After You Left

by Carol Mason

  He pondered his answer, perhaps sensitive to the possible effect of it. ‘I don’t know. But you never are, are you? It’s not normal, Evelyn. But it’s the way you are. It doesn’t mean I love you any less, though.’

  She stood there with her head bowed. She didn’t want him to see her tears.

  They were tears of joy, tears of sadness, maybe tears of confusion. She didn’t know what they were tears of.

  It was only when Mark had said she could go that Evelyn was unable to actually see it happening. Even though, up until that moment, it was all she’d been able to see. It was too good to be true. Eddy would lose his nerve. She would take ill, or get hit by a car. Something would come along to sabotage it.

  It only became real and possible again once she had stepped out of the small travel agency on the busy Brompton Road holding her ticket.

  Then Evelyn made her first mistake. She agreed to lunch at the Royal Academy with Serena Bailey, an editor friend from her early Cosmopolitan days, who had left the business when she’d given birth to her third son. Serena was the closest friend Evelyn had made in London, a wise, serious girl, who also had it in her to be disarmingly frank and fun. Evelyn had noticed something about herself: she could be on a high one minute, then, the next, plummet and doubt herself all over again. But today she was almost running away with her own elation. Still, though, she vowed to say nothing about Eddy.

  And then there was wine. Then there was so much cosy chatter, and since her mother died, Evelyn hadn’t had a proper heart to heart with another female, and she missed it. Sometimes she caught herself wondering how she would ever exist without it. By going home, would she ever have a friend apart from Eddy again? Nearly everyone she’d known, she had lost touch with.

  ‘I’ve met someone,’ she said. Evelyn wasn’t the type to blurt out her business to people. There were friends you could never tell. Serena was one you could.

  A forkful of tangy lemon flan was on its way to Serena’s mouth, but it never got there.

  Evelyn tried not to concentrate on her expression. ‘A man from home. Someone I used to know,’ she said.

  The fork was returned to Serena’s plate, set down, as though she was reluctantly finished with food altogether now. ‘You mean you’re having an affair?’

  Evelyn searched Serena’s face for some evidence of reciprocated glee, but Serena watched her flatly: without judgement, but without joy.

  Evelyn’s confidence slipped. ‘It’s . . .’ She talked to the flan on Serena’s plate. ‘That’s not what I’d call it. An affair.’

  Why did I tell her? She thought about Eddy saying how he no longer wanted to feel shame. She hadn’t properly felt it until this minute. ‘It’s not like that at all, in fact. It’s someone who touched my life a long time ago. Someone who should have stayed in my life, if I hadn’t been so wilful. Someone I love.’

  Serena made a doubting, sceptical face that was both friendly and slightly horrified. ‘Love?’

  Evelyn gave her a brief account of the situation, recognising that, as soon as the story set sail, it was shipwrecked, as was she along with it. What had possessed her to betray Mark, Eddy and herself? Not that Serena even really knew Mark. But still . . . She had found that when it came to the telling of secrets, one person tells one person, then it’s a runaway train. Serena’s eyes didn’t light up. Not once. It wasn’t the reaction Evelyn had expected.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Evelyn eventually said, when she could no longer look at Serena’s disappointed face. ‘I should never have told you. It’s not fair. It somehow makes you invested in my choices and my mistakes, and that’s wrong.’ She didn’t know if she had told Serena because she was bursting to talk about him, or because she knew she’d have to tell someone eventually, so this was her test run.

  ‘But you’re seriously considering leaving Mark for this Eddy? Your husband, for this man you hardly know?’

  ‘I know enough.’ Evelyn’s tone had steeled, slightly. ‘I know more about him than I knew about Mark when I married him.’ The difference was, she’d always felt she’d known Eddy, and she hadn’t experienced that with Mark from the moment they had met.

  But a little voice was saying, Go on . . . What do you really know about him, compared to Mark? When you cast aside bias, the truth was that if she had to list everything, beyond his upbringing, his dashed dreams and the fact that he was smitten with her, it would probably be a short list.

  ‘Have you thought of the life you’d be giving up? Once reality sets in and you’re back there, counting your pennies . . . Are you still planning on freelancing for the magazine? How would that even work when you’re so far away?’

  Evelyn heard the blood pounding in her temples. Had she respected Serena’s opinion less, she might not have felt so discombobulated.

  ‘I can get a job in Newcastle.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Writing. Or anything. Or nothing. I can support myself. I have savings. I have a house.’

  Serena looked almost pitying. ‘Evelyn, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s truly not my business, but haven’t you ever thought that he was just an infatuation? Every married woman wants to think she lights some other man’s fire, but that’s all it is: a kind of flattery we seek when our husbands start taking us for granted. In this case, you have a bit of a history with him. He was your unfinished business, perhaps. Maybe you were meant to have a little dalliance with him, a nice memory to carry you through life. But maybe you should leave it at that. Cut it off while it’s still a good memory. Accept you’ve been caught up in the nostalgia of it, but nostalgia, by definition, is a testimony of the past. It’s a memorial to things gone, Evelyn. And you can’t get back what’s gone, simply because you’re not meant to.’

  She reached across the table and squeezed the top of Evelyn’s hand, which was lying, rather dead, on the table. Evelyn couldn’t move. She could only replay Serena’s words and try to stop her tears.

  ‘Perhaps you just need to be sensible and forget him, and remember how much you love Mark.’

  Evelyn heard her gentle voice distantly. She stared at Serena’s slim hand lying there on top of hers. She told herself the conversation didn’t matter. But she knew that it did. That it would.

  Three days before her flight up North, Evelyn set about composing her letter to Mark. He would read it after she had left. It was cowardly. But it was the only way she could it. She knew that if she saw the look on his face she wouldn’t go, and she didn’t want to run that risk. She had made a promise to Eddy now.

  She tried to continue with a normal routine. But she was quietly saying goodbye. On the route she normally walked with Harry, she would absorb every detail of the park – trees, narrow walkways, horses on the bridle path – taking photographs in her mind. She stroked Harry extra fondly, and told him how she didn’t want him to fret for her, and then she cuddled him and wept into his soft fur. She lunched with friends, convincing herself that she would be in touch with them again. But she knew she wouldn’t. She would never be able to face their judgement, and they would judge her; she knew them well.

  But she was convinced she was making the right choice. Or, if she wasn’t, the choice was made already.

  On the day of Evelyn’s flight, December 17, the IRA set off a car bomb outside Harrods.

  As the news broke, Evelyn was adding her last items to her suitcase: only her more practical clothes and footwear, plus the odd book, or photograph of her horse and the dogs bundled up in a nightdress. No sequined dresses from Harvey Nichols. No crystal perfume decanters. None of her Cartier jewellery, only her favourite inexpensive Murano glass earrings that Mark had brought her back from Italy; she treasured those.

  She was in their bedroom with the radio on.

  She heard the news bulletin without listening to it. A phone call to the Samaritans. An explosion. Christmas shoppers. Fear of an attack on Oxford Street. London on a high state of alert. Extensive damage.

  Harrods. Mark had gone Chris
tmas shopping. She had watched him retrieve his Harrods charge card from his desk drawer.

  She tried to take a full breath, but it was trapped, like a bird that had flown into someone’s house and was panicking to get out. She tried to move, but her legs were lead.

  There had been a bomb at Harrods. Mark was at Harrods.

  There was a slackening sensation in her lower abdomen. She managed to pick up the phone. From the end of the bed, she rang the operator and asked for the store’s phone number. The muscles of her face quivered like a rabbit’s. She couldn’t get through when she dialled. She turned on the TV in the bedroom, and stood rooted there as she saw the full horror unfolding in Knightsbridge. Black smoke. Rubble. Smashed glass. Ambulances. Army vehicles. The walking wounded. Half-naked mannequins projecting like dead bodies out of the store’s windows. She searched every face in the crowd for Mark’s, imagining seeing him wheeled out on a stretcher. All this, while she was packing to leave him for another man.

  It was her fault. She had somehow brought on this catastrophe. Losing Mark was going to be her punishment. She was a co-conspirator with the IRA.

  Threads of her sanity started to come apart. Then she felt the warm trickle. It took her a moment to realise that she had wet herself. Before she could even think about changing her clothes, she bolted for the door and ran out on to Kensington High Street. It was damp and mild out, business as usual in the many boutiques, cafés and stores; the endless stream of people coming out of the building that housed the Tube station. Almost imperceptible waves of chaos were fanning out from Knightsbridge; the traffic was unusually gridlocked, more so than in rush hour. Then a taxi driver whom she’d flagged down told her, ‘There’s been a bomb at Harrods. You’d be wasting your money, love.’

  ‘My husband is there shopping,’ she pleaded. ‘I have to find him!’ She knew he was thinking, Just my luck! He quickly glanced her over, then, with a sigh and a headshake, waved for her to climb in. He struck out of the glut of cars, and rattled up a back street. She watched out of the window as they passed Queen’s Gate, taking the longer route to avoid the brunt of congestion along Kensington Road. Filling in before her eyes were the edited highlights of their life together, dating back to the flowers and the invitation to dinner. When she could handle the stops and starts no longer, she dove out and started running.

  She realised a little too late that she hadn’t paid. She heard the driver call out, ‘Come back, you bloody woman . . .’

  She could see far down the street that Knightsbridge was cordoned off. She was sure she could smell death. She ran toward Beauchamp Place, where she regularly lunched with her friends, ran until the balls of her feet smarted and breathing hurt. Outside Harrods was mayhem. Police, panicked people, camera crews, ambulances, more panicked people, people on foot, people in cars, people on stretchers – she couldn’t look, and yet she looked, and searched and couldn’t see him. She asked an officer how bad it was. But she was just one panicked woman in a crowd of panicked people. As hard as she pushed to get closer – ‘How many hurt?’ – she was propelled back, authority figures growing stern, hands gripping her and telling her she couldn’t be allowed closer; there might be another attack.

  Another attack.

  He’s dead, she thought. While he was probably out buying her Christmas present, he had lost his life. Somehow, none of this would have happened if she had just been happy with him.

  She stood in the middle of the push and shove of things, as police attempted to evacuate the whole area, inhaling the smell of blood and black smoke, wanting to vomit. She’d give anything for him to be alive. Anything. She would forget Eddy. She would stay. She’d be the wife Mark wanted her to be. She would never look back. She was freezing cold, and wet on her lower half.

  She heard some American tourists talking about the bomb going off in Hans Crescent, about a mangled police car. Distantly, more sirens.

  And then she saw him.

  It seemed impossible, given the number of people. It was as though she had summoned him up and he had appeared on cue – maybe because, in the strange way that things fall, he had just heard her silent pledge that she wouldn’t leave him if he did. He was walking down Beauchamp Place, toward Knightsbridge, where she was standing like a lost puppy. He saw her a moment or two after she saw him. He was carrying a small green-and-gold Harrods bag. He didn’t seem hugely surprised – as though she made a habit of standing in the middle of Knightsbridge looking fraught.

  He smiled.

  She saw him, briefly, through the eyes of the young girl she had been when she had met him. As the intelligent, kind man she had looked up to, and loved. Who wasn’t her ideal. Who was flawed. But neither was she a perfect human being.

  ‘Evelyn,’ he said, as she walked toward him. He had the slackened posture of someone who’d had a drink, or three.

  He held out his arms. She was numb when he circled her. He pressed his warm cheek lightly to hers. ‘What a thing!’ he said. ‘What a thing to happen!’

  She could have cried at the tender feel of his cheek against hers. His skin was hot. He always burned up when he had been drinking.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she said, and looked up at him. ‘Thank God you’re all right. I had an awful premonition that you were going to be one of them . . . I was so worried!’

  He kissed the centre of her forehead. ‘You shouldn’t have been, silly. I knew exactly what I wanted to buy, and was in and out of there in a few minutes. I went to San Lorenzo for something to eat.’ He hugged her tightly, the kind of embrace he hadn’t given her in so many years. She could feel every beat of his love for her in that hug. Even if he never said the words I love you again, she knew he did, that he always had and he always would.

  When he let her go, he looked curiously at her face. ‘What’s wrong?’ He squeezed the thin tops of her arms. ‘And where’s your coat?’ He immediately took off his, and placed it around her shoulders. ‘Come on. Chin up. We’re safe. Life goes on. I would suggest we go home and have a drink. But don’t you have a flight to hurry off for?’

  ‘What flight?’ she said, her voice catching.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Alice

  On Friday at 5:30 p.m., I have no choice but to go out for dinner with Victoria and a few of the girls from marketing. The fact that it’s Victoria’s birthday had completely skipped my mind. I’d popped out in my lunch hour and grabbed a card and a bookshop gift voucher. When she told me that she’d picked the same bar where I was first introduced to Justin’s friends, it seemed like one more reason why I should have just said I couldn’t go.

  As is the way of these things, we don’t end up ordering right away because some of Vic’s friends are late and she wants to wait. My eye is constantly on my watch, and by 6:10, our main courses haven’t even arrived, and I am almost eating my own nerves. I have to get out of here. But how? The music is loud. The girls are chattering and looking at me, but I’m sure they can see I’m not here. I am searching for the waitress. Where is the bloody food? I’m lip-reading rather than listening. The smile is dying on my face. Someone is making a toast. Everyone is raising their glasses. I raise mine. All I can think is, I will be seeing Justin in less than an hour. In less than an hour, I will know.

  And then it happens. That thing where you’re looking at someone and not actually seeing them, but they think you are. A man. He is standing with a group of men. He raises his glass to me, mimicking me, perhaps. Suddenly, it’s surreal.

  I have been looking at him because he is Justin. Or, rather, everything about this is something that has happened before. Me. Him – he is similarly attractive, similarly dressed, around the same age. The friends, in their suits and ties. They are standing in the exact location, nearer to the door than the restaurant. I stare at this man, wondering if I am hallucinating, if someone has spiked my wine. It hauls me back to that night. I had said I’d be there for 6 p.m. There I am: I can see myself, trotting down the street in stilettos, uncharacteristically lat
e; Justin is a stickler for people being on time. I’m about to meet a few of his better friends. I don’t want to be late. I should have just jumped in a taxi, but the fare would have been embarrassingly small. I am apprehensive. I want this to go well. I am almost there, unpicking the buttons of my trench. I’m hot now. I don’t want to look harried, I want to look fresh and in control. My hand is on the door handle. I take a deep breath, give it a push.

  He must have been watching for me. I see him right away and I witness the expression that alights on his face when he sees me, before he can stop it – as though time is a split second ahead of itself. That wonderful look that says far more than any of his muddled words about loving and being in love. Justin loves me. I know it now. It’s there for anyone to see. His friend, who has his back to me, turns. Clearly, he must want to see exactly what, or who, has captivated Justin. And it’s me.

  Justin and I smile.

  I am smiling now, captivated by my memory. The man across the room thinks I’m smiling at him. He waves over. He has just said something to a friend, and they’re both looking at me with a certain animal interest. The very way Justin has never looked at me. It brings me back to my senses. I get up sharply, catching the table and sloshing drinks. I need to get out of here, but I’m travelling in the wrong direction. As I pass them, this guy who reminded me of Justin makes a grab for my arm, but misses. It isn’t a particularly sophisticated gesture – something, again, that Justin would never have done. ‘Oi! Where are you going?’ he calls after me. His mates laugh.

  This is the terrible, desperately painful thing about the moment – I want to go back. I want to rewind us to that look, when I knew he loved me irrefutably, when there was no doubt. If only I could be coming out of the toilets and seeing Justin there, not those other fellows. And we could write a different outcome, one that is still winding and ambiguous, but that definitely doesn’t end up here. But instead I am in the here and now, about to return to my flat and find out at what point in intoning he would never leave me, Justin had already left.