‘It was him, Alice. It was definitely Justin.’
He was with a woman. The words just keep coming back to me. Yet suddenly there’s a partial clearing in the frenzy of my head, a light shining through. ‘Sorry, Sally, I’m not sure . . . It could have been anybody, right? A client . . .’ Justin is always out with clients. ‘Someone he works with.’ My mouth has gone dry. My top lip is curling and sticking under my top front teeth.
‘But you said he wasn’t at work. You said he was taking time off, didn’t you?’ Her voice brims with pity.
Did I? ‘No,’ I say, trying to think. ‘Louisa said he was working from home. He can’t just take time off work . . .’
I can feel speculation trying to flourish in the gap that follows – on both our parts. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, eventually. ‘I don’t think it was a client, Al. I mean, I know it wasn’t.’
My heart hammers – does she know something? Adrenaline and annoyance push it past where it feels healthy to go. ‘But you don’t know that for a fact. I’m not sure you can really say that . . .’
‘No. But . . .’
‘But what?’ Her obvious reluctance to just spit it out sends ungodly terror through me.
‘There was just something about them. They just looked . . . I don’t know, together.’
Together. The word comes back, and back, and back to me. I frown. I can’t relax my eyebrows. I can’t rearrange my face.
‘Sorry,’ she says, when I’ve gone quiet. ‘I know it must be so very hard to hear. I’m just reporting what I saw.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true, Sally. I think you’re reporting what you believe you saw. There’s a difference.’ Part of me is thinking, if the situation were reversed, would I be so quick to notify Sally of this when I had no real proof of anything? Then the other part of me wonders why I am being so critical of her again.
‘Anyway,’ I go on, ‘how was he going to meet some woman? We were always together. Either that, or he was working. And he’d never mess around with anyone at work – he hated that kind of thing. And if he had met someone else, then why marry me? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, eventually.
His text said, Discovered something before wedding. ‘He’s not having an affair. Honestly, Sally, I just know he isn’t. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. Whatever it is . . . Well, it’s something else.’ The confidence in my words convinces me of them.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I believe you.’
But then the tiny betraying voice of doubt speaks so quietly that I barely hear it. ‘Go on, then,’ I say. ‘You might as well tell me. What did she look like?’
NINETEEN
Evelyn
London. 1983
Dear Eddy,
I couldn’t bear to say goodbye. I thought it wise I return to London immediately. It’s best you forget me.
Evelyn
Mark had been called into a meeting, so his driver was waiting for her at Heathrow. She sat in the back seat of the Bentley feeling disconnected from herself, like a passenger in her own life, watching the outskirts of grey London slide past her.
High Street Kensington looked the same. Yet walking into her three-bedroom flat in the small garden square just behind the high street was a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The daily routines of her life were there in abeyance like a lost memory that was returning in fragments. The place was suspiciously tidy. None of Evelyn’s perfumed cardigans hung over the chair backs. There were no platform shoes in the hallway. No errant hairpins on the dining table. In fact, not a single piece of evidence on the bathroom counter that she lived here. It was as though someone had moved her out.
And that was how she felt from then on: emotionally relocated. Over the years, when coming home from visits up North, she had often experienced a strange limbo, unsure which life she was leaning toward reattaching herself to. When she had returned from her mother’s funeral it had been the heightened sense of her own mortality that had troubled her: the reality finally setting in about where she stood in the grand scheme of her own identity. She was someone’s wife, no one’s mother, and no longer anyone’s child. Without Mark, she would be without bearings, navigating her way around nothing. But now all her thoughts were of Eddy.
For the next three weeks, she drifted flatly between the events that defined her life. But nothing was quite the same. She tried to maintain her twice-weekly jazz dance classes in the sprung-floor studio in Covent Garden. Afterward, she would usually sip a cappuccino in the fresh air, listening to a Peruvian pipe band playing beside the central arcade, occasionally striking up a pleasant conversation with a stranger. But now she tended to sit in a corner and avoid people. On Wednesdays, she normally lunched with friends, but found herself drumming up excuses to avoid going. On Fridays, she clothes-shopped because there was a numbing anonymity among the racks of the season’s latest fashions. Afternoons would normally entail a leisurely walk through Hyde Park with Harry, their cocker spaniel, then a trip to Harrods Food Halls to pick up dinner if they weren’t dining out. But now she napped a lot in the afternoons. She convinced herself she was just tired, or run down, but secretly she knew it was because of Eddy. She missed him as though he had been the left ventricle of her heart.