Dear Evelyn, page 17
Yet Clifford, although he changed in other ways, remained very devoted. She could see how Connie might despise him for just that reason, especially since she wanted children and he, unable to perform because of his injury, couldn’t provide them … As for Mellors! At first Evelyn was appalled, but he improved somewhat once he dropped the idiotic accent. For a while it was almost entertaining, and then, after the initial lovemaking scenes in the pheasant coop and in the forest, the story started to upset her. Was the whole rest of it going to be them either fucking, as they insisted on calling it, or talking about it? So it seemed, but a little of that went a long way, she thought. If you thought too much about sex, it put you off. And why insist on that word, which didn’t sound like anything you’d want to do?
She set the book aside, and went upstairs to check on Louise, who lay with her arms flung wide, breathing with her mouth half open. She crossed the landing to her and Harry’s bedroom: like the lounge downstairs, it ran from front to back of the house and looked out over both gardens. She crossed to the back window and opened it, glad of the cool, damp air. Connie and Mellors had woven forget-me-nots and other flowers into the hair around their private parts! What a thing to do. Was that what a garden was for?
At this time, although the lawn glowed deep green, most of the shrubs and trees in their garden had lost their autumn colours, and there wasn’t currently a flower to be seen. It would be a long time until the snowdrops and hellebores emerged, let alone forget-me-nots, which they did have, growing by the front path and around the foot of the magnolia. They worked very well with tulips and daffodils in springtime flower arrangements, she reminded herself, struggling against a sudden rush of tears.
It was a silly book, but the trouble was that it had somehow put her in mind of what happened in Torquay during the war—had set her remembering how she and her mother, sweltering in the dust and heat of London, had escaped there for a week away. The town had been bombed earlier in the year but they told themselves that was no worse than home, and at least the public were still allowed on one of the town’s beaches. She’d not been to Devon before. They got a very good price for the trains and buses and a budget room on Brandon’s Cliffe: no sea view, but a decent size and pleasant enough. It was relaxing to be away.
And she remembered how after supper—no better than you’d expect, but not the point—and Lillian’s bedtime story, her mother took to playing cards with the owner, Mrs Briggs, in the lounge and the pair of them listened out for Lillian—she must have been about four—and Evelyn could slip out for some time on her own. It was a delicious time of day, still warm, the sea turning to violet and pink, the air smelling first of garden flowers and then of the sea.
Of course, the place was full of servicemen and someone was bound to try his luck. Her strategy was always to keep walking, but when on that first day she did eventually pause to take in the sunset on the water, the man who appeared out of nowhere and approached her had something about him that made her pause long enough for conversation to begin. He was not especially tall or muscular, quite slender, in fact, but from the beginning she felt an intensity, a strange kind of assurance and authority about him. And at the same time, he was very polite. He stood at a distance, called her Madam, introduced himself with a slight bow:
“Aleksander Grutowski. Polish Air Force. My squadron was evacuated when the Germans invaded and we are in this country now to train in exile. I can say no more than that … But I hope I may I have your permission to walk with you, unless you prefer to be alone?”
His being in the Polish Air Force was part of why she agreed to the walk, but it was also something to do with the way he held himself, his quaint manners, and the quick, definite way he looked at her.
They walked at a more leisurely pace than the one she had kept before. It was very lucky, she ventured, that his squadron managed to get out when the Germans came.
“Yes,” he said, and drew in a long breath, “yes, but I had no chance to say goodbye, and now I am afraid to say that my father, mother, and sister are missing. Look—”
He stopped by a stone wall covered in nasturtiums and took from his pocket first his passport, and then a photograph of the family, glossy-haired and posed formally in a drawing room bristling with gilded furniture and picture frames.
“All gone!” he said.
Looking at the picture, at his sister in her jewellery and elegant calf-length dress, and the parents in their dark formal wear, at the youthful, fuller-cheeked version of the airman himself, it had seemed impossible.
“Perhaps they’re hiding somewhere safe,” she said. He agreed to hope so.
His father was a count.
“One day,” she told him, close to tears, “we will punish Hitler for what he has done to your people and their country.” She put her hand on his arm as she said this, then quickly removed it.
“Even now, we punish the Germans quite often,” he said. He pulled a quick smile, continued. “Of course, it is never enough, and at the same time, it is not what anyone wants to have to do. Shall we turn around at the bay?” The sea was extraordinary, shimmering orange and gold.
He would be very happy to walk with her again, he said. He could see she was a married woman, and he would be very interested to hear about her husband and family. And then, when they parted at the end of her street, that little half bow again … He was very easy to talk to, and it turned out they walked together every day of that week except the Saturday, which she had to miss because it was her twenty-fifth birthday and her mother had something arranged.
“You seem no older than nineteen!” he said when she explained this, and she blushed. “With me,” he said, “I am a similar age, but I rather think it is the opposite way around.”
Her heart thudded when she so much as thought of him. Nothing untoward had happened, but she was incapable of turning away an opportunity to meet him, and this was in a way appalling to her, degrading somehow—yet she admired Aleksander Grutowski very much and that made it less shameful. She wept into her pillow at the prospect of not seeing him again when the holiday was over.
“The day after you leave, I will return to base to resume my duties,” he told her. “I will be both sad and glad. We are different men, in the air. I climb into the cockpit, and I already feel lighter,” he told her. “My shoulders release—” He stopped in his tracks, frowning.
“Relax?” she suggested, and a smile flashed across his face.
“Thank you … The roar of the engines, the moment when the plane takes off … This is beyond description. And when I look down and see the little world spread out below, I forget my troubles then, for a while at least. I love to fly. Though unfortunately it is now a very deathly business.”
Most of them only lasted a few weeks. She willed back tears, and the noise in her throat when she swallowed was so loud that he must have heard it.
“None of us asked for this,” he said, taking her hand, “but it cannot be avoided. The important thing is to live, to really live for as long as we have.” They had come to a halt at a bend in the path and he pulled her into a kiss.
She allowed it. Much more than that: she felt the kiss spread through her, she tipped her head back, and opened herself up to it. She had relished his hands on her waist and buttocks, the heat and pressure of his body against hers. She wanted it all, wrapped her arms around him. No one else was around. How far would it have gone if he had not pulled back at the end of the second kiss and said, smiling, “So this is what you want?”
And then she remembered who she was supposed to be. She too pulled back. Breathing hard, she looked right into his eyes.
“No,” she’d told him. “No. I’m married.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Extraordinary times do perhaps call for extraordinary behaving, but I certainly mean no disrespect for you, or to your husband.”
He released her completely and then, with a foot at least between them at all times, they walked briskly back to the guesthouse, resuming polite conversation about halfway there: the spell of good weather, how long it would take her to get home to London, her favourite parts of the city. The sun sank below the horizon; colours were softer and somehow richer. He accompanied her right to the door of the guesthouse.
“I do very much hope all goes well for you and your family,” he said, bowing to her before he walked off into the dusk.
It was around that time that Harry had written to her, from Tripoli, about a man in his troop getting a divorce when he learned his wife was having an American serviceman’s baby. I like to think that after the first shock of it I’d be more tolerant, he wrote, but please, don’t test me.
In the letter she wrote to him when she got home from Torquay, Evelyn mentioned the Polish airman and his birthday compliment, though she didn’t say that she had walked with him every evening, or that she had kissed him and more than liked it.
Of course, she had no idea then of the horrors to come. The Warsaw Uprising—the misery and starvation, the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. How, at the end of the war, Poland would be betrayed, handed over to the Soviets who had engineered their defeat. That Polish airman, she’d tell Harry then, the one I told you about. How would I face him? Though of course, the odds were that he was dead. She felt it was better not to try and find out, and as time went on she rarely thought of him.
Just once again, years after the war ended, prompted by a documentary about Poland on the radio, she had spoken to Harry of the airman she’d met on holiday.
“I was quite sweet on him in a way,” she said “But nothing happened.” They were taking a walk around the garden, looking at what was coming up.
“Understood,” Harry said. He glanced at her, slipped his arm around her waist for a while. By then they had two children and a mortgage; they’d long ago left the streets they grew up in and were almost middle-aged.
But if he had not asked me if that was what I wanted—if I had let that kiss continue, Evelyn thought as she looked out on the green lawn, the rich mud of the vegetable plot, the shrubs, mature now, but dormant, the cypress tree and the hedge at the back, at the neighbours’ gardens to the side and back, all large and well-kept—would I have been carried away by the last blind flush of extremity? Would I have found the very heart of the jungle of myself? Would I have become a passive, consenting thing, like a physical slave? She felt stirred up.
Harry was a conscientious lover. He took his time and wanted her to enjoy sex, and mostly she did, but there was no jungle, no being a consenting thing.
What a way to think! she told herself on the way downstairs.
She decided not to finish the book, and put it away in the back of her stocking drawer, where no one would look. Modern novels in general, she felt, were perhaps better avoided. You never knew what was going to jump out of them.
Something was going on: Evelyn’s eyes seemed brighter than usual, Harry thought, and her jaw tight. Louise was asleep upstairs and Valerie had already left the table to do her homework, so he asked, “What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Evelyn said.
“You seem a bit on edge.”
“You’re imagining it,” she told him, and he should have known to give up then, but he said, “Maybe you’re tired,” at which she stood and said, “I’m getting tired of this,” and began to gather the plates. Oh, not again, Harry thought.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I just—”
“Don’t just me,” she said as she made for the kitchen. He followed her.
“You’re being completely unreasonable,” he said, though he knew, by now, that reasonable was beside the point, and challenging her a stupid thing to do. But he wanted to know: “What is the matter?” he asked. She had her back to him and her hands in the sink.
“I’ve told you,” she said, “and will you get it into your thick head that there is nothing the matter with me.”
“I’d rather you didn’t speak to me like that,” he said, another mistake: he shouldn’t have given her the opportunity. Rather. She turned to face him, her eyes wild.
“Oh, you would, would you?”
“Don’t shout.”
“I’ll do what I damn well like!” He hesitated—almost said something along the lines of “When have you ever done anything else? I’ll leave you to it, then,” and almost walked out of the steamy kitchen, as he’d done before—out into the cold, soggy garden or the garage, where he’d find some kind of distraction, and could at least smoke. But instead he took a step towards her, stood close enough to hear her breathing. Her chest rose and fell. She stood proud, her hands fisted at her sides, her back and neck long, her chin a little tilted, her enormous eyes larger than ever, glistening, and fixed on him. It was not a simple thing. He saw that she was furious, but heartbroken at the same time.
“What’s that, then?” he said quietly, with half a smile, “What would you damn well like?” She didn’t answer, just looked at him.
“I know what I’d like,” he told her, then closed the gap between them, put his hands on her shoulders. He cupped the back of her neck, kissed her, then walked her back to the pantry door, the only part of the kitchen you could lean against.
“Valerie—” she reminded him. Valerie would be all right, he told her. He half pushed her up the stairs, and in the bedroom said he didn’t care about the damned girdle marks and why did she wear the thing anyway? Off with it, please. They stood together in the dusky room, running their hands over each other’s skin—that was the bit she would remember—and then got down on the floor beside the bed and fucked, as Lawrence would have put it.
A decade later, around the time things started to go off the rails but long before the visit to the police station, Louise, snooping one afternoon when Harry and Evelyn were at the Stark’s for dinner, found the book still there, in the middle drawer of Evelyn’s bedside chest. It was buried beneath a tangle of stockings of various thicknesses and similar hues, which looked like the cast-off skins of a nest of large beige and tan snakes.
Inches
The building was the colour of dried blood, and the door slammed heavily behind them. Inside, it stank of cigarettes. Several benches were bolted to the black-and-white tiled floor. The office was to the left; a pink-faced young police officer with very short hair slid open a much-smeared window.
“Yes, Madam?” he said. Earlier, Louise had thought of jumping out of the car, and now she thought of pulling free of her mother’s grip and running, but where? She was wearing flip-flops and had no money on her; also, part of her wanted to know if this could possibly be real, and if so what would happen next. Her mother’s fingers dug into her arm.
“Constable Ryan? Mrs Miles. I called earlier. I’ve brought my daughter in because she’s beyond my control,” she said. The officer switched his gaze to Louise, standing there in her jeans and T-shirt, and she stared back at him, noting a fold of neck fat that bulged above his collar. “I’d like to make a formal complaint,” her mother said, and the officer picked up his phone. Her mother’s grip loosened and Louise tugged her arm free.
“Constable Ryan. A mother with a teenage girl beyond parental control,” the officer said. “Yes. Mrs Miles. Please sit down and wait,” he told them, gesturing at the benches behind them, and obediently, they both did.
“Look what you’ve brought me to,” Louise’s mother said, clutching her bag on her lap.
“I didn’t ask you to read my mail.”
“Mail that you were having sent to your friend’s house!”
“I wonder why.”
“Don’t you take that high tone with me—”
The door next to the sliding window opened abruptly, and the short-haired officer motioned them to come in.
They followed him to a small but very high, cell-like room where a much larger, older, and completely bald officer sat behind a metal desk. The door closed behind them with a loud metallic clang.
“Sergeant Whitney,” he told them. “What is the problem, madam?”
“I believe my daughter has been having underage relations.”
Call it instinct. She was vacuuming. It was a Friday afternoon and she was doing the stairs and landings and main bedroom. Monday and Tuesday were for the washing and then the kitchen and bathrooms and Wednesday and Thursday were for the living and dining rooms. The house was finally under control, and things were much better since she’d spoken with Harry about the accumulation of books and the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room, especially since his book jackets did not match. He had eventually agreed to limit himself to three shelves on the unit to his side of the living-room fireplace. After all, she had pointed out when he chafed at this, he was not actively reading most of them, and was there not plenty of storage in the attic, as well as a huge, free public library in town?
On the matching shelves to her side, she kept her Du Maurier collection and a few other good-looking hardbacks, along with framed photographs and ornaments, so the look was not really symmetrical, but the chaos had been contained, and the two landscapes that hung above each of the sets of shelves, Cornwall and Box Hill, were the same size and framing and so had a soothing, balancing effect. And as for Louise’s dreadful room, the rule was that she had to pick everything up and vacuum on Sunday mornings, or else forfeit her pocket money, and that worked fairly well, too. Valerie had been untidy as a child, but grew out of it, so there was hope! Lily, of course, had always loved to have things nicely put away.
