The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

by Catherine Alliott

  I fluttered around the kitchen, wiping already clean surfaces, realigning chairs, putting things away, but when I'd put Ant's newspaper in the fridge, I stopped, sat down, knowing my legs could support me no longer and I could flutter no more. I gazed dumbly down the garden. It should be a riot of colour at this time of year, but for some reason I hadn't quite got round to getting the bedding plants in. Hadn't had time. Ant had said we should go for perennials, which apparently came up every year – as the name suggests, he'd added drily – but I hadn't got round to that either. Shrubs, then, prevailed, mostly evergreen, and consequently rather dark and dull, and of course the ubiquitous trampoline, which took up at least a third of the lawn, and where Anna bounced higher and higher, up into the branches of the laburnum, until I'd fling open the window and yell, ‘You'll hit your head!’ It stared back at me now, like a huge, knowing eye. A Cyclops. Anna. My chest tightened. Oh God, don't go there. Don't. Don't imagine her shock, her disbelief, her incredulity. A daughter? Dad's got another child? And fortuitously, I didn't have to, as the phone rang, breaking into my ghoulish thoughts. I snatched it up gratefully, but my voice wouldn't come.

  ‘Evie?’ It was Caro. ‘Evie, are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I managed. ‘Hi, Caro.’

  ‘God, you sound awful. Have I caught you at a bad time?’

  The worst.

  ‘No, I was just – eating. Went down the wrong way.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, listen. Been meaning to phone you all week. Tim tells me you're dead set on getting this horse, so to avoid any misunderstandings I just wanted to set out a few ground rules.’

  I leaned my elbows on the breakfast bar and sank my head into my hand, massaging my temples, cradling the receiver with the other. Caro's voice was brisk, combative, rehearsed. I could tell she'd been working up to this call; might even have a piece of paper with bullet points in front of her.

  ‘Well, no, not dead set, really,’ I mumbled. ‘It's probably not such a good idea. Too much trouble for you.’

  ‘Nonsense, one more mouth to feed won't make any difference. I did a quick head count this morning and d'you know, including the chickens, we've got one hundred and eleven beating hearts, so what's one hundred and twelve, I ask myself.’ She was clearly gagging to adopt the martyr's crown. ‘And anyway, Tim informs me it's a fait accompli,’ she finished crisply.

  I massaged harder as I dimly registered the row they'd no doubt had, the stand-up-knock-down in the kitchen: Caro shrieking that she was rushed off her feet as it was; my brother, firm, as he could be occasionally, taking a stand, talking of family, duty, of helping his little sister. Normally I'd be falling over myself to apologize, to rectify the situation, say it was a big mistake, that Anna had gone off ponies, wanted to be a gymnast, anything, but I just nodded mutely into the receiver, imagining Ant going to a tutorial, his heart heavy; the letter like a lead weight in his breast pocket, burning a hole in his heart.

  ‘So if Tim says it's final, it's final, so there we are. Contrary to popular belief we all know who really wears the trousers in this house. Now, for God's sake don't go and buy one on your own. Take someone to see it, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I muttered dumbly.

  ‘I'll come, if I can, but my caterers have let me down again and the marquee's got a hole in it where someone's clearly had fun with a cigarette, and the next few weeks are jam-packed with weddings, so God knows when I'll get away. But for heaven's sake, if I'm not there, make sure it lives out so we don't have any mucking-out to do, and that it's good in traffic. And even more importantly, make sure it's got a snaffle mouth. You don't want some Arab in a gag, do you?’

  A white-robed sheik, staggering, bound and gagged through the desert, sprang confusingly to mind.

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘So steer well clear of anything in a pelham or a curb, or she'll be carted into the next county. Just make sure it's safe, OK?’

  Safe. Safe sex. Always wear a condom. Or not, as the case may be.

  ‘And don't look at anything described as a “fun ride” – that's shorthand for goes like a train – or “a proper character” – which means it bucks. But as I said, I'll come with you in a few weeks' time. Just as soon as I can get away from this sodding wedding fiasco.’

  I remembered my manners. Cleared my throat. It was remarkably dry. ‘Um, how's it going, Caro?’

  ‘Oh, swimmingly. I've got potential brides bowling up my drive at an alarming rate, wafting around my kitchen wanting to discuss canapés and flowers and whether or not they can tie the knot under the willow tree. They can, believe it or not – can get married where they like these days, in the bloody bog if they so wish, as long as I've got the licence. And their ghastly mothers are all gimlet-eyed and never missing a trick. They're the nightmare, incidentally, the mothers. Last week we had one who discovered the groom's family had invited more guests than her side and then blamed me. Said I should have spotted it! I kicked her in the end, had to pretend I had a twitch.

  ‘Good, good,’ I said distractedly.

  ‘I mean they're not all ghastly, don't get me wrong. The Asians are heaven, lovely big families all nodding and smiley and so well behaved. Never any fornicating in the bushes, and never any sick to clear up, either. God, I love the Asians.’

  ‘Um, look, Caro, I'd better go, but thanks for… you know.’ What? I tried to remember why she'd called. Oh, yes. ‘The pony.’

  ‘Well, you haven't got it yet, and I'm not entirely convinced you know what you're letting yourself in for. Just for pity's sake be careful and don't look at anything under eight that hasn't been there, done it and got the T-shirt. But at the same time you don't want too many miles on the clock.’

  She was talking a different language now, but no matter: I'd long since stopped listening because, actually, I'd just thought of something. Realized something. While she'd been prattling on I'd been thinking about the letter and about the girl being seventeen. I'd done the maths instantly, of course I had, and felt safe. I hadn't known Ant then. But that distracted me from when the child had been born – September 1990. She was still very much sixteen, wouldn't be seventeen till later this year which meant – and here I got to my feet, slowly replacing the receiver as Caro said goodbye – yes, of course. The child couldn't be Ant's. Simply couldn't. Because if it was her seventeenth birthday in the autumn, she'd been conceived – I did some rapid mental arithmetic – the previous January: which meant I'd been going out with Ant. Going out for some time. Not only that, we'd been engaged.

  6

  I'd had to order Ant's copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We didn't stock such esoteric titles in Bletchley's: this wasn't spacious Waterstone's, or even academic Blackwell's. We were just a tiny independent, albeit on three floors, but each the size of your average front room connected by rickety stairs. It was all very charming and Dickensian, and appealed to my romantic notion of how a bookshop should be, even down to the musty smell of Jean's cats, who slunk down from her flat upstairs and stretched out on shelves or in pools of sunlight, adding to the ambience. I think the customers bought into the whole nostalgic bit too, liking the fact that they could settle down in a faded armchair with a book and not be asked to move on. Comfy chairs were a rarity in bookshops back then, and in a way it put us ahead of our time, even if the reality was that they were there for Jean, our fifteen-stone manageress, who liked to pause mid-floor for a breather. A couple of other things gave us the edge too: we were on the fringes of the city where a lot of students lived, we had a larger than average art and architecture section, and also a contemporary music section, which was popular. We stocked the usual fiction, of course, and pretty much all the classics, but not, as it happened, Ant's request.

  ‘They usually get that from the university bookshop,’ Jean told me as she overheard me ordering it on the telephone. ‘Who was it, a student?’

  ‘He looked a bit older than that.’ I glanced down at the name I'd scribbled on a pad, even though I knew it by hear
t. ‘Anthony Hamilton? With a local number.’

  She peered over my shoulder. ‘Oh, Doctor Hamilton. One of the youngest dons in the English Department. On a bit of a meteoric rise, by all accounts; shooting to stardom. Well, he must have dozens of those in his stock cupboard. I can't think why he's getting it from us.’ She pulled an incredulous and not altogether friendly face. ‘Perhaps he fancies you.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said quickly, knowing any single man who came in here had to fancy Jean. Ant was over eighteen and therefore ripe for the cull. I could feel myself colouring, none the less.

  ‘Well, he's terribly attractive, don't you think? I certainly wouldn't say no.’ She rolled her eyes and pouted provocatively. ‘Wouldn't mind getting stuck in the stock cupboard with him.’ She shot me an arch look before sauntering off to the staffroom on her thick calves, ample hips swinging, a pile of books in her arms.

  Jean, a divorcee, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sybil Fawlty, had a slightly desperate air and a double entendre for every occasion. She had to lower the tone, didn't she? I thought as I watched her go.

  Nevertheless, I spent the next few days pouncing on every parcel that came in, just in case Jean or Malcolm should get to it first, and practising exactly what I would say on the telephone when it did arrive. In the event, of course, it was desperately prosaic.

  ‘Oh, hello, Doctor Hamilton?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It's Evie here, from Bletchley's Books. Just to say, your copy of Sir Gawain arrived this morning.’

  ‘Oh, thanks very much. I'll pop in and get it.’

  ‘Okey-doke, bye!’

  ‘Bye.’

  As I put the phone down a hot flush swept over me. Okey-doke? When had I ever said that? That hadn't been in the script. But at least I'd got my name in – all part of the plan – and I'd nonchalantly shortened the title too, omitting the Green Knight, as I gathered those in the know did. And what a deliciously deep, modulated voice he had. ‘Thanks very much. I'll pop in and get it,’ I purred.

  ‘Get what?’ asked Jean, appearing at my shoulder, frowning.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I flustered, hurrying away.

  Over the next few days, I hardly left the shop. Whenever the door opened my head pirouetted, and I spent a lot of time in Health and Harmony, which was right at the front on the ground floor, with an excellent view of the street.

  ‘Having trouble breast-feeding?’ enquired Malcolm, my lovely gay colleague, who, on one of his rare forays down from Art and Architecture on the first floor – ‘lovely sensitive types you get up there, nice hands’ – was watching me dust Miriam Stoppard's Pregnancy and Birth Book for the millionth time.

  I giggled. ‘Not, as such.’

  ‘Something more serious?’ He raised an eyebrow as The Pain of Infertility was flicked over now.

  ‘How would I know?’ I sighed, resting my feather duster a moment. ‘I could be as fertile as the River Nile or as barren as the Gobi, I've no idea. No one's ever tested my tubes. I do know this, though, Malcolm, my biological clock is ticking loudly and there's no one to hear it but you, Jean and the cats.’

  ‘What about Steve, the surfing dude?’

  ‘No ambition. No… direction.’

  ‘Except the beach, perhaps?’

  I flicked him an unworthy-of-you look and resumed my dusting.

  ‘OK, well, that other chap then,’ he persisted. ‘Neil, the sarcastic book rep?’

  ‘Too chippy. He kept calling me a glorified shop assistant and waiting for me to rise, which I didn't.’

  ‘Not enough glory, that's why. Commandant Sybil sees to that,’ Malcolm jerked his head towards Jean, who very much ruled the roost here, overseeing any events in the shop and generally not letting us have a look in.

  I sighed wearily. ‘Actually, I'm thinking of joining that new dining club at the Poly. Meet a few more people.’

  ‘Well, as long as you're not hanging around here waiting for blue eyes,’ he said gently, ‘because I'm afraid you've missed him.’

  ‘Oh!’ I swung to face him.

  ‘Came in ten minutes ago while you were in the loo. I was all for running to get you, but Jean blocked my path and served him herself.’

  ‘But she knew —’

  ‘Of course she did, but she doesn't want her pretty young assistant being chatted up by one of the dons, does she? Here, my sweet,’ he delved into a shelf and plucked out a copy of Anger Management. ‘Read and learn. You'll last longer. I have.’

  He sauntered away. Bitterly disappointed, I dusted on in silence. Later that morning I slipped to the café next door to drown my sorrows in cappuccino. When I came back, Malcolm ran up, eyes shining.

  ‘Good news or bad news?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘He's been in again, and you missed him.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘But the good news is, he's coming to the poetry reading on Saturday night. Took a leaflet and everything, and – get this, poppet – asked if we all had to be there.’

  ‘Oh! D'you think he meant—’

  ‘Well, he surely didn't mean moi, munchkin. I'd have known.’ He tucked his silky blond hair neatly behind his ears. ‘And I really don't think he meant, that… that thing…’ His eyes widened in mock horror as Jean, halfway up a ladder at the top shelf, hitched her skirt a bit to scratch her pantyhose. Malcolm shuddered.

  She turned to frown at us. ‘Come on, you two. Less chat.’

  ‘Jawohl, mein Führer,’ muttered Malcolm under his breath.

  ‘Oh, and, Evie, your don came in.’ She grinned at me over her shoulder. ‘I'm afraid you missed him.’

  ‘Yes, Malcolm said.’ I smiled sweetly back.

  Malcolm gave me a huge wink as he sauntered away, pretending to shake Jean's ladder as he passed, then breaking into goose steps and a Nazi salute when he was out of her sight.

  Saturday couldn't come quickly enough. Normally I avoided readings like the plague. Being only a small bookshop we didn't attract the likes of Jeffrey Archer or Jilly Cooper, rolling up in their chauffeur-driven cars with their glamorous publicity girls; instead, some unknown local author would shuffle in off the street in a duffel coat, their book in a Tesco carrier bag. Given the spotlight, though, and the evening, these usually timid souls would become expansive; droning on and on, reading reams and reams of interminably dry stuff, which Jean, being a pseudo-intellectual, would smile knowingly at, head on one side, stifling her yawns, whilst Malcolm and I whispered in the corner about how much better we could do it if we were in charge, at least asking thriller writers, or romantic novelists, and perhaps three or four, not just one.

  Poetry readings were the worst. Some bearded type would read banal or incomprehensible verse, as everyone sat around in hushed, respectful silence, nodding off. The audiences were generally embarrassingly small too – the poet's girlfriend, his mother, and a cluster of loyal friends – although we did try to fill it out with a few locals, bribing them with drinks.

  This one looked like being no exception. The poet was female, and although I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Joan Baez, I imagine it's what she'd look like. A scrubbed face and humourless brown eyes stared at me through a curtain of long dark hair as I was introduced to her. She took my hand limply, murmuring something that sounded suspiciously like Emmylou Harris.

  ‘Evie Milligan,’ I smiled back, determinedly upbeat, and determinedly miniskirt-clad too, with sparkly earrings and lashings of lip gloss.

  My job had been to arrange a not too intimidatingly large circle of chairs around a solitary ‘throne’ where she would sit and recite, and to which I led her now.

  ‘Is this all right? Or you could have it a little further forward if you like?’ Some authors preferred a more intimate circle.

  She frowned. ‘I think I'd like everyone sitting on the floor.’

  I blinked. ‘Right…’

  I wasn't sure how this would go down with any elderly matrons who occasionally popped in to relieve a lonely eve
ning, but I supposed I could grab them a chair, and half an hour later Emmylou was sitting cross-legged on a beaded cushion – model's own – surrounded by twenty or so similarly intense-looking supporters – not a bad turnout, actually.

  ‘They're all girls,’ I hissed to Malcolm, one eye on the door. Doctor Hamilton had yet to appear.

  ‘Oh, yes, didn't you know? She's one of us. Well, one of them,’ he added sniffily. ‘I prefer my gay female friends to be of the lipstick-lesbian variety, glamorous, sharp-tongued and witty. This is the other end of the spectrum. The hairy-toed right-on brigade.’

  ‘Oh.’ I looked around with interest. They were all earnestly studying the text.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Well, I don't know empirically which church they go to, Evie. Some will be lucky to get serviced at all, by the look of them, and some might turn out to be common or garden feminists who failed to notice bra-burning and emancipation happened twenty-odd years ago with Marilyn French at the helm. Eh up, here's the Führer.’

  Jean, flushed and slightly tipsy – she was always in charge of the warm white wine – was making her way centre stage, clapping her hands prettily as if the place was humming with lively chatter, instead of hushed whispers. Her pink face clashed violently with the startling purple crepe trouser suit she'd chosen to sport for the evening.

  ‘Ahem! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Well… ladies. Lovely to see so many of you here, and may I say how delighted we are to have Mary-Lou with us tonight. Emmy… lou, as many of you know, is a local poet, and winner of the Banbury District Award for Young Talent.’

  A ripple of applause followed and Emmylou nodded gravely around, accepting only what was her due.

  ‘And now I hope you'll listen quietly –’ what were we, six? – ‘as Emily reads from her latest collection entitled Women in Chains.’

  ‘Oh my,’ groaned Malcolm in my ear, before sliding away to hide behind Crime and Thrillers, the better to roll his eyes at me and make me laugh. I determined not to look at him, but actually, even if I did, I knew I was too disappointed to laugh. After all that, after all my devotions to hair and make-up, not to mention a new skirt and chain belt from Dorothy Perkins, he hadn't turned up. And now, now that the reading had started, twenty minutes late, as it happened, he probably wouldn't. I listened miserably as Emmylou's shrill, reedy, self-important voice rang out strident and forceful. No nerves, it seemed, which didn't endear her to me. I was naturally suspicious of anyone who wasn't permanently covered in confusion.