Chapter Thirty
Evelyn
Evelyn is curled up on the sunlounger on her balcony, feeling wrung out. Yesterday was clearly more strenuous than she’d realised because today she feels absolutely dreadful, as if there’s nothing left in the tank. Her body aches, her thoughts are slow-moving, and last night’s wine has given her a splitting headache. She’s just wondering if she has the energy to make herself another cup of tea when she hears a knock at the door. ‘Coming,’ she calls, rising stiffly to her feet with a little groan.
One of the cleaning ladies is at the door, a stout woman, in her late fifties, Evelyn estimates, with a pleasant face and chapped hands. ‘Ahh,’ she says when she sees Evelyn there. ‘Icome later? No clean?’
‘Now is fine,’ Evelyn tells her, gesturing for her to come in. ‘Do you mind if I’m sitting out on the balcony? Iwon’t be in your way.’
The woman looks nonplussed as she hovers in the doorway. ‘Sorry– no English,’ she says haltingly after a moment. ‘Later?’
‘Just a minute,’ Evelyn says, holding up her finger. She retrieves her phone and jabs at it to find Google, then searches for the translate function. ‘There,’ she says, showing the woman the screen, where it has translated, ‘Yes please to having my room cleaned, but is it okay if Istay on the balcony? Iam very tired today.’
The woman reads it and nods, then puts a hand briefly on Evelyn’s arm– a gesture of kind understanding that needs no translation. ‘Yes,’ the cleaner says. ‘Is okay. Thank you.’
Evelyn returns to her spot in the sunshine with a novel, her phone and a bottle of water as the cleaner quietly starts work on the other side of the sliding doors. She finds her place in the book but, as it turns out, she is just too weary to follow the words across the page, as if the short interaction has sapped her remaining energy.
She puts the book down, shuts her eyes and folds her hands in her lap, then dozes in and out for a while. It’s silly of her to dwell on such things, but she keeps coming back to the small sting of shock she’d felt yesterday in Fiskardo, where she’d remembered the unhappy lunch she and Rose had had there on their honeymoon. You can lionise someone perhaps too much on their passing, you can revere them as a heroine, a saint, a goddess, airbrushing out their less splendid aspects, only for the rose-tinted filter to drop now and then. ‘You? A wet lettuce? Never!’ Miranda had cried disbelievingly on hearing Evelyn describe the scene.
It wasn’t that Evelyn had completely forgotten how Rose’s sharp tongue had sometimes made her feel the lesser person in their relationship, more that she has always chosen to sweep those thoughts into a dusty, distant corner of her mind. Didn’t everybody who had lost a loved one do the same? It was natural to want to reminisce about the great times they’d had, to wallow in fond nostalgia, assuring herself that theirs had been the best marriage ever. But. . . what if it hadn’t been?
Last night in Miranda’s lovely suite, sitting there companionably with their wine, they had begun planning their trip to Argostoli, and Miranda had repeated what she’d read earlier: that if you wanted to see the turtles you were advised to arrive early so as to coincide with the fishing boats returning. ‘Are you all right with early starts on holiday, Evelyn?’ she’d asked. ‘Or does that sound too much like hard work?’
‘Oh, Ican do early starts,’ Evelyn had replied. Mostly because of her poor sleep quality, admittedly; she’s regularly awake by five these days. ‘I’ve always been the annoying sort of person who’ll be early for an early start, even.’
‘I’d say that’s impressive, not annoying,’ Miranda had replied with a little laugh. ‘Iwish Iwas like that. The hair and make-up team on the show used to tease me when we had a crack-of-dawn shoot coming up on the schedule: We’re getting in extra concealer for you, Miranda, love, don’t worry, they’d joke, knowing that I’d arrive with massive bags under my eyes, completely dishevelled because Iwas so bad at getting up. Ionce turned up in my pyjamas when I’d overslept; they absolutely rinsed me for weeks on end about that.’
Evelyn had laughed too. It was nice to hear Miranda speaking positively about her acting work rather than being despondent. ‘Rose was a bit like that,’ she’d said. ‘She would calculate, to the last second, how long she could stay in bed before she had to drag herself out. Iused to drive her mad, because Iwas the opposite– I’m that annoying person who likes to be at a station or an airport ages before my departure time. Back when Iwas still playing in the orchestra, Iused to get in such a flap about being late for a performance, I’d be the first to arrive every time.’
‘That’s twice you’ve called yourself annoying,’ Miranda pointed out, narrow-eyed. ‘And Iwould call that being professional, actually. Ibet we’ve both worked with those people who crash in seconds before they’re meant to be on stage, and they’re a massive liability, half the time.’
‘Exactly! And yes, how can they bear it? But Rose would—’ She broke off, feeling rather that she was being unfair, telling tales on her dead wife.
‘Rose would what?’
‘Oh, you know, tell me Iwas neurotic and uptight, that sort of thing.’ She’d smiled, but it felt rather an effort. Meanwhile, Miranda was pulling a face.
‘Was she the one who put it into your head that you were annoying too?’ she’d asked, then glanced up at the ceiling. ‘No offence, Rose, if you’re listening, but that sounds a bit mean from where I’m sitting. Especially when Evelyn here is slogging around the world on your behalf now, like the most loyal, loving person in the world.’
‘She wasn’t mean,’ Evelyn felt compelled to reply, waving a hand as if to dismiss the idea. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
Nonetheless, Miranda’s indignant words have been circling around her head like sharks ever since. It’s true, isn’t it, that since Rose died she has rather glossed over some of the rows they had, some of the unkind things they’d said to one another during the course of their relationship. She has never, in fact, told another person how, in the last few days Rose was conscious, she had become unusually vicious to Evelyn, snapping at her and telling her to eff off. It’s not you, this sometimes happens towards the end, the nurses had consoled her when Evelyn was left shaken by the outbursts. They lose their real selves, the medication can make them behave out of character. Don’t take it to heart.
But she had taken it to heart all the same. It was impossible not to, hearing the love of her life hiss, ‘Get off me’ with real contempt when Evelyn tried to brush her hair or make her pillows more comfortable. And ever since then, she has boarded up those tarnished memories, not wishing to look at them for any length of time. That sounds a bit mean, Miranda had said and, although Evelyn isn’t about to hold a dying woman’s peevishness against her, it has tugged a loose thread inside her, nevertheless. Something has unravelled, leaving space for dark thoughts, difficult questions. What if Evelyn has been kidding herself this entire time about their relationship? Rose could be selfish and hot-headed, Evelyn always ending up the one who had to broker the peace. Had she been a pushover that whole time, the so-called wet lettuce, too weak to stand up to her partner? She has even started to wonder whether this whole pilgrimage of ashes-scattering has been a performative act of unnecessary exertion, designed to guilt-trip Rose in the afterlife. See how devoted Ihave been to your last wish? See how Iam dragging myself around the world for you, even when I’m dying? Bet you feel bad now, don’t you, because we both know you wouldn’t have done this for me! Even Miranda had alluded to it in similar terms.
She claps a hand to her mouth as these thoughts tumble through her mind, and has to suppress a little cry of horror. That can’t be true, can it? That isn’t why she’s spent so long undertaking these trips, surely. Is it?
‘ Efcharisto !’ she hears the cleaner call just then, as she makes her exit, and Evelyn thankfully hauls herself up from the sunlounger, feeling too hot all of a sudden and in need of shade. After the bright sunlight outside, the relative dimness of the room prompts black spots before her eyes, making her head spin as she steps towards the freshly made bed. Sitting heavily on it, she feels overwhelmed by doubt, bilious with the sudden dread that she might have got everything wrong after all.
Lying back against the crisp white pillows, she picks up her phone and writes a message to Charles. Having a wobble. Do you think Rose really loved me? Please be honest. She presses Send before she can bottle out, then wraps her arms around herself while she waits for a reply.
In the next moment, she starts to feel most peculiar. As if something seismic is happening within her at a cellular level, something quite beyond her control or understanding. How is it that she can be so dizzy when she is lying down? Her head swims, her vision seems to swing in and out of focus, the world pixellating and freezing confusingly. Her body has become numb, as if it belongs to someone else entirely, when she tries to move. What is happening?
What is—?
What—?