The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [33]
And then the next weekend, while Tim and Caro were still in Venice, Mum and Dad, having surprised themselves by making peace for the wedding, or at least an armed neutrality, decided to have a break from the farm, and go on holiday to Crete, where they had an almighty row in a taverna and were thrown out but that's another story. The one you need to know is that Ant and I moved in to look after the farm for them that weekend, and that was the weekend Neville Carter died.
Seventeen years ago, on 12 October 1989. And seventeen years later, here was I, in my basement kitchen in Jericho, having just had lunch with my husband, who'd just received a letter from a girl purporting to be his daughter. I gazed out of the window to Anna's trampoline, knowing I had to remember. Knowing it was important.
The Carters lived across the road from us and, knowing I was house-sitting at the farm, had popped by.
‘Evie?’ It was Mrs Carter who'd opened the front door, as people did in our village. She called up the stairs, ‘Evie, are you there?’
I'd run down, flushed, from the bedroom, pulling down my T-shirt. ‘Oh, Mrs Carter.’
‘Evie, would you mind, dear, only I've been called into work,’ Mrs Carter was a district nurse, ‘and I wondered, could you have Neville for me? I'll only be an hour or so.’
Damn, I remember thinking. ‘Of course, Mrs Carter.’
‘He'll be no trouble. He can play outside, if you like. If you're busy.’
‘Yes, yes, fine.’
‘Just keep an eye.’
And Neville, narrow, weedy, pinched-faced, not an attractive boy, and not popular with the village children either – a sneak, by all accounts – had sidled inside, biting his nails. He was eight, not a baby, not necessarily needing to be watched all the time, and – oh, I didn't want to remember any of this, but somehow I knew it was important – and I'd said, ‘Neville, will you really be all right in the garden?’ when she'd gone.
‘Yeah.’ Not looking at me. Uncommunicative, shifty.
‘Or d'you want to do some colouring? Look, we've got these.’ I hustled him to the kitchen, rifled in the dresser drawer for some felt pens and sat him down at the table with Mum's kitchen pad.
He shrugged. ‘Don't mind.’
‘Well, have a go, hm?’
And back I'd leaped up those stairs, to Ant, in bed, leapfrogging on top of him with a shriek, pulling my top off again, no bra, and Neville had wandered off: first to the swing – I remember glimpsing him out of the window, on the old tyre that Dad had hung on a rope for us – and then out of sight, to that bit of the stream we'd all been warned about as children, where the water flows much faster, darker, and you can't see the riverbed and oh… so ghastly. So ghastly later. Ant, ashen-faced as he and Maroulla, the wife of our farm worker, dragged him out: me, weeping, shrieking on the bank, the parents, Mr and Mrs Carter, arriving. Oh, no. Mustn't remember the parents. My parents then, getting a flight back from Crete, pale beneath their tans, shaken: the screaming, the rows, Mum good, Dad not so good. Telling the truth, having, obviously, to tell the truth, about where we'd been, what we'd been doing, in the spare room, the horror on my father's face, the shame on Ant's; his gentle, kind, intelligent, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly face that had killed a child.
And afterwards, we'd cried together, huddled together, cringing, guilty figures at the funeral. Tim and Caro were back now – not a nice homecoming – and the whole village was there, everyone I'd known and grown up with, looking at me, who they knew, with a mixture of pity and surprise, and looking at Ant with mistrust. The man she'd been with. The man they didn't know, who she'd been upstairs with.
Ant had taken time off work – his college