Cover Your Eyes (14 page)

Eva nodded. As Megan spoke she'd been looking in her handbag for a tissue, having given her hankie to Megan earlier, and when she'd found it, she took it out and began to wipe her eyes.

‘Let's forget that we spoke about this, Megan. All right?' She dabbed at her eyes and then reached into the bag again for her powder compact.

‘Fine. I've forgotten already. Let's talk about Betty Clifford's bathroom instead. That'll cheer us up.'

Eva made a sound that was supposed to be a chuckle but she knew that Megan wasn't fooled for a second. I have to trust her. And I do.

Angelika, hidden for seventy years, had finally risen to the surface. Angelika was always good at concealment. Eva would sometimes come into the room they shared and be unable to find something of hers; a toy, or a favourite doll. Once, Mitzi, her best companion, the doll who shared every secret, the one she always took to bed, disappeared for a week. The whole family looked for Mitzi all over the house. Angelika, Eva thought, told Mama that I'd left her in the café and we went back there the next day but she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't. She reappeared on Eva's bed one night and Mama said, ‘Oh, look, here's Mitzi. You should have told me you'd found her! You know how we've been searching.'

Eva hadn't said a word. She stood next to the bed, amazed. I wasn't even four years old, she thought now. How could I have said what I knew: that Angelika must have hidden her out of spite and only brought her back after a very long time? I didn't have the vocabulary to express such thoughts. Thinking about it now made her feel sad and worse: angry on behalf of the small, powerless child that she'd been.

As they drove through the gates of Salix House, the eagles on the gateposts were black against the sky and Eva imagined them spreading their black wings and taking off, following the car, peering down at her with their yellow eyes. She shook her head. Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. They're made of stone. They can't move.

‘Granny, Granny!' Dee came running down the steps and threw her arms round Eva as she made her way to the front door. ‘I'm an angel. I'm the Archangel. Isn't that wonderful? I'm so,
so
, excited!'

‘Wonderful, darling,' said Eva, sounding happier than she had all day long. She'd managed to calm down after her confession to Megan and was beginning to feel that maybe it was possible for everything to return to how it was before she'd let Angelika's name slip. And now here was Dee, who was going to be an angel in the Nativity Play. Eva couldn't help but make a connection. She said, ‘Am I allowed to make your costume?'

‘I'll ask Mr Shoreley. Maybe they've already got an angel costume. Bridie's a shepherd boy. She gets to carry a lamb. Not a real lamb, but a toy. Freddie's got a really big furry lamb. It's going to be cool. We're having rehearsals every lunchtime and sometimes after school as well.'

Megan said, ‘Come on, girls. Let Granny get her coat off. Isn't it nearly supper time?'

They went off together and Eva stood in the hall and ran her hands through the silk flowers. She could hear the girls laughing in the kitchen. The girls … she'd taken them for granted. What would it be like to live in a flat all by herself? Where would the laughter come from then
?

*

‘Do you think Megan really likes Mr Shoreley?' Dee asked. Because Megan was going to be out till quite late, Eva had volunteered to take the girls to bed and read them a story before they went to sleep. The three of them were sitting on Bridie's bed, but Dee knew that if she raised an interesting topic of conversation, she bought herself a little more time. Bridie, who was usually half asleep by story time, perked up when she heard the question and said, ‘I think she's going to marry Mr Shoreley.'

‘Honestly, girls,' Eva said. ‘You mustn't gossip. She hardly knows him.'

‘Yes she does,' Bridie said. ‘She sees him every day at school. And Mr Shoreley is kind and handsome and he really likes Megan. I know he does.'

‘Well,' Eva said, ‘we're not going to discuss this now because none of us knows what Megan thinks. I think we ought to read our story because it's getting very late.'

‘Tell us about your wedding,' Dee said, in a last attempt to delay matters. ‘Tell us about Grandpa Antoine.'

They'd never known Antoine except through her stories and Rowena's, which showed two very different sides to the man. Eva always spoke of how famous he was, and what wonderful photographs he took and how glamorous his life had been. Rowena told them about an ideal father, an indulgent man who'd taken her to the cinema, the theatre, out to meet interesting people in London. He'd bought her a kite and taught her to fly it. He'd been a good swimmer and taken her to the pool. He'd bought her pretty things every single time he came home from work: tiny little things, but still, every single time! That impressed Dee and Bridie more than anything because neither of them could imagine their own parents doing such a thing and neither could Eva. It required imagination. It meant that the parent, for at least a small part of the day, had to think about what would please his daughter and then make the effort to get it and remember to keep it safe. These little gifts were never expensive. Sometimes Antoine would bring a few coloured rubber bands from the office, or a little pad from the shop at the station, or a pencil with a pearlized finish to the wood. On other days, he'd find a miniature cake or a cheap necklace. If he'd forgotten during the day, he would grab a tube of Smarties at the station on the way home, even though Eva disapproved of chocolate. She sighed.

‘Another time, perhaps. It's getting late now, let's read, girls,' she said. ‘I can see Bridie's eyelids drooping.' They settled down on the bed, with Bridie under the duvet.

‘She's fallen asleep,' Dee whispered a little later, interrupting Eva's reading of an old favourite from when Rowena was a child called
Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf.
‘You can sit on my bed now and chat some more.'

‘Well,' said Eva, whispering so as not to wake Bridie. ‘We can do that but it's time for you to go to sleep too, you know.'

Dee made grumbling noises, but in the end she lay down in her own bed and said, ‘Okay. Will you stay a bit till I fall asleep?'

‘A little while, and then I must go down. Night, night.'

She kissed Dee and went to sit on the small armchair near the window. Dee fell asleep almost at once, as Eva had known she would, but she went on sitting there, thinking about Antoine. With hindsight, marrying someone who could never love you as much as you loved them must always be counted a mistake. But I loved him so much, Eva thought. There's a time when you're first in love when you don't see any obstacles as being insurmountable. Like every other bride, Eva on her wedding day had believed that her devotion, their happiness together, would change him. It hadn't, of course it hadn't, but they
had
been happy part of the time, hadn't they?

Eva wondered how that particular calculation would come out. If she made a list of every single year, every month even, of their life together, how many months could she count as happy? I'll never do it, she told herself now. I'm scared of the result. She stood up and went quietly out of the room, closing Dee's door behind her.

*

When I told Dee that I was going to have lunch with Tom, after the usual
Is he your boyfriend
nonsense, at which I sighed quite convincingly, she said, ‘But after lunch. What'll you do the whole afternoon?'

‘Depends.'

‘On what?'

‘The weather, for one. Maybe if it's nice we'll go for a walk.'

Right. We'd go for a delightful walk when the sky looked like corrugated iron and the wind was blowing a near gale. ‘Or,' I added, ‘we might watch a DVD.'

That seemed to satisfy her. As I outlined the possibilities to Dee, I realized that I'd known all along what we'd be doing. I'd even discussed it with Jay. She'd sent me an email yesterday which said:

He'd invited me to his flat, so of course we'd end up in bed. I hadn't put up a fight about kissing him up to this point, and his emails had become increasingly affectionate. The fact was: I liked it when he kissed me. I'd accepted his invitation knowing exactly what was going to happen. I'll make it plain to him, I told myself, that I'm not in love with him. I won't pretend feelings I don't have.

He came to Salix House to pick me up. When we got to the flat he set about making spaghetti bolognese.

‘Can I help?' I asked.

‘You could pour yourself a glass of wine. I've got everything under control. Sauce is ready. Just a matter of putting the pasta on. You could put the cake on a plate if you like. I haven't got round to that. Afraid it's not homemade. Coffee and walnut.'

‘Looks great,' I said. ‘Do you want some wine?'

He shook his head.

‘You're very good about doing without booze,' I added. ‘I could have driven here and had apple juice or something and you could have had a drink.'

‘I'm not bothered,' he said. ‘I can take it or leave it.'

Over lunch, I drank more than I normally do. This wasn't because I was nervous, though I was, a bit. I was wondering how we'd negotiate the move into the bedroom. I didn't have to be back at Salix House for hours.

To be fair to Tom, he didn't grab me and haul me off the moment I'd scraped the last of the cake off my plate. We sat on the sofa to have our coffee. His flat was exactly what I'd expected. I hadn't seen the bedroom, but the rest of it was pleasant if unspectacular: not too untidy, but full of books, and with things he was marking and bits and bobs from school all over the floor near the bookcase. The kitchen was small but neat. The door to the bedroom was shut.

‘Megan,' he whispered, once we were sitting together. He put his arm around me and we began kissing. Part of me wanted to say:
Let's go. Let's go now and get it over with because it's like a barrier between us at the moment. You can't think what to say to get me into bed
. My reactions to the way he was touching me, kissing me, encouraged him.

‘Will you … can we?' he murmured and before I knew it, we were in the darkened bedroom and on the bed, and he put his arms around me and undid my bra and I went on kissing him and pulled off my jeans and my knickers and I helped him as much as I could. He was making incoherent sounds and nuzzling my neck and I pushed myself against him suddenly like someone slaking a thirst, wanting him, wanting the weight and the warmth of him, the caresses and the tender words. For whole long moments, I was nothing more than a body, responding. I didn't, I couldn't think about anything. Being like this, so close, so tangled up with someone again made me feel as though I'd plunged into a whirlpool, but it was soon over.

‘Oh, Megan,' he sighed. ‘Darling Megan.'

I stroked his hair but I couldn't bring myself to say:
Darling Tom
, because I knew that what I was feeling wasn't love. Affection, the afterglow of pleasure, the softness in the limbs that happens after sex, yes, all of those, but not love. We lay there for a while, Tom's head on my shoulder. After a bit, I could tell he was asleep. His breathing was deep and steady, like a small engine beside me. The light was on in the living room and it threw deep shadows into the bedroom. I tried to make out details in the half-light but all I could see was some photos in a frame on a chest of drawers. And before I also fell into a doze, I had two thoughts. The first was:
I'm getting over you, Simon, aren't I? Well, aren't I?
And the second, disconcertingly, was,
I wonder if Luke Fielden will come and look at Salix House again?
I could understand the first but I had no idea why Luke Fielden should come into my mind at just that moment.

*

Eva looked at her watch. Nearly quarter to two in the morning. Something had woken her up … probably Megan coming in. She wondered whether to switch on the bedside light and read and decided against it. She'd been asleep and had woken again after a couple of hours: always a recipe for insomnia. She continued to lie in bed and tried to relax. The words of her long-dead adopted mother came suddenly into her head:

‘Count backwards from a thousand,' Agnes Conway used to say when Eva was a girl. ‘Or count sheep. That does work, you know. It wouldn't be the cliché it is if it didn't work at least some of the time.'

‘But it's boring, Agnes,' the young Eva used to protest and the old Eva hadn't changed her opinion. Most of the time, she preferred to let her thoughts run free, wherever they might take her but because of her preoccupation with flats and leaving Salix House and estate agents that was what her mind was trying to return to tonight, and that wasn't restful. A parade of all the squalid rooms she'd seen last week appeared in her head, one after the other. The first flat that she and Megan had looked at had a carpet not unlike the one she remembered from her childhood home with Agnes. Eva turned over on to her back and stared at the ceiling. Most of the time she tried to avoid thinking about her childhood but now, because it made a change from thinking about hideous hovels in which she might live, she found herself remembering Agnes.

Why did she never mention my family? Eva wondered. We went through the War trying to pretend they didn't exist. Perhaps this was the advice given by the vicar, or Dr Crawford, or one of her friends. Eva was twelve years old when the subject came up seriously for the first time.

1946

Eva knew, as soon as she came back from school that day, that something different was about to happen. Agnes was waiting at the kitchen door and even before she'd offered her a drink and a slice of bread and margarine, she said, ‘Hello, Eva dear. Would you mind coming into the sitting room for a few minutes? There's something we have to talk about.'

Eva's first thought was: what have I done wrong? She followed Agnes into the little-used room at the front of the house. The two of them generally sat in the warm kitchen, which had a sofa in it, and a table on which to do homework. The fire hadn't been lit for a long time and the sitting room felt chilly and unwelcoming at this time of day as the light was leaving the sky. It must have been autumn, because Eva remembered looking down at her legs and she was wearing woollen socks, darned many times over, and her winter school shoes, which were getting tight. Everything was rationed. There was a great deal of making do and mending in the Conway house and Agnes often said it was Eva's good fortune that she'd been put in the care of someone who'd been taught to darn so well that she could make socks last for years and years. Agnes was also good at undoing old jumpers and knitting them up again in different shapes, but nothing, Eva thought, could alter the fact that the colours were boring and sludgy. As she sat and waited for what Agnes was about to say, she began imagining a jumper knitted to match the autumn leaves: many shades merging into one another, melting into a rich arrangement of orange and brown and gold and with a touch of raspberry red to make the other colours sing. They sat down in the two chairs on either side of the unlit fire. Agnes said, ‘We've hardly ever talked before about your family, Eva, and this is a hard thing to say to a child of your age, but I feel that I must.'

‘I'm twelve, Mother,' Eva said. ‘I'm not a little girl any more.'

‘Well, no, I know you aren't, but still. It's hard to say this. When I first took you in, you were very ill. Do you remember? You lay in the bed upstairs and didn't speak for almost a month. You were running a high temperature and cried, sometimes as if your heart was breaking.'