After You Left

by Carol Mason

  But Evelyn was being propelled by the air. She was levitating with possibilities, gliding like the puffins, blackbirds and terns that made their home on the island’s north shore, where she would wander and dream. She was dreaming again now. Seeing it for how it could all be again. And yet there was the harsh grounding, the pulling down to earth with strong hands, the indomitable forces of her reality.

  I don’t know how to tell you this. I have had second thoughts.

  She stared at the polished silver place setting laid out by their housekeeper, Tessie – the morning pomp of their breakfast table – aware that the tears were ready to come, and she chanted in silent pleas, Don’t let me cry. I must not cry. Mark must never know.

  ‘Evelyn?’ he said, a fraction impatient. ‘I’m asking you if you’d like to dine out tonight.’

  She looked at him, somewhat blankly, then shook her head. ‘I don’t want to think about dinner, Mark. We’re just having breakfast.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, bewildered.

  The matter? The matter was she couldn’t properly draw a breath. The anxiety, the dilemma, had twisted her; her windpipe was wrung dry. She met his eyes, searched his face, but it wasn’t his face she was seeing. She would never look at him and see him again, which was so unspeakably sad. There was only one face she would ever see.

  He returned to his newspaper with a sigh. ‘I just imagined we might go out and celebrate the fact that I’m still alive, that’s all. But, then again, perhaps you wish I wasn’t still alive. I can never tell with you.’

  Last night was there so freshly – the choice she had made. She could still undo it. She could just tell him right here and right now. Instead, she said, ‘Don’t make light of it, Mark. You were there, shopping along with all those other terrified people. It could have very easily been you. Sometimes, you don’t realise how lucky you are. You sail through life . . . You shouldn’t take it for granted.’

  He was looking at her with a mix of adoration and frustration. ‘Yes, Evelyn, my darling. You’re right. I was there. It could have been me. But it wasn’t me, was it?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, a beat or two later. ‘About dinner.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. What’s to see?’ He was looking at her as though she always managed to be two people: the one he knew inside out, and loved, and this other who was a work in progress that he never bargained for.

  If she didn’t leave the room, she would cry, and then she would have to tell him. Mark might be a little blind, but he wasn’t stupid. She’d had the dream again. And, as was always the case when it happened, she was beside herself for days after. It relentlessly haunted her. Only this time she was beside herself for new reasons altogether.

  ‘Can you take this away?’ Mark said to Tessie, who had come in the room to refresh the coffee. Then he added, ‘Please,’ because Mark was consummately polite.

  ‘Just your plate, sir?’ Tessie hovered, flummoxed by this break in their routine.

  ‘Everything.’ He swept a hand. ‘Mrs Westland is apparently on a hunger strike.’

  Despite his claim, all those years ago, that he was attracted to her because she was the opposite of the girls from his ‘world’, she was sure that Mark had never managed to forget that he no longer lived at Blenheim Palace. That’s what she liked to call his family pile, just to put into perspective how privileged he was, just to remind him, when she felt he needed reminding, that most people didn’t come from this. She certainly hadn’t come from this. This wasn’t how normal people lived.

  Tears were building. The weight of her secret was almost stifling her. How had she got here? She could only take quarter-breaths, tiny hypoventilations. Of course, if he saw her crying, he’d probably think she was just being melodramatic again.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t do it . . .

  How would she ever land on the right way to say it? She might be a writer, but she would never find words.

  ‘I’m not feeling too hungry. I think I might go back to bed.’ Her voice quivered at the end. She left the table somewhat abruptly. Tessie momentarily took her attention from the bacon platter, and Mark looked like he was about to say something – perhaps, Bloody hell, what’s wrong with you? – but changed his mind.

  She walked into their bedroom, aware of the unsteadiness of her legs. Her actions yesterday had undone everything, and she was wrong about one thing: she couldn’t undo it again. She had allowed her will to be weak. But she had committed to her path, and now she had no choice but to stay with it, for all their sakes.

  Her head thumped, and there was a small spasm under her right eye. The defeat registered itself with the weight of a physical one; she literally couldn’t emerge from under it, so there was no point in trying. She lay down on top of the eiderdown. She stared at the hairline crack in the ceiling, telling herself she had to get a grip, if for no other reason than to stop herself bursting. That’s how she felt. As though she was going to blow up. It was probably a couple of minutes before her heart rate returned to normal. She closed her eyes, and tried to go back to the dream; she just wanted to see him again, even if this was the only way.

  It could have been one of several memories, really, but it was always this same one. Not of the first time she had set eyes on him in 1963, or the last, a few months ago. But the second.

  1968.

  Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom.

  The Long John Baldry concert.

  Four years after she had married Mark.

  They had gone back up North to see her parents; usually she made the trip alone, but on those rare occasions that Mark came with her, she would take him somewhere she thought might impress him – to show off the North East in its best light. This time, she’d been determined to prove to him that Newcastle’s high-life was every bit as vibrant as London’s. She had such treasured memories of nights out at the Mayfair when she was eighteen years old, perhaps nineteen. She loved Long John Baldry. So it couldn’t have been more perfect that he turned out to be playing there.

  She had never expected to see Eddy there.

  In this dream she’d just woken from, she had time-travelled so impeccably to 1968. Every molecule of detail – she could see, smell, taste and feel everything that she’d seen, smelt, tasted and felt then, with crystal precision – even details she hadn’t consciously been aware of at the time. The blue cloud of cigarette smoke that drifted just above the coiffed heads of dancers moving with the slow tide of Baldry’s ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’. The citrusy tang of the rum and pineapple she’d spilled on the breast of her red halter dress. Mark’s mohair jacket grazing her bare arm. The way he would inch closer to ensure his arm kept contact with hers while he stood there, transported by Baldry’s hot-blooded ballad of regret. Every time she moved fractionally, he moved fractionally. She found herself shifting slightly to see if he would follow, and follow he did. Never had she been more aware of an arm, and of the pleasingly maudlin lyrics, and how easily they could quash her if she thought too much about them. And Baldry, all six-feet-seven of him, dressed immaculately in his dark suit and ruffle-front shirt complete with oversized black bow tie, standing almost reverently still in a hazy spotlight as he sang about his grief at the love he once cast away. His molasses voice and the gentle mime-like gestures of his left hand, combined with the steady entrancement of the slow-dancing couples, reflected a void in Evelyn, one which, until that very moment, she hadn’t even known existed.

  She stood there, racked by overwhelming despair at this sudden new insight into herself. Then somewhere into the second repetition of the chorus, she was aware of a gaze. A gaze so hot on her, it reached from across the room.

  She had to blink and look again. But, yes. It was him.

  Eddy.

  She would never be able to say if he was with someone, or alone, what he wore, if he’d recently had his hair cut, or what he was drinking. Because all she knew, and all she would ever remember, was the way he was looking at her – his u
nending, unflinching, rebuking gaze – combined with the mesmerising undertow of Baldry’s gravelly, tear-jerking voice. Neither one could have singularly dismantled her like the force of the combination. It was a moment set apart from all others. She would come back to it years later, either dreaming or awake, and somehow she had known she would, right as it was happening.

  Never did Eddy’s eyes leave hers for even one second, nor Mark’s sleeve stop touching her arm – not until Baldry’s last lyric, and the audience’s clapping. Then Mark shattered the spell by looking at her and smiling before breaking into applause himself. It was as though someone had suddenly turned up the volume and life was too loud. She gazed at her husband’s profile for a second or two after his attention had returned to the singer. Then, when her eyes were pulled back to Eddy, there was only the startling hollow of his absence.

  She didn’t hear Mark leave for work. When she woke, it sounded like the rain had stopped, and the sun was trying to break through. Time felt as though it had shifted, and yet she was exactly the same. It hadn’t gone away. She had hoped she could have slept herself into an alternate reality. But she was still very much in this one.

  The shock of finding him gone in the dream, before she’d had a chance to do anything, still lingered. She lay there for a while, trying to bridge the present with 1968. It must have been ages, because the rain started up again. Then she got up and walked across to the window. Tessie was fussing around in the next room. The place still smelt of breakfast. It always did, until dinner. The pavements of High Street Kensington below were slick, and people were shaking off their wet umbrellas as they backed up into shops and ducked into taxis. She wanted their life. She wanted anyone’s life but her own right now.

  She went into her bathroom and splashed her face twenty times with cold water, mechanically counting each clap of her hands on her cheeks. Numbly, she stared at the sight of her freshened-up self in the mirror: a forty-year-old woman with a small face, pink-cheeked, eyelids slightly puffy. Back in the bedroom, she sat down at the writing bureau and reached for the pad of champagne-coloured Basildon Bond. The pen was like a foreign object between her fingers. She didn’t know how long she must have sat there, entirely debilitated by the task. Tessie had left, because the house had become eerily absent of sound – save for her heartbeat, which was overly loud in her ears, and the dull scratching of the pen on the paper as she wrote his name.

  Eddy.

  Tears plunked on to the page. The letter E had come out all jagged, and now it was smudged, too. She chose a fresh sheet, wiped her tears and tried to start again.

  Eddy,

  I’ve made a terrible mistake. I can’t do it, for everyone’s sake. I am so sorry.

  There would have to be more. But this was enough to begin with.

  SIX

  Alice

  Discovered something before wedding. Still trying to process. Need space.

  I read his text once. Twice. Three times. The thought that he is still there . . . I scramble to type quickly before he goes again. Pick up the phone!

  I am riveted to the small screen, unable to breathe. After about thirty seconds, up come the three little dots that indicate Justin is typing.

  I wait, but nothing follows. The dots disappear.

  Pick up the damned phone! I type, kneeling on the bed in a shaft of moonlight.

  The dots appear immediately. But then just as quickly they go again.

  My fingers hit all the wrong keys, and I have to keep backspacing and telling myself to calm down.

  What’s going on? RU ill? Tell me! Please!

  No, comes the instant reply. I’m fine.

  Then what? My legs suddenly have a mind of their own. I am propelled off the bed into the middle of the floor, then I don’t know where to go. As I stand there, I realise I am juddering with nerves.

  No more dots.

  I don’t know why he’s doing this! Why? But if he’s there, responding at this hour of the morning, he’s open to having it prised out of him, or he wouldn’t have replied in the first place.

  Where are you? I write again. Tell me!

  I wait for a moment, then when nothing comes, I dial his number. It rings and rings and he doesn’t pick up. The water glass is on my bedside table. I pick it up and hurl it at the wall. The shock of it smashing is like fireworks. I’m convinced the entire building has heard it.

  Then I see the three little dots again.

  Whatever he’s writing is long. The dots seem to be there forever. I continue to stand in the same spot, half petrified. He’s telling me . . . I’m going to know . . . I want to look and can’t bear to look at the same time.

  But then up pops, Will. Soon. Promise.

  My heart sinks before almost stopping. Three words? That can’t be it. I gawp at the screen, aware of an urgency, a grasping need to know, to wrestle an explanation out of him. I wait for him to write more. But there is nothing.

  After the possibility of him still being there subsides, I put the phone back on the bedside table, and go to the toilet, taking care not to step on the broken glass. It’s only when I come back into the bedroom that I remember the wedding photos.

  Discovered something before wedding . . . The words perform a combative tango in my head.

  I run and get my computer and pour myself a new glass of water. I have to log in with a password that Aimee gave me. Moments later, I am staring at a collage of dozens of small photographs, endless images of my own happy day – a tiny, cropped hint of a wedding dress, the front of a tuxedo, pale pink peonies, laughing faces, a flute of twinkling champagne, the sea, the stunning sea . . .

  We married at a small Catholic church on Holy Island. Justin always claimed he wasn’t religious because he said no God would have robbed a little boy of his father, but religion was an undeniable part of him. He still attended church at Christmas and Easter, and whenever he needed some time to step away from all the noise and just think. I accepted that about him, though to me, church meant very little. I had never gone as a child. I had no idea if my mother and father had married in a church because I never saw any wedding pictures of them; after he left, she destroyed everything with his face on it.

  When I moved up here from Manchester, I was enchanted by the idea of an island that was cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tide. It was so magically different from Stockport, where I had grown up. I went over there on one of my first weekends, crossing early on a summer’s morning right as the three-mile causeway had just opened up to cars. There was something hauntingly evocative about the small land mass, with its green pastureland dotted with goats and sheep, its mudflats with upturned fishing boats and the tiny streets of honey-coloured houses with their terracotta roofs. I remember sitting all alone on a bench listening to the ghostly music of a light wind wrapping around the Cheviot Hills and the occasional bleat of sheep – and nothing else; no other sound. Lindisfarne Castle sat perched on a craggy outcrop, like something built from sand by children. A structure that, impossibly, you’d imagine could be washed away by a high tide, or trampled by somebody’s rambunctious dog, and yet it had survived stalwartly from the sixteenth century. I had read about its history, its many owners, one of whom was the founder of Country Life magazine. From up there on the castle walls, you could see out to the Farne Islands, while the wind whipped your hair and you inhaled salty air blown in from a steel-grey sea. If you were a writer or an artist, you could find no finer inspiration than here. If Wyeth had been British, he would have wound up on Holy Island, and found his Christina among the local girls, who were probably all just as captivating and inaccessible.

  When I discovered that the castle could be booked for weddings, granted, it lost some of its mystique. Now it was just another national treasure that got pimped out to random brides with a big enough budget. Nevertheless, I wanted to be one of them. But Justin had wanted a Catholic church, so that’s what we did.

  I click on the first photograph of myself. It’s bizarre; I can�
�t relate one iota to that person in the white dress. It’s like finally meeting the twin you never knew you had, and knowing you should be able to forge a connection, but you just can’t. I am not interested in whether my hair held up, or if my make-up was too heavy, or how my dress looked from behind. All I see is a woman I can’t identify with, on the arm of a man who must have been wondering what the hell he’d done.

  ‘I want a big wedding,’ he’d said. ‘I’m only going to be married once.’

  ‘What if I die early?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Makes no difference. I only ever want one wife.’

  It was so very Justin – not really the way anyone else thought. But he’d won me over with it; I was going to be that wife.

  I come across one of him in close-up, cropped just below his deep cream buttonhole, semi-profile. His unfairly thick eyelashes. The unblemished, olive skin. Those eyes that are neither properly blue nor properly green – windows to the soul. But it strikes me that they’re the eyes of the man I can’t have truly known, who I lost so indistinctly. Was any of it real? A mute hysteria builds in the back of my throat. The need for answers is suddenly greater than my ability to handle them – perhaps I will just disappear into never knowing. Perhaps it’ll be easier. I take another drink of my water and click through the photos, hurrying past ones he isn’t in. Latching on to the ones of his face – staring at them until my eyes hurt – searching for any possible subtext in his expressions, in his body language, in the way he was holding a wine glass or scratching his cheek, looking for a moment of truth, something that will leap out and make me say, There it is! Justin, in the throes of realising he’s made a mistake! A forced smile that would belie some inner maelstrom of regret and despair. But there is nothing.

  In every photo, he looks exactly as you would expect him to look.

  Except for one.

  When I see it, my stomach gives a small lift and fall. I enlarge it to its fullest size – not that this really helps, given it happens to be the only photograph in which you can’t see Justin’s face. He is with Rick, his best man.