Learning by Heart (20 page)

I have changed, as you must have changed, too, darling: it is ten years exactly today since you went away
.

I wish I could cook for you. I can make
gamberi in crosta,
a little oil, unsalted butter and garlic, shrimp and white fish, all rolled up in pastry. That’s one of my favourites. Or
pesce di Ischia,
like the island near Capri. Lots of lemon. Good with salmon or sea bass. Or, when I have been to Genoa, I like to eat the
burrida.

I wish I could have shown you the market in Genoa, as my mother’s sister once showed it to me. I must have been seven or eight; I had been sent there when my mother was ill, for a month or so. In
la superba
there was a fish market of the most amazing varieties that they brought up out of those waters: the praying-fish, the sea-truffle, the
tartufi di mare,
sea-strawberries, and a mussel called
cozze pelose.
I love the
vongole alla marinara
and I cook it myself, a rough dish that some call fishermen’s clams. And, best of all, red mullet with oil, onion, wine and wine vinegar
, triglie alla veneziana.

You see the colour in the fish scales, that iridescent colour? It is so vivid when the fish is lifted from the sea. All kinds of blue and indigo and silver, a hint of silver with a blue-white tinge
.

Indigo blue, speedwell blue, violet blue. Every shade
.

‘
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves …’ that phrase comes into my head as I write of the colour. It closes you in its hand, that line, it describes you fading as I touched you. Keats. Writing to a nightingale, and wondering if he was awake or dreaming
.

I see myself as a child, between the blue sea and the blue sky
.

And I think often, also, of that evening, the first evening when I swam – you, Richard and Alex were sitting in the restaurant, and I went down the beach
.

I wanted to be out of sight of you because I was angry, to tell you the truth. Which was unattractive, as truth often is – unpalatable, sour in the mouth. I hated Richard that day, and I hated him returning. I wanted to be out of sight of you so I walked past the rocks, then took off my clothes and went into the water. I think, perhaps, that I even had a moment of hoping I would not come back, and would swim until I drowned, because I knew that the possibility of keeping you close to me was small, and I had a fierce longing to die rather than experience that loss
.

I know that you saw me; I think you did. I think your face was turned in my direction. As I looked at you, my heart flew from me. I was dispossessed. I knew it was no longer my own. It never would be again. I had to have you; I wanted you for myself. All the selfishness and cruelty of youth in that moment, all the blazing desire
.

And, less than a day later, we were in the same sea on the south coast, and I held you naked in my arms in the water, and the coolness only made your body seem warmer to me. And we stood with the water up to our shoulders and I could feel the whole length of you as you put your arms round my neck, as you had in Enna, but it was more wonderful because I could feel the little curve of your belly, the heaviness of your breasts, the pressure of your thighs
.

On the rocks beneath us, your foot brushed mine, and there was something more profound, more erotic in that than there was in the rest of you: as if you were stumbling as you walked, and I were holding you upright and moving you where I moved, guiding you where I wanted to be
.

And I was indeed entirely where I wanted to be, because the feeling of you was shattering; it tore my life to pieces. I have put myself back together, and I have a very good life, but it will never be like it was before. It is a carefully constructed building, clever, ingenious, but it is not what I found with you. It does not possess the sensation of living, and being part of the world, part of the blue ocean and blue heaven
.

What other colour is heaven but blue? Intensely blue, like lapis-lazuli, the stone that the Egyptians believed gave life, and the colour that they called the colour of truth. Zeus was painted blue. Zeus and Jupiter, Vishnu, Indra and Krishna. We live in a blue planet with blue moons. Romantic. But I look up and I don’t see the romance; only the same white face gazing down at me
.

I think of you, and I wonder, after all this time, if you look at the moon and the stars as you did once
.

I wonder if you look at the sea, or the sky, and think of me, or of swimming in a sea the colour of lapis, the colour of the gods
.

Twelve

Zeph was dreaming, and everything was how it used to be.

It was the first Valentine’s Day after she and Nick had met. They were in the first flat they had rented. It was morning. She was standing in the kitchen eating toast and shuffling through her handbag for her rail ticket; Nick was sitting at the table in the room next door, staring balefully at a laptop. ‘Look at the price of fucking roses!’ he had complained earlier. ‘Did you see what it said in the paper? Ten times the usual price. What’s so special about roses, anyway?’

She had agreed with him. Her mother had always liked roses, especially the heavily scented ones, but Zeph had never been fond of their obvious glamour. Besides, she associated them with the overgrown bushes at her grandfather’s house, and the old man meandering between them in his carpet slippers and dressing-gown during the last few months of his life.

Anyway, Nick was right about the rampant cost: it was preying on people’s guilt, couples trying to make up to each other for their lack of attention in the rest of the year. She could think of nothing more tasteless, more cynical, than the men who ignored their partners all year, or cheated on them, offering the ubiquitous bunch of flowers on 14 February.

‘I wouldn’t object to a meal, though,’ Zeph had said, as she gathered up her things and glanced at the clock.

‘I’ll cook for you.’

‘In a restaurant, I meant.’

Nick had leaned sideways in his chair to catch sight of her. ‘I can’t cook meals in other people’s restaurants,’ he said. ‘That would be rude.’

‘You idiot,’ she had said, laughing.

‘I’ll cook you pasta,’ he offered. ‘Your favourite.
Vongole
.’

‘You’re not cooking clams,’ she told him. ‘Think of another way to kill me off. One that involves less throwing up.’ She stood at the door, twirling her keyring.

‘That’s a very wounding thing to suggest,’ he said, pulling a mock-outraged face. He had stood up, walked over to her and gripped her in a bear-hug. ‘You,’ he had said softly, ‘are a very bad woman.’

She had smiled at him as his hands drifted downwards. ‘No flowers, then?’ she said. ‘No meal – nothing, right?’

‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re in love with a loser who has not a cent to his name.’

But he had done something, of course. It was Saturday; a cold night, but dry. He met her at the door of the pub after work; it was eleven o’clock. ‘We’re going somewhere,’ he told her.

‘Not me,’ she had said. ‘Only home to bed. I’m shattered.’

‘OK,’ he said, ‘but via the river.’

‘The river? That’s the opposite direction.’

‘Do as you’re told.’ He was holding a plastic carrier-bag, and his battered holdall.

‘What’s all this?’ she had asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said.

They got down to the embankment and walked up to Westminster Bridge.

‘“The river glideth at its own sweet will,”’ she intoned, as they got to the centre, and looked down at the water, the lights reflected in it. Then she glanced up at Nick. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Poems in my head. Mum’s fault.’

‘Here’s another,’ he said, fishing in the plastic-carrier. ‘“My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly” et cetera, et cetera and so on.’ He had made a rose out of paper.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s … well, possibly it’s nice.’

‘OK – so origami’s overrated.’

‘That’s not origami,’ she replied, amused, but trying not to smile. ‘In fact, what is it, exactly? It looks like the cereal packet.’

‘And what the hell is wrong with that?’

‘You might have coloured it. I never saw a rose with “Low-fat Crunchy” printed down the side.’

He took it from her. ‘I’m real upset now,’ he said. ‘But, hey, you’ll like the next bit more. Sit down.’

‘On what?’

‘The
chaise-longue
,’ he said, indicating the wooden bench behind them. ‘I took all day picking it out. Nice view of Cleopatra’s Needle.’

‘OK.’ She hesitated before she sat down. ‘This doesn’t involve costumes, by any chance?’

‘I hadn’t planned them,’ he said, ‘but it’s an option later, if you like. Do you want to be nurse or doctor? Can I choose what kind of restraint?’

She ignored him. ‘You’re not thinking of miming?’ she asked warily. ‘Or singing? Not dressing up as Romeo or something?’

His shoulders drooped exaggeratedly. ‘Aw, now you’ve spoiled it.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s it. I’m off. Goodbye.’

‘You are not.’ He pushed her down on to the bench. ‘Watch and marvel.’

Out of the bag, he took a package, which turned out to be a small collapsible seat. On the seat, he laid a cloth. On the cloth he arranged two dishes of strawberries and, next to them, a two-glass bottle of cheap sparkling wine. With a final flourish, he put half a dozen jam-jars on the ground around the ‘table’ and, inside them, tea-lights. With much cursing and dropping of matches, he lit the candles. Someone in the queue of traffic leaned out of a car window and applauded. He bowed.

‘Well,’ he asked Zeph, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think you’re nuts,’ she said, smiling.

‘Thank you,’ he replied.

He sat down beside her. ‘I’m sorry it’s crap,’ he remarked cheerfully. She linked his arm and moved close to him. ‘One day I’ll be wildly successful and buy you the real deal,’ he whispered, kissing her neck. ‘Suite at the Savoy, bucket of ice, Bollinger, four-poster bed, knickers that tie at the side, a pair of waders and a whip.’

‘What?’ She laughed.

‘Oh, pardon me,’ he apologized. ‘You don’t like the Savoy?’

She looked at him, then at the lights and the table, and back to his face. ‘I love you,’ she murmured.

‘That’s good,’ he told her softly, stroking her hand. ‘It would be so embarrassing to go to that place by myself.’

She had felt his touch so clearly, but she woke up – not to Nick, or the river below the bridge – to the room at the top of her mother’s house.

She lay for a while trying to orient herself, then realized that she was far away from Nick, and the sorrow of the last few days descended on her with new freshness. She turned her face into her pillow and cried.

After a while, she sat up slowly and gazed out of the open window. The cold air streaming through it chilled her; she got out of bed and closed it. She saw the cider-apple trees, row by row, on the hillside, a silent army that would soon be green, then full of blossom. Nick and she had come down here before in the spring, and it had been magical; they had walked through those trees when she had been pregnant with Joshua.

Nick had been a nervous prospective father, although Zeph’s pregnancy had been relatively uneventful. When she went into labour and was taken to hospital, he had sat with her through a day and a night, never sleeping, walking up and down. At one point he had turned to the bed where she lay and she had spread her hands in exasperation. ‘Look at you,’ she’d exclaimed. ‘You’re pacing the floor.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be creative, and I’m a cliché.’

Remembering now, in the cold in the middle of the night, Zeph wiped her eyes. Everything that had once seemed easy was now fraught with difficulty. She hadn’t only left Nick: she had left the construction they had built together: their life, their home. And she was torn between feeling that she had walked away from it, and that Nick had stolen it from her. He had stolen her routines, her security; he had stolen Joshua’s friends from him. He had taken away things that were familiar, that she and Joshua had depended on. The theft and the loss pressed down on her like a stone weight, and she tried to block out the small voice in the back of her mind that whispered she had been a player in the game of destruction.

Dimly, she tried to recall the first weeks after Joshua had been born. They were a haze of exhaustion. Nick’s good humour and attempts to help had irritated her. She had found it hard to sleep, anxious that something dreadful would happen if she lost sight of her child for a single moment. Sometimes – perhaps most days, she considered now – she had sunk into a kind of claustrophobic despair when Nick had left the house. Those first six or eight months had been shrouded in a kind of shadow.

She shook her head at the memory. It should have been blissful. Why hadn’t it?

She would have to live here with her mother now because, until the house was sold, she couldn’t afford anywhere else. Even the flats in town were hugely expensive. The thought of it all was agony: clearing the home, deciding who would have which things. The eventual compromises to which she knew, in her heart, she would have to come with Nick. The courtroom, the solicitors, the anger and hopelessness. If she thought that now was bad, it was nothing to what might come next.

She wanted to see suffering on Nick’s face; she wanted – many times – to see him put his hand on the window of the car because he couldn’t touch his son. She wanted him on his knees. She wanted him in the dust. When she thought of what he had done with that other woman, all reason vanished. He would pay over and over again; she would make him. The weapons were within her reach, the emotional gun in her hand. She would pull the trigger, watch him beg and fall. She would tear a hole in his life, the kind he had torn in hers.

In theirs. She pressed her hands to her eyes. In
their
lives. They would all suffer. And Joshua would be the pawn in the centre, the prize. In fact, she realized with a dawning horror, Joshua was the gun she was holding to Nick’s head. He was the avenging angel, a little boy of less than three years old, who didn’t understand.