Never Close Your Eyes (14 page)

‘Follow me.'

Evie led the young woman up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom. She'd laid the wedding dress out on her bed all ready to be tried on.

‘It's beautiful,' said the young woman, taking off her navy-blue coat. ‘I'm sorry I couldn't get here any earlier. I was really busy at work today.' She had short, dark hair, a pretty, round face – rounder than Evie remembered – and her cheeks were rosy. She looked awfully young to be getting married.

Not for the first time Evie was struck with the irony of the situation: here she was creating a dream dress for the bride-to-be's perfect day while her own marriage had been an absolute disaster. On reflection, she really ought to have picked a different career. Like a divorce lawyer.

‘No problem.' She smiled, hanging the coat on a hook on the back of her bedroom door. ‘Here, would you like to slip your clothes off behind this screen and I'll help you put it on.'

The young woman went behind the blue and gold silk screen in the corner of the room and Evie could hear her unzipping something. She'd picked the screen up for virtually nothing in an antiques market and re-covered it herself. It was very useful on occasions like this.

The young woman stepped out in her white bra and knickers, looking slightly embarrassed. Evie couldn't help noticing her bust – it seemed to have grown since the first fitting a month ago. And the tops of her arms were plumper.

Evie straighted her shoulders. ‘Right,' she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘I'll hold the dress up while you step into it. Don't worry if it doesn't fit, it's only tacked. I can easily alter it.'

The dress, in gold, crushed taffeta, was strapless, with a fitted, boned bodice which fastened at the back with lacing. It was supposed to ruche down gently to hip level and flare slightly to a two tier A-line skirt with a train. Evie prided herself on managing seemingly to interpret exactly what the bride-to-be wanted, whilst subtly steering her away from anything unflattering. On occasions, it required a high degree of diplomacy.

‘Is it a bit tight?' The young woman sounded worried.

Evie didn't even try to do the laces up at the back. She took a deep breath. ‘No problem, there's plenty of fabric. I, er, I can't help noticing though, that you've gone up a cup size or two. Have you, by any chance . . .' She steeled herself, ‘. . . thought of taking a pregnancy test?'

The young woman spun round, wide-eyed. ‘Oh,' she said, covering her mouth with her hands, ‘do you think I could be . . . ?'

Evie nodded. ‘I'd say so.'

‘That night of the dinner party . . . I must ring Matt . . .'

Evie did a quick calculation on her fingers. It was the first week in October. If the woman was, say, eight weeks pregnant now, she'd be nearly due by the time of the wedding in April. Tricky. They'd have to go for a different style of dress. She might even want to postpone.

‘Shall I make us a cup of tea while you get dressed?' Evie smiled. ‘You look like you need one.'

The young woman appeared dazed. ‘We weren't planning to start a family for a year or two . . .'

Evie patted her on the shoulder. ‘Sometimes babies have their own ideas about timing. It's not bad news, is it?'

‘Oh no. We definitely want kids. It's just . . .' The young woman smiled ruefully. ‘Well, I didn't want to be a fat bride.'

Evie gave her a friendly hug. ‘Don't worry, we can have a rethink. You'll look gorgeous.'

The young woman didn't leave till 6.30 p.m. and Evie wasn't in the mood for going out now. But she'd promised her neighbour, Bill, and he'd bought the tickets, so that was that. She didn't have time for a shower so she pulled on a clean pair of dark-blue jeans, which she tucked into her flat black knee-length biker books, and a sloppy black V-necked jumper that almost disguised her ample chest; she couldn't cope with the impertinent comments that it tended to attract today.

She added some earrings and a chunky black and white necklace to jazz the ensemble up. Her fair hair was looking a bit flat, so she tied it back in a French ponytail and slapped on some brown eye-shadow, blusher and lip gloss. She took a last look in the bathroom mirror. ‘That'll have to do.'

The children were watching TV. She felt guilty about leaving them. ‘Darling, can you make sure Michael's in bed by nine thirty?' she asked Freya. ‘I'll be home by eleven at the latest.'

Neither of them looked up.

Evie knocked on Bill's door at seven o'clock. ‘I'm a terrible mother,' she said, practically tripping over a pile of books in the middle of his hall as she went in.

‘Sorry,' Bill said, shoving the pile to one side with his foot. ‘There doesn't seem to be room for them anywhere else.' He took his jacket off one of the hooks on the wall and started to put it on. ‘A terrible mother?' he said. ‘Nonsense. I've just been rereading Charles Dickens's
Bleak House
. Mrs Jellyby, now she was a terrible mother, obsessed with her African project while her house is strewn with rubbish and her son's head is stuck between the banister railings.'

Evie laughed. Bill was always quoting some great work or other and his house was full of literature. Too full, in her opinion. There were shelves in every room and they were all bulging. With no more space left, he'd taken to stacking piles of books in every available corner, too.

‘Come on, we have to go or we'll be late,' she said, taking his arm.

‘All right, all right,' he replied, buttoning up his shabby brown leather jacket with his free hand. ‘Dash, I've forgotten my wallet.'

Evie took a deep breath. He was so absent-minded. Typical professor, though he didn't look like one. She always imagined professors to be small and round with white hair and glasses. But Bill was tall and lean. She supposed he got his muscles from all that digging at the allotment. He bounded up the stairs two at a time to retrieve his wallet.

They decided it would be easier to get a bus to the Orange Tree as parking was difficult in Richmond. They arrived just in time to take their places in the little theatre in the round. If you sat on the wooden benches in the front row, where they were, the actors practically perched on your lap. As the lights went down, she dug the tortoiseshell glasses out of her handbag and slipped them on, hoping that Bill wouldn't notice.

It was an amusing, madcap play by American writer Susan Glaspell, surprisingly modern given that it was written in 1922, and with a strong feminist message. Evie found herself laughing more than she had in ages, though she was aware that there was a powerful, suffused anger, too. She even managed to forget about Neil and the baby.

With his smart, liberal New York friends, Seymore Standish, one of the main characters, was a banker and frustrated artist whose poetic ambitions were hampered, he claimed, by the fact that he had a mother, wife and children to support in the conservative Midwest.

The real picture, however, was rather different. His wife, Diantha, whom he patronisingly called Dotty Dimple, wasn't in fact the small-minded character that he painted, and when Nora Powers arrived from New York, spouting radical ideas about birth control, Diantha jumped on the feminist bandwagon. Seymore, who was secretly attracted to Nora, was appalled by what he regarded as his wife's wild behaviour and exposed himself as a snobbish hypocrite.

The play ended with an unexpected twist: Diantha, realising that her new-found liberal ways were destroying her husband, decided to turn her back on Nora and return to her narrow, stifling existence.

There was a stunned silence at the end of the show, as people processed what had happened. Then the audience broke into applause. Evie wondered what Neil would have thought of it. They used to go to quite a lot of plays together, though he always said that he preferred the cinema.

She declined Bill's offer of a drink afterwards. She wanted to get back to the children and she wasn't in the mood anyway. They walked side by side to the bus stop round the corner.

‘Thoroughly enjoyable,' Bill commented, ‘though I found the ending disappointing.'

‘Did you?' Evie asked. ‘Why in particular?'

‘I just thought it was unconvincing, somehow, that Dotty would have chosen to go back to her repressed life with her vain, misogynistic husband after being exposed to all those enlightened ideas. She didn't need to.'

‘Oh, but I think she did,' Evie said.

‘Why?'

‘Because for all his faults, she knew he needed her, that he was nothing without her. He'd just shrivel and die.'

Bill went quiet for a moment. ‘What a terrible indictment of the female condition,' he said finally, ‘that a woman would choose to stay with her husband simply because he needed her.'

Evie felt her face go red. ‘Well, yes, but there was another very good reason too, don't you see?'

‘No.'

Was Bill being deliberately difficult?

‘What was that?' he asked. ‘I can't see any good reason at all.'

‘Dotty loved him,
silly
,' Evie said. ‘It was obvious. For all his faults, she was still desperately in love with him.'

They sat in silence on the top deck of the bus as it trundled towards home. Evie wondered if she'd offended Bill by calling him silly. She felt bad, but she couldn't quite believe that he could be so blinkered. To her it was what the whole play was essentially about: the mad, inexplicable power of marital love.

They parted at her garden gate. Evie could see the light was still on in Freya's room. She frowned. Freya really shouldn't stay up this late. She'd be so tired in the morning.

‘Thanks, Bill,' she said. ‘It was a lovely evening.' She gave him a peck on the cheek.

‘Don't mention it,' he replied, turning on his heel and walking swiftly away.

She paused in front of Freya's door. She must remember to knock before entering. Teenagers needed their privacy.

She thought of her own parents, who had been so controlling. They'd never knocked, ever. She'd felt under constant scrutiny. She'd hardly been able to move without one of them saying: ‘Shouldn't you put your slippers on?' or: ‘Have you finished your homework?'

Perhaps it was because they couldn't have children themselves. They'd tried for years, but nothing happened. So in the end they decided to adopt and what they got was her: their one and only precious child.

They loved her, she knew that, but the three of them were, in many ways, a terrible match. They were entrepreneurs, practical, businesslike – and totally lacking in imagination. It had made her think that as regards the whole nature versus nurture debate, nature tended to win out. But the adoption agencies could hardly be expected to take that into account along with everything else.

Her parents had made some money early on with a printing business, then lost it all. Later, when they were back on their feet, they turned to furniture shops and enjoyed some success but it was hard work and unpredictable. They were desperate for their only child to embark on a more solid career.

It was all right when she was little, but as she grew up they hardly knew what to do with this wild, temperamental girl who dyed her hair purple and begged for a sewing machine so that she could make her own wacky, bohemian clothes.

They tried to persuade her to do business studies at university. Instead, she insisted on going to art college, then the London College of Fashion, where she put her passion to good use and learned about clothes design. Everyone said she had lots of talent; she even won a couple of awards. But her parents remained unimpressed.

‘How are you going to earn a decent living doing that?' they sniffed. ‘It's only the lucky few who make any money.'

She was thrilled when she landed her first job with a lingerie designer in Kensington, but still they were disapproving. She spent her days cutting out, fitting, pinning, running around after the boss and being paid a pittance.

‘You'd earn more if you came to work with us,' they tutted.

But she loved what she did; at shows she rubbed shoulders with all the major names: Betty Jackson, Jean Paul Gaultier, Jasper Conran. And she managed to make a bit of cash on the side, making brightly coloured ball gowns for friends with teeny strapless bodices and huge net skirts.

After the lingerie job she'd gone to work for Margot, a top wedding-dress designer in Holland Park. Thanks to her good eye for detail and sympathetic manner with customers, Evie soon rose through the (admittedly small) ranks and found herself working side by side with the boss herself.

One of her tasks was to help with fittings in the vast changing room at the top of the shop. She loved the gold silk curtains, gilt mirrors and heaps of heavily perfumed fresh flowers. After the fitting she'd cut out the dresses then bag them up for the machinists. Then she'd do most of the alterations, sometimes having almost to redesign the dress when brides-to-be lost unusually large amounts of weight.

The dresses cost more than a thousand pounds, which was a lot in those days, but business was booming. When Evie married Neil, Margot designed the ivory, hand-beaded silk dress herself and gave it to the couple as a wedding present.

After she fell pregnant with Freya, Evie hoped that she'd be able to go back to work part-time but Margot refused. At first Evie was upset, but Neil persuaded her that it was for the best.

‘I don't want my children to be looked after by some stranger,' he said, ‘I want them to be looked after by their mum.'

She'd set up her own business and started making bespoke wedding dresses from home. It had gone rather well at first, she'd had quite a few orders, but what with one thing and another she'd let it drift. Neil had never given her much encouragement or seemed remotely interested in her work. Ironic, then, that he'd cited her lack of career as one of the reasons why she bored him and he was leaving her.