Learning by Heart (12 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘How many other ways can I say it?’

‘You’re not sorry,’ she told him. ‘You’re just terrified because I won’t play.’

‘Zeph,’ he said. ‘Look. I’ll do what you want, OK? I’ll go home. Is that what you want? You want me to be away from you. OK. I’ll go. I’ll wait. But in a week or two you’ll feel different, won’t you?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’ll change your mind.’

‘Oh, my God,’ she murmured, ‘you think I’ll come round. You really think that.’

‘You have to.’

‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why do I have to? Because it’s what you want – it’s what’ll make you feel better?’ Unconsciously she screwed her fist into her chest, her thumb pressing hard against her breastbone. ‘You know what I’m doing now, what my business is now?’ she said. ‘I’m going to make you feel as bad as I do.’

‘Holy Christ!’ he said. ‘It’s not as if I’m a murderer.’

She lifted her chin. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I’m not some forgiving wife. If you’ve painted me like that in your head, you can erase it.’

He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I don’t think of you like a character in a story,’ he said.

‘You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t,’ she said.

Nick looked at the car, then back at her. Then he walked rapidly towards it and put his hand on the door. The child lock was on.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘I want my son,’ he told her.

‘Get your hands off the car, Nick.’

‘Open the door. I want to talk to him,’ he said, and pushed Zeph away from him.

‘No!’

‘Give me the keys.’

‘No.’

‘The keys,’ he said, caught hold of her wrist and twisted it. She gasped, and sank a little lower to relax the pressure of the grip. Inside the car she heard Joshua murmur.

Nick held her gaze. Suddenly he pulled her to one side and against the bonnet of the car. She struggled to free herself. Then Cora’s voice came to them across the yard: ‘Nick!’ she was calling. ‘Nick!’

Joshua began to cry, and then to scream.

Nick dropped his hand. He stood still for a second, staring at his wife.

Cora ran to them.

Zeph lifted her wrist to her mouth.

‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t what I want,’ Nick said. ‘I want you.’

He looked at Zeph a moment longer, then took a step back and put his hand on the car window, beside Joshua’s face. He held it there for a second, then walked away.

Seven

Cora had come home after the nightmare of the night with David Menzies. Her mother knew that something was wrong, but Cora denied it. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she told her parents.

She could visualize them now, sitting in the dining room, her father at one end of the table, her mother at the other, and she between them. It was as if she had regressed several years.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ she had heard her father ask, the day after she got home. She was on the landing; they were standing below her in the hallway and had not heard her footsteps.

‘Perhaps she had an argument with Jenny,’ her mother wondered.

It was the opposite: Jenny had begged her to stay. She was about to get engaged to Terry Ray, and she wanted Cora to help her with the party.

‘I’m going home,’ she had told her friend.

‘But you can’t leave me,’ Jenny had said. ‘There’s too much to do.’

‘I have to go.’

‘Why? Is somebody ill?’

‘No.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No.’ This was a lie. She had felt sick since the night she had left Menzies’ flat. She was terrified as to what the reason might be.

‘What about David?’ Jenny asked. And a light dawned on her face. ‘What’s he done?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing. It’s not him.’

Jenny frowned deeply, trying to read Cora’s expression. ‘Bisley, then,’ she decided. ‘That miserable bastard’s done something to you.’

Cora bit her lip. Bisley was the one person she didn’t want to leave behind.

‘I knew it,’ Jenny said, seeing her hesitation.

‘It isn’t Bisley at all,’ Cora told her, ‘and I’m sorry not to be here for the party.’

‘It’s on Saturday,’ Jenny said, ‘five days away. Surely you could stay five more days.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Cora repeated.

But in fact she wasn’t sorry to miss seeing Jenny with Terry. She suspected that he was the same as Menzies. She had seen the bruises on Jenny’s arms, the marks on her face. She knew that Jenny was attracted by his money, but she didn’t dare to speculate whether she was slave to some other need or desire. She didn’t want to think about what men did to women, or what pleasure women might expect, or what humiliations they might be prepared to endure – or even enjoy. She could see that because she was so naive, with childish notions of romance, she had been a liability to herself; and because she had trusted Menzies, the thought that she might be in danger had not occurred to her. She had no doubt that whatever he had done to her, and however he had behaved, it was her responsibility.

She was supposed to give Bisley two weeks’ notice, but in the end she gave him only two days. She had put off speaking to him until Wednesday evening, by which time she had bought her train ticket for Saturday morning.

She had expected a scene. She had dreaded it.

But he simply looked at her levelly for a few seconds, then asked her to sit down. She obeyed, and gazed past him at the edge of the desk and the spines of the books stacked there. ‘London hasn’t suited me,’ she said. ‘You were right. I ought to have stayed at home.’

‘I was only teasing you,’ he told her. ‘You know, really, Cora, you would be very good in this business. You have the right sort of objectivity. Better than me, actually.’ He smiled. ‘Probably because you don’t drink.’

She said nothing.

‘Can’t I persuade you otherwise?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I shall miss you very much,’ he said.

She found herself in tears. Bisley got up immediately, came to her side and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘It isn’t me, this job?’

‘No.’ She put her hands to her face.

‘Can you tell me?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell anyone.’

He pulled another chair alongside her. He waited until she took a handkerchief from her bag. ‘Is it so bad?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re afraid of something?’

‘I must go home.’

‘Will you be safe from it there?’

She would never be safe anywhere, she thought. She felt vulnerable, naked. She felt as if she were still on the couch in Menzies’ flat; she would always be there. ‘No,’ she whispered.

‘Is someone trying to harm you?’

She put her elbows on her knees, her hands again over her eyes. ‘Dear child,’ Bisley said, ‘has it already happened?’

‘Yes,’ she said, still whispering, through her fingers.

‘A man?’

‘Yes.’

He was silent. She sat in abject grief.

‘When was this?’ he asked eventually.

‘On Saturday.’

‘You were attacked?’

‘It was my fault,’ she said, still into her hands. ‘I went to his flat. I went on my own. It was my fault.’

Bisley got up. She heard him pacing about the room. When she wiped her eyes, he was standing at the window.

‘Who is he?’ he asked.

She lowered her hands. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

‘I would very much like to know who he is.’

She shook her head.

‘Have you told the police?’

‘No,’ she replied, horrified.

‘But this man assaulted you.’

‘I can’t tell them,’ she said, panicked. ‘How could I?’

‘Why do you think? He’s committed a crime.’

‘But I couldn’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly. And I went there. He didn’t drag me. I went of my own accord. I just didn’t understand.’

‘Cora,’ Bisley said, ‘this man raped you.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘He didn’t rape you? He didn’t touch you?’

‘I should have known.’

‘Cora,’ Bisley said. ‘My dear girl.’

‘I made him think it was all right.’

‘How?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I ate his meal, I accepted a drink …’

‘For God’s sake, Cora,’ Bisley said, ‘cooking you a meal doesn’t give him
carte blanche
.’

He was standing in front of her, frowning. It occurred to her suddenly that this man, with all his experience of London and men like David Menzies, was probably better qualified to be her parent than her own father, who would be paralysed by fury and mystified by the circumstances in which she had found herself. In her father’s world men did not attack women: they behaved with utter formality.

Bisley returned to his chair, pulled it closer to her, and took her hand in his.

‘You see,’ Cora said, tears running down her face, ‘I couldn’t tell the police because they would say I encouraged him, wouldn’t they? They would say that I had made him think it would happen. It would be my word against his. I haven’t any evidence, have I? And he’s such … he’s so plausible … He seemed such a decent, interesting man … I thought he was romantic.’

‘Oh Cora …’

‘I didn’t know,’ she continued. ‘I’m too stupid to know.’

‘You’re not stupid.’

‘I must be,’ she said. ‘You used to say that I was like a sheep. Naïve, brainless. You were right. I don’t know how to behave with men.’

‘Cora,’ Bisley shook his head. ‘You are not brainless. And not naïve. Innocence is something quite different.’

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. I expected him to behave like the men who write these poems. To think like them. For it to be like that. Poetic. Romantic. And it’s not, is it?’

Pain crossed Bisley’s face, which she did not see. After a moment, he said emphatically, ‘You are a very sweet person. That’s worth far more than being like some other girls.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re wrong. I tried to stop him. But only at first. That’s the terrible thing, you see?’ she muttered. ‘I thought if it was over quickly … I thought there would be a terrible fuss if I struggled – I thought it would only make things worse, so …’

‘Did he threaten you?’ Bisley asked gently. ‘Did he hurt you?’

‘No,’ Cora replied, in misery. ‘That’s why it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Because I just let him.’

Everything was the same at home. It was comforting: the pattern on the curtains, the window-seat in her bedroom, the quilt on her bed. It was like being a child again.

‘Are you staying long?’ her mother asked.

‘I’ve given up my job,’ Cora told her. ‘I’ve given notice at the house.’

‘You’re not going back?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, although she did.

Seeing her mother’s doubtful expression, Cora had hugged her. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I was homesick.’

‘Oh, darling.’ Her mother laughed. ‘You are a funny old thing.’ She held her daughter at arm’s length. ‘That’s all there is to it?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Well, perhaps you’ll find a job in town,’ her mother suggested.

The first evening, Cora found it hard to sleep. She got up and sat in the window to look out on the long garden. There was a still a faint residue of daylight: it was high summer. She opened the latch, and put her hand on the thick green leaves of the magnolia that pressed close to the house. In the spring, the pale flowers framed the window and almost invaded the room. She reached out, took a waxy leaf in her palm and stroked it. Spider mites ran across her fingertips. Under the roof thatch, the scent was dank and green; webs infested the underside of the reed. Off to one side of the garden, she could see the rising ground and the edge of the lane, and through the trees she thought she could see a light. It flickered once or twice, then disappeared.

She looked back into the room, and saw herself suspended between one life and another, whispering against the walls of the house like the magnolia, pressing against the window without inhabiting the room, drifting like the light beyond the trees in the lane.

‘Nothing is over,’ Bisley had told her. ‘Don’t think that it is.’

He had given her a book of poetry: Shelley and Byron.

‘For love and beauty and delight/There is no death or change,’ he quoted. ‘Remember.’

‘Shelley eloped with two sixteen-year-olds and drove his wife to commit suicide,’ Cora said, ‘and Byron’s wife left him after a year. They are not good examples.’

‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,’ Bisley said.

She had shaken her head, but was touched by the gift. ‘I’m not a lyre,’ she told him, ‘and it’s words, just words.’

‘Don’t lose faith,’ he said, tapping his finger on the slim leather volume. ‘That’s an order, you know.’

She didn’t want to believe in poems any more: she had listened to too many. She closed her hands tightly over the book. ‘Thank you anyway,’ she said.

‘What will you do at home?’ he had asked her.

‘Oh, I’ll get a job,’ she had told him. ‘It won’t be difficult.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Typing.’ There wasn’t much else for a single woman to do in a county town. ‘Or I’ll work in a shop.’

‘Selling what?’

‘Clothes-pegs,’ she told him. ‘Sheep drench. Wellington boots. Cattle feed.’

‘Ah, the delights of the country.’

They had smiled at each other. ‘Come back,’ he had said, ‘when you’re ready. Please.’

It was mid-April. She had an interview at an office in Salisbury; her mother had loaned Cora her car. She had been home a fortnight. She left early, before ten, glad to get out of the house, which was in a flurry because her mother was helping at the village fête in four days’ time. The hallway was stacked with books for the second-hand stall, which gave off the stalest odour imaginable. Cora had pulled a face as she stood by the mirror, pulling at the jacket of the two-piece costume her parents had bought for her when she first went up to London.

It was scratchy brown tweed, an almost exact replica of one of her mother’s. Round her neck she wore a string of pearls; on the hall table stood the large leather handbag that had been a Christmas present. She was gazing at her reflection, wondering who the person was who stared back at her. At that moment her mother emerged from the kitchen. ‘Don’t forget your hat,’ she said.