The Actuality Read online

  It may be that they have finally given her pursuers the slip. The indications are good but now she must succeed in this final step. Not only for her own sake any more, nor for the sake of the growing list of those who have sacrificed themselves for her, but for the sake of this girl.

  For this task, Evie prepares meticulously.

  The small town has only a few shops but is wealthy, and along the side streets that lead from the square, old-fashioned outfitters service a demand for well-made traditional clothes fashioned from cotton and wool.

  Sola gazes out from the shop windows while Evie seeks out the sort of things that are typical of Evelyn and which she has always been attracted to – dark calf-length skirts, milky blouses with long cuffs, light-as-air cardigans in mohair with tapered sleeves and pearl shell buttons no larger than Sola’s fingernails, and soft slender-soled sandals, in which she feels at the same moment both as light as a starling and solid with the ground.

  She finds clothing for the child too, attiring her, as she daydreams she had once herself been attired, in a blue and white dirndl frock with, amusingly, no pockets (it is a joke between them), and a starched white apron. Also soft white ankle socks as fluffy as kittens and little shimmering nacre-buckled shoes.

  Dressing up also serves as a distraction. She is missing David; how would she not?

  Evie has no more use for the blonde wig and removes it in the street, dropping it in a refuse container. Shaking out her hair, she lets the cool breeze penetrate to her scalp, before gathering her hair with her fingers and weaving a single braid as she walks; tying it with a dark blue ribbon she treated herself to in the shop.

  Now they are both perfect.

  The first bit Evie must do alone and so leaves Sola at a cafe – outside, where it will be easy to run if the worst happens – tucked away at a table in a corner, where even the waiter has forgotten her.

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ she says, ‘at most no longer than two. It’s eleven o’clock – if I am not here by one, come to this place and ask for me.’ She draws a map on the back of a napkin, the ink swelling into balloons as it soaks into the paper, making the child smile. ‘But if it comes to that, you must be very careful, something will have gone . . .’ She is about to say wrong, but Sola’s imagination runs riot at the slightest thing and she concludes instead, ‘not according to plan.’

  She walks away, glancing over her shoulder as she weaves between the tables and again as she turns the corner, but the child’s head is under the chairs, throwing crumbs to an inquisitive robin while her dog looks on.

  It is a wrench to be parted. It is inexplicable, unfair and at odds with her biology how this creature has got under her skin in the way she has. But also crazy-wonderful. Some primal programming which she can’t believe she was meant to have has been triggered.

  Evelyn gave the impression of being too cerebral to be maternal. Elektra, from what she saw in the brochure and from the example of the ghastly Yuliya, possessed little of a motherly nature. Some other deeper code has surfaced, leaving Evie weak and wobbly when she needs to be strong, and willing to throw her own life away if this girl was in peril.

  Maybe it is a response that Sola just draws out – that she survived in The Dolls’ House, unbroken and still innocent of her vulnerability, perhaps provides a clue. If so, Evie can do nothing about it. For better or worse, they have knotted souls.

  The stretch of road running along the edge of the lake to the house, and the house itself – its old high walls rearing from the hillside – are achingly familiar. Both appear as fragments scattered through her early memories . . . Returning from school with the afternoon sun on her legs, her satchel heavy with books . . . reading said books lying on the warm wood of the little jetty . . . Things Evelyn must, or may once, have done.

  Evie approaches with the lake to her left. There is no barrier, and peering down she can see boulders coated with bright weed beneath the surface. The bottom of the lake shelves steeply and the water just a few yards out is dark and blown into sharp ripples. Her fear of falling in is overdone, she knows it, but she crosses to the other side of the road, just to be sure. Since her fall down the stairs at Maplin’s, something has not been the same. Her sense of balance, which had been infallible, is now, in her old friend’s Daniels’s parlance, ‘royally screwed’. It’s laughable really, that despite all of her extraordinary electronics and engineering, she has a heart blown from glass. A tiny spinning sphere designed by NASA, essentially the same as the ones used to guide their ships the millions of miles to Mars and back. ‘Only the best for the best’, the Elektra brochure had trumpeted. Men and their extravagant boasts . . .

  From this elevation the house has the appearance of a small castle. Its upper battlements rise from the rocks, its lower reaches are concealed by giant dark-leaved rhododendrons. A round tower looms above the trees, narrow windows penetrating the stone glittering like goblin eyes.

  Evie reaches the entrance steps and looks up. The tall front door is constructed from studded planks. The stone lintel is carved into arches which nestle one within another. With no windows at ground level, the house seems unwelcoming, hostile, the impression increased by a camera which has been tracking her since she rounded the bend. This is architecture with secrets. The melancholy welcome of fairy tales – The Princess and the Pea . . . The Goose Girl. And she thinks of arriving at such a door, unrecognised for what she is.

  She pulls the bell and it is answered by an elderly woman in an apron and cap. Standing in the doorway in her black dress with its white scalloped collar, she would only have needed a duster on a bamboo pole to perfect the image of a Victorian housemaid. It seems that in some corners the world has turned back on itself, in response to having moved forward in others with such abandon.

  She announces herself as Ms Davenport, a friend of Herr Maier’s family – a hazy description of her relationship to a man who is the nearest thing to the father she never had, but hopefully ‘Davenport’ will be enough to raise his interest. The woman scrutinises her, eyes settling on her face. Only when Evie has finished speaking does she stop staring.

  She asks Evie to follow her up a flight of stairs – a tight coil of steps leading to a landing. ‘Please wait here,’ she says and disappears down a corridor.

  A deep-set window faces the lake. Evie goes to it, and, conquering her anxiety, which would have had her pacing around, seats herself on the sill with her back to the stone. On the opposite wall is a mirror and she catches a glimpse of her appearance, primped to perfection for the encounter ahead.

  After their shopping, Evie and Sola had faced their reflections in the window of a tobacconist’s, Sola’s eyes roving from one to the other, admiring the trick they’d played with a simple change of costume. Slowly, her mouth formed an approving smile. ‘We look joli and nice maintenant Maman, no long a couple of grubby wh . . . ,’ just managing to stop in time any ‘mauvaise language’ from sneaking out. She is slowly being tamed, her waywardness polished into ‘proper manners’. Letting go of Evie’s hand, she had spun on her toes, the skirt of her dress fanning out above her knees, as the little dog ran in a tight circle around her shiny feet.

  Evie blinks back a tear. The child called her ‘Maman’ – she has not asked her to do that – where did that come from? Maybe it is just playfulness.

  Soft piano music permeates from above. She gazes up at the vaulted ceiling, from the centre of which hangs a chandelier fashioned from stag antlers. The sound tickles the air, as light as feathers burst from a pillow. Something she could reach out and pass her hand through.

  She recognises it as Beethoven’s Für Elise. Indeed, the piece is more than just familiar, she knows it inside out as being a favourite she spent long hours shaping and reshaping as a way of passing the hot afternoons last summer. The doors of the music room standing wide open to the garden. The lingering exchange of air allowing, during quiet interludes, the slow snip of Daniels’s shears to pervade.r />
  She hums along, anticipating each beat. Playing the piano is a passion. She was competent the morning she arrived, but her skills and sensitivity have blossomed since.

  Looking out of the window, the memory of a music teacher fills her mind – a sour little man notable for his desire to torment. A typical incident would start with something minor and his pimply cheeks would glow hot. One minute she might be ‘slouching’ – even though her back was stiff – and he’d poke her in the waist with his ‘baton’ (a thirty-centimetre wooden ruler), just because he could, then another day it would be something else.

  One morning he accused her of letting her hands slope. He took small bronze coins – one groschen pieces – from his waistcoat pocket and balanced them on the dimples of her knuckles with his podgy fingertips. When one slipped off, which one soon did, he brought the edge of the ruler down on her with the enthusiasm of a workhouse overseer.

  Her injured fingers had leapt to her mouth, sending the remaining coins rolling across the oak floor. Sucking on her throbbing hands to confuse the pain, chest rising and falling, she’d refused to look at him. He’d put the tip of the ruler under her chin, forcing her head up. She’d stared back with fury. ‘Zis temper of yours, Fräulein,’ he’d said, the waxed tips of his moustache quivering, ‘I vill it tame.’

  He took on the wrong fräulein in his cruel pastime; she’d engineered that he be caught, her father entering the room at this exact moment. Afterwards she’d watched from the window as he was booted, literally, out of the house to land face first in the road.

  Of course, the terrible teacher was never real – or at least not to Evie. His spiteful games were a memory implant. The pupil was the clever Evelyn, whom no one could get the better of for long. But sitting here now, Evie recognises, without a shadow of doubt, the view of the steps where he had his comeuppance and had afterwards ludicrously waved his fist up at her window.

  The music pauses and she surfaces from her reverie. How long has she been waiting? She’s lost track of time.

  The maid collects her and leads her along the corridor.

  They leave the old building through a feudal arch, cross a gravelled courtyard in noon shadow and enter again through a shiny automatic near-silent sliding door, back into the light. The cool air after the heat of the sun moistly brushes her skin.

  The doors to the final room are open. As she descends shallow steps, the view opens out until the panorama of the lake and snow-capped mountains stretches to the edges of her vision.

  Evie is in a glass-walled space. The white ceiling, some twenty feet above, is dappled by reflections off the lake, which reflect in turn off the polished floor and play over her ankles, so that it seems she paddles through shallows.

  She swivels on her heel, gazing around. The end walls, also of glass, blend seamlessly with the one ahead, so that the view has no limits. If she didn’t know what she knows, she’d wonder if it was all fake, the room giving her what she wants to see, like the one in Paris.

  So far, of the myriad new things she has encountered, this is the most awe-inspiring, both in its sheer beauty and for its manifestation of power over one’s surroundings.

  Only as she completes her rotation does she notice that she is being watched. From behind. She falters, stretching out an arm to regain her balance.

  Maier stands thirty feet away in the corner, his hand resting on the back of a chair, almost the only furniture in the room.

  They examine each other silently. Apart from the image in the library and the incident with the music teacher – in both of which he is frustratingly hazy – she has only the memory of them riding together in the mountains.

  She compares the man in front of her with his younger self – searching his face.

  Maier is deeply tanned, the effect made more pronounced by his white open-necked shirt. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, exposing strong, sleek forearms. His silver hair is combed back from his forehead. While his dark eyes attempt to penetrate her, his lashes flicker uncertainly. He has been presented with an impossibility. The world, which he is otherwise able to control, has been tipped on its head.

  She smiles as naturally as she can.

  He remains stiff-lipped. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Evie.’

  His face twitches. ‘No, you are not.’ But he doesn’t seem to quite know what he is denying.

  She smiles more strenuously, keeping her lips pursed but allowing the corners to lift so that dimples form in her cheeks. She knows how to do ‘innocent’, and what’s not in her programming she has cultivated from studying old Audrey Hepburn movies watched in bed with Matthew.

  ‘What kind of hoax is this?

  ‘I am . . . Evie.’ She takes a couple of steps towards him and, in doing so, the sunlight gleams on her face, making her appear spotless. Untouched.

  ‘Evie,’ he repeats, a little breathless from what he is witnessing. ‘Yes, we’ve had that bit already.’

  She takes another step, shuffling uncertainly one foot against the other, her hands clasped behind her, so that her upper body is pressed forward guilelessly. Something the devious little Sola does. There is much she is learning from that one!

  He swallows hard. ‘Who put you up to this?’

  ‘No one,’ she murmurs.

  ‘No one,’ he repeats.

  She tilts her chin, regarding him shyly. ‘I wanted to see you.’

  She looks down to allow him a chance to take her in – the living replica of the daughter he last saw forty years before – and observes him wipe his eye with a handkerchief. Her own eyes water too. The loneliness since the death of Matthew and Daniels, quenched temporarily by the brief company of David and now Sola, rises again to the fore.

  ‘Come closer,’ he murmurs, holding out his hand. The same tanned hand, albeit more wrinkled, that he had lain over hers, all those years before.

  She approaches until she is just a yard from him.

  ‘Are you a dream?’ he asks, shaking his head slowly.

  Evie is close enough to see a tear slide down his cheek and she gazes back, wide-eyed. ‘No dream,’ she murmurs, blinking and half-blind herself.

  33

  Maier leads her outside and down a further set of steps onto an expanse of decking suspended above the water. A cluster of rattan chairs are grouped around a low table. He rings a bell, and when the maid appears sends her away again to bring drinks.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks.

  ‘England.’

  ‘England,’ he repeats. His movements remain slow, stunned, as if she had told him she had escaped from the underworld. ‘I presume you know who you resemble, I presume you are prepared to admit that? . . . unless of course you really don’t.’

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  His eyes roam over her face and hair. ‘Well?’ he prompts, wanting to hear her say it.

  ‘Evelyn,’ she whispers.

  ‘Evelyn, yes. So you understand why I am puzzled. Your turning up from out of nowhere – like a phantom – calling yourself–’

  ‘Evelyn’s mother was English,’ she says, repeating what she learned from Matthew. ‘You met at Heidelberg in 2069. You were in your second year, she in her first week. You were introduced at a departmental tea party while sheltering from the rain amongst the palms under the glass of the botanical house.’

  Maier shakes his head, not in denial but as if to loosen a memory. He stares into the distance. The moisture from incipient tears collects in the wrinkles around his eyes. ‘Is this just his cruel game?’ he asks slowly. ‘An attempt to cause pain?’

  ‘Cause pain?’

  ‘After all these years?’

  She looks over the water, watching a gull fly low, wingtips skimming the surface. ‘I do not know whom you are referring–?’

  ‘I am referring to Matthew. I think you are aware of that.’

  They sit in an uneasy silence, until he resumes in a softer tone, ‘Do you know how Matthew and I became friends?�
��

  ‘You were his tutor at Cambridge.’

  ‘That is right. And you probably also know how that came about. That I had come to England to take up a lectureship in the Faculty of Philosophy the year he arrived as a freshman. We were both new to the town, maybe neither of us quite fitted in with our peers, and despite the age difference we became friends. But then that friendship led ultimately to something terrible. I am referring to what happened to my daughter. You know that too?’

  She nods.

  ‘Joy and sadness intertwined. Did he send you?’

  ‘I just wanted to see you,’ she murmurs. ‘That is all.’

  ‘You said that before. Is he with you here?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘And what is your relationship?’

  ‘My relationship?’ But she knows what the question means. ‘I am his wife.’

  The maid returns with a tray carrying a pot of tea, cups on saucers, a small jug of milk and two glasses for water. She places it on the table beside them, laying out the things, studying Evie from the corner of her eye as she does so.

  ‘You are his wife,’ Maier repeats, disbelievingly, once they are again alone.

  She nods.

  ‘How can this be?’ He passes her a glass of water from which she sips. She needs a little moisture regularly, although it is important not to overdo it. ‘How old are you? Twenty-five, twenty? Younger even than that?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  He pours the tea. ‘Then, how – or rather why – are you an old man’s spouse?’

  ‘Was,’ she clarifies. But referring to Matthew in the past tense triggers a ripple of grief that she is unprepared for and she looks down.

  ‘What happened?’ Maier asks, after a period of silence.

  ‘He died.’

  A tremor passes across his face. ‘How?’ he asks, quietly.