Cover Your Eyes Page 3

  2

  ‘The board’s going up in the next couple of days, Ma.’

  Eva Conway looked at her daughter and wondered for the millionth time why it was that with such great raw material at her disposal (good hair, good skin, fine blue eyes) Rowena managed to look so ordinary. She wasn’t unattractive, but there was something bland about the way she dressed and Eva felt a small twinge of disappointment every time she looked at her. Guilt followed. There wasn’t a law that said Rowena had to be stylish or striking. She was smiling at her mother from the other end of the table and saying something. Eva tried to concentrate on the words.

  ‘Ma, you’re not listening.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was miles away. But you said … a board going up.’ Eva shrugged. ‘I don’t quite understand, I’m afraid.’ She picked up her spoon and began to stir the coffee in the cup that Conor had just put in front of her. As she didn’t take sugar and her son-in-law had already kindly added milk for her, it was something to occupy her while Rowena spoke.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid we’ve instructed the estate agent. They’re going to put the board up outside the gates soon. Possibly even tomorrow and I didn’t want it to catch you by surprise. There’s been some interest already … Nick … you met him, do you remember? When he came to value the house … Nick says he’s got a couple of buyers who are eager to look around.’

  Eva blinked. She did remember Nick. He was a tall young man with a head like a hard-boiled egg. A boiled egg with spectacles. He had walked around Salix House in his pale grey suit appraising everything and Eva had suddenly seen clearly the shabbiness and tiny inadequacies that she normally didn’t notice. Take a deep breath, she told herself. Don’t get too angry. Her heartbeat was speeding up. She felt as though she were being dragged along by a tide of something; events that were nothing to do with her. Now, irritatingly, she was beginning to tremble and she dug her nails into her palm to stop herself from shouting at Rowena. ‘So. Let me understand you properly. Selling the house, I understand, is now a fait accompli. But I don’t want to leave it, Rowena. Couldn’t you wait till I’m dead and then sell it?’

  Rowena burst out, ‘Of course not. You’ll live for years and years yet, I’m sure. You’re not even eighty. No age at all.’

  ‘If I leave Salix House, I’ll die within months,’ Eva said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a drama queen, Ma. Honestly. As if you’d die. You must know how mad that sounds. You’re healthy; you’re busy with the costumes for the Belstone Players … what’s going to happen to the Christmas production of The Boy Friend if you decide to die? What a thing to say! You’re always in the garden, or going out to lunch with this friend or that. You hardly ever have a free day. You’ll be perfectly fine. We’ve been through the whole thing over and over, haven’t we? We’ve spoken about everything. You know we can’t go on in this way. It’s just getting … too difficult.’

  ‘In what way?’ Eva leaned forward a little and tried to look as receptive and interested as possible. It was true that they’d talked about this subject before but Eva was determined to spin the process out as long as possible. And I’ve got a right to, she thought. This is my house. They’re selling my house. How do they dare to do such a thing to me?

  Rowena sighed and began to list the ways in which things were getting difficult. She ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke, which annoyed Eva so much that she had to look at the framed photograph on the wall behind her daughter’s chair to keep from saying something she’d regret.

  ‘First of all, there’s the money,’ Rowena said. ‘That’s the main thing. We simply cannot afford to keep up Salix House any longer. As it is, it’s beginning to eat up your savings as well as every bit of our income. We’ve had to let several people go who used to keep it looking good. Even with everything you do, I don’t see how the garden can possibly stay as nice as it is without getting some more help and the money just isn’t there. The fabric of the house isn’t in a terrible state yet but it very soon will be. We can do paint cover-ups till we’re blue in the face but that doesn’t alter the fact that there’s structural things that need doing to the brickwork, the chimneys, and so on, not to mention the wiring. I dread to think about the wiring, Ma. It’s ancient. The house could go up in flames at any moment.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Eva laughed. ‘I admit, the house is a little … well, shabbier, than we’d like, but I’m sure that we can do something about that, can’t we?’ She turned to Conor, appealing to him. Sometimes he took her side in arguments.

  ‘No, Eva, Rowena’s right. I’m afraid we can’t. We don’t have the financial resources. That’s the top and bottom of it.’

  Rowena hadn’t finished. ‘And that’s not all, Ma. I’ve been offered a promotion at work—’

  ‘Which will mean a little more money, no?’

  ‘A little more, yes. But also a great deal more work, I’m afraid. And that brings me to something else that I should have told you about earlier. I’m sorry. I don’t know if I’m coming or going, half the time. The thing is: we’re both going to be so busy with selling the house, buying another and the hassle involved with that, as well as with my ordinary work, that I’ve advertised for a mother’s help. Someone to stay here with us, deal with the girls, take them to school and bring them back and generally see to them when Conor and I can’t.’

  Rowena could, Eva noticed, afford to pay someone to look after the girls. There always seemed to be enough money to do what Rowena thought was necessary. How quickly the young decide things, Eva thought. How definite they are about everything, and how optimistic.

  ‘You’ve got money to pay what’s in effect a live-in nanny, but not to do anything to save Salix House?’

  ‘Because it’s only temporary. Only till we move,’ Rowena said. ‘It’s not an ongoing expense, like everything about this house. My raise will just about cover her salary.’

  Eva said, ‘Is the commute getting too hard to do? You’ve never complained about it before.’

  ‘Because I’ll have more responsibilities. I’ll need to work later. Get there earlier. And you’re right, the commute is hard. It’s ridiculous and expensive to commute to London every day. Conor can work anywhere, with his computer consultancy, of course, but we’ve both agreed that what with the house being so hard to maintain and Dee coming up soon for secondary school and frankly, there not being a decent school within miles of here, that this is the right time to sell Salix House and move to London.’

  The kitchen around Eva seemed to shrink and then stretch as though she were in some mad version of Alice in Wonderland. It took a while for her brain to arrange the words in her mouth but at last she said, ‘And what will happen to me?’

  ‘To you?’ Rowena seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’ll move to London too, of course. We’ll find you a lovely little flat, very near us. Or maybe we’ll get a house which has a granny flat already as part of the property. Or you could go into sheltered housing, if you’d prefer to do that. You won’t be put anywhere you don’t want to go, Ma. I promise you that.’

  ‘I don’t feel as though—’

  ‘As though what?’ Rowena was frowning.

  ‘As though I’ve been properly consulted.’

  ‘Oh, Ma, how can you say that? We’ve spoken about this dozens of times. You know we have. Whenever we’ve spoken about it I’ve tried to find out what you think, but you don’t want to know. You just change the subject and hope the whole problem will go away.’

  That was true. She didn’t want to know. ‘I wish there was a way I could truly not know!’ she said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of—’

  ‘You’ll soon get used to somewhere else, you know,’ Conor said helpfully. The man was a fool. Eva debated saying so and thought better of it. To her it was obvious. How could she leave Salix House when every room, every corner of every room, every picture, every plant in the garden, was like a part of herself? She and Antoine had built it up fr
om the ruin it was when they first saw it more than forty years ago, into something different. Unusual. Not like any other house she’d ever seen. She loved it, but that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t want to leave it. She felt bound to the house by ties that no other person would understand. No one could. She was attached to it by things that were (how could she express this even to herself?) more than physical. Ties of guilt and shame and memories. Things had happened here, words had been spoken here that had entwined themselves into her soul and Eva felt unable to imagine leaving. She couldn’t say this to Conor and Rowena. To them, Salix House was a property. There would be other properties somewhere else. She understood that, but she would find it hard, to say the least, if they sold it and banished her, exiled her to another home altogether.

  ‘Well,’ she said, finally, ‘just because the house is yours technically, that doesn’t mean it’s yours emotionally. You must see that I still think of it as mine. Even though it’s not.’

  Rowena sighed. ‘Ma, we can do this the hard way, or the easy way. It was a wonderful thing you did, passing the ownership of the house to us.’

  ‘I only did it to avoid death duties,’ Eva said. ‘I didn’t realize anything like this was going to happen.’

  ‘But you must be able to see why it is, Ma,’ Rowena was trying to be calm and speak kindly but she was, Eva knew, getting more and more exasperated. ‘I’ve told you. We’ll find you a really good place to live. How could you think that we wouldn’t? But Salix House is no longer viable. You must see that.’

  No longer viable. There was nothing to say to that. Rowena and Conor had come to live at Salix House when Dee was born. In those days, neither of them was earning a great deal. They had a tiny flat in Amersham and when Eva proposed that they move in with her, they accepted at once. The burden of childcare was shared and it made Eva happy to have a baby in the house. The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d been terrified throughout Rowena’s early childhood, but this little scrap of a girl was different. After Bridie was born, Eva made up her mind that here were two sisters who’d be friends for ever and she made every effort to encourage them to like one another, to do things together. And it’s worked, she thought. They get on beautifully. How will it be if they’re not living with me any longer? Will I be able to make sure they’re all right?

  Everything had changed in the last year. Rowena had found a job with another accountancy firm and started to commute; Conor’s web design consultancy began to be profitable; and now Rowena had been promoted. And still, Eva thought, there isn’t enough money to ensure the survival of Salix House. She’d already lived long enough since putting the house in Rowena and Conor’s name to be sure of avoiding any death duties on it and she’d never, up to now, regretted making that decision. But if I’d kept it in my name, would Rowena have gone on giving me large sums of money for its upkeep? The truth is: she wants to move to a place that’s more convenient for her work and the girls’ schooling and the small part of me that isn’t entangled with Salix House can see her point of view, even if it isn’t one I share. My own daughter is contriving to make the rest of my life different; to take me from somewhere that’s part of the fabric of my life and put me in a place I don’t know. She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up.

  ‘I’m going to my room, now,’ she said. ‘I can see that you must do whatever you want. It’s not for me to stop you.’

  She tried to leave the kitchen with a firm stride, her head up, as though she were on an imaginary catwalk. Walk like a young woman, Eva, she told herself. She went straight to the study and sat at her desk, staring at the dark wood, not seeing it, but remembering the first time she’d set eyes on Salix House.

  1967

  In October, Antoine had been commissioned by Vogue to photograph a spread of Eva’s latest dresses. ‘Wait till you see the location I’ve found,’ he told her. ‘You’ll love it. A Queen Anne house in the middle of nowhere and absolutely falling to bits. Practically a ruin. It’s just what I wanted.’

  Salix House was exactly as Antoine described it. Eva went with him to look at it on a grey day a week or so before the shoot. The estate agent showed them round.

  ‘It used to be a school,’ he told them. ‘Been on sale for ages and going at a knock-down price because it’s such a wreck.’

  ‘It can’t always have been such a wreck. How long’s it been on the market?’

  ‘Two-and-a-half years.’

  ‘It’s not exactly on the main drag. Who’d want to live out here? Four miles out of a small town.’ Antoine said this as he wandered round the entrance hall and looked up at the broken windows in the cupola.

  ‘It only took us an hour or so to drive from London,’ Eva said. ‘It’s a beautiful house. You can see that it used to be beautiful, I mean.’

  ‘And now it’s derelict,’ Antoine said. ‘Which is just what we want, isn’t it? ‘

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Eve said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  That spread – which appeared in the Vogue issue of April 1968 – was one of Antoine’s triumphs. The clothes were beautiful, and the models included Lissa, the sixteen-year-old who was as sought after as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. On Lissa, Eva’s clothes looked other-worldly, and what Antoine photographed that day became known as the Ghost collection. Falls of crepe and chiffon in grey, taupe and storm blue; lace blouses with ruffled collars; silk shirts with fine pintucks worn with tight trousers; an evening gown that fell in a thousand opalescent pleats from the shoulder to just above the knee, made from thin silk in the palest pink imaginable; chiffon skirts that moved like smoke against Lissa’s legs: Eva was happier with these garments than with any she’d created before.

  Antoine placed Lissa in an empty classroom, leaning against the skeleton of what once was a desk; sitting on a wooden chair near a blackboard that had come adrift from whatever had kept it on the wall, looking out of cracked and grimy windows; under a salix tree, her thin face surrounded by a halo of pale, pointed, fragile-looking leaves; standing by the gate posts at the bottom of the drive gazing up at the flying eagles; looking lost under the domed roof of the hall.

  After everyone else had gone home, Eva and Antoine drove to the estate agent’s office to return the keys.

  ‘I’m going to buy it,’ Eva said. ‘Salix House.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You heard me. It’s going so cheap, Antoine. I love it. I’ve fallen in love with a house … can you believe it? ‘

  ‘You’re mad. You’ve taken leave of your senses. Think, Eva. It’s a wreck.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be. We could do it up.’

  ‘We? I’m not ready for this Eva. Really. Do think before you do anything rash.’

  ‘It’s not rash.’ Eva had never been so sure of anything. ‘It’s an investment. It’ll be beautiful.’

  ‘It’ll be crippling, financially.’ Antoine was beginning to waver, Eva could hear it in his voice.

  ‘And if I told you it wouldn’t? If I told you I could afford it, all on my own even if you don’t want to come in on it, what would you say then? If money wasn’t an issue?’

  ‘You’re determined, aren’t you?’

  ‘You’re beginning to agree with me, aren’t you? I can tell.’

  He smiled. ‘You know me too well. But okay. The place is certainly … well, I’m the one who found it and told you about it. I think you’re right. I think it could be fabulous.’

  ‘Then let’s make it fabulous. Help me with it, Antoine. Please.’

  He put out a hand and stroked her knee. ‘How can I refuse you, Eva? You must have anything you want. If you can. You know I’ll help you. Though what’s going to happen to our flat? And how can you work from the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t be a killjoy! We’ll sell the London flat. We could get a much smaller place to stay in when we need to, but why would we? Why not work from here?’

  ‘Because it’s the middle of bloody nowhere.’

  ‘Anywhere ou
tside a three-mile radius of Piccadilly Circus is the middle of nowhere to you. This place is fine. Only an hour or so to town. And look how cheap it is. Have you ever seen a house like this at such a price?’

  ‘It’s not a cheap house, Eva,’ said Antoine, pulling up outside the estate agent’s office. ‘It’s an incredibly expensive ruin.’

  ‘But it’ll be our ruin,’ Eva said, happy that he’d come round to her way of thinking so readily. ‘And it won’t be a ruin for very long, I promise you.’

  Eva sighed and turned her mind deliberately away from thoughts of the past. For the last ten years, she’d been designing and sewing the costumes for the local amateur dramatic society’s annual spring production. The Belstone Players were a good company, and it gave Eva satisfaction to know that her costumes had added to their reputation. She enjoyed the challenge, loved being able to draw something different every year, choose the fabrics, sew them, be praised at the first night and mentioned in the local paper. Musicals were a speciality of the Belstone Players. Eva opened her sketchbook and began to draw a pretty twenties dress for one of the flappers in The Boy Friend. So far away from the dark memories that seemed to overwhelm her more and more often these days.

  3

  I wasn’t allowed to ring his mobile. That was the rule. From the beginning he’d emphasized that I could text him but not call. No way of knowing who’s in the room, right? he’d said. Especially at night, hey, Simon? I imagined him lying there in his bed, all crisp white sheets and lacy pillows, next to Gail, and I couldn’t bear it. I was a bit drunk, but I did know what I was doing. I wanted to wake him up. I wanted him to suffer a bit. I imagined him saying to himself: I got through that okay. That went well, all things considered. She didn’t throw a wobbly. She’ll be okay. Well, fuck him, I thought. I’m going to wake him up. It’s the least he deserves. The thought of them lying there together, maybe even touching, was too much for me. I wanted to spoil the night for both of them. I wanted them to lose sleep. I didn’t care if they never slept again.