After You Left

by Carol Mason

  EIGHTEEN

  I am grating Parmesan for my pasta – forcing myself to make some proper food for a change, if anything just to reclaim some version of a normal routine – distantly thinking of Evelyn spying on Eddy’s wife, like Columbo, when the phone rings.

  It’s Sally.

  I wipe my hands on a tea-towel, and pick up. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I feel bad I haven’t rung you back!’ She’s left about three messages.

  ‘I’ve been so worried.’

  ‘I know. Sorry,’ I tell her. I realise that whatever little grievance I had against her, it’s over now. ‘I don’t know. I just haven’t felt much like talking.’

  I stuff the phone between my chin and shoulder and reach for the bag of macaroni, but it splits as I pull it open and pasta scatters on to the bench and floor. I stare at it and sigh.

  ‘How are you?’ she asks. ‘I mean, really. How are you doing?’

  I squat to start clearing all this up, but my legs are too weak, and I wobble and have to put out a hand for balance. ‘I’m not good, to be honest. I’m not very good at all.’ I’d actually thought I was a little better earlier in the gallery, but coming home always reverses my mood. ‘It’s not so bad when I’m around people,’ I tell her. ‘Then I don’t think about it.’

  I suppose I know something’s coming because I realise that her first words weren’t, Have you heard from him?

  ‘Alice . . . I have to tell you something,’ she says. Then, as my heart pounds suddenly, she says, ‘I saw him today.’

  My head swims. I go to stand up but see stars.

  ‘What do you mean, you saw him?’

  ‘In town. I was coming out of the shoe-repair shop. He was in a car. A silver BMW . . . Alice, he was with someone.’

  Justin doesn’t drive a silver BMW. I am confused. The sauce is splattering, jumping out of the pan. I should move it off the hob, or turn down the heat, but my brain isn’t instructing my hands. I back up, as though a threat is coming at me, crunching macaroni under my feet. ‘What do you mean, someone?’ I make contact with the counter, which stops me, and my legs almost give way.

  ‘A woman,’ she says, after a moment. ‘He was with a woman.’

  My blood is making a weird whooshing sound in my ears. It’s like hearing the sea through a shell.

  Justin. With a woman.

  Everyone’s sake.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Sally asks.

  ‘Yes.’ I swallow a gummy thickness that won’t go down.

  ‘Sorry. I hate telling you, but I had to. I mean, you have a right to know.’

  I need to clear my throat. ‘But . . . you said you think you saw him?’

  ‘It was him, Alice. It was definitely Justin.’

  He was with a woman. The words just keep coming back to me. Yet suddenly there’s a partial clearing in the frenzy of my head, a light shining through. ‘Sorry, Sally, I’m not sure . . . It could have been anybody, right? A client . . .’ Justin is always out with clients. ‘Someone he works with.’ My mouth has gone dry. My top lip is curling and sticking under my top front teeth.

  ‘But you said he wasn’t at work. You said he was taking time off, didn’t you?’ Her voice brims with pity.

  Did I? ‘No,’ I say, trying to think. ‘Louisa said he was working from home. He can’t just take time off work . . .’

  I can feel speculation trying to flourish in the gap that follows – on both our parts. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, eventually. ‘I don’t think it was a client, Al. I mean, I know it wasn’t.’

  My heart hammers – does she know something? Adrenaline and annoyance push it past where it feels healthy to go. ‘But you don’t know that for a fact. I’m not sure you can really say that . . .’

  ‘No. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’ Her obvious reluctance to just spit it out sends ungodly terror through me.

  ‘There was just something about them. They just looked . . . I don’t know, together.’

  Together. The word comes back, and back, and back to me. I frown. I can’t relax my eyebrows. I can’t rearrange my face.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, when I’ve gone quiet. ‘I know it must be so very hard to hear. I’m just reporting what I saw.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s true, Sally. I think you’re reporting what you believe you saw. There’s a difference.’ Part of me is thinking, if the situation were reversed, would I be so quick to notify Sally of this when I had no real proof of anything? Then the other part of me wonders why I am being so critical of her again.

  ‘Anyway,’ I go on, ‘how was he going to meet some woman? We were always together. Either that, or he was working. And he’d never mess around with anyone at work – he hated that kind of thing. And if he had met someone else, then why marry me? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, eventually.

  His text said, Discovered something before wedding. ‘He’s not having an affair. Honestly, Sally, I just know he isn’t. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. Whatever it is . . . Well, it’s something else.’ The confidence in my words convinces me of them.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I believe you.’

  But then the tiny betraying voice of doubt speaks so quietly that I barely hear it. ‘Go on, then,’ I say. ‘You might as well tell me. What did she look like?’

  NINETEEN

  Evelyn

  London. 1983

  Dear Eddy,

  I couldn’t bear to say goodbye. I thought it wise I return to London immediately. It’s best you forget me.

  Evelyn

  Mark had been called into a meeting, so his driver was waiting for her at Heathrow. She sat in the back seat of the Bentley feeling disconnected from herself, like a passenger in her own life, watching the outskirts of grey London slide past her.

  High Street Kensington looked the same. Yet walking into her three-bedroom flat in the small garden square just behind the high street was a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The daily routines of her life were there in abeyance like a lost memory that was returning in fragments. The place was suspiciously tidy. None of Evelyn’s perfumed cardigans hung over the chair backs. There were no platform shoes in the hallway. No errant hairpins on the dining table. In fact, not a single piece of evidence on the bathroom counter that she lived here. It was as though someone had moved her out.

  And that was how she felt from then on: emotionally relocated. Over the years, when coming home from visits up North, she had often experienced a strange limbo, unsure which life she was leaning toward reattaching herself to. When she had returned from her mother’s funeral it had been the heightened sense of her own mortality that had troubled her: the reality finally setting in about where she stood in the grand scheme of her own identity. She was someone’s wife, no one’s mother, and no longer anyone’s child. Without Mark, she would be without bearings, navigating her way around nothing. But now all her thoughts were of Eddy.

  For the next three weeks, she drifted flatly between the events that defined her life. But nothing was quite the same. She tried to maintain her twice-weekly jazz dance classes in the sprung-floor studio in Covent Garden. Afterward, she would usually sip a cappuccino in the fresh air, listening to a Peruvian pipe band playing beside the central arcade, occasionally striking up a pleasant conversation with a stranger. But now she tended to sit in a corner and avoid people. On Wednesdays, she normally lunched with friends, but found herself drumming up excuses to avoid going. On Fridays, she clothes-shopped because there was a numbing anonymity among the racks of the season’s latest fashions. Afternoons would normally entail a leisurely walk through Hyde Park with Harry, their cocker spaniel, then a trip to Harrods Food Halls to pick up dinner if they weren’t dining out. But now she napped a lot in the afternoons. She convinced herself she was just tired, or run down, but secretly she knew it was because of Eddy. She missed him as though he had been the left ventricle of her heart.

  It rained a lot that summer. She had written vi
rtually nothing, just tied up a few loose ends on a couple of magazine commissions. Mark, who had known someone high up at the exciting new women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, had originally got her a job there as an assistant. Since its inception, the magazine had taken Britain by storm with its frank and entertaining acknowledgement of the fact that women were not just mothers and accessories for men. They enjoyed sex, they had dreams of transcending the typing pool and they were no longer happy to plod on with unsatisfying marriages.

  The magazine’s concept had unleashed something in Evelyn. She had presented one or two story ideas almost daily to the editor. They were good and current. As Evelyn pointed out to her editor over wine in a smoke-filled pub, in April 1975 everyone had been singing along to Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’, which had ascended the British pop chart. But by July, they had moved on to ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’. Her editor had lapped it up. So, rather swiftly, Evelyn’s job changed. She no longer answered phones and filed copy. She was given proper assignments, and invited to editorial meetings. These often took place over a boozy lunch down some buzzing side street near the magazine’s offices. She lived for those lunches. Plus, she made friends of her own – real people, as she described them to Mark: those with whom she had something in common.

  She would trot out of there on such a mission, armed with her story and her direction for the week. But after a couple of years, her career had started to become inconvenient. Mark had wanted them to take off on spontaneous trips and weekends. Her job was hindering his freedom. So, reluctantly, she had gone freelance. But the irony struck her. A woman had just been made leader of the Conservative Party, the nation had just passed the Sex Discrimination Act, and yet Evelyn Westland’s ambitions were being curtailed because her job was getting in the way of her husband’s good time.

  Now, though, she was less motivated to find ideas for features, and was drawn to the fancy she’d long had of writing a novel. Sitting at her desk with pen and paper at hand, the idea of what the story would be about would hover but never fully land. Every time she tried to ask herself, What do people want to read? all she kept seeing was Eddy’s face.

  Once in a while, she popped into the magazine’s office to meet with her editor. It was on such a day, about a month after her return from Holy Island, that one of the secretaries said there was a letter for her.

  When she saw the postmark, everything seemed to stand still, except for the pounding of her heart.

  How had he found her?

  She took the letter to a crowded Italian coffee shop near Tottenham Court Road Tube station. The place hissed with gleaming machines that turned milk to foam. Its two tall windows either side of the door were steamed up, so you couldn’t read the backward inscription of the name on the glass: Mario’s.

  Dear Evelyn,

  His writing was neat and cursive. He’d even written the date in full, with the year – so very precise – which charmed her.

  I hope you will forgive me writing to you like this. I remembered the name of your magazine, and I enquired in a bookshop and found the address.

  Finding your note and knowing that you had left without saying goodbye devastated me more than I can ever tell you. But I know you did it because you thought it was what I needed, to shake some sense into me, and you were probably right.

  I should never have asked you to leave your marriage and your life for me. It was all too much, too fast, not to mention mad. I’d have had to be a very special man to compete with what you already have, and I suppose I’m realistic enough to know I am not that man. Expecting you to give up everything for someone who has nothing by comparison was insanity, and I regret dreaming for a moment.

  So why am I writing? I suppose because something has gone from my life now, but, for the time it takes me to pen this, I feel the thread of a connection again. Just the thought that you might be sat somewhere in secret reading my words cheers me up and brings me closer to you. I thought that after a month had passed I would start, in some small way, to get over you. But the opposite has happened. I am more certain than ever of my feelings for you. You are so ingrained in me now, Evelyn, that even if I never see you again I will always relive our time together, and fantasise that it didn’t have to end. I will be haunted by What if . . . ? I keep playing you over and over in my mind – from that very moment I was in your mother’s garden and I turned around and saw you coming down the path, looking like a fashion model, then everything that passed between us after that. And then back to twenty years ago – our meeting that perhaps affected me in ways that it didn’t quite affect you. Sometimes, I think I must have dreamed the happiness I knew so briefly because of you.

  I know that until the day I die I will never forget you.

  In hindsight, it might have been best for my sanity if we had never met at that wedding – if I had never been there, or if you had been with a boyfriend, and I wouldn’t have tried to stretch beyond my reach. But I did meet you. I just have to stop reading meaning into why.

  I hope you have returned to your life and are happy now that you have got something out of your system. And if I have been in any way responsible for that, then it was worthwhile in the end.

  No, I lie. What I hope is that you will come home.

  Eddy

  She was astonished by how beautifully he put words together. As the espresso machine hissed in the background, and someone’s kid stood trailing his index finger through the condensation on the glass, she held in her hand the pressed pink fuchsia bell that had fallen out of the notepaper.

  TWENTY

  Evelyn drifted through the weekend as though she were furnished with light.

  The routine was essentially the same as ever. She and Mark went to Buckinghamshire on Friday night, to their five-bedroom Georgian mansion that was only twenty miles outside London, set in eight acres of pasture and paddock. Normally, as soon as they arrived, Mark would become fossilised into sedentary, country life. They would walk the dogs: two basset hounds and a black Labrador – and Harry, the cocker spaniel, who lived with them in London. They would lunch together, and, in the afternoon, Mark would read the Financial Times in an armchair. Sometimes, Evelyn would bake an apple pie. On the land adjacent to the house, there was a converted coach house where the couple lived who tended to the horses and the dogs when she and Mark were up in town during the week. Evelyn liked the Kimberleys, and would pay a visit, taking over a little of what she had baked. When she was overcome with restless energy, she would take Thunder, her horse, out for a canter across the meadow; as his feet pounded the earth, the vibration set her free.

  On occasion, she recognised that the house lacked the rumblings of children. Their marriage had needed to grow new life. The worst of it was that the Harley Street doctors had told them that they both were capable of producing a baby, just not with each other. She had wanted to say, Is that the most scientific explanation you can come up with? But Mark hadn’t questioned its nonsensicality, and he wouldn’t have thought it was her place to challenge an eminent doctor. She had often wondered, though, if he was secretly afraid of finding out that the problem might lie with him. It sat there silently between them, this ghost of some other, more fulfilled life that they each might have secretly felt they were owed. And so they kept dogs and horses, filling the blanks with lots of living things to convince them that no blanks existed: ignoring the truth that perhaps they should have adopted a baby years ago. Once she had turned forty, it seemed too late. They knew this because they had had the conversation for all of five minutes.

  One day, the previous weekend, she had come across Lady Chatterley’s Lover on a shelf in their vast library. She’d read it when she first moved to London. D. H. Lawrence’s publisher had been acquitted in an obscenity trial at the Old Bailey a couple of years earlier. She had struggled to finish the novel then. But this time, she’d found herself reading it with new eyes.

  Now she knew exactly how Constance Chatterley must have felt. In fact, by the time she had finis
hed the novel, she was convinced she was Constance Chatterley. Only Constance hadn’t loved her gardener, not nearly in the same way, so it was quite different. She had hidden the book in a special place, between two of her favourite poetry books, to make it easy to find again.

  But this particular Saturday, Evelyn couldn’t read or bake or ride because she couldn’t settle all the thoughts that were running riot. There was no room she could wander into where she could stay for more than a couple of minutes, no chair she could sit on, no task she could complete. Possibilities were rushing at her. Every cell of her body was alive with him again. He was full, and real and he was back! She could barely keep the feeling inside of her. Eddy’s voice, Eddy’s eyes, his laugh, his touch, his kiss – his letter had brought him so far to the fore again that she imagined Mark would be able to actually see him when he looked her in the eyes. So, for that reason, she tried to keep her distance. But when they were together, in the evening, in front of the telly, she found herself observing him out of the corner of her eye. Since returning from her week with Eddy, she had done this often – studied Mark without him knowing – slowly pulsing with guilt at how she had betrayed him. But this time was different. This time, it was the disquieting variety of guilt that came with knowing it wasn’t over.

  On Sunday evening, they sat at opposite ends of the patio table overlooking the orchard that hummed and smelt of a rainy summer. They were eating Mrs Kimberley’s cottage pie when Evelyn said, ‘I hired a painter when I was back up home.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Mark didn’t look up from his food.

  ‘Eddy, he’s called. Would you believe it, but it turns out that years ago I was supposed to go on a date with him, but I never turned up.’ She didn’t know why she had said that. She had just wanted to say his name.

  Mark prodded peas with his fork. ‘Really? Well, that’s odd.’