The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton Read online

  The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton

  CATHERINE ALLIOTT

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © Catherine Alliott, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190864-9

  For Anna with love and thanks

  1

  Just recently, and it's hardly even worth mentioning except perhaps as a reproof to myself, I find that whenever I enter a church, not only does my heart sink, but I'm invariably late. Today was no exception. As the sorrowful aroma of beeswax, stone and candles contrived to lower my spirits, so the shrill tones of the female vicar, welcoming the congregation, confirmed my bad timing.

  As I crept in, a few heads near the back swivelled to smile sympathetically. I made to slide in amongst them, whispering apologetically, ‘Sorry, sorry…’ but my sister-in-law up near the front was having none of it. Her pointy features, flushed, irritated and rotated at a hundred and eighty degrees, were hard to miss.

  ‘Down here,’ she was mouthing theatrically, beckoning me on like an Italian traffic policeman. She even had the white gloves. White gloves!

  Dutifully I gathered my hymn book and handbag, and hastened, head bowed, down the aisle. As I hurried along, I inadvertently looked up and caught the eye of my brother in his rather too tight hound's-tooth-check suit, up by the altar, in his occasional capacity of churchwarden. He rolled his eyes in mock horror and gave me a huge wink.

  ‘We were worried about you,’ Caro hissed as I squeezed in beside her. Everyone in the pew shoved up a bit. ‘You're so late!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Traffic was horrific.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  I shrugged helplessly as if to suggest I could hardly be held accountable for the vagaries of Oxford's one-way system, and craned my neck past her to greet the rest of my family, such as it was. Beside Caro, my mother and stepmother had both leaned forward to smile: Felicity, my stepmother, elegant in a taupe chenille jacket and vanilla silk skirt, and my mother, startling in leopard-print leggings, a pair of tangerine trainers and matching headband. She blew me an extravagant kiss.

  ‘What's she come as?’ I muttered to Caro as I sat back.

  ‘Don't,’ she moaned, closing her eyes. ‘I swear she does it on purpose. I told her it was smart but casual, as in “no hats”, but she looks like she's out on day release. As if the minibus has just dropped her off!’

  I suppressed a smile and turned my attention to the vicar, visiting for the occasion: not the village's usual, but very enthusiastic, and, despite a telltale flush up her neck, really getting into her stride, encouraging us in carrying tones, to support these young people before us today, to applaud them in this, their momentous decision, to foster their faith.

  I smiled. Jack, my nephew, one of the six or seven teenagers in the front pew, the sun from a stained-glass window shining through his ears, making them glow pink, his red hair dishevelled and hanging over the collar of an uncharacteristic tweed jacket, had the grace to turn and flash me a grin. When he'd cycled into college one day to see us and I'd casually enquired as to his motives, he'd replied in surprise, ‘Oh, you get terrific presents. Hugo Palmerton got a diving watch, and his godfather gave him a digital camera.’ As I'd raised faintly startled eyebrows he'd rushed on, ‘And obviously I believe, and all that stuff. And it's a good idea if you want to get married.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Saves a lot of hassle.’

  I had an idea he was confusing confirmation with baptism, but grasped the general sentiment. He was getting something under his juvenile belt, another notch on his list of ‘must dos’: get GCSEs, play in the cricket team, snog a girl at a party. Getting confirmed, whilst not necessarily up there with the snog, was still a rite of passage to be doggedly manoeuvred. He was at a particular stage on his greasy pole, as I, I supposed, glancing around, was on mine. There was a time when I used to go to church for weddings, Saturday after Saturday, and then christenings, Sunday after Sunday. Now, with unerring regularity, it appeared to be first communions. Next, I imagined, with a jolt of surprise, it would be… yes. Well. After all, there'd been one of those already, hadn't there? Dad's. One box ticked. One box that had gone up the aisle, containing a supposedly hale and hearty man, a florid-faced, larger-than-life man, in this, our village church, whilst we'd all sat in this family pew, hankies clutched to mouths, shocked and silent: the remains of the Milligan family.

  Family pew. An anachronism, of course, but one that Caro maintained rigorously, referring to it loudly, as Mum and Granny never had, as if we were the ancient descendants of some aristocratic lineage, instead of impoverished farmers who'd managed, by the skin of their teeth, to hang on to a certain amount of dubiously infertile land and a crumbling old farmhouse.

  Caro leaned in to me now. ‘No Ant?’ She glanced around, as if perhaps expecting him to slide in, having parked the car. I swallowed my irritation.

  ‘No, I told you, he's taken Anna to a clarinet exam.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said vaguely. She had a faraway look in her eye, as if in some dim, distant conversation I had mentioned it, when in fact I'd made a point of ringing her and apologizing profusely, knowing what store Caro set by family occasions.

  ‘Does she still enjoy it?’ she whispered incredulously.

  ‘Loves it,’ I hissed back, as we were enjoined, at that moment, to get to our feet and sing hymn number 108.

  Yes, that was always the implication, wasn't it, I thought as I added my low warble to Caro's reedy treble and joined the debate as to whether those feet really did walk upon England's mountains green: that my overstimulated, hot-house flower was wilting under the pressure of academia and music exams and pushy parents, whilst her ‘brood’, as she always referred to them – as if three were a cast of thousands, for heaven's sake – got out into the fresh air and had a ‘proper childhood’; as if, somehow, Anna's was improper. My blood simmered away for a bit, but then, as the hymn came to rest in a green and pleasant land and we were bidden to pray, I tried to, not have green thoughts, but pleasant ones.

  After all, she was not only my sister-in-law, she was my oldest friend. I was guiltily aware that at one point ‘oldest’ would have been substituted by ‘best�
��. Certainly years ago, at school, when we were pretty much joined at the hip and lived in each other's houses. Which was probably where the trouble had started. She'd taken one look at my rambling old farmhouse in its idyllic riparian setting, the river threading through the willows in the bottom pasture, observed the big family meals in the farmhouse kitchen, the laughter, the noise, the sense of history, and thought: I want some of that. I can almost remember the look in her eye as she'd stood at the kitchen window one day after lunch, watching Tim, huge, burly and kindly, with his father's shock of red hair, bowling at a tree stump in the back garden. She'd wanted him too, and she'd got him. And if I'm honest, I thought, gazing down at the pattern on my tapestry kneeler, I'd looked at her orderly family, her punctual meals in the uncluttered town house with its state-of-the-art appliances, its colour TV and microwave, her quiet, professional, teacher parents, and thought: and I'll have some of that. Of course, I didn't marry her brother – that would have been too neat, and apart from anything else she didn't have one – but my eyes, shall we say, were opened: to an urbane, civilized lifestyle. One that revolved around restaurants and concerts and political debate instead of wheat yields and set-aside and crop rotation. I was smitten.

  When, some years later, I'd met Ant, tall, tousled, slightly myopic in his John Lennon glasses, an academic I'd found in a bookshop I was working in, I knew it was a blueprint I'd been working to. And so everything slotted into place. Caro got her heart's desire, and I got mine. In fact, Caro, even more so, because when Dad died, suddenly, unexpectedly, not in a tangle in his combine, as some farmers do, but just quietly in his sleep and, it transpired, intestate, Caro got the farm too. She almost hadn't, actually, because everything naturally went to Felicity, but Felicity wouldn't hear of it. No, no, the house and land should go to Tim. It was what Dad had always wanted, she insisted, what he'd said he wanted, what would have happened if he'd flipping well bothered to write it down. Felicity took sufficient from the estate to buy herself a small house in town, and left the bricks, the mortar – the acres – to Tim and Caro.

  I wouldn't say Caro moved in with indecent haste, but it must have been a relief to leave the dismal white bungalow in the village and hustle her children into their bedrooms under the eaves, with the playroom downstairs, family kitchen and rambling back garden. The fact that the roof leaked like a sieve and the winter months were spent running from room to room with buckets whilst the damp galloped gaily up the walls was neither here nor there. She'd got her farm, her land, the whole bucolic bit.

  As I'd got my bit, I thought, as I watched Jack come back from the altar, fresh from taking his first parish communion, cheeks flaming, eyes down, collar too tight, looking so impossibly like Tim at that age. I'd got my academic: my sensitive, clever Ant, who duly went on to become a don, making me, nearly bursting with pride, a don's wife, and all at the tender age of twenty-nine. Ant, not me. We had a house in college, in Balliol, one of those dear yellow stone terraced ones, looking out onto the grassy quad complete with gates and porter; we had like-minded friends on our doorstep – dons' wives with babies, with whom I pushed prams. Life was sweet.

  But then Ant had gone one step further. He'd written a book. Not a dry, academic tome, but a rather accessible biography of Byron, about whom he was a bit of an expert and whom he regarded as a bit of a dude. Which was how he'd portrayed him. As a legend. A modern-day lyricist, a good-looking, aristocratic, floppy-haired, druggy poet with supermodel girlfriends, in an accessible way that had caught the public's eye, and, more importantly the eye of a daytime television programme, which promoted him. Almost overnight, he became something of a success, and Anthony Hamilton, obscure English professor from Oxford, became Anthony Hamilton, bestselling author. Which wasn't entirely in the script, as far as Caro was concerned.

  Oh, it wasn't the fame she envied – I knew she got a vicarious thrill out of being his sister-in-law; broadcasted it loud and clear at the slightest opportunity – no, it was the money. Not a great deal, but enough for us to move out of the college house, which, whilst sweet, was tiny, to a large Victorian villa on four floors with high ceilings and sash windows in that academic Mecca, Jericho. Bills were paid, credit cards sorted, and Anna's school fees, which frankly we'd struggled with, became a doddle. And Tim and Caro couldn't even afford school fees. There was no money in farming now, not unless you had a thousand acres or a private income, and even with the extra Caro made from holding wedding receptions in the garden they were still very short. So they'd had to send their three to the local comp.

  I shifted in my pew. Yes, their three. To my one. After all, I'd been quite good about that, hadn't I? Quite grown up. We all had our crosses to bear. OK, not in the early days I hadn't been good. Not when Jack had been swiftly followed by Phoebe and Henry, and Anna by not a sausage. The despair, the sadness, the seething jealousy had threatened to overwhelm me then, but later… well, later, Ant and I accepted it. And she, Anna, was so lovely.

  I remember once, standing at the window at Church Farm, watching her play with her cousins in the garden. Jack and Henry were fighting as usual, Phoebe was petulantly splashing in the paddling pool as Anna patiently tried to fill her doll's teapot from it, and I was reminded of an Aesop fable. The one about the vixen, surrounded by her swarm of cubs – seven or eight – counting them loudly, taunting the lioness beside her, who only had one. ‘Ah, but mine is a lion,’ the lioness had replied with a smile. In a guilty, secret place in my heart I felt that; felt that every scrap of Ant and my energy, every ounce of excellence from the collective gene pool, had gone into creating not a scrappy load of cubs, but a tall, blonde, clever, brave lion.

  ‘Are you going up?’ Caro nudged me and I felt a rush of blood up my neck. How awful. To be considering her children so. In church!

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘For communion. Are you going?’

  ‘Oh. Yes – of course.’

  Our pew was filing out from the other end and I got up and followed Caro, Mum and Felicity, pausing to greet Henry and Phoebe on the way, who, yet to be confirmed, were staying put. I felt even more guilty as they smiled shyly but delightedly up at me. Sorry, God, I muttered, as I crept towards the altar. They're lovely. Of course they're lovely. How awful.

  Up on the rostrum, Tim was dutifully helping with the communion wine, there being quite a congregation today, offering the chalice to Felicity as she kneeled. The vicar, meanwhile, was offering hers to Mum.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Mum, firmly.

  ‘Oh – but I thought…’

  ‘I'll take it from my son.’

  The vicar cleared her throat. ‘The thing is,’ she murmured embarrassed, ‘we've got quite a lot to get through this morning, so—’

  Mum's voice became ominously loud. ‘I will take the blood of Christ from my son!’

  Caro shot me a look of horror and, after some hasty eye contact, Tim and the vicar switched places. As Mum stood up and I went to kneel in her place, she hissed, ‘I will not take the Holy Sacrament from a woman!’

  ‘So you made crystal clear,’ I muttered back.

  Tim's eyes, though, were sparkling with amusement at the diversion, and as he approached me with his chalice I felt those terrible church giggles I'd felt years ago; every Sunday, in fact, in this church, as Tim did his damnedest to make me laugh, seeing how many coughs or farts he could get away with during prayers, deliberately singing off key in the hymns, making my father lean across to swipe him as I shook with mirth beside him, my fist in my mouth. I determined not to look up at him now. As he put the cup to my lips, he affected a thick Irish brogue.

  ‘De blood of Christ, my child,’ he wheedled softly.

  No. I would not lose it. And I was fine, actually, until, as I sipped, Tim whispered in mock alarm, as if I'd taken a huge gulp, ‘Steady!’

  Doing the nose trick with the communion wine is pretty unforgivable, and as I returned, chastened and wine splattered, to my seat, Caro was frowning darkly. I knew she thought I was
a bad influence on her husband. ‘Tim seems to revert to childhood when he's with you!’ she'd trill gaily, and I just knew she meant, behaves like an absolute oaf. As I bent my head to pray, I recalled a friend's comment when Caro had married Tim. ‘How lovely, so you're gaining a sister.’ Why, then, years later, did I have a sinking feeling I'd lost a brother?

  Shocked for the second time by my impure thoughts, I resolved, as we all filed out ten minutes later into the sunshine, congratulating the young people as they stood about awkwardly, to be more sisterly. More… supportive.

  Caro turned to me, a defensive look in her eye. ‘You're coming back to the house?’

  ‘Of course,’ I smiled.

  ‘Good,’ she beamed, clearly imagining, I realized with a jolt, that I might not. ‘We haven't done much in the way of catering, just a glass of sherry and some sandwiches.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said faintly, knowing the sherry would be sweet and the sandwiches curly, and wondering how Caro had got so determinedly stuck in the 1950s when she hadn't even lived through them. Why she was so determined to be a parody of a landowner's wife.

  ‘Of course, we would have done lunch,’ she said, peeling off her gloves – Granny's gloves, I realized with surprise – and scurrying down the path, ‘but it gets so expensive, doesn't it?’

  Ah, there it was: the first reference to penury. Plenty more where that came from. She hurried up the lane to the farm where our land – her land – adjoined the churchyard. Stick thin as ever, bent at the waist as if against a howling gale, she bustled along and I followed, just as I'd followed her to lessons or PE, always with that same steely determination; always needing to get on.

  In my not terribly strenuous efforts to catch up with her I passed Mum and Felicity, loitering by the church gate, looking furtive.

  ‘Coming?’ I called cheerily.

  Felicity glanced over her shoulder. ‘Er, no.’

  ‘No?’ I stopped in my tracks.