She said his name. He said hers. They laughed. They had surprised themselves and each other. His gaze burrowed into her, touching chords of longing. She held on to him, clutching whatever part of him she could clutch, lost in the smell of his skin, his clothes, his body heat, the strength of him, his keen desire for her.
‘Evelyn,’ he said, after he’d carried her into her old bedroom. He picked open the fiddly buttons of her blouse and laid his hand on her rapidly beating heart. He looked moved, almost sad.
‘What?’
He gazed at her, appreciating her, like someone who was being given something he thought he didn’t deserve. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just overwhelmed.’
She entwined her fingers with his.
He made love to her in a way that she had never known, gently unwrapping her from her remaining undergarments, then bearing down on her with the sort of manly, territorial claim that she’d experienced only in some outlying fantasy world. Once or twice, the image of Mark tried to force an entry, but she pushed it away. While she was here with Eddy on Holy Island, this was another life she was leading.
This was what it was supposed to be like, she thought, after. She had been right in sensing something was missing. This was missing. They fitted like teeth on a zip.
‘You have an incredible heart-shaped face,’ he told her, stroking her jaw like you would a kitten’s. He’d said it before. The only description of herself that would ever matter. She was so moved to be feeling this intensity only now, at the ripe old age of forty, that tears rolled into her hair.
‘I wonder what my mother would think if she saw us lying here,’ she said, a long time later, after he had held her so closely that when she moved away from him slightly, her skin was saturated with their sweat.
‘I hope she’d think it was the way it had to be . . .’ he said, appearing moved by his own comment. ‘I think we’d make a good plot of a movie. Small-town girl marries rich man in the big city, then she falls for her old life and her old love: the poor man with the bad singing voice, whom she once stood up.’ He kissed her intermittently between speaking, like you might punctuate a long sentence with commas.
‘It’s a nice story. But it’s a fairy tale, isn’t it?’ She only meant it lightly. She didn’t want reality to rain down on them. Right now, she would do anything in her power to keep it at bay.
‘I’m actually the reverse of a fairy tale, aren’t I? Anyway, you’ve had the fairy tale already.’ He rolled on to his back, and stared contemplatively at the ceiling, slightly melancholy; she could feel the shift in his thinking – reality was pressing in despite their desire to exist only in a bubble. He looked at her, intently. ‘If I were a wealthy man, I’d love to give you everything you deserve, Evelyn. But I could really only provide you with a very simple life. Nothing like what you’re used to. It would be naive to promise you love as a substitute for all that.’
She didn’t need to ask herself if she was in love with him. It would have been a wasted exercise. She’d been in love with him from that very first day. Knowing it, as she knew it now, brought her mistake pressing either side of her head with monster-like hands – the mistake of having ever let him go. ‘Love is never a substitute, Eddy. Everything else is a substitute for love.’
He stroked her face again. She thought vaguely of the life she was used to, and only how utterly detached she felt from it, now that she was experiencing something greater than the sum of all her life’s parts. She touched his shoulder. Too much talking was going to shatter the fragile perfection of it, like blowing too near a dandelion clock. ‘Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, though. Can we keep it light?’
‘I feel like I’m in a rush because we have such little time.’
She told him that she had extended her ticket for another week.
‘What?’ he said, sitting up. ‘Another week? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Relief flooded his face suddenly. He kissed her before she could answer. Then he sighed and fell back on to the pillow again. ‘But then this week will come and go, and then we’re back here again, in this position again, aren’t we?’
She leant over him, and looked seriously into his eyes, the ends of her long, dark hair pooling on his chest. ‘We live for today – literally. Every minute we have together is a bonus we never expected. We take it, and we savour it, and we don’t overthink it. We don’t think, full stop.’ She popped another kiss on his mouth, kissed him all over his cheeks, his forehead. ‘Can we do that?’
‘We can try,’ he smiled.
They deliberately stopped talking. They lay there, instead, just enjoying the composition of themselves, perhaps both of them trying to deny what it was all adding up to. Then she said – so much for not thinking – ‘How can we have got in so deep, Eddy?’ They had been born into the same world, but had found themselves in vastly different ones. They ought to have nothing in common. She ought not to feel right with him, but she did. ‘You were just a man at a wedding.’
‘I don’t know how, Evelyn. But I was in deep the first second I saw you, and I’m going to selfishly and impractically want you in my arms like this until my dying day. That’s just the reality of it.’
Something occurred to her, in that moment. She had a sense of possibility – a sense that some of the best days of her life hadn’t happened yet. She smiled, because it was a lovely prospect.
FOURTEEN
Alice
‘What’s the prospect of you ever agreeing with me?’ Justin is lying on his side, his head propped on an upturned hand, looking down at me. ‘You’re so contrary.’
‘All I said was, it was a completely pointless film!’ I grin at him because he’s looking at me as though I’m an idiot. ‘It had no ending. It just, well, it just petered out . . . It was a total waste of two hours of my life!’
‘It did have an ending. You were supposed to supply it, using your im-ag-in-ation. You know, if you have one.’