Pip nodded. She knew exactly what Evelyn meant.
37
They drank their tea surrounded by the teetering piles of groceries. Now that Pip had seen the state of the kitchen for herself, Evelyn couldn’t see any point in shielding her from it any longer. There was a kind of relief in allowing another person to see how she lived, not having to keep it as a guilty secret any more. She had felt so ashamed of her mess, but Pip hadn’t batted an eye at it; she seemed to have seen it as perfectly normal. Evelyn had been surprised at how quickly Pip had guessed how things had got so out of control. Immediately Evelyn had felt better and less inadequate.
Pip had moved seamlessly into clearing up a bit.
‘So, you grew up here?’ she asked as she rinsed their cups out. The sink was full of Evelyn’s washing up, but Pip had run a bowl of hot soapy water and set to work, quietly and without drawing attention to what she was doing.
‘I did,’ replied Evelyn to Pip’s back. ‘Then I left. And then circumstances pulled me back again.’
‘Yes, that’s kind of what happened to me, too,’ replied Pip.
She had hinted as much at their previous meeting and Evelyn was desperate to ask her to explain, but something stayed her tongue. It felt too soon to delve around in Pip’s past, unless Pip raised it of her own volition. Perhaps if Evelyn shared something of her own story then Pip would reciprocate. Evelyn considered the implications of this. Until now, her game plan had been to extract as much information from Pip whilst at the same time giving away as little as she possibly could, but now that felt petty. Did she think her story was too precious to be told to a stranger? Of course, she couldn’t expect Pip to open up to her if she wasn’t prepared to reciprocate. And she did want Pip to open up. What had started as curiosity about the name business had grown into a real desire to get to know her better. The young woman had been sensitive enough to realise that the diary was important and had returned it, and now she was here, quietly cleaning her kitchen for her. Evelyn could search a long time for someone as thoughtful.
So instead of asking Pip to explain why she had ended up back in Southwold, she began with her own tale.
‘The truth was, I couldn’t get away from here fast enough,’ she said. ‘I was desperate to be an actress, but my family, particularly my mother, thought that was frivolous. They discouraged me at every turn, which of course just made me more determined, and as soon as I could, I left here and went to London to seek my fortune.’
‘And what brought you back?’ Pip asked.
It was an innocent enough question, the obvious one, in fact, but part of Evelyn still baulked at having to answer it, although she wasn’t entirely sure why. How could it possibly matter now?
‘I got pregnant,’ she replied as boldly as she could. This was the twenty-first century and no one seemed to hide behind euphemisms as they once had. I got into trouble, I was in the family way; such expressions were quaint and antiquated in this new age of forthright and direct speech, an age that Evelyn suddenly felt the need to embrace. After all, she had thought herself progressive in the 1970s, so why not now?
Pip didn’t comment, and nothing about her facial expression suggested that she was in any way shocked. Either she didn’t understand the ramifications of the words, or she didn’t consider them to be anything other than a statement of fact. Evelyn wasn’t sure which it was, but surely it would be the latter.
Encouraged, she pressed on. ‘It was a bit of a scandal at the time. I wasn’t married or even in a relationship with the father. I’d also just been cast in a huge role in a television drama series that would have sealed my career, and I gave it all up. There was no support for single mothers back then, so I had to make a choice. The baby or the job. I chose the baby, but I couldn’t support myself and so I had no option but to slink back up here. My parents were dead by then, but my sister Joan took a very dim view of it all.’
‘Is that her in the picture in the other room?’ Pip asked. ‘The miserable-looking one?’ She turned around and winked at Evelyn, but then immediately looked unsure of herself, as if she feared she had been too familiar, stepped over some invisible line.
‘Yes. That’s her,’ Evelyn replied, and rolled her eyes to show that no offence had been taken. ‘Joan was miserable as a child and she never grew out of it,’ she said. ‘Once I got up here, she made my life as wretched as she could.’
Evelyn saw Pip nod as if she already knew that and was entirely sympathetic.