In the drawer there is a second, more revealing image. A close up of Evelyn leaning against a wind-worn arch. In it her hair is knotted casually with a ribbon, escaped strands framing a smallish face terminating in a rounded chin. A straight little nose projects towards the lens, as if she is sniffing out the air; an eyebrow lifted, as if taken by surprise.
She wears an open-necked blouse, her pale throat seeming too thin for the weight of her head, suggesting a vulnerable and sickly air.
The cast of features are all-too familiar because this woman and she are of a set – playing-card queens – Evie doomed to be preserved in time, a mourning portrait of a perished twin.
Theirs is a face which would maybe not age well, too light on structure. That was a problem Evelyn never had the opportunity to confront and a destination Evie will never travel closer towards.
It is hard to be fond of this woman she is obliged to mimic. Despite inoffensive features, Evelyn clearly possessed a predatory alertness originating perhaps from the strength of her intellect (she was a top-flight scholar, Matthew told her) and the bitter seeding of her medical condition, the nature of which Evie has been left to guess. In contrast, Evie feels soft-edged and frighteningly uncompetitive, but then again, after all these years, it is she who is still around.
Has she made Matthew happier than Evelyn would have? Has she improved on the maquette?
It is the question she never dares ask.
The breeze outside quickens, swaying the ebony branches of the cherry against the sky like a scarecrow. She does not feel its energy. In fact she should really just go to bed to recharge, but Simon’s ‘spying’ hova from earlier won’t fly from her mind and she needs distraction. If she returns to her room, jittery like this, she’ll end up just staring at the ceiling.
Leaving the music room, she enters the kitchen. Daniels stands beside the table, a row of silver knives, forks and spoons laid out on a cloth in front of him. He lifts one to the light and, tilting it, places it back down.
She sits in her chair on the other side.
The cake he prepared for her a week ago is by his elbow. He has taken it from the tin and cut himself a generous slice. There is only a corner left, five candles remaining of the original twenty-one and they lean in to one another like the last forlorn trees on a crumbling cliff edge. She doesn’t really have a birthday to celebrate but every year he pretends that the day she arrived here is it. Perpetually twenty-one – her notional age – unable to ever grow up. The same glitch with destiny as Peter Pan.
Daniels takes a bite, and a gulp from a mug of tea, sucking it down between his teeth. He of course doesn’t offer to cut her a slice or make her a drink, as there would be no point, she does not consume food. But she does appreciate the gesture of celebration, small as it is, and maybe no more than an excuse on his part to bake.
Watching him buff a teaspoon, she asks, ‘Why do you do that?’
‘This? Keeps things proper.’ He holds it out to her so that she can see it sparkle, as if to prove his case.
‘He doesn’t notice.’
‘No, but that’s not the point.’
She doesn’t pursue it. She understands what it is to be enslaved by impulses over which one has no control. The silence and the warmth from the stove wrap around them.
She has known Daniels her whole life. She still clearly recalls his astonishment when he was invited into the library to meet her for the first time, almost falling over with shock, believing he was witnessing a resurrection. He could have passed as a younger brother then, a mere seventeen years old with floppy hair and gangly limbs, but now, back bent over the tin of polish, he would be more easily taken as her father or even grandfather. Time is a trap, the hidden kind with iron teeth.
‘What’s it like outside?’ she asks.
‘Cold and wet, as I think you discovered earlier.’ He is absorbed in his task and not paying her much attention. Not picking up on her agitation.
‘No. I mean outside the apartment.’
‘Street level?’ He peers closely at his fish-eye reflection in the round bowl of a soup spoon. ‘Not very nice.’ He then holds the spoon up to her to capture hers. ‘Being close to the river attracts a ripe sort I can tell you – sailors searching for a drink or a fight, they’re always the worst.’
Rather than sailors, she’d been more thinking about what sort of people would ride in a hova and pry over the wall. She should have told him about it at the time. Mentioning it now is just going to make her appear paranoid.
Daniels lifts a fork, twisting it to catch the glint on the tines from the light over the table. ‘No, the river is best avoided, poisonous and dangerous and full of slithery eels.’ He draws out the ry of slithery, rolling it like a pebble around his tongue. ‘Sharks too, hungry ones, although when it’s this close to it freezing over, they sensibly stay in the estuary.’
‘I’d like to see it when it freezes,’ she says. ‘Do people walk on the ice?’ Being here with Daniels is cheering her, as it always does, and she is thinking of the happy little Dutch prints in the library. The people skating in their padded winter jackets with their comic round noses and hand-tinted cheeks.
‘Yeah, some do.’ Before she knows what is happening, he is looking directly into her eyes, finally granting her his concentration. His voice has deepened too. Grown louder. ‘And sometimes they misjudge it and the surface snaps beneath them and they fall right through and however much they claw like mad things at the underside, they can’t get back out.’ He is taking delight in the sudden horror filling her face. ‘Their bodies are either flushed out into the marshes or they get caught between the arches of a bridge and stay down for the winter, only bobbing up in the thaw and floating along all bloated and disgusting and unrecognisable, faces chewed clean off by eels.’
He returns to the silver, an amused smile on his cheeks.
His teasing has shaken her up into a state worse than when she walked in and her knees click together as the trembling works its way through. Water is something she is careful with. After all these years she feels frayed and there is too much delicate circuitry to be safeguarded. It is a phobia deeply encoded. Drowning is the epitome of terror. The thought of it freaks Simon out like nothing else.
Daniels replaces the fork, straightening the line of cutlery. ‘Evie girl,’ he concludes, ‘take it from me, you’re better off up here.’ It is a variation of the stock answer she has been given from the get-go. Although he didn’t call her ‘girl’ back then – that came about only as the visual age difference grew.
‘Daniels?’ she says.
‘Yeah? What now?’
‘What will happen to me?’ This is now not about the spying car but the deeper worries planted by Simon that subside for days at a time only to bob back up like corpses. Simon’s fear is that on Matthew’s death, she will become nothing more than a chattel of the estate and end up in an auction house alongside the boxes of his books, his Dutch prints and the old masters. She should have asked Matthew earlier when they lay side by side and she could feel his pulse through his arm beneath her. Maybe she would have, if only he hadn’t called her by the wrong name.