After You Left

by Carol Mason

  ‘I doubt it’s anywhere near as simple as that. But don’t envy her. Envy is the most futile of emotions. Sometimes, you are envying an idea you have about someone, but you’re actually envying fiction.’

  I think about this. Yes, the grey area between what we know and what we think we know. I think of how quickly I assumed that Justin was living in that house, happily ensconced in bigamy.

  ‘I wonder, though, if the baby dies – I mean, I really, really hope he doesn’t die; that would be absolutely awful – but if he does, will they still stay together? Is the baby the glue, and if the baby isn’t there, is he going to regret leaving me? Will it fall apart? Or will he somehow discover that he and Lisa had been right for each other from day one – more so than we were?’ I don’t necessarily believe it. I just want someone to tell me I’m wrong.

  ‘Who knows and who cares?’ Evelyn gives me a look that says, Come on! Way too much over-analysing! ‘You mustn’t wonder, Alice. Personally, from what you’ve said, I’d entirely believe him. He’s only thinking about his son right now. It’s guilt that’s driving him. Guilt and responsibility. And I, of all people, know what it’s like to drag around guilt.’

  I have so many more questions. There is so much more I want to say. I’m a curious cross between burned out and fired up. ‘Guilt that you didn’t go to him when you said you would? Can we stop talking about me for a moment? I need to hear somebody else’s happy ending. Please.’

  Evelyn cocks her head, and seems to contemplate this. She stands up. ‘I think perhaps we should take a short walk to the shops. Perhaps our legs need to be stretched before the next instalment of the mammoth talking session. What do you think?’

  We take a pleasant stroll in the sunshine. At the corner shop, Evelyn buys a pint of milk.

  ‘You told him you couldn’t leave Mark for him,’ I say as we begin walking back. ‘That must have been so very hard.’ Was it hard for Justin? I would love to know how long he wrestled with his dilemma.

  ‘I told him it might be best he forget me – and he did. And now I’d give anything for him to remember me! Isn’t that ironic?’ She is slightly breathless, from emotion rather than exercise.

  I stare at our feet – my blue-and-white Converse, and Evelyn’s neat little tan loafers; we are walking in perfect step. I watch our rhythm for a while. Evelyn tells me about the bomb, and how her doubts had suddenly crystallised in that moment. ‘He sent the letter back to me, along with all the others. His way of telling me that he was rather disgusted at me, I suppose.’

  ‘But it was your right to change your mind, Evelyn!’

  She stops walking and looks at me. ‘But because of my actions, I ruined a man’s life!’ There are bubbles of tears in her eyes.

  ‘But . . . I don’t understand. How did you ruin his life? You just told him you weren’t leaving Mark for him.’

  Evelyn goes to the wall, and perches on it, even though there isn’t much room due to an overgrown hedge. ‘I don’t know how well you remember the dates of the letters . . . I was supposed to move back there in December. The plan was that in the early new year he was going to tell his wife. But he jumped the gun. He told her while I was still in London, and then I didn’t leave Mark, and his wife booted him out.’

  ‘Oh. Oh my . . .’ I try to visualise this. I can imagine Eddy attempting to undo the damage he had done, and can see how that might not have worked.

  ‘It’s hard to live in a small town and be under the scrutiny of people who have nothing to do but interest themselves in your drama. His wife felt she’d been made a huge fool of. Everyone was talking. There was all kinds of tittle-tattle flying about . . . Maybe some women would have thought that Eddy should have been the one hanging his head, but I suppose everybody has their threshold for how much humiliation they can stand.’ She looks at me. ‘She must have just wanted to get as far away from there as possible. Which I can understand. She took their child away. She obviously wanted to inflict the ultimate punishment.’

  ‘That’s insane! How could she get away with doing that? He had rights!’

  ‘Alice, this was thirty years ago. Things were different then. And you have to remember you’re dealing with a Northern, small-town mentality. Back then, the women held a lot of power in these matters. If Eddy’s wife wanted to play hardball, there was precious little he could do. He didn’t have money to hire solicitors and fight his case . . .’

  Something isn’t right here. ‘How do you know all this? About how it all played out?’

  ‘Eddy’s friend, Stanley. He was a very good friend to Eddy, and, in a way, to me.’

  ‘Ah! Stanley! Of the letters!’

  Evelyn nods. ‘I could hardly write to him at home. So I wrote to Stanley’s address, and he passed them on to Eddy.’ Her face darkens again. A hedge presses up against her bare arms, and I see small scratch marks on her pale skin. ‘He was so impulsive! Stanley said he wanted to prove to me that he could really go through with it, because I’d had my doubts. But I thought we’d settled all that! I didn’t ask him to prove anything to me!’

  I feel bad she’s so upset in the middle of the street. It’s truly incredible that this was thirty years ago and she’s as overwrought as if it had just happened yesterday.

  ‘But Evelyn, he was a forty-FIVE-year-old man. It was his job not to screw things up for himself, not yours.’

  ‘I know. But I knew he was impulsive. I should have been more careful with my promises. You can’t mess with someone’s heart, make pledges and then just walk away and claim no responsibility for the fallout. If I had never let it get that far, none of it would have happened. My friend Serena was right. I should have walked away after the affair and let it stay a nice memory.’ She looks at me, candidly. ‘Those are the best memories, you know. Memories of things that end when they should. Always remember that.’

  I think about this. Not sure how this will impact my memories of Justin down the road, but Evelyn’s distress stops me from dwelling on it for too long.

  ‘So that’s why no one ever visits him? Because, really, he has no family now? He only has you?’

  Evelyn nods. ‘He only has me.’ Tears roll down her face. She determinedly pushes them away. Someone walks past with an off-lead Lab; the dog trots over to her, and she places a hand on its head. The owner smiles. When they pass, Evelyn says, ‘Oh, I felt such pressure! It was awful. I phoned him shortly after I sent the letter telling him I couldn’t go through with it. I just wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to hear that he wasn’t as devastated as I knew he was going to be, if that makes sense. But he was very short with me. He said never to phone him at that number again. He didn’t say that his wife had already made him leave – that he only happened to be there because he’d gone back to get some of his things. Stanley told me all this, but I had to press him.’

  She gives a tiny whimper, like a small animal. It cuts my heart. ‘I felt this weight of what I’d promised. I remember, after the bomb, thinking, But I have to leave him! I have to honour my end of the deal, but I love Mark, too. Mark loves me and needs me! I can’t go!’

  Her head has a slight tremor. I sit on the wall beside her and squeeze the top of her hand. ‘Evelyn, I understand you need to get this off your chest, but you have to let it go. It’s in the past. We have to make peace with our past, don’t we?’

  I say it, but will I be thinking about Justin thirty years from now? Distraught with the memory of what he did? No, I vow. No matter what, I will not be like Evelyn.

  Evelyn upturns her tiny hand so that her palm meets mine. The last woman I held hands with was my mother in the final hours of her life. I’d felt so desperate for us to somehow make our disagreements water under the bridge, in that short span of time, to make up for a lifetime of distance. I feel the firm press of her fingers.

  ‘I suppose I should have felt flattered that he was ready to leave his family for me. But, in a way, it made me think less of him. Deep down, I didn’t want him to be the kind of man w
ho would put me ahead of his responsibilities. It struck me as a character flaw.’

  She looks at me when I must appear momentarily lost for words at that. ‘Shall we walk again?’ She gets up. ‘I’d like to go home.’ We walk the rest of the way in companionable quiet.

  ‘I am a bit confused, though . . .’ I say when we are back in her sitting room. ‘When did you come back?’ There is a small photograph of a man on a walnut-coloured occasional table by the bay window. I noticed it earlier. I couldn’t quite make out who it was. My eyes fasten on it again. I wonder if it’s a young Eddy.

  ‘I don’t think I can face another cup of tea,’ Evelyn says. ‘How about a whisky?’ She walks over to a small drinks cabinet. ‘Or maybe a sherry, at this hour, is more civilised?’

  I laugh. ‘I think I’d like the whisky, if that’s fine by you.’

  Evelyn reaches for the crystal decanter. I am fascinated by her classic furniture and taste, the air of good breeding that hangs around her, even as she does something as rudimentary as pour us both a drink, placing in each glass one perfect-sized ice cube. ‘I came back four years ago, after Mark died. He had pancreatic cancer. It was very sudden. He was only seventy-ONE.’ She hands me a glass. ‘We weren’t the kind of couple who went around declaring our feelings, you know. Mark wasn’t a true romantic, whereas Eddy had it in his soul. I never knew if Mark had any idea how much I loved him. If he thought I’d stayed with him only because I’d felt it was the safer of two options.’ She looks fondly over to the bay window, and I realise that the man in the photograph is, of course, Mark. ‘So I stood over his grave and I told him how much he’d meant to me. Everything I could never say to his face.’

  This threatens to break my heart. ‘Did you ever sell your Holy Island house?’

  Evelyn smiles. ‘Not right away. It was rented out. Always nice tenants. They took good care of the place. I moved back in for a time. With some savings, I was able to afford to take Eddy out of the home run by social services and put him in Sunrise. It was mainly the gardens that attracted me to it. I knew they would give him pleasure. I visited as often as I could. But the journey to and from the island was too much, so I decided to sell the house and buy this place, so that I can walk to Sunrise.’ She pulls a joyless smile. ‘He’ll never know I came back to be close to him. Nor will he ever know that I lived with one man, whom I loved dearly with my whole heart, yet I thought of Eddy every day from the last day I saw him. How messed up is that for a life?’

  ‘You don’t know what he knows, Evelyn.’ It was depressing, though. To be such a capable, vibrant person with so many passions, then have the entire story of your life go missing from your mind.

  Evelyn doesn’t answer. She just stares at the cube of ice in her drink, and chinks it against her glass. ‘I once read that very often we assume when we get to a certain point in our life that it’s all over. We’re done for. But so long as one person remembers you, it’s not over.’

  ‘So the visits to the gallery, Christina . . . You’re doing it because you want him to know it’s not over?’

  Evelyn gives me an enigmatic look, then smiles.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Mark

  London. March 1984

  When the letter came, Evelyn was in hospital. She had a cyst on her ovary that they discovered was cancerous. The doctors removed her womb, to be on the safe side. The stay in hospital was protracted because she had lost a lot of blood. While she was there, the magazine forwarded the limited contents of her postbox to her home address, along with flowers and a note saying, As you don’t drop in for messages like you used to, we thought we should send this letter on to your home.

  Mark received the delivery. He took the flowers into the hospital for her, of course. Evelyn loved flowers, and filled their home with fresh ones weekly. But the letter, well, that was a different matter. He hadn’t opened it. He wouldn’t do that, not even when it was addressed to someone who had once betrayed his trust. But he had seen the postmark. It was easy to guess who it was from. She was recovering from major abdominal surgery. They had begun to put all this behind them. Giving it to her now just didn’t seem like the helpful thing to do.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Alice

  A couple of days later, we arrive at the entrance to Sunrise. Evelyn was right about it being a pleasant place. I’ve only once been in a care home, when my stepfather’s mother was admitted to one, but it hadn’t smelt as nice as this one. A receptionist greets us, and Evelyn enters our names in a guest book. ‘Is Michael in?’ I ask the girl.

  ‘He just went for lunch. Probably be back in an hour,’ she says. And then, to Evelyn, ‘He’s in the garden. Lawn day.’ She takes the flowers that Evelyn brought, says, ‘Oh gosh, aren’t these lovely?’ and gives her a fond smile.

  Evelyn leads the way down a narrow hall that exits through a glass conservatory, where three or four elderly men sit around a small, antique table playing a board game. They look up and greet her as she passes, their curiosity quickly turning to me. Evelyn nudges me. ‘Careful. You’ll be setting off heart palpitations all round. And, in here, that’s a frightening prospect.’

  We find a seat on a wooden bench overlooking a large, well-manicured lawn, with flowerbeds, and two parallel oak trees, like goalposts, either side. It’s extremely private and pretty, and the air is spiked with the scent of flowers and a salty sea breeze. The gardener is riding his lawnmower, and, sitting beside him, his frame towering over the gardener’s, is Eddy. The man waves when he sees Evelyn.

  ‘Look at him! He’s so happy!’ The sight of him makes me smile.

  ‘This is what he loves most, just being out there with the gardener.’

  We sit quietly for a while, just watching him, listening to some squalling birds having a fight at a feeder on a nearby tree.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Evelyn asks.

  ‘I still don’t know. I’m in a daze, in some ways. I suppose work is keeping me busy, and when I get home I’m tired and I sit down and start thinking about it, but my mind just goes blank again. Then, the other day, I came across a small cream photo album with a little red lotus motif on it – Justin brought it back for me from a business trip to Florence. I flicked through the empty plastic sleeves and thought, God, not a single picture in it! Not that there probably should have been; we’d hardly had time to set about filling it, and who actually develops film these days, anyway? Nonetheless, it says something, doesn’t it?’

  I glance at her – at her little pink ear with its tiny diamond bezel set in gold.

  She catches me studying her. ‘Can you honestly say that, in your heart and soul, you believe you were meant to be with Justin? And that you feel that way, even after all this?’

  It’s a direct question, which takes me aback at first. ‘Well, considering everything I’ve heard of your love for Eddy, and his for you, I can probably say that, no, not in the same way. I may have thought it earlier. Though I distrusted it – I distrusted his certainness. Perhaps because he was ready for everything too quickly. Marriage, children . . .’

  At the thought of children, something new occurs to me: if his baby had been born perfectly normal, would he have still left me for them?

  ‘At the time, because I’ve always been romantic deep down, it all felt like it was the real thing. But then Justin isn’t a romantic. He’s a pragmatist. So you see’ – I look at her again – ‘I can’t make proper sense of it.’

  With the beating of the sun on my face and the stillness of the garden, with only the drone of the lawnmower advancing then subsiding, I feel oddly peaceful with this intimate conversation. I could never have said all this to my mother, who lacked a certain emotional objectivity when it came to the topic of men. ‘I don’t believe many people have the kind of certainty that was between you and Eddy,’ I say. ‘I once got so annoyed at Justin when he couldn’t just say, yes, he was in love with me. But, in a way, now I see his point. But then how do you know when someone is The One? Is it because you
know all the others definitely weren’t?’ I laugh a little. ‘Maybe being in love is one part circumstance, another part faith and the other part imagination.’ I meet Evelyn’s interested eyes. ‘Yet you knew Eddy was The One.’

  ‘I think what fully brought it home to me was when I saw him quite by chance in the Ballroom five years later. He probably should have long since forgotten me by then. But when I saw how his face was so flooded with what might have been . . . I will never forget that overwhelming, profound regret I suddenly had. How much I wanted to run to him, yet there I was standing across the room with Mark! It was a very bleak feeling for a young married woman to be having. I would not wish that on anyone.’

  ‘I wish I’d known Eddy. In some ways, he reminds me of Justin, even though they’re very different.’

  ‘My guess is that Justin was quite a serious fellow? Not lots of fun?’

  ‘He’s not a joker or a person who likes to be the centre of attention. Though he’s definitely got a sense of humour. But he isn’t one of these people who freewheels through life. He tends to take all the wrongs of the world on board and act like it’s his obligation to fix them, and that can be tiring at times. Sometimes, even when he was supposedly having fun, I sensed he was play-acting, maybe because he wanted to appear that way, but he knew he wasn’t that way.’ I shrug. ‘He’d probably be really offended if he knew I thought that.’

  ‘Well, maybe you need someone a bit more happy-go-lucky next time.’

  I close my eyes to the sun again. ‘Urgh! I don’t want to think about next times.’

  We sit for a while, then take a stroll. ‘Are they ever coming back?’ I ask of Eddy and the gardener, whom we can no longer spot.

  ‘Sometimes, he takes longer when he knows Eddy’s really enjoying it.’

  ‘That’s sweet.’ It’s charming how everyone likes Eddy so much. ‘I’ve been thinking that I need to see Lisa,’ I say, out of the blue. I glance at Evelyn, sideways. ‘You know? Like how you wanted to see Eddy’s wife?’