What a question. But it had to be asked. ‘I assume you must be, if you’re telling me this. Is that why you’ve been sitting here moping like this, Evelyn? Because you’re married to me, but you’re in love with a gardener from home?’
His wife had chosen to scrape the bottom of the barrel on some mission to make herself less depressed. He thought this uncharitable thought, but recognised he was only thinking it because his pride instructed him to.
Her eyes remained fixed on him, but she wasn’t seeing him again. He thought that was his answer, right there. He studied her, oddly fascinated to be staring into the daydreaming eyes of his wife while she was in the throes of pining for another man.
And he was right. Evelyn was gone. She had returned to her house, to Eddy’s warm arms. To their day at the beach. Their walks, their talks, their lovemaking. To the way he had sang to her years ago. To his sad gaze at the Mayfair Ballroom. Every time that song had come on the radio, she’d had to switch it off. Long John Baldry. ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’. Two or three lines in, and she was ready to crumple.
Mark’s voice sounded far away. In her peripheral vision, she could see the colourful oil painting of a summer garden that hung above their mantelpiece. They had bought it from a small Cork Street gallery. She could see the antique wall sconces from Sotheby’s, and a bronze figurine on the pedestal table by the armchair that they had found at a flea market in Venice. The things they had chosen together, which might not seem important, yet they furnished their life and told of their history. She could see Mark in the foreground, sharpening again before her eyes.
He had just asked her if she was in love with her gardener.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or at least, I thought I was, yes.’ In that instant, she felt so numb that she didn’t know any more.
The word yes faded as Mark heard it, as he tried to un-hear it. Faded, then came back again. He continued to look at her. He ought to be thinking of her as a stranger now, a pariah. He ought to hate her, or at the very least be furious. And yet, for some odd reason, he couldn’t. He saw this clearly for what it was: a symptom of this perpetual ridiculous homesick business in her. He saw it this way, simply because that was the best of all the possible explanations.
‘What do you want to do then?’ He hadn’t dragged her kicking and screaming from that abysmal Holy Island, with the wretched tide that you were always planning your life around. If she hadn’t wanted to be here, she should have left. If she didn’t want to be here now, she should go. He wanted to say all this; he would have loved to say all this, but he didn’t dare. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him.
She heard his question. Her eyes swooped over his well-worn Burberry blazer, his maroon tie with the greasy stain on it that he must have acquired over lunch. Mark always missed his mouth when he ate, or managed to dangle his tie-end in his soup. Her gaze landed at his feet. His shoes were a bit of a disaster, too. He could afford plenty of expensive new ones, yet he always wore the same clapped-out pair that Tessie polished every day. Mark was shabby chic. She had seen that expression in Cosmo and thought, Yes, that fits him. She felt strangely detached from all of his quirks, though. She was looking at him as though he were a stranger, assessing him. Someone might have just introduced them at a dinner party. The face appeared suddenly years older, the skin pale and slack. His sparse, greying hair formed a halo of frizz around the top of his head. His eyes were bloodshot, and his shoulders sagged like a ragdoll’s. There was something intensely grandfatherly about him. But something that made her still love him, nonetheless.
Mark wasn’t at all happy at the way she was looking at him. He got up and went to fill his Scotch glass, just because she was making him feel twitchy. As he did, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. His reflection made him take pause. He was a vibrant, upright, attractive man in his prime. An affair with a gardener! What on earth had she been thinking?
He brought his drink back to the chair and sat down again. Harry went and nudged off a bauble from the bottom branch of the tree. It struck Mark that he needed to be angrier. He had felt the rise of genuine pique a moment or two ago. But it had burned out like a log fire that starts off promisingly and then you don’t quite know what suddenly happened to it. ‘I’m presuming you want to leave me and go and be with him, your gardener,’ he said, after he realised that she hadn’t answered his question about what she wanted to do.
He drained the glass in one go. But he wasn’t as calm as he might have looked. He sounded so rational, like a mediator in a debate. But he wasn’t rational, either. Public school had taught him how to do the complete opposite of what his emotions were instructing. This whole thing was mad enough that she might actually do it. He didn’t want to lose her. He loved her profoundly. Right now, it didn’t matter massively that she might not love him back. She was looking at him in that strange way again.
She watched him polish off his drink. She could have said, I want to leave you and be with Eddy, if he’ll still have me. The letter she had tried to write this morning – to explain why she hadn’t shown up as promised – was in the drawer of her writing bureau upstairs. She hadn’t managed to compose it. She had made her choice, and yet she hadn’t committed it to paper. On one level, it was urgent that she sent an explanation to him; it was only fair. And on the other . . .