The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘You busy,’ she said, giving my hand the faintest squeeze. I was so relieved to hear her voice. Faint, but not too diminished. ‘As it should be. Family… Anna… how is my Anna?’

  ‘She's well, thank you. And lovely. Riding her pony. Maybe I'll bring her to see you?’ As I said it, I knew it was a bad idea.

  She smiled faintly. ‘No. Let her not see me so, hm?’

  She was right. Anna would be frightened. Fourteen-year-olds were not great at old people dying. We regarded one another fondly.

  ‘And Ant?’ she asked.

  ‘Ant's fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  Her eyelids were closing. I watched as the lids slowly came down like parchment shutters. I sat there, holding her hand, wondering whether to prattle on as people said you should, so they could hear your voice, or just to sit quietly as she slept. Her hair was so thin I could see her scalp. I licked my lips.

  ‘Yes, Ant's very busy. He's writing, of course, and—’

  ‘He no blame himself, no?’ Her eyes had flickered opened again as she interrupted me.

  For a moment I couldn't think what she was talking about, then realized she'd gone back in time. Way back to Neville Carter, the boy Maroulla had found in the river and never forgotten. In some small, non-specific way, I still thought about it every day. I knew Ant did, and no doubt Maroulla, too. It had taken all of this tiny, but once wiry woman's strength to drag that body from the river, weighed down as he was by sodden clothes, choked with reeds, water pouring off him, and on her own death bed, I imagined it would be a rather potent image.

  ‘You theenk is why he marry you.’ She looked directly at me. I was aware of a brightness behind through those deceptively cloudy eyes.

  ‘You knew that?’

  She waited, not inclined to waste words.

  I sighed. ‘I did, Maroulla. But I was young, then. Insecure. I don't think so now.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘He no panic buy.’

  Panic buy. Maroulla's English, dodgy at the best of times, was sometimes unnervingly spot on. When we were young we took full advantage of her limited vocabulary, knowing she couldn't always find the words to reprimand us, but occasionally it worked in her favour. Once she'd yelled up to the top of the hay barn where we were hiding, ‘You tread me like dog dirt!’ We'd slunk down the ladder shame-faced, pretty sure she meant treat, not tread, but either way it wasn't good.

  ‘How are you, Maroulla?’

  ‘I die.’

  ‘Well. Not yet.’

  ‘Soon. And good job too. Time to see Mario.’

  I smiled. ‘You reckon he's waiting for you?’

  ‘Of course.’ She gave a ghost of a smile. ‘He be cross I so late.’

  I grinned. Yes, he probably would. If Maroulla was fiery, Mario was more so. I had the feeling she was rather looking forward to it.

  ‘And your father too.’

  ‘Dad?’ I was surprised. ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘No suppose, he good man. He be there.’

  Quite a party she was anticipating, at the virtuous venue. And she had no doubt she was going there – why should she? All Maroulla had ever done was serve others: her husband, her children, Spencer and Tracy (I kid you not), our family – how could she not get to heaven?

  ‘He good master.’

  ‘Maroulla…’ I hated it when she was the forelock-tugging tenant and we the autocratic landlords.

  ‘And he make good sex love too.’

  ‘Dad?’ My eyes popped. Good Lord. Feudal rights?

  ‘No. Mario.’

  ‘Oh!’ That master.

  ‘And I know what he say when I see him.’ She tapped my arm with a bony finger, wide awake now. ‘He say – you keep it safe?’

  ‘Hm?’ I was thinking about Mario being her master and her lover.

  ‘Because I take photos.’

  ‘What photos?’

  ‘In village shop.’

  She'd lost me. ‘The photocopier in the village shop?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Yes, ten pence each. Right rip-off.’

  ‘Oh. Of what, Maroulla?’

  ‘Of thees. Mario say keep it safe, but when I die, who knows? I can't keep it safe no more, can I? So I geev one to Tim, yesterday. And Felicity when she come.’

  ‘Tim's been here?’

  She was sitting up now, or attempting to; pushing herself up her pillows, opening the drawer by her bed, rummaging with fluttering hands.

  ‘Of course. He come one time every week.’

  ‘Does he?’ I was appalled. ‘Oh, Maroulla, how awful. I knew Felicity came, but I didn't know… I don't know why…’

  ‘You busy. I know. I bring up family. I work. I know.’

  Well, she knew about running two households, scrubbing two kitchen floors and making endless meals. She didn't know about paying a cleaner and putting a little business the local restaurant's way.

  She was lighting upon a brown A4 envelope now, her eyes eager, opening it with a shaking hand. She pulled out a piece of paper and gave it to me. ‘There. You read.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I no know, I no read.’ No, of course she couldn't. Not English, anyway. ‘But he make us watch, and sign it. And when I ask Mario, he say very important paper, but he no read either. So I clean office every day, and your father, he so very untidy, and many things get lost in there, and always he rage and shout he can't find things and I worry. So one day I open drawer and find paper, and I take to rip-off shop to copy.’

  I gazed at her a long moment. Then down at the paper. An A4 sheet bearing a photograph of a piece of notepaper, clearly torn from a pad; the ring binding visible down one side. In my father's scrawling hand, I read:

  This country is a complete and utter disgrace. More crap from Defra, more unwarranted restrictions on my land, more outrageous demands from Brussels and piss-poor market prices. Christ Almighty. Felicity, my darling I have no option but to leave the whole bloody shooting match to Tim. Farm, land, money – everything. Poor bugger. He'll have a hard enough time of it as it is with this government, and you always said you'd be happy going back to your flat in college. You have your work, and Evie has Ant to provide, so I don't feel bad about the division of spoils. I'm sorry, my love, but I can't in all conscience saddle him with the bricks and mortar and not the wherewithal to run the wretched place. It will break him, as it's surely breaking me.

  Your loving husband, Victor Milligan, 27 February 1999

  Mario Rodriguez, 27 February 1999

  Maroulla Rodriguez, 27 February 1999

  I read it again. Looked up slowly. ‘He asked you to witness this?’

  ‘Yes, see there.’ She tapped her signature impatiently. ‘In his office. I weed the garden. He call to me through the French windows. No, Meester Milligan, I say, muddy shoes. But he say bloody well come now, Maroulla, impatient. Mario, he there, by Meester Milligan's desk, making cross face at me to hurry.’

  ‘So where's the original?’ I breathed.

  ‘Qué?’

  ‘The first one he wrote, from the notepad.’

  ‘Back in his drawer, I tell you.’

  ‘You put it back in his desk?’

  ‘Yes, his desk. In special folder.’

  But we'd gone through his desk when he died, Felicity and I. We'd done it together: taken that whole, chaotic room apart; stacked all the papers in cardboard boxes, all the bills, files, tax forms, receipts that had exploded from drawers, that had been piled up on the floor – a backbreaking task. There'd been nothing. He'd died intestate, nothing at all.

  ‘Ees good?’ She looked at me, anxious.

  I exhaled. ‘Ees bad,’ under my breath.

  ‘Qué?’ She looked stricken.

  ‘No, no, it's good, Maroulla. Yes, I'm sure. And Tim's seen this?’

  ‘Yesterday, when he come.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He lose blood.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In his face. Whiteness.’
/>   ‘Oh. Right.’ I swallowed.

  She frowned, worried. ‘I do wrong?’

  ‘No, no, you did right, Maroulla.’ I forced a smile. Took her hand. ‘As ever. You did right.’ But I was worried, very worried. I thought of Felicity's pretty Regency town house. Felt sick. Or did I? After all, Tim hadn't rung me, hadn't had the phone lines buzzing in high dudgeon. Perhaps it was nothing. Just a photocopied scrap of paper after all, of no worth or relevance: something Maroulla and Mario had thought fearfully important, because it had made them feel important.

  I made myself talk some more: ask after Tracy, husband still unemployed, oh dear, but Spencer working in Currys now, at management level, good, good. Then she looked tired. I kissed her papery cheek as, simultaneously, her eyes closed. I slipped away. Through the double door, down the corridor, out.

  Just a scrap of photocopied paper, I thought as I shut the green front door behind me. I stood on the step a moment. But… couldn't you write a will on anything? Back of an envelope? An elephant's bottom? As long as you had it witnessed? I stared at the houses opposite: dusty laurel hedges surrounded them. Wait: of course. February 27. Six months before he died. The end of a long hard winter, never a good time in farming. He'd had a bad day. He'd written it in a fit of pique, but later, after Maroulla had copied it and put it back, he'd taken it from his drawer and destroyed it. That was it. That was why we hadn't found it. I imagined him standing facing the fire, the one he always had going in his office in winter, legs astride, tall, very broad, red hair faded, screwing the piece of paper in a ball and tossing it in the embers. ‘Flog the bloody place,’ I'd heard him say to Tim, on more than one occasion. ‘When I'm under the sod, bloody flog it. It'll be a millstone round your neck.’ And Tim would smile, say nothing, knowing… what? That he didn't mean it? Or he did mean it?

  I drove home, unsettled. Something Felicity had said at Alice's party, about how I shouldn't see Maroulla, how she was gaga, reared up at me. But she wasn't really, was she? Just old. Glancing in the rear-view mirror I saw my lips were pursed, my eyes fretted with worry lines. I gave myself a dismissive little shake. Inhaled deeply. No. Forget it, Evie. It's nothing. Tim hasn't reacted, so it's clearly nothing.

  On the way back, though, I saw a sign to Holywell, and on a whim, I took it. My tyres screamed in outrage as I cornered left with a spectacular lack of caution, and an angry horn blared after me. I went hot. Christ. I could have caused an accident. I'd end up where Dad was soon, where I was going: Holywell. No room in village churchyards any more, not even if your family had farmed next door for four generations, not even if your house was called Church Farm, not even if all your ancestors were buried there. So Dad was here, on the outskirts of town, beyond the bypass, in a not particularly rural, not particularly lovely spot, behind this long, dry-stone wall, in this vast old cemetery with its dismal dark yew trees and its never-ending lines of graves.

  I parked easily at the entrance, perhaps the only place in Oxford one could these days, and went through the towering iron gates. They knew how to impose, those Victorians: knew how to say Remember Where Ye Enter. Rows and rows of graves ran away from me down a grassy slope, with a tarmac path dividing them neatly through the middle. I followed it right down to the end. He was in the second to last row if I remembered rightly, ten from the left, thirty to the right. I'd been back once or twice since the funeral. OK, once. On the first anniversary of his death. I'd meant to come more, but somehow hadn't got round to it.

  I found the grave and stood gazing down. A slight breeze had picked up, ruffling the grassy mound. Felicity had chosen the headstone: grey slate, solid and simple, with black lettering. Nothing fancy, she'd said. And indeed it was very fitting. ‘Victor Milligan,’ it read, ‘1934 – 1999. A loving father and husband.’ Father first, husband second, she'd insisted: because she'd come along later. Suddenly I felt ashamed. What was I doing here? Why was I standing, like a melodramatic heroine from a gothic novel, with the wind in my hair, at the foot of my father's grave? What was I waiting for? Vibes? For a voice beyond the grave? An extremely well-tended grave, at that, with fuchsias shivering in a vase, atop a nicely mown mound: fuchsias, which could only have been put there by Felicity, who came regularly to change the flowers and the water – the vase, sometimes, when it was stolen – and yet, here I was, for only the second time since his funeral, and all that had brought me here… was money. I caught my breath. Swallowed. Then I turned on my heel and walked away: back up the tarmac path, arms folded, head bent, and out through the wrought-iron gates.

  Caro rang me on my way home, breaking into my thoughts, making me jump.

  ‘I've got a police car up my backside so I've got to be quick.’

  ‘Well, I'm driving too. What is it?’

  ‘A lorry has shed its load on the A40 and I am completely and utterly stuck in stationary traffic. In about twenty minutes I've got a wedding reception in the garden and I'm not going to make it.’

  ‘Oh Christ. Alice Montague.’

  ‘Exactly, and I can't get hold of Tim. Can you get there for me, please, Evie?’ She sounded desperate.

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Not a great deal, just organize the children to park the cars – the boys know where – and then sort of stand around looking charming. They don't actually want you there but they really really mind if you're not, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘OK,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘You're a star, because I have absolutely no idea when I'm going to get back, and I've got Leonard with me and he's a bore,’ she hissed.

  Leonard. I had an idea he was an elderly uncle. I hoped his hearing wasn't too acute. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In the back. Thanks, Evie, bye.’

  She rang off quickly before I could change my mind.

  Right. I clicked my phone shut and tossed it on the seat beside me. Well, yes, I could do that. Stand around like Lady Bountiful, be a sort of mistress of ceremonies. I hadn't entirely planned on seeing Ludo quite so soon after saying goodbye, I thought with a sudden qualm, but then, as Caro said, it was a background presence she needed: I probably wouldn't even set eyes on him. And I certainly owed Caro. Hadn't thanked her yet for having Anna for most of half-term. And she'd sounded all right, hadn't she? Caro? Not in any way pissed off or livid about anything Tim had told her? Or shown her? No. So forget it, Evie. Another little inward shake.

  And a wedding would take my mind off things, I decided. Be just what I needed. But what I really must do, I determined, glancing down at my jeans, was change. I was very much the Pony Club mother at the moment and I needed to be the lady of the manor. I'd seen Caro do it once or twice, lipstick smile in place, hands clasped, floral frock: ‘Yes, aren't the roses lovely, but then it's been a very good year…’ I wasn't sure I could run to the floral number, but I might give my linen trousers an airing, with a white top and a long chiffon scarf… ideal.

  I parked creatively outside the house and nipped up the steps. Everyone double-parked these days, and I'd only be a minute. The door was double-locked so Ant wasn't at home. Must have gone into college. I was pretty sure he didn't have a lecture today, but then, as he occasionally drily observed, it was all very well for writers who were just writers, but when one was juggling a day job as well… I wondered if he'd chuck it in one day – college. Just write. Couldn't quite imagine it somehow.

  As I went in and shut the front door behind me, a heavenly smell wafted up the passage way. Mmm… jasmine. Or was it sweet peas? I pursued it to its source, down the hall, to the kitchen, which was where I realized it was neither of those, but roses. Two dozen at least, bright red, sitting plumb in the middle of the kitchen table in one of those sort of colostomy bags full of water. I stared. Slowly put my bag and car keys on the table. My heart began to quicken as my eyes snagged on a white card, waving at me in a jaunty fashion, on the end of a long green plastic stick. No envelope. I released it from its clasp. In a small, round – presumably the florist's hand – I read:

/>   Dear Evie,

  Can't stop thinking about you in your Miss Whiplash underwear. Isn't it time it had another outing?

  Love and heavy breathing Ludo. xx

  30

  I dropped the card as if it were white hot. Oh hell. Oh, blinking blithering hell, they'd made it. Despite Ludo's best efforts, the message hadn't got through and the roses had persisted. They'd scrambled over the wire, dodged the florist's searchlights and made it to 22 Walton Terrace with a little help from a lethargic delivery boy who hadn't picked up a message on his mobile. Ant must have taken delivery of them, bemused – ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah, Mrs Evie Hamilton. Sign here’ – then walked them down the hall to the kitchen, read the card – no envelope – and been taken aback. No. Downright shocked.

  I went hot. Pulse racing, I scrambled in my bag with fluttering fingers for my mobile. His phone was switched off. I left a breathless, thoughtless message about needing to speak to him urgently, to, um, explain, erm, the underwear thingy, which was just a silly joke, a message that even to my ears resonated with guilt, and then rang his office. Mary, the secretary he shared with various other dons in the English Department, said she hadn't seen him, but that didn't mean he wasn't about somewhere. Try his mobile? Thanks, Mary.

  I stared out at the back garden, dry-mouthed, mobile clutched to my heart. I imagined him in the quad, walking through the cloisters, hands in his pockets, head bent, saddened, appalled: I pictured him being hailed by students, colleagues who wondered why he didn't acknowledge them, why he walked on by. I had to find him. I seized a piece of paper from the kitchen pad and wrote in large capitals: ‘THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK! I CAN EXPLAIN!’ – and left it on the flowers.

  Then I hurried down the hallway, out of the front door, and down the steps to the car. I vacillated on the bottom step. Hang on. Where was I going? To Balliol? Where Mary said he may or may not be? And what would I do when I got there – race through the hallowed portals, charge around like a lunatic, my frantic footsteps echoing in the hushed cloisters, poke my head into crowded lecture theatres, barge in on a tutorial where he was one to one with a shy young student? No. Of course not. Ant wasn't unhinged, wasn't about to hurl himself into the Thames, and I'd look ridiculous. And guilty. I must wait. Explain later. And meanwhile, exhaust all other possibilities. Because if, say, he wasn't in college, where might he be? Was there anyone he'd confide in? I racked my brains. Not Anna, obviously. Mum? Quite possibly, actually. I sat down abruptly on the bottom step and rang her. In an effort to make my voice light and carefree, I sounded shrill and hysterical.