by Carol Mason
She stared at the top of his head, aware of an aching void of displacement and loss. ‘Well, it’s not exactly odd. It’s just a coincidence. One of those “small world” things.’
Mark pierced his last pea.
‘He actually used to help my mother in the garden. He’s very nice. And a very pleasant-looking man, too.’ She struggled to be casual, but was like china, cracking.
Mark looked up from his food. There was a beat of hesitation, where she thought, He knows! Then he said, ‘Do we have any more of this? It’s very good.’
She wanted to say, I’m talking about adultery I’ve committed with a man I’m in love with, and you’re more interested in a pie! But, of course, she didn’t. Getting angry at Mark to somehow assuage her guilt about Eddy was a strategy that even she couldn’t approve of.
Even if she had said, He came every day. We spent hours together talking, doing errands, and we even went to the beach together . . . Mark would never be threatened by someone who had what he’d have labelled as a menial job. Besides, Mark was not the type to mistrust his wife. That would have been a character flaw and a personal failure he’d not have wanted to contend with – on her part, and on his own, for marrying her.
When they went to bed, she was relieved that he didn’t want to make love.
They usually did in the country.
Back in London, Mark walked around their bed in his black socks and white shirt-tails, throwing a tantrum because he’d misplaced a cufflink. The contrast between her husband and her lover astounded Evelyn all over again. It was as though both men were standing at the fork of two long roads. Eddy was thinking of just hopping on his bike and flying off down there at lightning speed, and Mark was trying to decide if he should pack an umbrella.
‘I don’t know why you can’t just come tonight. You have to eat dinner,’ he said.
‘I’ve told you already. I have a headache. And, besides, you know I’m not really needed.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him vent his anger by screwing up one of her face towels that had happened to find itself on top of his dresser, and throwing it on to the bed.
She knew that his bad mood was more to do with his inability to control her. It was the one contention in their marriage. ‘It’s your Northern-ness,’ he’d say, implying that still, after all these years of living in London, Evelyn had failed to conform in the ways he saw as mattering. Once, when she had complained about how hard it was to make proper friends in London, he had suggested she take elocution lessons.
‘I can’t see how my accent can be the problem! Unless it’s a problem for you.’ She had glared at him. ‘Is it?’
He had frowned as though she were a tiresome child. ‘Of course it’s not. But you’re the one always complaining you don’t fit in.’
‘I thought you loved how I spoke? I thought it was part of what attracted you to me?’
‘I do love how you speak, darling. Just not always what you say.’
He had been teasing her. But since then, she’d been determined to keep her accent. In fact, she decided she was going to work hard to re-introduce any ugly Northern terms she might have once tried to stamp out, just to annoy him further. But she didn’t keep it up.
He was now fastening the cufflink that he’d found. ‘What do you mean, you’re not really needed? I need you. Doesn’t that count? It’s a bloody dinner. No one’s asking you to change political allegiance or solve world poverty.’
Mark had a gentlemanliness that made swear words sound respectable. Something that had attracted her to him years ago. But recently, she had started to wish he would fume once in a while.
‘If it’s just a dinner, it shouldn’t be a big deal then, should it?’
‘Exactly. So why is it?’
‘Oh Mark . . .’ She thought she might burst if he didn’t leave her alone to her thoughts of Eddy. ‘I’m under the weather. I’m not in the mood to make polite conversation with another wife whom I don’t even know . . .’ She wanted to say, I just don’t think I can do it one more time, and I just don’t see why I have to. But that would have sounded selfish and spoilt, because it was selfish and spoilt. Generally, she played the dutiful wife, and sometimes she caught herself realising it wasn’t even an act. Yet she often wondered why it couldn’t have been her business dinner, with Mark trying to talk to some husband who didn’t want to be there. The old Evelyn would have gone to make Mark happy, simply because she loved him and he asked very little of her. But getting the letter from Eddy had given her new power.
She pretended to browse through a magazine, hoping this would be the end of it. As she moved her eyes over glossy pages of type, she was seeing herself riding in Eddy’s van, wishing he had driven their lives in a circle, back to when they had first met, so she could have her choice all over again.
When Mark was dressed, he turned and looked at her stretched out on the bed, with affection. He kissed her forehead. ‘Have it your way. It would be nice if you’re still up when I get home, though. I feel I haven’t properly seen you or talked to you in ages.’
‘But we spent the entire weekend together.’
‘Yes. But you didn’t seem there.’
Dear Eddy, she wrote, with delight, when she was certain Mark had gone and wasn’t coming back. She had been surprised to see that Eddy had supplied the address of his friend Stanley. How uncharacteristically furtive of him!
I was astonished to get your letter. I have not been able to get you out of my mind. I’m sorry I left so abruptly. It was cruel of me. But it was the only way I knew I would leave. If you had held me in your arms again, and said, Don’t go, I would not have gone. All the reasons why I had to would not have mattered.
I have spent hours analysing my feelings for you – whether I am genuinely in love, or motivated by a need for some colour in an otherwise monochrome existence. But now I see it as it simply is. I have everything I should want in my life, and yet there is something I want that seems to negate everything else. And, for a brief time, I had it with you. I keep coming back to that day our eyes met in the church, and that sense I had, almost immediately, that you were going to be central to something. Strangely enough, I believe my mother knew. I am sure she hoped that somehow, with a little help, we would find a second chance.
Thinking of us is all that keeps me happy these days. I wonder how long this spell I’m under will last, or if I’m destined to think of you forever.
I wonder if you will go on tending to the garden until the end of the growing season? I know we had this conversation, but I am enclosing money for the next few months. I really don’t know what my plans are any more. My resolve to sell the place has somehow weakened. I don’t know what our letters – if this is the start of a correspondence – will mean. But I am going to take it for what it is: a welcome addition to my rather confused life.
By the way, you were wrong about something. You said you understood that it would take a very special man to get me to leave my marriage, and you didn’t think you could possibly be him. Well, sitting here writing this, I couldn’t envision leaving my marriage for anyone who wasn’t you.
Evelyn
Was it too heavy? She suspected that she would end up regretting having encouraged him. But she had already pushed it through the postbox. It was gone now.
TWENTY-ONE
There were no more afternoon naps, and no more depression. His letters came quickly. He talked about his love for her, his dreams, his daily routine and how much brighter the world appeared through his eyes now that he was looking at everything around him but seeing only her. She hurried to post her replies. She told him how she was throwing herself madly into life with new gusto. How she’d had her hair done like Dynasty’s Linda Evans, how she’d shopped for clothes that she imagined he would like her in. How she’d gone to the opera and sat through Madama Butterfly without shedding one tear because she’d been fantasising about the life they might have together. By the time the opera was over, she’d seen it in all its full and glorious
detail: Eddy conducting a successful landscape business to rich clients in London; Eddy and her dining with her friends on Fridays, whiling away their summer Sundays under trees in Hyde Park. She told him how she’d sold another article to the magazine, and had even begun her book, drumming up a rough outline from copious notes she had made over the last few months. She told him she would call herself Joanna Smart, if it ever got published. So that Mark would never know. She always signed off with, Your Constance Chatterley.
Then the letter came that changed everything.
My Constance Chatterley,
Your last letter was one I read over and over. I read all your letters multiple times – I can hear your voice in them and it makes me so happy. But this one was different. What you said has made me do a great deal of soul searching. The joy your letters give me, the joy I have from knowing you are still in my life, has changed my life. I’m not much of a writer. I spell as badly as I sing, and get clumsy and tongue-tied whenever I sit down with a pen. Yet you make me want to write better letters. You make me want to push myself to be a better man. Maybe if I’d moved away from here when I was younger, or tried harder in school, I would have amounted to something that would have made me worthy of you. If I could do it all over again, I would make that my mission. I always think of that knot I had in my stomach when I talked to you the first time in the garden – the same one I had when I thought we were going to go out, twenty years ago.
But I can’t do this any more.
Being back there every second week in your mother’s garden is too agonising for me. I think of you constantly, and I see you everywhere I look. I keep hoping that one day I’ll glance up and you’ll be there again, and you’ll have come home, come back to me. Sometimes, I even find myself driving past the house looking for you, even though I know it’s insane. But I realise I’m selling myself the same dream I sold myself briefly many years ago, and at some point I have to stop. You describe your life so beautifully, but that is your life – I was reminded of that in your last letter. Your life is there. It’s not here. And, let’s face it, I am never going to be a landscaper to rich people, dining out with your friends on weekends, which you tell me is how you would most like to see our story together play out. Evelyn, I will never stop wanting you. A part of me dies to think that Stanley won’t have any more letters to give me, and that you’ll find someone else to take care of the garden in my place, and then in time I will just be a distant memory. I will never let the passage of time allow me to forget you, or to love you any less. But I have to exercise whatever willpower I can manage to let you get on with your life, and somehow try to get on with mine.
It seems impossible to me that I may never see you again for as long as I live. But we can’t go on like this forever, can we? So I am making this very hard decision for both of us.
Goodbye, Evelyn. I love you more than I have ever been able to adequately say. But loving someone isn’t enough, is it? I realise that now.
PS. Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’ was just on the radio. Every time I hear it, I will think of us sitting in the sunshine in your garden, talking about our dreams. It’s up there with one of the best days of my life. Seems that nearly all of them have contained you.
A gasp, combined with a sob, came out of her so forcefully that she almost choked.
‘No!’
She was sitting in the same coffee house. She must have said it out loud because people at the next table looked at her in shock.
The response tumbled out of her so eagerly that she could barely hold the pen.
No, Eddy! I cannot let you do this. I wish I’d never written what I did. I suppose it was my unfortunate way of trying to impress upon you how much I think about you, how much I seem to exist only for you. You have taken me too literally. You living in London, being a part of my life here, is not how I see us at all – not really! I think I just thought that because it makes my being here more palatable to think of you with me. It doesn’t mean that I want to stay.
Please reconsider! I lost you once, through a very bad decision I made. I can’t lose you again because I have somehow managed to say the wrong thing. Please write back quickly and tell me you didn’t mean it, and that we can go on. I can’t bear it if you are gone from me . . .
She only had to wait an agonising two days. But she knew what he was going to say even before she read it.
I can’t. I can’t go on like this. It’s killing me, and it’s not fair to others. I want my fantasies to be of the woman I’ve got, not the woman I don’t have. Or at least that’s how it should be, shouldn’t it? Somehow, I have to find a way to make that happen. But for now, given I can’t have you, then my head has got to be free of you. Please try to understand. X
She had never, ever, even come close to experiencing the level of devastation that his letter brought. Perhaps it had to happen. Or she would never have known how badly she needed to say this.
I will leave him, she wrote.
TWENTY-TWO
Alice
Folding Justin’s things and putting them in suitcases and bin liners is like emptying a house after a death. I try doing it with the radio on, but the voices grate on my nerves. I try silence, and can’t bear that, either. I just keep seeing a composite of sharp, pretty features, and longish dark hair.
I vowed two days ago that if one more email or text I send goes unanswered, or if I phone him one more time and he doesn’t pick up, then this is it; I can’t go on like this any more. And yet when it’s come down to it, I am strung out with doubt and uncertainty. If I tell him to come get his stuff, then I’m being the one to make it final. I’m never going to know if he would have come back eventually, after he’d taken whatever time he needed. And I don’t know if my even thinking he deserves all this time is making me a considerate person or the biggest fool I know.
I manage to fill two suitcases and two bin liners. I look up at the empty wardrobe, staring at all the empty hangers – except for one that still has his khaki Burberry jacket hanging on it. I was with him on a business trip to London when he bought it. He’d treated me to a lovely indigo Prada dress, which had felt astonishingly extravagant; I didn’t wear designer clothes. Even though I earned decently, I was rarely generous with myself. My mother hardly ever bought herself new clothes, or cared to look all that nice, so perhaps it was learnt behaviour. I remember thinking how easily he ripped through money. The fine hotel, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Seeing the jacket now, though, a memory comes to me.
It had been a few days before the wedding. I’d walked in on him in the kitchen while he was on his phone. He was wearing the jacket with his dark jeans and a white dress shirt. He looked scrubbed up, like he was off out. Normally, I’d have said, Where are we going?, but he got off the phone so quickly, and scribbled on a piece of paper. He placed it in his right pocket, then smiled, seeming not himself. I hadn’t thought much of it. Looking back, of course, it was the kind of covert reaction that might have signified something, if you had been looking for it. But as it was, I just remembered thinking, I wonder who he was talking to that he practically hung up on?
I stare at the jacket now, at the deep, rectangular flap pocket. My heart gives a series of small skips. It won’t still be there. Of this I’m certain. Yet when I slide my hand in . . .
It’s a folded square. I don’t remember seeing him fold it. I open it out.
On it, he’s written:
25 Woodlands Ave. 2 p.m. 19th.
I read it again, taking it in strides: the address, the time, the date.
Who had he visited at 2 p.m. on the day before our wedding?
I click on to the computer and type the address into Google.
TWENTY-THREE
The Rightmove website describes it as An opportunity to own a charmingly renovated, four-bedroom, Edwardian townhouse, complete with private, professionally landscaped garden, though the property sold six months ago for nearly three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I flick thr
ough the pictures, looking at the white fitted kitchen with the dark oak flooring, the picturesque bay windows and high ceilings, the master bedroom and bathroom – obviously whoever lives in there now would have put their own stamp on things. The estate agent would know, but I’m not sure how to make the phone call.
I recognise the street as I turn down it, from the Street View option on the website. The area is close to schools and a park, and is walking distance into town. I pull up a few doors down from number twenty-five, and switch off the engine. The house with the white front door. The door that presumably Justin knocked on. I sit there for a while. As with most terraces, there is little actual sign that anyone is home. Blinds are dipped at the windows. The gardens out front are too small for children to play in. There’s a white van parked immediately outside – a worker’s van – but as there’s only street parking, the van could be anyone’s.
I was wavering before I got here. But I’m not wavering now. I vow I’m not leaving here until I learn something. I have no actual plan of how I’m going to achieve this, but the pledge is made.
But still I sit here. Staring at a house Justin visited the day before our wedding – a house he never told me about – is more of a daunting situation than I even thought. I am pinned to this seat, pressed into the back of it as though by the terrifying proximity of a ghost.
Do it, I hear the voice inside me say. Bloody go and knock on the door.
I get out of the car and hear it slam behind me in the Sunday-morning silence. Funny, though: I’ve got a fit of the braves. The clack-clack of my feet on the cobbled road, on to the path. The groan of the low gate. My feet walking where Justin’s walked.
I pause, hand raised to knock. Then: one, two, three. I stare at the wood and try to talk my heart rate down.
Nothing.
Four, five, six. Louder.
I am certain I hear movement.
A fussing with a latch?
