“Eve,” Olivia said. “Please don’t let’s leave it like this. We were friends, that’s what matters. That’s what mattered most about that summer, for me.”
And it was, she realised. The most precious thing she had lost that summer wasn’t James, nor the baby, for all the dreams and the heartache and the obsessive pregnancies that had followed. It was something simpler than either of those things, something smooth and certain like the pebbles on the beach at Aldeburgh: the pure, hard core of her friendship with Eve.
For a moment she thought Eve wavered, but if there was a quiver at the corner of her mouth she quelled it before it was more than a shadow.
“Maybe,” she said. “But this is something I’m going to do on my own. Something I’m going to have for myself. You have everything you could want, Olivia: a reliable husband, four perfect sons, a beautiful house. You have your music and your life here, twenty-five years of history to look back on.”
This last speech was so fluent, delivered in such a headlong stream of words, that Olivia was sure it had been rehearsed, or at least thought about, imagined, over and over again. Perhaps the whole evening, the whole script, had been planned. Had the look on Eve’s face, earlier, revealed a desire not for reconciliation but for revenge? Had she brought the photographs as evidence of some kind; proof of her worthiness?
“You’ve had your career,” Olivia said; a last-ditch plea. “You’re a doctor; you’re still a doctor. I gave up my career for my sons.”
“That was your choice.”
Eve got to her feet and Olivia followed, her head suddenly empty. She trailed Eve to the door and waited while she buttoned her coat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice sounding calmer than she expected. “I can see I’m to blame, and I’m sorry. I hope everything goes very well with the baby.”
When the door had shut behind Eve, Olivia let herself slide to the floor in the narrow hallway. She thought she would cry, but she didn’t: her eyes were dry, her heartbeat steady. She could hear it throbbing in her ears when her fingers pressed them shut. Perhaps I have a heart of stone, she thought. Perhaps that’s the truth, that all along I was the one with no feelings. It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t known Eve was pregnant; it wasn’t her fault James hadn’t wanted Eve. But even so she’d failed Eve, failed to understand her. She’d failed them both.
Through the kitchen door she could see the plates stacked on the sideboard and the bottle of wine, almost full, standing on the table. The cheerful domestic scene looked like something from a horror film now, full of foreboding rather than comfort. Nearer at hand, the hall table was littered with bills, catalogues, reminders from the dentist and the optician and the window-cleaner. All the tiny, insignificant details that were at stake. She knew it was ridiculous to sit there, but it was equally ridiculous to get up and fill the kettle as though nothing had happened. Once upon a time, she would have sought solace in the piano, but nothing satisfying and complex, nothing capable of diverting her mind, would flow through her fingers any more.
So here she was, trapped again in a moment when time seemed to have stalled; when none of the paths she could take seemed right or possible. Not so much a crossroads as a full stop: the place on the boys’ old train track where the buffer marked the end of the line, where you had to turn the engine round and let it run back the way it had come.
After a long time, long after all the noise from upstairs had stopped, the throb of music and the buzz of television laughter, the banging of doors and the flare of bedtime arguments, Olivia got up. She usually said goodnight to the boys, but they didn’t need her any more. They’d go to sleep when they were tired. Even Benjy would doze off over his Nintendo: she’d find it blinking on the pillow beside him later, when she went up to bed.
She went through to the kitchen and opened the cupboard where they kept spirits and mixers, bottles of dark rum and crème de cacao that hadn’t been touched for years. There was the bottle of whisky she’d drunk with Lucy. Duty free Laphraoig. She reached up and lifted it out of the cupboard. She could have done with Lucy’s company tonight, she thought. With someone to drink with, at any rate.
Chapter 30
Olivia was woken the next morning by the ringing of the telephone. She was conscious of her head throbbing, then of a shrinking, dismaying feeling in her stomach as she remembered the previous night. She groaned, burying her face in the pillow. The last thing she wanted was to speak to anyone. The thing she wanted most was to hear Robert’s voice. Might it be Robert on the phone? Or Eve? Eve saying she was sorry; that it had been a bad joke; that Olivia had paid her penance?
The ringing continued. The answerphone must be off, the boys all still in bed. What time was it, anyway? Light was seeping around the sides of the curtains. Should she be awake? Might it really be Eve?
She had forgotten, of course she had forgotten, that it was Friday. That the only person who rang her this early in the morning was Sarah.
“Did I wake you?”
She sounded so blithe, Olivia thought, so unsuspecting. Irony would be a waste of energy.
“Yes.”
The heating hadn’t come on yet: why was that?
“Are you free for lunch?” Sarah asked. “Say at the Lebanese place in North Parade?”
Olivia rootled for the alarm clock in the drawer. She must have forgotten to set it. It was quarter past eight already; too late to be starting the day. She shut her eyes for a few seconds then forced herself out of bed.
“Boys!” she yelled through the door. “Breakfast! Hurry hurry!”
A cold breakfast, as it turned out. No toaster, no kettle, no microwave. The electricity was all off.
Olivia frowned at the row of switches in the fuse box. “It’s supposed to tell you where the fault is,” she said.
“Mum. Chill.” Alastair stood behind her, a bowl of cereal in one hand. “We’ve got to go, anyway.”
“Have the others eaten?”
“Tom’s gone. Prefect duty on the gate.”
Angus and Benjy stood in the middle of the kitchen with schoolbags over their shoulders, holding a piece of white bread each. Despite herself, Olivia laughed.
“Look at your faces. No one would guess you beg me to buy that stuff.”
“For toast,” Angus said. “It’s disgusting like this. It tastes like cardboard.”
“I’m glad you’ve noticed.”
At least they hadn’t noticed the state of her, Olivia thought. At least the lack of electricity had put a damper on the usual squabbling as well as on their spirits.
“Go on,” she said. “Don’t be late. Have a good day.”
As the door slammed behind them, Olivia leaned against the kitchen wall and listened to the silence swilling around her. Her head throbbed; the smile she’d rallied for the boys had left the muscles of her face feeling like perished rubber. She felt tempted, just for a moment, to sink down again in the corner of the hallway where she’d sat the night before. There had been something easeful, comforting, in giving in to emotion like that, letting time slip away. But it wouldn’t do. This was the point, surely: that she had a life to run, four sons to occupy her.
A life to run, an electrician to call, and a pupil coming in half an hour. At least she could teach the piano without electricity.
Although she’d succumbed long ago to the Oxford habit of cycling, Olivia had found herself walking more and more in recent weeks. She followed the same routes, not always the most logical ones: often along the canal, which hadn’t lost its charm despite the uneasy memory of that surprise assault back in September. There was something delightful, escapist, about dipping down from the steep bridges to the tow-path, muddy at most times of year, to keep company with the waterbirds and the canal dwellers.
This morning Olivia walked to clear her head. She had thrown herself into the mechanics of her life during the last few hours, driven by a fervid energy she hadn’t known she could muster. She’d dealt with the fuse box – a power su
rge, the young electrician had said, that had blown three circuits at once. She’d taught a double-length piano lesson to a retired Physics don from Brasenose who was working with tyrannical dedication towards Grade 4. She’d rung the dentist and the optician and the window-cleaner, whose polite reminders she could ignore no longer. She’d let in Agata, the cleaner, and had escaped before the girl could begin on the stumbling conversation she regarded as part of Olivia’s payment for her services. Now she had three-quarters of an hour to get to the restaurant, to prepare herself for Sarah, to sort through the muddle left by last night’s encounter.
Apart from the ducks and the moorhens, the stubby trees fringed with ivy, Olivia’s progress along the tow-path was marked by the houseboats moored along the banks and the back views of houses opposite. Rows of houses that had once matched and were now all different; distinguished, like the ones in her own street, by projecting extensions, conservatories, dormer windows. Gardens elaborately cultivated or left to nature sloped gently down towards the canal or descended in graduated steps, ending in waterside bowers and little dinghies lapping against brick moorings. Olivia knew a few people who lived along here, but she knew their houses better. She knew the stories they told to observers on the far side of the water, with their trailing vines, their witty signs (crocodiles for 1 km), their deck chairs left over from the end of summer. The gardens were wintry now, deserted except for an occasional stalking cat or foraging squirrel, their trees and shrubs naked and fragile.
Olivia thought how comforting it would be to hibernate, sleeping out the winter and waking with the blossom in spring. It seemed too much to ask of the human brain to keep going day after day, adjusting to the passing of time and the shifting of circumstance. Her mind certainly wasn’t disposed to serious thought this morning. It busied itself with observation, opening itself to the pattern of ripples on the water, the delicate grey-blue of the sky, but it stubbornly refused to speculate about Eve, to delve any deeper into that quagmire. So be it, Olivia thought. Let her go; let it lie. That approach has worked well enough all these years. She felt a kind of relief she couldn’t fully embrace but wanted to believe in; the comfort of doing nothing. She pulled her coat tighter around her as the winter sun dipped behind clouds, and quickened her pace towards the Jericho Bridge.
Her return route took her past houses familiar from their pavement aspect. Houses in Walton Manor from which the sound of a clarinet or a violin drifted as she walked past; bay windows displaying vases of flowers. Signs, thought Olivia, passing a basement kitchen prepared for a lunch party, of ordered, desirable lives. What would her house look like from the outside, she wondered? Might someone else wish that they lived there, that they had her life instead of their own?
Olivia looked across the table at Sarah, absorbed in the menu.
“I saw Eve last night,” she heard herself say. Goodness: was it possible for your own voice to take you entirely by surprise, for some rogue element in your brain to pursue its own agenda without consultation?
“Oh?” Sarah was politely attentive, her face lifted with a smile. A bland smile, Olivia thought, suddenly vicious, measuring her against Eve. But she ought to be grateful for blandness, today of all days.
“She invited herself for supper. Brought the photos of her baby to show me.”
“Oh!” A different tone this time; expectant, though not, Olivia thought, sentimental.
Olivia hesitated. She hadn’t intended to mention Eve’s visit to Sarah, but she knew the story would all come out now. She recognised this ticklish feeling of dread and inevitability from childish confessions and from declarations of love.
“Did I ever tell you about what happened at the end of our driving tour, years ago?” she asked.
Sarah shook her head.
“We were staying in a house in Aldeburgh with a friend of Eve’s,” Olivia said. “Another medical student, called James.”
“Ladies?” The waiter was standing beside them.
“Shall we have the meze?” Sarah suggested. “Make it easy?”
Olivia nodded.
“Two meze,” Sarah said. “One veggie. And another bottle of sparkling water, please.”
She shifted slightly, a spasm crossing her face as she moved her plaster cast to a different angle.
“Are you comfortable?” Olivia asked. “Is it hurting?”
“It’s fine,” Sarah said. “Much less painful now. Go on.”
Olivia realised then that she was going to lie – that she couldn’t help giving her own slant to the facts. Isn’t that what she’d done all along: told it as a particular kind of story, believed her own version of the truth? Isn’t that what Eve had done too, last night?
“There was an argument,” she said. “Eve and I drove off in the car and got lost. We finally stopped at a phone box, but the phone was out of order, and there was a newborn baby lying on the floor.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “Alive?”
Olivia nodded. “Her mother must have abandoned her.” She swallowed. “We took her to the hospital in Ipswich, but by the time we got there she was dead.”
“How awful.”
Sarah looked at her for a few moments and Olivia looked back, her gaze steady.
“The thing was – “ Olivia broke off. Following the direction of the sun, she remembered; travelling west as it started to sink over the fields. Eventually she said: “we reacted differently, Eve and I. We argued. I thought we could save the baby, that we’d be the heroines of the hour.” She felt tears pricking to life. She hadn’t cried over the baby in the phone box for years, except in her dreams. “I think Eve just wished it hadn’t happened.” She hesitated again. “I never understood her reaction. But when we met for lunch a couple of weeks ago, she told me she was pregnant that summer. She’d just done the test, a few days before we found the baby.”
“Goodness,” said Sarah. “Poor Eve. And that’s why she – “
“Last night,” Olivia cut in, “we talked about it. She did. She said that James – he was the father, that was the thing. She was pregnant by him, and according to Eve he spent the whole week flirting with me.”
“Did he?”
“No,” Olivia said. “No, he …” She frowned, shook her head slightly. “It was a long time ago. We were very young, all of us. I didn’t realise it was all so complicated.”
“But it still rankles? With Eve?”
“She said that was why she’d come last night. Not to talk about the adoption, but to get the stuff about Aldeburgh off her chest. To accuse me of being responsible for her abortion.”
“You?”
“James treated her very badly, told her he didn’t want anything to do with the baby. But Eve claimed she knew for sure she couldn’t keep it when she realised James preferred me to her. That was the final straw.” Olivia sighed. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous, she knew. A trumped-up charge. But even though they were Eve’s words she was repeating, even though she’d been so upset by them, Olivia knew she wasn’t being fair. She was guilty of misrepresentation, just as she’d known she would be.
“So what did you say?” Sarah asked.
“I didn’t really get a chance. When Eve had said her piece, she walked out of the house saying she never wanted to see me again.”
Sarah frowned. “She always was a bit unpredictable.”
For some reason her tone provoked Olivia into a rage. Like a mother who doesn’t listen to what her child is saying, she thought. Dismisses it with a platitude. What would you know, she almost said. But what was the point? What was she doing, anyway, telling Sarah all this?
The waiter reappeared with a tray laden with little bowls which he arranged on the table between them. Taramasalata, moutabel, houmous: alluring circles of colour. She was hungry, Olivia realised. She hadn’t had any breakfast; no wonder she was irritable.
“This looks good,” she said.
“I love this place.” Sarah smiled, perhaps with relief. “The trouble is, now I can’t ta
ke any exercise the wedding diet is going into reverse.”
“You can always let the dress out.”
“I’m not that good a seamstress. Don’t let me eat too much. I never did have any self-control.”
That wasn’t how Olivia thought of Sarah. Her life had always seemed meticulously controlled.
“Do you remember,” she said suddenly, “that party at Eve’s house? A whole lot of us went for the weekend in the Easter holidays.”
Sarah nodded. “We slept in sleeping bags on the floor.”
There had been a startling array of alcohol at the party, bottles of wine and beer and a fruit punch that grew more and more potent as the evening wore on. Eve’s older brothers had invited their friends too, though only the boldest of the girls had dared speak to them.
“Vomit on the carpet,” said Olivia. “Milly Mason out in the garden with Eve’s brother Paul.”
She remembered Sarah, bright and chirpy the next morning, helping Eve’s mother clear up. She remembered Eve’s father standing at the front door when they all arrived: a huge man with arms permanently braced to offer a bear-hug or a bone-crushing handshake. His bonhomie had always alarmed Olivia. The sanctioned debauchery had alarmed her too: packets of cigarettes circulating freely, the adults conspicuously absent and the garden transformed into a place of shadows and hot breath.
“What hopeless innocents we were.” She dipped pitta bread into tzatziki, feeling a pang of nostalgia, or perhaps regret. “Where did you think you’d end up, back then?”
“I was still hoping to do medicine.”
“Like Eve.”
“Eve was never in doubt,” Sarah said. “Not about anything.”
No, Olivia thought, surprised by a sudden insight, that wasn’t true. There had been doubts for Eve; more than anyone realised, perhaps. She remembered other visits to the de Perrevilles’ house: the way Eve had been diminished rather than augmented by being at home; the way she’d stuck close to her mother; the power of her father. And those older brothers: had they been just like other teenage boys? Might her own sons appear that daunting to a shy younger girl?
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 21
