The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Instead of which,’ Ant got to his feet, ‘I have to go over and offer him my hand. Apologize for wrecking his sister's wedding. For hitting him.’ He took my hand and helped me up too. ‘It's not a question of being good, Evie, it's a question of behaving well. However bad you might think you are, however much you feel opening your home to Stacey is a knee-jerk reaction to what, in your eyes, could have been a far worse situation, you still did the right thing. It's what we do that counts; not how we feel. It's what makes us civilized people. Distinguishes us from the beasts. Nurture over nature, see Prospero on this.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind. We can't control what goes on in our hearts, but we can help how we behave. And with that bit of cod philosophy out of the way, I shall go and shake the bastard by the hand.’ He grinned sheepishly at his feet. Turned to go

  ‘I love you, Ant.’

  He turned back, surprised. ‘I love you too.’ His eyes widened. His arms opened too and I walked into them. ‘More than you'll ever know,’ he whispered.

  We kissed, then, like lovers do. Not like a thoroughly married couple. And then Ant turned away and strolled along the river bank, back towards the marquee.

  32

  I crossed the bridge over the river and made my way through the long grass on the other side, and then up the lawn to the house. I appeared to be hugging myself, smiling foolishly at my shoes. Grinning even. I gave myself a stern little shake as I went through the back door into the kitchen. I was pretty sure this would have replaced the marquee as the venue for the continuing saga of any Milligan family dramas, and a euphoric, post-clinch haze, having effectively reaffirmed my wedding vows with husband, might not necessarily be what was called for right now. Sure enough, as I made my way upstairs towards Caro's bedroom, I met my nephews, quietly exiting it, shutting the door softly behind them.

  ‘We took her a cup of tea,’ whispered Henry, tiptoeing wide-eyed down the corridor towards me. ‘Is it a nervy breaky, Evie?’

  ‘Oh, no, she's just upset.’

  ‘Still.’ He glanced back, evidently disappointed, at his mother's door. ‘She might need a couple of nights at the Priory, don't you think? If she's got issues? Maybe we should give her a laxative to calm her down?’

  Jack snorted. ‘Sedative, you mean. A laxative will give her the trots.’

  ‘I'm sure she'll be fine,’ I assured them, shooing them downstairs and telling them to say as little as possible to Phoebe and Anna when they appeared. Although actually, I thought, as I opened the bedroom door and Caro rose, rigid from the waist from her pillows to stare at me, hair vertical, eyes seemingly rotating, a nice Valium sandwich might be just what my sister-in-law needed right now.

  ‘She took our bloody money!’ she blurted out, before I'd even shut the door behind me. ‘I was in there,’ she pointed a quivering finger to her ensuite bathroom, ‘on the bloody bog, quietly minding my own business, when I heard you and Tim talking about it – couldn't believe my ears! I practically stopped mid-crap, froze to the loo seat. Couldn't believe you were both so calm about it. I wiped my arse and went straight down to knock her front teeth out!’

  ‘You didn't, though, did you?’ I said nervously, as I sat down on the bed beside her. I hadn't exactly had a ringside seat, what with muscling through all those hats. ‘You only slapped her, didn't you?’

  ‘Tragically,’ she muttered, flopping back on her pillows. ‘Must be my upbringing. Couldn't make a fist. I wish I bloody had, though.’

  The door opened softly and Felicity stood in the doorway: very pale, very shaken, her hat at an unusual angle. I flung myself on top of Caro as she rose up from the marital bed like The Thing From the Swamp, all bared teeth and seasick-making eyes, a bit like Mr Rochester's first wife.

  ‘Arrrrghhh!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Caro! Pull yourself together!’ I yelled, pushing her shoulders down forcefully, wondering if I should slap her myself. ‘Felicity, I'm not convinced this is the moment,’ I squealed over my shoulder.

  Suddenly Caro went limp under my hands. Flopped submissively back into the pillows again.

  ‘Let her come,’ she said darkly, ‘why not? Let's see what she's got to say for herself. Bring it on, I say. I hope you've got a good lawyer, Felicity. You'll need one.’

  I cringed. Oh, this was horrible. Horrible. They were such friends. I wished I wasn't alone with them.

  ‘Yes, you're quite right,’ Felicity whispered, coming – rather bravely, I felt – to stand at the end of the bed. She looked almost unrecognizable. Her lipstick was smudged round her mouth, her pallor deathly, her eyes circled with grey. I saw her take a breath to steady herself. ‘I will need a lawyer. Because I don't have any defence. I did take your money.’

  Oh Lord. I crumpled inside. Felt Caro stiffen beside me, as, simultaneously, Tim appeared in the open doorway. He didn't come in, just stayed there, quietly propped on a crutch.

  ‘But not immediately. I didn't know about that letter,’ she glanced at me, then round at Tim, ‘until well after your father died. Like you, I assumed he died intestate. After all, he hadn't told me he'd made a will, and we were happily married, so surely I'd know? Normally it's something husbands and wives do together, isn't it?’

  I nodded. Yes it was. Ant and I had made one together. Relatively recently in fact, promoted by Dad's not doing so.

  ‘First wives, perhaps!’ snarled Caro, looking and sounding now like something out of Dante's upper circle of hell.

  Felicity went on, ignoring her, ‘Evie and I took that room apart, didn't we?’ I nodded enthusiastically again; oh please, let this be all right. ‘Drawer by drawer, file by file, box by box and we found nothing. And then I moved out and you moved in,’ she looked steadily at Caro, ‘because even though it wasn't written down that you should have the house, I knew it was what Victor wanted. He'd told me so. But I could have stayed. First or second wife, the house was legally mine. In a court of law it would automatically have gone to me.’ Caro looked less sure of herself; glanced quickly at her husband. Tim's face was hard to read.

  ‘So when did you find the letter?’ I prompted gently.

  ‘Almost a year later, when I'd been at my house in Fairfield Avenue for a good nine months. I went to MOT the car. Found the log book in the bureau, together with the grey plastic folder with all the documents. Inside was the tax certificate and the latest MOT, and tucked behind that, the piece of paper.’

  I remembered Maroulla telling me she'd put it back when she'd copied it, not in Dad's messy drawer where she thought it would get lost, but in a very important-looking folder, with certificates. Birth certificates, she'd thought. I swallowed.

  ‘It was a beautiful summer's day, I remember it vividly. I even remember what I was wearing – white trousers, pink shirt – and I was happy. I'd been deadheading my pots that morning, on the terrace – geraniums, stocks – and for the first time for ages, I felt my life was getting back on track. I had this dear little house, my job; I no longer had Victor, it was true, but I felt… I could do this. Go on without him. And I felt he was watching over me too, urging me on. Then all of a sudden, my life came to another juddering halt, just as it had a year before. I stood at the bureau and stared at the paper. I felt sick. I had to sit down. I went hot, and then cold. I was frightened.’ She looked, for the first time, directly at Caro. ‘I was nearly sixty years old. I was alone. I had no children, no family. And soon, no house.’

  ‘You could have gone back into college,’ Caro muttered, but less forcefully. ‘Got a flat.’

  ‘Could I? Those flats are fought over tooth and nail, as Evie knows, and in my college they were all allocated. Maybe I could have pulled rank, but how much rank did I have? I was no longer head of the department. I was a part-timer, working three days a week. I'd had my day. And I'd given up a flat once before, don't forget. Might the powers that be not gently suggest that actually, maybe I should think about retiring, instead?’

  ‘Well, then you could have bought a o
ne-bedroom flat off the Cowley Road!’ said Caro savagely. ‘Near the industrial estate. Lived according to your means!’

  Felicity lowered her head. Didn't answer.

  ‘What did you do with the letter?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing, for a while. I sat and stared at it for ages, then I put it back, my hand shaking, I remember, in the top drawer of my desk. Under lots of papers. Buried it, like a dog would a bone. But almost hourly, I'd go back in the room, dig it out again, and stare at it. Have to sit down. Then quickly put it back again. It was dated six months before his death, but I couldn't decide what state of mind he'd written it in. I didn't know if it really was his last wish, or just a whim, late one night, after half a bottle of whisky. I didn't know if it was legal either, but that was irrelevant, really. What mattered was – had he wanted it to happen? If I'm honest, he'd said to me once that leaving Tim the farm with no money was a millstone round—’

  ‘Of course it was!’ shrieked Caro, rising up from her pillows again. ‘It was like cutting his legs off! Like giving us the wagon without the wheels, the cart without the horse, whatever fucking farmyard analogy you care to mention! It left us impotent, and working so hard,’ so hard, she quivered with rage, ‘you've no idea. We had to keep the farm going by any means we could. We struggled day and night, while you sat watching, knowing, in your pretty Queen Anne house with its terrace and its wrought-iron railings, not only with your salary from the University but with Tim's inheritance as well!’

  Felicity swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘yes, that's true. But my salary was my due, Caro. I worked for it.’ Her voice quavered. ‘And my husband's money, I'd thought was my due. We were married, after all. I was the wife, albeit the second one, who usually retains the estate when her husband dies. And as I said, I could, legally, have taken the house, the land—’

  ‘Which would have been entirely against his wishes.’

  ‘Exactly, so I didn't. But I could have. But we all agreed, didn't we?’ She glanced around beseechingly. ‘Tim and Caro should have the farm, Evie – well, not much…’

  ‘I didn't need much,’ I said hastily.

  ‘And I'd receive whatever money—’

  ‘But that was before you found the letter!’ Caro exploded. ‘And you say you didn't know how to read it – well, I don't believe you. I know why you went hot and cold, Felicity. You saw in that piece of paper that Victor Milligan wanted his son to carry on the farm for the next generation, for Tim, and then Jack, and then maybe Jack's son, to do the same. For not just four, but five, maybe six generations of Milligans to farm this land, as Victor's great-grandfather had done. You suddenly saw in a flash, in a tiny scrap of paper, that you weren't important in the scheme of things; that set against a barrage of history, against the pull of the land, you were nothing. You were just the wife!’

  ‘And so are you,’ said Tim, quietly.

  It was the first time he'd spoken. Caro's eyed darted to him. She opened her mouth to object, but his face silenced her. He limped into the room.

  ‘How much money did he leave? I forget.’

  ‘Almost two hundred thousand,’ said Felicity. ‘Which I put down as a deposit on the house.’

  ‘Not a great deal.’

  ‘Not a great deal!’ squealed Caro. ‘Believe you me, my darling, two hundred thousand pounds would go an awfully long way to—’

  ‘Not a great deal in the scheme of things,’ he interrupted, deliberately using her words. She closed her mouth.

  ‘But still, quite a lot for Dad to have?’ I suggested. I remembered at the time being surprised it was there. But pleased for Felicity. ‘Considering how broke we always were?’

  ‘It was his sinking fund,’ said Tim. ‘I knew about it. Grandpa made most of it in the good days, but Dad never touched it. He lived pretty much hand to mouth, the idea being that one day, hopefully, he'd buy more land with it, make the farm viable. It was his contingency fund.’ He turned back to Felicity. ‘Did you ever consider showing us the note?’

  ‘Many times. I often picked up the phone and thought – I must tell them, I must. I was in agonies. I knew it was deceitful, but as every day went by and I hadn't told you, as weeks, months… well, the awful thing was, it got easier. I still had to live with myself, of course—’

  ‘But you had your charity works to salve your conscience,’ Caro said bitterly. ‘To make you feel better about yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Felicity agreed, miserably. ‘Trying to be the person I knew I wasn't.’

  ‘But not a bad person, Felicity,’ I said quickly. She shot me a grateful look. ‘I'm not saying I'd have done the same,’ I said, as Caro shot me a venomous one. ‘But – who knows? All I'm saying is I can see how it happened, how Felicity got herself into the pickle. No one knew about it, she was the only one who had the letter—’

  ‘Apart from Maroulla, as you discovered when you went to see her in the hospice, which must have given you a really nasty shock,’ interjected Caro. ‘But then again, Maroulla was dying, wasn't she, Felicity? So soon, no one would know. Marvellous.’ She folded her arms grimly.

  There was a silence as we digested this. But I could feel my blood rising.

  ‘OK, Caro, tell me something.’ I turned to her. ‘If you found a letter – not even a proper letter, a scrap of paper – in the study, tucked, ooh, I don't know, behind a picture maybe, that one of Grandpa Milligan over the fireplace, written in Dad's hand, saying that actually, he wanted to leave the whole shooting match to Felicity, that there was no point struggling on with the farm any more, that Tim would be flogging a dead horse, what would you have done? How quick would you have been to call a family pow-wow? Hand your house back to Felicity and move back to the leaky little bungalow in Rutlers Lane with the fungus on the kitchen ceiling? And let's, just for the sake of argument, say that as you stood in front of Grandpa Milligan at the fireplace reading the letter, the fire was alight? In the grate? What would you have done, Caro?’

  I fixed her with my eyes. She looked back defiantly, but nevertheless, her gaze was guarded. I knew Caro. Knew she'd protect, not just her own interests, but her family's interests, her children's, at all costs. I knew about the indomitable strength women have in that department, their intractability, their tenacity when it comes to family. Had felt it myself very recently. If she saw something precious begin to slip from where she'd hung it so carefully, boy, would she hook it back up again.

  ‘Well, I'd like to think—’ she began disingenuously.

  ‘Bollocks!’ I roared.

  There was a silence. Caro and I glared knowingly at each other. She looked away first.

  ‘I'll give it back, of course,’ said Felicity quietly. ‘I'll sell up, and then you'll have your money, Caro. Every penny.’

  Tim cleared his throat. ‘Felicity—’

  ‘No,’ she held up her hand; shut her eyes, ‘I mean it. It's what I should have done years ago. And, you know, it'll be a relief. I haven't enjoyed living like this. The guilt has weighed very heavy on my shoulders. I'm glad you all know. And I'm very, very sorry,’ she added in a faltering voice. ‘The house is as good as sold.’

  We all looked at our hands. Even Caro had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  Tim spoke first. ‘Thank you, Felicity, but there's no need. Even with the money, it's still not enough to keep us going here. We'd still have to sell up.’

  I glanced at him, shocked.

  ‘We'd already decided that, hadn't we, darling?’ he said gently, turning to his wife. Caro didn't speak. Her face was very pale. She looked in real pain now. Suddenly I understood where all this anger had come from. And possibly been misdirected.

  ‘Look at me,’ he appealed to us, holding out his arms crucifix-style, his crutch hanging from his wrist. His legs, we knew without looking, were splayed from various operations. They might meet at the knees, but you could kick a football through his ankles. ‘This isn't a farmer. This isn't a man up to working the land.’

  Even his wife
didn't have the gall to gainsay this. Even Caro, who'd been in denial for years, kept her counsel, her eyes on the bedcover.

  ‘This is a man who needs a desk job,’ he finished bitterly. ‘A man who needs to stop wincing every time he goes to work in the morning. I can't do this any more.’

  He limped to the window and gazed out, perhaps to hide his face. He leaned heavily on his crutch. As he stood there looking out, it occurred to me that no amount of money would have found a way around this. We all, Tim included, had fumbled and fudged our way round this for years, around what was essentially a disability. Felicity's money wouldn't have helped, and looking at Caro, I felt she knew this too. Her eyes were less bright now; no longer burning with injustice. There was a resigned inevitability about the slump of her shoulders on the pillows, as if the fight had gone out of her. I also believe, in her heart, she knew that even if Felicity had come round in a panic, waving the scrap of paper, Tim, whose call it was essentially, would have screwed it up, said – forget it, Felicity, it's not worth the paper it's written on. We can't possibly take your money on the strength of this. What's done is done; we are where we are – silencing, in one glance, the protests of his outraged wife. I don't say that simply because I know my brother, because he's a nice guy, but because it seems to me that if people behave well, it encourages others to do the same. Who knows, maybe even Caro might have been impressed; wrong-footed.

  Yet when people behave badly… I looked at Felicity. She was not one I'd associate with human frailty, but fear is a powerful motivator, and once it had gripped her, once she'd found herself looking into what seemed like an abyss, her whole future dropping away from her, and once she'd given in to the vertigo, failed to rush round here, or pick up the phone, I could see how it became harder to inch towards the edge again. Much easier not to. And as the months and the years slipped by and no lightning bolt struck her from the heavens, no divine finger pinned her wriggling to the floor, as the world, in effect, revolved as usual, as she'd given her lectures, done her meals on wheels, pottered at home in her garden, as life went on, so the whole wretched business would have faded into the background. But maybe as she climbed the stairs to bed one Sunday evening, after lunch here at the farm, cooked by Caro, haggard with the perpetual motion that was her life, and maybe around the time Henry had been bullied at school and his parents had tried but failed to afford a private one for him, maybe as Tim had come in from the fields, yet again well after dusk, shattered, maybe the guilt had closed in on her then and she'd had trouble going to sleep. Maybe after all, as she'd said, it hadn't been worth it.