By the end of the week, they had done most of the rooms except her bedroom and the bathroom. It wouldn’t be long before she would be returning to London. When he came to her the following morning, he said, ‘I can’t work today. I have to run to Warkworth to deliver some garden plans for a builder. I’m meeting my friend Stanley there at eleven o’clock. He’s a plasterer, and I’m trying to set him up with some work. I wondered if you wanted to come for the ride.’
He was wearing a new dark-red shirt. She couldn’t look at him for fear of giving away how happy she was to be asked. ‘Oh, well . . . How long would we be gone?’
She glanced up and thought she saw a tell-tale flicker of optimism in his eyes. ‘Maybe an hour or so to run the errand, then I thought we could drive back slowly and stop somewhere for lunch.’
She couldn’t fully breathe. He was oppressively bearing down on her with his obvious hope that she would say yes. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve got so much to do around here . . .’ She shook her head in feigned exasperation at all the imaginary tasks that were keeping her from accepting his invitation.
‘I think you should forget what you have to do and come with me. To compensate for standing me up all those years ago.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’ve made me a proposition I can’t refuse.’ She turned and went back into the house so abruptly the door almost slammed shut in his face. She caught him looking at her through the blinds. He gave her one of his telling, red-blooded smiles.
She sat in his van while he talked to the men. On the radio, Heaven 17 was singing ‘Temptation’. She cranked it up, and pretended she wasn’t watching him. But it was a huge act. She couldn’t not watch him. She couldn’t stop marvelling at the quirk of fate that had brought them together again. Once or twice, one of the men – Stanley, she imagined – looked past Eddy’s head into the vehicle, perhaps wondering who she was, this woman sitting in Eddy’s van. She wondered what Eddy would say. The illicit tangle of it thrilled her.
When he climbed back into the vehicle, he threw it into reverse. ‘Right then. I’m all yours now . . . My friend wanted to meet you, by the way.’ He shot her a glance. ‘He’s quite fascinated by our story.’
‘Do we really have a story?’
He met her eyes again, briefly. ‘I quite think we do, Evelyn.’
They drove slowly through the pretty village, past the galleries, boutiques, chocolate shops, bread shops and tea rooms, following carefully behind two young female riders on horseback. Evelyn admired their deportment. When she told him she hadn’t driven the coastal route in years, he immediately diverted course. Soon, theirs was the only vehicle on the road, and the sun shone, and Culture Club sang ‘Church of the Poison Mind’. She hummed along to it. His fingers tapped the steering wheel, and she stole glances at him. From time to time, he whistled along, and caught her looking at him and smiled. She was so comfortable with him, she almost forgot that she had spent most of her adult life with another man, that she even had another life.
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took avoiding it. Who had said that? She couldn’t stop looking at his hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
He parked the van parallel to the sand dunes, and Evelyn got out, stretched and raised her face to the sun. He had stocked a small box with beer and pieces of cooked chicken. In a separate bag was a stick of fresh bread. ‘You knew I would come!’
He grabbed the box and a blanket. ‘Hoped.’
They found a spot across the dunes, overlooking the vast, deserted yellow sand beach with Bamburgh Castle behind them. He shook out the blanket, and they cracked open two beers.
‘How did you really end up as my mother’s gardener?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, be honest. It’s not as though you need the work.’
He lay on his back and stared at the sky. ‘There’s no big mystery. I’ve done some projects on Holy Island. I’d bump into her occasionally, and we would chat. Once, when your dad hurt his back, I helped secure their fence after a bad storm took it down . . . Then another time I brought her some peaches . . . She needed help after your dad died. I offered because it really costs me nothing to help people out a little bit.’
He helped secure the fence? Brought her peaches! Her mother hadn’t breathed a word of this, and Evelyn didn’t know whether she was touched by it or infuriated. ‘Did you ever talk about me when you had these cosy little chats of yours?’
‘They weren’t cosy. But no. Never.’
‘Never?’ she laughed, slightly. ‘Why do I find that hard to believe?’
‘I asked if you were well. That’s all. She didn’t add any more and, well, I didn’t stick my nose in beyond that.’
She couldn’t believe they’d had some sort of acquaintanceship, if that was the right word. She’d honestly just thought the first and last time her mother had set eyes on him had been that day he had come to take her on the date. ‘She liked you,’ she said, more in bewilderment than anything else. ‘She was really fond of you.’ Eddy this . . . Eddy that . . . His name, and how often it had come up, echoed with such significance now. How oblivious she’d been.