Cover Your Eyes (10 page)

*

‘Here we are,' said Conor as they drove through the gates and up to the front door of Salix House. The eagles perched on the gateposts were wreathed in mist but it seemed to Eva that their stone eyes were following the car as it passed, spreading their wings to protect her. Eva blinked away tears. How was she going to leave this place when coming home to it was such a solace? She opened the passenger door and stepped out into the chilly, damp air of an early evening which seemed like the middle of the night.

‘Mummy! Daddy! Granny!' The girls were on the doorstep, and behind them Eva could see Megan, holding the door open.

Once she was out of the car, Rowena didn't draw breath, letting out a stream of words that lasted all the way into the house. ‘Gosh, girls, go inside at once. It's freezing. Hello Megan. I'm exhausted. Are you okay? Was Luke Fielden all right? I'm sorry to land that on you, but the traffic was ridiculous.'

‘It's all fine. Don't worry. Come in and have something to eat. It's waiting in the kitchen, all you need to do is warm it up. I'll go and get the girls into their night things and we'll come down.' Megan turned to Dee and Bridie. ‘You'll get a slice each of Phyllis's apple pie if you're really quick in the bath.'

Megan went upstairs with the children. Eva wondered if she could plead tiredness and go off upstairs too. But she'd slept in the car and Rowena and Conor would realize that she was trying to avoid a post-mortem on the London house. Better face it all over the kitchen table.

Rowena warmed the soup. Conor got the baked potatoes out of the oven and poured the dressing on the salad. They were speaking to one another as they prepared the meal, but Eva tried to pretend that she was somewhere far away.

There was something about coming home late to Salix House, heating up a meal prepared long before, and sitting round the kitchen table which reminded her of the days when she and Antoine lived here by themselves. Rowena hadn't been born then, she thought. We used to sit in here when we were working late on a collection, or a photo shoot. There were times when the kitchen table was the only place in the house where you could put something down. Every other surface was covered in lengths of fabric, bits of paper, pins, drawings, Antoine's photographic equipment. Boxes full of buttons, cards with lace wound round them, feathers, sequins and ribbons spread themselves into every room in the house.

Antoine had been dead for years but there wasn't a day when Eva didn't ask herself if she hadn't made a terrible mistake, investing her love in someone who couldn't love her with an equal passion.

1965

She'd never been very good at falling in love. Perhaps, she used to tell herself, it was her early childhood, the way she'd been wrenched away from everything she knew, which made her so hard to please. She loved some of her friends, and had slept with several men, but she hadn't experienced true sexual love. It was obviously possible to exist without it but somewhere, buried so deep within her that she could go for a long time without even thinking about it, was the awareness of
something
: lost, missing for years but there, at the very limits of her consciousness, like an underground lake: love, waiting to rise up from where it had been lying for as long as she could remember.

When it happened, Eva wasn't ready for it. She was thirty-one. Surely that was a bit late for it to appear for the first time? It hasn't happened up till now, she reasoned, so that's likely to be that. I'm on the shelf. She wasn't even very upset at this thought. She had a career, a reputation, a following and the Conway look was being imitated.

Antoine Bragonard wasn't world-famous when she met him. They spoke about him on the fashion grapevine, but he and Eva had never managed to be in the same place at the same time. Then, one day, there he was, commissioned to take the photos for a spread in
Harper's Bazaar
which included a Conway dress.

He was pale, with dark hair and a long, rather Roman nose. Someone once remarked unkindly that he looked like a bird of prey. ‘If they ever make a film of Edgar Allen Poe's poem, you know, the one about the raven knocking on the chamber door, Antoine would be perfect. Even his hair looks like feathers.'

That, Eva thought, was jealousy. The man who spoke in these terms was almost bald and was clearly envious, she decided, of Antoine's thick, dark, shiny hair. He wore it cut short. He dressed in black trousers and white shirts, always. While she was married to him, Eva tried to persuade him into colours, patterns, something other than his uniform, but he was stubborn. In the end, she settled for varieties of fabric: shirts in linen, cotton, silk and soft wool; trousers in corduroy, serge, twill, denim, anything she could think of. The style never changed. You wouldn't complain that a tiger looked the same every day. The creature was simply, most beautifully, itself. That was true of Antoine. The way he looked pleased Eva in ways she didn't quite understand. When they first met she found herself drawn to him, attracted by his looks and his charm, but perhaps, she thought, he isn't into women at all. It didn't take long for the two of them to discover that they liked one another. He understood what she was doing with the clothes she made. He knew how to arrange the models so as to bring out the theatrical element in Eva's designs. The greatest part, Eva often thought, of their relationship was that: they understood one another. Eva never had to interfere. During the time they worked together, she saw, over and over again, the care that Antoine took to light a garment, pose a model in ways that took your breath away. The photographs appeared everywhere. Antoine became better and better known and editors demanded more and more of his time, but he always stopped what he was doing to come and take photographs of the latest Conway collection whenever Eva said she wanted him.

‘Of course she comes first,' he said in an interview in the
Observer
. ‘Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel are who they are, and of course I'm honoured to work with them both, but Eva Conway is my dearest friend.'

The first time Antoine kissed her, they were clearing up after a catwalk show. The models had left, it was empty backstage and most of the clothes had been packed away. Eva was looking round the cavernous dressing-room, gathering together hairclips and fallen powder puffs and a couple of bras … how could you leave your bra behind? She bent down to pick up a pink affair which was mostly lace and as she got up again, Antoine's arms were round her and before she knew what was happening, he was kissing her. She felt as though she'd been asleep and had suddenly woken up. She allowed herself to be kissed and then she moved to bring herself closer to him, kissing him back, wanting to absorb him into herself, wanting to be sheltered, wanting the kiss not to end.

‘Come back with me,' Antoine whispered in her ear, kissed her neck. ‘Come back to my place.'

‘Yes,' Eva said. ‘Yes, I will.'

She hardly noticed her surroundings; was only dimly aware of white walls with huge photographic enlargements on them. They went straight into his bedroom, and Eva, dizzy with longing, felt herself pushed back on the bed. She raised her arms and pulled Antoine to her. ‘Wait,' he said and undressed quickly. She had a glimpse of his smooth chest and white skin and closed her eyes as he removed her clothes, carefully, tenderly. He said, ‘I want us to be naked. I want to see you … see how lovely you are.'

Eva said nothing in reply. They made love for what seemed to her at the same time an eternity of almost agonizing pleasure and something that was over far too soon, and afterwards, when Antoine was already asleep, Eva lay awake for a long time wondering why she suddenly felt a little sad. I'm imagining it, she told herself. There was nothing in anything Antoine did or said that was not exactly what I wanted, needed to hear. Still, she had the idea, which she couldn't shake however much she tried to, that she was the more passionate one; the one who lost herself in sensation; who forgot everything; who felt herself overcome with emotion, and she was uncertain about the strength of Antoine's feelings. In any case, by the time they woke up together next day, Eva was lost. She loved him. Even if he was not in love with her, she wouldn't mind. What did they say? That there was always someone who loved and someone who was loved? She would be the one who loved. She felt safe with him. Protected. Maybe she'd even tell him her whole story one day – talk about the things she'd never confessed before. Would he forgive her? And if he forgave her, was there a chance that she'd forgive herself?

Everyone in the fashion world assumed they were an item. Eva did nothing to contradict the gossip, because she revelled in it. Antoine, too, didn't seem to mind his name being linked with hers in the papers or in Jennifer's Diary in the
Tatler.
They did everything together: ate, worked, travelled, so that when he suggested that they live together, Eva was overjoyed. She'd been living in a small flat in Chelsea, which was slowly filling up with her possessions.

‘It's like a basin with the tap left running, Eva,' Antoine said. ‘One day you'll get back from somewhere and find stuff seeping out under the front door. Let's get somewhere bigger? Together. We can live together … I want to be with you, Eva.'

For a moment, Eva was speechless. He was serious. He wanted to live with her so that must mean … She couldn't help smiling. She hadn't ever been so happy before, but she said as calmly as she could, ‘Okay. That would be … it would wonderful. And we'll have fun, won't we? Decorating it? Making it our home?'

They found a large flat in a quiet street off one of the less grand squares near South Kensington. Doing it up turned out to be a series of small battles. Antoine liked everything plain; and preferably in neutral colours. Eva was the exact opposite, but she only resisted his wishes in a mild way.

It became clear, as they decorated and prepared the flat, that they weren't going to be sharing a bedroom. They ordered two beds that were delivered to two separate bedrooms. Since that first time, in Antoine's flat, they'd made love on several occasions, but if Eva were honest, not as often as she'd have wanted. Kisses, caresses, hands held and looks exchanged across a room … things that Eva thought would lead to other things, somehow didn't. Or, she corrected herself, didn't very often lead to them. She'd begun to think (and she chided herself for this thought), that when they made love, Antoine was doing it to please her, to make up to her for something. She interrogated herself for hours: what am I doing wrong? Why isn't he keener? Is it me? Should I seduce him more often? How? She had no idea. With other men, she'd never been the one who took the initiative. She thought he ought to want her as much as she wanted him, and he didn't … not as far as she could see. She needed to make matters clear between them before they began to live together.

‘We've got to talk, Antoine,' she told him. ‘We've got things to discuss.' She'd chosen a time she thought was perfect: they'd eaten well and were on the sofa. Eva was sitting up with Antoine's head on her lap.

‘I'm too full. Can't discuss anything now.' And then, contradicting himself just as Eva was about to speak. ‘What sort of thing do you mean?'

‘Sleeping arrangements. Stuff like that.'

Antoine half turned and reaching up, pulled Eva down to him and kissed her on the mouth. Then he lay back again and said: ‘Oh, sweetheart. You know I love you, don't you? I just can't … I like to sleep on my own. Is that awful of me? I hate the thought of someone—'

‘You don't like anyone seeing you when you're less than perfectly turned out. You don't want to be caught snoring. I know. I'm a bit like that myself.'

She didn't add:
Though I'd change in a moment if you said you wanted me to. In an eyeblink …
though that was the truth.

‘You don't mind, do you? Truly, Eva?'

‘No, it's okay. I'll live with it. We can visit each other's bedrooms, can't we?'

‘Course we can. All the time.'

That wasn't how it turned out, in the end. At the beginning, when they first started living together, it was true that they made love often enough for Eva not to think there was anything unusual in their relationship. But no one told you what was normal. No one discussed such things frankly and Eva had told herself right from the start that she was the one who loved more. She was the giver and Antoine the taker. What do I have to complain about, Eva used to ask herself as she watched Antoine leaving her bedroom and closing the door behind him. Many women would be only too glad to be left to sleep on their own. No snoring, no funny smells, the whole bed to spread out in. She usually managed to cheer herself up in the end, because Antoine was easy to live with, as long as she didn't make too many demands on him. Eva convinced herself that she was as happy as she could possibly be. He loves me, she told herself. In his own way. As much as he can. Till now, there hasn't been anyone else who's loved me even a little. She would lie on her back staring up at the ceiling, telling herself that everything was okay. Everything was blissful and fine.

*

‘Ma. Ma, you're miles away. I'm going to ask Megan if she'll take you to some of the flats I want you to see while the girls are in school. One day during the week after half term? Or maybe a couple of days. Conor can do the pick-up from school. I would like to see all this settled. I'd go with you but I can't keep taking the day off as I did today.'

‘That's fine,' said Eva, feeling pleased at the idea of looking at flats with Megan and also instantly guilty. How disloyal of her, to prefer the idea of being with someone who wasn't her daughter! ‘Sorry … I was thinking. I'm very happy to go with Megan.'

This, Eva thought is the reverse of being in gaol. She envisaged the days going by, crossed off a calendar one by one, not while waiting to be released but exactly the opposite of that. She imagined the time sliding past, going more and more quickly towards something she dreaded: the last day at Salix House. She played and replayed a scene of them leaving. Everything she owned would be taken from here; sent to a sale room, or an auction or the tall skinny house in London and she'd be left with nothing. She'd step into a car. She could see herself with a couple of small suitcases which, oddly, looked just like the brown leather valise – Mama always used the French word – that she'd brought to England as a little girl. We'll drive down past the salix trees and it'll probably be late spring and the pretty whitish pointed leaves will be trembling on every branch and twig, and we'll go past the eagles on the gatepost for the last time and I'll look back and won't be able to see the house for tears. Every time she thought about that day, and she'd been thinking about it a lot, Eva felt physically ill.