The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [108]
‘Your garden's beautiful,’ I was saying, cradling my coffee and getting up to admire it, trying to ignore my ankle, which was making me wince.
The terrace gave onto a tidy enclosure of about half an acre, the foreground of which was crisscrossed with low hedges of well-educated box, which ran in tandem with gravel paths. It was an agreeable arrangement I recognized from glossy magazines, and which I had a nasty feeling bore the deeply romantic title ‘knot garden’, something, in a half-formed way, as soon as I set eyes on it, I knew I'd always wanted. Why, I'd even got round to tearing out the relevant pages in House and Garden, but never to planting it. Had she grown it all from seed? Perhaps I could hate her after all?
‘Oh, it's one of the reasons I bought it,’ she enthused, coming to join me and stroll amongst it. ‘Sadly I haven't the faintest idea how to maintain it. It needs a lot of TLC and I don't know the first thing about gardening.’ No. Couldn't hate her. ‘But I'm learning. I bought my first book the other day – Alan Titchmarsh no less – thought, now this is positively grown-up!’ I smiled. She was, after all, still young, and boy, had I done the maths. Eighteen plus nine months plus seventeen – thirty-six. With the face and figure of a twenty-six-year-old.
Ant was talking to the girls on the terrace as Bella and I strolled out onto the lawn; damp and shiny and strewn with curling yellow leaves. A cherry tree planted centrally enjoyed sole occupancy, its skinny grey branches scantily clad now, just a few yellowing survivors of summer clinging resolutely to their posts. They fluttered valiantly in the breeze, their comrades littering the sodden lawn below. Around the trunk was a circular wooden seat, which I admired.
‘Except I hadn't realized my tree was so fat, and look, it doesn't meet!’ Bella wailed, showing me round the back, where a six-inch gap prevailed.
‘Looks like the zip of my jeans on a bad day,’ I commented. ‘You need someone to knock a piece of wood in there for you,’ I advised, and as I said it, I knew I meant a man, a husband, an Ant, which of course she'd been without all these years. As it had struck Anna that Stacey had been without a father, so it struck me that Bella had been without a husband. That I'd got in first. And she'd been pregnant first. I had a sudden vision of her carrying Stacey, nine months pregnant in a Laura Ashley maternity dress. Then with a pram around the streets of Sheffield.
‘I… want to thank you so much for what you've done today.’ She looked at me, eyes huge in a pale face. ‘You have no idea how much it means to Stacey. To both of us. And a lot of women wouldn't have done it. Wouldn't have come. I think you've been tremendous.’
My eyes filled with tears and I wanted to tell her I hadn't been tremendous. That up to now I'd been filled with jealous loathing, had stamped on her face in a bookshop, had never wanted to meet her, hoping all summer to be able to cancel this visit, and until recently had had every intention of carrying on in the same hate-filled vein, but now, now that I'd met them both, I knew it was impossible. That I could quite see why Ant had fallen in love with her. That I was mortified he'd ended up with me. That the comparison was odious. I tried to steady my breathing. Her fingers were twisting nervously in the hem of her T-shirt, like her daughter's.
‘It hasn't been easy,’ I admitted. ‘I have to tell you, Bella, when I first heard about you and Stacey I wanted you both burned at the stake.’
‘I can understand that,’ she said quickly. ‘I'd feel just the same.’
‘So… did you feel the same? When you heard he'd married me? And you were left holding the baby?’
She narrowed her eyes at the untamed hills beyond, the sedgy wilderness interspersed with dense clumps of bracken, still darkly green and untouched by autumn, as if groping there for the truth.
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘I didn't hate you, because