‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I—’
‘I do not want your apologies. I do not ask for pity,’ she mutters. ‘Who do you think you are, coming here with your presumptions?’
Evie cannot hold her look and turns away, witnessing Sola’s face as she does so. Her mouth is open so wide that all her teeth, all the way back to the molars, are on show.
‘I didn’t mean anything,’ Evie says quietly.
‘And what are you doing married to an old man, you’re barely a child. What do you get from it? Money? That’s usually the thing, I believe?’
‘I had no choice.’
‘Is Eve even your real name?’
‘Evie,’ she corrects, her voice hollow.
‘You realise you look like me, when I was young, when he and I were… But I guess you know that. What did he do, pay for the surgery? It would have been typical of him. He altered me too you know, for life, but not in a positive way. I wasn’t always like this… a cripple.’
‘Evelyn dear, be generous,’ Maier says.
She twists to face him, revealing a crimson ribbon holding her greying hair off her neck. ‘Don’t “Evelyn be generous” me, when it was you who let her in.’
‘What did Matthew do?’ Evie asks tremulously.
‘You mean this?’ She holds up the handle of her stick.
‘Evelyn, all that was years before she…’
‘No! She should know about the man she’s married.’ Evelyn turns to face her. ‘I was your age or thereabouts. We were in England. Your husband and I had been friends but that was all in the process of changing. Spending time with him had become oppressive but he’d made the assumption he owned me already, he’d even bought a ridiculous house in the country to be my wedding present and was furious because I spoilt everything by rejecting his proposal.
‘We were returning from it in his car. He was driving down the narrow lanes like a madman to terrify me, and losing control we ended up crashing into a bank. The collision concertinaed the front against my legs, destroying me and his precious automobile in the same instant. Only, he got to walk away.’
Evie cannot look at either of them and stares at her napkin still folded on her place mat. Sola takes her hand underneath the table.
‘So no, I never died, nothing so romantic. Although over the years, suffering operation after operation as the surgeons spliced my splintered limbs back together, I have often enough wished I had.’
‘He left you?’ she murmurs, horrified that Matthew had deserted her so callously.
‘Oh, not quite. He briefly sentimentalised about nursing me himself, but when I returned home for treatment, it was the last I heard from him. And of course you know the final bit already, how he claimed the role of victim, spreading the lie that I had died… I tell you, if I had known he was doing that!’
‘I am so sorry,’ Evie murmurs.
This version of events has taken a ram to her happy memories of her husband. Instead, a recollection of falling short of his vision of perfection, of being abandoned outside his room trying to work out her mistake, rattles around her head.
‘You don’t look so pleased with yourself now,’ Evelyn says.
‘I never meant—’
‘How long have you been… married?’
‘Forty-one years, last autumn.’ Evie is close to tears, only just holding them in.
Evelyn snorts derisively. ‘You think this is amusing?’
‘No, it’s true,’ Maier murmurs. ‘Forty-one years. I was fooled too and that was in daylight. Our friend is, how can I put it, not quite what she seems.’
‘What are you saying?’ Evelyn’s eyes are suddenly wide. ‘That she’s a “bot”?’
She stares at Evie, then reaches across and takes her chin roughly in her hand and drags her face around to stare into her eyes. ‘Well, that just about sums him up. The only type of woman that would put up with him. And there I was taking you merely for an opportunistic little slut. So where is he now?’ she asks aggressively. ‘Why did he send you?’
‘He’s dead,’ she says, observing Evelyn, confronted by this revelation, momentarily brought up short.
The atmosphere around the table grows cold despite the fabricated heat. Everyone draws breath. Sola stares at each of them in turn, her mouth still agape.
‘Good,’ Evelyn says at last. ‘I’m glad.’
35
In Evie’s dream she is seated in her garden swing, the one Daniels hung for her. Sola is asleep in her arms.
David comes up behind and leans over, cold water dripping from his hair onto her neck. ‘What will you do in ten or eleven years’ time?’ he asks.
The question disturbs her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘When she is your age? Will you let her go? Is that not what parents must do?’
Evie wakes, head spinning, and brusquely detaches her charging lead, throwing it onto the carpet. She swings her legs around to sit on the side of the bed, only then realising that Sola is not beside her.
She checks in the bathroom and outside the door.
She goes down to the long reception room in which she met Maier the day before and crosses the sunlit floor. The sliding glass doors are partially pushed back, letting in the icy morning air. She runs through, down the steps and over the boards to the lake edge and paces along, peering into the dark water. She doesn’t even know if the girl can swim.
Evie returns inside and crosses the gravelled courtyard to the old side of the house, keeping to the route she had been brought along yesterday. She reaches the space in which she had been left to wait, then, following the distant sound of a piano – the melody not gracious as before but riotous and skirt-lifting – runs up the tower stairs. The higher she climbs, the lower the ceiling and the narrower the steps, whereas in the new building the opposite holds true – everywhere is bright and fresh, passageways are broad, natural light plentiful; nothing is steep or crooked or oddly arranged.
She reaches a chamber where she finds them seated at a piano with their backs to her – Sola and Evelyn – but it is Sola at the keys, her gaudy pounding infused with the thrills of The Dolls’ House – flamboyant and grotesque. Evie didn’t know the child could play, even if it is with a clumsy smash, grab and bouncy slam.
The child is full of joy, even more so than normal. Evelyn smiles down on her indulgently. Aware of Evie’s entrance – perhaps having orchestrated this moment – she slowly turns.
The smile of affection twists into a sneer. ‘You’re here, then,’ she says, looking her up and down coolly. ‘You appear fresh and well-rested, although I guess, being as you are, you always do.’
Sola continues playing, the clatter of the music hall growing cacophonous until Evelyn scoops the girl’s fingers from the keys and crisply brings down the cover.
Sola grunts and, facing Evie, mutters a weary, ‘Maman,’ as if it is she who is the cause of the entertainment’s termination. The dog, snoozing in a shaft of sunlight, disturbed by the sudden silence, wakes and yelps irritably, before again closing its lids.
‘Interesting,’ Evelyn says, ‘that the child calls you that.’ Her eyes glint with malice. ‘I would not have thought it was possible for such feelings to exist between… but then what do I really know of your kind – or, for that matter, of her.’
‘Thank you for looking after her,’ Evie says, maintaining a surface calm.
‘Not at all, the child is a delight. I can see why you’re so charmed. So amusing to hear her prattle. Some of the things she comes out with have quite made me blush.’
‘She is just a child.’
‘But such colourful language! I have been entertained. So much profanity from such a young mouth! So brave and kind of you, to take her on.’