After You Left

by Carol Mason

  I always deliberately misname her.

  ‘That was just a physical thing. It’s a shame there wasn’t more, but there wasn’t. Not on my part, anyway.’

  A physical thing that had gone on a long time. And she was very beautiful – enormously tall, and slim and dark-haired – because we had bumped into her once in Eldon Square. But I don’t really care to think about that.

  He looks at me forthrightly. ‘If we can forget about ex-girlfriends . . . I suppose I’m just saying I think there comes a time in life where if everything that you have with someone feels good, feels right, and they are good, good in their heart and soul, and you want the same things, then you have to go with it. You have to decide you’re going to make it work.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re doing with me? Making it work?’

  Way too much honesty! Justin has never disappointed me before. But I am disappointed now.

  ‘Now you’re going to try to twist it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are. You’re trying to hear what you want to have heard. To twist it. Because you’ve got issues with yourself. Maybe with what others have done to you, but you have to get over that.’ He seems genuinely frustrated by me. ‘What I’m saying – even though you’ve read it the wrong way – doesn’t diminish what this is, what we have. We’re not teenagers. I’m just trying to take a mature stance, that’s all.’

  ‘You could have left it at the bit about So yes, I believe I am in love with you. I’d have been fine with that.’ I try to sound light again. He is right: I do try to find blemishes. Maybe because the quiet voice inside me would think that if my own father didn’t think I was worth sticking around for, then why would any man? But I hate that strain in myself. I hate anyone even knowing it exists.

  He draws my face in, until it’s barely an inch from his own. ‘Let me repeat. I want you to know it in no uncertain terms. I am in love with you, Alice.’ He kisses me, slow and long. ‘Are you happy now?’

  I’m tired of this conversation. ‘Happy enough.’

  FIFTEEN

  Evelyn

  Holy Island. 1983

  ‘I’m leaving Laura.’

  They were standing in Evelyn’s kitchen. It was almost the end of their week. A week of him working with her on the house as he sang along to the radio, and her smiling inwardly, listening to him; of Evelyn cooking for him, them eating in the garden, and kissing under the plum tree. Of their jaunts to various little villages along the coast, where they would wander in and out of tea rooms, or buy fish and chips in cartons that they would then sit and eat at the end of the pier, feeding the odd seagull with the scraps of batter – careful not to look too cosy in case they were seen and aroused suspicion. But the last few days had been heavily weighted with the threat of it all ending. It had muted all joy and all conversation. Now she could barely meet his eyes without the tears springing.

  Evelyn was wearing one of her mother’s dressing gowns. They had made love. He had dressed again in his gardening clothes. He had clung to her like he knew he was going to lose her, and even though she was busying herself by making tea, she was still aware of the bleak absence of his body. The ghostly pencil-line around where his love had just been.

  ‘Eddy, you can’t possibly leave Laura! This is insane!’ She quickly abandoned the idea of making tea.

  He searched her face, slightly stunned by her reaction, but she refused to look at him. ‘Evelyn, I can’t speak for you, or for how you feel, but I, for one, am not going back to the way things were. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than plod on with her after this.’

  A flurry of panic went through her. At the idea of going back to Mark she felt only the blankness of impossibility. But, strangely, that didn’t mean she wanted to feel this way. She recognised they had crossed a bridge to somewhere that neither of them was truly prepared to find themselves.

  ‘You can’t do it on my account. I won’t let you break up your family for me!’

  ‘But I love you. I’ve never felt like this over anyone. Only you, Evelyn.’

  She floundered, thinking, No! I have to downplay this! We can’t do anything rash! ‘Eddy, you practically married your first sweetheart! You don’t know if you could feel this way over someone else. You haven’t had enough women.’

  ‘You were my first sweetheart. Or, you should have been.’

  ‘We don’t know that we’d have worked.’

  He looked at her in disbelief and frustration. ‘Why are you saying this?’ She had hurt him. ‘Do you honestly believe – after the time we have just spent together; after everything we have continued to mean to one another – that we wouldn’t work, Evelyn? Do you?’ He was searching her face, but she refused to meet his eyes.

  When she wouldn’t answer, he said, ‘You can believe what you want, but I’m certain there’s a reason we had to meet again after all these years. And these last few days have proven this to be right. Tell me you don’t believe that this was fate?’

  ‘Even if all that’s true, Eddy, you have a family. A child. You belong to someone else. As do I.’

  ‘But we can change that! We have a chance! Evelyn, I want to do all the things with you that I should have been doing with you from the minute we met. I want to shop with you, go to the beach with you, fill up petrol with you, watch telly with you, plan holidays with you . . . I want to be able to be seen with you in public, without looking over my shoulder. I want to walk down the damned street with you, holding your hand. I want this affair word stricken from my mind. It’s beneath us. I don’t want to be ashamed. I only want to be proud of everything that exists between us.’ He was right in referencing how covert they’d felt they needed to be. How many times, when they were doing errands around town, had she wanted to stop and spontaneously kiss him? But she’d had to check herself. Despite them trying on the idea of being an item, it had been so depressingly tempered by the fact that they were both married to someone else. And, if anything, he had hated that more than her, and she hadn’t known that would be possible.

  He held his head between both of his hands – this gesture of despair or silent panic she had seen before. After a moment, he looked up again. ‘I want you to be my wife. I want to see the outline of your body there in bed. And I want to see that outline of you change over the years, Evelyn. I want to be with you when I’m old and know that maybe it didn’t work out quite the way it should have, but at least I got forty good years with you – if I’m lucky enough to get that.’ He paused, his eyes buzzing around her face. ‘I want a life with you, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have that in this day and age. We’re not living in our parents’ era.’

  She wanted to protest as strenuously as he’d declared his love, but his speech had robbed her lungs of air.

  ‘I’m going to tell her tonight. And then I’m moving out.’

  She jumped up from the chair. ‘No! You can’t be serious! Where would you even go?’

  This broke his stride slightly. ‘Well . . . anywhere. I’ll get a flat. Or I’ll live with you.’

  She sat down beside him again, aware that a part of her was involuntarily withdrawing. ‘Eddy, you’re not being rational.’ She had seen him as a man with values, with a strong moral code. Someone much like herself. Yes, they were doing a deceitful thing, but they weren’t actually hurting anyone. But this – this reckless desire to dump all his responsibilities for love – this would hurt others. And the fact that he wasn’t paying heed to that – it made her think less of him.

  He gripped her shoulders and forced her to look at him. ‘Just tell him you’re not going back. You can get your stuff shipped up here. People do it all the time. It’s not impossible.’

  She opened her mouth to say something, something to drill some sense into him, but it died in her. He gently shook her. ‘It really just comes down to this, Evelyn: do you love me and want to be with me? Because I believe you do.’

  Tears built up. She felt the need to lie, but she couldn’t
leave here having lied to him about something this big. ‘I do love you, yes. There is just a rightness when I’m with you, a sense of belonging.’ Now she’d said it, she felt elated, as though saying it was all that was needed to give it the ghost of a chance. And yet there was a concrete weight of impossibility in her heart. ‘In a way, I fully understand what I always suspected. I couldn’t go on that date with you because I knew I’d fall in love – if I hadn’t already. I was torn then, and I didn’t want to be torn, I wasn’t ready for that. But I’m not sure I’m ready for it now, either.’

  She could see he was floored by her pragmatism and lack of faith. ‘And you’re wrong in what you say,’ she added. ‘You said it really just comes down to whether I love you and want to be with you. But it doesn’t just come down to that! What would you say to your daughter?’

  He looked genuinely mystified. ‘Well, I’d tell her the truth. One day. When she was old enough to understand.’

  ‘I mean now. What would you tell her now?’ She knew she was putting him under fire and he wasn’t used to it. ‘You see, you haven’t thought it through.’

  ‘I don’t believe I really need to think that part through! I’m leaving Laura, not April. I would never do anything to harm my little girl. I love her for all the world, and that’s never going to change. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be with you.’

  ‘You would break her heart. Are you ready to do that? You’re her father. You’re supposed to set the values for her. You’re not setting the values for April if you walk away.’

  ‘One day she’ll understand,’ he repeated.

  ‘But she’d always know you didn’t put her first. You put you first.’

  There. That was the crux of it. She wanted him to be better than that.

  He held her eyes. She could almost see him searching to contradict her, but the truth was pushing back at him, harder. ‘I don’t think that staying with her mother for all the wrong reasons is teaching April anything, is it?’ His voice had mellowed with doubt. ‘She’s not going to be better off being raised by parents who are just tolerating each other, knowing that they should never have been a couple. I should never have got back together with her all those years ago, after you . . .’

  ‘Eddy! There was no me. It was one day at a wedding. One quite fabulous day that took us completely off guard, yes. But a day. That’s all.’

  It hurt her to say it, because it felt untrue, but she had to make him believe it. She had to somehow make him see sense. They weren’t living in a bubble. Their perfect week together was perfect only because they had managed to keep reality at bay. But so many people’s happiness was hanging in the balance.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Anyway, I think you’re being remarkably cavalier. It’s easy to say all that, but no five-year-old would ever choose to have her parents split up just because of a concept she couldn’t understand anyway.’

  He wiped a hand over his mouth. It was clear that he could fight his corner, but Evelyn was the much stronger opponent. The tension came down a few notches. ‘Do you have a beer?’ he asked. She hesitated, then got him one from the fridge. ‘You know what?’ he said when he’d taken a big gulp. ‘I think it’s you who wouldn’t be able to do it. You’re using my situation as your excuse.’

  She sat down again, exhausted from all this intensity. ‘I don’t have a child, Eddy, no. But I have a husband and I love him, even if it’s more about loyalty and affection than passion. It’s still love. I made a commitment to him. Everything can’t all be about my happiness, can it? That’s not how it works when you marry. Mark has never done anything bad to me. I can’t just walk away.’

  ‘Why not?’

  His persistent naivety bothered her. She was starting to see it as a weakness.

  ‘It’ll break him.’ She doubted that, of course. Mark would survive. But he would be massively changed. Besides, oddly, in all of her fantasising over the last week that she could live a life with Eddy, she had never once considered the prospect of ending a life with Mark. It was suddenly way too much to have to take on board.

  He downed the rest of his beer. ‘People don’t break that easily, Evelyn. That’s a myth people invent when they want to imply everybody else is as weak as they are. Are you going to live your life making excuses, rather than facing up to the fact that you want to be your own person?’

  Had he hit on the essence of it? Perhaps she should never have married anyone. Perhaps she would have been better off being free to make her own choices, to forge new paths to new destinations, even if they were the wrong ones. She wasn’t necessarily going to do any of it. But maybe she just needed to know she could.

  ‘So what about me, Evelyn? If you’re convinced that people can be broken, if you go back to him, you break me.’

  The difference between the two situations was so obvious and irrefutable that she couldn’t stop herself from saying it. ‘Yes, but we’ve been a married couple for nearly twenty years. I’ve barely known you – properly known you – for five minutes.’

  He bore the weight of the put-down quietly. She could see hope fading in his expression. ‘So he wins because he won in the first place? He got you first?’ He was defeated: a boxer losing consciousness in the ring.

  ‘It’s not about someone winning me. It’s about me not wanting to live my life knowing that I did a wrong thing. I wish I could be different, but I can’t.’

  He was staring at his empty beer bottle. They didn’t speak for a while. ‘Then where do we go from here?’ he finally asked, quietly, as though he feared the answer.

  ‘Well,’ she stared at him, her eyes burning with tears. ‘I think we go nowhere.’

  SIXTEEN

  Alice

  I had almost forgotten I’d ever rung Rick. I was so wrapped up in thinking about my conversation with Evelyn, over tea. Her telling me about her perfect week with Eddy. His being ready to leave his wife for her. The story just keeps echoing in me . . . Now that I see Rick’s number on my call display, though, I have to wonder what’s taken him so long. Has he lain low to work out what to say? Maybe he was never going to call back, but Dawn bullied him into it. Has he conferred with Justin?

  When I pick up and say, ‘Hello, Rick’, I sound like I’m walking a tightrope two hundred metres above ground.

  ‘Alice!’ he says, brightly. ‘I’m so very sorry I’m only just ringing you back. Dawn’s mother had a stroke five days ago. It’s pretty bad, and we’re running backward and forward to Cheltenham General . . . What with that, and working and taking care of the kids, it’s been all systems go, and I haven’t had a chance.’

  Relief makes me audibly sigh. I tell him I’m very sorry to hear about Dawn’s mother. We exchange small talk. Then I say, ‘I’m sure you can appreciate this is a very difficult conversation for me to be having, but I need you to tell me where he is, please.’

  I can feel his hesitation, his puzzlement. Then he says, ‘Who?’

  I’m puzzled too, now. ‘Justin.’

  Another pause; somehow, I don’t think he’s acting. ‘Well, what do you mean, where is he?’ he says.

  I try to stay composed. Threads of my sanity are knotting themselves and I’m trying to unravel them, otherwise I’m not helping myself. They were friends from their Oxford days. They had shared the same house, studied together, raised hell together, were both Blues for rowing. I can’t imagine there’s anything Justin won’t have shared with his best friend. I explain what happened briefly and neutrally.

  He makes a couple of astonished noises, then says, ‘You’re kidding!’

  It truly hadn’t occurred to me that he might not know.

  I tell him about the short message exchange, about my chat with his secretary. ‘It’s been nine days. Nine days and I am none the wiser.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. Alice . . . My God.’ Then, after a hesitation, he says, ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him, after quick thought.

  ‘I
knew you’d both be back by now, but I haven’t had a chance to ring him, what with everything that’s been going on.’

  ‘I would really like you to tell me what you were both talking about when you stood outside in the rain at our wedding.’ I’m trembling. Hearing the words come out of my mouth somehow doesn’t make the situation any more real.

  ‘Alice, I . . .’

  ‘Please don’t tell me it’s nothing, Rick. I know you were talking about something. I’d really appreciate you being honest with me.’ I have the sense that perhaps Dawn has walked into the room. Of something being whispered. ‘Has he met someone else?’ I ask. ‘Is that it? Has there been some sort of affair?’

  He lets out a huge sigh. ‘God, Alice! Look . . . No. It’s not like that. And I don’t know why he took off and left you. You’re going to have to ask him . . .’

  ‘But I can’t ask him because he’s not talking to me and he’s not here.’

  ‘I know. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘But?’ I sense one coming.

  A whisper in the background. It’s a second or two before he replies.

  ‘But I do have some idea what it’s about. I’m just not comfortable being the one to tell you.’

  ‘Is he there?’ It just dawns on me. ‘Is he with you?’

  ‘What?’ he says, more in exclamation. ‘No. Of course not. I’m just . . .’

  Conferring with my wife? Because she also knows something you don’t.

  ‘Look, it’s not my place. It’s got to come from him,’ he says. Then, surprisingly, after a moment or two, he adds, ‘You know what he’s like . . .’

  And I think, Do I?

  ‘When things get on top of him, he tends to retreat. To think. It’s just his way. Perhaps that’s all he’s doing now.’

  I remember Justin telling me about how, when he heard his dad had died, he ran away. He was only missing a few hours – he’d been hiding in a barn – but his mother had rung the police.

  ‘Is he ill?’ I ask.

  ‘Ill? My God. No, Alice. He’s definitely not ill.’