After You Left

by Carol Mason

  ‘Sometimes, you get your life flung at you, and you have to get on with it and make the best of it. I have to try to make the best of it. For my son.’

  We sit in silence for a while. I try to grapple with it all. Then he says, ‘Do you have something I can drink? A beer? Anything.’

  ‘Sure.’ I go to the fridge and pull out a beer. I am caught in that hellish place of disowning him and still caring about him: disowning him because I think he’s wrong, and frustrated that I can’t change his mind. I open the beer and hand it to him. Our fingers meet as he takes it. ‘Did you eat?’

  ‘Not since lunch.’

  ‘Do you want me to make you a sandwich?’

  ‘No. Thanks.’ He looks perplexedly at the printing on the can, and passes it between his hands as if it’s a foreign object. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you hearing all this. I am not proud of the way I handled this, and how you’ve been hurt in the process. You must believe that.’

  I don’t know what to say, what response I can possibly make. ‘So what are you going to do, Justin? How do things proceed from here?’

  He looks right at me, quite calm now. Calm, but distant again. ‘Well, I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m going to release you of me. I am sure you’ll meet someone else, and one day you’ll have a family with this person. And I’m sure in time you’ll realise this was for the best.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be released of you.’ Tears roll down my face. I fly my hand up, but can’t stop them.

  ‘I know. But you have to let me do what I think is right.’

  I study him, wordlessly. There’s nothing more either of us can say.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Evelyn

  London. 1983

  ‘What is it, Ev?’

  Evelyn was lying on the sofa like an alabaster sculpture, with her head turned away from him. She was staring vacantly at the fire.

  ‘Look at you. You’re so pale.’ He hovered over her, stymied by the sense of his own helplessness. ‘You’ve got me very concerned. What is wrong?’

  Mark always worried about his wife. Someone had once told him that happiness is something you feel only when you’ve given up focussing on its absence. But Mark wasn’t sure Evelyn could ever be happy. Mark was convinced that Evelyn was depressed and it had come to some sort of head.

  She looked at him, without really seeing him.

  ‘What is the matter? Please tell me. You’ve not been the same since yesterday, since the bomb.’ They had shared that pinprick of time, when she had suddenly caught sight of him, and he had caught sight of her, and his heart had somehow taken flight. Her face had been full of love for him in a way that he didn’t think he’d seen before. Her eyes had glistened with tears. And it was then that he had realised how lost he would be if he were ever to be without her.

  And yet, as he stood here, he could almost see her brain composing words. Words that would hurt him. He hoped she wouldn’t speak them. He feared something, and yet he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.

  He sat down in the leather chair opposite the fireplace, unable to take his eyes off her. Christmas was coming. He just wanted Evelyn happy for Christmas. She usually loved this time of the year – and he had always loved the pleasure she had taken in decorating their tree and ordering all their festive treats; she was like a child. ‘What’s got you looking like this, Evelyn? Tell me. You can tell me anything, you know that.’ He said it, but it wasn’t true. Then a horrible thought occurred to him: what if she is ill?

  She slowly swung her legs around so that she could sit up properly. It seemed to take her a moment or two to orientate herself. She was ill. He was sure of it. She was going to give him horrible news. Suddenly, he saw his life unfolding without her. But that was the thing. It didn’t unfold. It stopped. He couldn’t see a future without Evelyn.

  ‘There’s something I never told you,’ she finally said. ‘Something you’re not going to want to hear . . .’

  She was dying. He would always remember: Evelyn told me the terrible news right before Christmas. He could already see the funeral: the cathedral, all his friends. Nineteen eighty-FOUR. His first year as a widower. All these tomorrows rushed at him, blinding him like he had just stepped into a blizzard.

  ‘I met a man when I was back home,’ she said. ‘My mother’s gardener. Someone I knew years ago. We had an affair.’

  He was sure he could actually feel the blood leaving his body. If he had been standing, his legs might have given out. His first thought was that he had misheard. His second was relief that she wasn’t dying. His wife had slept with a gardener? Was that what she’d just said?

  Maybe he wasn’t hearing straight.

  But he knew he was hearing straight.

  And then it came to him. ‘I knew,’ he said, gazing at the floor. The pattern on the rug blurred, its sharp colours mingling through the glaze of his tears. Harry was lying on the rug between them, warming himself in front of the fire without a care in the world, just like Mark wanted to be. Happily married to a happy wife at Christmas, without a care in the world. ‘What I mean is,’ he said when he could speak again, ‘I suppose I suspected.’

  Had he? Well, perhaps not exactly that. But he’d always suspected that he would never be able to keep her; his time to lose her would come. Her spirited independence had attracted him to her years ago, and he would never have wanted to change anything about her, but he had hoped that, over time, she would have become slightly more stable. She had a good life – he’d tried to give her everything he could – and yet she seemed to long for the past more than she enjoyed the present, and he’d always known he could never give her that. He plucked absently at the edges of the dark-green throw that was strewn over the arm of the chair. He had a habit of fiddling with things when he got nervous. A habit from his boyhood. He used to have a slight stammer, too. But he had conquered that because people mocked him and he hated being mocked.

  ‘So wait a minute. Am I to conclude you were going to go back and see him, this gardener’ – he could barely say the word – ‘yesterday?’ Hadn’t she mentioned hiring someone to paint the house? He hadn’t really been listening, unsure about how a story about her mother’s gardener could possibly be of interest to him. But why hadn’t he listened? Evelyn never made idle conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, like a witness under oath.

  ‘I knew,’ he said again, with more surprise than animosity. He had known something was wrong as they had walked back home. Once she had got over the relief – at least, he’d thought until now that it was relief – of seeing him alive, she had seemed like a ghost of herself.

  ‘Does anyone else know about this?’ he asked. He would process it better if it was contained. But women could never keep anything secret. She’d probably told everyone at her dance class, half of Covent Garden and all the wives in their circle.

  ‘No,’ she said, and he all but wilted with relief. Then he felt guilty that this should even matter.

  He sat there trying to read the situation. Adultery happened. That said, it was usually the husbands committing it. It seemed entirely different when it was a wife. His wife. He still couldn’t believe it. He felt hurt more than betrayed. Just hurt. And sad. Normally, he’d have switched on the Christmas tree lights by now. The unlit tree felt symbolic. Her betrayal of him suddenly tore at his heart.

  ‘So what does this mean?’ he asked her, somewhat disgruntled that she appeared to have the upper hand, and he was having to almost implore her to tell him where they stood. But he dreaded her answer. He genuinely didn’t know where this was all leading. It was hard for him to imagine her wanting to be with someone other than him. Not because he had a vastly high opinion of himself, just that he, himself, had never felt any need to be unfaithful, so it was hard to get his head around why she had. Though, he could have been unfaithful, he was sure, if he had wanted to be. It was what people of his class regularly did. But the difference was that he w
ould have been discreet. And he certainly wouldn’t have stooped as low as to do it with the hired help.

  He was sure there must have been someone she’d have told.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  What a question. But it had to be asked. ‘I assume you must be, if you’re telling me this. Is that why you’ve been sitting here moping like this, Evelyn? Because you’re married to me, but you’re in love with a gardener from home?’

  His wife had chosen to scrape the bottom of the barrel on some mission to make herself less depressed. He thought this uncharitable thought, but recognised he was only thinking it because his pride instructed him to.

  Her eyes remained fixed on him, but she wasn’t seeing him again. He thought that was his answer, right there. He studied her, oddly fascinated to be staring into the daydreaming eyes of his wife while she was in the throes of pining for another man.

  And he was right. Evelyn was gone. She had returned to her house, to Eddy’s warm arms. To their day at the beach. Their walks, their talks, their lovemaking. To the way he had sang to her years ago. To his sad gaze at the Mayfair Ballroom. Every time that song had come on the radio, she’d had to switch it off. Long John Baldry. ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’. Two or three lines in, and she was ready to crumple.

  Mark’s voice sounded far away. In her peripheral vision, she could see the colourful oil painting of a summer garden that hung above their mantelpiece. They had bought it from a small Cork Street gallery. She could see the antique wall sconces from Sotheby’s, and a bronze figurine on the pedestal table by the armchair that they had found at a flea market in Venice. The things they had chosen together, which might not seem important, yet they furnished their life and told of their history. She could see Mark in the foreground, sharpening again before her eyes.

  He had just asked her if she was in love with her gardener.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I thought I was, yes.’ In that instant, she felt so numb that she didn’t know any more.

  The word yes faded as Mark heard it, as he tried to un-hear it. Faded, then came back again. He continued to look at her. He ought to be thinking of her as a stranger now, a pariah. He ought to hate her, or at the very least be furious. And yet, for some odd reason, he couldn’t. He saw this clearly for what it was: a symptom of this perpetual ridiculous homesick business in her. He saw it this way, simply because that was the best of all the possible explanations.

  ‘What do you want to do then?’ He hadn’t dragged her kicking and screaming from that abysmal Holy Island, with the wretched tide that you were always planning your life around. If she hadn’t wanted to be here, she should have left. If she didn’t want to be here now, she should go. He wanted to say all this; he would have loved to say all this, but he didn’t dare. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him.

  She heard his question. Her eyes swooped over his well-worn Burberry blazer, his maroon tie with the greasy stain on it that he must have acquired over lunch. Mark always missed his mouth when he ate, or managed to dangle his tie-end in his soup. Her gaze landed at his feet. His shoes were a bit of a disaster, too. He could afford plenty of expensive new ones, yet he always wore the same clapped-out pair that Tessie polished every day. Mark was shabby chic. She had seen that expression in Cosmo and thought, Yes, that fits him. She felt strangely detached from all of his quirks, though. She was looking at him as though he were a stranger, assessing him. Someone might have just introduced them at a dinner party. The face appeared suddenly years older, the skin pale and slack. His sparse, greying hair formed a halo of frizz around the top of his head. His eyes were bloodshot, and his shoulders sagged like a ragdoll’s. There was something intensely grandfatherly about him. But something that made her still love him, nonetheless.

  Mark wasn’t at all happy at the way she was looking at him. He got up and went to fill his Scotch glass, just because she was making him feel twitchy. As he did, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. His reflection made him take pause. He was a vibrant, upright, attractive man in his prime. An affair with a gardener! What on earth had she been thinking?

  He brought his drink back to the chair and sat down again. Harry went and nudged off a bauble from the bottom branch of the tree. It struck Mark that he needed to be angrier. He had felt the rise of genuine pique a moment or two ago. But it had burned out like a log fire that starts off promisingly and then you don’t quite know what suddenly happened to it. ‘I’m presuming you want to leave me and go and be with him, your gardener,’ he said, after he realised that she hadn’t answered his question about what she wanted to do.

  He drained the glass in one go. But he wasn’t as calm as he might have looked. He sounded so rational, like a mediator in a debate. But he wasn’t rational, either. Public school had taught him how to do the complete opposite of what his emotions were instructing. This whole thing was mad enough that she might actually do it. He didn’t want to lose her. He loved her profoundly. Right now, it didn’t matter massively that she might not love him back. She was looking at him in that strange way again.

  She watched him polish off his drink. She could have said, I want to leave you and be with Eddy, if he’ll still have me. The letter she had tried to write this morning – to explain why she hadn’t shown up as promised – was in the drawer of her writing bureau upstairs. She hadn’t managed to compose it. She had made her choice, and yet she hadn’t committed it to paper. On one level, it was urgent that she sent an explanation to him; it was only fair. And on the other . . .

  I could leave now. I could just get up and go.

  Despite fading in and out of emotional blankness at times, she really had no doubts about her love for Eddy, even though she might have gently fudged it with Mark, just to be kind. But deep down, she knew that she didn’t want to walk away from her husband, either – this man who was looking at her in a way that he had perhaps never looked at her before. As much as these paintings and vases, and chairs and rugs all belonged here, so did she. And Mark belonged here, too: he with her, and she with him. This was their life, and she couldn’t really imagine it not being her life any more. Everything about London suited the person she had been happy enough to become. And, as much as she had questioned the happiness of that person at times, and as much as she thought she could leave it all, she really couldn’t see herself walking away from Mark and the life they had made together. She just kept picturing him buying her Christmas gift in Harrods, and how he might have died doing it. There were different kinds of love. One didn’t invalidate the other.

  She thought, distantly, of Serena’s sage advice about nostalgia, and how people would talk about her. Mark would be a laughing stock, and she worried more about that than what they would say about her. Then, inevitably, he would find someone. But he wouldn’t really want to replace her. He’d be doing it out of necessity, because Mark needed order in his life, and order meant a wife. And in a way – knowing her messed-up self as she did – she would envy that woman he had chosen to try to love as much as he once loved her.

  ‘I don’t know what I am going to do. I’m only telling you all this for one reason, Mark. Because I’ve done wrong, and it’s too big a thing to keep from you. I’m not a good enough actress.’

  ‘Well, frankly, I would have appreciated you trying to be.’ His last defence was a small attack.

  She found this ironic. Sometimes, she felt that Mark only ever wanted to know the part of her that it suited him to know. He would cheerfully bury his head in the sand as to the rest. And that was one of the infuriating things about him. But it was part of their marriage’s psyche. She couldn’t hate him for it.

  ‘I take responsibility for what I did. I never, ever, intended to be unfaithful, and I regret it in ways I could never begin to articulate. But you should know that my affair was a symptom of us, of how we are together as a couple, of what we’ve become. I have never fitted your mould. You married a human being, not a talking ornament. I wasn’t going to be p
laced where you decided to place me, and polished once in a while. I am a person.’

  It was sounding way more accusatory than she really intended, but she needed to be fully honest if they were to go on. ‘Mark, what I’m struggling to say is that I had independent dreams and desires of my own that shouldn’t have had to step in line with yours. If you hadn’t expected me to have them, you should have chosen one of those stuffed blouses that your other posh friends married. It was only natural that I would evolve from that naive girl you walked down the aisle with. But you have changed, too. Let’s not forget that. We evolved differently, and sometimes the differences are just too great for me. Plus, we should have tried harder to have children. It would have made us the family we haven’t quite managed to be without them.’

  He had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Talking ornament! She was a person! And now she wanted children? She’d hardly made a massive fuss about them before. When she acted like this – became all complex and rambling – it was completely over his head. There were a great number of pretty, airhead secretaries whom he could have married, who would have given him less grief, and a great many times he wished he’d picked one.

  Well, not a great many times. But perhaps right now.

  There was a tiny coil of gold tinsel on the carpet that Harry must have carried from the tree. He stared at it and said a silent prayer. Please don’t let her ever leave me.

  He had turned very still. Harry came over and nudged his hands.

  ‘I’ll leave if you want me to,’ she said. ‘If you’d done this, I don’t know if I could have stayed with you. So I’ll completely understand if that’s what you wish me to do.’

  He played this back to himself. It seemed that the decision was his. He didn’t know if this was genuine on her part, or a strategy. He suspected it was genuine, because she looked too indifferent to have a strategy.

  ‘You want me to tell you to leave, so that you can go to him and feel easy in your conscience. That’s what I’m guessing.’