Forgive Me (58 page)

‘Fuck off! I was only trying to
help,’ he roared back at her. ‘If you bloody well thought of someone else
but yourself for five minutes, maybe you’d see that.’

He turned and stomped off into the bedroom,
leaving Eva shocked that he’d sworn and shouted at her. But she felt unable to go
after him to apologize, so she just stayed on the sofa, rigid with tension.

He came back a few minutes later. He’d
taken off the smart shirt and trousers and had changed into jeans and a T-shirt.

‘We can’t go on like this,
Eva,’ he said. His voice was so sad, it made her feel even worse than when he
shouted at her. ‘You won’t let me in. It’s like living with a
domesticated robot. I’ve done everything I can to try to help. But the Eva I fell
in love with has gone, and somehow I don’t think she’s ever going to come
back.’

‘I want that Eva to come back,’
she said wearily. ‘But it’s like I’m dead inside. The kindest thing I
could do for you would be to clear off, and leave you to find happiness with someone
else.’

‘I don’t want anyone else,’
he said firmly. ‘But I can’t live like this either. The sale of the studio
will be completed next week. You’ve dealt with everything you can at The Beeches,
Ben’s got the Power of Attorney now, and he’s off the hook with the police.
It’s time you decided what it is you want for yourself. I had hoped that it would
be a house for us to share, and to get married. But I know that isn’t what you
want, and so I’m waiting to hear an alternative.’

He picked up the keys to his van.

‘Where are you going?’ she
asked.

‘To see a man about a plastering
job,’ he said. ‘Think on what I’ve said while I’m gone. I want
an answer when I get back.’

He left then. No door slamming, that
wasn’t his way.

Eva sat there on the sofa, not even able to
cry.

Andrew hadn’t made a complete
recovery. But he was considered well enough to stand trial, which was set for September.
Meanwhile, he was being held on remand in Gloucester Prison. When Ben went to see him
there, he likened his condition to that of a stroke victim. His speech was slurred, his
memory was affected, and he had lost some of the movement in his right arm and leg.

Ben said it was difficult to know whether it
was the shock of Sophie’s suicide or his injuries that had changed Andrew, but he
had broken down and made a complete confession to the police. He was intending to plead
guilty, and he insisted that all charges were to be dropped against Ben. He also agreed
to give him the Power of Attorney.

‘He’s like a pathetic little old
man,’ Ben had said after the visit. ‘He’s shrunk in every possible
way. I wanted to hate him, but the dad I knew isn’t there any more to hate. Maybe
it’s just as well his mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be – the
way he is now, he can deal with the boredom and the lack of freedom
in prison.’

Ben didn’t intend to see his father
again once he was sentenced. ‘There’s no point, Eva. I can’t forgive
him, so I’m going to airbrush him out of my life. I’ll take the money due to
me from The Beeches when it’s sold, for Mum’s sake, but only my share.
I’m going to instruct the solicitor to give Dad’s share to Portwall, to try
to make restitution for what he took from them.’

Eva could hardly believe that her little
brother could be so grown-up and honourable.

She had stayed in a bed and breakfast near
The Beeches while she sorted everything out and organized an auction room to take all
the furniture and household goods.

It was so strange going through drawers and
cupboards, finding things – such as the board games she, Sophie and Ben had played with.
She found an emerald-green scarf of Flora’s in Sophie’s room, and guessed
her sister had been taking it to bed with her. She found herself rubbing it against her
cheek and sobbing for both of them. Reminders were everywhere: old dressing-up clothes
in the attic rooms, dolls and teddy bears packed away in an old suitcase, Ben’s
collection of Matchbox cars, and a bracelet of Flora’s tucked down the side of a
chair.

It was easy to stuff Andrew’s clothes
into bin bags for the charity shop; nothing of his brought on pangs of sorrow. Yet the
pastry cutters in the kitchen, the secateurs in the potting shed, and a half-used pot of
face cream of Flora’s made her dissolve into tears.

Olive came round to give her a hand on two
consecutive days, and it was good to have her there. She was practical – not given to
analysing, or offering advice unasked. What she brought to the table was common sense, a
listening ear, and
a knowledge of which items were valuable enough to
sell in an auction and which would only be fit for a charity shop. Anyone else would
have picked over things and asked about them. But Olive didn’t; she just packed
them into the appropriate boxes and didn’t allow Eva to get sentimental about
anything.

‘Take a few things of Sophie’s
and Flora’s, if you like,’ she said casually. ‘But let everything else
go. Possessions can become like chains – especially ones that act as unwelcome
reminders.’

When Olive left on the last day, she hugged
Eva. ‘I know you think you’ll never get over all this. But you will. Write
down how you feel each day. In a little while you’ll have a day when you feel
happy, and you’ll suddenly realize you haven’t thought about Sophie or your
mum for a few hours. That will be the start of better times. And believe me, it will
come sooner than you think.’

Once everything had been taken away by the
auctioneers, and the clothes and oddments had gone to a charity shop, Eva had cleaned
the house from top to bottom. Then she locked the doors and took the keys to the estate
agent who would be handling the sale for Ben.

Eva had hired a car for the week she was at
The Beeches. As she drove out for the last time, she stopped at the gates, got out and
took one last look back at the house. It was beautiful, and even though the flower beds
around the lawn were now choked with weeds, she could still imagine Flora kneeling on
the grass, at her happiest with dirty hands, tending her flowers. Eva hoped whoever
bought it would be happy. She certainly wouldn’t want to buy a place where so much
tragedy had taken place.

Later she drove round to Crail Road. The
house looked just the same, though the tenant in her old room had stuck
plastic sunflowers on the window. She wondered if Tod still lived there, and if he
ever did enrol on his counselling course. He was bound to have read about what happened
to her family in the papers; she wondered how he had reacted to the story.

Now as she sat in the flat, Phil’s
last words ringing in her ears, she remembered that Tod had said she was needy. She had
been then, but she wasn’t now. Needy people didn’t want to be alone.

It crossed her mind that her real sister,
Freya, could be feeling the same as her, and maybe that was why she’d never got in
touch again. It was just as well she hadn’t – Eva knew she hadn’t got
anything left inside her for anyone else.

So what was she to do? Patrick had said
shortly after Sophie’s funeral that she ought to get away, right out of England
and far away from all the bad memories. He’d meant with Phil of course – but even
if Phil was free to go, that wouldn’t work. They’d just be taking the same
problem with them.

But what if she was to go alone – go to
Paris, to Rome and Florence? See all those works of art Patrick often talked about, and
find out if being completely cut off from everything and everyone was what she really
wanted?

She considered that for a few minutes, but
just the thought of having to get tickets, then pack and get on the right plane all
seemed far too hard. Yet imagining herself walking around Florence, seeing the wonders
of the Uffizi Gallery or the Pitti Palace, was a lovely daydream. Patrick had once said
that he’d like to take her there and show her all his favourite paintings and
sculptures, but that wasn’t likely to happen, he was always too busy.

Would it really be that hard to pack and get
tickets? Why was she being so pathetic?

Just thinking of doing it gave her a twinge of
hope.

But would Phil go along with it? If she
went, would he say that was the end?

Did she want it to be the end?

She put her head in her hands. She felt like
that famous and hideous picture called ‘The Scream’. Was she speeding
towards a mental breakdown? How did she think she was going to cope in Europe with just
schoolgirl French and a smattering of Italian, if she couldn’t cope here?

Yet that in itself was an attraction – if
she didn’t know the language, she couldn’t be drawn into conversations.
Without talking, perhaps she could nurse her inner self back to what it once was?

One thing was very clear to her. If she
stayed here, she was never going to recover. She would carry on doing what she’d
done for months now – pretending she was fine, and dying a little more inside every day.
Sooner or later, Phil would lose patience and ask her to go. He was getting nothing out
of this relationship now, other than having his clothes washed and his meals cooked. A
few months down the line she might be too apathetic to even do that.

He deserved better.

Phil came back soon after eleven, and she
knew he’d been in a pub by the smell of cigarettes clinging to him. He went to the
fridge and got himself a can of beer.

‘Well,’ he said as he sat down
opposite her, ‘your time is up. What are you going to do?’

His directness was one of the things she
loved about him. He said he liked it in other people, now she was going to test him.

‘I’m going to Europe,’ she
said.

‘For ever?’

‘No, just for as long as it takes to
find myself again. Sorry, that sounds like one of those dippy-hippy sayings.’

‘And am I supposed to sit and wait for
you?’

‘I wouldn’t have the cheek to
ask that of you,’ she said, hanging her head. ‘But you’re right, we
can’t go on like this. I’ve leaned on you long enough, Phil. It’s time
I learned to stand alone.’

He leaned back on the sofa and put his hands
on his head. The gesture was one of bewilderment.

‘I love you,’ he said, his voice
cracking. ‘Right now I wish I didn’t, because then I could show you the
door, and I could pick up the life I had before I met you. We’ve been through so
much together, Eva. This isn’t how it should end.’

‘I don’t want it to be the end.
But until I’m mended inside I’m no good to you.’

‘And how will going off to Europe
“mend you”?’ he said with more than a touch of sarcasm.

‘I don’t know if it will. But I
know if I stay here, feeling the way I do now, I’ll end up in a loony
bin.’

‘Then go. I don’t want that for
you,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘But do it quickly. Send me a postcard
from Paris.’ He walked off to the bedroom and shut the door.

An hour later, Eva was still sitting in the
same place and crying. She knew she’d hurt Phil really badly, and her whole being
wanted to go and cuddle him and say she wasn’t going anywhere. But she
couldn’t do that. All she could guarantee was that she would wear him down with
her silences, her distance, and it would poison his life. He really did deserve
better.

She slept in his brother’s old room,
and she woke in the morning to hear the familiar sound of Phil making tea and his
sandwiches for the day. He didn’t bring her tea as he
usually
did. She was glad, because she didn’t think she could bear to go if she saw his
face one more time.

Lying there, she waited for him to open the
front door and then close it behind him. She half expected him to shout out something
nasty, or at least bang the door shut. But, considerate as always, he did it quietly
with no last bitter remark or an order to leave her key behind when she left.

She heard the van starting up and then
pulling away. Tears rolled down her cheeks, because she knew he was hurting. It was
tempting to pull the duvet over her again and cry into the pillow. But having told him
she was leaving, she had to.

It was after twelve when she left, with a
medium-sized wheeled suitcase. She’d packed the rest of her more wintry clothes
into a bin liner and tucked it tidily under the spare bed. She would go directly to the
airport and buy a ticket to Paris there. She’d telephoned her solicitor and her
bank to tell them she was going away and would be in touch with a forwarding
address.

Her bank and solicitor had Phil’s bank
details, and she’d asked them to pay £10,000 into his account when the funds from
the sale of Pottery Lane were cleared. She knew he would have refused it if she’d
given him the money, but she owed it to him for all the work he’d done on the
house. She intended to write to Ben, Patrick, Olive and Gregor later today and
explain.

Finally she cleaned the flat, and last of
all wrote Phil a letter. She had so much she wanted and needed to say, but
couldn’t put it into words. So in the end all she wrote was a simple note.

Phil,

I loved you, I still love you and I always will. But I can’t make you
happy until I’ve learned how be happy again. I wish more than anything
that all this awful stuff hadn’t happened, because it’s made me
someone I don’t want to be.

You have been the very best person in my whole life. I’ll never forget how
you loved and supported me through everything.

My love always,

Eva

PS: I’ve left some clothes under your brother’s bed. I’ll
understand if you throw them out.

Sorrento

Eva leaned on the rail of the swimming deck,
looking down at the waves washing over the rocks some four feet below. The afternoon sun
was beating down on to her bare shoulders, and the decking was too hot to stand on
without her flip-flops.