Part Six

Friendship

I love the bit in Winnie the Pooh when Pooh says a friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and also that quote from Woodrow Wilson about friendship being the cement that holds the world together, which is a roundabout way of explaining to myself why I forgave Eve and why she forgave Melly. It’s hard to understand otherwise, even for me. I mean, who would have thought I’d end up being close to the woman who had an affair with my husband? She was a friend first, then a sort of enemy, then someone I had to help, and, in the end, a best friend. I realized what she was made of the day they found Sorrel; you can see it in her face, which was on all the front covers of the papers. The journalists got there in time to capture it as she came out of the shed the day Sorrel was found. She was blazing with love. She’d been through things that would have destroyed some women—the loss of her son, the kidnap of her daughter—but that day she was on fire. She reminded me of my grandmother; the way she used to be for us. I forgave her; it seemed crazy to throw away our friendship because of Martin.

It took Eve a while to work it out with Melly—maybe she went down a similar line of reasoning: Why let a man destroy something as precious as friendship? It was different, of course, because Paul had destroyed so much, but that was hardly Melly’s fault, and I think that’s what Eve came around to thinking in the end.

We should have known by then, just when we thought it was all beginning to settle down, that something worse was coming our way.

16. April

Eve

Eve watches. She watches Sorrel and Poppy and even Izzy. She needs to keep everyone safe. There are rings under her eyes from getting up in the night to watch the children. Sometimes she slips into bed with Sorrel and holds her, watching the way her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks in the moonlight.

The whine of the power saw has become background noise in the daytime. She watches from the window as the trunks topple, the branches with their sprays of green descending slowly. Blake helps pull the undergrowth out after school and on weekends; Eric is tired after his long days, longer without Igor. He seems to have abandoned his former ideas about a Japanese garden. Evenings are silent, he goes to bed early, straight after supper sometimes.

Poppy is reading much more than she used to, old books Eve read to her a while ago: Little House in the Big Woods, The Magic Faraway Tree, Roald Dahl, Beano annuals; comfort reading like comfort eating or drinking. She doesn’t talk about Ash much, nor does Sorrel. Sorrel has been told he has gone to heaven and isn’t coming back. Fragments of memory have appeared, flotsam washed up from the deep: the glass plates in Greece, paddling in the sea, a doll she’d gotten for Christmas. Eve asked all the children not to push her for more and they listened, nodding.