Nicholas told her endlessly that if she insisted on sleeping in her chair then she only had herself to blame, but really, what was the point of shuffling from chair to bed? At least she could get up from her chair when she needed to. If she took to her bed, there was no guarantee that she’d ever bother to raise herself out of it again. They would find her, if they came looking, flat on her back, her body rigid and unmoving even as her heart still pumped blood around her veins.
Reaching for her spectacles, Evelyn placed them on her nose and peered out at the street beyond her window. In truth, it was becoming increasingly difficult to see out. The salt together with the grime from the street below and decades of dirty rain had combined to coat the glass in a smeary film. Maybe she should ask Nicholas to clean this one pane. She didn’t care about the other windows, but she missed having a clear line of sight to the street and the sea beyond. Almost nothing ever happened directly outside the house, but it would be a shame to miss what little there was to see because she couldn’t make it out through the murk.
That girl yesterday, for example. She had stood in the street and stared up at the house for five minutes straight. The staring wasn’t that unusual. People often stared – children, mainly, and those who had nothing better to do than waste their time wondering about what went on behind her front door. But they didn’t often stand and stare quite so blatantly, or for quite as long. Evelyn hadn’t recognised her either, although that meant nothing. She knew no one in the town any more. Nobody visited other than Nicholas, and that suited her just fine.
On a side table next to her chair sat a mobile phone and a diary with a pen tucked into its spine. She didn’t keep a diary these days, not like she had done. She had stopped all that when she’d realised there was nothing in her life worth recording, but she did like to keep a track of the days as they passed. Otherwise they all ran into one another with no way of telling them apart.
Today was a Friday. Friday was the day her groceries were delivered. She had set the online shopping order up herself. Nicholas had shown her how to do it, and she had taken to it like a duck to water, although there were some aspects of managing it that still bamboozled her. Sometimes she played a game with herself. She would imagine she was organising an enormous party, like the ones she had gone to back in London, and she’d fill her little basket with everything that she needed. Smoked salmon and blinis, jars of caviar and all kinds of canapés that you could buy ready-made nowadays. And champagne – bottles and bottles of champagne. It was surprising how quickly it all added up. Throwing a party was an extremely expensive business.
And then, once she had amassed everything she would need to host the kind of affair people would be talking about for months, she took every item out of her basket, the total spend dropping click by click until she was left with the bare remains of her needs for the week – a paltry selection, as she lived a very simple life.
So if it was Friday it must be her morning for a bath. She liked to look （and smell） at her best to greet the delivery man. It was always a man, she’d noticed. In all the years her groceries had been delivered, it had never once been a woman who brought them. Was that because women weren’t allowed to do the job? Evelyn had been cut off from the ways of the world for a long time, but she felt sure that couldn’t be right. There couldn’t still be one set of rules for men and another for women. Surely, things had moved on.
It was far more likely that women didn’t want to do the job, she concluded. It couldn’t be much fun, shifting crates all day and having other women give you orders about where to put everything.
Evelyn was very clear about her own delivery requirements. The man emptied the plastic bags out of the crates and left them on her doorstep, and then she brought them into the house herself. One Friday, an over-officious driver, no doubt in an attempt to be helpful, had ignored her increasingly loud protestations and pushed past her into the house.
‘Through here, are we, love?’ he’d asked as he made his way past the piles of newspapers down to the kitchen.
She could tell from his face that he had found her living standards questionable. There had been a wrinkling of the nose and a shaking of the head.
‘You need some help here, my love,’ he’d said, his eyes roaming round the mess that had once been the kitchen. ‘Do you have anyone you can call?’
Evelyn had made it clear in no uncertain terms that she had everything she needed, and was in no need of any kind of assistance. The delivery man had tutted, shaken his head again and looked as though he was about to protest, but then he had seen something in her expression and changed his mind.