Eden (7 page)

“Hetty?”

“James.”

“The Northern kid?”

“He’s not just a ‘Northern kid’.” She swipes a hand halfheartedly at Penn’s leg, still smiling. “He’s good, you know he is. You saw his Prospero. Besides, he’s a friend.”

Penn pauses, a pause she knows is made up of “what is he to her?” and “what is she to him?”. He is a friend, that’s all. But she won’t tell Penn that. Because this way works better
.

“What does he need?” he asks finally
.

“Nothing big. Just that he’s had this dream since he was a kid. About playing Hamlet, you know. That it
is
him. But he won’t audition against you.”

“You want me to stand down?” Penn’s face darkens
.

“No,” she says quickly. “I would never ask that. Just that if you encouraged him, maybe worked with him a bit, then he’d at least try for it.”

“Aren’t you going for Ophelia?”

“Of course.”

“So whoever gets the part gets you.”

“It’s a play, dahling,” she mocks. “Not real life.”

But it’s all intertwined here. What happens on stage spills out into the everyday. She knows James won’t get the part. But she feels an urge to help him. It’s odd, she has never had a need to nurture before. Or maybe only with Evie. That’s what she sees in him, she thinks, suddenly. He is like Evie, he has a kind of neediness that only she seems to be able to fulfil
.

“Please,” she says. “Pretty please with ice cream and cherries on the top?”

Penn rolls his eyes. “Fine,”
he says. “You win. But don’t expect me to go down without a fight.”

“Never,” she answers
.

But as she watches them rehearse together, she realizes she was wrong. James doesn’t need Penn’s help. He isn’t just good, he is astonishing. But if he gets the part, and she gets Ophelia, then what will happen to Penn? What will happen to the promise of them? She is Penn’s Ophelia. Not James’s. Isn’t she?

The cast list goes up on a Friday, their fates typed out on thin foolscap. Penn is at the top, of course, always at the top. James, though, is lost among the faceless ranks of the chorus, his surname carelessly misspelt. And Bea, his Ophelia, is destined for someone else
.

“He’s perfect,” Camilla Gordon says, sighing. “Isn’t he? Perfect for the part.”

James nods. For a week he had believed he stood a chance. Bea had made him believe, with her pleading and pushing him to sign up. Penn too, telling him he was made for it, born to it. Those were just lies, he understands that now, empty praise to please Bea. Praise Penn could afford to proffer because there was never any doubt about who would win in the end
.

“It should have been you,” she says to him later
.

They’re in her room. She at the dressing table, him on her narrow bed, his back against the wall and his heart half broken, a blade stuck in
.

“Hamlet, I mean. We all think it. Even Penn.”

Maybe it’s the truth, or maybe she is just placating him. But whichever, it doesn’t change the reality of it
.

“He’s a third year,” James shrugs. “And he’ll be good. You know he will.”

She looks over at him, their eyes meeting in the flyblown glass of a junk-stall mirror they chose together on East Street, as they transformed her room in a single Saturday from Barratt home to boudoir. And he flicks his hair into his face, declaims “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”, mimicking Penn’s West London drawl, his dropped “t”s failing to disguise seven years of Eton and a lifetime of silver spoons
.

“God, that’s uncanny,” she laughs
.

But then she turns her eyes away, focusing instead on some perceived imperfection on her chin. “Pity me, then,” she sighs. “I’m the one who has to kiss him.”

Thirteen streets and half a mile away Penn sits at the kitchen table idly flicking a penknife open and shut. He knows it was wrong: asking Ben, the director, to drop James. But Ben owed him – for dope, for food, for the three months he’d spent sleeping on the sofa when his girlfriend kicked him out – and besides, he had to do it, had no choice. He had to get her on her own, get her away from that boy who clung to her so pathetically
.

She wasn’t James’s to cling to, she was Penn’s. She would be Penn’s
.

AUGUST 1988

WHEN WE
were little, Bea and me, people would ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Bea was precise in her answers, though they changed as often as the wind from shore to sea. “An empress,” she would tell our grandfather. Then, a week later to Mrs Ennor in the village: “A nurse.” She worked her way through them all with the pace and clarity of a skipping rhyme: mermaid, lady, gypsy, queen. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Until she settled on one, and her answer to everyone – to her parents, to Mrs Ennor, to the girls in her dorm or the boys in the Lugger – was the same: “An actress. I’m going to be an actress.” It didn’t take a shrink to know that that way she could be all things at once; all heroes and villains. She could be Carol in
Road
, dressed in a miniskirt and high heels, her vowels lengthened, her speech hardened by the broad Bolton accent; she could be light-as-air Titania, queen of the fairies; she could be Iphigenia, Eurydice, Medea. Whomever she chose, whenever she chose; a thousand futures wrapped in one.

Tom, too, changed from pirate to pilot to carpenter, before settling on lawyer.

But me? My reply never changed. I would always say, “Here.”

Tom and Bea would laugh, thinking I was confused, had misunderstood or misheard the question. “Not where,
what
.
What
do you want to be?”

But I would look blank, and repeat my answer: “Here,” I would say, then louder, insisting, “I just want to be here.”

Because here was a whole, perfect world of wonder, limitless in its possibility, an endless new territory to be explored and charted. I wanted to stand with my back nestled in the curvature of the morning-room wall, held steadfast by its oddness and the surety of history. I wanted to roll my finger on the rounded brown Bakelite of the light switch at my bedroom door – on and off, on and off, my breath rising and falling with each satisfying click. I wanted to lie face-down in the tangled fur of the sheepskin rug on the landing, smelling its lanolin sweetness, absorbing every footfall, every figure that had passed. I wanted to hide inside my grandmother’s wardrobe, our door to Narnia, a mothball-scented dressing-up box of furs and flapper dresses and long-forgotten gowns.

The house was a story, a book that caught us in time, trapped us like silverfish in a leather-bound volume of Dickens; like the dust that lay thick and heavy on the stone mantels and window sills, that caught in the folds of fabric and blew like tumbleweed across the pantry floor.

Like the damp that defied a battery of attempts to banish it. That, despite shuttered windows, and air bricks, found its way back in; oozing through every fault and fissure, sending wet fingers along the scullery floor, into the brocaded seams of wing-backed chairs and into the highest shelves and bottom drawers of cupboards, rendering biscuits and breakfast cereals a claggy, stale mass.

But it was this damp air that fed our fertile imaginations, curious thoughts growing like pin mould on pantry bread. The house became our Neverland – full of strange creatures and terrible monsters and magic, magic everywhere. But now this land of make-believe was being dismantled, piece by rotting piece. That sweet, musty smell – of the past, of a hundred lives and a thousand stories – was replaced by eye-stinging sawdust and the bitter, chemical tang of gloss paint. And the peace that hung over Eden like a sacred shroud was driven out, shooed across the lawns by the high-pitched, angry buzz of electric drills and sanders.

A week later, I follow it; slip from the back of the wardrobe and, taking an apple, a sandwich and a paperback book, I slide out the back door and into the woods.

The path to the boathouse is narrow now. Spindly nettles nod and waver a warning towards my bare calves as I pass, and the once well-trodden soil is overgrown. Brambles whip my thighs, thin scratches of red against pale skin. Yet I run on regardless, my plimsolls skimming over clods of earth and the exposed roots of oaks, beeches, and the last of the elms. I fly, second star to the right and straight on until I reach my morning: a wide curve of water that glistens in the early sun – Calenick creek – and next to it, a faded-board boathouse, with a corrugated roof and painted “No Entry” tacked haphazardly, childishly, across the door.

If Eden was our world, then the boathouse was our playroom: a ready-made gingerbread house in an enchanted forest, picture-book perfect with red-checked curtains, a table and chairs, a camping stove. We would spend all day here, playing at pirates, at Swallows and Amazons, at Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx, taking turns to row our boat –
Jorion
– across to the Millhouse and back, Tom paying us for the journey in penny chews or strawberry bootlaces. We would swim out to the pontoon, lie on our backs until our skin stung from salt and sunshine, until our throats were hoarse from singing that Robert de Niro was waiting; until, when we pressed against our eyelids, shooting stars danced across the pinkness like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Then, at night, when we dared, we would sleep top to tail in the foldaway camp bed or on the floor, waking with toes in our faces and the world upside-down to a breakfast of biscuits and cherryade.

And then one summer Bea just stopped coming. At first there was a film she wanted to see at the Lux in Liskeard; an American high school thing of rebellion and leather jackets and boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Then the excuses rolled off her tongue as easily as marbles: too many goodbyes to be said to schoolfriends; too many shopping trips to Plymouth for pillows and sheets and shoes; too many scripts to be read in the solitude of the attic, where my splashing couldn’t soak the pages, and my sulking couldn’t distract her study.

And oh how I sulked. I sulked with the same determination with which she ignored me. Because I couldn’t play alone any more. I was a cowboy with no Indian, a Wendy with no Pan. I would sit in my own room and curse, pray for a plague of locusts or frogs, make pacts with shadowy figures I conjured up in my own netherworld of self-pity. Until I was forced to admit our days of Hansel and Gretel were over. And that’s when I turned to Tom. He became my partner in crime, my faithful sidekick, and I his. Though I hoped, prayed, I would be more. Then one night we rowed back late from the village and collapsed side by side in the boathouse, too heavy-limbed and lazy to make it any further than the creek.

Even now I still feel the heft of the boards beneath my back, the sheet clinging to my sweat-sticky body, the perfect proximity of him.

“Are you awake, Evie?” he said.

“No,” I replied.

He laughed, then. “Me neither.”

“I’m hot,” I said, cursing myself for stating the obvious. For not being able to articulate what I really wanted to tell him.

“I’m hot, too,” he echoed.

And then it happened. He went first: stripped off his T-shirt and shorts. And though it was dark, and he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow, I knew he was naked. And, though I’d seen him like that so many times before as children, this, this was different. This meant something else.

“Your turn,” he said.

And, with the sound of my heart pounding in my chest, and his breath quickening, I peeled off my clothes until only my white knickers remained in their pathetic, virginal glory. They should be black, I remember thinking, or lacy. I should have borrowed some of Bea’s.

But Tom didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Because then, there, on the floor of the boathouse, the same floor we’d played Peter Pan on, played pirates on, he kissed me.

The rest is a jumble of images – ones I have had to imagine, conjure from the darkness that shrouded us: my hands on his chest, his back; his moving down my legs, then up again; my knickers pulled aside. Then my hand pushing his away, panic slowly taking hold: that I can’t do this. That I’m not like Bea. I’m not Bea.

“It’s OK,” he says. “It’s fine.”

But it isn’t.

We lay in silence until sleep took him, and then, before the clock struck twelve, I ran away from the shame of it. Not of what happened, but what didn’t. That I couldn’t go through with it after all. That I was the child he always thought of me as.

I awoke the next day to an afternoon so blistering I had no choice but to swim. I will tell him, I thought, as I pulled on my bathing suit. I will tell him that I’m sorry, that I love him, that I do want him, I do. And he will understand. Of course he will.

So convinced was I of the absolute truth of this that I didn’t think to wonder whether he wanted me too.