Chapter Twenty-Five
For the first time in many years, Evelyn did not feel like doing her morning beachcomb.
Easing herself out of the diorama’s tiny cot bed, she felt old and broken and her mouth was sour.
Passing by Mr Cornish Life, she resisted the temptation to knock his pompous little pipe out of his hand.
Then she gazed into the blank painted eyes of Mrs Cornish Life.
Had Elsbeth known about her husband’s philandering?
Or had she, like Evelyn, been deceived – told over and over that she was imagining things?
Her mother’s funeral had been as small and unobtrusive as Elsbeth Silver had remained throughout her life.
After abandoning her degree to marry Edwin and move to Cornwall, she’d fallen out with most of her family.
Only an aunt and an uncle had stayed in touch and come to the funeral.
‘Still don’t understand why she moved here,’ the uncle had said, biting into a sausage roll.
‘It’s the ends of the earth.’ The aunt, musty in mothballed black, said that to her knowledge, the only heart problem Elsbeth had suffered from was when she fell for Edwin Silver.
With a satisfying crack, Evelyn shook out a black plastic bin bag and began to fill it with the detritus of yesterday’s event.
The wine glasses she stacked in their crates, to be returned to the hotel.
When she found several forgotten triangles of Nils’ pumpernickel bread topped with herby cream cheese, she popped them in her mouth for her breakfast.
‘Hey, it’s me. Sariah.’
Evelyn stood very still. She felt bad that she hadn’t caught up with Sariah since their trip to see her mother, Grace, but she was in no fit state to receive visitors.
‘Evelyn? You in there?’ There was a pause. ‘I need a bit of a chat, really. I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’
Evelyn reluctantly unlocked the door and opened it so that Sariah could slip in.
‘Tea, you say?’
She needn’t have worried about her dishevelled appearance because Sariah barely glanced at Evelyn as she handed her a takeaway cup. ‘It’s OK, it’s from Nils’ place. Della’s still sleeping off a hangover,’ she said, pacing the sticky museum floor. ‘Just wondered how you thought last night went?’
Evelyn eased the lid off the cup and took several sips. ‘Well, a mixed bag,’ she said.
Sariah continued pacing. ‘I think the council’s running scared – I saw Kayla on my way here and she and her sister have already emailed, saying they want you to stay. More to the point, they said their dad has too, and people round here tend to listen to him.’
‘That’s good,’ Evelyn offered, but she could tell Sariah was working up to something.
‘Did anyone keep a tally of who came? Because Jacob said that old boy over in Fowey who wrote about fishing knots didn’t make it. And no sign of Alison. Just her bloke,’ Sariah added darkly.
‘Yes, although I wish he hadn’t. Is Jacob OK?’ Evelyn asked.
‘He’s fine, but he’s got a black eye. I mean, it’s not fine, what Roy did. But that’s Roy.’
‘We should check on Alison,’ Evelyn said.
‘I know. I did drive up there and knock on her door and there was no answer. But you’re right, I should go back.’ Then Sariah stopped pacing. ‘Thing was, last night I had a surprise visitor.’
You and me both, Evelyn wanted to say, but she kept quiet.
‘My mum came,’ Sariah said.
‘Ah. How did that go?’
‘She was different, actually. Sort of softer.’ Sariah gave a rueful smile. ‘Threw me a bit, to be honest.’
‘Well, that sounds like good progress.’
‘Yeah, I suppose. I mean, I wasn’t planning to keep in touch. I thought it would be easier to forget about the lot of them.’
Evelyn drained her tea and began to crush the paper cup for her recycling bin. ‘Except pushing things to the back of your mind never really works,’ she said, taking care to find the right words. ‘And you never stop wondering how and why things happened.’
‘That’s true,’ Sariah said.
Evelyn resumed peeling damp flyers off the floor and stacking glasses. She took a breath. ‘Actually, I had a surprise visitor too.’
Sariah let out a small gasp. ‘Who? Was it about your lace – did someone come forward?’
Evelyn frowned: was there anybody in this town that didn’t know her story? ‘Well, I thought so at first, but it was a false alarm.’
‘Oh, Evelyn, I’m so sorry.’ Sariah came closer. ‘Can I give you a hug?’
Evelyn saw women doing this sort of thing all the time: hugging each other when they hadn’t been apart five minutes, shouting ‘Love you!’ down the phone for no particular reason.
She shrugged and gave in to the unfamiliar sensation of another body pressed to hers.
She caught a whiff of almond shampoo and the fake fur trim on Sariah’s hood tickled her nose.
She pulled away, grateful for Sariah’s understanding.
‘The thing is,’ Evelyn said, ‘my visitor did me a favour. She helped me see things more clearly and I think I’ve been looking for my birth mother in all the wrong places. I’ve been sitting here in Portheast, but I’ve started to wonder if I should look further afield. In London, for example.’
‘London? Is that what you heard last night?’
‘Not exactly. But this woman I met, she made me realise how I always take people at their word. When the truth might lie elsewhere.’ Evelyn reached for the broom and began to sweep. ‘Sorry, back to your mum. How did you leave it?’
‘She suggested we meet up again. Talk things through.’ Sariah moved a crate of wine glasses over to the door.
‘Sounds promising.’
Sariah fetched a second crate and the glasses gave a merry tinkle as she put it down on top of the first. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘A couple of months ago, the two of us hadn’t ever spoken and now look at us – chatting like old friends.’
It was mid-morning before Evelyn began trying to trace Frances Parfait. She realised that, when it came down to it, all she knew about the woman was that she’d loved ancient East Asian artefacts, Benson & Hedges cigarettes, Inspector Morse – and possibly her father, Edwin Silver.
A short trawl through the British Museum’s website showed that, unsurprisingly, she was no longer working there – she would be in her eighties by now – but neither was she mentioned as a visiting speaker or as an author of any of their specialist publications.
However, it turned out that Frances Parfait hadn’t bothered taking down her LinkedIn profile, even after her retirement.
It seemed she had officially stepped down in 2009.
Since then, there had been no further updates.
Once, she’d known Frances’s landline number off by heart, a relic from the days before mobile phones, but now only the number for Asa’s old flatshare lived on, uselessly, in the recesses of her mind.
Just once, she thought she’d seen Asa. In the summer of 1991, she’d been in the queue for the till at B&Q, buying a trellis for her mother, who was concerned her jasmine was wilting rather than climbing.
She’d noticed a tall man two people ahead of her in the queue and something about the way he tilted his head to one side rang a bell of recognition.
She’d stood on tiptoe and noted that he was buying two disposable barbecues and a set of tongs, and standing beside him was a small fair-haired boy.
It being August, Cornwall was full of visitors, so it was not beyond the realms of possibility that Asa Lingard had brought his family here on holiday.
Her heart thumped so hard she feared she might be sick.
But then the cashier asked him a question and she saw him turn and look behind him.
He was miming something, holding up his hand and asking, ‘Bag?’ It was almost as if he was looking directly at Evelyn and, unthinkingly, she felt her face break into a smile.
Then, from behind Evelyn, a voice piped up: ‘No, darling, I’ve got loads’ and a woman breezed past, adding another item to the conveyor belt: a pink blow-up beach chair.
It hadn’t been Asa at all. As he packed his barbecue goods into a reusable carrier bag, she realised this man’s chin was too weak, his stance was all wrong and his accent was more Essex than Edinburgh.
But it had shaken her, the thought that it could have been.
It was a reminder that the real Asa Lingard must be out there somewhere, possibly also lighting a beach barbecue, making sandcastles with a son and pumping up a plastic chair for a wife who was too fancy to sit on the sand.
But largely, Evelyn had banned herself from thinking about Asa or wondering what he was doing.
Naturally, she stayed away from London and the British Museum, but she also took care to avoid any reminders of him.
If she caught a glimpse of a magazine article about ancient Rome, she turned the page.
She officially became a vegetarian (the sight of meat reminding her of their final meal) and she refrained from watching University Challenge, which had been his favourite programme.
She even swore off Penguin biscuits, their tea break snack of choice.
So by the time the internet arrived, she had trained her mind not to slip down any dangerous rabbit holes and she had resisted even googling his name.
Now, however, she opened her laptop, returned to the British Museum website and checked every department’s staff list with mounting excitement. Yet she could find no trace of Asa Lingard. She did some more straightforward searches, but still couldn’t find any record of him.
Had he become a conspiracy theorist, fastidious about leaving no digital footprint?
Worse still, had he died before the internet gobbled up everyone’s names, birthdays, jobs and funny cat videos and shared them with the world?
She hoped it was the former and that he was living a life of obscure academia, his thoughts unsullied by the internet, barbecue tongs and, ideally, a wife.
Evelyn shook her head at how easily – and ludicrously – she’d been sidetracked.
This was about Frances Parfait, she reminded herself.
There was no record of her on , but she struck Evelyn as the sort of woman who might enjoy being a thorn in the side of residents’ committees and the like, so she searched Frances’s name combined with ‘Bloomsbury’, ‘Fitzrovia’ and ‘London’, but yielded nothing.
She contemplated ringing the museum, or the handful of smaller establishments devoted to East Asian antiquities, but she knew they were unlikely to give out any information.
After a few hours of dead-ends she began to think that there was no option but to return to the flat in Bloomsbury.