Cover Your Eyes

by Adele Geras

  ‘Sure, ‘I said. ‘No probs. Only you haven’t told me who’s coming. Who am I meant to be looking after?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Luke. Luke Fielden. I should’ve said. He does seem keen on Salix House so I want to encourage him as much as possible.’

  ‘Okay, not a problem. Best get on; the girls’ll be out in a moment.’

  ‘Thanks so much, Megan.’

  I sighed. I really didn’t relish the thought of this. Would it be okay to give him a cup of tea and leave him in the sitting room by himself? Probably not. Just thinking about someone other than Eva owning Salix House made me feel sad for her, so I didn’t imagine I was going to have too much fun hearing how much he was looking forward to moving in.

  Dee came running out to find me.

  ‘Megan, can you come? Bridie’s crying in the cloakroom.’

  I set off after her. ‘Why’s she crying?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s lost her hat. Mr Shoreley’s helping her look for it.’

  Mr Shoreley and Bridie were waiting for us.

  ‘Found it!’ Bridie said, happily. She ran up to me and hugged me. ‘I was very sad. I thought it was lost.’

  ‘Even if it was lost,’ I said, hugging her back, ‘it wouldn’t have been a disaster. We’d have got you another hat, Bridie.’

  ‘But I like this one. Granny made it.’

  She pulled it on to her head and I saw what she meant. It was only a simple knitted hat, but the pretty pink flower stitched to the side of it did make it special.

  I turned to Mr Shoreley. ‘It was kind of you to help look for it.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m good at looking. I’ve got X-ray eyes.’

  ‘He hasn’t really got X-ray eyes,’ Bridie explained. ‘That’s a joke. He’s always joking.’

  I laughed and said, ‘Well, X-ray eyes or not, thanks very much, Mr Shoreley. It would have been a shame to lose this nice hat.’

  ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘Please call me Tom.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And I’m Megan. Now, let’s get home, girls. We’ve got a visitor coming in a while.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Dee. ‘Bye, Mr Shoreley.’

  A chorus of goodbyes went on then. Dee and Bridie to Mr Shoreley … Tom … and him to them and me to him and him to me. At last we were in the playground. Dee was skipping.

  When we got back to Salix House, I gave the girls a glass of milk and a biscuit each while Phyllis cooked supper, and put them in front of the television in the sitting room. Just before five, I went upstairs to comb my hair and put on a bit of make-up ready for Luke Fielden’s visit. You could go to the downstairs loo, I told myself, but I knew that I wasn’t going to step into that room if I didn’t absolutely have to.

  The doorbell rang as I was crossing the hall. I went to open the door and there he was, smiling. To be fair, the smile didn’t leave his face when he saw that I was neither Rowena nor Phyllis.

  ‘Hello, Mr Fielden, do come in,’ I said, stepping back into the hall. He was tall, I noticed.

  ‘Oh …’ He only hesitated for a moment. Then: ‘It’s you. You very kindly moved your car for me.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m Megan Pritchard. I’m working here now, I look after the girls.’ As we walked towards the sitting room I said, ‘Rowena’s been delayed in traffic but do sit down in here, she won’t be long. I’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  ‘That’s okay. A cup of tea would be great. Can I help?’

  ‘No, thanks, that’s fine. I won’t be a moment.’

  He sat down and I went to the kitchen. I’d just got everything together when my phone pinged to announce a text message.

  ‘May be further delayed. Do show LF round yourself if he doesn’t mind. He wants to go over house once more before offer. Thanx.’

  *

  They left the London house in Conor’s car. Eva hated being driven, she much preferred being in the driver’s seat but the firmness and determination with which both Rowena and Conor had insisted on the big car indicated to Eva that they didn’t really trust her behind the wheel. Perhaps they thought she was too old to drive but that was nonsense. Her eyesight was excellent and so were her reactions. Still, if she was insisting that the stairs in this London house were going to be beyond her, then she’d better also accept that she’d be demoted to a mere passenger.

  Eva closed her eyes and tried to breathe evenly. She had no intention of continuing her argument with Rowena on the way back, and the best way to avoid arguments in a car was to go to sleep. If you couldn’t really fall asleep, because you were churned up by what you’d been doing all day long, then you pretended and no one was any the wiser. Rowena and Conor wouldn’t mind. They began to talk about the house. They were excited about it. They won’t discuss what to do with me, Eva told herself, even if they do believe I’m truly asleep. It occurred to her that they probably knew she was putting it on as a kind of avoidance strategy. Maybe she wasn’t as good an actress as she thought she was, or perhaps they could tell from her breathing that she was simply opting out of conversation.

  The rhythm of the car must have lulled her properly to sleep because after a while she felt herself jolting awake and Rowena was saying, ‘Are you okay, Ma? You were talking. I couldn’t understand what you were saying … you must have been dreaming.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Eva said. ‘Just dozed off for a minute.’

  Forcing her eyes to stay open, Eva looked out at the autumn landscape sliding past the windows at high speed. I can’t even enjoy the trees, she thought. The dream is still there. She didn’t have to make much effort to recall it because she’d been having the same dream, on and off and in one form or another, for as long as she could remember.

  There was always a space. A wide, dark space. It had a vaulted wooden roof. A grey floor stretched out in front of her for yards and yards. In the early days of the dream, Eva didn’t know where it was but then there was a train somewhere, so she assumed it was a railway depot of some kind. She knew the train was there, even though she couldn’t see it. The floor was grey concrete. Darkness surrounded her, and rose into the roof. The strange light, bright and white, came from round lamps, like the headlights of a car. Bitter, deadening cold. Eva was squashed in somewhere. The space above her head was nothing but black. She reached out her hand and felt rough wood. Then she curled herself up behind something, some kind of crate. She hated the scratchiness when her fingers touched the wood. She wanted to cry but knew she mustn’t. She heard words and they sounded funny. They were in her ear, whispering, but they came from far away, too. Eva had forgotten most of the German she’d known as a child and she’d been careful about never relearning it. During the War, it had been a form of self-defence: if you didn’t know any German words, no one could say you were German, could they? No one could even think you had anything to do with the enemy. Still, she knew what the words in the dream meant. She remembered the voice clearly. A girl’s voice saying: Deck deine Augen. Cover your eyes, that meant. Each time she heard it the phrase went to her heart and settled there. Cover your eyes, the voice from far away always said to her. Zähl bis hundert. Count to a hundred. In the dream, she thought, we were playing hide-and-seek.

  *

  We’d had a cup of tea together in the sitting room and I did try to be as friendly as I could. I couldn’t say I liked Luke any better than I had the first time we’d met. There was something about him that made me feel on edge in some way: uncomfortable. I suppose he couldn’t help how he looked (as though the rest of the world was somehow failing to meet his expectations) but his voice and manner made it worse. He seemed impatient at being kept waiting and obviously would have rather Rowena was the one showing him round. Well, I thought, that makes two of us. He drank his tea quite quickly, I noticed, so I thought, okay, you’ve made it clear you don’t want to sit and chit-chat with the hired help, so I’ll offer to speed things up.

  ‘Rowena just texted me,’ I said. ‘She’s asked me to show you round, if you don’t mind.’


  ‘Would you? Really? Only it’d be a tremendous help to me. I’m in a bit of a rush.’

  ‘Okay, that’s fine. We can start whenever you’re ready.’

  He stood up. ‘That’s great.’

  ‘I’m happy to take you round, of course, but I’ve only been here a very short time so I don’t know much of the history of the house or anything.’

  ‘That’s no problem. Tell me about yourself instead. Rowena told me you were a journalist. Hadn’t you written something about Mrs Conway?’

  It sounded funny, hearing Eva called that. Did I want to tell him about myself? He was at least being polite, asking me questions about myself. I said, ‘I used to work at a fashion magazine, but I was only an editorial assistant. I’ve left there now.’

  Would he want to know why? I was already framing a reply when he said, ‘Do you come from round here?’

  ‘I’m from Northampton.’

  ‘Do you get to go back very often?’

  ‘Not that much, any more. Actually, my mother died quite recently and my dad lives in New Zealand.’

  We were already walking around, and although he’d seemed preoccupied with what he was looking at and appeared not to be paying attention to what I was saying, he stopped when I said that and turned to look at me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said and for a moment his light brown eyes looked kinder in the long, rather forbidding face.

  We moved on to the next room and I was glad he didn’t ask me any other questions. He was busy now examining everything. Tops of doors. Corners of floors where they met the walls. I must have seemed a bit bemused because he said: ‘I’ve got some experience of looking at property. You’d be amazed how few people notice things like the slant of a floor. The fact that door frames aren’t straight. That sort of stuff.’

  ‘Are you a surveyor or something?’

  ‘Used to be. Run a property development company now.’

  What I said next came out before I could think about what I was saying. ‘Are you going to develop Salix House?’

  ‘I certainly am, if I buy it. I reckon it’d make a really interesting and unusual small hotel and spa. Or a really wonderful private house. I can see all sorts of possibilities. What do you think?’

  I couldn’t tell him what I thought. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you in the first place. It’s not my business.’

  He smiled at me and said, ‘Shall we go upstairs now? I’m sorry if you don’t approve but I fell in love with this place the moment I saw it. I intend to improve it, you know. I’m not a vandal. Also, please call me Luke.’

  ‘Right. I’m Megan.’ I shut up after that. We went from room to room, speaking very little. It felt rather personal, showing him the bedrooms. I’d never been in some of them myself. Eva’s was decorated in shades of olive and rose. Her mirror was hung with so many scarves and necklaces that you couldn’t see the glass. Rowena and Conor’s room was mostly cream and grey with touches of dark red. Luckily my own room was tidy. When we’d been round every room on the first floor, he started down the corridor towards the stairs leading up to the dress room. Of course, I told myself. He’s got to see that too. There’s nowhere in this house that’s out of bounds.

  I knew that the cupboards were full of Eva’s dresses. She’d brought me up here the first time I came to see her and shown me some of them, taking the hangers carefully off their rails, hooking some on to the open doors and draping others over the chaise longue which stood against one wall. A long mirror on a stand near the door had been covered with a sheet then and was still covered, I noticed. I sat down on the chaise longue and waited as Luke walked about, thinking that for someone in as much of a rush as he’d said he was, he was taking his time.

  ‘I should go back down,’ I said. ‘The girls’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.’

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry. Let’s go. I’ve seen what I needed to see.’

  He went out first. On his way out, he must have caught his foot on the edge of the dustsheet covering the mirror and it slid down to the floor.

  ‘Let me fix that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll do it. You go down,’ I told him. I’d already picked up the thick, chilly sheet in my arms and I turned away from him, ready to drape it over the mirror again. What must have been his reflection, as he left the room, moved across the glass and I rushed to cover it. I had the sensation of muffling something with the cloth. That’s ridiculous, I told myself as I followed him out of the room, making sure to turn off the light. I don’t know what made me look behind me, but it seemed, as I glanced over my shoulder, that the mirror and the sheet flung over it were glowing a little in the dark, as if the tall, white-draped rectangle was itself a source of light. You’re off your rocker, I told myself, but all the way downstairs, I felt unsettled. Scared. Pull yourself together, I told myself. What you’re thinking is impossible. Completely ridiculous. By the time I got to the hall, I’d almost convinced myself that what I’d really seen was light from the corridor shining on the dustsheet. But I didn’t seem able to shake the feeling that I’d been stifling or somehow silencing something when I placed the dustsheet over the glass. It was as though there was energy there, some kind of life or movement in the mirror, and the sheet was there to hide it; to cover something up.

  *

  ‘Here we are,’ said Conor as they drove through the gates and up to the front door of Salix House. The eagles perched on the gateposts were wreathed in mist but it seemed to Eva that their stone eyes were following the car as it passed, spreading their wings to protect her. Eva blinked away tears. How was she going to leave this place when coming home to it was such a solace? She opened the passenger door and stepped out into the chilly, damp air of an early evening which seemed like the middle of the night.

  ‘Mummy! Daddy! Granny!’ The girls were on the doorstep, and behind them Eva could see Megan, holding the door open.

  Once she was out of the car, Rowena didn’t draw breath, letting out a stream of words that lasted all the way into the house. ‘Gosh, girls, go inside at once. It’s freezing. Hello Megan. I’m exhausted. Are you okay? Was Luke Fielden all right? I’m sorry to land that on you, but the traffic was ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s all fine. Don’t worry. Come in and have something to eat. It’s waiting in the kitchen, all you need to do is warm it up. I’ll go and get the girls into their night things and we’ll come down.’ Megan turned to Dee and Bridie. ‘You’ll get a slice each of Phyllis’s apple pie if you’re really quick in the bath.’

  Megan went upstairs with the children. Eva wondered if she could plead tiredness and go off upstairs too. But she’d slept in the car and Rowena and Conor would realize that she was trying to avoid a post-mortem on the London house. Better face it all over the kitchen table.

  Rowena warmed the soup. Conor got the baked potatoes out of the oven and poured the dressing on the salad. They were speaking to one another as they prepared the meal, but Eva tried to pretend that she was somewhere far away.

  There was something about coming home late to Salix House, heating up a meal prepared long before, and sitting round the kitchen table which reminded her of the days when she and Antoine lived here by themselves. Rowena hadn’t been born then, she thought. We used to sit in here when we were working late on a collection, or a photo shoot. There were times when the kitchen table was the only place in the house where you could put something down. Every other surface was covered in lengths of fabric, bits of paper, pins, drawings, Antoine’s photographic equipment. Boxes full of buttons, cards with lace wound round them, feathers, sequins and ribbons spread themselves into every room in the house.

  Antoine had been dead for years but there wasn’t a day when Eva didn’t ask herself if she hadn’t made a terrible mistake, investing her love in someone who couldn’t love her with an equal passion.

  1965

  She’d never been very good at falling in love. Perhaps, she used to tell herself, it was her early childhood, th
e way she’d been wrenched away from everything she knew, which made her so hard to please. She loved some of her friends, and had slept with several men, but she hadn’t experienced true sexual love. It was obviously possible to exist without it but somewhere, buried so deep within her that she could go for a long time without even thinking about it, was the awareness of something: lost, missing for years but there, at the very limits of her consciousness, like an underground lake: love, waiting to rise up from where it had been lying for as long as she could remember.

  When it happened, Eva wasn’t ready for it. She was thirty-one. Surely that was a bit late for it to appear for the first time? It hasn’t happened up till now, she reasoned, so that’s likely to be that. I’m on the shelf. She wasn’t even very upset at this thought. She had a career, a reputation, a following and the Conway look was being imitated.

  Antoine Bragonard wasn’t world-famous when she met him. They spoke about him on the fashion grapevine, but he and Eva had never managed to be in the same place at the same time. Then, one day, there he was, commissioned to take the photos for a spread in Harper’s Bazaar which included a Conway dress.

  He was pale, with dark hair and a long, rather Roman nose. Someone once remarked unkindly that he looked like a bird of prey. ‘If they ever make a film of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, you know, the one about the raven knocking on the chamber door, Antoine would be perfect. Even his hair looks like feathers.’

  That, Eva thought, was jealousy. The man who spoke in these terms was almost bald and was clearly envious, she decided, of Antoine’s thick, dark, shiny hair. He wore it cut short. He dressed in black trousers and white shirts, always. While she was married to him, Eva tried to persuade him into colours, patterns, something other than his uniform, but he was stubborn. In the end, she settled for varieties of fabric: shirts in linen, cotton, silk and soft wool; trousers in corduroy, serge, twill, denim, anything she could think of. The style never changed. You wouldn’t complain that a tiger looked the same every day. The creature was simply, most beautifully, itself. That was true of Antoine. The way he looked pleased Eva in ways she didn’t quite understand. When they first met she found herself drawn to him, attracted by his looks and his charm, but perhaps, she thought, he isn’t into women at all. It didn’t take long for the two of them to discover that they liked one another. He understood what she was doing with the clothes she made. He knew how to arrange the models so as to bring out the theatrical element in Eva’s designs. The greatest part, Eva often thought, of their relationship was that: they understood one another. Eva never had to interfere. During the time they worked together, she saw, over and over again, the care that Antoine took to light a garment, pose a model in ways that took your breath away. The photographs appeared everywhere. Antoine became better and better known and editors demanded more and more of his time, but he always stopped what he was doing to come and take photographs of the latest Conway collection whenever Eva said she wanted him.