Learning by Heart (3 page)

‘I didn’t think it through like that. Darling, please don’t cry. Don’t cry.’

She doubled up as if he had struck her, hands folded over her stomach. He tried to put his arms round her in that awkward position, but she stumbled backwards, pushing him away. When she stood up he saw something of Joshua in her: the fragile, helpless look of terror that he wore sometimes when the world seemed too huge to handle.

‘You did it,’ she whispered, as if confirming it to herself. ‘You really did. All day I’ve been hoping … I’ve been thinking it can’t be right, it can’t be true …’

He cursed himself. He should have denied it, he thought. Blamed Jess, the newspaper, anybody, rather than admit what he had done. ‘I didn’t think,’ he mumbled. He sounded crass, shallow, stupid.

‘You’re damned right you didn’t,’ Zeph replied. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. When she spoke again her voice had hardened. ‘But you’ll have plenty of time to think now. In fact, you and your girlfriend can think it through together. You’ll have all the time in the world.’ She tried to push past him, but he stepped back to bar the doorway.

‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

‘I’m going down to my mother’s, and I’m going to stay there,’ she told him.

‘But for how long?’

‘You’re quick to catch on, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘For good, Nick.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Well, hey, I’m doing it.’

‘But Josh …’

‘We’ll work something out,’ she said. ‘You can squeeze in your visits between paying for hotel rooms. Although, actually, come to think of it, you won’t need them now, will you? You can bring the deliciously pouting Miss James here and screw her in our bed.’

He grabbed her shoulders. ‘Don’t take Josh.’

‘What do you expect me to do? Leave him with you and that bitch?’

‘Don’t take Josh,’ he repeated, and meant it. ‘I’ve seen other fathers at weekends, trying to find their wives who’ve gone off to God knows where with their kids.’

‘You should have thought of that before,’ she said furiously. ‘But, oh, I forgot. No man thinks with his head when his dick’s engaged.’

‘Don’t punish me with Joshua,’ he said.

‘Or what?’ she demanded. ‘What are you going to do about it? I’ll take Joshua and I’ll do as I like. That’s the price you’re paying, Nick.’

‘I need him here,’ he protested.

‘Oh, really?’ she said. ‘Going to teach him that that’s what daddies do, like you’ve taught him to swear?’

‘You’re not taking him away,’ he said.

‘Yes, I am,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing.’

‘Then I won’t go to Paris.’

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’ll still happen.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk this through.’

‘Stay or go,’ she said. ‘Talk until you’re blue in the face. Look what you’ve done to us! You bastard.’

Some fuse, some thread of caution, broke in his head. ‘And you’re a saint?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You’re so wonderful, so caring, you never think of yourself,’ he told her. ‘You won’t sleep with me, and when you do, it’s under sufferance. You don’t talk to me. You’re always in a bad mood. I feel like I’m treading on eggshells. You belittle what I do. You haven’t any patience. You talk down to me in front of Joshua.’

‘I do not!’

‘Yes, you do, Zeph. You always have. You’ve done it so much lately, it’s like routine. Let’s make fun of Daddy. What a bloody liability Daddy is. You know you do. You make me feel like a shit.’

Zeph hesitated. ‘You
are
a shit,’ she said.

‘And now you can prove it,’ he said. ‘Now you can tell Cora and anyone else who’ll listen to your catalogue of woe what a complete waste of space I am, and they’ll all agree with you, and I’ll be Public Enemy Number One.’

‘That’s right,’ she said grimly.

There was a second or two of complete silence.

‘And you can believe it?’ he asked.

A fraction of a second’s pause. ‘Of course I can. It’s true.’

‘But I take Josh to school, don’t I? I pick him up most days, too, if I’m here.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘congratu-fucking-lations. Once in a blue moon.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Not as often as I should.’

‘You sit up there in your ivory tower and act like you’re the important one.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All of that. I sit up there working when I could help you out maybe.’

‘There’s no “maybe” about it!’ she exploded. ‘I work part-time and I run this place full-time. And then you expect me to be a rampant nymphomaniac for your pleasure.’

‘For our pleasure,’ he said. ‘Remember that? For
our
pleasure.’

She was silent. Gradually, her face softened. He saw something else in it: regret, sadness. His heart felt as if it had taken a single great beat of relief.

‘Zeph,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, I remember,’ she told him quietly. ‘But once it’s gone you can’t get it back.’

‘You can,’ he protested, and tried to take her in his arms.

She pushed him away. ‘No,’ she told him, with finality. ‘You can’t, Nick.’

Two

Cora glanced at the sky as she came out of the house. The forecast had been for rain, but there was nothing yet, merely iron-dark clouds, sweeping in from the Quantock Hills. She stood in the yard of the farmhouse, shrugging on her rain-jacket, so old that even the waxy finish was threadbare in places.

‘Denny!’ she called, narrowing her eyes to focus on the fields, where the dog might have strayed. ‘Denny!’

The Labrador was elderly; he had gone out first thing that morning, and not come back, as he usually did, fifteen minutes later. Cora had opened the window and called him to no effect. Worried now, she had come out to find him.

The farmyard was in almost permanent shadow from the three sides of the house that surrounded it, but in a few paces the route through to the fields brought her to a slight slope thick with hawthorn. There was a gate in the hedge, and beyond that, two large horse-chestnut trees at either side of the path. In late spring, Cora would wake to see their vast banks of white candles; last year, they had been particularly abundant, and she had lain in bed for some time on May mornings, looking at them. She always woke at first light, and never drew the curtains. She had seen the trees as thick with snow as with leaves; seen them, too, bent against the westerly gales.

She gazed at them now, as she came through the gate, then lifted it to secure the latch. The timber had cracked and the gate had dropped; it was another job that needed doing. She hunched her shoulders automatically, and looked back at the house from her vantage-point.

Two things characterized her day more than any other. First, there was the view of the house below the chestnuts, a sanctuary whose roof was sunken in the centre, a peculiar warping of age above eighteenth-century walls. The overgrown lane and the road to Sherborne beyond it, invisible unless a car was passing down it. Beyond that, she could see field after field, tree after tree, and the distant grey-green rise of the Blackmoor Vale.

She turned away, and leaned against the gate.

Second, there was this view to the west of the farm, now laid out before her; this was the passion that had kept her going in the last few years.

Nine thousand trees were planted beyond the gate. Dabinetts and Michelin, Yarlington Mill and Ellis Bitter. The Dabinetts were her favourite, prettier than the Michelins, by her reckoning. The cider-apple orchards occupied a slight rise in the ground, not high enough to be called a hill yet raised to avoid frost pockets and waterlogging. The field closest to her was almost one prolonged, round-headed mound, so soft was the contour and so gentle the falling-away of the land into the woods.

She walked forward, still calling Denny’s name.

The trees were planted in rows far enough apart for several people to walk astride between them. She set off now along the first, stopping every now and then to run her hands along the branches and feel the end of each with her fingers. She looked carefully at the tips for signs of winter infestation: for aphids’ eggs, or spider. Sometimes, in the spring, she would overturn nest after nest of minute caterpillars, curled in a wad of sticky white wool. Their intent, slow-burning attack fascinated her: their fuses were primed to blow in slow motion and take the autumn crop from her.

After two hundred yards or so, she stopped and called again. ‘Denny!’ She would be surprised if he had gone as far as the woods. Ten years ago, perhaps, but not now. Not when he knew that she would soon be putting the kettle on the stove.

They were a deserving couple, she thought, as she stood against the wind, a solitary figure in a great sweep of planting. A wry smile came to her face. A woman coming up to her sixty-fifth birthday, and a dog to his fourteenth. That made him almost a hundred in human terms. They were two old basket cases together.

She felt in the pocket of her coat for a headscarf. Inside her Wellington boots, her feet were bare, and she had tucked her cord trousers into the tops. Like a child, she wriggled her toes inside the boots. Still functioning. No arthritis. Cora balanced on her heels, rocking backwards and forwards as if to reassure herself. She dreaded the onset of a telltale ache in her wrists and knees.

She lifted her face to the wind and closed her eyes. She could taste rain. She had become good at detecting it, or the slightest change in the weather, just by standing here. But perhaps there would be no storm, just this sweeping, dancing, grey-on-white sky.

She looked at her watch. Nine fifteen. She had to be in town, at the solicitor’s, by eleven, and it was a good half-hour’s drive. Denny usually came with her, trundling through the crowds at his snail’s pace, submitting to being tied up – and petted – outside while she did her errands. He would stand by the car if he realized she was going out, and refuse to leave the spot until she had ushered him on to the back seat. She frowned, and glanced back at the house.

As she was walking back, and came within sight briefly of the lane, she saw the post van. A few moments later, Jim Blake came to the fence, holding the mail in one hand. ‘Blustery,’ he called, as she got closer to him.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is there much for me?’

‘A few bits and pieces,’ he said.

She got to the gate and opened it. ‘I can’t find Denny,’ she told him.

‘Want me to go and look for him?’

‘Goodness, no,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably turn up any minute. Come inside and have some tea.’

They went into the hallway. Flagstoned and dark, it was full of boots and coats. Tied bundles of newspaper ready for recycling lay under the stairs. On the black dresser there was a tide of circulars, bills, receipts and magazines; notes, too, that she had made for herself and, just as quickly, forgotten. There was a bowl of clementines, almost desiccated with age, their skins shrunk to the texture of coloured, crinkled cardboard.

‘Put it on there,’ Cora said, indicating the dresser with a wave.

Jim looked at the mail in his hand. ‘There’s a little parcel,’ he said.

‘People are hounding me with all sorts of things,’ she told him. ‘I’m sick to death of the lot of them. Estate agents. The bank. I have to see the solicitor this morning. I’ve had to find the deeds …’

‘This is from Italy,’ he said.

She was half-way to the stove. Blake put the parcel on the long oak table, and sat down, rubbing his hands and glancing out of the window. ‘Coming into leaf, are we,’ he asked, ‘down there?’

‘Not yet,’ she murmured. ‘Soon.’ She looked at the parcel.

‘Did you know that the Sampsons are selling up?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You mean the house?’

‘The whole place. There was an auction sign on the fence when I came by this morning.’

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen them in weeks.’

‘Somebody told me they were going to their daughter’s in Spain.’

She brought the teapot and cups to the table.

Blake watched as she poured the tea, and handed him a mug. She smiled at him. She had known him for years; known him as a round-faced boy of twelve coming up to help with harvest. Seen him married; seen him divorced. She worried about him from time to time; she wanted very much, with what she supposed was sheer nosiness, to ask if there was another woman at home for him now. He was the sort of man who needed a wife, someone waiting for him, filling his empty house, making it a home, giving him children. But Cora wasn’t used to asking such questions and he was not the kind of man to volunteer information about himself. So she watched him as he drank her tea every other day, and went on wondering.

‘You’re not worrying too much, I hope,’ he said, ‘about all this. About the money.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘You’ll not sell, like them?’

Her eyes strayed again to the parcel, but she made no move to open it, or even to bring it closer to her. ‘I don’t think I have a choice,’ she told him.

‘But you’ve had this place a long time.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thirty years.’

And she looked long and hard now at the brown-paper package. There was a white label on the front, covered with a printed, flowing sepia script, a company name, bearing a large postage seal in one corner, and a line of stamps.

Blake followed her gaze and turned the parcel towards him with a fingertip. ‘Syracusa, Sicily,’ he said idly. ‘Who do you know in Sicily?’

Thirty years.

She had been born in Sherborne. She was a local girl, who couldn’t wait to get out of the county. It was the end of the fifties when a schoolfriend at Leweston had told her that her father was letting his house in Camden. She was asked to go, with another girl, and she had leaped at the chance. She remembered getting on to the train – the little railway station within sight of the abbey – one Saturday morning, her mother and father standing anxiously on the platform.

‘You’ll be careful?’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll phone us tonight?’

‘Yes,’ she had replied, already far away in her head, too excited to care what they were thinking or whether they were worried.

‘Listen to your mother,’ her father had admonished, rather half-heartedly. He often feigned disapproval, and was terribly bad at it. She saw his kindliness. She had noticed, as she slammed the train door, that her mother had taken her father’s hand surreptitiously, and tried to hide the gesture behind the folds of her skirt.