‘I was only getting started.’ Again, that smile.
‘And if you must know, I didn’t leave without a backward glance. I had some serious misgivings. I think I had a very strong sense that, in order to go off and pursue what I thought I wanted, I was walking away from something . . .’ She couldn’t find the right word. Something monumental. Someone who perhaps only came your way once. ‘I suppose right when I thought I’d been everywhere, seen everything and done everything in my home town, you came along and you were different to the rest. And strange as it was, I never really knew you, yet I felt the loss of you as I was leaving. And I went on feeling it for a long time after I left.’
She remembered sitting on the train thinking, Why am I not exhilarated about what’s ahead? Why am I thinking of what might have been? Why is it that I want to pluck him up and take him out of the North East? Why is it that I can’t? And, finally: Why am I so damned messed up?
‘But you obviously found what you were looking for, because you never came back.’
She wondered if he were referencing Mark now, if he were remembering him from that one time at the Mayfair.
She pulled her tangerine cotton cardigan tighter across her chest. He seemed to notice her every move. His eyes kept casting over her hair. She had taken it out of its ponytail earlier, and it hung freely around her shoulders. She wondered if he was faithful, if he was still attracted to his wife, what kind of husband he’d have made.
‘So you’re really going to sell this place?’ he asked, and she was relieved he’d changed the topic.
‘I don’t think I have much choice.’
‘You don’t sound too enthusiastic.’ His eyes circled her face like a hummingbird around a petunia.
‘I don’t know. I’ve always loved Holy Island. It’s such a part of me. Of course, I didn’t know that until I left. I sometimes think my heart will break to see the home where I grew up go.’
She remembered those trips back here in the early days of her marriage, when she had an inkling that she wasn’t as happy as a new bride ought to have been. Being here made London and Mark feel like another life. And it always saddened her that she missed neither in the way that she believed she should have. She and Mark had met six months after she had arrived in London. She had always imagined she’d have had a few more dalliances first. And yet Mark had qualities she could never have hoped to find in one person. While she was living alongside him, she could never make sense of her discontent, especially given that she had a privileged life, one that would have been unattainable for most girls of her background, and it was in Evelyn’s nature to be grateful. Plus, she loved him. Yet as soon as she came home, she saw it straightforwardly. She had gone to London not really knowing where life would take her. But somehow she had arrived too quickly, and found out too soon.
‘Don’t grieve for a house, Evelyn. It’s just a structure. The really important stuff is locked away in here.’ He tapped his temples. ‘You carry this with you always . . . If you’re happy with your life, it’s best to let your past stay in the past and just treasure it from a healthy distance.’
Her brows pulled together. ‘This is making me sad.’
‘Don’t be sad. You have great memories, and nothing can take them away. And you’re lucky, you know. That’s more than many people have.’
She was touched by his words. Meeting his eyes, she registered the unsteady pencil line around the possibility of his having been The One, if only she had stayed. ‘Perhaps we would have hated one another if we had gone on that date,’ she said.
‘We wouldn’t have. But that’s in the past now.’
She looked around at the garden, and the sudden weight of inexplicable regret dragged down the corners of her mouth. ‘Lindisfarne is the most magical place on earth. I’m torn between bursting to tell everyone about it and desperately wanting to keep it secret.’ Tears came to her eyes. ‘Sometimes, I wish the tide would close us off permanently from the rest of the world and I’d be captive here, even though as a young woman that used to be one of my worst nightmares!’
‘You’d eventually wither and die, or start swimming and drown. Then your children would be bereft.’
‘I don’t have children.’
‘The earl, then.’
They looked at one another again. The casual way he made reference to Mark made her remember something. He was someone else’s husband. She was someone else’s wife.
‘You probably need to get off home now,’ she said.
‘You mean you want me to get off home now.’
‘Maybe.’
He studied her for a moment, then started walking to the garden gate, seeming to naturally assume she would follow, and she did.
It didn’t feel like it was just today that they had met again, that today they had talked for the first time in twenty years. There was an ease between them, an ease that you wouldn’t have thought could be there, but it was. ‘My dad grew those in his greenhouse.’ She pointed to three or four mounds of frothy pink-and-white bell-head fuchsia by the gate. ‘When he died, Mam planted them here, not really expecting they’d take off, but they did. I think my dad must have been giving her green thumbs from heaven.’
He bent down beside one of the bushes of red and purple ones, and carefully held a flower head, and the memory of his hands came back to her with a rush. ‘These are called Lady’s Eardrops because of the shape. But some say they resemble a ballerina. See, the stamen look like the legs of a dancer, while the petals are the dancer’s tutu.’ He inadvertently glanced over her legs, and it sent a small charge through her. She remembered how desperately she’d wanted to sleep with him, but she was a nice girl and it had felt like the wrong way to behave.