The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

by Catherine Alliott

  A horse dealer, I thought with a start as we drove out of the yard. Is that what he was? That sounded a bit – you know – dodgy. But I reckoned he was honest, essentially. And I was pretty sure we hadn't paid over the odds. And even if we had, more importantly, Anna had got her dream, a pony. And she might need a few dreams, I thought wretchedly as we drove back down the Woodstock Road. She was prattling away beside me, shiny-eyed, about Molly, about how she couldn't wait to tell Jemima, her best friend, couldn't wait to show her cousins. Yes, she might need a pony to cling to, if her little world was about to be shattered, her bubble burst.

  I gripped the steering wheel, letting out a long, shaky breath as we turned into our road, then slammed my foot on the brake as a girl stepped out onto a zebra crossing in front of us. I went hot. Christ, I'd been miles away. As she walked past she glared at me through the windscreen, clearly believing I hadn't stopped quickly enough. A skinny girl, in a skimpy white halter-neck top, about seventeen. Was that her, I wondered, with a sudden stab of horror. The barmaid's daughter? I sat, frozen at the wheel as I watched her mount the pavement, then turn left, in the opposite direction to our house. No. No, of course not. I drove on, flustered.

  But one day – one day it could be. One day, maybe having got no response to her letter, or perhaps some response – I'd been so upset last night I hadn't asked Ant if he'd formulated a plan, if he intended to write – she'd come. Anna and I would arrive back from the school run, or perhaps a shopping trip, to find her in the drawing room, perched on a sofa opposite Ant, cool and defiant, Ant turning wide, frightened eyes on us as we walked in.

  ‘Won't Daddy be pleased!’

  I swung around to Anna, horrified. ‘Why?’ I whispered.

  ‘Well, he always says he likes a houseful of girls. And now he's got Molly too. He's got another girl!’

  9

  As we drew up outside the house, it was in time to see Ant, not in his usual weekend jeans, but navy chinos and a biscuit linen jacket, shutting the front door behind him. He locked it carefully, pocketed the key, then turned to come down the steps, pausing to pick up a large suitcase.

  ‘Where's Daddy going?’ said Anna, her voice betraying a note of panic.

  My mouth dried as I watched him descend the steps. His head was bent and he looked purposeful, sad.

  ‘Wait here.’

  I parked chaotically on the opposite side of the road, nose in, tail out. Then I got out and dashed across the street, nearly getting mown down by a convertible Alfa Romeo, with an alfa romeo at the wheel, his squeeze beside him.

  ‘Oh, for fuck's sake!’ he roared fruitily, but I ignored him, climbing over the bonnet and running to Ant.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I gasped.

  He stared impassively at me. ‘To your mother's.’

  ‘My mother's?’ Even in my distress it seemed an unlikely bolt hole.

  He looked at me. ‘Don't you remember? We're going for lunch there today.’

  My mind cleared. ‘Oh!’ Saturday. Yes, of course, lunch. ‘But – the suitcase…’

  ‘It's not. It's that old Z-bed we had in the attic. She wants to borrow it for this reiki thing she's doing.’

  I gazed down at it; saw that he was right. The collapsible bed. Which folded up into what looked like a large case. And which we hadn't used for years. I felt my heart slow down, but it had been at racing speed, so it wasn't an immediate descent. As he looked at me I realized he was suddenly alive to what I'd been thinking. A wave of shock passed over his face.

  ‘But, it's huge,’ I prattled on, trying to gloss over my horrific assumption. ‘What were you going to do – drag it there or something?’

  ‘No, I was going to put the seats down in the back of my car and meet you over there,’ he said evenly. ‘I tried to ring you, but your phone's off. I assumed you and Anna had already gone on. It's nearly one o'clock, you know.’

  ‘Is it? No, I didn't.’ I passed a rattled hand through my hair. ‘I've lost track of time. We've been to see that pony. Anna wanted to— Oh, darling.’ She'd materialized beside us. Beside her parents, talking rather too anxiously on the steps of her house.

  ‘Look, Daddy's taking Granny the Z-bed. We're going there for lunch!’ I said, as if we were off to Disneyland Paris, trying to protect her with my forced jollity, but also Ant, from knowing that she too had thought the same. But he'd seen her worried little face, and suddenly, from being the happiest family this side of the Banbury Road, we were crumbling. Ant and I rallied simultaneously.

  ‘Right, well, we may as well use your car, now you're here,’ he said. ‘Bigger boot.’

  ‘Good idea. And, Anna, you run up and change. Chop chop, Granny will wonder where we are, have lunch on the table!’

  Highly unlikely, I thought, as I too raced inside to change my shoes and grab a jacket. When had my mother ever managed to get a meal together on time? So my stab at normality, normal in any other family, earned me an odd look from Anna.

  I hurried back to the car, deliberately racing my daughter, to slide in beside my husband, who'd assumed the wheel.

  ‘We must talk, Ant,’ I gasped. ‘This is horrible.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said quickly. ‘Not fair on Anna.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We must keep the peace at all costs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  But as she rejoined us and we set off, Ant and I making forced, over-bright conversation, me regaling him with the horse-trading saga, Anna, gradually becoming convinced things were OK and joining in from the back, enthusing about her new pet – ‘She's s-oo sweet, Daddy, you'll love her’ – I couldn't help wondering what the costs would be; what I must agree to, to keep the peace. To keep this little family on track.

  Felicity was already at Mum's place when we arrived. The pair of them were standing outside the little blue house, their backs to us, looking back at the front door, which badly needed painting. I wondered if that's what they were discussing. We came up the cobbled path behind them, through a riot of cottage garden flowers.

  ‘It's just a bit misleading,’ Felicity was saying anxiously, turning as she heard us. ‘I think you should wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’ I asked.

  ‘Your mother wants to put up a brass sign, about being a reiki practitioner,’ she explained nervously.

  I boggled at the little brass plaque Mum had in her hands: ‘Barbara Milligan, Reiki Therapist.’

  ‘Of course she should wait! Christ, she's not even qualified yet!’

  ‘I'm more than halfway through,’ Mum said defiantly, clutching her plaque to her breast. ‘So I'm a practitioner in progress. And one woman in my class is already seeing students. At half-price, of course.’

  ‘Well then, she's stupid,’ I snapped, all the pent-up emotion of the last few days being taken out on my mother, who, if not stupid, was certainly foolish.

  Three years ago it had been homeopathy, until she'd realized the course took four years and a great deal of hard work and application. Then she'd switched to aromatherapy, and now this. I found her inability to focus on anything for more than ten minutes – and, if I'm honest, the objects of her attention span – intensely irritating, perhaps because I recognized elements of myself in her and dreaded ending up like that: inventing a spurious direction for my life, alone, as her mother had been, and my great-grandmother before that. All women who'd been left by their husbands. And even though my mother had done the walking, I couldn't help feeling this lonely, aimless life was only a mis-step away if I wasn't careful; hereditary. As a result, I was much tougher on her than I should have been, regretting it later. Who was it said we start off loving our parents, after a while we judge them, and rarely do we forgive them? Today I was more unforgiving than usual.

  ‘It's just ridiculous, Mum,’ I stormed. ‘You'll be had up by the General Medical Council or something. You can't go around pretending you're a doctor when you're not!’

  ‘Oh, now I don't think Barbara was going to do that,’ soothed
Felicity, seeing anxiety, always so close to the surface with Mum – not far behind her skippy enthusiasm – shadow her face, her grey eyes widening in alarm.

  ‘Of course she wasn't,’ said Anna, staunchly, shooting me a look that said, Lay off, Mum. ‘You're just practising, as in, having a go, aren't you, Granny? For when the time comes to get some proper patients?’

  ‘That's it, dear,’ said Mum, brightening quickly, equilibrium restored – ever susceptible to flattery, I thought bitterly. ‘And do you know, if I keep it up this time, in only another six months I'll be there. D'you want to see my room, Anna love? Ooh, thank you, Ant, that's just what I need. Bring it down, would you? We're in the basement.’

  She wrapped her cardigan around her and turned to descend the little outside wrought-iron staircase that led to the basement. The others clattered obediently after her, Mum fishing out a key and chattering on about how marvellous it was for the surgery – surgery! – to have its own entrance. Anna turned at the bottom and shot me another warning glance up the stairwell: Don't be mean. Oh, right, so we were supposed to encourage her in this, were we? Pander to the fiction? Just as we'd all knocked back the Bach Flower Remedies and said, ‘Oh, yes, so much better, Barbara’? I breathed deeply and forced myself to follow them down.

  Mum proudly unlocked the door at the bottom trilling ‘Ta-dah!’ as she swung it back. We followed her inside. What had been her basement junk room, full of wicker chairs, old hair-dryers and general female detritus, had been transformed into a pink parlour. Womb music warbled low and candles glowed on every conceivable surface: all along the windowledge, on top of a filing cabinet – lit in our honour, no doubt – some just sitting in their own wax. A driftwood collage, which I recognized as one of Mum's early works, covered one wall, and on another, an Athena poster of Japanese homilies had been Blu-Tacked up. In a corner on the floor, what looked like a baby bath was full of pebbles, water trickling over them by way of a sort of Heath Robinson pump, a few ferns stuck here and there. Despite the lavender candles, which were horribly strong and put one in mind of one of the cheaper brands of lavatory cleaner, there was no disguising the whiff of damp. A blow heater going at full blast didn't do much to dispel it either. I picked up a little leaflet on the side, which told me that Metaphysical Therapy and Self-Development Counselling was also available at this establishment. I could feel myself getting crosser and crosser as the others wandered around, exclaiming and marvelling, touching the stones, reading the soothsaying, simultaneously hating myself. ‘It's harmless,’ Ant would say later. ‘Let her be.’

  ‘Just here, Barbara?’ he was saying now, as he and Anna unfolded the bed in the middle of the room on some sort of plinth she'd knocked up from concrete breeze blocks painted pink, under a fringed lamp. Much kinder than me, I thought miserably, watching them assemble it. But then she wasn't their mother, was she? Wasn't such an accurate reflection of themselves. But surely if Felicity and Ant, both professors, could manage not to scoff, I could too?

  ‘Looks super, Mum,’ I smiled, coming across. I bent down to pat the swirly seventies print of the ancient Z-bed mattress. ‘But maybe it needs a cover or something?’

  ‘Oh, I've got one!’ She instantly nipped over to collect a couple of pink towels from a pile on a chair and spread them out, detecting a hint of enthusiasm in my voice and pouncing on it pathetically, like a dog a scrap.

  ‘Shotgun be the first patient!’ announced Anna, quickly sitting on the bed. She stretched out on her back, grinning. ‘Come on Granny, heal me! Reiki style!’

  My mother was instantly all puffed-up importance and twiddling beads. ‘Well, I'll have to have absolute quiet, obviously,’ she said gravely. ‘And the lights dimmed. And no audience. Go on, off you go!’

  She fluttered her hands at us, cheeks pink, eyes shining.

  ‘Yes, go on,’ agreed Anna, flicking her hand at us dismissively. ‘Buzz off. Granny and I have got work to do.’

  As we left them alone and went to go upstairs, I shut the door behind me and glanced back. Through the little square of glass in the door I saw my mother, eyes shut, God help me, laying her hands on Anna's head and shutting her eyes. As Anna struggled not to smile, she made a sort of ‘hommmm…’ noise. I shuddered.

  Ant put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. ‘It's —’

  ‘Don't tell me it's harmless!’ I snapped, shaking him off and pushing past him up the wrought-iron staircase.

  Later, of course, after a large glass of wine, I relented and went down. Made myself available to Mum's healing hands.

  ‘She likes you to go a bit dreamy,’ Felicity whispered to me as we passed on the staircase, she having been the last patient: ‘a bit spacey. Oh, and you're supposed to feel her hands go hot when she gets to the trouble spots, which of course they don't, so just pretend. I'll put the spuds on.’ She nipped on up.

  This only served to send my blood pressure rocketing again, so that by the time Mum – a white coat over her Monsoon dress and cardi – got to work on me, having first fannied around changing the CD in a ghetto blaster that I recognized as being an old one of Anna's, and having washed her hands very assiduously and theatrically with surgical soap, I was about to pop.

  ‘Now, darling, just relax,’ she said, in the manner of a professional soothsayer. I shut my eyes tight, knowing it was the only way forward, but not before I'd seen Mum shut hers too, and look a bit hypnotic, pretending to swoon as she stood over me. Her hands were held aloft and horizontal, hovering over me like a pair of metal detectors. The force was with her.

  ‘Hommm…’ she started low and portentous, like a Buddhist monk.

  ‘Is the humming mandatory?’ I couldn't resist, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Oh, no, darling, most people don't do it. But I think it helps.’ Excellent news.

  ‘Hommm…’ Oh, get on with it.

  After a bit more humming and hovering, the hands eventually arrived, homing in on what she clearly believed to be my trouble spots. They came to rest on my shoulders, then slipped down my arms and over the backs of my hands, lingering on my fingers, stroking, like spiders. The temptation to shake her off was overwhelming.

  ‘Where is the pain, my child?’ she breathed gustily in her best clairvoyant manner.

  ‘In… my… head,’ I muttered back with studied irritation and in all truthfulness. I didn't need this. Really didn't need this. Not now. Not with Ant and ooh… Ant. Taken out of my troubles, as I had been for ten minutes by my mother's behaviour, as I remembered it rocked me like a little boat, caught in the slipstream of an ocean liner. I wobbled, a wave of sickness churning through me. Mum's hands came to rest on the top of my head. Hot hands, I thought in surprise as I lay there, slightly taken aback. Really quite hot.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she whispered, ‘it is in your head. I can feel it. Feel your pain. Can you feel the heat?’

  I opened one eye carefully to look at her. Her head was thrown back, mouth slack, eyes shut, trancelike.

  ‘Yes,’ I said uncertainly.

  She smiled, eyes still shut, head lolling. ‘I can too,’ she breathed. ‘Yes. It's channelling through. Transferring.’

  Transferring. Blimey.

  ‘I feel it flowing right through me now,’ she gasped.

  ‘Where does it go?’ I muttered, still eyeing her.

  ‘I store it for you,’ she gulped, wincing as if in pain. ‘Take it from you, and then – out! Out! Into the ether!’

  The hands were cooling now, and suddenly, her eyes sprang open. She stepped back and shook her head as if coming round from some sort of out-of-body experience. ‘Phew.’ She blinked. Looked exhausted. ‘Better?’ She peered anxiously at me.

  I sat up, swung my legs off the bed and shrugged. ‘So-so.’

  ‘But you felt the channelling? Felt the transference?’

  ‘A bit,’ I admitted grudgingly.

  She smiled. ‘And in time, you'll feel it more. When you're a little more open-minded. More suggestible.’

  ‘Right,
’ I said shortly, finding my shoes.

  I watched as she bustled around the room, taking off her white coat and hanging it up, blowing out candles now that her last patient had been seen, pausing occasionally, to touch her forehead, as if still a bit weak from her exertions. Then I noticed, as she bent down to blow out the last candle on the floor, that her cardigan fell forward on one side, as if it was weighted down.

  ‘Mum, what's in your pocket?’ I said sharply.

  She straightened up and swung around, her hand shooting into it protectively. She looked defensive.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oooh, Mum!’

  There then ensued a rather unseemly little tussle, the details of which I won't bore you with, and of which I'm not particularly proud either, but suffice to say, moments later, as we parted, panting, I was the victor. My right hand was held aloft, as she leaped for it, like a terrier for a ball, and in it, was a warm, squidgy object, like a bean bag, which I suddenly realized was hot.

  ‘A handwarmer!’ I spluttered, opening my palm and reading on the side that it was intended for shooting or skiing purposes. ‘Bloody hell, Mum!’

  ‘Only to get it going,’ she hissed. ‘Sometimes the transference needs a bit of jump-starting.’

  ‘So mean,’ said Anna later, as we drove home, her eyes hot with tears. ‘So harsh, Mum, to come marching in with it, and plonk it down on the kitchen table like Exhibit A. Poor, poor Granny!’

  She hadn't been poor so much as utterly defiant and unrepentant, I thought privately. Hadn't hung her head in shame, but had kept spouting the rubbish about jump-starting, and everyone else had soothed and agreed, and I'd been incandescent with irritation.

  ‘But can't you see you're just encouraging her?’ I'd spluttered, as Felicity – who always cooked, whether lunch was at her house or Mum's – put a roast chicken on the table. ‘She's only going to hoodwink some poor susceptible student out of their grant – can't you see it's immoral?’