Dear Evelyn, page 21
Though you hardly needed to look. Sex was everywhere, impossible to avoid. They seemed to have liked the woman on her elbows and knees.
“They’re not at all slender, are they?” Harry pointed out to Evelyn as they studied a faded fresco in flesh and earth tones. “Pear-shaped. Rather voluptuous,” he said. Despite the crude execution of the painting, he found the knees-and-elbows position fairly arousing—a reminder of times when things between them were more spontaneous and varied. He had to keep himself from putting his hand on Evelyn’s hip.
“That winding path down to the shore,” Julian said that evening, the second night in Sorrento, all four of them leaning on the rail to look at the lights twinkling on the water, “the switchback down to the little harbour? Did you hear the story?” He told them how, before the first war, the wealthy German arms manufacturer, Krupp, had arrived on his yacht, fallen in love with the island, and paid for the construction of the path to the bay, at the bottom of which a small, locked gate led to a cave that housed a not-so-secret club. “Outrageous homosexual orgies,” Julian said, his eyes widening. “Krupp’s wife heard of it and complained to the Kaiser, and the Kaiser, being a friend of her husband’s, locked her up in an asylum. But eventually photographs leaked out and Krupp had to leave Italy. Went back to Germany and shot himself.”
“Good riddance,” Evelyn said. “And a shame the firm didn’t collapse; it might have saved a lot of lives. What happened to the wife?”
“I don’t know,” Julian said, “but I will make it my business to find out.” He did, too, delivering the answer two days later: she was released.
“Did you two go to the grotto?” Harry asked.
“I trust there aren’t any stories about that,” Evelyn said. Though surely, Harry thought, there would be: silvered swimmers lost, found, or turned into dolphins; the ghosts of emperors ravaging teenaged girls.
“We waited almost half an hour,” Mary said, “but in the end we had to give up. There were so many people. We would have missed our transfer back. We should have gone with you.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me on all fours, like an animal,” Evelyn told Harry, and actually, he had been thinking about it, but there was no law against that.
“I’m not expecting anything,” he said, kneading the muscles between her shoulder blades. She lay face down on top of the bed, the sheet pulled over her legs and buttocks. “But,” he added, “do you remember the fun we had in that first flat? I think we did, back then—”
“Down a bit,” she said.
“I do,” he said, running his fingers slowly down the bumpy sides of her spine until he reached her lower back, another area that she liked him to give detailed attention to. Over the last decade, it had got so that foreplay could take days, a week even, beginning with the first verbal overtures, and often a gift of some kind, such as the swimsuit, and progressing by subtle degrees from there.
“You are still just as lovely,” he told her. If he was lucky and she relaxed enough, she would turn over and let him in. The whole ship, he thought, might well be engaged in similar activities after their day in the city of the dead, who, before the ash fell, had been so very much alive.
They were at sea the next day, and Harry found that once Evelyn fell asleep, he grew tired of sitting by the pool. The tedium put him unpleasantly in mind of the troopship, going to Egypt. To dispel the association, he walked around the Calypso several times, exchanging pleasantries with other passengers and stopping periodically to study the waves, the sky, and the mysterious place where one became the other. He thought he might manage to get over his inability to write about the grotto by writing instead about the very impossibility of describing its blueness. He leaned his notebook on the cap of the rail and wrote: Blues must not try to be the blues of sky. Or sea, for that matter, he thought, looking out at the expanse of it, the darker parts, the shining places, speckled with light, the mysterious stillness. The depths, and the surface, sometimes a mirror, sometimes a skin. The skin of the sea … Didn’t Homer, perhaps feeling the same impossibility, avoid particularizing the colour, and call the sea wine-dark? Each blue was its own entity. He’d be better off without the words that existed, must somehow create something new. That was the thing: the experience of being in the grotto with Evelyn required a reinvention of blue. He wrote that down, too. There could be a sonnet, he thought, beginning with the attempt to avoid azure, and ending with the search for utterly new words, the need to reinvent, syncopate. And there was a deeper journey, as well as the actual one. What was it about being in that blue that melted him so? What was he really trying to name, keep, and pass on? The journey from outside to in was part of it. The little boat—the transition from land to water, the disconnection from the earth, was the beginning of the whole thing. Wave-jostled, they glided towards an invisible entrance, slipped away from the sun and the sky into that low passage, a narrow neck of rock, blue glowing at the end of it, a strange flame, and all the while the water lapped and the boat rocked, and Evelyn had leaned back on him. All experience was ravishment. It had been like being born, or perhaps the opposite of it, an inverse birth, returning to a womb of light and music, the two of them joined in the experience … Blue womb. It was contained but at the same time vast, and in it, in the bluelightedness, the blessedness, the impossible blueness, a man and woman together after many years, a heavenly thing—
A shadow darkened the page and he knew immediately that it was Julian.
“Nice morning! And nearly time for a glass of wine,” he said, as Harry snapped his notebook shut. “What are you up to?”
Harry shrugged, looked out at the ocean’s indescribable blues: utterly different to those in the cave, related, yet unique. Perhaps everything that mattered was like that, he thought, beyond expression. Yet how he wanted to be able to set it down. Why? To keep it? No—you couldn’t. Out of gratitude? To whom, or what?
“Just jotting down a few notes,” he said, slipping the pencil down the spiral binding and tucking the book in his pocket.
“Good for you. I do so admire people who write.”
“I don’t, really,” Harry told him, “I just have a notebook.”
There was a long pause.
“I must say, your wife is terrific fun,” Julian said. Harry turned to look at him but his face was relaxed and ordinary as he too studied the sea. “So spirited and full of life. Though I can imagine she might sometimes be a bit of a handful.”
“Excuse me?” Harry said.
“Oh, I didn’t meet to give offence. But I can see how, well, determined she is. To be honest, I wish Mary had more of that spirit. She was very vivacious when I first met her, but she lost a baby and, frankly, hasn’t been the same since. She’s on some new kind of tablets now but they’re not working. And, so far, this holiday doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect. Sometimes I wonder how long I can put up with it. I don’t seem to have much luck with wives.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harry said. The two of them stood there staring at the glittering water of the Ionian Sea.
“Do you suppose,” Julian continued, “that Evelyn would take Mary under her wing a bit? A new friend might help her shake it off.” Their eyes met briefly; the man was clearly desperate: why else would he make such a proposition. But what on earth to say?
“I can only ask.”
“Much appreciated,” Julian said, treating Harry to a toothy smile. “What a day, eh? Now, going back to your writing,” he said, “is it poetry, now, or prose?”
“Nothing, really,” Harry said, “but verse.”
“I’m only asking because my brother edits a little magazine and they’re always looking for things. I could put you in touch.”
“No, really,” Harry told him. “I’m not at the sending-out stage.”
They reached Corfu at dusk, a time when the colour of the sea was particularly deep and unfathomable. Masson’s talk that night featured Calypso, Nausicaa, and Odysseus, with illustrations from a variety of painters through the ages, some of them very amusing, and quotations from the Odyssey. Calypso, Masson reminded them, had seduced Odysseus and kept him on Ogygia for seven years, desperately in love with him even though, despite her attractions, he hankered for his wife, Penelope. Eventually, under pressure from Athena, Calypso released him and he set forth on a raft, only to capsize in a storm and struggle, naked, ashore here in Corfu, where he stumbled upon princess Nausicaa and her maidens, at which point he admitted his identity and began to tell them the complicated tale of his adventures thus far.
“And thus,” Masson said, “when we step ashore in the morning, we will be standing on the island where the most famous story of all time was first told—that is, if Homer is to be believed.”
“Nausicaa fell in love with Odysseus,” Harry told Julian, who was sitting to his left, “but he wouldn’t marry her. He sailed home to Penelope. And later on, Nausicaa married his son. More suitable, really …”
“Befriend her?” Evelyn had said before dinner, when Harry mentioned Julian’s request, “Why would I do that?” She was sitting at the little dressing table doing her hair. She wore the necklace he had bought her for their silver wedding anniversary.
“He thought it might help. Jolly her along, I suppose.”
“Harry,” she’d said, turning to him, “I don’t like her. We’ve nothing in common! She’s a wet blanket and you know I’m not a do-gooder. We’re on holiday! We didn’t pay all this money to spend our time being social workers.”
“I thought it an odd request,” he said, “but I said I’d mention it. I suppose if you were down like that, you might like some encouragement.”
“But I wouldn’t be,” she said. “You can’t let yourself fall to pieces like that. I didn’t. It’s terrible to lose a baby, of course, but it must have been a very long time ago. She has to get over it.”
“It’s probably not the whole story.”
“It’s quite enough,” she said. “As for tomorrow, let’s do the old town and the monastery, just the two of us.”
It was excruciatingly awkward, but Harry felt saying nothing would be worse still, so he accompanied Julian to the bar after the Corfu lecture.
“Look, I did have a word with Evelyn, but I don’t think it’ll work out. She feels you probably can’t engineer these things.”
“Just a thought!” Julian said, smiling determinedly. “Women, eh? Very complicated. How’s that poem of yours coming along?” Doubtless it was just conventional chit-chat, or the need to change the subject, but Harry felt a sudden and powerful urge punch the other man in the face: was there nothing of his the man would leave alone? Not even his innermost thoughts, the words he played with in his head, his dreams of what he might have been? But he swallowed his fury, shrugged, and wished Julian goodnight.
Evelyn lay on her side, covered only by the sheet, breathing evenly. He undressed and lay beside her, but sleep eluded him. He told himself that a day at sea without any real exercise was likely to blame and eventually slipped out of bed, opened the window as far as it would go, and settled into the not-very-generous armchair. He considered finding his shorts and digging his notebook out of the back pocket, but did not do so. The Blue Grotto sonnet was over and done with, spoiled, dead. He would never complete a poem to his satisfaction, much less send one to a little magazine, however much he had once imagined he might do such a thing. It did not matter that he had an ear for verse and had grown up in the same streets as Edward Thomas. He was no longer that boy who had sat on the back step, his heart thudding as he read the sonnet his teacher had assigned him: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom … And he was no longer the young man coming home to his wife after years of war, vowing not to be ground down by routine, to stay open to the possibility of an ecstatic life. He was none of that now, so who had he become?
A “keen gardener”?
A career in municipal construction, counting bricks and catching contractors when they tried to cheat, the management of others doing the same, the writing of policy: all that, thank goodness, would soon be over. Four years to go. He was a father and very glad of it; he’d have been happy to have more children, and had taken Evelyn’s two miscarriages harder than she had. Despite all the violent emotion, or even because of it, he liked being among women. More than anything, he was a husband. He liked having a wife who, even now, other men noticed and envied him for, a woman who only had to sit on a deck chair or a park bench and a would-be charmer would materialize … As for Evelyn, had she changed? She had become more intensely herself. She was sometimes generous and sometimes passionately loyal; she understood duty and believed in it, yet in practice found it intolerable … When she wanted something, it drove her. She experienced her own feelings with great intensity, but often failed to accept those of others, especially if they differed from hers. She disliked bullies and tyrants; she also disliked introspection, compromise, weakness, vagueness: these things frightened her, he understood, and also, she saw them as a waste of time, of life. She believed in food, laughter, walking, fresh air. Evelyn would never do a thing she didn’t want to do; she was incapable of it. She had always been like this, but seemed more so, now, as she moved beyond the middle years. Perhaps the girls were right that he should have withstood her, defended himself, and them? But he would have lost her, and that was unthinkable.
Her hunger for life seemed starker and more desperate without the distracting glow of youth, also less charming, more primitive. It was growing more powerful; as she felt the pressure of mortality, the life force in her, the ego, or whatever you called it, the thing about her that everyone noticed, pushed back harder. This was Evelyn: strong, hungry, wilful, beautiful, sometimes kind, sometimes harsh: completely extraordinary. The woman he had met on the library steps thirty-five years ago had changed only in degree. He had chosen her and continued to do so. What love was had changed to the point that he no longer understood it, though he knew its scale and depths, and knew that it was most of who he was.
She slept on while he thought these things.
In the morning they would stroll around Corfu, and the next day the ship would dock at Olympia, and from there go to Crete, where somewhere, in the nearby hills, waiting to be discovered, lay the Minotaur’s cave. They would visit the ruins of the palace at Knossos, where Pasiphaë had mated with Zeus’s bull and her daughter Ariadne showed Theseus how to navigate the labyrinth, and then was abandoned on the beach.
But all that was to come. There were gods and there were mortals, Harry thought. Evelyn was some kind of goddess, and he was just a man. She lay on her side, one arm tucked under the pillow; the sheet she was draped in skirted the tops of her breasts and then tucked under the other arm, which rested loosely on her side. Her youthful face had restored itself. Her eyes at rest behind smooth-seeming lids, she slept on and gradually it grew lighter, the sea glittering first silver, then gold.
*
Only a month after the holiday, Julian wrote to tell them that Mary had taken an overdose of sleeping pills: he’d returned from work to find her on the sofa, dead. They agreed to invite him for a walk on the downs and a pub lunch, if he felt up to it. Evelyn found that she liked Julian much more without Mary there.
“Your wife’s suicide was a terrible thing,” she told him, putting her hand on his arm, “but you must accept that it was probably for the best, if she felt as she did about life.” It was up to him, now, she said, to make the most of his time.
He was a little taken aback at first, but took this well, and later gave them, without charge, some very useful tax advice.
Hotel Paris
Cloud
During the summertime visit, there was still a kind of comedy to Evelyn and Harry’s mealtime negotiations, and Louise did not at first realize how bad things were.
“What do you want? Chicken sandwich or macaroni cheese?”
“Whatever you’re having will be fine, dear, thank you.”
“You know it drives me mad when you say that. What do you want?”
“Please remind me of the choices.”
“Chicken sandwich, macaroni cheese.”
“I really don’t mind …”
Evelyn whipped around to face Louise. “He won’t choose in case someone else wants the same thing,” she said. “Martyrdom. Drives me mad.” But perhaps Dad really doesn’t care, thought Louise. Or perhaps he wants neither.
“Macaroni, please,” he said, his eyes fixed on his wife’s face.
“I’ll have to warm the oven all over again.”
“In that case, chicken.”
Time after time … It was even worse at night.
“Have you used the facilities?”
“Will you kindly leave me alone?”
“Why are you so bloody-minded?”
And so at Christmas, when she took the children to visit, she warned them in the taxi to the airport that their grandparents might have changed since their last visit. She cringed at the euphemism even as she uttered it.
“Changed into what?” asked her oldest, Zoe. Liam, the youngest, sucked his fingers. Issy, who hadn’t wanted to come, stared miserably out of the window at the wasteland of industrial buildings and hotels.
