There. That was the crux of it. She wanted him to be better than that.
He held her eyes. She could almost see him searching to contradict her, but the truth was pushing back at him, harder. ‘I don’t think that staying with her mother for all the wrong reasons is teaching April anything, is it?’ His voice had mellowed with doubt. ‘She’s not going to be better off being raised by parents who are just tolerating each other, knowing that they should never have been a couple. I should never have got back together with her all those years ago, after you . . .’
‘Eddy! There was no me. It was one day at a wedding. One quite fabulous day that took us completely off guard, yes. But a day. That’s all.’
It hurt her to say it, because it felt untrue, but she had to make him believe it. She had to somehow make him see sense. They weren’t living in a bubble. Their perfect week together was perfect only because they had managed to keep reality at bay. But so many people’s happiness was hanging in the balance.
He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Anyway, I think you’re being remarkably cavalier. It’s easy to say all that, but no five-year-old would ever choose to have her parents split up just because of a concept she couldn’t understand anyway.’
He wiped a hand over his mouth. It was clear that he could fight his corner, but Evelyn was the much stronger opponent. The tension came down a few notches. ‘Do you have a beer?’ he asked. She hesitated, then got him one from the fridge. ‘You know what?’ he said when he’d taken a big gulp. ‘I think it’s you who wouldn’t be able to do it. You’re using my situation as your excuse.’
She sat down again, exhausted from all this intensity. ‘I don’t have a child, Eddy, no. But I have a husband and I love him, even if it’s more about loyalty and affection than passion. It’s still love. I made a commitment to him. Everything can’t all be about my happiness, can it? That’s not how it works when you marry. Mark has never done anything bad to me. I can’t just walk away.’
‘Why not?’
His persistent naivety bothered her. She was starting to see it as a weakness.
‘It’ll break him.’ She doubted that, of course. Mark would survive. But he would be massively changed. Besides, oddly, in all of her fantasising over the last week that she could live a life with Eddy, she had never once considered the prospect of ending a life with Mark. It was suddenly way too much to have to take on board.
He downed the rest of his beer. ‘People don’t break that easily, Evelyn. That’s a myth people invent when they want to imply everybody else is as weak as they are. Are you going to live your life making excuses, rather than facing up to the fact that you want to be your own person?’
Had he hit on the essence of it? Perhaps she should never have married anyone. Perhaps she would have been better off being free to make her own choices, to forge new paths to new destinations, even if they were the wrong ones. She wasn’t necessarily going to do any of it. But maybe she just needed to know she could.
‘So what about me, Evelyn? If you’re convinced that people can be broken, if you go back to him, you break me.’
The difference between the two situations was so obvious and irrefutable that she couldn’t stop herself from saying it. ‘Yes, but we’ve been a married couple for nearly twenty years. I’ve barely known you – properly known you – for five minutes.’
He bore the weight of the put-down quietly. She could see hope fading in his expression. ‘So he wins because he won in the first place? He got you first?’ He was defeated: a boxer losing consciousness in the ring.
‘It’s not about someone winning me. It’s about me not wanting to live my life knowing that I did a wrong thing. I wish I could be different, but I can’t.’
He was staring at his empty beer bottle. They didn’t speak for a while. ‘Then where do we go from here?’ he finally asked, quietly, as though he feared the answer.
‘Well,’ she stared at him, her eyes burning with tears. ‘I think we go nowhere.’
SIXTEEN
Alice
I had almost forgotten I’d ever rung Rick. I was so wrapped up in thinking about my conversation with Evelyn, over tea. Her telling me about her perfect week with Eddy. His being ready to leave his wife for her. The story just keeps echoing in me . . . Now that I see Rick’s number on my call display, though, I have to wonder what’s taken him so long. Has he lain low to work out what to say? Maybe he was never going to call back, but Dawn bullied him into it. Has he conferred with Justin?
When I pick up and say, ‘Hello, Rick’, I sound like I’m walking a tightrope two hundred metres above ground.
‘Alice!’ he says, brightly. ‘I’m so very sorry I’m only just ringing you back. Dawn’s mother had a stroke five days ago. It’s pretty bad, and we’re running backward and forward to Cheltenham General . . . What with that, and working and taking care of the kids, it’s been all systems go, and I haven’t had a chance.’
Relief makes me audibly sigh. I tell him I’m very sorry to hear about Dawn’s mother. We exchange small talk. Then I say, ‘I’m sure you can appreciate this is a very difficult conversation for me to be having, but I need you to tell me where he is, please.’
I can feel his hesitation, his puzzlement. Then he says, ‘Who?’
I’m puzzled too, now. ‘Justin.’
Another pause; somehow, I don’t think he’s acting. ‘Well, what do you mean, where is he?’ he says.
I try to stay composed. Threads of my sanity are knotting themselves and I’m trying to unravel them, otherwise I’m not helping myself. They were friends from their Oxford days. They had shared the same house, studied together, raised hell together, were both Blues for rowing. I can’t imagine there’s anything Justin won’t have shared with his best friend. I explain what happened briefly and neutrally.