Evie kneels behind the child and strokes her hair, smoothing it and separating it into bunches, before starting to plait. Her fingers move expertly. When finished, with no ribbon to hand, she uses shrivelled stalks to tie little bows. Evie could never have imagined a few days ago the level of trust they now have between them.
It may be that they have finally given her pursuers the slip. The indications are good but now she must succeed in this final step. Not only for her own sake any more, nor for the sake of the growing list of those who have sacrificed themselves for her, but for the sake of this girl.
For this task, Evie prepares meticulously.
The small town has only a few shops but is wealthy, and along the side streets that lead from the square, old-fashioned outfitters service a demand for well-made traditional clothes fashioned from cotton and wool.
Sola gazes out from the shop windows while Evie seeks out the sort of things that are typical of Evelyn and which she has always been attracted to – dark calf-length skirts, milky blouses with long cuffs, light-as-air cardigans in mohair with tapered sleeves and pearl shell buttons no larger than Sola’s fingernails, and soft slender-soled sandals, in which she feels at the same moment both as light as a starling and solid with the ground.
She finds clothing for the child too, attiring her, as she daydreams she had once herself been attired, in a blue and white dirndl frock with, amusingly, no pockets (it is a joke between them), and a starched white apron. Also soft white ankle socks as fluffy as kittens and little shimmering nacre-buckled shoes.
Dressing up also serves as a distraction. She is missing David; how would she not?
Evie has no more use for the blonde wig and removes it in the street, dropping it in a refuse container. Shaking out her hair, she lets the cool breeze penetrate to her scalp, before gathering her hair with her fingers and weaving a single braid as she walks; tying it with a dark blue ribbon she treated herself to in the shop.
Now they are both perfect.
The first bit Evie must do alone and so leaves Sola at a cafe – outside, where it will be easy to run if the worst happens – tucked away at a table in a corner, where even the waiter has forgotten her.
‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ she says, ‘at most no longer than two. It’s eleven o’clock – if I am not here by one, come to this place and ask for me.’ She draws a map on the back of a napkin, the ink swelling into balloons as it soaks into the paper, making the child smile. ‘But if it comes to that, you must be very careful, something will have gone…’ She is about to say wrong, but Sola’s imagination runs riot at the slightest thing and she concludes instead, ‘not according to plan.’
She walks away, glancing over her shoulder as she weaves between the tables and again as she turns the corner, but the child’s head is under the chairs, throwing crumbs to an inquisitive robin while her dog looks on.
It is a wrench to be parted. It is inexplicable, unfair and at odds with her biology how this creature has got under her skin in the way she has. But also crazy-wonderful. Some primal programming which she can’t believe she was meant to have has been triggered.
Evelyn gave the impression of being too cerebral to be maternal. Elektra, from what she saw in the brochure and from the example of the ghastly Yuliya, possessed little of a motherly nature. Some other deeper code has surfaced, leaving Evie weak and wobbly when she needs to be strong, and willing to throw her own life away if this girl was in peril.
Maybe it is a response that Sola just draws out – that she survived in The Dolls’ House, unbroken and still innocent of her vulnerability, perhaps provides a clue. If so, Evie can do nothing about it. For better or worse, they have knotted souls.
The stretch of road running along the edge of the lake to the house, and the house itself – its old high walls rearing from the hillside – are achingly familiar. Both appear as fragments scattered through her early memories… Returning from school with the afternoon sun on her legs, her satchel heavy with books… reading said books lying on the warm wood of the little jetty… Things Evelyn must, or may once, have done.
Evie approaches with the lake to her left. There is no barrier, and peering down she can see boulders coated with bright weed beneath the surface. The bottom of the lake shelves steeply and the water just a few yards out is dark and blown into sharp ripples. Her fear of falling in is overdone, she knows it, but she crosses to the other side of the road, just to be sure. Since her fall down the stairs at Maplin’s, something has not been the same. Her sense of balance, which had been infallible, is now, in her old friend’s Daniels’s parlance, ‘royally screwed’. It’s laughable really, that despite all of her extraordinary electronics and engineering, she has a heart blown from glass. A tiny spinning sphere designed by NASA, essentially the same as the ones used to guide their ships the millions of miles to Mars and back. ‘Only the best for the best’, the Elektra brochure had trumpeted. Men and their extravagant boasts…
From this elevation the house has the appearance of a small castle. Its upper battlements rise from the rocks, its lower reaches are concealed by giant dark-leaved rhododendrons. A round tower looms above the trees, narrow windows penetrating the stone glittering like goblin eyes.
Evie reaches the entrance steps and looks up. The tall front door is constructed from studded planks. The stone lintel is carved into arches which nestle one within another. With no windows at ground level, the house seems unwelcoming, hostile, the impression increased by a camera which has been tracking her since she rounded the bend. This is architecture with secrets. The melancholy welcome of fairy tales – The Princess and the Pea… The Goose Girl. And she thinks of arriving at such a door, unrecognised for what she is.
She pulls the bell and it is answered by an elderly woman in an apron and cap. Standing in the doorway in her black dress with its white scalloped collar, she would only have needed a duster on a bamboo pole to perfect the image of a Victorian housemaid. It seems that in some corners the world has turned back on itself, in response to having moved forward in others with such abandon.
She announces herself as Ms Davenport, a friend of Herr Maier’s family – a hazy description of her relationship to a man who is the nearest thing to the father she never had, but hopefully ‘Davenport’ will be enough to raise his interest. The woman scrutinises her, eyes settling on her face. Only when Evie has finished speaking does she stop staring.
She asks Evie to follow her up a flight of stairs – a tight coil of steps leading to a landing. ‘Please wait here,’ she says and disappears down a corridor.
A deep-set window faces the lake. Evie goes to it, and, conquering her anxiety, which would have had her pacing around, seats herself on the sill with her back to the stone. On the opposite wall is a mirror and she catches a glimpse of her appearance, primped to perfection for the encounter ahead.
After their shopping, Evie and Sola had faced their reflections in the window of a tobacconist’s, Sola’s eyes roving from one to the other, admiring the trick they’d played with a simple change of costume. Slowly, her mouth formed an approving smile. ‘We look joli and nice maintenant Maman, no long a couple of grubby wh…,’ just managing to stop in time any ‘mauvaise language’ from sneaking out. She is slowly being tamed, her waywardness polished into ‘proper manners’. Letting go of Evie’s hand, she had spun on her toes, the skirt of her dress fanning out above her knees, as the little dog ran in a tight circle around her shiny feet.