Did The Earth Move? Page 15

  Now that they were in, she saw how tiny the bare white-painted rooms were and felt the damp and dankness of the kitchen and the bathroom. Both had grey spirals of mould on the walls and ceiling.

  But she heard herself telling her sons as they ate a fish supper on the sitting room floor, 'I know it looks a bit ropy now, but we're going to decorate it really nicely. You can help me choose the colours of all the rooms, we'll get posters and once we've unpacked our things, you'll see how different it looks.'

  And she meant it. This was her life now, she was in charge and it was damn well going to work. She would not let herself be ground down by Dennis, who had chosen to walk out on them and disappear right off the face of the planet.

  The three of them slept together that night, crammed onto the fold-down futon, listening to the strange new noises of the neighbourhood. Cars revving up, the noisy chat as drinkers walked home after closing time, the scuffle of cats, she hoped, in the downstairs garden bins. She had a son on each side and she cuddled their sleeping bodies against her long into the night until she finally fell asleep just before dawn.

  Over the next few weeks the flat took shape around them – a crazy and unexpected shape. Maybe it was the bottle of Baileys she was taking some comfort in at night, or maybe it was the need to stick two fingers up to the precious Surrey lifestyle she'd spent six years adhering to, but Eve's decorating went wild. With the boys' full approval, the sitting room was painted a rich, claret red with turquoise paintwork to match the lurid turquoise carpet already in place. The boys' bedroom was transformed into a red fire engine, the kitchen had a crude sunset with black palm trees painted onto one wall and the bathroom was, what else – sky blue with white clouds.

  It was perfect, like living in a Wendy house, and she was in charge. She didn't have to care for one moment what Dennis, their friends, her dad, or anyone else would think. She no longer had to housekeep to impossibly immaculate standards and neither did she have to fiddle about in the kitchen at the weekends making fussy soups, toasting pine nuts, dissecting star and kiwi fruits, fraying her nerves with boeufen croûte and truffle layers.

  Evelyn Leigh was trying to let go, become the kind of person who left things undone, who washed whites and coloureds together until everything was bluish, who watched TV at breakfast (sometimes), who made vegetable stew and lentil casseroles, who had time to spend the whole day in the park with the children. And she was determined to make some new friends and maybe even have a laugh.

  After only a fortnight in the flat, she felt she was at home. Her shoulders moved away from the position they had taken up right next to her ears and she started to relax. She was finally in control of her own little domain. It felt liberating. She was going to bring the boys up exactly the way she wanted to, let herself become the mum she'd always wanted to be.

  One afternoon when they were picnicking in Hyde Park in the drizzly rain under an enormous umbrella, the two boys were laughing hard over a silly school joke and she felt a lightness which at first she couldn't define. Then it occurred to her that maybe it was happiness. It was so long since she had felt anything like it, she hadn't recognized it.

  Before she knew it, it was October and she was faced with going back to college for the first time in seven years. That very first morning, when she registered for her classes, she heard herself telling the clerk that there had been a mistake, she was no longer going by the name of Evelyn Leigh, she was Eve Gardiner.

  That she wanted to revert to her maiden name was not so hard to understand – but Eve? She had always secretly called herself Eve, but only now at the age of 26 was she allowing herself to grow into it, let her public self become a bit more like her inner, real self.

  Walking into the big refectory with her new classmates and their friends for lunch, she realized how much had changed for her in six short months. Here she was, eating a plate of subsidized macaroni cheese with a group of other women – some her age, but most younger, all in the kind of hippie chic groove-nick clothes, which made her polo neck, jeans and anorak seem so incredibly square. They were talking films and rooms and rents and boyfriends and her past life as Evelyn Leigh – tennis and boutique shopping, private schools and dinner parties – seemed so far away, it was almost as if it had never happened. This was her first day of training to be a probation officer. What would

  Delia and company ever, ever make of this? If they ever took the trouble to find out what had happened to her.

  'I'm going to have to miss the last class every afternoon to go and get my kids,' one woman was telling a friend. 'I'll have to borrow someone's notes to keep up.'

  'Me too,' Eve told her.

  Very quickly, she and this woman, who was studying midwifery and introduced herself as Jenna, 'but everyone calls me "Jen"', were doing the bonding mummy chat.

  'How old are yours?' Eve asked her.

  'Terry is five and John is nine months. I am dragging myself out of the house to do this course.'

  'I've got two boys as well, Denny's six and Tom's nearly five. I love boys,' Eve confided with a smile. 'All that footballing and cars and trains and rushing around.'

  'Yeah! But they're bloody exhausting,' Jen laughed. 'So where are you from, then?' She had a slight London accent and a tired face set off by unruly dark hair bundled into a ponytail. She looked about Eve's age, maybe a little older, maybe a little more careworn.

  Eve told her, skating over all but the merest of details, how she'd been living in Surrey but had moved back to London 'when my marriage ended'.

  'So you're a single girl again?' Jen asked.

  'Oh, I don't think of it like that, because of the boys.'

  'You will,' Jen smiled. 'And you've come to the right place. I've never been anywhere more obsessed with sex. Look around you – couples coupling, flirts flirting, lecturers leching . . . You're going to have a great time. Too bad I've got the old man at home, that's what I say.'

  Eve just laughed at this.

  'Where are you all living then?' Jen asked and as Eve told her, Jen nodded and asked her the street name, then smiled, telling her. 'That's round the corner from my place! I'll have to take you out and show you the sights.'

  And because they left college at the same time and took the bus back to Hackney to collect their kids from the same school, and because they lived just round the corner from each other and had two sons each, it felt inevitable and right that they became firm friends.

  Over mugs of undrinkably strong tea in Jen's flat or the college canteen, they talked and gradually learned a lot more about each other.

  Jen hadn't always lived in London; at 17 she'd followed a boyfriend down from a small town in the north-west. She'd worked long hours in a clothes shop while he played drums all day, gigged, got drunk at night and never paid his share of the rent. 'I just drifted through my twenties,' she'd confessed.

  She'd moved from shop to shop, from flat to flat after a string of hapless boyfriends called Dane, Shane, Wayne and so on until she'd met Stavo, a Slav who at least seemed to have some goals, ambitions, some reason to get up in the morning. But his reaction to her pregnancy announcement had been to head-butt her in the face. She'd knocked him out cold with the first heavy object to hand, the bathroom scales, then packed her bags and left.

  She'd had baby Terry, all alone, apart from a midwife holding her hand and buying her flowers in the hospital shop.

  'He's named after my dad and John is named after his grandfather,' Jen had explained.

  Baby John's father was Ryan, the lovely Irishman who looked after Jen and toddler Terry, who got her out of the house and smiling again.

  'You can't imagine how bad it was, Eve, stuck on the 18th floor of a dreadful block with a baby, all on my own. Living off benefits for the first time in my life,' Jen told her: but only the once, because she was a woman who had moved on, pulled herself through and didn't like to dwell on how bleak it had once been. 'Ryan was my reward for all the crap stuff. I've no idea how he finally persuaded me
to have another baby, but he promised he would stick with us no matter what.'

  In a delighted whisper, so her sons couldn't hear, Jen had confided: 'We're saving up to get married ... maybe when I finish my course and land my first job. When we'll have enough for a proper party.'

  Jen had never forgotten the midwife who helped her through Terry's birth. She told Eve: 'She bought me flowers although she didn't know me from Adam. And I decided I wanted to do that job, give other women help through that terrible time, when you're straddling life and death and wondering which side you and your baby are going to end up on.'

  As they got comfortable with one another, Eve had allowed little bits of her own life story to unfold. And eventually, the gilded life and times of Evelyn Leigh became a big joke between them.

  'Oh darling, Ralph Lauren does one just like this,' Eve would swoon over Jen's latest market stall purchase.

  'I don't know ... Does it come in suede?' was a catchphrase they used for all sorts of nonsense – dusters, children's underpants, baby's bibs, bin bags.

  The Donna Karan evening dress, the silk curtains, the Range Rover with the leather seats – it was a fantasy world Jen loved to hear about. It wasn't painful for Eve to reminisce. It was like the memory of a dream. How she could now joke at the pettiness of it all. She and her new friend would shriek with laughter, as if this was the most ludicrous world anyone could ever imagine.

  Eve Gardiner had such a new life now, to go with her new name, a life which revolved around the children, of course, but also college and hip student friends, flat parties, Sunday markets, charity shops and junk stalls, the library, museums, DIY, vegetarian cooking ...

  Every single aspect of her life changed and by the end of her first term she didn't think Evelyn Leigh would even recognize the person she'd become. A better person, she was sure. She spent long hours with the children and rediscovered all sorts of things she'd liked doing as a child, but hadn't done since. She taught them how to knit and they sometimes spent whole afternoons painting: handprints, potato prints, glitter and sparkle paintings and home-made Christmas cards for all her new friends. She made a quick decision not to bother sending anything to the Surrey brigade. She couldn't see the point. Despite the fact that she'd paid to have mail forwarded from her old house to her father's, not a single one of her old friends had tried to get in touch.

  About Dennis, Eve felt only a dull anger, but for the boys' sake, not really for herself any more. She put it to the back of her mind. In fact she was surprised at how little she thought about him now. Disappearing Dennis had become something that only troubled her at night as she was falling asleep – and not every night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  'God, you look so well, I can't believe it!' Janie was being ushered up the cramped staircase to Eve's one-bedroomed home for her first visit. Although she'd been dismayed by the dinginess of the street her sister was now living in, she was relieved to see that Eve did genuinely look better than she had done for ages, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

  'Prepare yourself for the decor,' her older sister warned her with a laugh as she showed her in. 'I got a bit carried away.'

  'Oh my God! But maybe you all needed cheering up.' Janie took in the lurid sitting room and kitchen, then poked her head into the bedroom and even the bathroom. 'It's good . . . cosy,' was her verdict. 'Where are the boys?'

  'A friend's looking after them for a couple of hours. I wanted you all to myself just for a bit,' Eve told her, noting her sister's heavy, silk-lined coat and leather overnight bag and registering how out of place they were in this cheap and cheerful flat.

  'Where do you sleep?' Janie asked.

  "The sofa folds down. Tonight you get the lower bunk in the boys' room and I cuddle up with Tom, in case you're wondering!'

  'It's fine, honestly.'

  'So... what's the big news?' Eve asked, taking a good look at Janie now. 'Why the rush to come up here and visit us this weekend?'

  'Well, I wanted to see you, of course and make sure that everything was OK. I've been so worried about you, but...'

  It really wasn't hard to guess what else was going on in Janie's life. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were shining and she was finding it hard to stop smiling. 'David has asked me to marry him!' She gave a little scream and had to hug Eve all over again.

  'Congratulations!' Eve told her. 'Really! I'm so happy for you! He's a very nice man. I don't think there's any danger of him turning out like Dennis,' she couldn't help adding.

  'Well... I realize this must be hard. Me getting engaged, you . . .' Janie hesitated, wanting the right word . . . 'abandoned' was definitely not right... 'Separated'.

  'No, you're wrong, Janie,' Eve replied, going into the kitchen for glasses so they could start on the bottle of champagne her sister had brought: 'I'll be the happiest guest at your wedding, honestly, we're doing really well.'

  And Janie could see that it was true. Her sister looked scruffier, but more relaxed and happier than she had done for years. She looked younger, that was the strange thing. She'd been through all this terrible stuff, but she'd come out the other side looking a lot better. As Dennis's wife, all dressed up and blow-dried, she'd always looked well into her thirties.

  'I think student life suits you,' Janie told her as they sat on the sofa together and toasted each other.

  'Mmmm... beautiful,' Eve said after a long sip and swallow. 'It's been a long time since I've had a glass of champagne.'

  'Well, drink up,' Janie told her. 'There's plenty more here.'

  'OK and now I want to hear all about the proposal. Blow by blow. Don't leave anything out.'

  Janie snorted with laughter here: 'Oh big romantic moment. David rolls over in bed and tells me "I was just thinking I'd like to marry someone like you." I say "Someone like me? What about me? Don't you want to marry me?" And he says "Well... yeah."

  '"Well, yeah,"' Janie repeated. 'Isn't that the most underwhelming proposal you've heard in your whole life? I burst into tears.'

  'Oh no.'

  'Don't feel too sorry for me though,' Janie added, sloshing some more champagne into their glasses. 'He now feels so guilty, he's buying me a ruby the size of a golf ball and taking me to Venice for Christmas. Well, I mean ... I wanted to check with you first,' she added guiltily. 'You know, if you're planning to be at Dad's and you want me there ...'

  'Don't be silly, go to Venice,' Eve told her, from the dizzy haze of a champagne high. 'Make lurve on Christmas morning.' They both giggled.

  'We're going to stay here, I've decided. In our cosy little home,' Eve said. 'Dad might come up and visit on Boxing Day.'

  Once most of the bottle was gone, Janie quizzed her hard. Was she really OK? Were the boys coping? Did they need anything? Did she want to borrow some money?

  'We're really fine. I promise,' Eve assured her. 'I know, it's hard to believe, but we're very happy. I like it, Janie,' she confided. 'It's very zen! No, honestly. Everything has changed and I needed that. A shake-up, a paring down... I've been thinking about it a lot.' Eve put her glass down, crossed her legs and faced her sister, fixing her cool grey eyes on her. 'I've lost so much: the baby, our home, our whole way of life, all the things I loved that I'd surrounded myself with, Dennis ...'

  Dennis was last on the list, Janie noted with some relief.

  'All I want now is peace, calm and the basics . . . it's hard to explain. I don't want anything right now that we don't need and I don't want anything that can be taken away. I suppose it's a security thing. I don't want any of us to be hurt any more.'

  Janie thought she understood, but she still asked: 'But don't you miss so many things? It's worse than being a student because you don't even get to go home and stock up on all the nice stuff in the holidays.'

  'Like what?!' Eve wanted to know.