Chapter Twenty-Four #2
The bitter bolus continued to swell in her throat and Evelyn could only look down mutely at Marianne’s hand.
In her mind, she saw another hand and the way her father’s damp lips had dragged across it and she imagined all the other places his lips and hands had been and then the world was closing in, dark and muffled, and she had to escape before her lunch of port and baby bird came back up.
But she wasn’t quick enough. A torrent of pink liquid forced its way out of her and she was heaving and reaching, blindly, for something to steady herself.
Her eyes and ears seemed sealed shut but she gripped what must be the edge of a table and then her body jerked again, desperate to get rid of its last swill of port, and as it did she felt the table shift under her.
There was an unusual sound of something sliding, then a loud crash, followed by another slightly smaller crack.
She was on her knees and her eyes were open again, except she wished they weren’t because the floor was splattered with wet pink fragments.
And the fragments weren’t poussin, but pottery – precious, ancient Egyptian pottery.
She could even make out the unmistakable pointed ear of a jackal.
Arms hoisted her up to standing and someone brusquely wiped the vomit from her face with a hard paper towel and then two security guards escorted her from the scene of devastation.
She remembered sitting in a plain white room, the guard’s arms crossed and him refusing to meet her eyes.
A set of keys hung from his belt and she knew that her own key on its chain, and the status it signified, would never be returned.
Later it was confirmed that a total of three precious pieces of pottery had been tipped onto the floor when Evelyn Silver had knocked over a table. A further item, a grain jar, survived, but it had been the least rare and valuable of them all.
When Evelyn’s father came to collect her, her shame was complete.
Her belongings would be packed up and sent on later, he told her.
‘Frances is very upset too – she put herself out for you. We all did.’ Then he telephoned her mother: ‘Drunk, in the museum . . . The damage, inconceivable . . . May press charges. Getting the next train home.’
She was given the window seat on the train, not as a treat but because she couldn’t be trusted.
‘Might go wandering off in search of more drink,’ her father said darkly.
The outskirts of London passed in a blur.
Later, she saw drab fields and then the sea, confirming that she was leaving the life she’d glimpsed so briefly: the new life she could have begun with Asa.
She only spoke of it once, the thing that had set those terrible events in motion. It was on that train journey home, somewhere between Exeter and Newton Abbot, by which point she’d lost hope.
‘I thought I saw you,’ she said lightly. ‘At Rules restaurant.’
Her father’s head jerked up.
‘Yes, with Frances Parfait,’ she continued and then a word came to mind, one she could not remember ever using before. ‘Canoodling.’
Her father slammed his hand down on the train table. ‘What rubbish,’ he said, eyes wide. ‘Do not speak of this nonsense again.’
Shortly afterwards, an elderly lady in a purple coat sat opposite them, so Evelyn and her father remained silent until they rose, together, as the train pulled into their station.
Only then did he say in a low voice, ‘You can’t go accusing men of things that simply never happened. You were mistaken, plain and simple.’
It was all Evelyn could do to nod. She had just banjaxed her career and lost the love of her life – not to mention causing untold damage to the field of Egyptology. Adding drunken ramblings to her list of crimes was small fry.
Once back home, she retreated to her childhood bedroom and refused to come out.
She accepted the simple meals her mother left on a tray outside her door, but declined to come to the phone when Asa called.
Weeks passed and still she could not face the outside world.
Wrapped in her duvet and with the curtains closed, flashes of that day came back to her, sharp as electric shocks.
But they were disjointed, as if the day was too monstrous to tackle as a whole.
It was a huge and slimy rock she could not climb, or a wild animal she was afraid to approach.
So eventually she decided to stop trying.
As her own memories became hazier, her father’s words acquired a sharper focus.
Evelyn had been drunk and disorderly, so what she needed was a more orderly life.
When her father first mentioned establishing a local museum, she understood this was an act of charity, because Evelyn would never find work in any other institution.
‘A mind like yours needs to be kept busy,’ her father said.
‘Routine can be good,’ her mother added nervously.
In that way, Evelyn’s fate was sealed and she never felt the urge to leave Cornwall again.
Asa wrote her a long letter, expressing his thoughts across several pages.
First, he was puzzled: Did I offend you in some way?
and then shocked: What on earth happened back at the museum?
Finally, he declared himself heartbroken.
She didn’t know where to begin answering his questions, so the simplest thing was to ignore them.
Asa and that world soon became a distant memory, as unimaginable as life on the moon.
Her mother offered her sympathy in a hand-wringing, ineffectual sort of way, but Evelyn couldn’t explain herself.
It was so much simpler to say nothing and a silence settled between them, heavy as fog.
One evening her father announced it was time for him to resume his trips to London and Evelyn had looked up, confused. ‘Academics to visit, auctions to attend,’ he added genially and she gave a quick nod, feeling guilty for thinking otherwise.
Tonight, Edie had wrinkled her neat little nose and implied Evelyn had been a fool for imagining Edie had come about the lace. But really, Edie had tricked Evelyn.
And the truth was, her father had done the same almost forty years ago. He’d made Evelyn feel so small and wrong that she’d doubted her own instincts. He’d lied to her and, wracked with guilt at her own mistake, Evelyn had accepted it.
As she lay awake, Evelyn wondered what else in her life she’d accepted at face value, particularly where her father was concerned. She’d always assumed that the piece of lace was evidence of her Cornish birth story, made by a local woman who was too young or poor to keep her baby.
But what if Evelyn had been looking in all the wrong places? Her mother might not have been Cornish at all, but someone her father had known for decades, and continued to visit throughout his marriage: an unassuming woman in a tweed suit called Frances Parfait who had worked at the British Museum.