Evie glances back up the stairs to see if Maplin is concealed there, playing a trick.
‘You are out of your depth,’ the monkey concludes sadly, now reminding her of Simon with his attitude of self-importance.
Letting go of the banisters, he slopes off into the shadows.
21
Evie rejoins Maplin in the kitchen. He looks at her differently. Maybe he is seeing in her, with the change of clothes and the red lips and dark-rimmed eyes, a copy of his sister. Maybe she is only imagining it. Imagination – another thing she is not meant to have. She glances down at the ridiculous top with the silver tufts on the shoulders, like fairy epaulettes or the tips of wings, which she would never have been seen dead in in her previous life.
‘I thought a change would be good,’ she says. Defensive when there is no need to be.
The fact is, when she put the musty old jumper and blouse back where she’d found them, the little rebellion was another step in casting away the identity she was grafted with. Bundling it up with her old dress and torn stockings in the bottom of the wardrobe had been a further small act of faithlessness to Evelyn.
She is putting together a disguise piece by piece. When she leaves here, which she soon will, she intends not to be found.
Evie’s growing assertiveness is apparent in other ways, too. She hears Simon less – or perhaps listens less – and when he speaks, the volume is reduced and his tone, higher-pitched, merges with her own. It occurs to her for the first time what she has had to put up with over the years: their relationship was always about him when he had a vested interest, but all about her when something went wrong.
Part of the process of survival has to be finding her way to Austria. Can she make Maplin help her in this – not to come but to tell her how? She must approach the subject obliquely. She suspects he will not assist in anything that will hasten her departure.
‘Timothy, have you been to Europe?’ she asks, throwing the question out there, like a ball, casually, as if she doesn’t care whether he catches it. But he is like the eager little dog in her Ladybird reading books and happily leaps. B is for Ball, she thinks. D is for Dog. U is for Using someone to get what you want.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘What’s it like?’
‘Shinier, more advanced. They have tech you’d never see here.’
‘Is there anything there similar to me?’
Maplin looks at her carefully. ‘Depends what you mean. They brought in equivalent laws for the control of AABs – particularly in Germany because of the trade unions – but they’re keen as mustard in the east. The Russians have thousands of specialised units in the military – male and female – and there’s little to stop the ones that desert from getting around. I saw them quite a bit. The farmers use them for cheap labour and in towns they do the unpleasant tasks that people won’t. They were actually why I went but to be honest I was disappointed. None of them were like you. Or if there were any, I wasn’t able to find them.’
Maybe that is the point, Evie thinks. They were too clever to let themselves be found.
‘How did you get there? I read there are flying boats.’
‘Flying boats?’ He looks confused.
‘Ships that glide above the water.’
‘Oh those! There was something like that once, but the easiest way now is the tunnel.’
‘Where’s the tunnel?’ She knows so little. When she is on her own, it will be her ignorance that will be her chief vulnerability.
‘Dover.’ He looks at her suspiciously. ‘Why all these questions, why the fascination with over there?’
‘No particular reason. You’re taking it for granted that everyone has had experiences and knows things. All my life I’ve lived with people who permitted me no more than a child’s view of the world.’ Evie plays up the hurt in her voice. Will Maplin believe her? What worked on Daniels may not work on him.
‘There was a photograph in the apartment of the Alps,’ she continues, losing herself in storytelling. ‘They were so beautiful, I’ve always wondered about them.’ This was the picture of Evelyn, Matthew and Evelyn’s father with their picnic and bicycles. ‘But no one would tell me anything.’ Which was true: neither Matthew nor Daniels would be drawn on the image. Maybe it was designed to be a fragment of her backstory – that she was meant to believe it actually was her in that mountain meadow. If that had been their plan, they’d overlooked planting the requisite memory that would have tied it all together.
‘I was hoping you’d be different,’ she says, smiling up at him ingratiatingly.
‘Well I don’t know about any mountains, I didn’t go there for that.’ Despite all her best efforts, suspicion remains in his voice.
Evie bites her lip, wondering how she can find out more about this tunnel.
‘I’ve seen maps,’ she says, ‘simple ones, I know the Channel is south of London and on the other side is France, but I’m clueless how it all joins up. I’m curious to learn and you’re the only one who can help.’ She gazes at him with wide, helpless eyes, hoping she has done enough to conceal her motives. ‘Big eyes won’t get you anywhere with me’, is what Daniels used to say but he was wrong, quite blind to the fact that they always did.
They seem to succeed now, too.
‘Yeah well, of course,’ Maplin says. ‘I forget sometimes you’ve been a bit sheltered.’
‘How often have you been?’
‘Only the once.’
‘And you just walked through, into France?’
He sniggers. ‘Walk through – it’s over twenty miles! You’d have to be pretty desperate to attempt something like that.’
‘So how, then?’
‘There’s a train. It used to run all the way from London to Paris – fifty years ago anyway – but now you have to transfer at Dover.’
‘Is that easy?’
‘Depends what you mean by easy. It’s easy enough to leave England, there’s certainly no law against that, but the French aren’t so keen on taking just anybody and they run their own checks before you board.’
‘What sort of checks?’
‘Primarily cameras that scan your face. Old tech but still effective enough at picking out anyone who is a problem or a potential problem or merely the wrong colour…’ Maplin stops and stares at her. ‘You’re planning on leaving me, aren’t you?’
Evie’s greedy rush for answers has given her away and, not good at lying, she flushes.
‘Why would you do that?’ Maplin sounds betrayed. His eyes grow bright and she realises that, almost unbelievably, he is on the verge of tears.
She is going to say something about Austria but stops herself, brought up short by the vision of him doggedly pursuing her the way he had in Cambridge. Better that she had never even mentioned the Alps.
‘If you’re thinking of Europe, you’ll never make it on your own,’ he tells her bitterly. ‘They’ll pick you up in no time and before you know it you’ll be a pile of parts, with your head on a bench.’
The precision of the vision makes it sound as if he is wishing such a horror on her. There is a nastiness in his eyes and Evie realises again how little she knows about him. He has become unpredictable. A puppy turned vicious.
Daniels told her once about a dog he came across in the street that had gone savage and tried to bite him, and how in those situations there is only one recourse: to put it down.
‘Once I am across the channel I will be safe,’ Evie says, trying to remain calm. She wants to be away from here, right now. She has had enough of savagery.
‘Well!’ Maplin says loudly. ‘This is gratitude!’ He shoves his chair against the counter and crosses the room and looks out of the window. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this,’ he continues, ‘because I didn’t want you to worry, but when I was in the shop earlier, they have your story on a loop on the news channel behind the checkout. You’re wanted for murder. They’ve got pictures of bodies covered in blood.’ Even he sounds a little afraid. ‘Everyone in the queue was talking about it. You’ve stirred something up in people, something primal. It’d be peasants and pitchforks if they found you.’ His reflection stares back at him. His hair is dishevelled and his shoulders are hunched and stiff. He is trying to hide that he is crying but she can see it in the glass.