It was the season for them, or for seeing them, and though a spider’s web was one of the most familiar of mental pictures—who has not at some point doodled a spider’s web?—the actuality was bewitching. How on earth was it done? How on earth were they conceived and constructed, these entrancing, lethal things?
She had not anticipated that the garden would be decked out like this, as if just for her. And look what she’d done. Intent on something else, she’d walked straight into one of these wonders and ruined it.
She’d thought, for an instant, of the silver tiara she used to wear, trapped above her fringe in her blonde hair.
• • •
Early September. Exactly fifty years ago the show had closed. The end of the season: the crowds departing, the light on the waves changing, the waves themselves, even in the way they gnawed at the beach, seeming to know something. Time to stack up the deckchairs and put them away.
September 1959: when she and Ronnie should have got married. Let’s give it the season, let’s give ourselves and the act the season. And wasn’t their act, by that September—even by the middle of August—quite something, a success? What couldn’t they do next?
There was something else Jack had said to her, when it all happened, when Ronnie was with his mum, or as it had turned out, not exactly with her. He’d said, ‘Don’t you think, Evie, that all this stuff, the pier, the show, the whole bag of tricks, it’s had its day? It’s not what they’ll want for much longer. The future’s elsewhere, don’t you think?’
Only that last bit might have been part of some declaration to do with them. The rest was hard-nosed, if slightly sad. It was all a far cry from Jack Robinson, the man on the end of a pier, singing his song. It seemed she was with more than one person—two, three people—at the same time. And what might he have thought of her?
They were on the pier then, in that little reserved bit, and it was just the two of them. It was where, some weeks later, she dropped the ring. It was the morning after. The morning after he’d made the first announcement of the two announcements: ‘Indisposed.’ The morning after she hadn’t had to perform—who did she have to perform with? But they’d gone off together, as she’d known they would, after the show.
And how had poor Ronnie slept, all alone, that night?
Yet what Jack was saying now didn’t feel wrong at all, it felt shrewd. In her sharp little heart she could feel it was true. The weather had changed, but the storms had passed by and the sea, for the moment, was calm and sparkling. ‘The whole bag of tricks’, that’s what he’d said. He had put his arm round her as if she was all his now, and she hadn’t tried to remove it.
She’d got into bed with Jack Robbins one night in 1959 and the truth of it was that she’d never got out of it until a year ago. And she’d even, this morning, wanted to carry out to him the warmth of that same bed. It was all she could think of doing. She’d gone out into the garden, only to be ambushed by a network of shimmering gossamer. Her breath itself had glinted and swirled like silver dust in the cold air.
Exactly a year ago she’d woken up—from whatever dream she’d never remember though she might wish to be permanently back in it—and put out her arm. Jack was there, of course he was. But he wasn’t. Something even in her fingertips had told her. He was there, but had gone. She didn’t want to think about the seconds, the moments that had followed, yet every morning and every middle of the night she’d have to repeat this innocent, terrible act of waking up.
As if a year’s worth of them would reprieve her now. As if, after all, he might really be there.
When she’d collected the ashes she’d dithered and wondered. Jack, ever helpful, had never said anything, had left nothing written down. She’d wanted anyway at first to have the pathetic feeling that she’d brought him back home to Albany Square. Perhaps she might just keep the ashes here with her in their jar, here in this bedroom. Under the bed. Better still, not even under. Perhaps she might just sleep with her husband’s ashes. For several nights, she actually had. The things that we do.
Less than a year ago, one October morning, she’d done the simplest, most obvious thing—steeling herself to do it, all the same. She’d gone out into the garden and stood under the crab-apple tree that Jack, with much actorly ceremony, had planted as a sapling, and she’d scattered the ashes there. She hadn’t offered much ceremony herself. It was not like the never-ending unendurable funeral. There was nobody else but her. She’d upturned the jar. It was all very simple, like applying some gardening product. And if they had to be scattered somewhere, then let it be close. The garden, of course.
And then, when it was too late, when she’d even thumped the bottom of the jar to get the last bits out, she’d had the thought: In the sea, in the sea, from the end of Brighton pier even. Was it Jack suddenly, mischievously intervening? Or someone else?
• • •
So what, then, might she have done today? She had a driver she could call at any time, Vijay, Jack’s former driver, though really the company’s driver. She might have said, ‘Vijay, I’d like you to drive me to Brighton.’ She might have sat in the back in stately silence, while Vijay, keeping understandingly silent too, just drove. She might have said when they got there, ‘Give me half an hour, Vijay, then pick me up again here.’ Then
