The Accidental (20 page)

She put her feet up on the wood of the pew then took them off again, dusting down where they’d been with her hand. She tried to recall the words of At Seventeen: inventing lovers on the phone who murmured vague obscenities because the girl in the song was too ugly to get any valentines and do anything other than invent lovers. And then that Marianne Faithfull song about the woman so past it at thirty-seven that she’d never drive through Paris in a sports car with the wind in her hair. It was all over at seventeen. Then it was all over again at thirty-seven. Forty-two, Eve thought. I’ve really had it. There was the tape, too, that the German assistant teacher at school, blonde, petite, and who must have been all of twenty-two, brought to class for them to translate, a song by a German rock star.
Sie ist vierzig
, he sang,
und sie fragt sich, war es nun schon alles?
Because she’d never get to California now, would she, that forty-year-old woman, being so old? She’d never get to frolic in the sea now with Jimmy Dean and all those film stars she’d dreamed about. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Eve (15) looked up from her desk in the German class at Eve (42) all those desert years later, and winked. Eve (42) sat in the church with all its buried dead outside under the grasses and paving stones and wondered how her books were doing on Amazon. She wondered if there was anywhere in the village she could go online and look it up and find out.

Then she wondered how her books would do on the real Amazon, if she were to drop them into it off the side of a boat.

This vision of herself on a boat and her books in the water sinking took her by surprise and made her laugh out loud. The church rang with her solitary laughter. It wasn’t respectful. When she stopped laughing the echo of herself stayed in her ears.

She locked up the church again. She returned its key to its rightful keeper.

What is it that’s wrong with your knee? Amber asked Eve out of the blue one evening.

My knee? Nothing, Eve said. Why?

You always hold your right leg that way, at that angle, when you sit down, Amber said.

No, Eve said. Well, funny you should say it, though, since I did damage the knee quite badly, years ago, but it’s fine now. How funny. I’d never noticed I held it like that. Probably because I’m sensitive about it I do it.

It hasn’t completely healed, you know, with you holding it like that, Amber said.

It feels fine, Eve said.

It looks sore, Amber said.

She had come across the room and knelt down in front of Eve. Now she was holding Eve’s knee with both her hands and pressing the muscles round it with her thumbs. Eve felt panic shoot out of her knee and up and down her body.

No, really, it’s absolutely fine, she said.

Amber didn’t stop. She was pressing quite hard. She had very hot hands.

It’s sensitive, Eve said.

Yes, Amber said.

She began to circle Eve’s knee with her hand and Eve had the peculiar sensation she usually only had when she was in an aeroplane air-bouncing in mid-takeoff, her heart in her mouth, her body sprung and fearful with her feet braced against the floor and her arms hard against the arms of the chair.

Eve started to talk. She said the first thing that came into her head.

Later, when they were getting ready for bed, Michael was strangely resentful.

You never told me you had a bad knee, he said. All these years and you never mentioned it, not to me anyway. Why didn’t you?

You never asked, Eve said and lay back in the bed. Michael: What did you do to it to damage it?

Eve: I fell off a horse.

Michael: A horse? When were you ever on a horse?

Eve: It was before I knew you.

Michael wasn’t listening and didn’t really care when it was. He was traipsing round the room like a petulant boy, looking for his special pillow. Eve lifted the sheet and showed him his pillow, tucked under the crook of her knee.

Eve: I need to borrow it tonight.

Michael: You know you can’t. You know I need that one.

Eve: Can’t you use one of the others? This one would really help me get some sleep, I need to put something under my knee after all that playing about with it, and it’s just the right shape for it.

Actually her knee felt fine, but she didn’t want to tell Michael this. Actually it felt very good, better than it had felt for years. Actually she was annoyed, though she knew it was irrational, that Michael had never at any point in their more-than-ten years together noticed she might even conceivably have a history of a sore knee. Instead it took some girl who didn’t even know her, to notice it. How many other things didn’t he notice? How many other things was she blind to, herself, because of his inadequacies?

She gave Michael back his pillow and he put the light out and positioned the pillow over his ear.

Eve lay in the dark with her hands folded neatly on her stomach. As she lay there she got angrier and angrier.

Very quietly, she got up and pulled on her dressing gown. Very quietly, down she went.

Amber was lying on the back seat of the car. When she saw Eve through the open window she kicked open one of the back doors with her foot. She drew her legs up to her chest so that Eve could sit on the edge of the seat.

Couldn’t sleep? she said.

Eve shook her head.

Want to go for a drive? Amber said.

If you’re not too busy, Eve said.

Amber laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Up to my eyes, she said.

I mean, obviously not busy, I mean tired, Eve said. If you’re not too tired.

I’m not tired at all, Amber said. She buttoned up her shorts. She swung herself over the front seats into the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door for Eve.

Forty miles an hour on the Norfolk backroads, the headlights lighting up dizzied insects and the colourless sides of the hedgerows; Eve and Amber had their elbows out of the rolled-down windows in the warm-cool air of the night. Eve lit a cigarette and passed it, lit, to Amber.

I feel quite renegade, Eve said.

I like driving nowhere, Eve said. It’s much better than driving somewhere.

We’re just like Thelma and Louise, Eve said.

Whee, Eve said.

I was twenty-three, Eve said, and I was on a tube train in London, and there was this boy opposite me, he was very good-looking. He was reading a book. That’s the thing, he was reading this intelligent-looking book, but he had a name-badge on which meant he worked for Curry’s. It said Curry’s, and then underneath it said his name: Adam. So I waited until he looked up and saw me looking at him, and I said, you’ll never believe this, but I’m Eve. And he said, actually you’ll never believe how many people come up to me telling me they’re Eve, and he smiled, and then he looked back down and carried on reading his book as if I wasn’t there. I had never done anything like that before in my life, I had never so much as said boo to a goose, never mind made a direct pass at someone I’d just seen thirty seconds ago. So I stood up to get off, but before I got off I leaned in over the top of his book, it was a book about a Polish film director, Adam was always finding things to be interested in before they became trendy and everybody else was interested in them. I leaned in over the top of it and said, yes, but what you don’t realize is, I’m the real Eve, the original Eve, and then I got off the train, it wasn’t my stop but I wanted to make an exit. So I went up the escalators and up to the street, and I stood in the air and I was really angry at myself, but I was exhilarated too, I was both. I kept telling myself he wouldn’t have been worth it because he worked, you know, for Curry’s, and I was right, because as it turned out, as I found out, he had almost no ambition, Adam, in fact you could say he had negative ambition. But there I was, standing in totally the wrong place, I had no idea where I was in the city and I was going to have to buy another tube ticket because I’d exited the station, so I turned around to go back down the steps and–there he was, standing right behind me, it was like something in a film, it was even raining, like it would be, in a film, and I said, hello, and he said, hello, and I said did you follow me all the way off the train and up the escalators? And he said, no, actually, it’s my stop, and he pointed, I live here, I live just round the corner. Then he said, Are you really Eve? I said yes. And he said, well, do you want a coffee or anything? And I said yes.

Eve sat back, finished, in the passenger seat.

Isn’t that amazing? she said. That he said
are you really Eve?

God, you’re boring, Amber said.

I’m–I’m what? Eve said.

Is that it? Amber said. Is that the highpoint, the true-blue, the secret-can’t-be-told everything-must-go ultimate all-singing all-dancing story-of-you? Jesus God you’re going to have to tell me something a bit more interesting than that or I’m going to fucking fall asleep right here at the wheel.

You are? Eve said laughing.

Next you’ll be telling me the ‘story’ of giving birth to your babies and how hard it was or how easy or whatever, for fuck sake, Amber said.

Well, Magnus, as you know, was a complicated birth, but he was fine and so was I. To be honest, it was after Astrid that I felt so totally fragmented. I still do, in some ways. But babies smell so nice. I think I’d give everything up just for the smell of my own new baby again, Eve said.

Amber had flicked what was left of her cigarette out of the window with a degree of violence. Maybe she wasn’t joking. The car was going faster. She seemed to be using the whole of her body to put her foot even more heavily on the accelerator. With each word she said she jerked more speed out of the engine.

Jesus fucking wept, all these endless endless fucking endless selfish fucking histories, she was saying.

Please slow down. Please stop swearing, Eve said.

I ought to punch you in the effing ucking stomach, Amber said. That’d give you a real fucking story to tell.

She took her hands off the wheel and then hit the wheel with the flats of both palms. The car swerved and jolted.

Don’t, Eve said.

The car rattled, swayed far too far over to the right as Amber took the left-hand bend too fast.

Eve began to fear for her life.

Eve went to London to see her publisher. After Norfolk, London was unbelievably noisy and busy.

Amanda, her publisher, took her to Alastair Little in Soho for lunch, now that Jupiter could afford it. On their way, Eve stopped and gave a street-beggar a pound coin. Amanda scrambled in her bag for a coin too, to do the same. Between the publishing house office and the restaurant, Eve stopped and gave away a coin to every person who asked her, just to see if Amanda would.

Here, Eve said giving one weather-stained man a five-pound note.

The man looked astonished. Then he looked delighted. Then he shook Eve’s hand. Amanda looked doubtful, then looked in the note compartment of her purse. She took out a ten, nice and new and brown.

Effing ucking ha ha ha, Eve thought.

The man did a little jig.

Thank you, ladies, he said. Have a nice day.

The restaurant was full of people looking to see who everybody else in the restaurant was.

Amanda always talked as if she had a list of the things to say to Eve memorized inside her head and she was mentally ticking them off as they spoke, seemingly spontaneously, to each other. Sixty-seven and a half thousand and rising, she was saying now that she’d ticked off the boxes beside family and holiday. Tremendous, she said. Demand for the first five is also utterly fantastic. Naturally, the question that everybody I talk to wants to know the answer for. How’s the new Genuine?

Getting there, Eve said.

How does April sound? Amanda said looking in her diary.

April ought to be fine, Eve said.

Great, Amanda said.

I thought this time I might write about a person who dies, Eve said.

Well, of course, Amanda said.

No, I mean dies, and that’s it, Eve said. Finished. Done. Kaput. End. No more story.

Well, yes, it’s an interesting idea, Amanda said. Though the Genuines don’t generally do that, do they? I mean, the Genuines formula is life-affirming, because they affirm life, don’t they?

A Palestinian boy, I was thinking, like that twelve-year-old the soldiers shot, Eve said.

When? Amanda said. I mean, which year, roughly?

She looked confused.

Last month, Eve said.

Last month? Amanda said. Well. It cuts down the market appeal drastically.

For throwing stones at their tank, Eve said. Or what about if I wrote about someone who’s alive right now, but will be dead tomorrow morning, say? In Iraq?

In…? Amanda said. She looked even more appalled.

Iraq, Eve said.
You
know.

Well, it’s, it’s more overtly contemporaneously political than we’re used to, Amanda said. Though why you’d want to change the historical focus, which is the Genuine premium, in other words which is, if you ask me, and I think if you were to ask the readers too, why they work so well, why they’re so popular, why readers have just cottoned on to the formula, it’s because their particular historical focus–

I haven’t decided yet, Eve said. I may even decide not to write a book at all.

Of course if it’s a question of advance, Amanda said.

I’m beginning to think I’ve maybe written enough books, Eve said.

But you just said, you just said April would be fine, Amanda Farley-Brown of Jupiter Press said looking miserable, putting down her wine glass.

It depends on the erosion of the Gulf Stream, of course, and how the relevant weather fronts perform, Eve said.

What? Amanda said faintly.

Whether April will be fine, Eve said.

Amanda looked flushed and lost. It made Eve feel bad. She didn’t know Amanda very well. She didn’t know what kind of life she led, what the pressures were on her life, what her reasons were for being the kind of person she was. What were the pressures on a twenty-seven-year-old with an editor’s job at a small publisher that had just been taken over by a much bigger publisher? Amanda had the look of a person who’s been told she’ll be shot at dawn.