by Carol Mason
‘The men in his family all have health problems.’
‘He’s not ill, Alice. Okay? I’m sorry.’
I feel this conversation is about to burst into flames. I don’t mean to hang up on him; it just happens. It occurs to me to ring back and say, Please tell Dawn I hope her mother will be well. But the moment passes.
SEVENTEEN
‘The girls in this painting are more glamorous than the girls in the others.’ Martin is pointing to Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey: two sophisticated ladies sitting opposite one another at a small table in a restaurant. Something about the artist’s intent focus on the silence between them reminds me of tea with Evelyn, when she began to tell me her story, and, weirdly, of Justin and Rick talking in the rain.
Evelyn isn’t here today. Michael said she hasn’t been well. I remember how she seemed so changed that day, after she had finished describing her week together with Eddy. In a way, it has changed my thought process – made me ask myself some questions. Now I have been comparing Eddy’s love for Evelyn to Justin’s love for me, and finding it lacking. ‘He loved me so much that he could think of nothing except being with me,’ Evelyn had said. ‘He wanted to leave his marriage. He wanted me to leave mine. He loved me to the point where he had lost all reason.’ Her face had clouded. I’d thought she had been about to cry. I had felt so incredibly bleak, a quiet voice asking, Why didn’t Justin love me like that?
‘What happened?’ I asked her.
She pulled out her pretty handkerchief again. ‘I told him it was impossible. He had a family, and I had a husband who was my family . . .’ A half-finished piece of carrot cake sat on her plate, and she stared at it.
‘And that’s where it ended?’ I wanted to know so much more. She had managed to buy herself one week. But is that all it ever was?
Her hesitation held me riveted. ‘No. But that’s all I think I can manage to tell you today,’ she eventually said.
She looked desperately tired and wrung out suddenly. When I peeked at my watch, I saw that we’d been sitting there for two hours. No wonder she had seemed to fade into the pattern on the chair. Listening to her story had been like watching an engrossing film where you can barely bring yourself to press pause to take a toilet break.
‘I hope Evelyn is all right?’ I say to Michael now. ‘Perhaps you can give me her phone number so I can check on her later?’ What happened after that week? Had she returned home? I’m concluding she must have. I am fascinated by how much I want to know.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I am sure she’d love that.’
We stand in companionable silence, and eavesdrop on a conversation that Martin and Ronnie are having about the hats worn by the two women in the painting. Martin is telling Ronnie they are called cloche hats, which is amazing and absolutely right.
‘Where are Martin’s teeth?’ I ask Michael, just noticing they are missing.
‘Good question.’ He shrugs in that languid way of his. ‘Teeth can be a bit of a shared commodity at Sunrise . . . Whenever a set goes missing, they have a way of showing up in someone else’s mouth. In Martin’s case, whichever nurse identifies them first gets the prize of not having to bathe him for a week. He hates the tub.’
I gasp, then chuckle. ‘Oh no!’ There’s something oddly magnetic about Michael’s genuine, down-to-earth charm. I’m only really sensing the full force of it now. I can’t imagine him ever becoming angry or letting anything get to him. I bet he loves dogs and has no desire to go bar-hopping in Ibiza.
‘They just look more glamorous because the colours in the picture are bright,’ Ronnie says.
‘They’re not really even talking. Maybe they’re jealous of each other. Maybe it’s to do with the hats.’ Martin doesn’t sound quite so authoritative without his teeth. I smile.
‘You’re right about the colours, Ronnie.’ Michael winks at me again. ‘But I don’t think the women dislike each other. They’re just having a serious conversation. One they have to break up with long pauses.’
He never patronises his patients, I notice. He never oversimplifies things or implies they can’t understand. I’ve caught myself on the verge of doing it, and stopped myself, following Michael’s influence.
‘Apparently, a journalist who met the artist said Hopper was hopeless at small talk,’ I tell them. ‘He was supposed to be famous for his monumental silences. But like the spaces in his paintings, the emptiness was never really empty. It was weighted down with things that were best silently concluded rather than said.’ Michael smiles when I finish, and holds my eyes. It’s vaguely possible that he’s flirting with me, which is pleasantly flattering, and slightly bewildering to this new bride.
The men become bored with Chop Suey. They’re looking at Christina now. I wonder if they remember her from their intense previous visit.
‘This one isn’t happy, because she’s crawling on the grass and looks sad,’ Martin says.
‘But we can’t see her face to know if she’s sad,’ Michael says. ‘All we can see is that she’s looking up at a house.’
‘You don’t always have to see somebody’s face to know they’re sad,’ Martin adds, looking at me a mite too closely, as though I’m giving something away. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination. ‘Sometimes, you can just tell from how they are.’ His voice has a tender quality that touches me.
‘If we can’t see her face, we might think she’s beautiful. If we saw it and it’s ugly, we wouldn’t care about her. The artist knows how we think.’
‘I think we can’t see her face because Christina could be any one of us,’ Michael adds. ‘I think this is what the artist intended. She longs for something she can’t have again, and we’ve all done that in life.’
Gosh! I think. He’s quite insightful about art. I like how he brings a bit of a personal interpretation that speaks of his own lurking disappointments.
‘That’s crap!’ Martin fires back. ‘It’s because she’s ugly. In all my life, I have known this to be true. Nobody’s interested in ugly people. I’ve been ugly all my life, and it got me nowhere, but I’ve known some very beautiful people who were successful.’
This makes me chuckle.
‘Well!’ Michael titters, too. ‘That’s a very intriguing theory about ugly people you’ve got there, Martin. You should copyright that. You could make millions.’
‘I tell you, ugly people and sad people. Nobody wants to be around them. Ugly women never marry rich men. Christina’s not ugly, but she’s sad. Maybe that’s why she’s ended up all alone.’
‘It’s because she’s so alone in all that dull-coloured landscape,’ Ronnie chimes in. ‘The only thing there is the house that she can’t go back to. You know what? I think she’s lonely. I think she wants a man.’
‘That’s what I was just saying, dumbo,’ Martin says. ‘She’s alone and she’s not very pretty, and she can’t get a fellow.’
I have to cover my smile. This is proving to be quite an entertaining day. I notice, though, that Eddy just sits quietly on the bench. He’s wearing the same bright-red shirt he wore on the first visit. He’s so thin, even with the help of a thick shirt tucked into his jeans; it’s hard to imagine him the way Evelyn described him that day she first saw him in her garden. And yet I can easily picture them riding together in his truck on that first outing, him driving them through charming coastal villages, their picnic at the beach, their afternoons spent up in her bedroom, his declaring the certainty with which he loved her . . . her telling him – what were her words? We go nowhere.
I stare at the back of his fine-shaped head, and suddenly I recognise something about myself. The vivid way she described him has made me fall for him a little myself.
Perhaps we’ve undergone some telepathic thought transference, because Eddy turns and looks at me. He smiles. Something about the expression is self-aware. A connection flickers briefly between us and then is gone. I go and sit down beside him.
‘What do you think, Eddy?’ I nod to Christina. I c
an’t help looking at his wonderfully expressive hands: the long, tapered fingers, the hands of a working man who had an unexpected artistic side. Did he, I wonder? I will have to ask Evelyn. ‘This was Christina’s home that she loved so dearly. Do you think Christina was wrong to leave?’
It’s not as though I believe that oblique overtures about the past will get me anywhere. I just keep thinking of how he’d spoken last time, and Evelyn’s belief that it could happen again.
He doesn’t seem to register my question. At one point, though, his eyes comb over my face like he might be recognising me from his last visit. I’m on the cusp of saying something to perhaps bridge the connection, but by the time I can think of what, the moment is lost. ‘Not chatty today, Eddy?’ I gently squeeze his hand. ‘I get my quiet days, too. We’re a lot alike, you and I . . .’ At the sight of our hands together, I inexplicably choke up.
We fitted like teeth on a zip . . . she’d said. How I loved that. Could I claim the same about Justin and me? And, if not, is that why he might have someone else?
‘I’ll not pester you, if you’d rather I leave you alone.’ Uncertainty cleaves a huge hole in me.
‘What would you call this painting if you had to name it, Ronnie?’ Michael asks.
Martin beats Ronnie to an answer. ‘I would call it The Sound of Silence.’
‘That’s a great title, Martin. Why would you call it that?’
‘Because there are no dogs, no tractors, no cars. It’s very quiet there.’
‘What would you call it, Eddy?’ I try.
And, without a beat of hesitation, Eddy says, ‘I would call it Regrets.’
‘Why would you call it Regrets, Eddy?’ I glance excitedly at Michael, who gives me a short, pleased nod.
‘Because she’s yearning for something she’s let go.’
My spirits are capering around like a bird. ‘I agree, Eddy. She’s incredibly torn, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she’s torn, and I don’t want her to be,’ Eddy says. ‘I want her to choose.’
‘What do you want her to choose?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer.
‘I don’t like it.’ Martin is covering his eyes with his hands. ‘She’s on the outside looking in at something she wants. She’s in exile.’
Michael speaks quietly in my ear. ‘Heck, since we’ve moved on from talking about ugly people, it’s all taking a very negative turn.’
‘Well, I think you guys are all barking up the wrong tree,’ Ronnie pipes up. ‘I think the painting is very hopeful.’
‘Why’s it hopeful, Ronnie?’ Michael asks.
‘Because she looks like she’s going to get to where she wants to go.’
When I get back to my office, I ring Evelyn. She answers the phone, slightly breathless.
‘Oh my gosh! What’s wrong?’ I fill with alarm.
‘Nothing!’ she says, and I can hear the sound of a smile in her voice. ‘I wasn’t feeling myself this morning. I thought it best that Michael go alone . . . But I’m fine now. I’ve just been dragging some boxes out of storage. It’s winded me. Phew!’
I try to picture her in her world, in her flat she bought – the one Michael called swanky. ‘Well, you should take care. Can’t you get someone to do that for you? Michael?’
‘My manservant, you mean? I am sure he would love that.’
I laugh. I tell her about the development in the gallery with Eddy. ‘He called the painting Regrets. He said Christina is yearning for something she’s let go . . . I thought the regrets word was interesting. I don’t think anyone could really look at that painting and conclude that Christina has regrets. I’ve never even heard that interpretation before. So I wonder if this is a sign that Christina is triggering something on a deeper level for Eddy. Something, maybe, about you?’
The line goes quiet at first. Then she says, ‘I doubt it somehow. We are probably just trying too hard to look for something.’
I don’t really know Evelyn, but I do know that she’s not normally this pessimistic. ‘I realise it’s possible we’re hoping for something that might never happen. But it felt encouraging to me. I sensed he was bringing something of himself to the moment – that he wasn’t just talking about a girl on the grass with a house in the background.’
‘That’s very sweet,’ Evelyn says. ‘And perhaps you are right. Someone once told me that there’s no harm in believing something that makes you happy, so maybe I will believe that. Thanks to you.’
She still doesn’t sound convinced, though.
After a beat she says, ‘Anyway, how are you?’
‘Me? Oh!’ I don’t know why the question takes me aback. ‘I’m okay, I suppose.’ Even I can hear the fallen note of my voice.
‘If there’s anything you would like to tell me, you always can,’ she says.
‘I’ve never been great at talking about myself.’
‘Neither have I. But look how well I manage it!’
I chuckle. ‘I loved your story, Evelyn. Or at least the part you’ve told me so far . . . You took me to your house, your garden. I saw your romance with Eddy as clearly as if it had been my own. But I’m not good with words the way you are. It’s harder for me to express myself . . .’
‘Well, it’s easier to talk about things that happened a very long time ago. You have distance in your favour.’
‘Does time heal?’ I am not sure where the question comes from. ‘Don’t they always say time heals all wounds? I just wonder if I’ve at least got that to look forward to.’
The line goes silent again, except for the small, soft rushes of her breathing. I sense this question has distressed her. ‘I don’t think it does. Not really. It just makes the pain less uppermost.’
‘I appreciate your honesty,’ I tell her. But I don’t like it. It terrifies me. Will all conversations I have with anyone, from this point on, somehow circle back to Justin? Will I really carry this around for the rest of my life – not an open wound but a permanent scar?
I suddenly remember that first day in the gallery. When she talked about wrong choices and consequences. ‘Well, to cite another cliché, don’t they say regret what you didn’t do, not what you did?’
‘Hmm . . . I particularly don’t like that one.’
I feel like saying, What if you’d never known a person could love you like he loved you? Then you would be exactly like me.
‘Are you able to tell me what happened next? After you told him you weren’t going to let him leave his wife for you – I’m curious to know where this goes.’
She is silent again, and I can tell she is lost to the pull of the memory. ‘You don’t have to,’ I add. ‘Not if it’s going to be upsetting.’
‘I was torn,’ she says. ‘Eddy was right. Alice, I was wavering so very badly. I’d told him we both must get on with our lives, but I had absolutely no idea how I was going to walk away.’ Her breathing softly rushes again. ‘There was only one thing to do. I realised I had to see them – his family. They had to become real to me, because in my moments when I was vacillating, they were becoming bleary, and I was being able to convince myself . . .’
‘That they didn’t really exist,’ I finish for her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘So I drove to the community hall where he’d said his daughter took dance classes. I waited around, sitting slumped in the seat of my car with a silly hat on. I must have looked ridiculous, like a female Columbo . . . I recognised the little girl from the photographs Eddy had shown me. She was wearing a pink leotard and white footless tights. She had long, light-brown hair, and she bounded out of the car and ran ahead of her mother, over to some other children who were standing outside the main door with their mothers. I couldn’t believe I was staring at Eddy’s child.’ Her voice sounds warm and wistful suddenly, and this touches me. ‘She was such a cute thing. I was quite enthralled by the sight of her, and of course I felt awful! I couldn’t believe I was nearly responsible for taking her father away from her. She was so young and innocent! I felt this incr
edible urge to protect her. The force of it stunned me.’
‘What did his wife look like?’ I ask her.
‘She was attractive. Confident. Friendly. She stood and chatted animatedly to the other mothers. I’d expected someone more downtrodden.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I don’t know. The silly notions we have . . . Perhaps if I had seen someone who had clearly let herself go, I might have thought she deserved having her husband fall for someone else – which might have made me feel better about it. But as it was, it all just felt sad.’
‘Why did you feel sad for a stranger, Evelyn? You didn’t even know her. She might have been a horrible person, a nightmare to live with . . .’
‘Because I was sleeping with her husband. She was just a woman living her life, working part-time, taking her child to dance class, and she was standing there completely unaware that her husband wanted to leave her for me.’
‘But it’s life, Evelyn. It happens all the time.’ As soon as I say this, I realise I’m not entirely convinced of it. Would I feel this pragmatic if I learnt that Justin had left me for some other woman? I highly doubt it.
‘Well, it did what I’d needed it to do. Once I saw them, it repositioned the way I thought of Eddy. It gave him a lesser foothold in that place inside me where I saw him as mine.’ She sounds terribly moved suddenly, as though she were reliving this in real time, and the pain is absolutely back to being uppermost. ‘I realised that in order to break up a family, I had to create a false truth: that taking another woman’s husband is okay, especially if perhaps you have succeeded where she has failed: in showing him that you need him more.’
‘So you left and went back to London?’
‘Yes. Sneakily. I didn’t have the courage to face him. I just left a note pinned to the back door.’
‘And that was the end of it?’
‘If I find what I’m looking for in these boxes, they’ll be able to answer that for you.’
I hear her rustling around again.
I don’t know if she’s being deliberately evasive, or just eager to get back to what she was doing. ‘Hmm . . .’ I say, smiling to myself. ‘You have a way of drawing out a story, Evelyn.’