Eden Read online

  Unless, unless…

  And then that wretched hot day, I stumbled upon the truth that I’d not dared to admit. That it was Bea he wanted, Bea he must have reserved his glances for, and I – blinded by love or desperation – had failed to see them.

  So no, I don’t want to see him.

  Aunt Julia sends him up anyway. “Talk some sense into her,” I imagine her saying. And he tries.

  He knocks, says my name. “Evie?” His voice is deeper than I remember, rougher somehow, and I picture his hand, the whorls on his fingertips worn from the ropes on the ferry he tills at weekends, the palms blackened with oil from the outboard engine; his hair, longer now, a curtain drawn over his eyes so that he can peer out but no one can look in.

  I hear a sound, the “shhh” of shoe rubber turning on carpet, and think he’s given up. But just as I reach to clasp my pathetic victory, I hear something else, a swish of cotton against wood, the rattle of a lock. He hasn’t fled. He’s sat down, back against the door, and it’s one–all.

  “I’m worried about you,” he says.

  Nothing.

  “We all are.”

  Nothing.

  “I miss you.”

  I feel something tighten inside my stomach. A knot of anger. Or hurt. “Miss her, you mean.”

  “No— Yes. Of course… But you too. Last summer… Bea, I didn’t… I mean, it wasn’t. She was just… ”

  I mumble, a formless noise that sounds like disbelief, but even I can hear it is wrapped in something else. Hope, maybe. And then I say it. Say the thing I have wanted to, have wanted to shout at him, scream at him. But it comes out as barely a whisper.

  “You kissed her,” I say.

  “No. I—”

  “I saw you,” I say, louder now. “I saw you with her.”

  “Yes, but— I didn’t…” He pauses, trying to concoct some answer, I think – something more palatable. “Evie, she kissed me, OK? Bea kissed me. Not the other way round.”

  I snort. But then, hoping, I think back to what I saw, the tangle of arms, the confusion of sounds. But it’s no good. As hard as I try I can still see them, see the truth of it: his hand reaching to her face, his fingers on her cheek, that sound that he made, not of disgust but of pleasure, I am sure of it.

  “But you let her.”

  He’s silent for a moment. Thinking up a lie, maybe.

  “At first. But then…” he trails off. “Shit. I should’ve talked to you about it at Christmas. But you wouldn’t see me.”

  “Oh, it’s my fault?” I shoot back. Though I feel the truth hit me as sharp as a stone.

  “No, I … that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I add. “It’s not like I care.”

  “Evie…”

  “I don’t,” I lie. “It’s done.”

  Then we fall into awkward, deafening silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he says eventually.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know, everything I guess. That. Bea. The house…” He pauses. “I can’t believe you’re going.”

  “Me neither,” I say to myself. Though I’ve known for a year now. That though my grandfather bequeathed us the house he left no money to run it. That even without the divorce it would have to be sold, or leased out. Bea shrugged when she was told, but her world was vast, and losing a corner of it was small change. But my world was here and I begged Aunt Julia to change her mind, to run it as a B & B, or an art school. I’d read about one in Tregony, a fading manor that had been brought back to life by week-long courses in watercolour. But Julia couldn’t bear the thought of more than a few months at a time in this “godforsaken place”. Everything I loved, she hated; the solitude, the isolation, the silence. She couldn’t see the attraction of long walks and log fires and beds that needed warming with copper pans or rubber bottles before you could climb into them. “What about Hannah?” I would ask. “She was from London.” “Well, yes,” my aunt would reply, “but she’s different.” Poor, she meant. A sculptress, she’d been a friend of my mother’s at art college. She came down for a holiday after graduation and fell in love; with the river, with Eden, with a young carpenter called Bill who lived in the Millhouse, and never left. And now there is Tom, and a garden full of bronze hares and minotaurs. And no money. But love.

  “Remember when we broke the sofa in the morning room?” he asks.

  I smile at the sudden memory. It was years ago – five, maybe more. We were trying to fly; bouncing off the base to see who could get highest, furthest across the carpet and onto a pile of cushions. A game that lasted for hours before ending with the crack of old wood and a shriek from Tom, whose ankle was trapped in old webbing.

  “You cried,” I say, remembering now.

  “Only a bit,” he says. “More from pride than pain.”

  Part of me wants to make him laugh, then tease out other memories – the time we tried to dye ourselves blue in the bath; the time Bea and I cut Tom’s hair with pinking shears; the time we drew an army of animals marching along the scullery wall; the time we stole a bowl of chocolate mousse intended for a dinner party and ate it all with our fingers before being sick in turns on the back lawn.

  But then everything comes back to that day, the last time we were together, and I know I can’t do it because all those other times, those memories, are sullied, dirtied. They were charades, I think, and only that last day was real.

  “When do you leave?” he asks.

  “Aunt Julia goes in two days,” I say, by way of an answer.

  And then there is silence again, silence that stretches into minutes, then half an hour.

  “I should go,” he says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “See you soon.”

  I shrug, then realizing he can’t see me add, “I doubt it.”

  Three words, again. Three words I want to erase, to rub out like our pencil marks on the scullery walls, because the anger that bore them isn’t at him, not really. It’s at the end of it all: of Bea, of us, of Eden. I wanted one last summer here. No, want one last summer. I want her to fill my head, my heart, with her wild ideas, her unfailing conviction. I want to play in this paradise, fading though it is. Not just because Eden belongs to me but because I belong to it.

  I don’t want to go to the new flat in London. I don’t want to be in the big wide world that Bea talked about. I want to be here. This is my world.

  It comes over me like warm syrup on porridge, a sweet realization: I have to stay. Just for a few weeks. Until I find out how to be without her – to be me without her.

  I’m going to stay at Eden. Somehow, I’m going to stay.

  OCTOBER 1987

  COLLEGE IS more like school than James had imagined. The same tired teachers repeating last year’s lessons; the same ranks wide-eyed, like it’s the Sermon on the Mount, all believing these words hold the key to their transformation into the Next Big Thing; the same self-appointed monarchy ruling over the also-rans, a caste system based on no more than who has the loudest voice, or the most famous father, or the best dope – a crown he knows he can never claim for his own and so doesn’t bother to covet.

  She is different, though.

  He thought she’d made a mistake when she walked into the auditorium that first afternoon and stood squinting up at the raked seats, her hand shielding her eyes against the glare of the stage lights. He assumed she’d been looking for a friend, or for another lecture hall at the far end of the campus where the literature students gathered, crow-like in their black coats and boots. He thought it couldn’t possibly be this easy, that she would be thrown into his path like this. But then a name was called and she answered with “here”.

  “Bea.” He says it in his head. Then out loud, savouring the way it feels in his mouth; its rounded perfection, like an egg.

  Bea. Bee. A buzzing bright queen, she soars above them all, refuses to align herself with the lesser insects. James feels it; the authenticity of her. None of Ther
esa or Brigid’s bottled bronze or frosted gloss. No fakery or fraudulence like the girls on the bus, the pretenders and wannabes in their black-market Chanel and straight-off-the-market nylon. None of the desperation of the other girls on the course, who want to be Hepburn or Redgrave or Rossellini. He watches her with that girl Hetty with the Louise Brooks bob, with the two Lucys who wear such similar black uniforms he forgets which is which, with those third years that cluster around Penn. She flits in and out of their circles on gossamer wings, like the angel he saw at the station that day. No, not an angel, a fairy; Puck or Ariel, or Tinkerbell even, dancing around the Lost Boys. And he, he is Peter Pan.

  Then one evening in the bar when Hetty is arguing about Page 3 girls at a Women’s Soc meeting and Penn and the others are playing pinball with a devotion usually reserved for international sport – she lands next to him.

  He’s sat at a table in the corner, a paperback copy of The Tempest in one hand, in the other a pint of Flowers he has nursed for one long hour already, and will make last another before he makes the walk back down Queens Road and home. He’d thought he’d drink wine by now, a claret or burgundy. But beer is cheaper, lasts longer.

  He’s auditioning soon and is lost on Prospero’s island when the tide washes her ashore and she drops into the worn leatherette next to him and says, “Which part are you going for?”

  He starts, drops the book, apologizes.

  But she doesn’t roll her eyes or drift away. She picks it up for him, wipes a film of beer off on her dress. One small, simple act of kindness, of selflessness. But for James it is everything.

  “Prospero,” he says, taking it back from her. “Though I won’t get it.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Penn will get it. Everyone thinks so.”

  “Then everyone is wrong. Because Penn’s not going for it,” she replies with a raised eyebrow. “But don’t say I said so.”

  “He’s not?” He’s not sure whether to be happier with this pearl of knowledge, or that she chose to reveal it to him alone.

  “He’s got too much on,” she smiles. “I heard him tell Hunter. Stuff at home, too, you know?”

  He nods. Though he can’t imagine what “stuff” Penn would have. Penn didn’t come from a back-to-back in Wigan, the son of a plumber. Penn was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, not coal tar soap to wash out the swearing.

  “I love the magic plays,” she says then. “When I was little I used to pretend I was Miranda and wait for Ferdinand to rescue me.”

  “And did he?”

  “Not yet,” she smiles slowly and bites her lip.

  And in those two words he knows what she is telling him. That he has a chance, that if he is special enough, brave enough, she could be his.

  “Though in truth I think he’s a bit of a drip,” she continues. “It’s Caliban who gets the best lines, don’t you think?”

  “Yes!” he agrees emphatically. “Yes, I do.”

  And that is how the conversations begin. Conversations wound through with importance, with meaning. Conversations he tells himself they will remember not just when they wake in the morning, but when they lie in bed when they are old. Conversations about the miners, about Thatcher, about the future of theatre and the history of everything.

  They talk through another pint in the NUS bar, then two in the Rosemary Branch on the New Cross Road.

  They talk all the way from the pub, past the late night minimart and the shuttered junk shops, up the hill to Lawrence Hall, where she lives.

  “So, this is it,” she says.

  “This is it,” he repeats.

  And then there is a pause, a moment that dances with possibility; but in the seconds it takes for him to summon the courage, she turns and is gone, the fire door slamming shut on her retreating figure as she winds her way up the communal stairs, leaving him to the sodium glow of the streetlight and the sirens of late-night Lewisham.

  JULY 1988

  SO I make a plan to stay. A blueprint built on desperation, and held clumsily together with the Sellotape that is the self-belief of youth; a whip-smart answer to every “what if” or “but” Aunt Julia could throw at me, and a final flourish, a triumphant trump card: I wasn’t doing this for me, I was doing it for her.

  I’ve worked it all out: when she goes back to the flat in London, returns to her coffee mornings and tea parties and cocktails at seven, I will stay here and supervise the decoration.

  “I won’t be a hindrance,” I tell her. “I won’t get in the builders’ way. In fact, if you think about it, they can’t really do without me, because who else knows things about the house?” Like how to operate the stubborn stopcock on the water system, where the fusebox is, or what to do when the geese from the Millhouse come into the kitchen.

  “But where will you sleep?” she says. And despite the fear that edges her voice, I feel the first flutter of hope, because she hasn’t said “no”.

  “In my room,” I reply. “They can do it last. It will take two weeks, three, even, for them to finish downstairs, then there are nine other bedrooms, the bathrooms – the landing alone will take days.” I reel off the rooms. Twenty-three in all; twenty-five if you count the boathouse and the attic. But I don’t, because the boathouse, though it will be sold as a chattel, is not part of Eden proper – not to her. It is its own land, and she wouldn’t dare, has never dared, to enter.

  There’s the attic, too, but we don’t mention that either.

  “And the kitchen’s done,” I add, before I linger on it, before she can think of it. “Which means you don’t need to worry about me starving.”

  Aunt Julia folds her arms as if she is cold, her polished nails pale shells against the dark of her goosepimpled cruise tan. “But there’s no one to cook,” she tries instead.

  “I can cook. We learned at school. Beef pie and eggs en cocotte.” And six other dishes that Mrs Beadle demonstrated and I obediently replicated, then immediately forgot, having no intention of cooking in the future she imagined for us as wives and mothers. But then I have no intention of cooking now; can barely eat as it is. There’s cereal in the larder, bread in the freezer for toast, and an account at Cardew’s in the village if I’m desperate.

  “What if there’s an accident?” she tries, her forehead puckering into a frown, one hand worrying the locket at her throat.

  “I’ll phone 999. Or Mr Garrett.” The ex-Chief Constable who is everyone’s Sheriff and Batman and everyday Jesus rolled into one.

  “What if the electricity goes? It always goes.”

  “I’ll row to the village.”

  “At night?”

  “Tom’s then,” I lie.

  She pauses and I can tell she’s weakening, is already weak from the divorce, from death, from too many Tramadol. But she tries one last shot, a backhand.

  “But think of what you could do in London. The galleries, the theatres… And there’s that girl, from school— What’s her name? Etchingham?”

  “Thea Etchingham?”

  “Yes. Dorothea. That’s it. What about her?”

  I think of Thea, with her perfect fringe and her perfect grade score; a girl who offered her friendship to me at the same glib speed with which she took it away once the Grosvenor twins saved her a place at refectory. “She’s in Cannes,” I say. “All summer.” And the ball is returned neatly over the net.

  “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I don’t understand what’s to be gained. It seems as if you’re just putting off the inevitable. You’ll have to come for Christmas, of course.”

  “Christmas is months away,” I say. “And a lot of maybes.” Maybe the house won’t sell. Maybe I’ll dig up my fortune in the damp earth and buy Eden myself. Maybe the world will end.

  “You can’t live on maybes,” she sighs.

  Bea did, I think. She lived for the maybes, the slim possibilities, the one-in-a-million chances.

  I have back-ups. Plans B and C. I will chain myself to the iron gates, a
suffragette for my cause, refusing food and shelter until my demand – for the cessation of time – is met. Or take our boat and row out to sea, to a far-flung isle where the sun never sets and the larder is always full.

  But I don’t need them. I can see by the sag of her shoulders and the set of her jaw that she is defeated. And, eventually, after a long and tedious phonecall to Uncle John, after an extracted promise that I will not get in the way of the decorators, or unpack boxes, or go unaccompanied to the pub, after a last “look-at-what-you-could-have-won” listing of the alleged pleasures of London, she gives in, and gives me my prize: a set of keys, and a last summer at Eden. With Bea.

  NOVEMBER 1987

  BEA SITS at her dressing table and pushes perfume bottles, odd earrings, a half-full mug of tea aside to make room for her pad of thick cream writing paper – a present from her mother. Though it isn’t Julia she’s writing to, has no need to, for she saw her at the Connaught last week and their conversation barely stretched through tea and scones.

  “I thought you’d be brimming with news,” said her mother, placing the paper-thin porcelain cup carefully back on its saucer.

  And Bea is, but she can’t tell her mother about him. She has sketched a vague outline for her, but the colour, the fine detail; that is reserved for Evie. It doesn’t matter that nothing has happened – yet. It doesn’t matter that Evie still hasn’t written back to her last letter. That was never the point. She just wants to imagine her sat wide-eyed at the thrill of it all. The point is in the telling.

  Evie, you would love him, she begins.

  Everyone does. Bea thinks of him now, sat on the steps of the union, holding court like a robber king in his faded T-shirt and torn jeans. Money means nothing to him. It is art that matters, art and love and life itself.

  James cares about art too, he knows Brecht and Büchner, has wept over Coleridge and declared he would die for love. But with him there is an edge of desperation. He is Buttons to Penn’s Prince Charming with his endless clowning in class, pretending to be other players: now James Dean, now Jimmy Stewart or Laurence Olivier.