She twists her neck on the pillow to look up at him. ‘It doesn’t have to be today.’
‘Good. In a couple of months, if everything is fine, I’ll take you wherever you want, I promise.’
‘I didn’t mean a couple of months either! I thought you may mean tomorrow.’
‘Evie, stop this now,’ he says, raising his voice. ‘You’re not a child.’
No, I’m not, she thinks, I’m older than you, and am supposedly your late master’s widow, however I have let myself be treated.
Daniels strokes her hair consolingly but she shakes off his hand. He stands and gazes down. ‘Listen, I know you’re itching to see everything – I can only imagine what it must be like – but we must just wait a little longer, that’s all I’m saying.’
She leaves through the back door. Daniels is in the yard, chopping wood. He glances up as she passes.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she says, avoiding eye contact. ‘In the lane. Come watch me if you like.’
He sighs. ‘What time will you be back?’ He leans on his axe. He is stripped to his vest.
‘I have no idea.’ She pulls opens the gate and lets the spring slam it closed. The two of them have never fallen out before, never even exchanged harsh words, both of them amenable beings in the extreme. The crazy thing is that she is sixty-two years old, if you add her notional age to the years she has been with Matthew, but since this morning she has regressed into a stroppy teenager and doesn’t care. The loneliness of being nearly the last of one’s kind is something Daniels will never have to understand, and meanwhile there is this boy David, maybe the single other creature in the country like her, and for the next few days only, he is just a few miles away.
Evie follows the lane around the hill, walking where the snow has been trampled and the stiff grass is pressing through. The weather is warmer today and the snow slides from her boots to form a rim of slush around her prints. The steep field to her left lies tangled with brambles and bracken and dotted with scrub and saplings, presumably no longer worth the effort to farm despite all the hunger and malnutrition in the cities. The bare untidy branches have already begun to overhang the road.
She reaches the church and checks the bus stop. She has never been on a bus and must figure out what to do. A timetable is fixed to a pole. There are only two scheduled this morning and she has missed the first but is lucky that the second is still to come. The clock in the church tower reads nine-fifty. The bus is due ten-o-nine. With this fortunate timing she could be there and back by early afternoon. She is already worrying about Daniels worrying, but she mustn’t weaken now.
She crosses to sit in the church’s porch, but as she approaches, at each step, the stonework becomes unnervingly more familiar. Is this the background behind Evelyn’s head in the photograph in the library drawer? Had Evelyn and Matthew stood in this actual spot, forty years before? The likelihood they came here is strong, given that Matthew bought the cottage with her in mind.
She presses on the oak door with her shoulder. Inside, the air is still, and, away from the sun, as cold as the interior of a fridge.
She stops beside a shelf of hymn books, peering down the aisle towards the altar.
Then grabs hold of the nearest pew before she falls.
The end window is just as she recalls it. The tiny figures of Adam and Eve running at full pelt out of the luscious greens of an Eden pregnant with fanciful vegetation and mythical beasts, into a barren desert, pursued closely by a gang of oversized angels swinging aloft flaming swords.
Her breath comes in gasps. She has, without warning, entered the set of her own wedding. Fake as it may have been, the meticulous craftsmanship of the implant is extraordinary. Not only in the detailing of the window but in every other facet too, from the way the sun glints along the dark pews, casting stripes of darkness, to the hymn board dangling aslant above the pulpit.
She is astonished that they went to so much trouble. Had Matthew planned to marry Evelyn in this very church? And had he wanted her substitute to experience this as her first recollection?
The door scrapes on the stone flags.
‘Evie, dear,’ a voice chirrups. ‘Fancy finding you here.’
She looks behind her. It is the old woman from yesterday.
‘Hello,’ Evie says, trying to sound friendly but not feeling it. The intrusion is a gatecrashing of her most precious memory which, however false, is in danger of being ruined.
‘Oh, excuse me,’ the woman says, glancing at the bucket she carries. ‘You must be wondering—’
‘Not at all,’ Evie replies, wanting desperately to get away.
‘Having an early spring clean,’ the woman continues. ‘My late husband has a stone in the corner and it gets so grimy from the candle smoke. I like to give him a little bath once in a while.’ She titters privately. ‘But my dear, I’m interrupting, you look so sad.’
‘I am fine,’ she says, making her way quickly to the door, backing out and letting it crash-thump behind her in her eagerness to escape; the woman’s curious gaze pursuing her all the way.
As she walks through the streets of Cambridge, Evie keeps her hood up and her head down, wary of the cameras – which are truly as numerous as Daniels suggested, mounted above most shops and on all the college gates. Her visibility is restricted by the fur of her hood but she is still aware of the lenses sweeping around to pursue her as she passes. They seem to single her out from the crowd, maybe attracted by her weaving pace or by her clumsy attempt to pass incognito.
She reaches the museum at noon, approaching via an avenue of beech trees. It is indeed in the shape of a glass prism, just as the newsplastic had portrayed it, but although built on the side of the river facing the college backs, is neither suspended over it, nor does it revolve. She had let herself be a little taken in, but her anticipation as to seeing this creature, uniquely like herself, is all that matters.
She buys a ticket from the window, using almost the last of the dollars she took from Daniels’s coat, and runs up the wide stairs to the exhibition hall constructed beneath the atrium, barely able to contain her excitement.
Up here, the air, heated by the sun through the glass above, is as warm as in a greenhouse and although it does not bother her, no one wears anything more than a shirt and so as not to stand out she removes her coat also.
The crowd around the enclosure is several deep, but she squeezes through, wriggling to the front until she is squashed against a twelve-foot glass wall built around a bare concrete square.
Bare that is apart from a youth prowling the boundary of his domain, staring out at his spectators. He pauses in front of a group of women, peering curiously as if he has never seen such creatures, raising from them loud giggles. He wears just a pair of white tennis shorts and as he steps back, startled by their noise, his stomach ripples in the shaft of light from above.
‘David,’ someone calls from the other side, ‘over here.’ They all want his attention as if he is a rock star.
He resumes his promenade, his bare feet padding on the polished screed.
‘Don’t know what the fascination is,’ the man behind Evie’s shoulder says. His chin is so close that his sour breath ruffles her hair. ‘Is this all it does, walk up and down?’
‘And these things were meant to be the future!’ his companion responds.
‘I only came because my daughter said I should. She went with the school and has been back three times on her own. She’s even got the poster on her wall.’
Evie can’t take her eyes off him. Such sculpted beauty has never existed for her. This creature with his strong shoulders and narrow hips is like nothing she has ever imagined.