Learning by Heart (8 page)

She turned off the engine and rested her head briefly on the steering-wheel. She had worked herself into irritation because she was nervous of telling Cora what she had done.

‘I never left your father’s side,’ she imagined she would be told.

And there would be an argument.

But her mother came from a different world. Her mother had never had to put up with the things she did, a husband who disappeared with his work for days, sometimes weeks, at a time.

She wished her father were here now. Richard would understand. He would take her side. He would say that she had done the right thing, and that Nick’s behaviour was intolerable. She could imagine his voice, with its Cumbrian burr as he turned to his wife: ‘Cora,’ he would have said, ‘this is unforgivable.’

Cora would gaze at her with that flat, unreadable expression; she would shake her head, and look down at her hands. She had reacted in this way since Zeph was a child, and Zeph had never been able to fathom what it meant. Her father would have strode across the room to hug her. He would have threatened to go up to London to find Nick. He would have clasped his daughter’s hand until it ached and she was forced to withdraw it gently.

But she couldn’t imagine that Cora would do any of those things.

Zeph sat in the car trembling, wishing her father back more intensely than she had done for years.

When at last she got out, she realized that the house was empty. She tried the front door. It was locked. She walked round to the barn and saw that Cora’s car was gone. She took out her mobile phone and dialled her mother’s number. To her frustration, she heard the mobile ringing somewhere inside the farmhouse.

She stood on the doorstep and tried to imagine what would make her mother forget a phone call she had made only twenty-four hours ago. She tapped her hand against her thigh in confusion. What time had she said she would be here? Lunchtime? Early afternoon? Suddenly, she couldn’t remember. Perhaps she had said early afternoon. Two, or half past.

She went back to the car and released Joshua from his safety seat. He wriggled out and ran for the door.

‘Grammy isn’t in,’ she called after him.

He swerved, arms held out in imitation of an aircraft. Two fat pigeons on the path that led to the side of the house launched themselves upward in protest. Joshua roared after them, yelling at the top of his voice.

‘Don’t go into the fields,’ she called.

He glanced back at her.

‘Don’t,’ she repeated.

His pace slowed. He tripped a couple of times over his feet, and began to kick at the dust.

Resignedly, she trotted after him and took his hand. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘We’ll just go to the top of the hill.’

She walked through the orchard trees. She had been recruited every year, from the moment she could walk, to harvest the seemingly endless tons of apples. It had been her job in particular to crawl under the low-sweeping branches and attach the thick canvas bands to each trunk, so that the crop could be shaken down. No need to take care with cider apples: bruising was immaterial. Just hours later they would be crushed in the factory forty miles away.

The smell of the trees, almost sickly sweet, the pungency of the ripe and overripe fruit, the sticky residue of juice on her hands and clothes had characterized those weeks at the end of each summer. Sometimes, in bed at night, she could not get the smell out of her mouth and nose; it had permeated the bedclothes and her own skin, no matter how hard she scrubbed her fingers and arms before she went to bed. Today, as she took the left-hand path and climbed the incline towards the woods, she looked appraisingly at the bare rows below her.

Joshua stood uncertainly by the stile at the entrance to the woods. Reaching him, Zeph helped him over. The ground under the trees was damp, the first blades of bluebells and wild garlic showing through. The trees looked spindly, almost cold: between them, Zeph could see the other side of the low valley. If they climbed to the top, they would see the Sherborne road, the way they had come, the route back to Nick.

It’s the past
, she told herself severely.

But he was in her mind anyway.

She watched Joshua run down the path. All morning she had avoided looking at her son because he reminded her of his father; she stopped now, out of breath, and watched him ahead of her. It was a terrible admission, that she could not look at Josh because of what Nick had done. She put her hand to her face. No, that wasn’t right. The truth was that she couldn’t bear to look at Nick because she was angry and vengeful. Because she would prefer not to imagine him on the planet, prefer not to have met him, not to have any memories.

Yesterday she had wanted to hit him. If Nick had walked through the door during the afternoon she would have done so, whether Joshua was in the room or not. She had wanted to draw blood. It wasn’t until later, as she made something for Joshua to eat, that it had occurred to her that this might be wrong.

What am I doing
? she had thought, while she was laying Joshua’s place at the table.
What am I thinking
? The realization that she had spent three or four hours waiting for Nick to come back so that she could attack him was like being hit herself or, worse, violated.

Suddenly she felt so sick that she had to sit down. She was all churned up inside. There was a knot in her stomach, constantly tightening and releasing, tightening and releasing. And violation wasn’t too strong a word. The person she had been before had been degraded; everything they had together was degraded.

Joshua had come in and stood at her side. He had been in the hallway, watching her through the open door, and, although she had known he was there, she hadn’t spoken to him.

‘Mummy,’ he said, coming to the side of her chair.

‘I’ve got a poorly head,’ she told him, the best explanation she could come up with that he might accept.

Gently, her son had put his hands on her temples.

Now he turned back and looked at her.

He was so like Nick.

Please don’t let me hate my son, she thought.

This is Joshua, not Nick.

It’s not Nick.

And that was when the first acute sensation of pain caught her. In a rush, she remembered the first weeks in the house, and the time before that, a holiday in Greece, making love behind closed shutters in the vast, blanketing heat of the afternoon; Nick’s soft American voice, which had attracted her the first time he had talked to her, that same voice whispering. She remembered how astonished she had been the first time they had slept together: he was so unlike other men she had known. He talked – about them, about the future, about what he felt. And he said wonderful things. Things so romantic that she might have been tempted to think he was joking, but a glimpse of his face confirmed that he was not.

One morning, as she had come back into the bedroom from the bathroom – they had been living together for maybe a month – he had opened his eyes and said, ‘You are so stunningly beautiful.’

She knew that she wasn’t beautiful, or anywhere near it, but she could see that he believed what he had said, and it wasn’t a line, or an attempt to get her back into bed. He loved her, and found her beautiful. That memory made her gasp, as if she had sustained a physical blow.

Her little boy was pointing at something between the trees. She put her hand to her mouth, fisted it against her lips, as if to hold the sound inside her. She mustn’t cry. It would upset Joshua. She would not cry. All those things were past, gone.

She began to walk faster, and, as she got closer, she saw that Joshua was bewildered.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

He looked over his shoulder.

She wondered if he had seen a dead bird. The first time he had seen one, killed by a neighbour’s cat, he had been fascinated, prodding it and turning it over, watching intently while it was buried. But then he had become fixated by death, watching herself and Nick. The next time they had crossed the park on the way to playschool, there had been feathers on the path and he had cried so hysterically that she had had to take him home.

‘What is it?’ she repeated, dreading another bird and the scenes that would follow.

She looked to where Joshua was pointing.

The dog – Cora’s dog – was lying on his side in the undergrowth. He looked as if he was asleep, the black flank showing between the bushes, the curve of his shoulder.

‘Denny,’ she said. ‘Denny?’

La Rosa

You remember there is a road that runs south from Syracusa, along the side of the sea? My father has bought a second house there on the coast. It is a little way from where we stayed, a little way from the first house, but it looks east. My father is building it bigger; it is for tourists to stay
.

The local people think that no one will want to come to where there is no beach, that they will only want to stay at Taormina or Cefalu, and that south of Syracusa there is nothing for them. But he says that people will want the quiet; they will want the view of the sea. And he says all this without knowing what the place gave to us
.

I have been to the second house and it is not the same as the first. For one thing, it is much bigger, and he is making it bigger still. I have spent the last month there with the builders, with the carpenter my father brought from Enna, and the men who have made the new foundations and the new walling to the land. You told me that Richard had made a new house on land that no one wanted, and I think of him as I do the same job. And what else I think I dare not say to you, dare not repeat. I have told you too often
.

There is a room in the new house that runs almost the entire length of the ground floor, and the workmen are making large windows there, almost all windows, so that you may sit in the sun for hours at a time and watch the water
.

I am waiting for you, Cora, as you asked me to. Six weeks have passed. It is like six centuries
.

I am waiting, and I think of that terrible day when Richard came here to reclaim you, and I think of the expression on your face as you told me that you would return with him to England. But I believe your promise to me. I believe that you will come back to me soon, very soon. Before this year is over you will be here, in the cottage near Syracusa, and all the waiting will be over
.

Remember our place, darling. Keep it in your mind. Think of me there. I shall try to be patient, though every day is long. It is our house, that cottage, our place, with its single room and the broken-tiled floor. I have thought of you so many times sitting beside me there, lying in the bed, and I cannot put down on the page what my heart carries. I feel it too much, you would say
.

You will be surprised to know that I have planted the rose. It is so funny to see an English rose in this garden. It will flourish in the spring but I am afraid that it will be burned to ashes in the summer. I have planted it, nevertheless, in the shadiest part. I have asked the woman on the farm if, when her sons are passing, they might water it. She nodded, but she thinks I am crazy. I can almost hear her sons laughing. ‘To water a rose? A rose? He thinks we have time to water a rose
?’

‘
Roses that sicken …’ I have been reading as you taught me. It is not easy to find English poetry here. But I have the books, and I have been reading them all. I have read John Gray. Why is he not more known? I have found ‘the roses, every one, were red …
’

It is a poem just like us. It is a poem about this country. Did he ever see this country? ‘The sky too blue, too delicate: too soft the air, too green the sea …’ The sea is sometimes green when a storm is coming, or in the morning, occasionally, where it touches the land, green under the bridge to Ortigia. I stand on the bridge and think, She put her hand on this rail. I put my hand over her hand. Do you ever think such things, Cora? Will you ever think of the rose trying to grow by our house on the road that runs south from Syracusa
?

The roses are not like Gray’s. They are white. There were no red roses, though I asked for them. Will you think of them, perhaps think of me planting them? They say I am possessed by madness
.

I walked six miles with the rose to plant it
.

So perhaps they are right, after all
.

Five

Cora stood in the doorway of the abbey, waiting to catch her breath. For the past five minutes, no one had passed her in the shadowy entrance, although she had made a great show, when she had first stepped inside, of reading the announcements of services, flower rotas and lectures that were pinned to the notice-board, in case anyone should come. She didn’t want people to think that she was there with no purpose. She didn’t want people to see her as an old woman who needed a seat, an arm, any kind of help.

So she stood by the great door and gazed at the times and places of events that she had no intention of attending, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, and the narrowing, choking sensation in her throat to subside.

She had been married in this ancient place, where the first kings of Wessex were buried; so lovely with its subtle, honey-coloured walls and arches, and great soaring roof. She had stepped over this threshold forty-five years ago on Richard’s arm, at midday on a beautiful September morning, over this very stone where she was standing now. She had been a girl of nineteen with a husband of forty.

Suddenly a man strode in from the abbey green, tutting to himself, complaining at the cold. ‘Oh,’ he said, brought up short when he saw her. ‘Hello.’

He was in his sixties, she guessed. ‘Good morning,’ she replied.

‘It’s a blowy one,’ he remarked.

‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. ‘Quite cool.’

He turned down his collar, and she saw that he was the priest. ‘Anything I can help you with?’ he asked.

‘Oh … no.’

‘Just sheltering?’

‘Yes. Just for a minute.’

He looked into her face. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked.

She heard the concern in his voice. ‘No, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I must get on.’ She gathered up her bag and gloves from the floor. When she had come in, she had been blinded for a while; she had thought she might faint. It had been sheer panic, but it had passed. ‘I must get on,’ she repeated.