be thinking – about their routine. Once again, it awakened the soft spot she had for his foibles.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘For purely selfish reasons that have nothing to do with how you feel about me.’

She loved the sad truth of it. She loved him for the guilelessness of what he had said. It struck her again that no one knew her like he did, and his knowing her so fully added a vital dimension to her life. Eddy only knew the side of her that she gave him, the one that flourished in his presence. Even though Mark wasn’t romantic, wasn’t perceptive or overly sensitive to her emotions, it worked; their weaknesses and strengths struck a balance that constituted a marriage. Its currency wasn’t how hard their hearts throbbed for one another. It was the small daily revelations and reaffirmations of their quirky, entangled personalities.

‘Then I’ll stay,’ she said.

He really hadn’t thought for a minute that she would love this gardener person enough to want to leave her marriage for him.

But he was very – very – relieved to find that he had been right.





TWENTY-NINE


Alice

I’m just stepping out of my office to go and fill my water glass when I come across Michael standing there, almost loitering, by my door. We practically knock noses.

‘Ah! Michael!’ My flatness, the unflinching absoluteness of my misery, lifts slightly. ‘We didn’t have a meeting today, did we?’ I glance around for Evelyn.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m just popping in.’ He looks slightly shifty, and ruffles his hair. ‘I came by two days ago as well, but they said you were taking a few days off.’

‘I had a tummy bug,’ I lie.

‘How are you today, then?’ His concern touches me.