Pip could sense Evelyn sizing her up and hoped that she wasn’t found to be lacking. The old woman’s pale eyes were staring at her intensely, unwaveringly, like those of a bird of prey. Pip had the impression that they missed nothing, but she was determined not to feel intimidated. She had withstood far deeper scrutiny than this in the court room. If Evelyn was hoping to frighten her, then she was going to be disappointed.
So far, things seemed to be going according to plan. Pip had managed to get into the house, at least, even if Evelyn didn’t quite know what to make of her. It felt to Pip as if the pair of them were playing a tactical game of cat and mouse, each waiting for the other to reveal themselves first. It made a change to find herself pitched against a worthy adversary, and she realised that she was enjoying herself, even though the pleasure was tinged with a bloom of anxiety that she might not be able to get what she wanted from the encounter. At work she had learned to use silence to her advantage, and so she fixed a gentle smile on her lips and waited.
‘Well, then,’ said Evelyn after a second or two. She was clearly less comfortable with silence than Pip. ‘You say you have my diary.’
‘Yes,’ replied Pip. ‘It came into the shop in a box of books. I thought it was probably there by mistake, so I retrieved it and then did a little detective work to find out where it had come from.’
‘I saw you outside the other day,’ Evelyn said.
‘Was that you? At the window?’ Pip asked disingenuously. ‘I thought I saw someone.’
‘And may I have my property back?’ Evelyn asked. Her tone was bordering on sharp, and Pip, noting this, decided to change tactics. She didn’t want to be dismissed before she had managed to start a real conversation.
‘Of course,’ she said, reaching into her bag and bringing out the flowery diary.
Evelyn drew in her breath when she saw it, then reached for it with a wavering hand. She held it for a moment before dropping it into her lap. A strange sense of loss came over Pip as she relinquished it. She had no rights over the diary, but she was reluctant to give it up, much like Bilbo Baggins with the precious ring.
‘Would you tell me about your acting?’ Pip asked, to break the tension.
Now that the diary had been returned, her hold over Evelyn was all but gone – unless she let it be known that she had read it, of course, but she was reluctant to do that at this point. She smiled as she spoke and tried to look charming, hoping that the joint temptation of a conversation and the opportunity to share something of her past would be enough to tempt Evelyn to open up a little. She could see that Evelyn was weighing up the pros and cons of allowing her to stay now that the diary had been returned. After a moment’s hesitation, she appeared to choose conversation, and the tension ebbed a little from her narrow shoulders.
She took a breath and returned Pip’s smile with one that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
‘I worked mainly in London in the 1970s,’ she said, ‘which will have been before you were even born. I did a little stage work and some things for television. There were only three channels back then, of course, so you tended to be recognised in the street a little, but most actors weren’t thought of as being famous at all. The Queen was famous, and The Beatles, but not television actors.’
‘How refreshing,’ Pip replied. ‘It isn’t healthy the way we treat celebrities these days. Not for them or us.’
Evelyn didn’t agree or even react to the comment, and Pip wasn’t sure she had understood her meaning, but then she supposed that if Evelyn had been living here as a virtual recluse, she would have no idea what the tabloids had made into their bread and butter.
‘Anyway, I had ten years living that life,’ Evelyn continued, ‘and then . . .’ She paused. She appeared to be considering what to say next, how much information to share. Did she assume, Pip wondered, that she hadn’t read the diary? She felt her stomach squirm. ‘And then things changed,’ Evelyn continued neutrally. ‘I moved back up here, and this is where I’ve been ever since.’
As a story it was unsatisfactory, Pip thought, for without including the real reason why she had left London, it was bland and unremarkable, but it appeared to be all she was prepared to give her for now.
Evelyn shifted a little in her seat, causing a bloom of dust to appear before it resettled itself. She lifted a hand to her ear, running the pads of her fingers across her earlobe. In court, such a movement might be used as a tension creator, a tiny pause in the pace designed to pull the judge up and think a moment about what was happening. Nobody would generally notice it, but Pip was trained to see these things. Then again, she might be overthinking it. It was probably just an unconscious gesture made without thought, as such movements generally were.