“Dad says if he finds out who leaked the story he won’t be held responsible.”
“Jesus, Seb, who do you think leaked it?” Evie sneered, rolling onto her back and kicking her legs in the air. “It’s the lesser of two evils. Release a small story to hide a bigger one.”
“Evie, could I speak to you for a minute?”
Duncan led his sister away without waiting for an answer and spoke at her while heat blared against the hill. When the pair returned, Evie looked so wretched that Lawrence felt he had to say something. “I know what it’s like,” he told her quietly. “To be disappointed.”
It was as if he’d shone a torch in her face. Seconds passed, stillness. It got so that Lawrence became afraid Evie was going to say something horrible to protect herself, like she usually did, so he stood up to kill the moment. The trick to lying is believing what you say in the instant that you say it, thus making what you’re saying at least partly true. But there was no trick to truth, and therein lay its power.
“Come on, Slowcoach,” he said, “I’ll race you to that red tree.”
Without waiting for an answer, he sprinted across the grass, listening to Evie calling after him. He didn’t stop until he reached the family maple, where he was met by a tall figure bumbling through the furze. This stranger wore one of those clinical masks made out of white plastic. He looked horrific, like Frankenstein’s bleeding ghost.
8
BEING DRUNK WAS hardly a new feeling, but it was always welcome. Evie wondered whether she was too young to enjoy it the way she did, then again her mother had never thought so. They used to drink together when they lived in Muswell Hill, gin and martinis like proper ladies. If Clive was doing well he treated them, splitting the cost across his expenses to justify the west end eateries. Perks, Fiona winked, perks. The Jaguar drove them to lunch. Early maturity meant early refinement, so Evie was allowed to drink.
She’d learned the big lessons early: men were despots, life was flawed and money mattered. It took her longer to learn that in the business of self-preservation there are no equal measures; parents would do anything to have you reflect well on them and pretty much everybody is a hypocrite.
Not a second thought had been given to marooning her in this backwater canal. She, a woman trapped in the body of a girl, forced to doggy paddle past the submerged trolleys and traffic cones of Litten.
As far as Evie could tell the north was bare limestone hills, brusque towns, and lurking beyond them, savage country ruined by concrete and heavy industry. Pragmatic shapes dominated everything. Power station cooling towers and factory chimneys, the gaunt shadows of metaclass="underline" hoists, cranes and parades of pylons massive against whatever skyline she happened to be driven towards.
They said it was pleasant around Harrogate, Ripon and Wetherby, but down here there was nothing but a village, surrounding villages and yet more villages furnished by works, land and the pit. Litten, where you tucked your hands under your armpits to keep them warm, where the before-morning darkness◦– so really not darkness at all◦– flooded the halls of your borrowed home and isolated you in profounder, more unfamiliar ways.
Evie had complained, complained, but as far as her parents were concerned she was old enough to know better if she made a mistake, yet too young to be allowed to follow her own mind. She squinted now, the grass beneath her still morning-damp, the sun ahead bothering the view, then shielded her eyes with her hands, careful not to smudge her make-up. Making an effort was something she could still do. She always wore coloured eye-shadow, always the lips were clad in red. Clarissa Swarsby had been the same: an octogenarian made up like a dog’s dinner to the very end.
Duncan was talking. “Is he coming back?” he said. The endless mottle and chimneys fanned out in front of them.
“Evie?”
“I heard you.”
“Well?”
“Well how should I know?”
It took him three dandelions to realise he had to apologise. “Good for you,” Evie replied, once he had.
“You were saying too much.”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Evie, you nearly told him about Dad.”
“So?”
“So are you mad?”
“What would you find more suspicious, Seb, me playfully skirting the issue or you acting like there’s something to hide? Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t care.”
“You’ll care if Lawrence blabs. And what were those hero comments about Bram?”
“You mentioned him first.”
“No, Evie, I didn’t.”
So what if she had raised the subject? Bramwell Guiseley was impossible not to discuss, the man who cooked her devilled eggs in his flat above the wharf. A branch belonging to the dogwood on the balcony had tapped at the window, as if asking if it could come in.
“Take it from someone who knows, Pup. The older you get, the more damaged women your own age are.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Damaged? But how could you be?”
So exciting. Together in Bram’s second or third apartment, which was full peculiar corners and ungainly points. Bram was never without company when Evie was growing up. He was the friend of her parents whom she sought to listen to above the others, ears to the crick between the door and the frame when it was agape, eavesdropping on the dinner parties, the gossip from White’s and The Cavalry and Guards Club, the reminiscences of pitiless conquests and ribbings gone by. Those were the days of cottoning onto the reality of men who could generate their own social climate, for Bramwell Guiseley’s moods could affect entire rooms. Evie admired that. One catcall was all it took. Handsome even in his forties, Bram was the kind of person who would have been carried in a palanquin in another era. Probably cries paisley tears, she’d heard someone say once, although Evie didn’t think Bram capable of crying.
“Lawrence doesn’t know his Ps from his Qs,” she said.
Duncan smirked. He could always be lured with a snide remark. “Have you ever noticed that everything he wears looks like it’s from the penny rail?”
“I think that’s exactly where it comes from.”
“He doesn’t convince me.”
“Doesn’t know when he isn’t being funny.”
“Or when to shut up.”
Evie stopped laughing. There was scorn in her, and it had a tendency to break through when she wasn’t looking. “Still, he’s kind of sweet, though,” she added, not daring to look at Duncan, whose eyebrows she could practically feel rising into his hair.
“That’s rich, you’ve been like a baby with a spinning top.”
“Well, he still feels… decent.”
“So you want to play with him.”
“I don’t!”
“Evie, I can see you doing it.”
“Shut up.”
Shut up shut up shut up.
Duncan took the bottle and said, “He’s changed his accent and you don’t even say anything about it. He’s desperate and full of shit◦– I don’t know which is more pathetic. God, that’s strong.” He put down the bottle. “If you believe even a shred of what Lawrence says then you’re more naïve than I thought. It’s obvious he’s from an estate.”
Evie had never been to an estate and had no plans to visit one. All you had to do was look around Litten to see where Lawrence came from. From the mothers here chained to their prams, to the seagulls that had somehow found their way inland, everything in this place seemed so lost that she could never imagine it found, a death of great insignificance awaiting it, a death it was at all times Litten’s job to avoid. Evie would run if she were made to stay into the New Year.