The Accidental (19 page)

Well, Eve said because her head was full of the images of herself as a small new child matted with blood and Amber had stood up, was about to leave her like that, about to go back across the room and tell Michael something about himself; he was already holding up something, a keyring or something. But you can’t go without telling me the answers, Eve said to Amber, low, catching her by the wrist.

To what? Amber frowned.

To those questions, Eve said.

I don’t know the answers, Amber said.

All the same, Eve said not letting go.

Amber took Eve’s hand and opened it. She dropped the little white stone, warm from her own hand, back on to Eve’s palm and closed Eve’s fingers over it. As she did she caught Eve’s hand in both of hers and shook it as if heartily congratulating Eve.

You’re an excellent fake, Amber said. Very well done. Top of the class. A-plus.

Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of Eve Smart in her taupe linen suit on a summer night in the moonlit garden of the holiday home. Calm and measured. Measured and calm.

Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of Eve Smart (42) working hard on her latest book all summer in the idyllic summerhouse of the holiday home of Eve and her husband, Dr Michael Smart, and look how the light caught the wet fountain-pen ink on the page as she wrote line after steady line, and how she paused for a moment to think, and how the photograph caught the moment of it, and caught that unidentifiable wraith of smoke or dusty air in a shaft of sunlight, and the way this marked the accidental fall of the light through the summerhouse window that day.

Here was a summer 2003 holiday snapshot of the Smart family standing outside the front door of their 2003 Norfolk holiday home, Eve Smart and Astrid Smart at the front with their arms round each other and Magnus Smart and Michael Smart horsing around at the back, Michael with his hand on Magnus’s shoulder.

A family, all of them, smiling. Who were they smiling for? Was it for themselves, somewhere in the future? Was it for the photographer? Who took the photograph? What did it show? Did it show that Michael had come home smelling, yet again, of someone else? Did it show that Magnus was a boy so like his father that Eve almost couldn’t bear to sit in the same room with him? Did it show that Astrid was infuriating to Eve, that she deserved to have no father, just as Eve had done most of her life, and was lucky to still have a mother at all?

Eve roamed the moonlit garden shocked at herself and at how very fine it felt to be this angry, smoking only half a cigarette, to keep the fen mosquitoes off, well, that was her excuse. And what kind of life was it, where she needed an excuse to smoke even half a cigarette? And were there fens in Norfolk, or were the fens somewhere else? Eve didn’t know. Did that make her a fake, not to know? The girl had taken her by the hand, then called her a fake. Was Eve a fake? Was she a fake everywhere in the world, or only a Norfolk fake? A Norfake! Eve felt drunk. Her heart was beating like mad. Eve Smart had a mad heart. That sounded good. It sounded extraordinary. It sounded like a heart that belonged to a different person altogether.

The very notion that Eve Smart (42) could be something other than what she seemed was making her heart beat more than anything had, including Quantum, for years.

A couple of days before this, Eve had been looking for Amber to tell her about a dream she’d just had and ask her what she thought it meant. Eve had dreamed that Michael was being sent love letters from the students he slept with and that the love letters were printed minutely on each of his fingernails, like the tiny pages of those record-breaking Smallest Bibles In The World, the words even smaller than Your Name On A Grain Of Rice. The nails could be read, but only with a special reading apparatus which was very expensive to hire and Eve had woken up before she had managed to sign all the forms in the hire shop.

Eve had prepared, over breakfast, a version of the dream that didn’t implicate Michael or herself. Astrid had told her, over breakfast, that Amber was very good at dream interpretation. But Eve couldn’t find Amber. Amber had disappeared. She wasn’t in the garden. She wasn’t in her car. Her car was still there, though, at the front, so she couldn’t have gone very far.

She wasn’t with Magnus, who had his nose in a book in the front room. She wasn’t with Astrid; Eve could see her kicking about outside by herself, bored-looking under a tree. Michael had gone to the city. Eve had seen him leave. She definitely wasn’t with Michael.

Eve ran up the stairs. She called Amber’s name. She caught sight of someone moving below her. But no, it was just the cleaner shuffling the vacuum through into the front room, trailing its plug and flex, its unwieldy plastic tube tucked up under one arm and its bits and pieces of brush held tight under her other arm.

Excuse me, Katrina, Eve called down.

The cleaner stopped. She stood still, waiting, with her back to Eve.

You haven’t on your travels seen my friend who’s staying with us, have you? Eve asked. Amber, you know?

With her back to Eve, the cleaner shook her head and started her shuffle through the hall again. But as she went she said something. Eve couldn’t quite make it out.

What she’d said had sounded like:
her name’s a hammer
.

?

It meant nothing recognizable. The cleaner had continued, machine-laden, into the lounge.

It wasn’t that Eve had been scared to ask the cleaner to repeat whatever it was she said. Not at all. It wasn’t that Eve was intimidated by the cleaning girl in any way, who looked poor, who looked old before her time, who looked a bit simple, who looked down or away all the time, who in fact would never look Eve in the eye, who had a habit of talking to Eve with her back to her or looking away from her which definitely signalled a refusal of responsibility and meant the curtains in the main bedroom would never get changed or laundered no matter how many times Eve asked, and who was like some dreamed-up cartoon version of a resentful cleaner in a sitcom on tv but who somehow (now how did she do it?) left Eve feeling like it was Eve who was the cartoon, like it was Eve whose life was somehow less on this beautiful summer’s day than the greyed-out existence she imagined for Katrina the cleaner in whatever wallpapered living room or whatever downmarket supermarket where the goods weren’t quite good enough, who, with her insolent back-turned answering-back, her answering an incomprehensible answer to a question Eve hadn’t actually asked, left Eve feeling off-balance, as if challenged and beaten by someone who was supposed to, who was
paid
after all to, make life easier for Eve.

Eve had stood at the top of the stairs and the vacuum had roared beneath her.

Eve woke up in the middle of the night. Michael was asleep with his pillow over his head. It was quite light in the room because of the moon. People were gathered at the end of the bed.

Who are you? Eve said.

She shook Michael’s pillow. Michael didn’t wake up.

There were two men and three women. One of the women was sitting at the foot of the bed holding a very small, quite motionless child. Another of the women held up something that glinted in the dark like a broken tumbler of glass. The men behind the women looked torn-up, rough. One glistened, wet down his front and across his face. The last of the women had an old-fashioned hairstyle as if from a BBC drama about the past. She held in her hand a little baton, like a tubular stick, with light coming out of one end of it. She shone this light right into Eve’s eyes. Eve put her hands up over her face. When she could see again the people had gone. Where the woman with the child had been, at the foot of the bed, there was a different, older woman. It was Eve’s mother. She was wearing her dressing gown as if she’d just got out of the bath.

Hello, Eve said. Where have you been?

Look, come on, I can’t. I’m dead, Eve’s mother said.

Eve shook Michael’s pillow again. Michael woke up.

Yes, he said like a statement.

My mother was here, Eve said.

Was she? Michael said more blearily. Where? Where was she? Where is she?

She’s not here any more, Eve said.

Do you want me to do something? Michael said. Some tea?

Okay, Eve said. That’d be nice.

Michael got up and went downstairs. Eve sat in bed in the empty room, listening to the unmysterious little noises of the house. Eventually she heard Michael on the stairs again. He came in with two mugs of tea and handed her one with the handle turned towards her so that she wouldn’t be burned.

Thank you, Eve said. That was nice of you.

Hardly nice of me. Was it a bad dream? he said.

No, Eve said. I think it was quite a good dream.

They drank their tea, talked for a while and then both went back to sleep.

Was dream a reality? Was reality a dream? Eve walked to the village, where she knew there was a church. She was wondering if a church might help.

But the church door was locked. A notice on it gave directions as to how to get into it.

Eve found the house of the man who had the key. A woman answered the door, presumably his wife.

Are you a genuine visitor to the village? she said.

She was a stocky woman wearing an apron. She had the same inbred jaw as Katrina the cleaner. She looked at Eve with possible malevolence.

Yes, Eve said. I’m staying at the Orris house; my husband and I have rented it for the summer.

No, what I mean is are you a genuine tourist? Do you have permanent accommodation elsewhere? the woman said.

Of course, Eve said.

Have you got an electricity bill? the woman said. Or a gas bill or something with your name and address on it?

Well, no, not right now, Eve said, not on me. I didn’t know I’d need one to get into the church.

Well, you do, the woman said.

But you could phone Mrs Orris and I’m sure she’d vouch for me, Eve said. Do you know Mrs Orris?

Do I know the Orrises? the woman said. You’ll be the one with the family, are you?

I expect so, Eve said.

She asked Eve’s name and home address. She shut the door. Three minutes later she came back with an old mortise key on a piece of rope.

Is it for praying or are you just going in there for a bit of a look, like? she said.

Probably a bit of both, Eve said.

Now, you can have the key, but don’t be giving the key to nobody who asks you for it, the woman said, because them travellers are threatening to camp out in the church, so if you give it to anybody else and any traveller gets into the church and we can’t get them out then it’s you that’ll be to blame for that and you that’ll have to pay for any sorting it out and any damage as gets done.

Right, Eve said. Got you. Guard it with my life.

And bring it back when you’re finished with it, the woman called after her down the garden path between the neat pinks and the rose bushes.

Eve walked back through the murderous village to the church.

Its grounds were at least quite interestingly wild and its door reassuring and traditional in its heaviness. But inside, the church was disappointing. It was nothing special. It was blank, utilitarian and modern, regardless of its old stone walls. It was ugly. It didn’t smell spiritual, whatever spiritual would smell like. It smelt of disuse; it smelt a bit seedy. It said nothing about the possibilities of anything after this life, other than more of the same small dull accountings, more of the same colour brown. Brown, Eve decided, was the real colour of the empire, of Great Britishness–the sepia colour that had set in like a dampstain in the Victorian era. Ceremonial brownness. The Union Jack should be brown white and blue. The St George cross shouldn’t really be red. It should be brown on white, HP Sauce on a white plate, or an HP Sauce white bread sandwich. All the small towns and villages flew the flag. They had driven, on their way here, past repetitions of repetitions of brown-brick Victorian semis and terraces, houses and shops like extras from a post-war kitchen-sink drama, houses brown as decrepit dogs and so on their last legs that someone should really take them in hand and have them humanely put to sleep. It was the end of an era. It was the brown end of an era.

Eve sat down on the back pew and felt a bit illegal for thinking these things. She tried to think about the big subjects, but now she couldn’t get a song out of her head from when she was small, by a group she had forgotten the name of who had insisted that the concrete and the clay beneath their feet would begin to crumble but love would never die and that they’d see the mountains tumble before they said goodbye. My love and I will be. In love eternally. And that’s the way. That’s the way it was meant to be. It was meant to be like it was on all the American tv series, where the Waltons had their lumber mill right outside the house and all the girls got married and the boys worked the mill or went to the war and came back from the war, and the eldest boy grew up to be a voiceover and kept the solemn record of their lives on Walton’s Mountain, the mountain named after their family, and Laura and her sister Mary and Ma and Pa built a whole town with just their bare hands and the goodness of their family, and all went to the church they’d helped build, every week. If beautiful blonde Mary went blind, then a few episodes down the line she’d get her sight back, of course she would with beautiful big blue eyes like those, how could eyes like those not see again? Pa and Ma gave each other knowing looks as Laura saved a whole orchard of trees from something–was it a drought, or an evil woodchopper? Eve couldn’t remember. Ma helped the girls (and herself) comprehend pregnancy by getting them to help their cow give birth; Ma and the cow had a special understanding. Laura ran down the hill with her arms out like a bird for the sheer joy of it again and again in the closing credits. Then she learned the truth at seventeen, like in the Janis Ian song; because presumably that child actress got hardly any parts in anything after Little House on the Prairie was over. Eve couldn’t remember seeing her in anything ever again and surely she’d have been easily recognizable, unless she’d had her teeth fixed.