The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

by Catherine Alliott

  I smiled and hopped back into bed with my toast and the papers.

  When Ant and I had been married only a few months, he'd left for work one morning then popped back ten minutes later, having forgotten a student's essay. He'd found me back in bed with a box of lime creams, a cigarette and Cosmo. I'd been as mortified as if he'd caught me with a naked man, but Ant had roared with delight.

  ‘It's why I love you,’ he'd said, leaning over the bed to kiss me. ‘Because you're not up and dressed, hair scraped back, beavering away trying to write the next Madame Bovary, like everyone else in this city. You just enjoy yourself. You embrace pleasure.’

  I seem to remember we'd embraced a bit more pleasure that morning as one kiss had led to another and Ant was late for his tutorial, and I remember wondering if the student waiting patiently for him to arrive had any idea that the flushed young professor, who eventually appeared waving the forgotten essay, had just achieved bliss in the arms of his wife, on top of a box of lime creams. Probably not.

  These days my tastes had changed, and tea and toast accompanied the Daily Mail, but I still read the important bits: the ‘Femail’ section in the middle, the diets, the detoxing, the fashion – I didn't skimp. This being Monday I also shimmied through the local paper too, glancing, out of habit, at the houses at the back, then the furniture for sale – we were vaguely looking for a baby grand piano for Anna – when an ad in the livestock column caught my eye.

  For Sale. Beautiful grey Connemara pony, 14.2 hands, 6 years. Very willing, a great character. A teenager's dream. First to see will buy. £1,000.

  I stared in disbelief; read it again. Oh. Oh, how marvellous! Right here, in front of my nose. It was fate. I just knew it was. And I also knew, from listening to Anna, that 14.2 was about the right height. And a thousand pounds, I was sure, was pretty reasonable too. I feverishly read the address. Parkfield Lane. Which was off the Woodstock Road. Minutes away!

  I straightened up in the crumpled bed, retying my dressing gown, lips pursed triumphantly. Never in a million years had Caro imagined I'd actually buy a pony when she'd sent her taunt sailing across the yard, and never in a million years had I imagined I could. She knew I didn't know a thing about horses, knew she'd clean-bowled me right through the stumps, and yet… what could be so hard? I peered at the ad again. ‘A teenager's dream.’ Well, I had a teenager and she had a dream – perfect. My hand was already straying across the duvet towards the phone on the bedside table when it stopped. Hang on. It was one thing to sit up in bed full of bravado, and think, I'll show her, and quite another to march into her farmyard leading a horse.

  I swallowed; saw my nerve rapidly disappearing down the plughole. Well, OK, I'd talk to her, I determined. She'd probably calmed down a bit by now, as had I, and we'd sort this out like… like friends. Like sisters. If Caro really meant Anna needed a pony for Pony Club, then fine, we'd get one, but if she'd meant over her dead body, we'd forget it. Anna would understand. I quaked, remembering her eager little face at the gate this morning.

  On the other hand – I leaned forward, dissecting the ad minutely – this pony might go quickly. It was clearly a winner, and my sister-in-law was a busy woman. She never answered her mobile and I'd have to go to the farm to track her down, and whilst I was canvassing her opinion in a pigsty, or sucking up to her whilst her head was down her Portaloos, she'd say she'd think about it and get back to me, while in the meantime some other lucky teenager would have bought it. Whereas if I just presented her with a fait accompli… In another moment, and with that famous impulsion Ant was so fond of, I'd plucked the phone from the bedside table and dialled the number.

  ‘Hello, yes, I've just seen your ad in the local paper…’

  Ten minutes later I'd agreed to meet a man in a stable yard off the Woodstock Road, who'd promised me a mare to die for: a horse so serene the Queen herself would be proud to be seen on her, so quiet she'd take a sugar lump from your head without harming a hair, and so well trained she'd wandered into his kitchen only yesterday, quiet as a mouse, without him even noticing.

  I'd had a rather unsettling vision of a horse, perched on a stool at my granite breakfast bar, legs crossed, calmly reading the paper and demanding cereal, but agreed that my daughter and I would most certainly be there on Saturday morning, early, to meet this equine paragon. Then I put the phone down and flushed with horror. Lord, what had I done?

  I quickly dialled Caro's number. Tim answered.

  ‘Oh, Tim.’ I flooded with relief. ‘I was, um, ringing to thank you both for yesterday,’ I lied. ‘Such a lovely day, and all that delicious food!’

  ‘Well, it was good to see you. How did Anna get on?’

  ‘Oh, fine. She said it was easy. I mean – not bad.’

  ‘Grade seven, Caro tells me!’

  ‘Um, yes. Tim, is Caro around? I wouldn't mind a word.’

  ‘She's not at the moment. She's down at the yard with Harriet.’

  ‘Harriet?’

  ‘The blind pig. She has to hand-feed her or the others don't let her get a look in.’

  I blinked. The paradox didn't escape me. Caro was already up and hand-feeding her blind pig, whilst I was sitting up in bed in my Cath Kidston nightie.

  ‘Right. Yes, well, speaking of animals, Tim, I just wondered…’ and off I skittered, it all coming tumbling out, ending up with ‘… I mean, we obviously haven't got anywhere to keep it, so I just sort of wondered—’

  ‘Course you can,’ he boomed, interrupting me. ‘God, we've got too much grass here for our own horses, one more won't make any difference. And if it lives out it's no trouble at all. No mucking out stables and all that malarkey.’

  ‘Well, that's what I thought,’ I said eagerly. ‘And obviously I'd pop over and – you know – check it occasionally.’

  ‘Oh, Caro can do all that. She has to sort out the others, she can cast an eye.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don't want Caro doing anything,’ I said quickly. ‘It's my responsibility. But I just wondered, if it needed – I don't know – its feet picking out or something and I couldn't get there, maybe you, or Jack…?’

  ‘Well, not me, obviously. I don't know the first thing. Dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle, as far as I'm concerned, but Jack's your man, or Phoebe. And how lovely to see more of Anna. The kids will be thrilled.’

  I knew he was genuinely pleased. There was a bit of a gap, socially and intellectually, between Anna and her cousins, and Tim and I had been so close.

  ‘Caro too,’ he added.

  ‘Er, actually, Tim, she wasn't.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thrilled. I sort of broached it with her yesterday, and she was a bit… you know.’

  ‘Was she? Well, yesterday was a stressy day, Evie. But don't you worry. You get your horse and we'll give it a home. Anna can come at weekends, get the train over. Caro will pick her up. I must fly now, hon. Got to see a man about a bull.’

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he'd gone. I put the phone down guiltily. I'd gone round Caro, hadn't I? Gone straight to Tim. But not deliberately, I decided. I'd actually rung to speak to her, to thank her for yesterday, seek her permission. It wasn't my fault Tim had answered, was it? I got out of bed and reached for my clothes. I'd ring her again later. When Tim had already broken it to her, told her it was a fait accompli, I realized with another guilty pang. Oh dear. But actually, Tim's response was the more natural one, I decided as I buttoned up my new Joseph shirt. The more mature, friendly response. And I'd do the lion's share of the work – I pulled on my jeans – of course I would. I'd enjoy it. I needed a project. I wouldn't ride it or anything, but I could – you know – lead it. In my mind's eye I was already strolling down a country lane in a spriggy summer dress and a straw hat with an old grey mare, flowers in its hair. The old grey mare, not me. And the old grey mare was the horse not—Anyway. Lovely.

  Right now, though, I thought, darting round the room, popping in some sparkly earrings, finding my Italian mules,
I needed to hustle. Maria would be here at ten to clean and I hated her to find me in bed. I had to get Ant's suit from the dry cleaners and pick up that clarinet music Anna wanted. I had a busy day ahead and I needed to get on.

  4

  Days passed and Friday found me cycling to meet Ant for lunch, under a cloudless sky, treats from the deli for the weekend safely stashed in my basket, long dark hair streaming out behind me. I'd suggested cutting my hair recently – shoulder length, I'd thought, in a bob – but Ant had been horrified.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I'm too old for long hair,’ I'd protested.

  ‘Don't be ridiculous. It's you.’

  He'd looked so upset, I'd left it. But perhaps I should tie it up, I wondered as I cycled behind a lady of a certain age with an elegant grey chignon fastened to her head with pearly combs. She turned left under the arch into Trinity and I smiled to myself. That was what I loved about this city: you never quite knew who you were cycling behind or sitting next to on the bus; a scientist working on the next cure for cancer, or an astrophysicist sending rockets to Mars?

  ‘Probably some poor devil off to restock the KitKats in the staff canteen,’ Ant would scoff.

  ‘Nonsense, you can tell. They have that vague, eccentric look, like they don't know what day it is.’

  ‘Ah, like your mother.’

  He had me here. Mum rarely knew what day it was, sported a wispy grey ponytail and a charity-shop wardrobe, yet didn't have a scholastic bone in her body. Felicity, on the other hand, my stepmother, looked like she'd just stepped off a yacht in St-Tropez and was, in fact, a biology professor at Keble.

  ‘I rest my case,’ Ant would say smugly.

  I smiled as I neared the end of their road: Mum and Felicity's. Not that they lived together or anything, but when Dad died, Mum had told her about a house that was coming up at the end of her street. Felicity, grief-stricken, and for once needing a bit of help and guidance, had looked at it and bought it immediately. Yes, odd, I mused, turning into it now as a short cut, how that had worked out. No one had been terribly surprised when, after Tim and I got married – and I do think she'd hung on until then – my mother left my father. They rowed pretty much constantly and had always had a tempestuous relationship, but the marriage really came to a head when, on one memorable occasion, empty gin bottles were thrown, of which, as Tim commented later, there were not a few. Mum had come to loathe the farm: the mud, the wet – which was rich, my father would snap, when she'd married a farmer – and Dad hated what he called her spiritualistic crap; her cod medicine.

  Mum, a self-styled free spirit, was heavily into alternative remedies. Reflexology, aromatherapy, you name it, she'd tried it, her latest obsession being reiki, of which, after a startlingly brief training period, she claimed to be a qualified practitioner. The final straw for Dad had been her plan to set up a practice at the farm, transforming one of the barns – with a few pink towels and some womb music, he'd snort – into a holistic medical centre.

  ‘I'm not denying there's something in all this alternative bollocks,’ he'd roared. ‘What I am denying is that your mother is in any way, shape or form qualified to administer it!’

  One unseasonably clement day in October, after just such a heated exchange, Mum took her beloved Cairn terrier, Bathsheba, and walked all the way into Oxford – no mean eight miles – to visit her sister. She telephoned Dad to say that since it was so far, she thought she'd stay the night. The following morning she rang to say she thought she'd stay a few days, because Cynthia, her sister, was under the weather. A few days had turned into a few weeks, and then a few months – and then she never came back. If Tim or I enquired, Dad would say vaguely, ‘Your mother? Oh, she's still at Cynthia's.’ And if we rang Mum and asked when she was thinking of returning, she'd say, ‘Oh, when Cynthia's a bit better, I expect.’

  The truth was it suited them. Mum was back in the city where she belonged, and Dad was happy with the farm to himself, remote control in his hand of an evening and no frustrated housewife wanting him to light candles and sit cross-legged listening to his inner music. Dad lived like a slob, wore the same clothes every day, ate baked beans from the tin and left washing up in the sink in a tottering pagoda. Periodically I'd despair to Tim, who'd say – who cares? He's happy. Let him be. And he was. They both were, in fact, for the first time in years, and life became remarkably peaceful.

  Inevitably, though, as time went by, they both became lonely and then came what Tim and I nervously referred to as ‘the courting phase’. Mum embarked on a series of jaw-droopingly unsuitable boyfriends – some half her age, one a student, for God's sake, one a busker she'd found in an underpass, all of whom predictably came to nothing – and Dad moved in Felicity.

  I have to say, in the beginning Tim and I were slightly wary of Felicity, simply because she was so palpably not Dad's type. He'd met a few women through Rural Relations, a country dating agency – primarily rosy-cheeked women with trousers held up with binder twine but Felicity was tall, slim, ravishingly good-looking and highly intelligent.

  ‘What does she see in Dad?’ I wondered rather disloyally to Caro over a cup of tea in her bungalow. She'd bristled slightly, Tim being very like his father.

  ‘Well, he's tall, good-looking and not entirely impoverished, with a farm and three hundred acres – what's not to see?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I'd agreed, suitably rebuked.

  Some weeks later Dad had invited us all to Sunday lunch, to meet Felicity properly. We'd tried not to boggle as we spotted napkins on the table and a vase of flowers in the middle, and then sat down to a starter – a starter! – with Dad at one end in a freshly laundered shirt, Felicity at the other, looking nervous. And actually, because of her slight unease, I'd warmed to her instantly. We all had, even Caro.

  ‘She's just what your father needs,’ she'd declared when she'd rung me later for a post-match analysis. ‘An intelligent woman with a no-nonsense approach to lick that farmhouse into shape.’

  ‘Mum was intelligent,’ I'd countered loyally, but I knew what she meant.

  ‘Yes, but she got so distracted. Felicity has such a clear vision of how that farm should be.’

  It was true, Dad and Felicity were a brilliant team. In no time at all she'd cleared the house of clutter, redecorated, and even attacked the garden, so that although we all still knew the place was falling down, cosmetically it looked a lot better. And she was fun to have around; pleasant, friendly but didn't try to ingratiate herself too much, just cheerily invited us to lunch most weekends, knowing Tim, especially, still regarded the farm as home. She'd click around the kitchen she'd repainted a sunny cadmium yellow, in high heels to Classic FM – whilst Mum had shuffled in moccasins to Cat Stevens – served delicious food with vegetables and herbs she'd grown in the garden, and then excused herself after coffee, ostensibly to disappear to work in the study but perhaps to let us chat. Dad adored her, absolutely adored her, his whole, astonished, wide-eyed demeanour saying, Look! Look what I've got! Bloody hell!

  In time, Felicity included Mum in her invitations too, asking her first one Christmas, for lunch.

  ‘So that everyone can be together, and you and Tim don't have to flit from house to house?’ she'd asked me anxiously, soliciting my opinion first, when we'd met for lunch in Browns. ‘What d'you think, Evie?’

  ‘I think it's a brilliant idea,’ I'd said. ‘If she'll come.’

  To our surprise, she did, and a surprisingly jolly Christmas Day was had by all. The first for many years, I'd thought as I'd caught Tim's eye over the turkey, wondering if he remembered the one when Mum had chased Dad round the table with her Christmas present to him, an electric carving knife.

  And Felicity had a way of getting the best out of people: of getting Dad to be garrulous and genial, Tim to be amusing and a chip off the old block, Mum not to be too embarrassingly wacky but charmingly eccentric, and even Caro… Caro I'd looked at with new eyes that Christmas Day as she'd recounted losing her s
hoe in Cornmarket, putting it on again and getting home to discover she'd got one blue and one brown. ‘I swear,’ she'd insisted, wide-eyed around the table as we'd all roared with laughter in our paper hats, ‘I'd got someone else's shoe!’ I'd remembered what fun she could be and had caught Tim looking at her too, remembering why he'd married her.

  Yes, Felicity had been the cement our family needed, no one doubted that, and no one had been surprised when she and Dad eventually tied the knot. Even after he was married Dad couldn't stop parading her like a prize heifer; proudly showing us the new research book she'd written, pointing out the letters after her name, teasing me that I wasn't the only one in the family married to an academic. He'd happily host faculty dinner parties for her too, pulling corks and grinning benignly as molecular science chat went on around him.

  ‘Mum would have loved all that,’ I'd said wistfully to Ant in the car on the way home from one such dinner.

  ‘All she wanted was a bit of culture in the house.’

  ‘That's not culture,’ he'd smiled. ‘That's scientists.’

  I'd dimly grasped the distinction, but all clever people were cultured to me. I think of all of us, though, Ant had been slightly suspicious of Felicity to begin with and I'd wondered if there'd been a tinge of rivalry, both coming from the same University pool. In time, though, he'd warmed to her too, seeing what a profound difference she made to Dad, who bounded around the farm like one of his young calves, like a new man. Which was why, one bright August morning, it was such a shock that he was a dead man.

  Grief-stricken as we all were, we knew immediately it was Felicity who needed help. After the funeral she retreated to the farmhouse, pulling up the drawbridge, putting the answer machine on, hunkering down for days. We'd worried and rallied, Caro and I bringing lunch to the farm on Sundays, which she usually cooked so effortlessly, trying desperately to keep some semblance of normality going, some cheerful banter as she sat, toying listlessly with her food, or not sitting at all, shuffling around in the background as we ate – no clip-clopping now – sifting through letters of condolence, looking pale. After a few months it was no real surprise when, one Sunday, she announced the house was too big for her and held too many painful memories and that she was moving to 47 Fairfield Avenue, down the road from Mum, who, at number 16, had inherited Cynthia's house when she'd died. They weren't necessarily soul mates back then – Mum was just doing Felicity a good turn – but over time, proximity and a shared past – after all, they'd both been married to the same man – they forged an unlikely alliance. Tuesday nights found Mum in Felicity's sitting room at the backgammon board, where gin and tonics were served promptly at six; they took it in turn to provide the sandwiches. Thursday night was book club night, and on Sunday's, if they weren't with Caro or me, they lunched together in town. Oh, and some mornings had coffee too.