Eden Page 5

  But Penn doesn’t need to pretend to be anyone. He is someone. Not like James, not like the village boys, not like Tom.

  She bristles at the memory. She had gone too far that time, she knew it even then as she pushed her lips against his, her bikini-clad breasts against his bare chest. It wasn’t meant to hurt. It was just boredom, and cheap, tepid wine she’d hocked from the post office when Mrs Polmear was weighing out humbugs.

  Or was it? For she’d known what she was doing, had needed it, her dependency as strong as an addict’s for alcohol or amphetamines. She wanted to be adored. Wanted him to look at her like she knew he looked at Evie.

  She feels the sharp prick of guilt, a needling in her side, but shakes it off. She’s said sorry, and it’s not as if Tom and Evie would ever have come to anything. She’s away at school most of the time and he must be leaving for college next year, and that would be that. Besides, falling for the boy next door is so pathetically provincial, the stuff of Jackie magazine and bad TV drama. The best ones – the Holden Caulfields and Hamlets – have lived bigger lives, better lives; have stories to tell. Stories like Penn’s.

  You should see him, she writes. He walks through the world like it’s butter and he’s a hot, sharp knife. Oh! That sounds good, doesn’t it! I may take up poetry after all. Become Sylvia Plath, only without the oven and dreary clothes. Penn shall be my Ted though, I’m sure of it. We haven’t kissed, not yet. But we will, I’m sure of it. Besides, this is the best part, isn’t it? The longing, the anticipation of it. Like a birthday party. All those balloons and games and cake, and then you unwrap the present at the end of it all and it turns out to be something you already have, or it breaks after five minutes, or you get bored. Why did I never realize that before? Remember Billy Barton? Ugh, what was I thinking? That under the fat, hairy exterior of farmer’s boy he’d turn out to be some kind of soulful Byron or Shelley?

  Penn’s not like that. He’s not like anyone I’ve met, and he’s too full of secrets to tire of. Everyone thinks they know him but they don’t, not really. They don’t know he once had a pet beetle called Humbug, or that he broke his arm when he was three falling from the laundry-room window pretending to be Icarus. They think he has this perfect, gilded life with a rich, famous daddy and a place at the RSC already in the bag. They don’t see that he’s suffered to be here, made sacrifices, upset his family. They don’t know the half of it, Evie.

  She writes more. About college itself; about her halls, about the late night parties, the early rehearsal calls, the endless, wondrous drama of it all. She mentions James, too, of course.

  But it is Penn who takes up the best words. And all her thoughts.

  JULY 1988

  TWO DAYS later, Aunt Julia is gone. Back to the bright lights, big city in her Golf convertible, leaving behind the boxes, the house, and me.

  In her place is a freezer full of ready meals and a list of instructions: who to call if the decorators don’t come, or if the water pipes burst, or the coal man turns up despite being told not to bother any more. Or if wolves come from France through a secret tunnel, I think, like we feared they would, wished they would, tapping nervously, excitedly, on wooden panels along the hallway to check for hidden passages, willing it to be so. Who will protect me then? I wonder. Who will protect me, now that she cannot?

  I stand idly in the kitchen, sipping water from a plastic beaker – a pink scratched thing that reminds me of packed lunches and picnics – and picking at a box of crackers. I am still not hungry.

  “Hey.”

  I start. The beaker of water slips out of my hand and clatters across the floor, a pool of oil-black wetness spreading across the slate.

  And then I laugh, unbidden; with a relief that I have to hide as quickly as it emerged. Because it’s him. Of course it’s him. Who would protect me if the wolves came? Tom. Always Tom.

  “As if by magic,” I say.

  “Ha ha.” He stoops to pick up the pink plastic cup, and hands it back to me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be funny,” I say, taking it back delicately and dropping it on the counter.

  “Then congratulations,” he smiles.

  But the smile fades, for the joke, the ease, feels false. Because this is not who we are any more.

  I look down. The water is inching slowly, deliciously, towards my bare toes.

  “You going to clear that up?” he asks.

  I shrug. “It’s only water.”

  “Jesus, Evie. You’re supposed to be looking after the house.”

  I watch as he takes a tea towel from a plastic hook, drops it on the puddle as he drops to his knees. He is always doing the right thing, I think. Always sweeping up after people. Or trying to; their mess, their problems. Good, I would say to myself as I watched him trying in vain to coax a gull from washed-up netting. He is a good person. “A do-gooder,” Bea would snort. Just not good enough for her, it turned out.

  “I thought you were doing that,” I say. “Keeping tabs. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  He looks up at me, his eyes unreadable under that lock of hair. He pushes it behind his ear once, twice. “No. I came to see if you’d changed your mind. If you wanted to stay with us after all. You know, with all the disruption.”

  “Is this your mum’s idea?”

  He pauses. “No. Mine.” And I don’t know if it’s true. Or if I want it to be. If I want him to care, still. To be that Tom who carried me home from the pub that time, who put me to bed, who left a glass of water on the bedside table and a bucket on the floor, just in case.

  But it makes no difference. It would still be the same answer.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I just—” my voice cracks.

  “Hey, it’s OK.” He touches my arm briefly, and I feel a shiver through me, a confusion of want and anger.

  “Is it … is it because of last summer? Because we’ll be fine. Me and you, I mean. We’ll work it out. Work something out.”

  But I don’t want to work anything out with Tom. Not now, maybe never. It’s not about us any more; about what might have been or never could. We were nothing and we are nothing. It’s about me and Bea. That’s all that matters now.

  I want to be here with her.

  Now that Aunt Julia’s gone I feel it more than ever. She’s in every crack in the floorboards, every keyhole. She’s in the scraps of sunlight that fracture through leaded windows, in the cool wind that whistles down the chimney at night bringing ash and bird droppings in its wake. Her hopscotch steps ring out on the flags in the scullery; her laugh is caught in the heavy drape of the drawing-room curtains. When she runs, she sends motes of dust swirling into the light, catching on my clothes, and in my hair.

  She came back after all. And so I have to stay. Even in the clatter and clutter that is to come. Even with the army of strangers who will march through the halls, whistling tunelessly to tinny radio as they steam and scrape the heavy flock from the walls.

  I want strangers. I want to be unknown. I want to be alone. Alone with her.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I just … can’t.” And it is the truth. And he knows it.

  “Well you know where I am.”

  “Always,” I say. “As if by magic.”

  “Ha bloody ha.” And this smile is not forced or fake. It is guileless, honest. And for a fleeting second it is how it always was. We are how we always were.

  But then the smile fades, the feeling evaporates, and he is gone. And it is just me again. Me alone in Eden.

  NOVEMBER 1987

  BEA CONSCIOUSLY tilts her head, twirls a lock of her hair, touching herself so that he’ll think about doing the same. “Will you do me a favour?” she asks.

  Penn grins, “For you? Anything. D’you want me to fight a duel with Freddie Hatcher for your honour?”

  Bea laughs, leans forward, “No. Too messy. Besides, I don’t like Freddie. He’s got a wart on his right hand and he reads sci-fi!”

  “You’re right. He stands no chance. What then? Sl
ay a dragon? Write your Gothic paper? Or is it money?”

  “No!” She’s indignant now. That’s not why she wants him, not like the others who borrow a tenner here, a twenty there. “It’s for a friend.”

  “Hetty?”

  “James.”

  “The Northern kid?”

  “He’s not just a ‘Northern kid’.” She swipes a hand halfheartedly at Penn’s leg, still smiling. “He’s good, you know he is. You saw his Prospero. Besides, he’s a friend.”

  Penn pauses, a pause she knows is made up of “what is he to her?” and “what is she to him?”. He is a friend, that’s all. But she won’t tell Penn that. Because this way works better.

  “What does he need?” he asks finally.

  “Nothing big. Just that he’s had this dream since he was a kid. About playing Hamlet, you know. That it is him. But he won’t audition against you.”

  “You want me to stand down?” Penn’s face darkens.

  “No,” she says quickly. “I would never ask that. Just that if you encouraged him, maybe worked with him a bit, then he’d at least try for it.”

  “Aren’t you going for Ophelia?”

  “Of course.”

  “So whoever gets the part gets you.”

  “It’s a play, dahling,” she mocks. “Not real life.”

  But it’s all intertwined here. What happens on stage spills out into the everyday. She knows James won’t get the part. But she feels an urge to help him. It’s odd, she has never had a need to nurture before. Or maybe only with Evie. That’s what she sees in him, she thinks, suddenly. He is like Evie, he has a kind of neediness that only she seems to be able to fulfil.

  “Please,” she says. “Pretty please with ice cream and cherries on the top?”

  Penn rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says. “You win. But don’t expect me to go down without a fight.”

  “Never,” she answers.

  But as she watches them rehearse together, she realizes she was wrong. James doesn’t need Penn’s help. He isn’t just good, he is astonishing. But if he gets the part, and she gets Ophelia, then what will happen to Penn? What will happen to the promise of them? She is Penn’s Ophelia. Not James’s. Isn’t she?

  The cast list goes up on a Friday, their fates typed out on thin foolscap. Penn is at the top, of course, always at the top. James, though, is lost among the faceless ranks of the chorus, his surname carelessly misspelt. And Bea, his Ophelia, is destined for someone else.

  “He’s perfect,” Camilla Gordon says, sighing. “Isn’t he? Perfect for the part.”

  James nods. For a week he had believed he stood a chance. Bea had made him believe, with her pleading and pushing him to sign up. Penn too, telling him he was made for it, born to it. Those were just lies, he understands that now, empty praise to please Bea. Praise Penn could afford to proffer because there was never any doubt about who would win in the end.

  “It should have been you,” she says to him later.

  They’re in her room. She at the dressing table, him on her narrow bed, his back against the wall and his heart half broken, a blade stuck in.

  “Hamlet, I mean. We all think it. Even Penn.”

  Maybe it’s the truth, or maybe she is just placating him. But whichever, it doesn’t change the reality of it.

  “He’s a third year,” James shrugs. “And he’ll be good. You know he will.”

  She looks over at him, their eyes meeting in the flyblown glass of a junk-stall mirror they chose together on East Street, as they transformed her room in a single Saturday from Barratt home to boudoir. And he flicks his hair into his face, declaims “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”, mimicking Penn’s West London drawl, his dropped “t”s failing to disguise seven years of Eton and a lifetime of silver spoons.

  “God, that’s uncanny,” she laughs.

  But then she turns her eyes away, focusing instead on some perceived imperfection on her chin. “Pity me, then,” she sighs. “I’m the one who has to kiss him.”

  Thirteen streets and half a mile away Penn sits at the kitchen table idly flicking a penknife open and shut. He knows it was wrong: asking Ben, the director, to drop James. But Ben owed him – for dope, for food, for the three months he’d spent sleeping on the sofa when his girlfriend kicked him out – and besides, he had to do it, had no choice. He had to get her on her own, get her away from that boy who clung to her so pathetically.

  She wasn’t James’s to cling to, she was Penn’s. She would be Penn’s.

  AUGUST 1988

  WHEN WE were little, Bea and me, people would ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Bea was precise in her answers, though they changed as often as the wind from shore to sea. “An empress,” she would tell our grandfather. Then, a week later to Mrs Ennor in the village: “A nurse.” She worked her way through them all with the pace and clarity of a skipping rhyme: mermaid, lady, gypsy, queen. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Until she settled on one, and her answer to everyone – to her parents, to Mrs Ennor, to the girls in her dorm or the boys in the Lugger – was the same: “An actress. I’m going to be an actress.” It didn’t take a shrink to know that that way she could be all things at once; all heroes and villains. She could be Carol in Road, dressed in a miniskirt and high heels, her vowels lengthened, her speech hardened by the broad Bolton accent; she could be light-as-air Titania, queen of the fairies; she could be Iphigenia, Eurydice, Medea. Whomever she chose, whenever she chose; a thousand futures wrapped in one.

  Tom, too, changed from pirate to pilot to carpenter, before settling on lawyer.

  But me? My reply never changed. I would always say, “Here.”

  Tom and Bea would laugh, thinking I was confused, had misunderstood or misheard the question. “Not where, what. What do you want to be?”

  But I would look blank, and repeat my answer: “Here,” I would say, then louder, insisting, “I just want to be here.”

  Because here was a whole, perfect world of wonder, limitless in its possibility, an endless new territory to be explored and charted. I wanted to stand with my back nestled in the curvature of the morning-room wall, held steadfast by its oddness and the surety of history. I wanted to roll my finger on the rounded brown Bakelite of the light switch at my bedroom door – on and off, on and off, my breath rising and falling with each satisfying click. I wanted to lie face-down in the tangled fur of the sheepskin rug on the landing, smelling its lanolin sweetness, absorbing every footfall, every figure that had passed. I wanted to hide inside my grandmother’s wardrobe, our door to Narnia, a mothball-scented dressing-up box of furs and flapper dresses and long-forgotten gowns.

  The house was a story, a book that caught us in time, trapped us like silverfish in a leather-bound volume of Dickens; like the dust that lay thick and heavy on the stone mantels and window sills, that caught in the folds of fabric and blew like tumbleweed across the pantry floor.

  Like the damp that defied a battery of attempts to banish it. That, despite shuttered windows, and air bricks, found its way back in; oozing through every fault and fissure, sending wet fingers along the scullery floor, into the brocaded seams of wing-backed chairs and into the highest shelves and bottom drawers of cupboards, rendering biscuits and breakfast cereals a claggy, stale mass.

  But it was this damp air that fed our fertile imaginations, curious thoughts growing like pin mould on pantry bread. The house became our Neverland – full of strange creatures and terrible monsters and magic, magic everywhere. But now this land of make-believe was being dismantled, piece by rotting piece. That sweet, musty smell – of the past, of a hundred lives and a thousand stories – was replaced by eye-stinging sawdust and the bitter, chemical tang of gloss paint. And the peace that hung over Eden like a sacred shroud was driven out, shooed across the lawns by the high-pitched, angry buzz of electric drills and sanders.

  A week later, I follow it; slip from the back of the wardrobe and, taking an apple, a sandwich and a paperback book, I slide out the back
door and into the woods.

  The path to the boathouse is narrow now. Spindly nettles nod and waver a warning towards my bare calves as I pass, and the once well-trodden soil is overgrown. Brambles whip my thighs, thin scratches of red against pale skin. Yet I run on regardless, my plimsolls skimming over clods of earth and the exposed roots of oaks, beeches, and the last of the elms. I fly, second star to the right and straight on until I reach my morning: a wide curve of water that glistens in the early sun – Calenick creek – and next to it, a faded-board boathouse, with a corrugated roof and painted “No Entry” tacked haphazardly, childishly, across the door.

  If Eden was our world, then the boathouse was our playroom: a ready-made gingerbread house in an enchanted forest, picture-book perfect with red-checked curtains, a table and chairs, a camping stove. We would spend all day here, playing at pirates, at Swallows and Amazons, at Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx, taking turns to row our boat – Jorion – across to the Millhouse and back, Tom paying us for the journey in penny chews or strawberry bootlaces. We would swim out to the pontoon, lie on our backs until our skin stung from salt and sunshine, until our throats were hoarse from singing that Robert de Niro was waiting; until, when we pressed against our eyelids, shooting stars danced across the pinkness like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Then, at night, when we dared, we would sleep top to tail in the foldaway camp bed or on the floor, waking with toes in our faces and the world upside-down to a breakfast of biscuits and cherryade.

  And then one summer Bea just stopped coming. At first there was a film she wanted to see at the Lux in Liskeard; an American high school thing of rebellion and leather jackets and boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Then the excuses rolled off her tongue as easily as marbles: too many goodbyes to be said to schoolfriends; too many shopping trips to Plymouth for pillows and sheets and shoes; too many scripts to be read in the solitude of the attic, where my splashing couldn’t soak the pages, and my sulking couldn’t distract her study.