Chapter Twenty-Six
Back at her caravan, Evelyn fed Toots and took a quick shower. This was more arduous than it might sound as she had to assume a hunched position and keep one hand pressed against the shower door at all times to ensure water did not escape from the cubicle.
After her tepid dousing she got dressed and selected her third best dress for the day ahead.
Having slept in the wool one, it was in no fit state.
She rejected her navy blue number with a sailor collar as too fancy and settled on a brown linen one she’d bought at a jumble sale.
It was from a shop that specialised in maternity wear, which explained why the bust area came with two liftable flaps (initially, she’d assumed it was an outré fashion statement). Still, it passed muster with a belt.
As the train pulled into Paddington, Evelyn felt like she was in a dream – albeit one where she was tired, hungry and nervous. But she had been waiting passively for too many years. It was time to know the truth.
Returning to London, the faces she saw were marked by woe: on the concourse, a lonely man picked half a sandwich out of a bin and in the Ladies’, a young woman with bad teeth asked her for spare change.
Ignorant as a tourist, she followed the stream of people down the steps to the Tube, where she held on tight to her bag and watched what everyone else did.
Nobody bought a cardboard ticket anymore; instead they tapped their bank cards at the turnstile, so Evelyn did the same.
The first train due was the brown line – the Bakerloo – so she got that.
The smell of hot dust and the roaring sounds remained unchanged, but inside the carriage the adverts no longer promoted shampoos to cure baldness or courses to learn Pitman’s shorthand.
Instead she read about dating apps, food delivery services and AI assistants.
When she got off at Oxford Circus, the platform was so crammed with people that Evelyn had a moment of panic, imagining a dreadful accident had occurred.
But no one else seemed in the least bit perturbed and eventually the crowd began to move and she continued up steps and along tunnels until she emerged onto the street.
The first things she noticed was that Topshop had disappeared, which felt like some sort of sacrilege, particularly as she’d purchased her beloved sailor-collar dress there all those years ago.
In Topshop’s place stood an Ikea. People walking in looked reasonably normal, but those leaving looked like ragged survivors of some catastrophe, wearing dazed expressions and clutching huge blue bags.
But then muscle memory took over and she found herself walking a once familiar route through Fitzrovia’s backstreets towards Frances’s flat.
She passed a pub where she and Asa had drunk Grolsch beer until neither of them could see straight, but fancy coffee shops and juice bars had replaced the old corner shops and video rental stores.
She was so close to her goal, yet Evelyn felt oddly detached from what might unfold.
It was as if she was on a day trip, come to revisit a different version of herself – the Evelyn who could have stayed in London, gaining in confidence and knowledge – and as she walked, she dared to imagine how things might have turned out.
Almost certainly, she would have moved into a flat in north London with Asa.
They would have celebrated with a bottle of cava, then cherished small acts of domesticity like cooking their first meal together and sticking up their art gallery posters with Blu Tack.
A year or two later, they might have bought their first house, moving to Hackney, which would have seemed expensive at the time but they would later realise had been a steal.
She would have dined on masala dosas, pad Thai, falafel and vine leaves instead of her mother’s egg salads and hotpots.
She would have visited basement bars where the bass beat was so strong you felt it in your gut, drunk rum and had questionable haircuts.
She might have dressed in Lycra and oversized shoulder pads, crop tops and, for a brief period, stonewashed denim.
Over the years, she and Asa would have progressed from LPs to CDs to downloads and then back to LPs, in an ironic sort of way.
Gradually, Evelyn’s weekend trips back to see her parents in Portheast would have become less frequent.
She would say the train fare was too expensive, but really it was because every time she visited she felt lonely and wrong, and eventually Asa would point out that your family wasn’t meant to make you feel like that.
She would agree and then, when they started thinking about starting a family of their own, that version of Evelyn might have gone to see a counsellor and talked about how she felt, knowing so little about her own birth story.
After each session, she would have told Asa that the talking helped.
She might have said it felt like sloughing off a thick layer of skin, one that was heavy and grey and had weighed her down for too long.
Sometimes that process felt raw, but mostly it felt like she was getting a second chance.
But none of that had happened.
Evelyn turned a corner and there was the redbrick mansion building where she’d spent nine months of her life in 1987.
The building had been spruced up, with shiny door furniture and an intercom.
Fearing that if she didn’t act fast she’d find an excuse to walk away, Evelyn reached out her finger and pressed the bell beside the number 12a.
‘Hello?’ It was a man’s voice – young and with a hint of an accent she couldn’t place.
‘Hi. This is going to sound weird, but does Frances Parfait still live here? Or do you have a forwarding address?’
In the silence that followed, she wondered if this was where her journey ended, discovering that Frances had moved out long ago or had died.
‘Hello?’ She wondered if the man was still there.
There was a crackle and his voice came back on: ‘Who is this?’
‘My name is Evelyn Silver. I knew Frances many years ago. I lived here, in fact.’
His reply was curt: ‘Wait there.’
Through the glass doors, Evelyn saw a man approaching, dressed in a uniform, and as he opened the door she saw it was a nurse’s tunic. He spoke quietly, as if he didn’t want to disturb anyone, and she wondered if this had always been his way or was an acquired habit.
‘How can I help?’ he asked.
‘Sorry, this is a bit out of the blue, but I was in the area.’ She gave a nervous laugh and watched as the man’s face shut down.
‘Miss Parfait is unwell,’ he said. ‘She’s not able to accept visitors who are just “in the area”.’
Evelyn felt the pressure of the past twenty-four hours pressing in on her and realised she was close to tears.
This was her only chance. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why I laughed.
None of this is funny and I wasn’t just passing.
I have come all the way from Cornwall to see Frances, but I didn’t know she was ill. Is it serious?’
The man jiggled the keys in his hand impatiently and she knew her time was up.
‘Please, can you tell her I’m here? Say I’ve come to talk about the past.’
‘I already told her your name,’ the man said. ‘She’s asked you to come up.’
The nurse was called Samuel and as he led the way through the chequer-tiled foyer, he explained how he had to protect his client and make sure she didn’t get too tired.
They stepped inside the small old-fashioned lift and as he pulled the zigzag metal gate across with a clank, Evelyn was sliding back in time, remembering the smallness of this lift, how embarrassing it had been when you shared it with a stranger; how much fun it had been with Asa.
She caught sight of herself in the lift’s mirror – a vision of drabness – and looked away. How had she become so old?
‘She sleeps a lot, but she still has all her faculties,’ Samuel said.
Entering the flat, everything felt smaller than she remembered and as if the colours had faded. In the hall, the reds and blues of the Persian carpet were sun-bleached and the edges of the phone table were chipped. But the smell was still the same: a mixture of furniture polish and tinned soup.
Evelyn braced herself, expecting to be led into Frances’s bedroom. She envisaged a hospital bed, a discreet bedpan and the fug of illness. But she was shown into the living room, where a stick-thin woman sat at the window. Most surprisingly, she was dressed in a royal blue velour tracksuit.
‘Excuse my appearance,’ said Frances Parfait. ‘Loose clothing works better these days. Gentler on my skin.’
Instinctively, Evelyn sat in what had been ‘her’ place on the left-hand side of the sofa. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were ill,’ she began.
‘Oh?’ Frances said archly. ‘I thought good news always travelled fast. Which is how your father probably views my impending demise.’
Evelyn was thrown. ‘Oh, he died,’ she stumbled. ‘Five years ago, during Covid.’
‘Well, how about that.’ Frances raised a hand in the air, then let it fall back into her lap. ‘And all this time I thought he’d “ghosted” me. Isn’t that what they call it these days?’
The veins on her hands were raised, the loose skin dotted with dark spots.
‘I don’t know,’ Evelyn said. ‘I’m sorry, if you weren’t told.’
Frances leaned forward. ‘Evelyn Silver. You always were a shy thing. But you still say “sorry” and “I don’t know” an awful lot.’
It was becoming clear that Frances Parfait had long since stopped caring about manners.
‘Well, you’ve got to the heart of it,’ Evelyn replied, because she too had had enough of being polite. ‘My life has been full of apologising and not understanding what was going on – like what exactly went on between yourself and my father.’
‘Really?’ Frances sounded incredulous. ‘Why do you say that? I mean, you saw us carrying on that day in the restaurant. Most embarrassing.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did. But I didn’t comprehend, not properly.’
Frances looked sceptical, as if she didn’t believe a woman of twenty-two could have been so naive.
‘All OK, Miss Parfait?’ Samuel the nurse stood in the doorway.
Frances raised her eyebrows and replied, ‘Yes, fine. Still dying’ and Samuel walked away, shaking his head.
Evelyn unbuttoned her coat and pushed her hair back from her forehead, which was clammy with sweat. If Frances liked people being direct, she could oblige.
‘OK, so you clearly had a relationship with my father. I need to ask, are you my . . .’ No, actually, she couldn’t say the word. ‘Did you give birth to me?’
Frances had been gazing out of the window, seemingly absorbed by the slow-moving traffic and the office workers heading home. When she replied, her acidic tones had softened. ‘Oh, Evelyn. Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Because you and my father, well, you clearly had a long affair. And then, when I was twenty-two, you gave me a home. I suppose I jumped to conclusions.’ She felt her hope drain away, like water circling down a plughole.
‘Oh, Evelyn.’ Frances sounded grave as she turned to face her. ‘Edwin was never honest with me, but I had hoped he was a different man at home.’
‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.’ Evelyn felt like a soft toy that had been thrown from person to person in some cruel game and then suddenly dropped to the ground.
‘There you go again with your don’t knows.’
Evelyn’s hands were two tight fists. ‘So tell me, Frances,’ she almost shouted. ‘Tell me the truth.’