That Part Was True by Deborah Mckinlay Page B

Tim Spence cooking for her once. Rather neatly, rather painfully self-consciously. Everything about her relationship with Tim Spence, a bachelor from the bridge club, had been painfully self-conscious. A circumstance which had been exacerbated by her mother’s lewd remarks whenever Eve had returned home from seeing him, on the dozen or so occasions when she had. The thing had been short-lived, stifled from the outset, and had ended as ineptly as it had begun, in discomfited near silence over dryish scones, in an over-decorated tearoom, on the river. More than once since, Eve had ducked into a doorway to avoid poor Tim. Poor Tim—she knew suddenly that this was the way a lot of people probably thought of her. Poor Eve.
    â€œMummy, Mummy…?”
    â€œYes, sorry.”
    â€œDid you get the invitation proofs?”
    â€œYes, yes, I did.”
    â€œAnd the sample menus?” Izzy’s voice was sharpening. She was afraid that her mother might skitter into, not levity, but that sort of light distractedness to which she was prone. Izzy was immensely irritated by light distractedness.
    â€œYes,” Eve said firmly, hoping to cut her off.
    â€œGood. All right. See you next Saturday then.”
    â€œYes, Saturday.”
    Â Â 
    Eve discussed Simon’s letter with her therapist. She hadn’t intended to. It wasn’t as if the therapy was the type that focused on your past. At first, Eve had been glad of this, relieved not to have to relive the particularly throat-constricting lonelinesses of childhood. Although briefly, she had wondered whether that wasn’t what she needed. Briefly, in fact, she had wondered whether the whole thing wasn’t going to be a waste of time.
    Beth, the therapist, hadn’t seemed, on first meeting, to embody the sorts of characteristics Eve was seeking—she’d expected someone neat and forthright who exuded the promise of a prescriptive, no-nonsense solution, but when Beth had called to her to come in after her initial knock, she had been greeted by a scruffy, flustered-looking woman whose soggy, once navy, cardigan drooped unhappily from her shoulders. But then Beth’s eyes had met hers, mindfully and intelligently. And from then on, she had always made Eve feel as few people had ever made her feel—as if she had her undivided interest.
    Eve found herself, rather than dreading her therapy sessions, beginning to look forward to them. And the techniques that Beth had taught her for coping with her anxieties, anxieties which Beth seemed to accept, reassuringly, as important, but nevertheless unremarkable, really were effective. Eve had gone into that shop, for instance, the little boutique that sold women’s clothes, having only ever glanced admiringly at the window before. She’d always felt that, in a shop like that—a small, exclusive shop—a woman would have to know what she wanted, be confident in her selection. Be the sort of woman that Eve was not. But one afternoon recently, almost unthinking, she had walked in; and bought something, too—a lovely linen dress, light gray with white piping at the neck and pockets. She had left, with the dress tucked inside a pink and black carrier that advertised her visit, feeling almost euphoric.
    But Simon’s letter had set her back. Reading it, she had felt, not the symptoms that she had come to recognize of the actual attacks, but the disconsolate sense of loss again. Loss of love, loss of a past she could have had, and also, now, the potential loss of Izzy. Simon’s house, Simon’s family, Simon’s wife—would all be more exciting than anything she, Eve, had to offer. Izzy, and Ollie, too, would want to spend Christmases there, Sunday lunches. Eve imagined lively meals in a charming dining room. Lots of happy talk and laughter and people. But not her. Not Eve.
    Simon was asking for her forgiveness and sanction, but he didn’t want her . No more than he