by Joanna Nadin
I go to touch his hand. I want to unclench it because I am afraid he will shatter the glass and the polish will drip blood-like down his fingers. But he pulls away.
“But I loved her. You have to believe me. You do believe me, don’t you?” He’s desperate now, his eyes wide, whites showing. He drops the bottle and it hits the rug noiselessly. Then he clutches me instead, my arms in his hands, his grip tight, terrified. “Evie. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes I believe you. I told you before, I told you: it’s OK.”
A sob breaks free from him then, and he drops onto the bed, his head hidden in his hands.
I sit beside him, unsure whether to touch him or if he’ll lash out. But I have to do something so at last I pull him to me. And his face still hidden, he lets me hold him, gentle at first, but then more tightly, as if I can squeeze the hurt out; like a promise, that I will never let go.
And so we sit, for how long I’m not sure. Until the tears subside, until he’s pulled away to wipe the salt from his face, the snot from his chin. And I know I can’t lie any more. I don’t want him to think he is alone in this.
“She hated me,” I say suddenly. Blurting it out before I can change my mind.
He turns quickly, shakes his head, his brow creased in confusion. “No. She loved you.”
“She did. Once. But then, after that row – about the boy – I couldn’t forgive her. She apologized but I refused to listen. And so she dropped me.”
For it wasn’t just those three spat-out words over Tom on Christmas Eve, but another argument, two days later, as she was leaving. “Wake up,” she’d said to me. “Wake up, or grow up. Either will do.”
“You’re the one who needs to grow up,” I’d sneered back at her, my childish whining destroying my own argument.
She’d rolled her eyes at that, taken her bag and stormed downstairs. I stayed in my room, watched the car pull away, saw her staring ahead, refusing to look up in case she saw my sorry face. It was the last time I saw her.
“But she wrote,” he says.
I shake my head. Not after Christmas. I’d waited for a letter, checked my pigeonhole every day for an apology or even a pretence that nothing was wrong, a postcard of Big Ben with “wish you were here” on the back.
“Look at me,” he says.
I raise my eyes to his.
“She was going to write,” he says. “She told me. To say sorry. She wanted to come and see you in May, but you weren’t here – you were at school. Then in July she said she was coming back to Eden. To wait for you. She was going to take a train, that night…” His voice cracks as he realizes what he has said, what this means to him, what it will do to me; that sickly sweet, almost-but-not-quite of it.
But I already know. Because he told me of her plans to come back in a letter I shouldn’t have opened because it was never meant for me. A letter that’s hidden now, pushed to the back of a drawer where I can’t see it, where it can’t harm me.
But as I go to betray it with a glance, something distracts me: a flicker in the corner of the room, a brush of air across my face.
“She’s still here,” I say.
“What?”
I blush again as I hear myself. I am idiotic, a cliché. “I just mean, I feel her sometimes, that’s all. I know it sounds stupid.” I try to get out of it, making excuses like a child caught red-handed.
“No,” he says, his voice clear, sure. “It’s not stupid.” Then, for a moment, he is lost in himself. “So she came back, after all.”
“Yes,” I say.
He looks around, his eyes darting, as if he is searching the high ceiling, the canopy, the cornicing.
“Is she with us now?” he says. “Can you hear her?”
I listen, and there it is again, echoing from the walls, bouncing off the wood of the bookcase. She is speaking to me. For the first time she is speaking to me, saying the same words over and over, the same words that Tom used.
Be careful, Evie, she says. Be careful.
“No,” I lie. “I can’t hear anything.”
JUNE 1988
THE WARDROBE is dark, safe. It is the perfect place to hide.
Another production has ended and another party has begun in the house on Telegraph Hill. James said he wasn’t going this time and had waited for her to beg, plead, as he knew she would. Because she needs him now that she’s losing Penn to the mess of his life; his dying father, his mother in denial.
So James makes the walk along Queens Road, a bottle of cheap red in a plastic bag and a white seed of hope in his heart. And he pretends he’s one of them. He talks to them, drinks with them. Though all the time he knows he is a king amongst mortals, with their drugs and their too-loud laughs and their childish games. Someone even suggests hide and seek and Bea claps her hands and says she will be “it”. So James agrees to play for her sake. He knows at once where he will hide.
For she doesn’t share Penn’s room any more, she has her own: the attic. A girl has moved out, off to a part in a Northern soap, and she has taken her place. She has hung her butterfly dresses across the eaves and set the mirror up under a high window, so that in one swift glance she can see her own reflection and that of the city – its promise mirrored in the burgeoning skyline of the Docklands, the first gleaming storeys of Canary Wharf.
“It makes sense for me to have my own room,” she says. “That’s all. Don’t read anything into it.”
And then she counts off the reasons she has chosen solitude: Penn has finals, he needs the quiet; next year he’ll probably be away, in rep, and Hunter wants his room; she can see the river. But he knows these are just caulk, paper to cover a crack; only a chink now, tiny, but a vulnerability just the same, into which he can insinuate himself, can push his way deeper into her world, and push Penn out.
And so he is here, Narnia-like in her wardrobe, crouched among the coats and cardigans, all hung with the smell of her, the smell of patchouli and possibility. And just like always he waits for her to come to him at last.
AUGUST 1988
IN THE weeks without Bea, the house always seemed impenetrable; a fortress of thick, grey silence. In the days before she came home it wore an expectant air. Her bed would be turned down, the larder stocked with her favourite pink wafers, her wellington boots retrieved from the back of the garage and lined up in the hallway, waiting for her feet to slip inside. Like me they were waiting for adventure. Then, when she was here, Eden was transformed: every barren corridor became a secret passage; every plain wooden door a portal to a new world of wonder.
Now, with Penn, I feel it again. Eden is alive with possibility.
We breakfast on fig rolls and orangeade, sitting cross-legged on a blanket box on the landing; we lie top to toe on the iron day bed, reading plays and poetry; we play parlour games and hide and seek like rainy-day children.
“It’ll be fun,” I insist, when he says it’s childish. “You’ll see.”
And he does. And the decorators curse as we sneak under dustsheets and behind paint-tacky shutters. They beg us to go outside to play. So the next time, when it’s my turn to hide, I slip past the open door and dance across the lawn to the stable block. Then I crouch down behind the sleek, curved wheel arch of a Jaguar, and wait.
At first all I hear is the thump-thump of my racing heart, but then it comes: the crunch of a shoe on gravel, cautious at first; two slow steps, then a pause while he surveys the kingdom, seeks his quarry. Then a run when he sees the doors are ajar, throwing a shaft of sunlight across the concrete floor.
“I know you’re in there,” he calls, his voice rising and falling like a moustache-twirling villain, like the Hooded Claw. “I’m coming to get you.”
I feel my breath quicken as his footsteps get closer. I want to win, but I also want to be found.
He’s behind me now. I see an elongated shadow stretch out before me; catch the piney smell of his deodorant, the faint peppermint of my toothpaste. I gasp as a pair of hands closes ove
r my eyes, as lips brush my ear.
“Got you,” he whispers.
Got me, I think. But I don’t move. I don’t try to flee. Because I want this. And more.
We stay there, for one heartbeat, then two, then ten. Until suddenly his hands drop, and he stands.
“What is this place anyway?”
I scrabble to my feet and brush the dust from my hands onto my shorts while I shoo away the disappointment. “Oh, um, the stables. Well, it was,” I elaborate, gushing now to cover. “But no one rode really after my mum. Well, I did a bit, but then there was school. So Uncle John put his cars in here.”
There are four of them. Four vintage classics, all polished in a row. Barely driven; the tread of their wheels still deep, the leather unmarked. Uncle John’s pride and joy. Locked up, shut away from the dangers of the world. Like he would’ve shut away Bea if he could, kept her like Rapunzel in her tower, until some handsome prince with a minor title and an account at Coutts rescued her and took her to his palace in Kensington.
But Bea was too wise for that. And she didn’t need rescuing, she said. She could rescue herself. Though she still let them try, let them shower her with gifts and plaudits and pleas, gave them just enough to think they had won her hand and heart, then slammed the door and ran back to the attic, laughing all the way.
“Where are the keys?” he asks, his voice edged with excitement, with purpose now.
“What?”
“The keys for the cars?”
“In the cabinet. But it’s locked,” I say. Of course it’s locked, with a combination set by Uncle John.
And solved by me and Bea one long Sunday when we were playing at codebreakers; she the wartime heroine, me an orphan child she had found and adopted. Not that we ever used it. It was the knowing that mattered, the beating the grown-ups at their own game.
“You know the number don’t you,” he says.
“I—”
“Come on. It will be fun.”
“But I can’t drive.”
“I can.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“You shouldn’t,” he echoes.
“I shouldn’t,” I repeat.
But I will.
And there they are: four numbers – the date of Bea’s birthday – revealing four single keys to match four singular cars.
“Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo…” He runs his fingers along the hooks. “Catch a tiger by the toe.”
“If he hollers let him go.”
He smiles. “Eeeny, meeny, miney. Mo!”
He plucks the key from the wall, dangles it around his little finger. “So which one is it?” he asks, his accent changed. He is dapper now, Waughesque.
“That one,” I say in perfectly clipped notes, a flapper to his Bright Young Thing. “The Alfa, darling.”
We roll slowly down the long drive. “Don’t race,” I warn, echoing Uncle John to Julia. “The gravel will fly up and scratch the paint.”
He laughs. “Scaredy cat.”
I am scared. And excited. And horrified. And happy. Because I’m sat next to him in a 1969 cherry red Alfa Giulia, top down, radio on, heading through the iron gates of Eden towards the world, towards no-man’s-land.
We come to a halt at the road.
“Which way?” he asks.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Where is there to go?”
“Right is England.”
“What about left?”
I start, remembering the last time I came this way. “It’s— town. Well, village really. Calenick.”
I never liked it that much. Bea would beg me to go with her, to take our games of Cinderella or Macbeth to a bigger stage, where we could pass as kitchen girls or princesses or blood-handed queens amongst a wider audience.
“There’s a whole world out there,” she would say, her eyes lit with a strange kind of hunger. “All those people.”
“In Calenick?” I would reply.
“It’s a start,” she would snap. And then sulk until she got her way. For she always got her way. And so she would make Calenick our Emerald City, or our Tara, and she wouldn’t miss a beat: not a stumbled line or a skipped gesture as she walked up Fore Street, Elizabeth Taylor in a pair of saddle shoes. While I would freeze, my mouth gaping like a lunatic, like a slow-witted sidekick. Until in the end that is all I became: her silent accomplice, her cover as she sought out new thrills, new worlds, and no longer needed ours.
But with Penn, it could be different. It will be different.
“To town, Mrs Pennington?” he says.
It’s a joke, I know. But with those words, I feel surety fill me with treacle warmth. “To town,” I say, smiling. Then I laugh, my head thrown back with the thrill of it. “To town!”
Like the creek, Calenick changes with the seasons. Steep streets of tightly packed houses, clinging to each other and to the rock like limpets or stubborn barnacles. In the winter they glower, staring grimly out at a sea that is as grey as their own granite walls. But in the summer they dress up, wink brazenly, their faces decked with bunting as crowds of tourists throng the pavements, queue for ice cream or a cone of hot, salty chips or the mackerel boats that they can write home about, boasting about their catch, claiming they are a natural.
The older I got the less I liked summer in Calenick. As my taste for ice lollies or polystyrene pots of prawns waned, so did my tolerance of crowds; of braying boys and horse-faced girls. I felt out of place, out of time – the boat girl in her outdated dress and school plimsolls.
But today is different. Today I’m full of pride, of power. His arm through mine is a shield, a shining cloak that reflects back the confidence of these strangers as swiftly as it sweeps away the pity of those I know: the silver-haired, bent-backed Mrs Cardew; John Penrice in his Land Rover; the vicar, hot under his dog collar.
We walk into the Lugger. Into the orange-soaked dimness and stale taint of beer.
“But I’m not eighteen,” I say. “Not for weeks yet.”
“He doesn’t know that,” Penn replies, nodding towards the bar.
I look at the bartender, his hair sun-bleached and long, his accent from far away – Australia or New Zealand. He doesn’t know me. Penn is right. He doesn’t know me at all. None of them do, not really, not today. Today I’m different: bright, brilliant. I’m the kind of girl to whom people pay attention; the kind who lets herself be bought lobster knowing he can pay for it; the kind who washes it down with vodka and tonic, then another, and another. So that by the time we walk back down the steps to the street I’m giddy; with alcohol, with freedom, with Penn.
So giddy my shoulder crashes into an oncomer from the throng, making me stumble, lose my grip on Penn. I have to reach to the wall to steady myself, laughing.
I look up, and my eyes meet my assailant’s.
It’s Tom.
I wait for it, for the accusations, the reprimands, the pleas. But he says nothing. Just looks at me. His eyes move up and down, taking me in. The newness of me, the difference. He looks at me the way I wanted him to look last summer; like I’m worth having, like I am the prize, as he was mine. “Well it’s too late,” I tell him silently as I loop my arm back through Penn’s. “I don’t want you any more. I don’t need you any more.”
And I don’t. Whatever I felt for Tom pales when I see him next to Penn. Tom and I are done, we are over. If we ever really began.
“Who was that?” Penn asks, turning.
I watch Tom’s back as he weaves his way up Ship Street. “Nobody,” I say.
I tug at his arm. “Come on.”
“Where to now, my lady?”
The grey, gated church is to our right. I had planned on showing him her grave. So he could say what he would have said at the funeral. So he could say goodbye. But…
“She’s not there, is she? Not really.”
I shake my head.
“She’s at Eden,” he says, saying the words for me. “The real Bea. She’s at home.”
“Yes, home,” I say. “Take me home.”
And so he does. He drives slower this time, more sedately. For we are grown-ups, not children playing any more.
Back up the hill to the edge of the village.
Back down the narrow road that winds through the woods.
Back to Eden.
Back to Bea.
JUNE 1988
SHE FINDS him last. The sound of the door being flung open startles him. It’s been half an hour, maybe more since he crept in, and sleep crept up, as he waited, waited.
But she’s not alone. And she isn’t staying.
“You’re ‘it’,” she says triumphantly. Just two words, then dances off, a Greek chorus of punch-drunk Pans in her wake, but no Penn, for Penn has refused to play, says he’s not in the mood for games today.
James doesn’t want to play any more either. Instead he will play a trick, he thinks. He will let them hide away, bury themselves in corners and cupboards, then he, the Great James, Master of Mysteries, will disappear. And after, when she has sat alone in the dark, counting down the minutes and hours, she’ll know what it is to wait for someone.
And so he creeps carefully, quickly down the stairs, his feet noiseless on the carpet. He’s good at this, has had years of practice at home – walking on eggshells around Theresa and Brigid once a month, tiptoeing past his da and Deirdre every Saturday night to wash off the smell of sweat and smoke and sin.
He’s at the bottom of the stairs now. The front door is just ahead. He’ll slip outside and then his vanishing trick will be complete. But then he hears a sound from Penn’s room: a suppressed giggle, then another voice – a man’s – speaks low, then groans. They’re in there together – him and Bea. They’re not playing by the rules. He hesitates. The door is ajar, a sliver of light from a lava lamp playing on the tiles. He knows he shouldn’t, that this isn’t some Berwick Street peepshow. But the need to know what is happening is overwhelming, and so he presses his face against the jamb, and peers in.
It takes him a few seconds for his eyes to focus in the half-light, and two or three more for them to register what he’s seeing. Then he has to suppress a sharp intake of breath, a gasp out. For it’s worse than he imagined. And better too, so much better.