by Minnie Darke
Arie placed something on the table, and although Evie tried not to look at it – tried, instead, to look over the top of it, pretending it didn’t exist – she saw at a glance how perfectly the gift was wrapped. She took the seat opposite Arie’s, one foot tucked beneath her, and for a moment he closed his eyes, as if looking for an autocue behind his eyelids.
‘The other night,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think clearly in the moment, and I handled everything very badly. If I could go back and do it all again, I would still have turned the car around. But I could have taken you to a café, or a bar, and I could have told you everything I need to tell you now.’
Evie could see how carefully he was choosing his words, and she suspected he might be about to mete the story out to her in tiny, bite-sized chunks, when what she wanted was for him to spit it out quickly.
‘The woman in the car,’ Arie said. ‘It’s nothing like you must think. She’s . . . she’s the mother of someone I loved very much.’
Mother? The woman in the car was . . . Diana Clare’s mother? Questions piled up on her tongue, but before she could get them into any sensible order, Arie began to tell her the whole story . . . Diana, the plane crash, his ongoing and complex relationship with Belinda Clare. As he spoke, Evie was reminded of the way he’d looked in the television interview she’d seen on the internet. He was so sincere, so vulnerable, that she knew it was going to be difficult to remain angry with him.
‘Yesterday was Diana’s birthday,’ he said, and the smile he gave her had a twist of grief at its corners. ‘That’s why I’ve not come to see you sooner. That day . . . it’s, kind of, set aside. And the other night, do you see? I knew that if Belinda had driven to town on the night before Diana’s birthday, she’d be upset – and I was right about that. Seeing you would have made it worse.’
For the first time since he’d started talking, Evie suspected he wasn’t being entirely truthful.
‘You didn’t want her to know you were out on a date,’ she said. It was not a question.
Arie winced. ‘No. No, I didn’t. I’m so sorry, Evie.’
The woman he’d wanted to hide Evie from was not his lover, then, but the guardian of a memory. He’d felt the need to choose, and he had chosen. One dinner date, one kiss – Evie knew these had to seem like flimsy things compared to the years of history he shared with Diana’s mother. He’d done what he’d done out of care. Evie understood all of this, but the fact remained that he’d humiliated her. It was all so very complicated.
‘I should have told you. About Diana.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Evie hoped this sounded only like the genuine question it was, and not a recrimination.
‘I liked the way it felt when you didn’t know.’
Evie bit her lip. ‘I did, though. I did know, about the plane crash, and Diana.’
‘You did?’
‘I may have Googled you,’ she confessed, her blush refreshing itself.
Arie looked puzzled. ‘You knew, and you didn’t say anything?’
‘I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.’ She paused. ‘It must have broken your heart, to lose her.’
‘It did. I should have told you that, too. By the river, with you . . . it was the first time since she died that I tried to do anything with my heart.’
At this, Evie felt herself soften a little further.
‘I know I’ve blown this thing with you. Irreparably,’ he said.
Yes, she thought, you have.
‘But maybe what I have to take away from it is that I’ve got a bit more work to do, on myself, before I’m really ready to move on. I hurt you, I know I did, and I’m so sorry for that. Right now, I don’t feel like a very safe pair of hands.’
It was, Evie thought, a brave thing to admit.
‘So, have you decided where you’re going?’ he asked, gesturing to the folded map.
‘Not yet,’ she said, realising that she didn’t want him to know any more than he already did. Her anger had dissipated, but she could still feel all the edges of her disappointment. She wanted to have her walls in place, and to hide as much of herself as possible behind them.
‘I had hoped to make it up to you,’ he said. ‘To see if I could persuade you to let me take you out for dinner again – just a friendly dinner – and see if I could do the ending part a bit better. But I have to go away tomorrow. I won’t be back until Sunday.’
‘I check out of here on Monday,’ Evie said.
‘I’d reschedule, but it’s my sister’s wedding.’
‘I see.’
‘She’s getting married in the Blue Mountains. It’s a long drive.’
‘You’re driving?’ Evie asked, perplexed.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I see. Because you don’t—’ Fly.
‘No.’
After a pause, Arie pushed the box towards her. ‘This is for you. To say I’m sorry. I thought of flowers, but . . . I didn’t know what kind you liked.’
Evie wondered what it could be. Chocolates, maybe? She untied the bow and peeled away the paper, and inside the wrapping she found a wooden box. Its lid – about the same dimensions as a postcard – was carved with an intricate paisley-like pattern.
‘You and I – we talked,’ Arie said, as she regarded this rather beautiful thing, ‘about the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Do you remember?’
She did.
‘Go on,’ Arie urged.
Evie lifted the lid and could not help but smile. The box was filled to about a third of the way up its sides with what appeared to be white sand, although the grains had a particular sparkle to them that made Evie think there might be some glitter involved, too. Wedged into the sand at an angle was a small glass vial, stoppered with a cork. Inside this little vessel was a slip of paper: a message in a bottle. Evie opened it and used the tips of her fingernails to catch the edge of the paper and draw it out. The words were – carefully, elegantly – handwritten.
eselverue
n. the desire, brought about by the knowledge that one has made a grievous error, to travel through the universe to an alternative Earth and merge, there, with a version of oneself who had the good sense not to have made the same error.
Evie commanded her face to be still.
‘It’s my contribution . . . to the dictionary,’ Arie said, leaning forward, clearly anxious to know whether or not she liked it.
Evie was still processing. He’d invented a word. Just for her.
‘You said you like unusual words,’ he prompted.
Eselverue, Evie silently repeated. Who in the world, she thought, hadn’t at one time or another – after doing a stupid or regrettable thing – felt a pang of eselverue?
‘Thank you,’ she said, moved. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘Can you forgive me?’
Of course I can. ‘Maybe. What happened was pretty shitty.’
‘It was,’ he said, ‘deeply shitty.’
‘I have had worse endings to dates, but not very much worse,’ Evie said, with a laugh that went dangerously close to letting out one or two of the tears she was holding fiercely in check.
‘I can’t tell you how much I wish this had all gone differently. I’m sorry that we seem to be out of time.’
Despite an urge to placate him, to soothe him, Evie said nothing. Then she saw his brown eyes brighten a little as he considered something.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could come. To the wedding, I mean.’ He looked as surprised as she was, as if these words had come out of his mouth before he was quite certain that he’d intended to say them. ‘I know it’s insane to be driving all that way. You probably wouldn’t want to, but . . .’
She thought.
‘You did say you’d never been to a wedding.’
He gave what she assumed to be his best imitation of a careless shrug. It was true that it was a crazy idea, but Evie was fond of road trips. And, truth be told, she’d love to take a glimpse inside his world, to meet Arie’s mother and f
ather, and his sisters.
‘So, you’d like . . . a friend,’ she clarified, ‘to go with you to the wedding?’
‘Very much.’
‘I didn’t think you could invite extra guests to a wedding at the last minute? I thought there were, you know, seating plans and so on?’
‘It’s not that kind of wedding,’ he rushed to say, and then he was rambling, about how Evie would be doing him a favour, really, since they could share the driving a bit, but only if she wanted to, obviously, and how there were two bedrooms in the place he’d rented, but if that was too awkward then she could stay there alone, and he could go to the guesthouse where the rest of his family was staying, and . . .
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Around nine.’
‘And your sister. Are you sure she wouldn’t mind?’
‘Heidi? God, no. She’d be thrilled.’
The days between now and her ferry booking were empty. What else would she be doing?
‘Well?’ Arie prompted.
‘I’ll . . . think about it,’ she promised.
ARIE WAS FAR from sure which way Evie would decide. But in the morning, there she was, standing in the street with an overnight bag at her feet. Coming out of his house, he saw her before she saw him, which gave him a minute to study her in her huge tortoiseshell sunglasses, white T-shirt, floral skirt and strappy brown leather shoes. There was something classic about her – perhaps it was her haircut – that made her look timeless, and it occurred to him that if the Tavistock Row backdrop were stripped away and replaced with the hillside of a Greek island some decades in the past, she could easily have passed for a tourist there, waiting for a car to stop on the dusty white road and collect her.
She’s actually going to come, he thought, allowing himself for the first time to understand just how much he’d wanted her to.
‘You’re joining me then?’ he asked, trying not to seem over-eager.
‘Looks that way.’
‘Take your bag, madam?’
‘Why thank you, sir.’
By the time they’d stopped to grab takeaway coffees and croissants, Arie had worked out that if Evie was holding on to any bad feelings about the Belinda Clare situation, she hadn’t brought them with her on the road. Instead, she’d packed an iPod with a ready-made playlist – ‘a very long one’, she told him.
As they passed through the city fringe, he was profoundly aware of her in the passenger seat beside him – of the reflecting light that bounced off the lenses of her sunglasses, of the strawberry birthmark on the side of her right calf, of the way her lips moved ever so slightly to the words of the songs. A few flakes of croissant pastry clung to her T-shirt and littered the fabric of her skirt. She’d put her bare feet up on the dash, so that there was now a subtle, smudgy line of toeprints along the inside of the windscreen.
On her playlist, there were songs he knew and a lot he didn’t, but all of them were joyful in a mellow kind of way. While the music played, not too loud, not too soft, Arie and Evie talked easily, their conversation fading in and out without any pressure to keep up the chatter. She didn’t ask him to share any more about Diana, and for his part he didn’t press her on the subject of her future plans. What he felt, and almost wanted to say to her, was risky as a compliment. But if he’d gone ahead and said it, he’d have meant it as high praise – there was nothing about her that irritated him.
She burst open a bag of jelly babies. ‘What colour do you want?’
‘Green.’
‘Seriously? You like the green ones?’
‘You don’t?’
‘No. Yuck. I only like the red and orange ones. The purple ones are okay.’
‘Nah – green and yellow, all the way.’
‘My God,’ she said, with a burst of disbelieving laughter. ‘How good is this? Wide open road, music on the stereo, and a perfect match of jelly-baby preferences.’
In glances, Arie observed her. It was clear that her sunglasses were cheap, that her skirt was handmade from thin cotton, and that the shoes she’d discarded on the floor of the car had seen better days. She reminded him of the girls he’d known as a student – the ones who’d been able to cobble their style together on the most threadbare of shoestrings. But in the time he’d spent with her, he’d never had even the vaguest sense that she was in any way discontented with her lot. She was one of those lucky people, he thought, who were easily delighted by the small things in life.
They ate dinner on the road and arrived at their destination at twilight. The owners of the cottage, who lived in the nearby homestead, had left a couple of the interior lights switched on, so that the casement windows appeared as lozenges of amber set into the dark timbered walls. The honeymoon effect was not lost on Evie, at the wheel now, as she carefully threaded the Renault through a narrow gate and brought it to a standstill on the gravel patch that lay a short distance from the cottage. Nearby, a flock of geese nested like a scattering of white boulders in the grass.
A sensor light flicked on as Evie and Arie approached the front door, so they could see the large old-fashioned key waiting there in the lock. Indoors – where the timber of the walls and furniture was everywhere softened by tasteful rugs and cushions – the scene was no less inviting, nor was it any less clear what assumptions the owners had made when Arie had messaged to say there would now be two guests instead of one. A lamp had been left on in the loft bedroom, which had steeply sloping walls, so that a triangle of light glowed at the top of a rustic timber staircase. A pair of deep-bowled wine glasses and a bottle of local Shiraz stood on the kitchen counter, along with a handwritten note that said, We hope you have a magical stay!
Evie gravitated to the bookshelf while Arie loaded their provisions into the fridge, then opened various of the downstairs doors to locate the bathroom and second bedroom. They had been so easy with each other for all of the car journey, but now they had arrived in this new space, Evie could feel a charge of tension in the air. There were things to navigate and negotiate, and in response to this they had both become awkward and quiet.
‘Which room would you like?’ Arie asked.
Evie didn’t mind, but she knew that if she said so, this could only be followed by Arie saying he didn’t mind either, and so it would go, each of them trying to be more considerate than the other.
‘I’ll take the loft room,’ she suggested.
‘Great. I’ll, um, have this one.’
Evie took her bag upstairs, where a dormer window set into the rough-timbered walls gave a view over the semi-darkness of the grassy yard. On the foot of the low futon bed, a pair of bath towels had been set out, their corners overlapping. A silver-wrapped chocolate had been placed on each side of the invitingly turned-back covers.
It would have so been nice, Evie thought. That is, if she and Arie had been the guests they were supposed to be.
The loft bed was soft in a feathery way that made Evie feel extravagant, and its yielding mattress dragged her down into a deep, deep sleep. When she woke, it was to the smell of coffee and frying bacon. She got out of bed and peered down over a railing into the kitchen below, where Arie, believing himself all alone, was humming a thread of song as he supervised eggs poaching in a pan and bread toasting under the grill.
He’d set the table for two, including a couple of orange marigolds in a water glass, and everything Evie saw returned her to yesterday’s atmosphere of holiday, escape and calm.
‘Morning,’ she said, coming down the stairs.
‘Morning,’ Arie said, smiling up at her. ‘I made you coffee, but I don’t know how you take it.’
‘Just white.’
‘Easy to remember, then. Same as me.’
There was an incongruity about the situation that made Evie smile. On the one hand, there was something ridiculously intimate about standing there with Arie in that small kitchen and having him pass her a steaming mug of coffee. At the same time, though, she was such a stranger to him that he didn’t ev
en know if she took milk or sugar.
‘So, I’ve been worrying,’ she said, watching him expertly plate up the toast, poached eggs and crispy bacon.
‘About?’
‘My clothes for the wedding. Everything I own has either been in a garage for several years or else it’s spent half its life scrunched into a backpack.’
He handed her a plate and gave her a reassuring smile. ‘It really won’t be a fussy kind of wedding. Promise. You could come in a hessian sack if you wanted to.’
‘Well, that’s probably fortunate.’
The ceremony wasn’t to be held until mid-afternoon, but Arie was expected in the late morning at the guesthouse where the rest of his family was getting ready. After breakfast, and having taken lengthy turns in the bathroom, Arie and Evie emerged from the cottage.
She’d chosen a well-travelled favourite of a dress – simple and sleeveless – that held a subtle shimmer in its deep green fabric. From her stored clothes, she’d retrieved a black wrap of fine wool; back at Tavistock Row she’d sat down with a needle and thread to repair a couple of moth holes in order to make it presentable. The shoes, too, had come out of storage, and although they were pretty – black and strappy with a kitten heel – they hadn’t ever fitted all that brilliantly. She’d straightened her near-black hair until it shone, and while she’d kept the rest of her make-up subtle, she’d run amok with the most dramatic mascara she owned.
‘Perfect,’ Arie told her.
He looked comfortable but a little dressy in a pair of light brown pants and an off-white linen shirt, tucked in, but with no tie. She could smell some kind of scent and it struck her as warm and expensive, like honey and petrol together – but in a good way.
Under different circumstances, Evie thought, this would have been the perfect moment – here on the grass, outside this quaint little cottage – for Arie to offer her his arm, or to reach out and take her hand, and from the look on his face, she thought he knew it, too. As if trying to keep himself out of trouble, he slid his hands into his pockets.