He interlaced his fingers behind his head, and her eyes followed the one pronounced blue vein that ran down his inner arm. ‘Mine is looking back at my life and thinking how one wrong choice ended up defining everything that happened to me.’
‘Urgh!’ She shuddered. ‘Let’s not think about wrong choices.’
London. 1963
She arrived at Annabel’s in an emerald-green, ankle-length dress from Harrods. The price tag still dangled on a string down her back; she’d return it the next day. She recognised him as soon as she saw him, of course. She’d seen him many times around the hotel: seen him, without really seeing him.
He leant a little closer to hear her over the music. ‘I had to really work up the courage to ask you out. In the end, I could only do it with flowers. I don’t find these things easy, I’m afraid . . .’
She believed him. He was a little clean-cut for her tastes, but he was modest and unassuming, and she liked him instantly. He had warm, honey-brown eyes, a quiet charm and a confidence that would work well on women who would have normally been out of his reach. He smoked Cohiba cigars, and she remembered thinking he was probably the only man who could hold his pinkie-finger in the air and still look masculine. She would always remember how he looked at her that first time, as though she was the springboard for a sudden shift in his priorities. It all felt very signed and sealed, very fast, and in the dark crevices of her mind she was thinking that if only she had felt more infatuated, it would have been storybook.
On their second date, he took her to Hyde Park for a picnic. ‘There are people starving all over the world, and we’re feasting on all this!’ She had never tasted expensive champagne, let alone eaten caviar or oysters. ‘There are things in that hamper that I’m not even sure are edible. I think we’re eating hamper bunting!’
‘You don’t have to eat it, if you don’t want to.’ He playfully tried to snatch a small lamb chop from her hand. She laughed. They sat by the Serpentine in the dappled shade of a tree, only her bare feet spot-lit in a random patch of sunshine. People passed by and looked at them. She felt like Eliza Doolittle at the races. He kept watching her wiggle her toes. Once in a while, he would meet her eyes. He was studying her, as though he was trying to work out how not to lose her.
One month after their first date, he slipped her best cerise cashmere cardigan from her shoulders. Underneath, she wore a simple cream shift dress that she’d teamed with pearls. She remembered his gentle kisses down the back of her neck, and thinking that she’d never been so tenderly picked over by anyone. He was patient with her when she told him that she didn’t have vast experience. In being trained by him, she somehow became his.
He took her everywhere. A whirlwind of ‘in’ bars and members-only restaurants. She rubbed shoulders with shipping magnates and European royalty. They had front-row seats to witness Beatlemania before the Queen and Princess Margaret at the Prince of Wales Theatre. He took her shopping on the King’s Road, where she bought one of the first-ever Mary Quant miniskirts. ‘Why do you never wear that stunning dress you wore on our first date?’ he once asked.
She told him how she’d had to return it.
He took hold of her hand. ‘I promise you, Evelyn, if you stick with me you’ll never have to return clothes again.’
Part of her loved this idea; the other part was the one she was frustrated with.
For Christmas, he bought her a car: a newly launched Rover P6. In the new year, he suggested she leave her job at Claridge’s.
And then Mark Westland had his bride on his arm. Evelyn’s head was still spinning when she entered the small Gloucestershire church, the day that Elizabeth Taylor first married Richard Burton. ‘I love you, Mrs Westland,’ he said.
‘I love you, too,’ she replied. And she meant it. But serenely, without fireworks.
Mark had introduced her to his parents just one month before the wedding. It was then that she understood how rich he was. He had kept it from her because he so desperately wanted to be perceived as ordinary. He was the youngest of four children, and she later learnt that he barely got on with his siblings. Only in time did she understand how he could occasionally be stubborn, and that this could cause rifts among his family that he did little to rectify.
Her parents came to the wedding. There was a marked divide down the centre of their photographs, especially the ones of the happy couple flanked by both sets of parents. She thought she’d never seen her mother look so pretty, and yet so weathered and out of her depth. Her father’s rugged fisherman’s complexion beside the insipid fairness of Mark’s father said it all without words.
‘You should have got married in your own church,’ her mother reprimanded her. ‘That’s what brides do. They marry in their own home town.’ Her mother was right. Evelyn regretted that all her life.
‘You’d better get home before the tide strands you here,’ she said to Eddy, as his van turned down her street. It was a little like déjà vu. It had almost happened this way before.
He parked at her front door, and there was a moment when they both just sat there.
Conflicting thoughts sailed through her head. You only get one life. Do unto others as you’d be done by. No regrets. She placed her hand on the door handle, but couldn’t move it. She knew he was experiencing a similar dilemma. A strange and unsettling traction existed between them; she needed to break it, but was powerless.
‘Evelyn,’ he said, very quietly.
At what point had she already crossed a line? When she had held his eyes in the Mayfair Ballroom, in the presence of her unsuspecting husband? When she’d allowed him to help paint the house?
Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t make a good life complicated. Be honourable to Mark because that’s who you are. A decent person.