And from the word go, it was a success. We made a good team, the four of us, a good posse. We drank in pubs together, cooked suppers together, went bowling, saw films – three of us knowing each other from the year dot, one of us a new boy, never having heard the jokes, but roaring dutifully, his eyes opening to the lighter side of life.
Ant's background, I discovered, was subdued. The only child of a widowed mother who'd ‘given in rather gratefully’ – Ant's words – to a bout of pneumonia four years ago, assuring her son it was time she went to see his father, he'd had, not an unhappy time of it, but a quiet one.
Tim and I, on the other hand, came from a long line of practical jokers, and Tim was the biggest. He was forever organizing parties at which Ant and I were the only ones to arrive in fancy dress, whilst everyone else was in jeans. We'd walk in and Tim and Caro would shout ‘Surprise!’ and fall about laughing, and I'd fall about too, as Ant stood blinking behind his specs in nothing but a sheet and a crown of thorns. We introduced him to flaming sambucas, setting fire to his coffee beans and roaring when he predictably burned his lips on the glass; we taught him to drive the remains of the car Tim had written off, and which had pride of place in our sitting room; how to take imaginary bends making screeching tyre noises, to have a snog on the back seat: he loved it. He bought into the frivolity, finding it a refreshing change, I think, from tedious faculty drinks parties at the University, where he had to nurse a glass of wine for hours, and where everyone vied to be cleverer than anyone else, whilst the Milligans vied to be sillier.
The only practical joke he did draw the line at was when he went for an interview for Provost at Balliol, and before he went, found a note on his desk saying ‘Don't forget to take your urine sample.’ Off he went and, at the end of the interview, when asked if he had any questions, produced it from his pocket saying uncertainly, ‘Um… what shall I do with this?’
On the whole, though, he found us entertaining. We raced around town in his terrible old Citroën, and even went on holiday in it together, Ant driving, Caro navigating – naturally – through the Dordogne and right down to the coast, whilst Tim and I giggled in the back. Ant, hunched over the steering wheel, would search myopically for signs, as Caro, leaning out of the window, waved down passers-by and asked directions to the beach.
‘Garçon! Garçon!’ she called imperiously on one occasion. ‘Ou est votre bêche?’ She received a horrified stare and a Gallic shrug as her man walked on.
‘You just called him a waiter and asked him where his spade is,’ Ant informed her.
‘Yes, but he got my drift, for heaven's sake,’ Caro muttered, rolling up her window.
It was on that holiday that Tim asked Caro to marry him. I remember them coming back from the beach one day, when Ant and I had been to see a monastery; Tim looking sheepish, Caro pink, keeping it to themselves for a bit – well, like ten minutes – before Caro, unable to resist, blurted out, ‘We've got something to tell you.’
To this day I can remember my heart dropping like a brick through water. My best friend and my brother – of course I was delighted, of course, but… it wasn't me. I hated myself, still do, but even as I was rushing off to get the champagne with Ant – terrible cheap stuff from the local shop – and coming back brandishing it joyfully, I was aware of a nasty sicky feeling inside me. I happen to think it's a fairly primeval urge women have, after about the age of twenty-five, to get married, and our biggest drawback as far as men are concerned. It's almost better to say you've got VD than to say you want to get married. But we can't help it, and I had a lump in my throat as we toasted their happiness.
‘How exciting! Oh, I'm so pleased!’
And the thing is, even as I was gushing, I knew there was a bit of Caro that knew what I was thinking, because we'd known each other for donkey's years and talked about boys and weddings and what our bridesmaids would wear and what our children would be called, and all the silly things girls aren't supposed to talk about as they're doggedly pursuing their careers but do. So as she's telling me breathlessly about the village church, and the marquee at the farm, she knows too that I also want the village church, and a marquee at the farm. She knows my hopes and dreams, which is the good thing about a best friend and also the bad, so she knows my insides are curdling, but she can't help it. Can't help it, and why should she? She's getting married, she's first, she's won. And her eyes, when they look at mine, are full of happiness and shame. Happiness and shame. And I'm galvanized. I will be next, I will!
Ant wasn't stupid. Far from it. The four of us had been hanging around together for some time, and now two of our number were going it alone.
That night, after we'd made love, in that sticky, rather exciting way one does in hot villas, in our little whitewashed room with the crucifix over the bed and the view of the bay, the waves rushing up the beach, he held me close.
‘Lovely for Tim and Caro,’ I murmured into his shoulder.
Yes, I know, a bit obvious, but as I said, it's primal. And actually, it would have been odd not to mention it.
‘Hm,’ he murmured sleepily. Then, after a moment, ‘They'll be good together.’
My heart flipped at this. Did that mean… he thought we wouldn't?
‘Yes, they will.’
Silence.
‘They're quite different,’ I ventured, wanting at all costs to prolong this line of chat.
‘Hm.’
‘Don't you think?’
‘You mean, Tim's easy-going and Caro's a control freak?’
I laughed. ‘I suppose. But actually, Tim probably needs a bit of control. Needs… I don't know… gripping.’
‘Hmph.’
Silence. I took a deep breath. ‘So… how d'you think we'd check out? As a team?’ Blimey, Evie.
We'd slipped apart now, on account of the heat, and were lying side by side, the sheet thrown off: the over twenty-five-year-old girlfriend and her man.
After a moment, Ant rolled over on top of me and propped himself up the better to look at me, his elbows either side of my head. The moon, through the open window, lit up his face. Thoughtful. Sincere. My heart began to palpitate. Oh my God… this was it. This… was… it! His eyes searched my face, my hair, then—
‘Got it!’
He thwacked the pillow, spun round and sat up, showing me a squashed mosquito in the palm of his hand.
‘I've just saved you from certain pain. This bloodsucking parasite was about to take a slurp from your cheek.’
I sat up beside him and, using the wrong muscles, grinned gamely at his hand. Wanted to bite it. ‘They always go for me.’
He kissed my cheek. ‘Sweet blood, that's why. They like that. Night.’
‘Night.’
Tim and Caro got married in the autumn. And it was lovely, of course it was. Heaven. It was in the village church, naturally, right beside our house, on a fine October day, and I was chief bridesmaid in a midnight-blue velvet dress, very sophisticated and without a hint of meringue, and Ant was an usher, devastatingly handsome in a morning coat. Caro looked radiant in ivory silk, with tiny blue velvet bows sewn just above the hem – I know you need to know this whether you're over twenty-five or not – and velvet ribbons hanging from her bouquet, which was cream rosebuds. Mum looked very pretty in her hippyish way, in a long flowery dress and a floppy straw hat, hair right down her back in those days, and she and Dad – still together then, albeit tenuously – put aside their differences and their gin bottles for the day, and beamed and looked proud. The reception was held in a marquee in the garden, with lashings of pink champagne, and then a rather pissy disco, before the happy couple went off on their honeymoon.
And then the next weekend, while Tim and Caro were still in Venice, Mum and Dad, having surprised themselves by making peace for the wedding, or at least an armed neutrality, decided to have a break from the farm, and go on holiday to Crete, where they had an almighty row in a taverna and were thrown out but that's another story. The one you need to know is
that Ant and I moved in to look after the farm for them that weekend, and that was the weekend Neville Carter died.
Seventeen years ago, on 12 October 1989. And seventeen years later, here was I, in my basement kitchen in Jericho, having just had lunch with my husband, who'd just received a letter from a girl purporting to be his daughter. I gazed out of the window to Anna's trampoline, knowing I had to remember. Knowing it was important.
The Carters lived across the road from us and, knowing I was house-sitting at the farm, had popped by.
‘Evie?’ It was Mrs Carter who'd opened the front door, as people did in our village. She called up the stairs, ‘Evie, are you there?’
I'd run down, flushed, from the bedroom, pulling down my T-shirt. ‘Oh, Mrs Carter.’
‘Evie, would you mind, dear, only I've been called into work,’ Mrs Carter was a district nurse, ‘and I wondered, could you have Neville for me? I'll only be an hour or so.’
Damn, I remember thinking. ‘Of course, Mrs Carter.’
‘He'll be no trouble. He can play outside, if you like. If you're busy.’
‘Yes, yes, fine.’
‘Just keep an eye.’
And Neville, narrow, weedy, pinched-faced, not an attractive boy, and not popular with the village children either – a sneak, by all accounts – had sidled inside, biting his nails. He was eight, not a baby, not necessarily needing to be watched all the time, and – oh, I didn't want to remember any of this, but somehow I knew it was important – and I'd said, ‘Neville, will you really be all right in the garden?’ when she'd gone.
‘Yeah.’ Not looking at me. Uncommunicative, shifty.
‘Or d'you want to do some colouring? Look, we've got these.’ I hustled him to the kitchen, rifled in the dresser drawer for some felt pens and sat him down at the table with Mum's kitchen pad.
He shrugged. ‘Don't mind.’
‘Well, have a go, hm?’
And back I'd leaped up those stairs, to Ant, in bed, leapfrogging on top of him with a shriek, pulling my top off again, no bra, and Neville had wandered off: first to the swing – I remember glimpsing him out of the window, on the old tyre that Dad had hung on a rope for us – and then out of sight, to that bit of the stream we'd all been warned about as children, where the water flows much faster, darker, and you can't see the riverbed and oh… so ghastly. So ghastly later. Ant, ashen-faced as he and Maroulla, the wife of our farm worker, dragged him out: me, weeping, shrieking on the bank, the parents, Mr and Mrs Carter, arriving. Oh, no. Mustn't remember the parents. My parents then, getting a flight back from Crete, pale beneath their tans, shaken: the screaming, the rows, Mum good, Dad not so good. Telling the truth, having, obviously, to tell the truth, about where we'd been, what we'd been doing, in the spare room, the horror on my father's face, the shame on Ant's; his gentle, kind, intelligent, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly face that had killed a child.
And afterwards, we'd cried together, huddled together, cringing, guilty figures at the funeral. Tim and Caro were back now – not a nice homecoming – and the whole village was there, everyone I'd known and grown up with, looking at me, who they knew, with a mixture of pity and surprise, and looking at Ant with mistrust. The man she'd been with. The man they didn't know, who she'd been upstairs with.
Ant had taken time off work – his college had been kind – and we'd drunk in pubs on the outskirts of the city: anonymous pubs where people didn't know us, drinking too much, always there for last orders, our guilt and our shame binding us. And then one of those nights, walking back, full of alcohol, he'd asked me to marry him.
I looked up from the slate work surface I was gripping fiercely now, and down the garden again, to the laburnum tree. To give me my due, if I was to be afforded any, I'd said no. No, I said, we were too highly strung and emotional right now. Not in our right minds. Let's wait. But he'd insisted. Said it was all he wanted. And, let's face it, he knew it was all I wanted. Knew that that day, as we'd been fooling around in the spare-room bed, in the farmhouse, as Neville had quietly padded down to the river, I'd been angling again, not in a crass, unsubtle way, but still… Saying how lovely Tim and Caro's wedding had been, how beautiful the church was, how happy they'd looked.
I felt the blood rush to my face now as I gazed at the wisteria on the garden wall, my bike propped beside it. Well, if that wasn't crass and unsubtle, what was? And, whilst I was angling, Ant had – I forced myself to remember this, as I never had before – looked awkward. I felt a jab of horror. Had gently – and was this after we'd made love, or before? – gently untangled himself and said, ‘Evie… I'm not sure.’
I shut my eyes. Well, lots of boyfriends weren't sure. Said they weren't ready. Needed time. And I hadn't pushed it. I opened my eyes. Hadn't said, but, Ant, we've been going out for months now, as long as Tim and Caro, and I badly want a baby and she's going to beat me to it, and all our lives we've been competitive, all our lives it's mattered, to Caro and me. No, of course I hadn't said any of that, and only even fractionally thought it. It was only because I was forcing myself now, years later, to be so ruthlessly honest that these thoughts were surfacing. I was probably forcing them to surface, like squeezing a spot that wasn't quite ready. But now, now this letter had come and was making me think, what if Neville hadn't died? I knew it was important; knew we'd become closer, but had never allowed myself to think… had it changed everything? Had Neville dying changed the course of my life? Surely it was always on a trajectory to marry Ant?
I felt panicky, leaned heavily on the work surface, hands clenched together. And now – a child. By another woman. Conceived around that time. A barmaid, he'd said, a passing fancy, but nevertheless, a release from me. From my nagging. I pressed my fists to my temples. The demons were crowding in on me, making me think the worst of myself. Making me think, what goes around, comes around, Evie. A child. Two years older than Anna. And so – and this I had to really make myself do – and so think back. Think back to the moment before we'd heard the scream from Maroulla, who'd found Neville floating face down; think back to what Ant had said a few seconds before the scream had changed our lives.
‘Evie… there's something you need to know. Something I've got to tell you.’
Up to now, it had been ruthlessly erased from my memory. I'd never said – weeks, months later – what was it, Ant? What was it you had to tell me? That was my shame. That I'd pretended he'd never said it. Or that I'd never heard.
I let go of the slate worktop. Took a deep breath. Exhaled shakily. But as I went to leave the room, I looked around. Wondered what else I'd pushed. He hadn't really liked that Welsh dresser I'd found in the antique shop in Woodstock; had thought it olde worlde, cutesy. But there it was. Hadn't really liked the yellow walls, thinking them too bright, a little challenging over the morning paper. But there they were. Hadn't really liked the water-colour of the milkmaid and the chickens above the sink – too twee, too whimsical. But there it was. And here I was too.
I bowed my head and left the room.
8
‘Mum! There's a guy on the phone wanting to know if you're coming to look at his skewbald!’
I sat bolt upright in bed. His what? I hadn't slept a wink until about four in the morning, when I'd finally taken a pill, so now, here I was groggy, swaying and full of toxins.
‘Oh,’ I croaked. The horse. I swung my legs out of bed. A mistake. I sat on the edge, holding my head. ‘Tell him we're on our way.’ I quavered to the carpet.
Ant's side of the bed was empty, I noticed. I got up tentatively and tottered off to find my clothes, fumbling around the bedroom like a blind woman, listening to Anna's voice on the phone, downstairs in the hall.
‘Yes, I'm so sorry… oh, did she? Oh, my mum's hopeless, yes, we're on our way!’
She mustn't know, was my overriding panicky thought as I pulled on my jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. She mustn't know that this was anything other than a normal day. I clutched my T-shirt to my breast and sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed, reme
mbering last night. Last night, when Ant had come home, quite late from an evening meeting in college – and late was normal, but not as late as this – I'd confronted him.
‘You see?’ I'd said, with a mixture of fear and triumph. ‘See, Ant, it can't be your child. We were going out together, even engaged!’
And then I'd watched his face turn grey as I knew it would; watched him crumple, defeated into a chair, his gentle eyes pained. I'd listened, as he explained that yes, it could be his. That this had indeed happened while we were going out together, this thing with the barmaid – a one-off, a one-night stand – because he'd felt so trapped. Felt he was going insane.
‘When, exactly?’ I'd whispered, hanging on to the back of a chair. ‘When had you felt so trapped? Felt you were going insane?’
‘After lunch, at your parents' house,’ he muttered. ‘One Sunday. When Caro told us she was pregnant.’
My mind skittered back, foraging. But I remembered. Caro and Tim had been married for about three months, Ant and I engaged for one. And Ant and I had just returned from a much-needed break in Scotland, deciding, while we were up there, that our wedding would also be in the village church, like Tim and Caro's, but smaller, a more low-key affair. It was, after all, only a short while since Neville's funeral at the same venue. Ant had been quiet in Scotland. He'd fished a lot, whilst I'd walked, or read, but people were quiet when they fished, weren't they? This, then, would have been our first family gathering since… our first Sunday lunch for some time.
Mum, with half a bottle of cooking sherry inside her – and this would have been shortly before she left home – was on flying form: outrageous, confrontational, dancing to Fleetwood Mac in her cheesecloth dress as she stirred the Bisto well after two o'clock, Dad unamused, glaring at her. I imagine there comes a point in every marriage when what was once charming becomes intensely irritating.
The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton Page 8