The estate agent had said he could drive her out there, it wasn’t so far. She had to spend an hour or so in the company of an over-attentive young man, clearly pleased to be out of the office and to be showing her what he called ‘quite a posh’ house. He might have wondered why she was so interested in this particular property and, assessing her age and possible bank balance, had his doubts. But—she couldn’t act? And in any case a wedding ring (what a useful little accessory) now shone on her finger.
It still shines on her finger, embedded in its wrinkles, now. And how many times has she touched it today?
It wasn’t that posh at all, even in her own lowly judgement. It was all a strange, rather bleak disappointment. Why had she come? To destroy the image she could, now, no longer carry in her mind? It was just an Edwardian house at one end of a straggly village. The village seemed to have undergone much post-war development and become almost a suburb of Oxford. It was not a long car ride. The house was not in the depths of the country nor in splendid isolation. It was a largish house with gardens front and back, but not particularly distinctive and fairly run-down. There was nothing to suggest the mansion full of wonders that Ronnie had seemed to evoke whenever she’d got him, sometimes with much effort, to speak of it.
It was perhaps necessary to jump back somehow more than twenty years and place herself in the mind of an eight-year-old boy from Bethnal Green. But how did you do that?
It was March, the thin end of winter, and the place even looked rather grim. You would have said, very readily, that it had no magic. It had been thoroughly cleared, and inside it was drab and echoey. Floorboards creaked. She didn’t need a separate tour of the muddy and overgrown back garden. She could see it clearly from one of the upper windows. A small greenhouse and a cold frame, both with smashed glass. Beside the house there was a tumbledown wooden structure that hardly merited the description ‘garage’.
All the while she had to keep up her performance with the pressing young man. So what line was her husband in then? It was hard to get away from him, to find even a moment of contemplation, but she’d done her best. No house could have looked more gloomily empty, but she said it, and said it, necessarily, inside her head: ‘Ronnie? Are you still here?’
As her back was turned to the young man, as she looked from the window, she had felt a stab, her eyes had started with tears. Evie White. Since when had she deserved her spotless name?
But she could always say, at least to herself, that she had been there. She had done it. What more could she do? And, yes, engraved in the stone archway over the front porch, amid other decorative work—oak leaves, flowers, scrolls—was the name that must once, and for some unknown reason, have been confidently chosen and then sharply chiselled, but was now blotched and eroded by a dark-greenish mould: EVERGRENE.
She never told Jack she had gone there. It was another half-century secret. And was it still there now? And who was living in it?
18 Albany Square was still here—just about, it suddenly seemed to her. And who was living in it? As she looked in her mirror, this suddenly seemed a question you could ask too.
• • •
Penny Lawrence, having taken out the mug of tea and the glass of ginger beer, quickly made herself scarce. She knew by now when to vanish and when to appear. She was as good at it as those rabbits, though goodness knows how they knew what to do, when to be there or not, it was beyond her. They were about to appear now, she was sure of it. Eric had that look about him.
She had delivered the two drinks and then said, as was her way, but perhaps particularly brightly, ‘Here we are!’
Once, years ago, when the two of them were what was known as ‘courting’, he had asked her, one summer evening, to come and see his dad’s allotment in Cowley. His dad was somewhere playing cricket. He’d said there might be some spare runner beans she could have for her mum. It wasn’t the most romantic of invitations, but the allotment included a shed and she’d thought: Aye aye. But he’d done nothing more bold, at first, than to fetch out two fold-up wooden chairs, like you see in church halls.
It was a nice evening, there were swallows flying about, and it was as though they were sitting in front of their own little house. She was nineteen. It was 1916. They were lucky, the war would miss them both. His father was a manager at the Morris works and so had found him a job there too, in the office, when it had mainly gone over to arms contracts. This had probably saved him.
Eric Lawrence, for the time being, was a bookkeeping clerk, very familiar with double-entry and the cost of hand grenades, but he said that when the war was over he wanted to do something different with his life. Quite different.
Then he said, ‘Look behind you, Penny.’
Bloody hell. And how on earth?
Then he said, ‘Now look again.’
Later he said it was his ‘magic shed’. In more ways than one. She got the strong impression that evening that Eric and his father might indeed have very different outlooks. Though Eric’s father had probably saved Eric’s life. And just as well.
And now he was about to play the same trick on Ronnie. She felt an odd twinge of jealousy, but it was mixed up with a secret excitement, even with a sudden flood of happiness. It
