I won’t ever tell S about him. She doesn’t need to know anything. She has asked me about her father once or twice, but she’s so little and it’s easy just to distract her. Obviously, I shan’t get away with that forever, though. One day she will want something more.
This had been the first comment she had come across about Scarlet’s father, and Pip had scoured the entry for any clues as to his identity, but there weren’t any. She assumed it was just the usual old story – boy meets girl, girl gets into trouble, boy runs for the hills, and Evelyn clearly didn’t want him to have any part in Scarlet’s life, despite how hard her own life appeared to be as a result. Evelyn was very bitter, though, which didn’t seem to square with that story. Pip couldn’t really work it out.
Her sister Joan continued to be hellish to her as well, and Pip often found herself seething with outrage and indignation at the way she treated Evelyn. She seemed to be little more than a skivvy in the house and Joan had her doing all the domestic tasks as if she were her maid and not her sister. It reminded Pip of Cinderella and her ugly stepsisters, but Evelyn seemed to accept her treatment, a few waspish diary entries aside.
Pip felt forced to draw comparisons between Evelyn’s situation and the way her own mother sometimes asked, very nicely, if she could perform a particular task for her, only for Pip to fail to do it. The thought made Pip ashamed and her insides squirmed at the contrast between her own behaviour and Evelyn’s. She would try harder, she decided as she read on. Her life was challenging and she was finding it hard to cope, but that was no excuse for snapping at her poor mother or stropping around the farm like a teenager.
Pip turned to leave, but as she did so she looked up at the house one more time. A pale face appeared in the lit window. It was hard to make out any details through the dirt, but it looked like a woman, white hair caught up in a bun on top of her head. Even though Pip couldn’t see her features clearly, it felt as if their eyes locked, just for a moment, and Pip found that she couldn’t pull her gaze away.
Was it Evelyn?
For a wild moment, it crossed Pip’s mind that the other woman knew she had read her diary, was party to her innermost thoughts, but of course that was ridiculous. How could she possibly know?
And yet, as the two women stared at each other across the street, it felt to Pip as if there were some connection that she couldn’t quite fathom.
Then the woman stepped away from the window and was gone, leaving Pip alone on the street.
23
Pip was just unlocking her bike ready to ride home when she heard someone calling her name. She turned and saw Jez in her father’s van on the opposite side of the road.
‘So this is what you get up to all day?’ he said, cocking his head towards Have a Heart and grinning at her as if it were a sex shop.
Pip left her bike where it was and, taking care to check for oncoming cars, crossed the road to talk to him.
‘I know. The glamour, eh?’ she said. ‘If my friends could see me now.’
‘Oi!’ replied Jez. ‘I’m your friend, don’t forget, and you look pretty good from where I’m sitting.’
Pip smiled, despite her best endeavours not to. ‘Flattery will get you precisely everywhere,’ she said.
‘Is that a promise?’
Electricity crackled between them for a moment and then dissipated into the evening air.
‘Listen, I’ve got half an hour,’ said Jez. ‘Fancy a quick drink? Then I can chuck the bike in the back of the van and give you a lift back up to the farm.’
‘Great. Why not?’
They went to a different pub this time. Pip wondered whether maybe Jez didn’t want to be seen out with her too often.
He bought her half a cider, her favourite tipple when they were teenagers, and a pint for himself, and they sat on a bench underneath the window. A silence rested between them, but it wasn’t awkward. They both sat, contentedly looking out at the other customers and enjoying their drinks.
‘Do you still see anything of the others?’ she asked after a while.
She had dropped her school friends almost as soon as she’d left for university, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in what had become of them all. Jez rattled off a list of who was still in the town, who was married and divorced and other choice bits of scandal from the intervening ten years, and Pip listened and made appropriate sounds when the news merited it. Jez seemed to relish telling the stories as if he, like her, had no one to tell them to. She assumed that his fiancée Teresa would have little interest in stories about people from his past and so he was probably enjoying having a new audience for them. One or two of the names he mentioned meant nothing to her.