Chapter Ten
Toots the cat made it very clear that Evelyn had been neglecting him and he was not best pleased.
He rejected her first peace offering, a tin of sardines, and sat with his back to her, every now and then giving his tail a twitch.
Finally, he relented when she got out the hard stuff: a packet of Dreamies treats.
It was good to see him again but she wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d stayed away.
Something about the new busyness to her days meant she could see her caravan through fresh eyes: there were several stains on the brown corner sofa, in reality a thin layer of foam that she should have replaced long ago, and the windows needed a good clean.
Then there was the sour smell that had bothered her for some time, but had no discernible source.
Still, it was the best place for her to sit and let the events of the past few days settle.
A week ago, her life had been ticking along at its regular pace.
Since Della had appeared waving that letter from the council, her days had been an endless series of disturbances.
People who had been near strangers were now calling her by her first name and wandering into her museum, suggesting meetings and websites and, now, an exhibition.
It was odd, she thought, how in a small town, you could absorb a superficial knowledge of people, yet never dig any deeper.
For instance, she knew that Della was from Australia, but she had no idea why she’d come to Portheast or how long she intended to stay.
She’d noticed a young woman called Alison who had been pregnant and then reappeared with a tiny baby in a sling and Roy, one of the Pinlow brothers, by her side.
Years ago, standing in the queue at the post office, she had overheard a woman she now knew was Sariah asking for a form to redirect her post from an old address to the staff accommodation at the new hotel.
And, like everyone in town, she knew that Jacob was a down-on-his-luck Warburn and that George Rook was not to be trusted.
Yes, in a town like Portheast you could be surrounded by people that you recognised, or who recognised you, but still feel a deep, gnawing loneliness. She was her own worst enemy, of course. Since childhood, her habit had been to put her head down and rush past anyone who attempted conversation.
‘Say hello, Evelyn,’ her mother would urge her on trips to town, pressing a hand between her daughter’s shoulder blades.
Evelyn would do as she was told, but she was far happier when she could return to her own private world: the doll’s house in her bedroom or the various secret camps she had made in the overgrown bushes of their garden, hiding behind waxy leaves of camellia and laurel.
Part of her reticence came from the fact that everyone in the town already knew more about Evelyn Silver’s circumstances than she would like.
It was common knowledge that she had been adopted by the Silvers, a special delivery from the north coast. Although only a short drive away, that part of Cornwall had always felt like another country to her – a place overshadowed by tall engine houses from its mining past and craggy drops into the sea.
The grassy cliffs and curved bays of Portheast seemed gentle by comparison.
With people already knowing so much about her past, Evelyn tried to guard what little she could.
She would angle her arm around her exercise book at school so no one could copy her answers and politely declined rare invitations to playdates.
She grew accustomed to eating her packed lunch on her own, dutifully working her way through oatcakes and grapes and a single bruised banana (‘Full of potassium, good for growing bones’) packed by her mother, while her classmates tucked into Ski yoghurts, Wagon Wheels and bags of Wotsits.
She was bright, but it was decided that university would not suit her temperament, not even one that was relatively close by such as Exeter.
Instead, she did an Open University degree in Classics and then took up the unofficial position of proofreader for her father, who was writing up a lifetime’s knowledge in a book he’d catchily titled Coastal Grasses, Mosses and Ferns of South Cornwall.
So it was a surprise when, one Monday morning, she was summoned to her father’s study and presented with an advertisement in the jobs pages of The Guardian. ‘It’s a trainee curatorship,’ her father explained, smoothing out the newspaper. ‘And I have a few strings I can pull.’
‘But it’s in London,’ she’d stumbled.
‘Well, it’s the British Museum.’ He laughed. ‘So, yes, it is.’
Her mother wasn’t sure Evelyn was robust enough to cope with life in the big city, let alone the rigours of a nine-to-five position.
But Edwin seemed keen for his daughter to spread her wings.
And, as each dull day passed in a fog of proofreading, watching the Six O’Clock News over tea and then Horlicks before bed, Evelyn began to wonder if there was more to life.
So she went ahead and applied and was accepted onto the scheme.
Her father even helped arrange her accommodation: a curator in the East Asian Antiquities department had a spare room in her flat in a redbrick mansion block near Goodge Street.
On sunny days, Evelyn and her landlady, Frances Parfait, strolled to work together through the backstreets of Bloomsbury.
Frances wore brogues with a tweed skirt suit and was a chain-smoker, and liked to complain that the museum wasn’t the institution it used to be.
‘Back in the day, curators were Oxbridge only,’ she said, dropping her cigarette onto the museum steps and grinding it out with her sturdy lace-up.
Gradually, what Evelyn came to love most about those walks and London in general was that nobody knew who she was.
She’d thought the busyness and the anonymity would be terrifying, but in fact it was a liberation.
As she started to explore beyond her small patch of WC1, she revelled in it.
Unlike Portheast, nobody knew Evelyn Silver’s sad past and, for a while, it felt as if life was opening up into a series of larger vistas and possibilities.
She even loved the antiquated routines of the museum, the way all the curators and the small cohort of trainees had to queue up at the porter’s window behind a pillar in the foyer each morning for their keys.
You had to be ready to recite your key number quickly, so as not to hold up the line.
‘Nine-three-one,’ she’d say clearly and the porter would hand over her weighty key on a chain.
It hung around her neck and made her feel important as she made her way through the galleries to whichever department she was assigned to that month.
Her first placement had been in Maps, accessed through a secret door that was set into a run of bookcases: a keyhole in the woodwork beside The Cartography of Ancient Greece was the spot to look for.
Next, she shadowed a curator in Egyptology, where she got used to the musty smell of long-preserved bones and was told never to touch anything with her bare hands.
This was followed by a stint with her landlady in East Asian Antiquities.
Frances was more easy-going and actually encouraged Evelyn to handle the collections.
She also took frequent smoking breaks, leaving Evelyn alone to admire the ceramics laid out for cataloguing.
Then she met Asa Lingard, a fellow trainee curator, who had a passion for Greece and Rome.
He’d been on a dig in Rome in his final year at university and waxed lyrical about it to Evelyn.
‘The evidence is all there, right in the middle of the city: ancient columns and slabs of rock that were carved thousands of years ago.’ He had long, gangly arms and they wheeled around in the air as he got excited.
‘The Colosseum is mind-blowing – you must go. All that gore and debauchery.’
Asa had grown up in Edinburgh with academics as parents and he was almost as cripplingly shy as Evelyn.
But somehow, when they were alone together, their mutual awkwardness evaporated, as if two negatives made a positive.
At the weekends, they often met at a cinema in Bloomsbury, where, finally, during an afternoon showing of A Room with a View, Asa dared to lay a clammy hand over Evelyn’s.
Within months, they were spending every spare moment together and exchanging longing looks across a table of the British Museum canteen.
After lunch, Asa would walk her back to whichever department she was working in.
With his curly hair and strong nose, Evelyn dared to tell Asa he was as handsome as the Roman statues they passed by.
He, in turn, said she was as rare and precious as the ancient Egyptian jewels she was finally allowed to dust with a tiny brush.
Yes, as she told her parents over the phone, life in London was pretty wonderful. Until it all came crashing down.