Dear Evelyn, page 27
“And the thing is, she wrote in it that she was visiting soon. But I don’t think she has,” he told Sandra. There was something wrong with his voice. “Has she? I’m worried about her. Could you please phone one of my daughters for me?”
Sandra squatted down on the grass in front of his wheelchair, held both of his hands in hers, and looked up into his face.
“Harry, you might have forgotten that there was some very sad news about Evelyn. She passed away almost two months ago, not long after she got back from her holiday.”
“That’s impossible!” he told her.
“Valerie gave you the news,” Sandra said. “It was a heart attack, and then her kidneys failed. She was very brave, and didn’t suffer. Everyone agrees it was the way she would have wanted to go …”
Impossible! The way she would have wanted to go? Evelyn would never want any way of going. Sandra kept on looking up at him.
“Valerie was with her. The other two flew over right away. You were too frail to go to the memorial, but Louise just took you to see the tree they planted in her memory. And of course we can call her or Valerie or Lillian if you’d like.”
She was still holding his hands, and looking up into his face.
And for a moment it seemed as if Valerie might have told him about a phone call from the hospital in the middle of the night. That Evelyn had been comfortable, and still able to talk. And then—but if—surely there would have been a message for him?
No, it was impossible. Dear Evelyn—always so very energetic, full of life. Only this afternoon, she had kissed him in the bluebell woods, the air honey-sweet. She had just been to Paris. She remembered all their holidays.
He wanted his letter back.
Acknowledgements
Harry and Evelyn are characters, not real people. That said, my first and deepest thanks must go to my parents. I am particularly grateful to my father for his letters to my mother during the Second World War and its aftermath, and to my mother for keeping them. In “Water, Water, Everywhere” and “Bascombe,” some of these letters of my father’s, used with his permission, form an important part of the narrative. They appear sometimes verbatim and at other times edited, recombined and in other ways altered. In some places, I intersperse original letters with entirely fictional letters written in a similar style. My father is, then, the posthumous co-author of some parts of this book, and I hope that both of my parents would be pleased with the outcome, though I certainly cannot be sure of it. I am profoundly grateful to my sisters for being open to such a project.
I also want to thank some poets, as well as poets in general. Listed here are the poems overtly referred to, and also some of those more obliquely connected, in the author’s mind at least, to each section of the book.
Desperate Glory: “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson; “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins; “Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter,” “January” and “I Am” by John Clare; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats; “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” by William Wordsworth; “Adlestrop” and “Lob” by Edward Thomas; “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” by Rupert Brooke; “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen; “Sea-Fever” and “Cargoes” by John Masefield; “Sonnet 21,” and others, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; “Sonnet 116,” and others, by William Shakespeare. Whatever the Poets May Say: “Love’s Philosophy” by Percy Bysshe Shelley; “Sonnet 6” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; “September 1939” by WH Auden. Water, Water, Everywhere: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Homer’s Odyssey. Bascombe and Bloody Nothing: “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot (used with permission). A Kind of Music: “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Another Man: “The Other” by Edward Thomas; “The Sick Rose” by William Blake; “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth; A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (3.1.527 onwards, Oberon’s speeches). House Garden House: “An Arundel Tomb” by Philip Larkin; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. Sounds: “The Word,” “The Thrush,” and other bird poems by Edward Thomas; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. Inches: “This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin; “Ode on Melancholy” by John Keats; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. Blue: “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats; Homer’s Odyssey. Cloud: “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth; “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas. All the World: As You Like It (2.7, Jaques speaking) by William Shakespeare; “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare. To Make Much of Time: “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick; “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. Hotel Paris: “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell; “Poem 372” by Emily Dickinson, and “Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon.
Inspiration is one thing, time to write another. This book would still be a collection of fragments were it not for timely support from the Access Copyright Foundation, who assisted with research expenses, and from Vancouver Island University and The British Columbia Arts Council, which enabled me to set aside the time to finish drafting it. As for emotional support, I am not sure where I would be or whether I would write at all without my husband Richard and my two children, whose love, belief in me, and forgiveness of my absences make the whole enterprise possible.
Many people helped me research and then write Dear Evelyn. Heartfelt thanks are due to my friend Carole Miles, who accompanied me on UK research trips, wearing out at least one pair of shoes while documenting land and cityscapes with far better photographs than I would take; to Tony Jones, archivist at Emanuel School; to Colin Thornton of the Edward Thomas Fellowship for fielding my many questions about the poet and his life; to historians Simon Fowler and Colin Taylor for helping me understand and visualize the messy end of the Desert War; to the British Library for its wonderful maps and to Battersea Public Library for its local archives; to Alison Harvey, SCOLAR archivist at the Cardiff University library; to Kate Fisher for her fascinating book Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960; to the late Alan Moorehead for his classic account, The Desert War, from which I borrowed the image of surrendering troops as butterflies; and to Edna Longley for her notes in the Collected Poems of Edward Thomas.
Several writer-friends read various versions of the manuscript and supplied me with both encouragement and excellent advice, some of which I did not act upon, but all of which I appreciated: many thanks to Vicky Grut, Caroline Adderson, Gillian Campbell, Lynne Van Luven, and Margaret Thompson, and also to those who answered an important question: Adina Hildebrant, Shirley Graham, Peter Levitt, and Maggie Zeigler. I’m grateful to Pamela Mulloy, editor at The New Quarterly, which published versions of four segments of the book while I wrestled with others.
I have been lucky with editors. John Metcalf from Biblioasis—acute, brilliant and tireless as ever—saw what I was really trying to do with this story and pushed me hard when necessary; without him and his faith in the project, Dear Evelyn would not exist. Likewise, Tara Tobler at And Other Stories always appreciated the essence of the book, while at the same time understanding—and passionately advocating for—what it needed in order to come to its final form. My final thanks go to everyone at And Other Stories and at Biblioasis for their dedication to imagination, language, story, and the ways they connect us and enrich our lives.
About the Author
Kathy Page is the author of ten previous books, two of which, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016), were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Other works include Alphabet, a Governor General’s Award finalist in 2005, The Story of My Face, long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and Frankie Styne and the Silver Man. Born in the UK, she moved to Salt Spring Island with her family in 2001, and now divides her time between writing and teaching at Vancouver Island University.
Kathy Page, Dear Evelyn
