38
She stood at the long window, watching him as he busied himself with preparations for the wedding. The large marquee was being raised on the lawn, and she had to smile, because he couldn’t help himself; he had to be supervising the affair, from the first peg in the ground to the arrangement of the rose-heavy garlands. He said he was making such a fuss because he wanted it to be perfect. Like her, he’d said, brushing a finger against her cheek. He wanted the day to match her skin: flawless.
‘And the mirror crack’d from side to side…,’ a voice said.
It caused her to start, to look back suddenly. She’d not heard him steal up behind her. He saw her expression change instantly from one of unalloyed happiness to one of quiet distrust. He took pleasure in eliciting this from her.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said, composing herself and turning her attention to the activity outside in the grounds. But her posture had shifted; her back a little more rigid than before, her hands clasped protectively in front of her.
‘You know, from the poem by Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot; she that can only look upon her beloved Lancelot through a mirror, but alas she cannot resist turning to look upon him in the flesh and her world collapses around her. One of my father’s favourite poems. He is such an old romantic, my father,’ observed David Lambert-Chide, close at her shoulder. ‘He doted on my mother just the same as he does you, you know. He is such a fool — no woman is worth that. Least of all you, Evelyn.’
Her head spun round, eyes momentarily blazing, but she knew he was baiting her. ‘Why can’t you be happy for him, David? Just once you might find it in yourself to do that, after all he has done for you, all he has given.’
‘He holds back more than he releases. But one day I will have my due. He cannot last long.’ He rapped a fist against his chest. ‘Dodgy ticker, we’re told.’
‘That is such a cruel thing to say, David! You can be such a heartless young man. You forget who you are and who you talk to.’
David laughed. She felt him coming round to her side. ‘Really?’ he said, so close to her ear she felt the heat of his breath. He came to stand in front of her, between the window and her. ‘That’s just the point, Evelyn; I don’t know who it is I talk to.’
‘You are so spiteful, David,’ she said and made as if to walk away. He grabbed her tightly by the arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ she snapped. ‘Let go of me!’
‘Don’t you dare turn your back on me, Evelyn! Or is it Evelyn? You see, I’m confused, because I’ve had people check up on Evelyn Carter and the strange thing is it appears you are not the person you say you are.’
‘That’s absurd!’ she said, a flicker of alarm in her voice. ‘Let me go at once, do you hear me?’
‘You’re a fraudster, Evelyn — ah, there I go again, calling you Evelyn, when we both know the real Evelyn Carter is long-dead and gone. What’s your game, to marry and fleece a desperately love-sick and lonely old millionaire grieving for his beloved wife? To escape being the simple shop girl that you were when he found you? You think I would freely hand over part of my inheritance to a cheap freeloader?’
‘That’s a horrid thing to say!’ she countered. ‘I love your father like I have never loved anyone else. I care for him with all my heart, with my very being.’
David Lambert-Chide’s face became a twisted mask of loathing. ‘If you love him, as you say, then you’ll walk away from here and never see him again.’
‘I can’t do that,’ she said.
‘No? Would you rather it was me that broke the news to him that his sweet little angel is a thieving whore? Or shall I simply call in the police? You have a choice. Think yourself lucky I don’t hand you straight over. As it is I’m giving you a head start before I get the law down here.’
She blinked hard, her breath coming in sharp little gasps, her chest heaving. She bit at her lower lip as she went over what he’d said. ‘We can be very happy, your father and I. I have waited so long, so long, to find a person like him, to love so truly, so honestly. I truly love him. It is no sham. I didn’t know who he was when I met him. I fell in love with the man, not his money.’ She yanked her arm free, rubbing the point of contact, but made no attempt to move away. ‘Don’t do this to him. It will hurt him badly. It could destroy him.’
‘Every cloud and all that…’ he returned with a poisonous grin.
‘That’s an awful thing to say, David.’
‘I want you out of here tonight. You do not speak to him, do you understand? If you do not do as I tell you I shall call in the police and inform the old man without a moment’s hesitation.’ He smoothed down his jacket, picked at a speck of cotton clinging to the dark material of his sleeve. ‘Goodbye, Evelyn, or whatever your real name is. I don’t want to see you ever again. Consider your mirror well and truly cracked.’
David Lambert-Chide remembered it all as plain as if it happened only hours ago; remembered how he turned his back on the young woman, heard his footsteps echoing down the long hall, and he firmly believed their paths might never cross, except perhaps in court. She’d only taken a few things, the most valuable being the Cartier brooch. She could have taken more — his father had been very generous with his cash — but she didn’t, and he supposed she attached some foolish sentimental importance to it. He’d secretly taken a number of other, far more valuable items from the house, some of his mother’s fine jewels and a couple of his father’s prized Rossetti’s, telling the police and his distraught father that they had been taken by Evelyn and possible accomplices. It served two purposes, he thought; to turn his father even more against the wretched woman, and to sell on privately to fund his own interests. Beyond that he never gave the woman called Evelyn Carter a second thought. The missing valuables didn’t have the desired effect on his father, however; the old fool pined for the woman like a lovesick teenager in the strangulating throes of first love. The last name on his lips, as he lay paralyzed down one side by the heart attack that was to finish him, was not his son’s or that of his former wife, but Evelyn. He hated her all the more for that.
As he peered now into that beautiful young face with its taught, unblemished skin, he still found it hard to believe all those years had intervened. Here she was, as young as if time had all along been standing still, in sharp contrast to his aged and desiccated self. As he gazed upon her now it was as if he had been transported back to 1939. He could almost smell the tang of newly-mown grass as the grounds were being prepared for the marquee; could almost see his father ordering people around, supervising the many staff that buzzed all over the place like flies around jam; almost feel his father’s renewed vitality, his lust for life that the presence of the young woman had brought to him.
‘I took her for a cheap opportunist, Gareth,’ he said. ‘Men in our position attract them like a cloud of pretty little butterflies; butterflies with stings in their tails. She was a shop girl working in a London store when father happened upon her. He fell for her, and then he was led like a meek little donkey on a halter by his foolish emotions. It had always been a failing of his. I thought I’d seen the back of her for good.’
Erica seemed to be shrugging off the effects of the drug. Gareth noticed her head was steadier, her eyes better able to focus. ‘You can’t believe Erica and Evelyn are the same woman, surely?’ said Gareth incredulously. ‘That’s nonsense.’ But he still had hold of the photo album, and the likeness of Erica to Evelyn was uncanny.
Lambert-Chide gently stroked Erica’s hair with a bony index finger and she flinched as if touched by a firebrand. ‘But we met again, didn’t we? Thirty-odd years later. Purely by accident. I was attending some tiresome function or other and, to my complete astonishment, who did I see dressed as a simple maid sweeping a hotel carpet? You didn’t recognize me at first, did you? But I knew you. Of course, I thought the resemblance to Evelyn truly remarkable, but could not possibly think you were the one and the same person. That, as you say, Gareth, is nonsense. Yet there was fear in her eyes when she looked at me, the same fear as I beheld standing by the window that day back in 1939. Yes, Erica — or Evelyn Carter or Beth Heaney, whichever you prefer as you have had so many over the years — it was the fear in your eyes that gave you away. Here before me was a woman who should have been approaching the age of sixty, but instead looking as fresh and as young as she did back in 1939. A woman who did not age, at least not in the conventional sense.