The Actuality Read online

  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.

  3

  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.

  In the drawer there is a second, more revealing image. A close up of Evelyn leaning against a wind-worn arch. In it her hair is knotted casually with a ribbon, escaped strands framing a smallish face terminating in a rounded chin. A straight little nose projects towards the lens, as if she is sniffing out the air; an eyebrow lifted, as if taken by surprise.

  She wears an open-necked blouse, her pale throat seeming too thin for the weight of her head, suggesting a vulnerable and sickly air.

  The cast of features are all-too familiar because this woman and she are of a set – playing-card queens – Evie doomed to be preserved in time, a mourning portrait of a perished twin.

  Theirs is a face which would maybe not age well, too light on structure. That was a problem Evelyn never had the opportunity to confront and a destination Evie will never travel closer towards.

  It is hard to be fond of this woman she is obliged to mimic. Despite inoffensive features, Evelyn clearly possessed a predatory alertness originating perhaps from the strength of her intellect (she was a top-flight scholar, Matthew told her) and the bitter seeding of her medical condition, the nature of which Evie has been left to guess. In contrast, Evie feels soft-edged and frighteningly uncompetitive, but then again, after all these years, it is she who is still around.

  Has she made Matthew happier than Evelyn would have? Has she improved on the maquette?

  It is the question she never dares ask.

  The breeze outside quickens, swaying the ebony branches of the cherry against the sky like a scarecrow. She does not feel its energy. In fact she should really just go to bed to recharge, but Simon’s ‘spying’ hova from earlier won’t fly from her mind and she needs distraction. If she returns to her room, jittery like this, she’ll end up just staring at the ceiling.

  Leaving the music room, she enters the kitchen. Daniels stands beside the table, a row of silver knives, forks and spoons laid out on a cloth in front of him. He lifts one to the light and, tilting it, places it back down.

  She sits in her chair on the other side.

  The cake he prepared for her a week ago is by his elbow. He has taken it from the tin and
cut himself a generous slice. There is only a corner left, five candles remaining of the original twenty-one and they lean in to one another like the last forlorn trees on a crumbling cliff edge. She doesn’t really have a birthday to celebrate but every year he pretends that the day she arrived here is it. Perpetually twenty-one – her notional age – unable to ever grow up. The same glitch with destiny as Peter Pan.

  Daniels takes a bite, and a gulp from a mug of tea, sucking it down between his teeth. He of course doesn’t offer to cut her a slice or make her a drink, as there would be no point, she does not consume food. But she does appreciate the gesture of celebration, small as it is, and maybe no more than an excuse on his part to bake.

  Watching him buff a teaspoon, she asks, ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘This? Keeps things proper.’ He holds it out to her so that she can see it sparkle, as if to prove his case.

  ‘He doesn’t notice.’

  ‘No, but that’s not the point.’

  She doesn’t pursue it. She understands what it is to be enslaved by impulses over which one has no control. The silence and the warmth from the stove wrap around them.

  She has known Daniels her whole life. She still clearly recalls his astonishment when he was invited into the library to meet her for the first time, almost falling over with shock, believing he was witnessing a resurrection. He could have passed as a younger brother then, a mere seventeen years old with floppy hair and gangly limbs, but now, back bent over the tin of polish, he would be more easily taken as her father or even grandfather. Time is a trap, the hidden kind with iron teeth.

  ‘What’s it like outside?’ she asks.

  ‘Cold and wet, as I think you discovered earlier.’ He is absorbed in his task and not paying her much attention. Not picking up on her agitation.

  ‘No. I mean outside the apartment.’

  ‘Street level?’ He peers closely at his fish-eye reflection in the round bowl of a soup spoon. ‘Not very nice.’ He then holds the spoon up to her to capture hers. ‘Being close to the river attracts a ripe sort I can tell you – sailors searching for a drink or a fight, they’re always the worst.’

  Rather than sailors, she’d been more thinking about what sort of people would ride in a hova and pry over the wall. She should have told him about it at the time. Mentioning it now is just going to make her appear paranoid.

  Daniels lifts a fork, twisting it to catch the glint on the tines from the light over the table. ‘No, the river is best avoided, poisonous and dangerous and full of slithery eels.’ He draws out the ry of slithery, rolling it like a pebble around his tongue. ‘Sharks too, hungry ones, although when it’s this close to it freezing over, they sensibly stay in the estuary.’

  ‘I’d like to see it when it freezes,’ she says. ‘Do people walk on the ice?’ Being here with Daniels is cheering her, as it always does, and she is thinking of the happy little Dutch prints in the library. The people skating in their padded winter jackets with their comic round noses and hand-tinted cheeks.

  ‘Yeah, some do.’ Before she knows what is happening, he is looking directly into her eyes, finally granting her his concentration. His voice has deepened too. Grown louder. ‘And sometimes they misjudge it and the surface snaps beneath them and they fall right through and however much they claw like mad things at the underside, they can’t get back out.’ He is taking delight in the sudden horror filling her face. ‘Their bodies are either flushed out into the marshes or they get caught between the arches of a bridge and stay down for the winter, only bobbing up in the thaw and floating along all bloated and disgusting and unrecognisable, faces chewed clean off by eels.’

  He returns to the silver, an amused smile on his cheeks.

  His teasing has shaken her up into a state worse than when she walked in and her knees click together as the trembling works its way through. Water is something she is careful with. After all these years she feels frayed and there is too much delicate circuitry to be safeguarded. It is a phobia deeply encoded. Drowning is the epitome of terror. The thought of it freaks Simon out like nothing else.

  Daniels replaces the fork, straightening the line of cutlery. ‘Evie girl,’ he concludes, ‘take it from me, you’re better off up here.’ It is a variation of the stock answer she has been given from the get-go. Although he didn’t call her ‘girl’ back then – that came about only as the visual age difference grew.

  ‘Daniels?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah? What now?’

  ‘What will happen to me?’ This is now not about the spying car but the deeper worries planted by Simon that subside for days at a time only to bob back up like corpses. Simon’s fear is that on Matthew’s death, she will become nothing more than a chattel of the estate and end up in an auction house alongside the boxes of his books, his Dutch prints and the old masters. She should have asked Matthew earlier when they lay side by side and she could feel his pulse through his arm beneath her. Maybe she would have, if only he hadn’t called her by the wrong name.

  For the first time since being with her husband, she senses Simon listening deep inside. ‘You know, when . . .’ She wants to explain that her husband is growing frail but can’t think how to put it into words, without sounding disloyal.

  Daniels is returning the silver piece by piece into a felt-lined box. ‘Evie, nothing is going to happen to you,’ he answers finally, looking at her sternly as if she is being a ridiculous child.

  She smiles weakly. She wants to believe him but just can’t. Rather it feels like after four uneventful decades, she has only just realised that she’s been living the whole time on a cliff-edge.

  In her bedroom, Evie sits in front of her dressing table and takes from the centre drawer, behind her hair brush, a hinged case. She unclasps it and selects a steel pincer with spring-loaded grip. Opening her mouth, she inserts the hook into her gum and, compressing the handle, lifts back the membrane. The skin of her gums has a tendency to recede, leaving gaps permeable to moisture, and needs to be periodically reset. She has the mirror in front of her, but operates by touch alone, repelled by the sight of her exposed jaw, which, with the roots of her teeth screwed into titanium glistening with gel, appears thrusting and robotic.

  She replaces the pincer in its box and holds out her arms. She flexes her wrists, bending her hands back and forth, sensing the interaction of piston and lever in her narrow wrists.

  Afterwards, going over to the bed, she takes from under her pillow an ankle-length nightdress. She was programmed to desire traditional things. What they called at the time her trousseau – the term hopelessly antiquated – has long since been worn to threads and she must now dress in what Daniels buys her in the shops below. He searches second-hand stalls for the fabrics she likes, pleasing himself as much as her when he comes back with something conservative and pretty. She is a lover of frocks, she can’t help it, and nowadays who else would even think of claiming that? Most of his choices are a success and it makes the task easier that her taste is consistent. When he spectacularly misfires – like last year when he brought her a bag of his own daughter’s castoffs, including a fluorescent self-healing nanoflec all-in-one – there is little she can do to compromise. Of course it would all be so much easier if she could accompany him on his expeditions, but that will never be allowed.

  There are no curtains in her room to close, as she no longer has a window. The room she was given when she arrived was next to her husband’s with an adjoining door. That one had had a large window but she spent too many hours staring out of it and it was decided that it was preventing her from settling. Daniels did his best to make the alternative space cheerful, painting the walls a sunny pink (‘morning rose’ it said on the can) and the woodwork in cream. You’d never think it had been a storage room for luggage.

  She climbs into bed and lies under the covers. She is aware that this is programmed behaviour to make her appear more human, but a cushioned surface minimises pressure points and reduces long term wear. Also, her ch
arger is built into the mattress, making a direct connection unnecessary.

  She lies without moving. Literally not stirring a muscle. She can even go without breathing in this state. The calm allows her to think, and she wonders, as she often does, about the building beneath her. Is there anyone there similar to her? She imagines meeting such a creature – the encounter like staring in a mirror, saying the same things when they speak. Although she really does not want any more Evelyns around, accentuating her shortcomings.

  The silence in her head, which she had enjoyed earlier, grows oppressive. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, but still Simon does not reply. How long will he keep up his cruel strop? However much they annoy each other, they are cohabitees of the same small capsule. Besides she wants to ask him again about the hova from earlier. Whether he really meant what he said that it was spying. Maybe he was just trying to ruffle her, although she knows what she saw. Despite the shaded windscreen, she could clearly make out three sets of eager eyes, the glow from the controls burning in the orbs.

  Her mind wanders back to the very beginning, back to her wedding day, forty years before. She does not recollect arriving at the chilly country church. She only remembers standing at the back in a puff-sleeved dress, bodice sparkling with pearls in the limestone light, and gazing down at the bouquet in her hands, examining the novelty of her fingers as curious devices. Through her veil, the blurred backs of the small congregation are turned away. Unaware of her arrival, Matthew waits by the altar, quietly studying the window ahead and its depiction of the banishment of the first humans from the Garden of Eden. The small man and woman being chased from the exotic greens of one frame into the desert yellows of the next, by menacing figures with flaming swords.

  It is the first time she has seen him and she has no reference point against which to compare his tall silhouette. She falls in love on the spot, just as she was programmed to, deep down at a binary level – the downward motion, so lovely, it is like flying . . . had they any idea of the sensation they gifted her? – but without which she would have plucked at her feathers like a caged bird or hanged herself like a handmaid. Thinking of it now, she gets the same light involuntary flutter, even though she worked out years ago that her memories of the event were composed and popped into her head like pills to keep her sane because as Evelyn, she’d require the legitimacy of such a ceremony.