Paul Braddon: The Actuality

That is nasty and unfair , she thinks back at him.

The hall is cooler than the kitchen and darker too, lit only by the wall sconces and in the distant corner a hologram of a Tibetan vase on a plinth, slowly flickering between two and three-dimensionality. Apart from herself it is almost the only concession to the modern world, and the heavy gilded frame of a Dutch seascape hanging beside it, with its leaden waves, rolling clouds and troubled fishing boat struggling in the gloom, is more typical of her home. It is as if time has been trapped here in the same net as she.

Her husband’s room is at the end and, bending her side, she depresses the handle with her elbow.

The room is softly lit. He is seated with a blanket over his lap by the picture window with its prospect west along the Thames towards Battersea Power Station. She knows that is what it is, because he explained the view to her when she first arrived and he was so full of his intentions for her. Those were the days when he promised to show her the world and her to it. Before the plans changed and parading her about no longer seemed such a good idea.

Matthew smiles and holds his hands up as she approaches. ‘ “And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid so fair / As Nature could not with his art compare”.’ He starts to cough. He has been poorly this fortnight and for a few moments struggles to regain his breath.

Her silhouette faces her in the window, the silkette dress cleaving to her hips. The red and yellow lights from the riverside buildings and the blue beacons on the tops of the power station’s three pencil-thin chimneys shine through her hair. This is the only room she’s allowed in which affords an exterior view and she greedily takes it in. She understands why they took her window away but she misses it.

Turning to him, she places the tray down and unrolls the napkin. Leaning over, she tucks it into the neck of his shirt and spreads it across his chest.

Her face is close to his. ‘May I?’ he says, reaching up and caressing her cheek with his knuckle. He then sinks back into his chair and gazes up at her. ‘I saw you in the garden in the rain. I questioned Daniels if it was wise that you were out.’

‘I was careful,’ she says. She is conscious just how alone she is in here with him and just how pleasantly quiet it is inside her head. The nice change that silence makes. Simon, in his sulking, has retreated deep inside. He has put his face to the wall.

Her husband takes her wrist, and turning her hand over smooths the back; the biogel below the surface ripples beneath her pale skin. The back of his in contrast is ridged with veins and peppered with spots like blots of brown ink or the foxing on the pages of his books.

His grip strengthens and he draws her closer. In programmed response, a warm current tickles through her and as it reaches her extremities, her lids close. A solitary green system light pulses gently in the distant corner of her internal darkness.

He levers himself to his feet and, standing over her, presses his mouth into her hair. His lips are moist on her neck. ‘Evelyn,’ he murmurs, ‘my darling…’ and she shudders, as she always does, when he gets her name wrong. Separating from the moment, her eyes flick back open and she stares out through the glass over his shoulder, out past the reflection of her face with its confused smile.

Evelyn is the name of the woman she must emulate, and it was how she was greeted on arriving forty years before. But it is not the name she has kept. Whether it was too bold a gesture to call her after his mentor and best friend’s deceased daughter, too painful a personal reminder of his loss, too much of a mouthful for everyday use, or perhaps just her own failure to deliver the illusion, she soon became simply ‘Evie’. Once the diminutive had been adopted for everyday, Evelyn passed into disuse.

It was the first step towards becoming herself. There was something about the real Evelyn, an insistence on standards, which told her that the woman would never have accepted such a surrender of formality.

Now when Matthew calls her Evelyn, she tries to accept it as a compliment as she knows she should, applause for her acting, but nevertheless it is like he is talking around her, addressing the actuality behind. Simon’s persistence with using Evelyn is different: he is just doing it to be sly.

Matthew straightens to his full height. He is not the man he was but is still impressive and towers over her. Finding something of his youthful vigour, he lifts her into his arms and, holding her against his chest, kisses the bridge of her nose before carrying her slowly across the rug.

Evie leans over the piano, shoulders tense, fingers shifting from key to key, torturing precision from what was already a complex melody, even before the demanding variations she has imposed. It is what she does when she is seeking calm. She plays something as challenging as possible so that she can exclude all other thought. But then she drops a note, tries to catch it but fails, and it clangs emptily, echoing around like a lost button on the hardwood floor, and the illusion of peace is lost.

She jerks back the stool, walks around the instrument to the tall windows and stares out. Low clouds shroud the rockery. All that can be seen through the fog are the camellias in the border the other side of the glass, dripping with wet. It is as if her garden has been taken away, her small world made smaller.

Where is Simon? He maintains his distance. Has not communicated since her being with Matthew earlier. He is still offended.

The continuing emptiness in her head leaves her feeling abandoned. Guilty when she isn’t. After the first time all those years ago he had become so distressed, and back then inexperienced to his tantrums, she had ended up in tears, leaving her new husband wondering what he’d got himself into.

‘He has the right,’ she says loudly, hoping he is listening; then going further, desiring to taunt him, ‘I am allowed to enjoy it.’

If she is concerned about anything from their lovemaking, it was her husband calling her by that woman’s name while still inside her – although there is absolutely no reason she should be. After all, Evelyn is the sole point of Evie’s being.

No, the reason for her nervousness continues to be the sense that her existence balances on a knife-edge. That her life as she knows it is coming to an end, this fear endlessly played up by Simon. A fear underlined by the perplexing appearance of the hova earlier.

Her relationship with Evelyn is a tangled skein, the unpicking of which only gets harder. Evie is programmed to be as like her in all the cunning ways they could devise. But personality is an insubstantial thing and, aware their efforts will be inevitably imperfect, it is also in her programming to seek out the involuntary cues in Matthew and to herself bridge the gaps. In this way, the pressure is always on her to perform.

Even in this room, which belongs more to her than to the others, she cannot escape. Even here Evelyn’s ghost judges her efforts.

A photograph in an ebony frame is propped on the cabinet. In it a young woman stands in an Alpine meadow. She is flanked by her father and a youthful Matthew. A mountain rises behind them, leaving only room for a corner of sky, while in the foreground three bicycles lie, wheels spinning on the grass. It is an image more representative of the 1930s than the 2090s. The sun shines on the group, the men smiling, the woman hiding behind sealed lips. She holds herself stiffly, shoulders not quite touching the others, her tiny features difficult to make out. The location is printed beneath – Am See – and Evie has used the atlas in the library, the huge one kept on the bottom shelf which needs both her arms to carry, to find out that Am See is in Austria and that it is a tiny jewel of a town clinging to the rim of an ice-blue lake.