21
Evelyn took a long, lingering look around her little room before she left it for the last time. The flat had never been much to write home about. It was cramped, cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, with shabby fixtures and fittings and a creeping damp issue, but it had been her world for the last five years and she had loved it. For all its failings, which were many and varied, it was what it represented that was important. The flat spoke of independence, a determination to succeed; dreams, if not quite fulfilled, then at least works in progress. Evelyn had left the safety of a world she knew behind and had pushed out on her own to make her fortune in a city where the pavements sparkled in the spotlights. She hadn’t exactly made a fortune, but she had managed to support herself without ever once asking for help, and that had made her proud.
But now she was going back, back to Suffolk, to the family house, to her sister. It felt like a retrograde step, a move in the wrong direction that discredited everything she had achieved so far. And not only that, she was taking with her the scent of scandal. She was pregnant, with no sign of a wedding band on her finger or a father for her unborn child. Such a situation might have been fairly commonplace and even acceptable in London, but where she was going it would shroud her in disgrace. Tongues would wag from one end of the town to the other. Ironically, Evelyn thought, she would be the most exciting thing to happen to the place in years.
In fact, if the whole situation weren’t so overloaded with complication, Evelyn would have been quite proud of the bomb she was about to drop on her former hometown. In other circumstances, she would relish the expressions on the faces of people from her past as they saw her expanding form and realised why she was suddenly back living with Joan in their parents’ house. Evelyn would have enjoyed flaunting both her bump and her status as a singleton.
But life wasn’t as straightforward as that. She was going to have to throw herself on the mercy of her sister, and so she would need to toe the line. It was clear that Joan was keen to add a gloss of respectability to her story. In one telephone conversation, she had suggested that Evelyn come up with some lie about her ‘husband’ dying unexpectedly.
‘It would be better all round, Evelyn, if we just pretended that you were a decent woman who had fallen on hard times,’ Joan had said.
Evelyn had ignored the obvious slur and chipped back with her objections to the plan. ‘But that would mean lying every day to everyone. I happen to think that it’s important to be honest at all times. And anyway, I would probably get into a terrible pickle trying to remember what I was supposed to say. I’d be bound to trip myself up, and that would be worse than just telling the truth from the start.’
Joan had harrumphed down the telephone line.
‘In any event, I don’t suppose anyone will be interested,’ Evelyn continued disingenuously, ‘but if they are, I will just tell them that I’m having a baby on my own and I’m back at home to get some support from my loving family.’
She could feel the frost radiating from her sister even though she was a hundred miles away. It was crystal clear that Joan was only taking Evelyn in out of a sense of duty, but Evelyn hoped that if she made herself useful and was good company then perhaps she could win her sister round. She was prepared to try, at least, which was more than could be said for Joan currently. Maybe when the baby arrived, her sister would soften a little. It would be difficult to stay so angry with her nephew or niece smiling and cooing and kicking their little legs in the air, or whatever it was babies did. And there wasn’t much either of them could do about the inevitable gossip around the town. They were just going to have to ride that storm out.
‘All set?’
Evelyn turned and saw Ted behind her, a cardboard box in his arms.
She nodded a little forlornly. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘If we must.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ Ted said, putting down the box and wrapping his arms around her shoulders. ‘It’s only a flat. Bricks and mortar, that’s all. It’s the memories that are the important part.’ He picked the box back up and headed towards the stairs. ‘Come on. If we set off now, then we’ll miss the worst of the traffic. It’s a nice little run out to Suffolk and I’m looking forward to getting a bit of sea air in my lungs, get rid of some of this city smog.’
God bless Ted. He had borrowed a van from somewhere and had offered to drive her and her belongings up to the house. If he hadn’t, then she would probably have had to take out a loan to pay a removal firm, money that she had no prospect of repaying any time soon. The arrangement was that she would contribute to his fuel costs and keep him entertained on the way. Well, she could manage that, at least.