‘That they didn’t really exist,’ I finish for her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘So I drove to the community hall where he’d said his daughter took dance classes. I waited around, sitting slumped in the seat of my car with a silly hat on. I must have looked ridiculous, like a female Columbo . . . I recognised the little girl from the photographs Eddy had shown me. She was wearing a pink leotard and white footless tights. She had long, light-brown hair, and she bounded out of the car and ran ahead of her mother, over to some other children who were standing outside the main door with their mothers. I couldn’t believe I was staring at Eddy’s child.’ Her voice sounds warm and wistful suddenly, and this touches me. ‘She was such a cute thing. I was quite enthralled by the sight of her, and of course I felt awful! I couldn’t believe I was nearly responsible for taking her father away from her. She was so young and innocent! I felt this incredible urge to protect her. The force of it stunned me.’
‘What did his wife look like?’ I ask her.
‘She was attractive. Confident. Friendly. She stood and chatted animatedly to the other mothers. I’d expected someone more downtrodden.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I don’t know. The silly notions we have . . . Perhaps if I had seen someone who had clearly let herself go, I might have thought she deserved having her husband fall for someone else – which might have made me feel better about it. But as it was, it all just felt sad.’
‘Why did you feel sad for a stranger, Evelyn? You didn’t even know her. She might have been a horrible person, a nightmare to live with . . .’
‘Because I was sleeping with her husband. She was just a woman living her life, working part-time, taking her child to dance class, and she was standing there completely unaware that her husband wanted to leave her for me.’
‘But it’s life, Evelyn. It happens all the time.’ As soon as I say this, I realise I’m not entirely convinced of it. Would I feel this pragmatic if I learnt that Justin had left me for some other woman? I highly doubt it.
‘Well, it did what I’d needed it to do. Once I saw them, it repositioned the way I thought of Eddy. It gave him a lesser foothold in that place inside me where I saw him as mine.’ She sounds terribly moved suddenly, as though she were reliving this in real time, and the pain is absolutely back to being uppermost. ‘I realised that in order to break up a family, I had to create a false truth: that taking another woman’s husband is okay, especially if perhaps you have succeeded where she has failed: in showing him that you need him more.’
‘So you left and went back to London?’
‘Yes. Sneakily. I didn’t have the courage to face him. I just left a note pinned to the back door.’
‘And that was the end of it?’
‘If I find what I’m looking for in these boxes, they’ll be able to answer that for you.’
I hear her rustling around again.
I don’t know if she’s being deliberately evasive, or just eager to get back to what she was doing. ‘Hmm . . .’ I say, smiling to myself. ‘You have a way of drawing out a story, Evelyn.’
EIGHTEEN
I am grating Parmesan for my pasta – forcing myself to make some proper food for a change, if anything just to reclaim some version of a normal routine – distantly thinking of Evelyn spying on Eddy’s wife, like Columbo, when the phone rings.
It’s Sally.
I wipe my hands on a tea-towel, and pick up. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I feel bad I haven’t rung you back!’ She’s left about three messages.
‘I’ve been so worried.’
‘I know. Sorry,’ I tell her. I realise that whatever little grievance I had against her, it’s over now. ‘I don’t know. I just haven’t felt much like talking.’
I stuff the phone between my chin and shoulder and reach for the bag of macaroni, but it splits as I pull it open and pasta scatters on to the bench and floor. I stare at it and sigh.
‘How are you?’ she asks. ‘I mean, really. How are you doing?’
I squat to start clearing all this up, but my legs are too weak, and I wobble and have to put out a hand for balance. ‘I’m not good, to be honest. I’m not very good at all.’ I’d actually thought I was a little better earlier in the gallery, but coming home always reverses my mood. ‘It’s not so bad when I’m around people,’ I tell her. ‘Then I don’t think about it.’
I suppose I know something’s coming because I realise that her first words weren’t, Have you heard from him?
‘Alice . . . I have to tell you something,’ she says. Then, as my heart pounds suddenly, she says, ‘I saw him today.’
My head swims. I go to stand up but see stars.
‘What do you mean, you saw him?’
‘In town. I was coming out of the shoe-repair shop. He was in a car. A silver BMW . . . Alice, he was with someone.’
Justin doesn’t drive a silver BMW. I am confused. The sauce is splattering, jumping out of the pan. I should move it off the hob, or turn down the heat, but my brain isn’t instructing my hands. I back up, as though a threat is coming at me, crunching macaroni under my feet. ‘What do you mean, someone?’ I make contact with the counter, which stops me, and my legs almost give way.
‘A woman,’ she says, after a moment. ‘He was with a woman.’
My blood is making a weird whooshing sound in my ears. It’s like hearing the sea through a shell.
Justin. With a woman.
Everyone’s sake.
‘Are you still there?’ Sally asks.
‘Yes.’ I swallow a gummy thickness that won’t go down.
‘Sorry. I hate telling you, but I had to. I mean, you have a right to know.’
I need to clear my throat. ‘But . . . you said you think you saw him?’