He hadn’t really noticed her this morning. Hadn’t noticed the change in her. Hadn’t looked twice and detected anything that might hint at the turmoil inside her, the unstoppable thrashing of contradictory impulses in her head. Mark never noticed. That was why it was so easy to hide things from him.
I’m sorry, I don’t know how to tell you this. I have had a change of . . .
Plan? Heart? Mind?
‘I thought we might go out to dinner tonight.’ He was looking at her from around his newspaper, as though fondly enticing her back from another land.
She still hadn’t touched any of her breakfast. She heard his voice distantly. She was aware of an out-of-body sensation. Whoever was sitting there in the Queen Anne chair was just a shell, and she, the contents of the shell, was across the room, off-camera – an onlooker seeing herself as a stranger would see her: an attractive, properly composed wife eating breakfast in a room with a high ceiling, where the air was scented with fresh coffee and kippers.
‘What do you think?’
But Evelyn wasn’t following the question. Evelyn was gone. She was back home on a tidal island battered by north-easterly winds. A young girl. A loner who could waste entire mornings stamping over grassy dunes that banked a gunmetal-grey sea, humming popular melodies, dreaming of a fanciful stranger who would take up residence at Lindisfarne Castle; who would peer out of his window and see her playing aeroplanes across the pastureland, arms outstretched, the thin sleeves of her dress flapping like birds’ wings. A stranger who would think to himself, Now there is this castle’s next queen.
‘Evelyn? Are you even listening to me?’ The affectionate despair.
But Evelyn was being propelled by the air. She was levitating with possibilities, gliding like the puffins, blackbirds and terns that made their home on the island’s north shore, where she would wander and dream. She was dreaming again now. Seeing it for how it could all be again. And yet there was the harsh grounding, the pulling down to earth with strong hands, the indomitable forces of her reality.
I don’t know how to tell you this. I have had second thoughts.
She stared at the polished silver place setting laid out by their housekeeper, Tessie – the morning pomp of their breakfast table – aware that the tears were ready to come, and she chanted in silent pleas, Don’t let me cry. I must not cry. Mark must never know.
‘Evelyn?’ he said, a fraction impatient. ‘I’m asking you if you’d like to dine out tonight.’
She looked at him, somewhat blankly, then shook her head. ‘I don’t want to think about dinner, Mark. We’re just having breakfast.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, bewildered.
The matter? The matter was she couldn’t properly draw a breath. The anxiety, the dilemma, had twisted her; her windpipe was wrung dry. She met his eyes, searched his face, but it wasn’t his face she was seeing. She would never look at him and see him again, which was so unspeakably sad. There was only one face she would ever see.
He returned to his newspaper with a sigh. ‘I just imagined we might go out and celebrate the fact that I’m still alive, that’s all. But, then again, perhaps you wish I wasn’t still alive. I can never tell with you.’
Last night was there so freshly – the choice she had made. She could still undo it. She could just tell him right here and right now. Instead, she said, ‘Don’t make light of it, Mark. You were there, shopping along with all those other terrified people. It could have very easily been you. Sometimes, you don’t realise how lucky you are. You sail through life . . . You shouldn’t take it for granted.’
He was looking at her with a mix of adoration and frustration. ‘Yes, Evelyn, my darling. You’re right. I was there. It could have been me. But it wasn’t me, was it?’
‘We’ll see,’ she said, a beat or two later. ‘About dinner.’
‘For heaven’s sake. What’s to see?’ He was looking at her as though she always managed to be two people: the one he knew inside out, and loved, and this other who was a work in progress that he never bargained for.
If she didn’t leave the room, she would cry, and then she would have to tell him. Mark might be a little blind, but he wasn’t stupid. She’d had the dream again. And, as was always the case when it happened, she was beside herself for days after. It relentlessly haunted her. Only this time she was beside herself for new reasons altogether.
‘Can you take this away?’ Mark said to Tessie, who had come in the room to refresh the coffee. Then he added, ‘Please,’ because Mark was consummately polite.
‘Just your plate, sir?’ Tessie hovered, flummoxed by this break in their routine.
‘Everything.’ He swept a hand. ‘Mrs Westland is apparently on a hunger strike.’
Despite his claim, all those years ago, that he was attracted to her because she was the opposite of the girls from his ‘world’, she was sure that Mark had never managed to forget that he no longer lived at Blenheim Palace. That’s what she liked to call his family pile, just to put into perspective how privileged he was, just to remind him, when she felt he needed reminding, that most people didn’t come from this. She certainly hadn’t come from this. This wasn’t how normal people lived.
Tears were building. The weight of her secret was almost stifling her. How had she got here? She could only take quarter-breaths, tiny hypoventilations. Of course, if he saw her crying, he’d probably think she was just being melodramatic again.
I’m sorry I couldn’t do it . . .
How would she ever land on the right way to say it? She might be a writer, but she would never find words.