shrug – because all this was normal too – and he nodded and turned away.
And I am suddenly passionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.
‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Sean, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.
I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Sean’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’
There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white arse hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.
Sean said, ‘Eat your breakfast, Evie.’
I said, ‘Would you like some eggs?’
And Evie said, ‘I hate eggs.’
And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That’s what I think.
I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’ and he bent to kiss her too.
As far as Sean was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don’t win – as he liked to say – at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.
How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn’t show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair’s room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan’s house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.
‘When did she leave?’ said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.
‘What are you doing Evie?’
‘I was just looking.’
It was, up to a point, just the way she was.
‘I was just,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
Sean was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, ‘Just not going to do it, this time round.’ And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn’t – he just couldn’t – listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.
‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just growing. It’s fine.’
Then, one Saturday after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama class. Sean who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in class that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them – then Sean decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.
He wanted to shout her name and then did not shout. He found a security guard, who muttered into his walkie-talkie, then wrote out a phone number and advised him to ring the local police. Which Sean did, standing on the street, watching buses and cars, and old ladies with stand-up trolleys, going about their usual business. The man who answered asked him to hold the line. Then a woman’s voice. I must sound bad, he thought, if they are handing me to a girl.
‘Can you describe your daughter?’
Just the word ‘daughter’, the way she said it, made him feel like a liar. He felt like someone who was about to be found out.
‘She has big eyes,’ he said.
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
‘Take your time, sir. Can you tell me the colour of her eyes?’ At which point he did that thing; he turned himself into a person who can describe his daughter in words you might hear on the evening news: age, height, hair colour.
‘What was she wearing?’
‘I’ll have to ring her mother,’ he said. And as soon as he cut the connection, Aileen was on the line.
For a few moments, he failed to understand, not just the words she was saying, but her voice itself – she might have been talking Danish – then he somehow figured out that Evie had rung Aileen, or Aileen had rung Evie, and she was in the theatre, where she was supposed to have been all along.
‘You spent the class in the toilet?’ To which Evie replied, ‘No!’ And then, ‘I must have done.’
There was nothing for it, but to go back to the doctors – the same round of referrals and endless waiting lists, the same watchfulness and morning anxiety, Aileen on the internet every night, googling ‘absences’, ‘lesions’, ‘puberty’; inviting it all in.
When they finally found themselves back with Dr Prentice – it was with difficulty, Aileen said, that she did not ‘fall on the woman’s neck’ – Evie had very little to say.
She answered all the questions and gave no clues.
‘And what do you think is going on, Evie?’ the doctor finally said, to which Evie offered the idea that her brain might be funny.
‘In what way funny?’
Evie, who by this time knew more than most children about the human brain, said, ‘The two halves – the hemispheres, you know? – it is like they don’t join up properly.’
Dr Prentice pursed her mouth and looked into her lap, then she lifted her head and with great clarity and tactfulness, discussed the anomalies of Evie’s case, and suggested – strongly suggested – that
This was what was going on, the Christmas I wandered the deserted city streets. They gave her a computer, and told her not to spend so much time on the computer, and they pulled crackers, and hugged her, taking careful turns.
It is my suspicion that, after this, Aileen finally confronted Sean with all the things she had known – but not let herself know – for years. I suspect that she kicked him out. Because she realised the lies they told each other were wrecking Evie’s head.
Or perhaps he kicked himself out, for much the same reason.
It is hard to pin down. Sean tells the story differently every time, and he believes it differently each time. But the fact seems to be that, at a time when it seemed most important, for Evie’s sake, that they should stay together, it was also vital, for Evie’s sake, that they should part.
