That Part Was True (5 page)

“After a fashion. The dog shows hadn't quite knocked the high-mindedness out of me, so I quit the newspaper and sat and brooded, and chewed a Bic pen and churned out a pile of painful fake Joyce. And then, when that didn't get me the attention of the international literary set, I started on some painful fake Hemingway.”

She laughed.

“My poor wife had to pay the bills and put up with all my clichés and conceit into the bargain. Eventually she got wise and left me for a pediatrician, a real wholesome guy. They live in Connecticut. Happy as clams. Three kids and a gazebo. So at least I don't have to feel too bad about that.”

“Marnie was your second wife then?”

Jack, lifting his coffee, paused.

“Dex told me about her,” Adrienne explained.

“Marnie was my second wife—two strikes. Apparently I'm not good husband material.”

“No children?”

“No. It's probably a good thing. I reckon I'd be pretty lousy father material as well, and that's a tougher rap.”

As soon as he said it, he regretted it. It was too serious a tone for a conversation over coffee with a young woman who was a virtual stranger. He braced himself for some cutesy reply, the kind a lot of women would come out with, “Oh, I don't know…” A flirtatious sort of reply. But he didn't get one.

“Yes,” she said seriously. “Yes, it is.”

Back at the house, he said good-bye to Adrienne outside. They stood, a little stiffly, beside her car for a moment. Then, just before she stepped out and around the hood to get in the driver's side, she stretched up to kiss his cheek, lightly, simply. “See you, Jack.” She called over her shoulder. “I'm glad I came.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Jack was still
at the curb when Lisa drove past with her car roof down and turned into her own driveway with a reckless swerve. It was hard for Jack not to come to the conclusion that this, and the nonchalant way she got out of her car and then swung the door with a flourish, was not done with him in mind. It was. Anyway, filled suddenly with purpose, and a sense of decency after Adrienne's visit, he crossed the road and her front lawn and called out to her.

“Lisa.”

She turned immediately, her heels belying the casual expression that she had adopted.

“Jack?” She had a shopping bag in her hands from a boutique in town. Jack recognized the name of it—he had bought presents there a few times for Marnie, her face always brightening at the sight of the bag. Now Lisa lifted it in front of her, like a shield.

“Lisa, I wanted to apologize. I should never have spoken to you the way I did,” Jack said, reaching her on the driveway.

“No, you shouldn't have,” she said.

She tipped her head to frown up at him, looking, he thought, as if she might want to draw the thing out, extract a longer, increasingly thin apology. He prepared himself for it. But Lisa, acutely aware that Jackson Cooper was an attractive, solvent, single male, one, what's more, whom she genuinely liked—a rare breed for which her sights were permanently set—smiled and let the shopping bag slip, and stood her chest back to attention and said, “We drank too much,” in an accepting voice.

She was prettier at that moment, realer, Jack thought, than she ever had been before.

“I appreciate it, Lisa,” he replied. Let's-be-friends hovered just beneath the words.

Hearing it, angry at herself for ignoring it, Lisa said, “Would you like to come in? It's getting so warm, I'm going to spend the afternoon by the pool.” One last lure, softly placed.

Jack's house did not have a pool. The previous owners, a geriatric couple who had employed His and Hers Swedish nurses by the time they'd sold it, had not approved of pool bathing. They'd attributed their great age, ninety-six for him and ninety-three for her, to swimming in the sea, tottering down for a morning dip each day from March till October, every year since they'd bought the house in 1956. Jack thought of them now, imagined their wizened little bodies in their black swimsuits, her with a rubber cap on her head, both of them clutching towels around their waists, picking their way across the sand. Hell, he thought, he didn't want to be old yet.

“Okay, sure,” he heard his brain say. But his voice didn't let him down. “Thanks. No,” he said as kindly as he could.

Lisa, who recognized the defeat in men's kindness, lowered her shopping and her breasts and her hopes again and resigned herself to another long evening of empty telephone calls and aimless magazine reading.

Eve parked the car in the parking building attached to the new shopping mall. The shopping mall was about eight years old now, but it was still referred to as “new” by most people in Sudbury, and probably would be until there was another new one. She would have preferred to travel by bus, not because she liked traveling by bus—she did not; Eve disliked all public transport—but because she felt it somehow gauche to work at a charity shop while driving a Bentley.

The Bentley had been bought by her mother some years previously and Eve had inherited it and kept it, selling her own cheery little Mitsubishi on Izzy's insistence. Izzy was not ready to part with anything that her grandmother had touched.

Eve had to take two turns around the car park before she found a parking space she was comfortable maneuvering into and then she walked over the bridge and down the High Street to the Red Cross shop.

“Hello, stranger,” Geraldine said. It was true that, over the past twelve months, Eve's attendance there had been infrequent. She felt bad about it.

“I'm sorry I haven't been more help, Geraldine,” she said.

“Not a problem,” Geraldine insisted cheerily. She was wearing an extraordinary multicolored collection of garments, several of which she had apparently made herself, and her hair hung in a long, careless plait down her back. She smiled broadly. She was the happiest person Eve had ever met.

“You're here now,” she said. “Shall I make some tea? I've just been sorting these.” She indicated a small hillock of baby clothes on the floor beside her. “Into sizes and whatnot. A woman came in with them this morning. They're all in marvelous condition. Look.” She tugged a baby's crawler suit from the pile and held it up.

Eve agreed that it looked immaculate. “I'll make the tea,” she said. “You've got your hands full. I've brought some ginger biscuits.”

“Goody.”

Eve found the genuine enthusiasm in Geraldine's voice deeply heartwarming. She'd been right to come.

“Even the tea tastes better when you make it,” Geraldine said when Eve emerged from the musty back room with the cups.

“I brought some loose with me. I used it instead of the bags,” Eve said.

“It's not just that. It's a touch. I've never had it—that touch with food. If it doesn't need scissors or a can opener, I can't cook it.” She laughed.

Eve laughed, too, and put her cup down to help with the baby clothes. They'd finished by the time a young woman came in with a little girl of about two. The child was in a stroller. She looked at Eve, wide-eyed, over her sipping cup.

“All too big for you, monkey,” the mother said, riffling through the piles that Geraldine and Eve had made. “Cute, though.” She grinned at them. “But I've got two in school already,” she said. “I've done my dash.”

Eve smiled at her. She had fine crow's feet at the corners of her eyes and her hair was escaping from a plastic clip at the back. She wore jeans and a navy rain jacket that had seen better days. She steered the stroller, weighed down at the handles with shopping, around the racks of clothes and piles of books and bric-a-brac and eventually came back to the counter with a child's T-shirt and two books, one a children's book in the shape of a clock and the other a fat paperback. It was one of Jack's.

“My boyfriend likes these,” the young woman said.

In the stroller the little girl had fallen asleep. The sipping cup was abandoned in her lap, and her head rested against the metal stroller frame. Leaning and picking up the cup, tucking it into one of her unwieldy canvas bags, her mother asked, “Are they any good?”

“Yes,” Eve said. “They're very good.”

Outside it had begun to drizzle and the woman tugged the stroller's sunshade forward roughly. Then she pulled her own hood up over her head and frowned. Her skin, in the shade of the deep color, looked pallid, like overused sheets.

Jackson Cooper, Eve thought, lives a five-hour flight from here in another universe.

Eve stayed the whole day at the shop and locked up for Geraldine, who sang in a choir on Thursdays and was glad to get away early.

“Gives me time for some baked beans before I go,” she joked.

Eve was happy to make up for her lack of attendance, but she also wanted to prove something to herself. Wanted to prove that she could cope. That she could be out of the house and cope. That was really why she'd come.

The shop was quiet for the last half hour and she had enjoyed Geraldine's company, but Eve felt weary, nevertheless, on the drive home. The thought of the wedding and its attendant responsibilities was beginning to keep her awake at night. The trip to Hadley Hall had been such a spectacular failure, and she knew there'd be worse to come. She drove evenly at the regular pace dictated by the ribbon of evening traffic, but in her chest a small, nervous, erratic beating started, like the flap of wet washing on a windy day.

Gwen was waiting when she let herself in at the kitchen door.

“I never like going back to an empty house,” she said when Eve remonstrated with her for staying so late. It was well past six. “I've made a chicken pie. Pastry's not as good as yours, but it's warm. Sit down,” she said. “I'll put the kettle on.”

Eve, feeling, despite her short absence, as though she'd been away forever, replied, “No, don't, Gwen. There's some Chablis in the larder. I'll open that. Will you have a glass with me?”

Gwen looked surprised at this, and Eve was aware that it was a departure from form, but she suddenly didn't care.

“Please, Gwen, just a small glass. I know you've got to get home.”

Gwen, responding perhaps to the depth of feeling in Eve's voice, agreed. She went to fetch the wine.

“No, really, let me,” Eve insisted. “Sit in the conservatory. It's nice in there in the evenings.”

Gwen, though, waiting while Eve opened the bottle, set out two glasses on a small lacquered tray.

“Oh heavens,” Eve said, seeing it. “Don't let me carry that, I'll drop it.” Then she began to cry.

Eve had wept rarely in her life, and the tears that she had shed had escaped her, flowed rather than burst forth. Once, soon after Simon had left, she had wandered, sleepless, into Izzy's nursery and sat next to the crib on a button-back nursing chair, watching her own sleeping baby in the dark without touching her, and cried a small river. But she had done so silently and with no force. In fact, when the nanny had come upon her, starting at the white nightgowned figure, and said, “May I help you, Mrs. Petworth,” Eve had been collected enough to reply, “Thank you, no, Kate. I just looked in for a moment.” And Kate, switching on a low light, had gone about her work without any sense of the depths of pain that the room still housed.

But now Eve cried wretchedly, as if her soul were being wrenched from her. And Gwen, decent, kind, motherly woman that she was, put one reassuring hand on her arm and let her. Then, when Eve had stilled a little, she led her quietly to the conservatory.

Gwen sat Eve in a wicker chair and handed her a glass and then she sat, too, opposite her. For a moment they sipped their wine in silence, and then Gwen said, “Well, that was a long time coming.”

Eve looked at her questioningly, depleted. She put her wine down, and her hand drifted against the glass-topped table beside her.

“About twenty years, I reckon,” Gwen went on.

Eve felt something, not crisp, but distant come to her lips, some statement of denial, some comment that would reestablish the employee-employer relationship between them. She began to pull herself up, but then she let go and withered again, back into her chair, and closed her eyes. A fresh, solitary tear skimmed her cheek. When she did speak, her voice was still broken. “Gwen, I'm such a mess. My life is such a mess.”

“Uh-huh,” Gwen said.

And Eve, at once aware of the airy, pitch-ceilinged conservatory and the immaculate garden beyond, said, “Oh, I know…,” rushing with embarrassment. “I know I'm terribly privileged.”

Gwen held up her hand. “You're lonely,” she said firmly. “You spent years at the beck and call of that cow of a mother of yours. I'm sorry, but we're speaking frankly and the woman was a cow, the way she treated you. And now, now that you're finally shot of her, you're letting that daughter of yours run you ragged. What you need are friends of your own. Not more plants, not more recipe books. Friends, flesh-and-blood people who appreciate you. You're one of the smartest, nicest, kindest people I've ever met, and you're sitting out here all alone night after night wasting your life.”

Outside the sky was beginning to turn milky with twilight. Gwen pressed on, “What's more, you're an extremely good-looking woman, with a wonderful figure. You could find yourself some nice man.”

Eve began, gently, to cry again, but she found, despite that, that she could still speak. “The thing is, Gwen, I can't…even if I did have friends…I can't go anywhere, I have these…attacks.”

Gwen nodded. “Like that day at the lavender,” she said calmly.

“Like the day at the lavender.”

On the day before her mother's funeral, Eve had decided to make lavender scones, because Izzy was due, and because she needed something to do. Something she could do without thinking. She had been feeling low. Not specifically because of the loss of her mother—Eve was not a hypocrite—but in that loss, so many other losses had made themselves felt. In the hours after Virginia died, a great amorphous ache had beset her.

And then there'd been the funeral to deal with, a wake at the house to cook for. The life of a party girl and serial marrier tends not to gather much moss in the way of long-lasting friendships, but there was still Virginia's doctor, Geraldine, a neighbor of Eve's, and an old boyfriend of Virginia's—whose name was unfamiliar to Eve, but who had seen the announcement in
The Telegraph
and telephoned—and also Dodo, Virginia's old pal from her champagne days, to mourn alongside her family.

Dodo had said she would stay at The George, although Eve had extended a cordial enough invitation to her to sleep at the house. “No,” she'd insisted. “I like my own space.” It was the first thing Dodo had ever said that Eve had felt she could relate to.