The Girl Next Door (23 page)

Which was exactly what Madison Cavanagh apparently wanted to do right now, here in the darkness. And he didn’t want it. What’s more, he didn’t think he actually could do it. He couldn’t quite believe it. The point was… that there was no point. No point to this. It would just be sex. He didn’t care about her at all. For the first time, that actually seemed to matter.

He stopped moving, and waited for Madison to realize that he had. She opened her eyes and looked at him quizzically. Her cheeks were grazed red by his stubble and her breathing was heavy.

‘What’s wrong?’ She pushed her blonde hair back from her face.

‘I’m sorry.’ Was he really saying it? ‘I don’t want this.’

‘What?’

‘You’re gorgeous, Madison. I just… I’m not into this right now.’

‘Whoah! You seemed pretty damn into it about twenty seconds ago.’

He didn’t know what to say, so he shrugged, but he put one hand on her shoulder.

Madison, it seemed, thought it was worth one more try. She leant forward and licked his ear. The whole gesture turned him off, and he pushed her away, a little less gently this time, with his hand.

Madison shook it off. ‘I did something wrong?’

‘No. No. It’s not that. Not at all.’

‘It’s not about me, right?’ Her voice was suddenly bitter. Wow – that was fast.

‘Right. It really isn’t.’

She pulled her vest across her chest, held it there with one arm, and pushed her hair back again. She laughed a small, sardonic laugh. ‘Well, that’s a new one on me.’

‘I am really sorry. I should have said right away. Except I didn’t know, right away…’

Madison pulled herself off his lap, and turned her back on him to pull her shirt on.

He watched her.

‘Don’t bother to explain. It’s no big deal. It was a way to pass the time, that’s all. Your loss, Trip.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

She wasn’t as tough as she was trying to sound, he knew that. But he also knew there was no way of salvaging the situation, and making it less humiliating for her.

Was it Emily? It had to be Emily. These were uncharted waters for Trip, and he was more confused than anything else. He wished he was sober. And he was sorry. He shouldn’t have let Madison get started on him – he’d known from the start, if he was honest with himself, what she was here for.

Madison was standing by the door now, tidying her hair self‐consciously.

He went to her. ‘I really am sorry, Madison.’

‘Yeah. You should be. I’ll see you around, Trip.’ She didn’t want to make eye contact with him.

He opened the door for her.

Emily was standing in the corridor with a small flashlight. Her blue eyes took in the scene in the faint light – Madison, dishevelled, red‐cheeked and half naked, the buttons undone on Trip’s shirt, and she looked at him with such a look.

‘Hey, Emily,’ Madison made her voice sound light. ‘See you, Trip.’ She passed Emily and headed for the stairwell without looking at him, grateful for the interruption and desperate to get away. Emily stood still and stared at him, but he couldn’t read her face.

‘Emily?’ His voice pleaded with her.

‘Sorry.’ Why was she apologizing to him? She turned to follow Madison. ‘Emily, please… nothing happened.’

She stopped and turned. ‘You don’t answer to me for what you do.’

But I want to, he thought. I want to.

And then she was gone, with her tiny beam of light, and he was left in the darkness.

Violet

Down on the fourth floor, Eve knocked on Violet’s door, hoping she would find her home, and alone. Violet opened her door, and pulled her in, closing the door behind her quickly.

‘Thank God it’s you, Eve. Come in at once. I was terrified you were going to be Hunter Stern, “rescuing me” – he’s a terrible chauvinist, at heart – and I’d have to spend an intolerable night talking psycho rubbish.’

‘I hope you don’t mind. Ed’s in Chicago.’

‘Mind? I’m delighted to have the company, lovely. Come on in.’

Violet’s apartment looked pretty – her furnishings and artwork lent themselves to candlelight, somehow. There was, Eve had decided, something entirely Victorian about Violet in general, and this was her lighting. It wasn’t that she was old‐fashioned – in many ways, she seemed to Eve more with it than she was herself, despite her age. It was something more subtle than that. About a gentleness, and a calm that was decidedly not twenty‐first century. Violet had candles burning on almost every surface – tall pillars in hurricane lamps, small votives in lacy white cups, elegant dinner candles in her silver candelabra.

Once Violet could see Eve more clearly, it was obvious that she’d been crying. Her eyes were red‐rimmed, and there was a flush on her chest.

‘What’s wrong? You’ve been crying. Are you all right?’

Eve nodded, embarrassed. ‘Ed and me… we had a stupid fight. On the phone.’

‘Sweetheart.’ Violet put an arm around Eve’s shoulders, and Eve dropped her head into the crook of her friend’s arm, grateful for the hug, and for the absence of questions. Violet gave her one gentle squeeze, and then moved into the room.

‘Looks like the set of
The Phantom of the Opera
in here, doesn’t it?’

‘I think it looks beautiful,’ Eve protested.

‘Me, too. I’m drinking sloe gin. Can I tempt you?’

‘God – sloe gin. Haven’t had that in years… Do you know, Violet, sloe gin was the first thing I ever got drunk on.’

‘Fancy. Cider – that was me. Harvest Festival. Fell off a stack of hay and broke my wrist. My father nearly killed me.’

‘Well, that sounds very
Cider with Rosie
and bucolic. Sloe gin was me, had no idea how strong it was, and I behaved very badly at a friend’s twenty‐first.’

‘And I behaved less than well at a Church social.’ They both laughed. ‘So how about it? No one to behave badly with here, so we’re perfectly safe. You’ll take a glass?’

‘I can’t, Violet.’ She may as well tell her. She was nowhere near twelve weeks, of course. But Ed had said she wouldn’t be able to keep the secret that long. And anyway, Violet wouldn’t tell. She shrugged her shoulders and an excited grin broke out on her face. ‘I’m actually pregnant.’

‘Darling girl. How wonderful! Come here!’ Violet gave her a hug, and a kiss on both cheeks. ‘That was quick.’

‘Wasn’t it? Ed’s terribly proud of himself.’

‘I daresay he is!’ She was pouring herself a large glass, and she raised it in tribute to her friend. ‘I’ll find you some barley water, in a minute, but first I must toast this momentous news. To Ed and Eve, and their extraordinary fecundity. So how pregnant? When is this baby coming?’

‘Beginning of March.’

‘Ages away.’

‘Yes, I know. It seems it, doesn’t it? I’m only about five minutes pregnant, really.’

‘It’s all happening in there, though, isn’t it?’ She pointed to Eve’s tummy. ‘All that magic.’

What a lovely way to put it. It was exactly how Eve saw it, she realized. Magical things were happening inside her. Magical, inexplicable, wonderful things.

Violet raised her own glass in a toast. ‘Congrats. Lovely. Come and sit down. No wonder Ed is worried about you.’ Violet took Eve’s hand, and held it in her lap briefly. ‘Just promise me something, Eve. Don’t just have one, will you? Have more than one baby. Have lots of babies.’

‘I hope we will.’

‘Good, good. You do that.’ She squeezed Eve’s hand once, and released it.

Violet changed the subject then. She talked about the last big blackout. Hunter Stern had come in to rescue her, and they’d drunk a bottle of red wine each, and then had a fantastic row about psychology versus the stiff upper lip (‘silly, pompous old fart’) that got so loud Arthur downstairs had started banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and scared them half to death. ‘I slept so soundly, I didn’t even know the power was back on,’ she laughed. She told great stories – there was something almost theatrical in her performances, and Eve loved to listen. It had taken her mind off Ed and the stupid argument.

Then they were both quiet for a while.

‘You’re a mysterious old bird, aren’t you, Violet Wallace?’

‘That I am. Imagine, if I told you everything, all at once, why would you bother to keep coming to see me?’

‘Are you joking? I’d come because you’re wonderful,’ Eve laughed. I’d come because you’re the best friend I have in this place, she thought, and because I need you, but she was too shy to say it out loud.

‘Wonderful and mysterious, you see. Deadly combination…’

Eve laid her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes for a moment. Violet felt a wave of tenderness for the girl – and a wave, straight after that, of surprise. It wasn’t like her.

‘Tell me how you came to be here, Violet.’

‘You don’t want to hear all that. It’s a very long story.’

‘Listen to me.’ She sat forward earnestly. ‘I’m missing
Grey’s Anatomy
. I need to be entertained… Please tell me. I’d really love to hear it.’

Violet rubbed her eyes, and Eve worried that she’d overstepped the mark.

‘I mean… you don’t have to… if you don’t want to…’

Now Violet smiled kindly at Eve. ‘Are you kidding me? We oldies live for this. We just like to make you work for it… and since you’re a captive of the power cut, I’m starting at the very, very beginning…’

Violet put her glass down and folded her hands in her lap. Eve leant back against the sofa cushions, and curled her feet under her, ready to listen to Violet’s story. The sound of her deep voice, with its familiar lilting accent, largely unchanged by her time in America, was comforting.

‘So in true Dickensian style, let me get started… how is it you’re supposed to do it? Ah yes! I was born. I was born during a thunderstorm in November 1929, in the front bedroom of my parents’ farm in Norfolk. Another difficult labour for my mother, a third disappointment for my dad. My two sisters, Iris and Daisy, were four and two. I was supposed to be a boy, as they also ought to have been. A boy to help on the farm.

‘Being helped on the farm was my father’s obsession, you see. He’d been one of four sons, the youngest, born in 1900, just as the century turned. His father was the fourth generation of the Hill family at the farm – they could trace Hills in the village back to, oh, I don’t know – forever. My grandmother had been a good wife, and produced four strapping sons – Matthew, Paul, John and Adam, my dad. She’d assured the farm for the next generation and died in the process – giving birth to my father. It wasn’t uncommon in those days. No doctors, no drugs, no hospital for most people. I don’t know much about how my father was raised – not much beyond a few dates and the odd story – and I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my grandfather – four young boys and forty acres. I know he drank – and that how much he drank and what he did when he was drinking made my father a lifelong teetotaller. That’s why he was so cross, when I got drunk on the cider at the Harvest Festival when I was twelve. I know there was a second wife – Mabel – but I have no idea what happened to her. They were both dead before I was born. She didn’t ever sound like a stepmother – of the wicked, or any other, kind – more like a drinking companion for my grandfather. They pretty much drank themselves to death, I reckon. I think the boys – my dad included – had a bloody tough life, doing the lion’s share of the work on the farm. Until the war.

‘Matthew and Paul joined up straight away. John was conscripted eventually. My dad was too young to fight. He’d been born in 1900, you remember – and the war was over before lads his age were conscripted. Too young for the first one, too old for the second. Lucky devils, that lot. Except that I think not going to the war had a legacy of its own. He stayed behind and ran the farm – first with John, and then pretty much alone. Waiting. For his brothers to come home, or to be called to join them himself, if the war lasted long enough. He was just a child – thirteen years old when war broke out. Not much of a childhood up until then, and by the time the fighting started, what little there had been must have come to an abrupt end. None of them were very old, mind you. Matthew was 19, I think – Paul 18. Not much more than kids. Full of bravado, no doubt. That whole “we’ll be back before Christmas” nonsense, I expect. Well, they weren’t back before Christmas – none of them. Matthew was killed in France in early 1915. They never got a body for burial, or full details of what happened, but it was Gallipoli. Paul was home by the end of 1916, burned and blinded at the Somme, just as John was called up. He lost a leg immediately after the Armistice was signed, and died of blood poisoning somewhere along the way home. A whole family almost wiped out.’

‘My God – that’s awful.’

‘You can’t imagine it now, can you? It wasn’t just them. It would have been almost every farm in the valley, every village in the county… a generation, pretty much. The numbers were huge. Nearly a quarter of a million killed at Gallipoli. Not far off half a million at the Somme. Bloody terrible.’

Violet stopped talking. Eve didn’t know what to say.

‘I think I’ll have another glass of gin, actually.’ Violet went to the sideboard, and filled her glass.

‘Do you know – it really is unimaginable, isn’t it? Pointless. Such a waste.’

‘Utterly.’

‘How did your father take it, do you think? I mean, did he talk about it much?’

Violet snorted. ‘Never. Talking about it is a bit of a modern phenomenon, I think. Men like my father didn’t talk about much on that level.’

Eve thought of her own father, and his inability to talk about their mother after she died – how she and Cath had talked and cried alone while he sat downstairs, not watching the television, and smoking cigarettes.

‘But I think it was Matthew’s death that hit him hardest. Matthew was the oldest, and I think he’d been a father figure of sorts. He was the luckiest one, in a way. What killed Matthew killed him fast. The war killed John and Paul as well – it just took longer. And it changed my father forever. I always think it was like he got his heart so badly broken by all of that, he never recovered. I don’t think he was capable, after the war took or changed everyone he loved, of being kind, or gentle – or of really loving properly. No mother at all, no father to speak of. He was just… he was hard.