Not Without You (41 page)

‘I know.’ Eve is impatient. ‘But it was my fault. And I just have to get it straight in my mind – it’s often not clear. Poor Conrad.’ She’s staring into the distance again. ‘It wouldn’t happen now. Maybe it would. I don’t know.’ She runs the tea towel through her fingers. ‘I don’t think I could have prevented anything that happened to me, you know,’ she says, after a moment’s pause. ‘I don’t think I could have stopped my baby dying, any more. But I think I could have saved Conrad. That is my guilt. That’s the guilt I carry around with me. I came back and saved Rose, but I should have saved him too.’

My mind is struggling to unravel it all.

‘What did you save her from? How did you save Rose?’

There’s a silence, and the atmosphere in the room changes, thickens. They look at each other anxiously.

‘We don’t like to talk about it,’ Eve says.

‘No,’ Rose says. She looks down at the floor, steadying both her hands on the back of the chair. ‘They lied to Eve. Our parents, they—’ She stutters, suddenly. ‘They – they – they, yes, they lied to us both. Eve remembers me falling into the stream. They told her I’d died. But I hadn’t. They sent me away.’

‘Why on earth?’

To my horror Rose’s eyes fill up, and without warning her face folds into a ghoulish parody of laughter that I realise is a silent cry of pain. Tears slide down her cheeks and fall onto the table, bleeding into the wood. Like a pattern, one drop here, another there. She brushes her face angrily with the back of her hand, not making any noise, shaking her head, her mouth pursed up. It is awful to see. Eve comes over to her sister, puts her head on her shoulder, and they are very still, their dark dresses melding into one, their grey hair mixed together.

‘No,’ Eve says firmly. ‘It’s all too much. Later.’ She moves away from her sister, hands me a cup of tea. ‘Drink this.’ Her eyes are swimming with tears too. Her expression is fierce as she sits down, pulling Rose onto the chair next to her. ‘You see. This is what I told you would happen if we go back into it all.’

‘But we can’t live like this any more,’ Rose says. She takes a cotton handkerchief out of her pocket and blows her nose. ‘I won’t do it.’ Through the nose-blowing she gives me a half-smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘No—’ I say, feeling hot with mortification. ‘I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have—’

Eve sits down at the table, next to me, and pats my hand. ‘We don’t entertain much, as you can see,’ she says drily, and I glow, thrilled at her touch.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come. I just felt I had to find you. Please believe me, I won’t tell anyone about this.’

‘It’s my fault,’ Rose says. ‘Eve wants us to stay here, ivy wrapping itself around us for ever, but I don’t.’ She stands up again and gives a shuddering sigh. ‘That’s why I told Melanie you should come. I want us both to go back into the world. I want my life to start, you see. Eve has a life. I haven’t.’

‘But I don’t.’ There’s a note in Eve’s voice I haven’t heard. Cool, determined. ‘I want to stay like this. You’ve got it all wrong, dearest. I don’t want this girl here.’ She looks down at the table, at her sister’s tear stains. ‘Forgive me, Sophie,’ she says. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. In a strange way, you know, you remind me of … a little of myself. Isn’t it curious.’

Rose says to her fiercely, ‘I thought she’d be right. I thought she’d help you. She wanted you for the part, because she thinks you’re good. Don’t you?’ She turns to me. ‘Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that what we’re doing this for? Someone likes you, someone remembers you, Eve. They’re here because they remember you. Lots of people do, Miss Leigh said so herself.’ Eve is shaking her head. Her sister’s voice grows louder. ‘Lots of people. Not just him. He’s real, they’re all real. The world’s full of nice people too, you know. You loved him once, Eve—’

Eve puts her hands over her ears. ‘Stop it.’ She curves over, into herself, and my heart pulls again. I put my hand on her arm.

‘Who else knows about you two? Who is it?’

She looks up at me. ‘Don Matthews,’ she says. ‘Don knows.’

The name is so familiar, the memory is almost there at the front of my brain. ‘Who’s Don?’

‘Don Matthews. He wrote
Too Many
—’

‘
Too Many Stars
!’ I break in, excited. ‘And
A Girl Named Rose
! You knew him? Of course!
Too Many Stars
, oh, my gosh. I must have seen that almost as many times. I used to act out the orphan’s speech to the stars on my bed every night. What a script!’

‘You remember him,’ Eve Noel says. ‘Oh, that’s just wonderful. You remember him,’ and for just a second I see her eyes flash, and she is young again, and beautiful, and everything in this damp quiet cell of theirs recedes and I can only gape at her, at her beauty. And in that flashing moment I understand now why they called them gods and goddesses in the golden age. This woman is a goddess, and I am lucky to be in her presence. I see why people plucked her out of obscurity and made her a star.

‘He was the love of her life,’ Rose says. ‘He’s over eighty now. He’s coming to England and he wants to see her again. After all these years. And she won’t meet him.’

‘It’s been too long. I’m not the same person, and he wouldn’t – oh God, Rose. I’m sick of talking about it.’ Eve pushes herself up, her voice throbbing with anger. ‘You may have forgotten what it was like when we first came here. I haven’t.’ She rubs her eyes, and then catches sight of me again, and her mood abruptly switches. She sounds cross. ‘You too, why do you keep coming round to bother me? Today, yesterday, the day before. All these visits and I keep saying no.’

‘One visit,’ I say quietly.

She blinks again. ‘It’s not one visit. It’s two, three.’

‘No, only once before,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ Rose says. ‘She came once before, with the man from the film company. You remember?’

‘No. I know I get things wrong, ’cause of the shocks. I’m not wrong about this, though.’

‘What shocks?’ I don’t understand her.

‘The treatment. My treatment after I lost my …’ She shakes her head. ‘No. Sophie, you came before. Or a girl who looked like you.’ She seems uncertain. ‘The day it was so hot. You had your hair—’ She sweeps her hands up behind her head, miming a ponytail.

I can feel icy water running through my body.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That wasn’t me.’

She looks at me steadily. ‘You think I’ve made it up? No, it’s true. She was real.’

‘I don’t think you made it up.’ I try to think. ‘Just that it’s very strange. Who … Have you thought about who it might have been?’

Eve moves her chair a little closer, so she’s right opposite me. ‘I’m afraid she reminded me of you.’

‘You’re afraid?’

‘Yes. Because she scared me, and I want to like you. She brought white roses, too.’

I can feel my blood run cold again, and I know something is happening, something that will take me closer to whatever or whoever it is that is in my life, in hers, creeping around, suddenly lashing out in violence.

‘It wasn’t me, I swear,’ I say, but it sounds unconvincing.
Was it me? Have I gone mad, do I not remember?

She stares at my face, and Rose watches her. ‘No, she was similar to you but it wasn’t you. Like when we take it in turns to go out, and we’re almost the same person. I see it now.’

‘Can you tell if her accent was English or not? Could she have been American?’

‘Maybe. I just don’t know. I thought she was English but … she sounded strange.’

I shift uneasily in my seat. ‘Eve—’

There’s a crash from outside, and we all jump.

‘What the hell—’ I get up but Eve is faster. She moves down the long, damp corridor, scuttling fast. I wonder what’s been troubling me, and I look around the kitchen. I hear a voice, a man’s voice.

‘… told her … pick her up … Nothing for half an hour …’

‘Jimmy!’ I shout. I get up and run down the corridor. A mouse runs across the floor in the front room, piled high with boxes that sag with damp. ‘I’m here, I’m so sorry – I forgot all about you.’

Jimmy’s tapping his watch. ‘You said ten minutes. I need to get you to town before seven. That’s what I told them. Never going to happen at this rate.’

‘It’s fine, Jimmy. Give me five more minutes. I’ll be out then. I promise.’

‘Gavin says he’ll come get you himself, if you ain’t out soon. Right?’

‘OK. Just a bit longer. It’s fine.’

Eve shuts the door firmly, with a thud that sinks dully into the velvety silence of the house. The lines from
My Second-Best Bed
that I was learning on the way over come back to me, something Anne says to Shakespeare that he uses in a play later on.
I am gone though I am here. There is no love in you. Nay, I pray you, let me go.

We go back to the kitchen and I look at my watch. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘They want me to go to London. It’s a long story.’

Rose gets up. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she says. ‘I usually have a bath around this time, so I shall leave you two.’ Eve looks uncertain. She reaches out to pluck at her sister’s dress, but Rose shrugs. ‘She might understand, better than I, Eve dear. Sophie, it has been extremely interesting meeting you. We know that you are busy and I’m very glad you came.’ She takes my hand for a moment. ‘Please come back. Soon.’

I watch her go. It feels very quiet after she’s left.

Eve gestures for me to sit down. The two of us face each other at the table. ‘What do you keep in the boxes?’ I ask her, shy now we’re alone.

‘Letters,’ she says. ‘My letters. And things I’ve written down. My time there. Memories I’ve had when I dream. I have terrible dreams, since they shocked me.’ She touches the side of her head again, blinking.

‘What happened to you?’ I ask her softly.

‘I’ll try and explain it. I think I need to work it all out myself, too.’ She puts her hand on my arm. She has long slim fingers. ‘Sophie, I should have said so before but I am glad to meet you, you know. I hear about you, on the radio, on the television. I’ve always noticed because you grew up not so far away. I felt as if you might be me. Forty, fifty years on. Now I see you properly, we’re not so dissimilar, are we?’

‘Maybe,’ I say, and I can’t help smiling, because it might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. ‘But I don’t think so.’

‘That’s sometimes what keeps me going, after everything that’s happened. We were good. What we did was good, Don and I—’ She looks at me.

‘Tell me about it,’ I say, moving my chair closer to hers. Her mouth opens and her clever, dark eyes search my face.

‘You don’t have time. But I want to do something. Let me give you some things to read.’ She looks around the room. ‘I’ll give you a box of papers. His letters, and some pages I’ve written about … about it all. I wrote everything down.’

She gets up and leaves me, and for the next couple of minutes I hear her moving about in the next room, the rustle of paper, the creak of furniture. She reappears with a box which seems too big for her small frame.

‘Here. Take this.’

‘I can’t take all of this,’ I say, looking down at the pages of neat, black inked writing, the letters postmarked
USA
, dog-eared, worn with folding and refolding, and carbon copies of her own pages, a few scraps of smooth fax paper.

‘This is just a selection,’ she says. ‘A random selection. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of letters in that room. Come back and we’ll go through them if you enjoy them. Some of them won’t make sense …’ She is holding out the box, her frail arms outstretched. She looks like a little girl, asking for approval. I hesitate, and she steps away from me, as if assailed by doubt. ‘Oh dear. Maybe it’s crazy. Do you want to read all this?’

‘Of course I want to read them.’
I want to make a film about you one day, Eve. About you and your sister, and your life. But I have to know the truth first.
I know this box is only a fraction of the story.

She gives that funny, wry smile again. ‘Well … then – take these and I hope you find them interesting. Like I say –’ she gestures behind her into the huge room I passed earlier filled with boxes – ‘the story’s all back in there. We’ll go through it one day.’

I shake my head. ‘Why are you giving them to me?’

Eve’s big black eyes lock with mine. She leans forwards, touches my hand and says, very quietly,

‘Something needs to change. Someone else needs to know.’ She’s nodding, and as she blinks a tear slides down her cheek, splashing onto my hand. We both stare down at it. ‘Sophie.’ She rubs her throat, as though it hurts. ‘It’s just I’m still scared. Of what’s out there.’

‘We all are,’ I say, as softly as I can. ‘I promise you we all are.’ I take the box, gently. ‘I promise I’ll take good care of them. They’ll be safe with me.’

‘Of course. Come back soon and I’ll show you everything in that room. It tells the story. But mostly it’s up here –’ she taps her head. ‘Ah –’ she spreads her arms out and then hugs herself. ‘Wonderful.’

In her tiny, withdrawn world she has a contentment I’ll never have, because she has Don, and Rose, and because Eve Noel knows someone, somewhere is enjoying one of her films, that she’s made something good. We’re facing each other on the small kitchen chairs. She is appraising me, blinking slowly. ‘Do you know, I was so sure that girl who came to see us was you. But now I look, she can’t have been. You are lovely, you know.’

I hear the sound of footsteps on gravel. I know our time is up. I take my phone out of my pocket and fiddle with it for a moment. ‘Miss Noel – Eve. Before I go, I have to ask you something. Someone is after me. They’re trying to kill me, I think. Or – they have a grudge against me, and they want to hurt me.’ I flick through my phone, and then turn it round so she can see. ‘Can you remember, was this the person who came to visit you?’

She stares at the small screen, the light reflecting on her face.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says eventually. ‘That was her. I’m sure of it.’

Excerpts from the Correspondence Between Eve Noel and Don Matthews

1970-2012

April 4th, 1970

Dear Rose,

I have no idea whether you’ll get this letter. I’ve written you so many times over the years, and I don’t ever hear back. If you know that, you’ll throw this one aside. ‘The stupid fool, why doesn’t he take a hike?’ I wrote you at your house, the studio … I even found the village you came from and fired off a letter to the doctor’s house there. Your dad was a doctor, right? But then I had a brainwave I hadn’t considered before: that I should go through your UK agents. Who’d have thought. A mere two-week trawl of movie agents in London, and I finally get one who says she looks after you, though she’s never met you. I don’t know, Rose – is this the gal you want handling your career?