as the big. As much importance. Maybe the candidate stood for the same values? She wanted to play a role. Besides, her friend Tania already worked for him and had told Evelyn this would be an in.
‘Have you ever been hospitalised? If so, for what condition?’ Tonsils, at thirteen. Done less and less these days, isn’t it? The secretary had a daughter who suffered, rounds of antibiotics every winter, but the doctors refused to whip them out. Penicillin allergies, me too. They both knew the words Erythromycin, quinsy. Eve remembered her mother in the chair by her hospital bed, the blissful rarity of having Lee all to herself.
‘And have you ever been treated by a psychiatrist or psychologist? If so, for what condition?’
No, she had not been treated for drug addiction or alcoholism. No, there was no health-related reason she might not be able to perform the job of telephoning people for donations. Driving violations, only parking. Violations were not going to be a problem. Minor violations.
And the credit report was fine, and she had never been arrested. Evelyn fought the shameful urge to reveal her father’s subterranean credit rating, those Ministry of Justice envelopes, the embossed crest against her fingers. In some unspoken way his failure was the children’s fault. Proof: now that Frank, Lee and Ruth lived in the States, they were fine. Survivors, no longer pulled under by the thrashing octopus of family.
Yes definitely, the interview had gone well. Her stockings hadn’t laddered, she had pitched the political details right, and that evening she’d sat with Nate on the back steps, distant clouds under-lit a brilliant peach by the low sun, and believed she was entering the world again, coming back into her own skin after five years of being nothing but a mother. A mother, a mother, she scolded herself, not nothing but. Soon there’d be a phone call – ‘Come in, get started, you’re just who we need!’ – but instead here was the final-stage questionnaire, letter-headed, watermarked paper, beneath her hands on the kitchen table, a thick black line at the bottom of the seventh page waiting for a verifying signature. Please return along with all relevant documentation. She slid it back into the white A4 envelope, also bearing the insignia of the candidate’s office, and folded the lip of the envelope down. But since the flap had been opened, the glue had dried up and left chewy little traces and it would not stick.
On Sunday they went with friends to Mission Bay, the water warm enough to paddle in, shelly orange sand sticking in tidemarks along the edges of their bare feet. Nathan and Louisa threw pebbles into the sea. A bird strutted up to Evelyn, all sinew, and thrust its face towards her. It batted huge wings and hopped at the sandwich in her hand. She lifted it above her head but the bird kept coming, ruffling and jumping at her, and Eve shrieked and threw the sandwich away and the bird followed it, everyone laughing. Later, when the others had run back to the playground, Nathan asked what stage the application was at. Evelyn’s hair striped about her face. ‘Still waiting,’ she said, pulling a strand from her mouth, ‘for them to send that final questionnaire.’
If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family or the candidate if it were made public, please describe.
That night they made love. Drifting into the relaxed, soft-limbed sleep that followed, Evelyn knew, from friends and their problems, that their married sex life was a kind of luck. If Nathan cared about his male pattern baldness and his bad posture, she didn’t. Like Dorothy, she had married a provider, no accident. Of course Andrew was permanently pissed off about that role. A small, sharp feeling turned over in Eve’s gut. She had to admit life was easier now that she was more happily married than Dot, who kept having babies to plug that gap, the love gap. The unworthiness of that feeling burned for a moment before she willed her mind away.
Then as though her subconscious was playing a joke, getting her back for the smugness about her marriage, she dreamed about Daniel on the mountain, and she stood on the snow and he leaned forward from the gently rocking chairlift and kissed her, in that way that Nathan never could.