Eden (14 page)

He laughs. “That’s incredible.”

I nod.

“And now it’s your aunt’s?”

I shake my head quickly. “Mine actually. Well, mine and Bea’s. He left it to us. That’s why we still came back in the holidays, all holiday. It was in the will – that it had to be our home and we had to spend the holidays here.”

“Clever.”

“Not really. Aunt Julia hated coming here and Uncle John never had the time. And Grandpa didn’t leave any money to look after it, and so now, well, it has to be sold. They win.”

“That’s not fair.”

I shrug. “Life’s not fair,” I say, echoing Aunt Julia’s excuse, her get-out clause, trying to appear devil-may-care.

But I do care, and he knows it.

“We were going to live here, me and Bea,” I tell him. “When we grew up, I mean. We were going to have a wing each. She was going to put on plays, turn it into a theatre or a film set.”

“What were you going to do?”

“Take the tickets.” It sounds like nothing. Like the job you give to the smallest child, or the fool, to keep them out of the way. But it wasn’t like that; Bea wasn’t like that. I chose it. I was happy to stay in the wings as long as I could watch her. And then, when the audiences were gone, it would be ours again, our own stage. It never occurred to me that by then we’d have grown out of those games, out of make-believe.

He folds then unfolds his arms, then leans forward. “What about … men – boyfriends?” His face reddens as he says it. It’s the first time I’ve seen him falter or show a flicker of embarrassment. I wonder why now. Is it because of Bea? Or me?

“They’d have been brothers,” I say. “And best friends. They’d have gone along with it. Living here, the four of us.” Bea said this once, had this idea we would meet and marry twins, that we would all live together, our children interchangeable, sleeping in one giant nursery.

But the truth was that, until she met Penn, the men in Bea’s life played only bit parts: trees or soldiers. Like swifts or swallows, they came and went with the seasons. She was the star of this imagined life, and I her faithful sidekick. I’d thought, once, in my own idle daydreaming, that we wouldn’t need to marry brothers. I could marry Tom. He would inherit the Millhouse and work for us. Then one day I’d kiss him – this frog prince – and then we two would tend to Bea, together, for ever.

I feel my own face redden at my childish conceit, my foolishness, and change the subject. “I’ll show you where you’re sleeping,” I say. “You can have the blue room.”

“The blue room.” He repeats. “It’s like a film, or a novel. ‘She slept in the yellow room, he in the blue.’”

There’s an edge in his voice. Sarcasm. Jealousy almost.

“Sorry,” I mumble, as I lead the way to the staircase. “I know it sounds – I don’t know… lame.”

“No, no.” He turns to me. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just so different. That’s all. Different.”

“Not like this at yours then?”

He laughs. “No.”

“I thought you had a big house – Hampshire isn’t it?”

“I— yes, yes we do. In the constituency. But I was thinking of London.”

“Of course,” I say. Then mumble a “sorry”. Because I shouldn’t have taken him back to his house – it’s a place I don’t want to go either.

“You don’t have to be sorry.” He looks down. “I’m the sorry one.”

I want to tell him then – that it wasn’t his fault, it couldn’t have been; he wasn’t even there. It was an accident. No one could have known what was going to happen. I want to squeeze his hand so he knows it’s all right. Or is going to be. That one day it will be no more than a memory, as distant and air-light as the others. It has to be.

But maybe it’s me who needs convincing.

We’ve climbed the staircase now, risen from the paint pots and wallpaper tables of the ground floor to the wide, galleried landing of the first, where the walls remain untouched, keeping their faces for just a few more days. For that’s all we have: a few more days until he, and then I, will have to move on.

I push the thought down and grasp the brass handle in front of me. “This is it,” I say, and I turn the handle slowly, then push the door and let it swing open. I let him step into the room first and see it in its strange, sad glory.

“It was my grandparents’ room,” I say, explaining the double bed, the brush set on the dressing table, the photographs on the window sill.

“It’s great,” he says. “Thanks.”

But I know he’s disappointed. Despite its splendour, its views across the lawns, its carpet so wide you can waltz across it, this isn’t the room he wanted to see.

“I can take you up there.” I say. “If you want?”

He nods, not even answering. He doesn’t need to: I understand. Just as he understands me, knows me; like I know him.

And so, leaving his books and bag on the floor, we close the door and climb the narrow, twisting staircase to the attic.

For a while he says nothing, just silently touches these pretty, precious things with childlike wonder. Then it begins. Her baubles and bric-a-brac pull the sorrow from him on long ribbons of memory.

“I loved her,” he says. “So much, but—” He pauses, to find the right words, to find the strength. He grasps a bottle of nail varnish. The rose red is set in stark contrast to the white of his knuckles. “We had a fight. A petty, pointless fight. I made a mistake, told a lie, and she … she couldn’t forgive me.”

I go to touch his hand. I want to unclench it because I am afraid he will shatter the glass and the polish will drip blood-like down his fingers. But he pulls away.

“But I loved her. You have to believe me. You do believe me, don’t you?” He’s desperate now, his eyes wide, whites showing. He drops the bottle and it hits the rug noiselessly. Then he clutches me instead, my arms in his hands, his grip tight, terrified. “Evie. Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes I believe you. I told you before, I told you: it’s OK.”

A sob breaks free from him then, and he drops onto the bed, his head hidden in his hands.

I sit beside him, unsure whether to touch him or if he’ll lash out. But I have to do something so at last I pull him to me. And his face still hidden, he lets me hold him, gentle at first, but then more tightly, as if I can squeeze the hurt out; like a promise, that I will never let go.

And so we sit, for how long I’m not sure. Until the tears subside, until he’s pulled away to wipe the salt from his face, the snot from his chin. And I know I can’t lie any more. I don’t want him to think he is alone in this.

“She hated me,” I say suddenly. Blurting it out before I can change my mind.

He turns quickly, shakes his head, his brow creased in confusion. “No. She loved you.”

“She did. Once. But then, after that row – about the boy – I couldn’t forgive her. She apologized but I refused to listen. And so she dropped me.”

For it wasn’t just those three spat-out words over Tom on Christmas Eve, but another argument, two days later, as she was leaving. “Wake up,” she’d said to me. “Wake up, or grow up. Either will do.”

“You’re the one who needs to grow up,” I’d sneered back at her, my childish whining destroying my own argument.

She’d rolled her eyes at that, taken her bag and stormed downstairs. I stayed in my room, watched the car pull away, saw her staring ahead, refusing to look up in case she saw my sorry face. It was the last time I saw her.

“But she wrote,” he says.

I shake my head. Not after Christmas. I’d waited for a letter, checked my pigeonhole every day for an apology or even a pretence that nothing was wrong, a postcard of Big Ben with “wish you were here” on the back.

“Look at me,” he says.

I raise my eyes to his.

“She was going to write,” he says. “She told me. To say sorry. She wanted to come and see you in May, but you weren’t here – you were at school. Then in July she said she was coming back to Eden. To wait for you. She was going to take a train, that night…” His voice cracks as he realizes what he has said, what this means to him, what it will do to me; that sickly sweet, almost-but-not-quite of it.

But I already know. Because he told me of her plans to come back in a letter I shouldn’t have opened because it was never meant for me. A letter that’s hidden now, pushed to the back of a drawer where I can’t see it, where it can’t harm me.

But as I go to betray it with a glance, something distracts me: a flicker in the corner of the room, a brush of air across my face.

“She’s still here,” I say.

“What?”

I blush again as I hear myself. I am idiotic, a cliché. “I just mean, I feel her sometimes, that’s all. I know it sounds stupid.” I try to get out of it, making excuses like a child caught red-handed.

“No,” he says, his voice clear, sure. “It’s not stupid.” Then, for a moment, he is lost in himself. “So she came back, after all.”

“Yes,” I say.

He looks around, his eyes darting, as if he is searching the high ceiling, the canopy, the cornicing.

“Is she with us now?” he says. “Can you hear her?”

I listen, and there it is again, echoing from the walls, bouncing off the wood of the bookcase. She is speaking to me. For the first time she is speaking to me, saying the same words over and over, the same words that Tom used.

Be careful, Evie
, she says.
Be careful
.

“No,” I lie. “I can’t hear anything.”

JUNE 1988

THE WARDROBE
is dark, safe. It is the perfect place to hide
.

Another production has ended and another party has begun in the house on Telegraph Hill. James said he wasn’t going this time and had waited for her to beg, plead, as he knew she would. Because she needs him now that she’s losing Penn to the mess of his life; his dying father, his mother in denial
.

So James makes the walk along Queens Road, a bottle of cheap red in a plastic bag and a white seed of hope in his heart. And he pretends he’s one of them. He talks to them, drinks with them. Though all the time he knows he is a king amongst mortals, with their drugs and their too-loud laughs and their childish games. Someone even suggests hide and seek and Bea claps her hands and says she will be “it”. So James agrees to play for her sake. He knows at once where he will hide
.

For she doesn’t share Penn’s room any more, she has her own: the attic. A girl has moved out, off to a part in a Northern soap, and she has taken her place. She has hung her butterfly dresses across the eaves and set the mirror up under a high window, so that in one swift glance she can see her own reflection and that of the city – its promise mirrored in the burgeoning skyline of the Docklands, the first gleaming storeys of Canary Wharf
.

“It makes sense for me to have my own room,” she says. “That’s all. Don’t read anything into it.”

And then she counts off the reasons she has chosen solitude: Penn has finals, he needs the quiet; next year he’ll probably be away, in rep, and Hunter wants his room; she can see the river. But he knows these are just caulk, paper to cover a crack; only a chink now, tiny, but a vulnerability just the same, into which he can insinuate himself, can push his way deeper into her world, and push Penn out
.

And so he is here, Narnia-like in her wardrobe, crouched among the coats and cardigans, all hung with the smell of her, the smell of patchouli and possibility. And just like always he waits for her to come to him at last
.

AUGUST 1988

IN THE
weeks without Bea, the house always seemed impenetrable; a fortress of thick, grey silence. In the days before she came home it wore an expectant air. Her bed would be turned down, the larder stocked with her favourite pink wafers, her wellington boots retrieved from the back of the garage and lined up in the hallway, waiting for her feet to slip inside. Like me they were waiting for adventure. Then, when she was here, Eden was transformed: every barren corridor became a secret passage; every plain wooden door a portal to a new world of wonder.

Now, with Penn, I feel it again. Eden is alive with possibility.

We breakfast on fig rolls and orangeade, sitting cross-legged on a blanket box on the landing; we lie top to toe on the iron day bed, reading plays and poetry; we play parlour games and hide and seek like rainy-day children.

“It’ll be fun,” I insist, when he says it’s childish. “You’ll see.”

And he does. And the decorators curse as we sneak under dustsheets and behind paint-tacky shutters. They beg us to go outside to play. So the next time, when it’s my turn to hide, I slip past the open door and dance across the lawn to the stable block. Then I crouch down behind the sleek, curved wheel arch of a Jaguar, and wait.

At first all I hear is the thump-thump of my racing heart, but then it comes: the crunch of a shoe on gravel, cautious at first; two slow steps, then a pause while he surveys the kingdom, seeks his quarry. Then a run when he sees the doors are ajar, throwing a shaft of sunlight across the concrete floor.

“I know you’re in there,” he calls, his voice rising and falling like a moustache-twirling villain, like the Hooded Claw. “I’m coming to get you.”

I feel my breath quicken as his footsteps get closer. I want to win, but I also want to be found.

He’s behind me now. I see an elongated shadow stretch out before me; catch the piney smell of his deodorant, the faint peppermint of my toothpaste. I gasp as a pair of hands closes over my eyes, as lips brush my ear.

“Got you,” he whispers.

Got me, I think. But I don’t move. I don’t try to flee. Because I want this. And more.

We stay there, for one heartbeat, then two, then ten. Until suddenly his hands drop, and he stands.

“What is this place anyway?”

I scrabble to my feet and brush the dust from my hands onto my shorts while I shoo away the disappointment. “Oh, um, the stables. Well, it was,” I elaborate, gushing now to cover. “But no one rode really after my mum. Well, I did a bit, but then there was school. So Uncle John put his cars in here.”

There are four of them. Four vintage classics, all polished in a row. Barely driven; the tread of their wheels still deep, the leather unmarked. Uncle John’s pride and joy. Locked up, shut away from the dangers of the world. Like he would’ve shut away Bea if he could, kept her like Rapunzel in her tower, until some handsome prince with a minor title and an account at Coutts rescued her and took her to his palace in Kensington.