‘I had to leave,’ she confirms.
‘I was driven through the centre of London once. I was being taken to the airport. We stayed the night in a vehicle park because the plane we were going to fly in needed repairing, but they did not let me out. I was kept in the vehicle. They never took risks like that.’ He has a disarming way of talking, the rhythm of his speech without inflexion, almost childlike, not unintelligent but completely without artifice.
‘Where else have you been?’ she asks.
‘Lots of places – all over the globe – although they all seemed the same. Now everywhere I go is different.’
This makes Evie grin, a feeling of youthfulness overcoming her. ‘For me, too. For forty years I knew just the one place and in the last week I have witnessed enough of the rest of the world to last a lifetime.’
‘It can’t be all like this,’ he says. ‘Some of it must be good.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, thinking about the cottage and her little room painted in watery green. She slides down until she is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall.
‘Where are you going to go?’ he asks. The question makes her realise that she has not confided in him even the smallest detail of her plan, while he, for his part, has been obliged to place his full trust in her. She, who knows only a little more about how the world works than he does.
‘I was created in imitation of someone,’ she begins. ‘A copy of a woman my husband had been in love with but who’d tragically died. Now that I’m on my own, I’m trying to find this woman’s father. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead and if he is alive whether he will want to see me, or even recognise whom I am intended to be.’
In the harsh light falling from the ceiling bulb on the other side of the door, she perceives that he is examining her, trying to process the bizarre motivation behind her existence.
‘Where is this man?’ David asks, prompting her after she has been silent for a while.
‘He lives in Austria, in a village in the mountains, or at least he did when his daughter was alive. I have his address from a letter.’ She pauses and smiles faintly to herself. ‘I guess it sounds like a lot of long shots.’
‘I think he will want to see you,’ he says. ‘And will appreciate you for what you are.’
‘That’s what I hope.’ She breathes out a short sigh, wanting to believe it but wondering whether she is completely deluded.
‘Do you wish me to come?’ he asks hesitantly.
She nods. ‘Yes, I wish you to come.’ She cannot read his expression because his face is in shadow.
Is this really what he wants too? Does he realistically have any other options? Is she mad not to uncouple herself from him at the earliest opportunity?
They hear the door to the corridor squeal and bang against the wall. Evie hurriedly gets up from the floor so as to avoid being glimpsed under the three-quarter-length door, and retreats to the back.
The man on the other side zips and leaves. The door bangs again. The tension departs from her spine and she slumps against the wall by his head.
‘I will come with you,’ he whispers, resuming their conversation, his breath caressing her ear.
Emerging from the latrines half an hour later, they cross the concourse, passing a massive tele-display mounted above the departures board.
Evie pauses to watch, attracted by the sports coverage of women charging around in the mud with a ball. All of this is still so new to her. Then the item suddenly terminates and she is staring up at a twenty-foot-sized video close-up of her own face in which she timidly scans her surroundings, looking first right and then left, and then straight ahead as if searching the high station walls for someone she has lost. Believing that they have her on camera, she freezes, before realising that the clip was taken from her first visit to the Hawking Museum. Reassuringly, her appearance has since been transformed by the wig and change in clothes.
‘People are beginning to look at you,’ David says and he takes her by the arm and draws her away. But as he does so, all she can think of is what she wouldn’t give to be able to visit her fool-self of just a few days ago, and coach her out of all the stupid things she was about to do.
On reaching Dover, they need to change to the train that will take them through the tunnel.
Evie and David cross the station and enter under a stone arch into a cavernous embarkation hall. Grand once, several of the high windows are broken and a piercing wind enters through those not boarded over. Melting snow drips from the roof to form pools on the cracked cement.
Little attention is paid to policing the border on the English side, just as Maplin had told her, and they walk through past a guard huddled at the rear of his box.
But French controls, sited here in England, are more thorough.
They join the queue snaking back from the French gate, leaning against the stained plaster. They keep their eyes down but with David standing an inch or two taller than the next-largest man, it is not easy to blend in. If only I could shrink him, she thinks, or (feeling guilty for contemplating it) somehow slip away.
When their turn comes, they shuffle forwards nervously under a series of signs warning about the incursion of rats, rabid dogs and wolves.
The security system relies on facial recognition. She is counting on them not triggering anything but if they give no reading at all, that surely would be even worse. Or what if their pictures have arrived ahead of them?
At the barrier, a bar of blue light passes rapidly down over their faces, too quickly for her to blink. Briefly everything is streaked grey, even the square-jawed men beside the gate, who stir from their seats and stiffly approach, removing from their belts long truncheons which they slap against their hands.
Evie steps back into David’s chest, primed for flight. She can’t help herself. She has suffered too much physically already to take any more. Since Maplin, she has grown petrified of pain.
Before she can run, David wraps his arm around her. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmurs, holding her firmly and for a crucial moment her fear is held in check. In Cambridge she was the one to calm his nerves; now their roles are reversed.
The guards shove past and take the man cringing behind them away from his terrified family and, when he belatedly opts to resist, beat him to the ground.
The train that will take them under the channel is a large express with broad carriages, very different to the throbbing diesels belching fumes that had carried them through England.
They descend into the tunnel. The overhead lights flicker and, through the intermittently darkened windows, Evie spots isolated figures sloshing through the oily water between the tracks. She blinks to clear her eyes, to make sure she has seen what she thinks she has seen.
They emerge back into the light, and, relieved to be safely in France, she collapses into the deeply cushioned seats. Lulled, she gazes out at the passing countryside, barely noticing the camps for illegal immigrants stretching for miles either side of the line.
David rests in the corner, his body coiled, legs knitted one around the other, knees drawn up and arms folded and held tightly over his chest. The awkward pose speaks for their shared sense of insecurity, its essence utterly human. A glow from the ceiling and walls, the source of which she cannot locate, shines on his face, accentuating the line of his jaw. A loop of dark hair curls over his forehead.
Gazing at him, Evie realises that he is not without flaws – his chin is fleshier than she had noticed and his hair has a stubborn flick. These little human touches strangely make his otherwise perfection all the more complete.
She lays her head on the seat-back close to his shoulder and tots up his good points. It’s a growing list: 1) he’s strong and can smoothly lift her over high walls; 2) he’s physically impressive/intimidating, so people give them a wide berth; 3) he is good, no, make that ‘great’, with languages, a skill that could be useful once they are across the channel; 4) he has a sense of humour – it needs more work but she has had glimpse of it; and 5) well, what can she say? – he’s easy on the eye. Lizzie Long, in her stories, may have been in love only with adventure, but Evie wasn’t designed that way.