It rained a lot that summer. She had written virtually nothing, just tied up a few loose ends on a couple of magazine commissions. Mark, who had known someone high up at the exciting new women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, had originally got her a job there as an assistant. Since its inception, the magazine had taken Britain by storm with its frank and entertaining acknowledgement of the fact that women were not just mothers and accessories for men. They enjoyed sex, they had dreams of transcending the typing pool and they were no longer happy to plod on with unsatisfying marriages.
The magazine’s concept had unleashed something in Evelyn. She had presented one or two story ideas almost daily to the editor. They were good and current. As Evelyn pointed out to her editor over wine in a smoke-filled pub, in April 1975 everyone had been singing along to Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’, which had ascended the British pop chart. But by July, they had moved on to ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’. Her editor had lapped it up. So, rather swiftly, Evelyn’s job changed. She no longer answered phones and filed copy. She was given proper assignments, and invited to editorial meetings. These often took place over a boozy lunch down some buzzing side street near the magazine’s offices. She lived for those lunches. Plus, she made friends of her own – real people, as she described them to Mark: those with whom she had something in common.
She would trot out of there on such a mission, armed with her story and her direction for the week. But after a couple of years, her career had started to become inconvenient. Mark had wanted them to take off on spontaneous trips and weekends. Her job was hindering his freedom. So, reluctantly, she had gone freelance. But the irony struck her. A woman had just been made leader of the Conservative Party, the nation had just passed the Sex Discrimination Act, and yet Evelyn Westland’s ambitions were being curtailed because her job was getting in the way of her husband’s good time.
Now, though, she was less motivated to find ideas for features, and was drawn to the fancy she’d long had of writing a novel. Sitting at her desk with pen and paper at hand, the idea of what the story would be about would hover but never fully land. Every time she tried to ask herself, What do people want to read? all she kept seeing was Eddy’s face.
Once in a while, she popped into the magazine’s office to meet with her editor. It was on such a day, about a month after her return from Holy Island, that one of the secretaries said there was a letter for her.
When she saw the postmark, everything seemed to stand still, except for the pounding of her heart.
How had he found her?
She took the letter to a crowded Italian coffee shop near Tottenham Court Road Tube station. The place hissed with gleaming machines that turned milk to foam. Its two tall windows either side of the door were steamed up, so you couldn’t read the backward inscription of the name on the glass: Mario’s.
Dear Evelyn,
His writing was neat and cursive. He’d even written the date in full, with the year – so very precise – which charmed her.
I hope you will forgive me writing to you like this. I remembered the name of your magazine, and I enquired in a bookshop and found the address.
Finding your note and knowing that you had left without saying goodbye devastated me more than I can ever tell you. But I know you did it because you thought it was what I needed, to shake some sense into me, and you were probably right.
I should never have asked you to leave your marriage and your life for me. It was all too much, too fast, not to mention mad. I’d have had to be a very special man to compete with what you already have, and I suppose I’m realistic enough to know I am not that man. Expecting you to give up everything for someone who has nothing by comparison was insanity, and I regret dreaming for a moment.
So why am I writing? I suppose because something has gone from my life now, but, for the time it takes me to pen this, I feel the thread of a connection again. Just the thought that you might be sat somewhere in secret reading my words cheers me up and brings me closer to you. I thought that after a month had passed I would start, in some small way, to get over you. But the opposite has happened. I am more certain than ever of my feelings for you. You are so ingrained in me now, Evelyn, that even if I never see you again I will always relive our time together, and fantasise that it didn’t have to end. I will be haunted by What if . . . ? I keep playing you over and over in my mind – from that very moment I was in your mother’s garden and I turned around and saw you coming down the path, looking like a fashion model, then everything that passed between us after that. And then back to twenty years ago – our meeting that perhaps affected me in ways that it didn’t quite affect you. Sometimes, I think I must have dreamed the happiness I knew so briefly because of you.
I know that until the day I die I will never forget you.
In hindsight, it might have been best for my sanity if we had never met at that wedding – if I had never been there, or if you had been with a boyfriend, and I wouldn’t have tried to stretch beyond my reach. But I did meet you. I just have to stop reading meaning into why.
I hope you have returned to your life and are happy now that you have got something out of your system. And if I have been in any way responsible for that, then it was worthwhile in the end.
No, I lie. What I hope is that you will come home.
Eddy
She was astonished by how beautifully he put words together. As the espresso machine hissed in the background, and someone’s kid stood trailing his index finger through the condensation on the glass, she held in her hand the pressed pink fuchsia bell that had fallen out of the notepaper.
TWENTY