And, fortunately or unfortunately, it was true. And, fortunately or unfortunately, she was right.
And hadn’t it turned out in the end, and for nearly fifty years, to be entirely fortunately?
• • •
She looks in her mirror now and sees herself as she was then. Hardly a slip of seventeen not knowing what she was doing, and an engagement ring winking on her finger.
Ronnie had phoned. He’d said, ‘I was too late, Evie. She’s gone.’
It was the voice, strangely, of a man who’d done something wrong, and was now awaiting his punishment.
‘Oh I’m so sorry, my darling. You mustn’t blame yourself. Do you want me to come and be with you?’
And these were all the right words, except she might have been with him in the first place. Then everything would have been different.
He said he would be okay. He said it might mean a couple of nights. There were things he had to do, sort out.
She said, ‘Take care, my darling, I’ll be thinking of you.’
And that same night, after Ronnie had phoned, after Ronnie’s mother had died, after the show in which she didn’t appear, she’d got into bed with Jack Robbins. She’d thought of her own mother, her sunhat and frock. One day there might have to be some explaining. Guess what, Mum.
In the dark they’d talked about mothers. Everyone has to have one. It was the topic of the day. How strange, her head now lay on Jack’s chest, her fingers wandered over it.
And as soon as Ronnie had returned he’d looked into her face and he’d seen. She knew it. She even had the feeling he’d looked into her face before he’d left and known it then, somehow, impossibly, beforehand. And she might simply have said in the first place, ‘I’m coming with you.’
He just looked into her face and she knew that he knew. He didn’t say anything. Nor, of course, did she. And wasn’t the important thing to be talking about his mother?
‘I’m so sorry, my darling.’
She might have been saying it on either account.
She’d got into bed with Jack Robbins. She’d known what she was doing. She’d even known that sooner or later it was bound to happen, as Jack had known. As much as anything can be bound to happen in life.
It was a Friday night, and she got to know Jack a lot more, even to know, a little bit, his mother, though she’d never met Jack’s mother either. ‘Mothers, Evie, who’d have ’em?’ His chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. When she’d pressed her hand to the small of his back, he must have felt the prod of the ring against his spine. The weather had changed, but the storms kept away. All that night there were little blinks of light, just enough to make the curtains flicker for an instant, followed by low rumbles that never became louder, far out at sea.
But Ronnie did say one thing when he returned. He saw and he knew, and what he said, given that he knew, was close to what she might have expected him to say, but it was strange.
He said, ‘I saw something, Evie.’
She waited a little, even prepared herself.
‘You saw something?’
‘Yes, I saw something. From the train.’
• • •
She looks in the mirror. Had her face, then, been so transparent? Not even like a face in a mirror, but like glass itself?
She could dance, she could smile, but she could never sing, and all her life she could never act either. No? She could not do that thing that all his life Jack could do—or so he’d make it seem—as easy as walking, as if for him it was no trouble at all to step out of himself, even to step through a mirror.
But then Jack had once said in one of his interviews—one of those moments of startling candour when you might have said he wasn’t acting: ‘Acting? We all do it, don’t we? We all do it all the time.’
On the TV screen, she couldn’t help noticing, his own face was showing its age.
This morning she’d done a strange thing. Anyone looking from one of the neighbouring houses in Albany Square might have thought it a weird performance. But then who would have been looking? It was very early. Which only made it weirder.
She’d woken and known at once what day it was, and what she must do. The thought and the deed were the same. She was wide awake, but she might have been sleepwalking. She got up and put on her dressing gown and, of all things, a pair of old trainers from the days when she used to do gym classes. She’d tied the dressing gown carefully round her and gone downstairs, through the quiet kitchen and into the garden. It was a still, clear morning, the sort that can mean an immaculate day to come, but it was not long after dawn and the low sun was only just creeping, dazzlingly, into the garden. The air was sharp and cold.
But she needed to do this thing that anyone watching would not even have been able to see. To carry with her, inside her dressing gown, the warmth of the bed—the bed where Jack had died one year ago—out to the place where, if he was anywhere, Jack was now. She must do it quickly before the warmth she was carrying was stolen from her.
But before she knew it, or saw it, she had stepped into the impossibly thin thread, slung between two shrubs, from which hung a complete spider’s web. As she breasted the thread and as it stretched and then gave way, she saw for a second, from the corner of her eye, the intricate dew-silvered structure for which it had been spun, first in its agitated entirety, then in wilting collapse as it vanished into shadowed air. She had to flail with her arms to make sure she was not now enmeshed in its wreckage.
