The Stopped Heart (24 page)

If I had known it would be as good as this, I said, I promise you I would have got you to do it to me a long time ago.

He looked at me for a moment and then he shook his head.

What? I said.

He smiled.

Just you. The things you say. You remind me sometimes of a girl I once knew.

What girl? I said, wondering if he meant the poor dead sweetheart in Lowestoft or the other one that also ended badly.

He shrugged and his eyes were faraway.

Just a girl. Her name was Violet. She rode ponies. She was wild and crazy just like you.

I laughed.

You think I'm wild and crazy?

But he did not smile.

Too crazy for the workhouse and too sane for the asylum, he said. That was Violet.

I stared at him, trying to imagine this new girl with the name of a flower who was a bit or maybe even a lot like me.

Was she the sad one that broke you? I said.

What? he said.

The one you wouldn't tell me about?

He drew a quick, sharp breath, as if he'd forgotten what he'd already told me.

No, he said. No, that was another one.

I thought about this.

You've known a huge, great lot of girls, I said at last.

He shrugged. He didn't say anything.

And what happened to her? I asked him at last.

He swallowed. I couldn't tell if it was with disgust or sadness.

You don't want to know that, Eliza, he said.

O
UR LOVE BLOSSOMED.
W
E HAD CONNECTION WHENEVER WE
could. Early in the morning and late at night, usually behind the old fallen tree or the apple shed. I made him show me all the different ways of putting ourselves together that might bring me to that same sweet point of shock and delight. Some of the ways were quite unexpected. He seemed intent on opening up all the most secret parts of me you'd have sworn could not be opened.

Don't be afraid, he'd say as he coaxed my body into some new and unlikely way of behaving itself. Just do as I say.

And I learned to do exactly that, because when I did, it was only a moment or two before I was gasping aloud with the pure dark pleasure of it.

Sometimes I resisted and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I trusted him and wished I hadn't. He had his own ends in mind and he wasn't always gentle. Sometimes he teased or slapped me, left me frantic and upset and sore. But after a
while I learned not to know what was coming, and even to like not knowing it. It had the effect of making the final explosion much higher and swoonier, not knowing when and at what cost it would arrive.

I had never dreamed that love could be so hot and bright and dazzling. Some days it seemed impossible to believe that the small quiet me who had once liked to sleep alone on a rough sheet and spend her nights thinking about the insects and the birds that made their nests outside her window, could now be so greedy for a man's hard purpose inside her.

You are a holy bloody terror, he muttered in my ear one morning, when he'd just brought me to a place of such deep and panicked rapture that I'd wet myself for all the world as if I was a great big helpless baby like our Honey.

M
EANWHILE, THERE WAS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT: MY MOTHER WAS
up the spout. She waddled about moaning at how big and tired she was and saying how she hadn't the heart for a new one after the loss of poor Frank and how this one would certainly be the death of her.

She was always like this when she had a new one coming, so I thought nothing of it. But another part of me looked at my father's poor, tired face and the way he and my mother never said a kind word to each other, and I was uneasy. The air crackled with something, and it wasn't just the death of our Frank.

Remembering what Phoebe had said, I asked James if he had ever had anything to do with my mother and when he asked me what on earth I meant, I told him.

Now he looked very angry indeed.

Oh my God! he cried.

What? I said, disappointed because he'd had his thumb lightly
shoved up inside me and we were only just getting started. Where are you going?

He sprang up off the grass and straightaway began doing up his flap and brushing himself down.

To see that fucking bitch Phoebe Harkiss, of course!

Don't say that! I cried, because even though I thoroughly disliked the girl, I was shocked at his language. Please, James, don't call her that.

He looked at me for a moment. His hair flaming upward like a cock's bright crest and his cheeks white with rage. He stared quite hard at me and then he began to smile.

Oh, princess, he said. You're right. Of course you are. What am I doing? Look at me. I'm rushing at things.

I smiled back at him. And I sat up, smoothing my skirts back down over my knees. He spat on his palms, rubbing at his hair till it was flat again.

Phoebe Harkiss is a liar, he said. She'll say anything that comes into her head.

I said nothing, but he lifted his eyes and looked at me as if he wanted to make sure that I'd heard.

I saw that there was sweat all over his face, the whole of his forehead and cheeks dripping and shining with it. I thought he looked like he was running a fever, his face drawn and his eyes glittery.

You're hot, I said.

He said nothing.

James, I said. Look at you. You're very hot indeed. I hope you're not getting sick.

He wiped at his face with his sleeve, but his eyes and his mind seemed far away.

I'm not sick, he said. I'm angry.

Well, don't be.

He looked at me.

It's not a thing a person has much choice about, Eliza.

He got out a cigarette and smoked it. I could see from the tightness in his cheeks that he was thinking hard.

When he'd stubbed it out, he still didn't say anything. He just turned me over as if I wasn't there and pulled down my drawers and carried on exactly where he'd left off, putting his thumb in at first and then getting on me from behind like you see the dogs doing it in the ditch.

As I felt him reach into me, he grabbed my hair and yanked my head back and I was about to complain but then the popping brightness of what came next seemed to blow my head off and the cry I made went on echoing in a place that felt so distant and brackish and lonely that if someone had told me that it was not even on this earth of ours, I think I would have believed them.

M
ARY GOES TO THE DOCTOR
'
S.
A
TINY SURGERY IN A LONG BRICK
bungalow, right down at the end of the village, past the allotments and by the humpback bridge. Shiny brown furniture, diabetes leaflets, worn-out spider plants. A plastic box of children's toys on the floor.

The woman at the desk gives her some forms to fill in. She hesitates over the part about pregnancies and children, then writes
2
and puts down her daughters' ages as they were then. She hands the forms back and is surprised when the woman says she can see the doctor straightaway.

The doctor seems no more than a girl, barely out of her teens. She wears a white summer dress made of cheesecloth. Sandals. A tortoiseshell comb in her long brown hair.

“Let's just pop you on the table,” she says.

The brown-haired girl examines her gently, prodding and pressing with cool, barely convincing hands, then gives her a tube
and says that, given the symptoms, she'd like her to do a pregnancy test.

Mary hesitates, still sitting on the white paper, legs hanging stupidly from the table.

“I couldn't possibly be pregnant.”

The doctor is writing something, her head bent, hair falling over her face.

“All the same. If you don't mind. I'd just like to rule it out.”

She sits there, frozen, her heart banging.

“What I mean is, my husband had a vasectomy years ago.”

Now the doctor looks at her.

“How many years?”

She struggles—when was Flo born? For a quick, suffocating moment, she can't even see her daughter's face, let alone locate the month or the year.

“Seven or eight years at least.”

The doctor pushes her hair behind her ears. She looks down at the form. Frowns at her computer screen, scrolling up and down. Then she wrinkles her nose, smiles.

“Do you mind? Since you're a new patient. Just so we can both be a hundred percent sure?”

A
HEAT WAVE.
I
T
'
S OFFICIAL NOW.
T
HE LONGEST, HOTTEST,
driest spell for thirteen years, something like that. The countryside is dramatically, visibly parched. Grass withered and brown, air stretched and bending in the light, roads shimmering like water.

They eat supper in Deborah and Eddie's garden. Wooden decking, storm lanterns, citronella candles, a huge white awning. Their third or fourth supper there, it must be. Next time, Mary tells them, it really is our turn.

“Nobody's counting,” Deborah says as she passes around the big bowl of salad. “And look, all I did was grill a bit of fish.”

Deborah is kind, Mary thinks. They're both kind. Eddie too. He means well. She sees that now. Since that morning when he came to see her, he hasn't bothered her again. He's stopped calling her, and when she saw him in the farm shop the other day, he was exactly as he should have been. Relaxed and friendly, but not too friendly.

She worries, now, that she wasn't very polite to him that day. Perhaps all he was doing was reaching out to her. Perhaps Graham's right—that he's just lonely. People get lonely. She must remember
that. Sometimes she thinks she's become so unused to normal social contact that she's forgotten how other people behave. She doesn't know anymore what's usual and what isn't.

A
FTER IT HAPPENED, AFTER IT WAS ALL OVER AND PEOPLE SUPPOSEDLY
left them in peace to pick up the pieces and try to get on with their lives again, she hid herself away. Unable to find the energy or the courage or whatever else it took to speak to anyone—not even to the people who mattered, the ones who needed to be spoken to.

She did not call her mother, for instance. And when her father went into the hospital quite suddenly for an operation, all she did was send a card. It was Graham who had to call and find out what had happened, to hear about the complications, to put up with her mother weeping over the phone. She ignored all offers to meet with friends for drinks or lunch, and when those offers finally petered out, she was relieved. She knew very well that her life was shrinking around her, growing smaller and tighter, and still she did nothing to stop it. It was as if she could not remember what the point of friendships or social occasions had ever been. Without her daughters in her life, there seemed to be no point in any of it anymore, not even family. The only person she could bear to be with was Graham.

She remembers how shocked she was when her sister had a miscarriage. Nineteen weeks. Her first baby. She'd never even told them she was pregnant.

“How could we?” Katie said on one of the rare occasions when they met up. “After what you were going through? How could we possibly have told you something like that?”

For the first time since it happened, she'd felt ashamed of herself.

Katie has a healthy baby now. A boy called Sam, nine months old. But Mary hasn't seen him since he was born and she hardly ever speaks to her sister these days. Her mother tells her that Katie's afraid to be around her with the baby, afraid it will upset her. And though she tells her mother that's nonsense, that it's no one's fault, that one of these days she and Katie will get together, she knows it's not true. She is here, and Katie is over there. And every day the gulf widens and she tries to tell herself that she minds, but the truth is she's not sure.

I
T
'
S NOT DARK YET, THE AIR STILL PROPERLY HOT, SCENTED
with the honeysuckle that Deborah pointed out earlier, clambering right up through the magnolia tree. Mary notices how the white cotton dress Deborah has on emphasizes her slenderness, smocked at the bodice like a little girl's dress. As soon as they finish the fish, Eddie lights a cigarette, insisting, when Deborah complains about it, that it keeps the midges away. When she starts to clear the plates, Graham leaps up.

“Ah, I see you've got him well trained,” Eddie says, and Mary smiles and tells him that's a sexist thing to say.

“What? The idea that women train men to do their bidding? You don't think it's true?”

She shakes her head.

“It's the kind of thing my father would say.”

“And her father's a retired bloody army colonel,” Graham says over his shoulder as he carries the plates away.

Eddie looks interested.

“You're an army child? And you think I'm like that, old-fashioned and, what, militaristic?”

She looks at him.

“My father has the excuse of his generation. You don't.”

Eddie laughs, but she can see she's upset him. As soon as Graham is properly in the kitchen and can be heard talking to Deborah, he turns to her.

“You don't have to keep on going for me like that, you know.”

She looks at him, trying to decide if he's joking.

“Going for you?”

“I didn't mean anything by it, you know. It was just a joke.”

“I know that,” she says, watching as his face softens and his dimple appears.

“How are you, anyway? Are you OK? Why aren't you drinking?”

“I am. I'm drinking.”

“You haven't touched it. I've been watching. You're not ill, are you?”

Mary looks at her glass, just the look and smell of the wine, suddenly tart and chemical, turning her stomach.

“I'm fine,” she says. “Really, I'm fine. How are you?”

He sighs and his face falls.

“You don't want to know.”

“What doesn't she want to know?” says Graham, picking up his napkin and sitting back down and reaching for the bottle of wine.

“Just talking among ourselves,” says Eddie, distributing spoons, as Deborah brings some kind of lemon dessert in tiny white dishes. “Her being an army child. Now that I know that, well, it explains a lot.”

Graham smiles and Mary feels him glancing at her.

“What does it explain?”

She watches Eddie top up her untouched glass of wine.

“Well, let me see.” He puts down the bottle. “You probably moved around a lot as a child, did you?”

She nods. Eddie laughs and looks at Graham.

“See? She has that aura about her. Rootless. Resilient. Able to cope. I mean it in an entirely complimentary way, of course.”

“You should meet her dad,” Graham tells him. “Quite a piece of work, he is.”

“Do you get on with him?” Deborah asks.

Graham hesitates.

“He's all right. It wasn't always easy at the beginning, but yes, he's a good man, we rub along.” He looks quickly at Mary. “It's been hell for them, for Pat and Ken, the past year or so. And I'm not sure we've been able to help much, have we?”

“That's not your fault,” Deborah says.

Graham looks at her.

“I know. We've done our best; they've done their best.”

For a moment no one speaks.

“And what about your parents?” Deborah says at last.

Graham looks at his plate.

“They died about three years ago. One after the other. First my dad and then my mum. Thank God.” He stares into his wineglass for a moment. “They weren't strong in the way that Pat and Ken are. I think that this—this thing—it would have absolutely destroyed them.”

They talk briefly about Ruby, then. Graham, having drunk more wine than Mary's seen him drink in a long time, confesses that he's worried about her.

“In what way worried?” Eddie says.

Graham hesitates, then says he thinks she might have a drugs problem.

“When you say drugs?” Deborah looks at him, holding her spoon in the air. “What kind of drugs do you mean?”

Graham hesitates.

“I don't know. I don't know what I mean, really. She drinks a lot—I mean serious amounts, way more than we did at her age. And she smokes a bit of weed.”

“Well,” Deborah says, “they all do that, don't they?”

“But it's more than that—more than weed, I mean. I know she uses MDMA. She's been in trouble at school, stuff like that. I suppose at the end of the day, she just doesn't seem to rate sobriety very highly.”

“I'm sure she'll grow out of it,” Deborah says.

Graham sighs.

“Anyway, her mother wants her out of London for the summer, so guess who gets the lucky ticket?”

Mary shakes her head.

“We haven't discussed it properly yet.”

“And will her friend be coming too?” Eddie says.

“What, Lisa? I hope not,” Mary says, before she can stop herself.

She pushes away her dessert, half-eaten. Then checking herself, not wanting to seem rude, she pulls it gently back and digs the spoon in again, playing with it. She feels Graham looking at her.

“I know you're not very fond of Lisa,” he says, “but at least she keeps Ruby occupied.”

Eddie sits up.

“Why aren't you fond of her? What's wrong with her?”

“Nothing's wrong with her,” Graham says.

Mary looks at him.

“You realize Ruby hates our house? You realize Veronica's going to have a hard time even getting her to leave London.”

Deborah looks at her.

“Veronica? Is that her mother?”

“Ruby will do as she's told,” Graham says.

Eddie leans across Mary to pour more wine for Graham and
Deborah. Mary puts her hand over her glass. He puts the bottle down a little too heavily and places a hand on her knee.

“Now tell me something: Why don't you like Lisa and why doesn't Ruby like your house?”

“It's complicated,” Mary says, pushing his hand off as gently as she can.

“Complicated? How complicated? Is she scared of it?”

“Stop it, Eddie,” Deborah says. “You're drunk.”

Mary feels her heart contract.

“Who told you that?”

“What?”

“That she was scared.”

Eddie laughs.

“No one told me. I just made it up. I thought she might be creeped out by such an old house, that's all.”

Graham shakes his head.

“Ruby isn't scared of the house. It's not that. It's just that she'll latch on to any possible bloody excuse for why she needs to stay in London. Anyway, she was fine last time when she had Lisa along to keep her company, wasn't she, Mary?”

“She was,” Mary says.

“So there you go,” Eddie says. “Young Lisa has a function after all.”

Mary looks at him.

“No one said she didn't.”

“I'm not sure you can blame London anyway,” Deborah says. “Once kids want to have fun, they can find it pretty much anywhere, can't they?”

“Sure, but it's a little bit harder around here,” Graham says.

Deborah's eyes widen.

“I don't know about that. Just look at the bus shelter on a Saturday night. Those kids aren't sober. The only difference between
here and London is they wait a whole lot longer for the bus to come along.”

Eddie laughs and so does Graham.

“Well, I think you're both great,” Deborah says. “With Ruby, I mean. I'm sure it's not easy. Maybe you just need to keep her occupied. Send her strawberry picking or something.”

Now Graham laughs so much he almost spits his drink out.

“I'm sorry. Just the idea of my daughter, clothed head to foot in black, stumbling, half-stoned, down the strawberry rows at Wharton's farm. Well, it doesn't bear thinking about.”

D
EBORAH MAKES COFFEE AND
M
ARY HELPS HER.
I
N THE
kitchen the lights are dim and the elderly Siamese is asleep on a blanket on the sofa.

“I'm sorry about Eddie,” Deborah says as she scrapes the plates and puts them in the dishwasher while they wait for the pot to bubble through.

“Sorry about what?” says Mary. “What's he done?”

Deborah hesitates.

“I think he's a bit drunk. But he was in a funny mood tonight right from the start. Rebarbative. It's just the way he is. He gets like that sometimes.”

“I really didn't notice,” Mary says.

Deborah doesn't look at her. She put a soap tablet in, shuts the dishwasher. It starts to hum. Mary watches as she turns off the gas and removes the pot from the stove.

“You've been very good to him. Don't think I don't know that. He's told me, you know, about how great you've been.”

Mary stares at her.

“I really haven't done anything.”

Deborah shakes her head and her earrings move. Mary notices that she looks tired.

“All the same. He does appreciate it. We both do. He's just not very good at expressing it, you know?”

They drink coffee and the conversation drifts. They discuss the train crash in France that's all over the news. They talk about the mechanics of it—how could a huge great train like that ever gather enough speed to veer right off the track?—but not the body count, not the deaths.

They talk about a big antiques barn just off the A12 where Deborah thinks they might find a garden table. The amazing and very reasonably priced nineteenth-century French glass chandelier that she saw there a couple of years ago and didn't buy, the loss of which still haunts her now. They talk about the weather. The fact that the heat wave's supposedly set to continue right into August. And, of course, the wildfires.

“You expect them in California or Australia or wherever,” Eddie says, shaking his head and opening another bottle of wine even though everyone insists they've had enough. “But here—”

“We thought it was an exaggeration,” Deborah says. “All this stuff about no barbecues and being careful not to chuck cigarette ends and all that. But then we drove past this stretch of heath just beyond Leiston, didn't we, Eddie?”

He looks at his plate.

“Absolutely blackened. Burned to a cinder, it was. You wouldn't recognize it. Nothing left at all.”

Mary gets up fast. Gasping for breath. Cold water pouring through her. The sound of chairs being pushed back as they all turn to look at her. Everything suddenly on a tilt. Deborah's little cry of shock. Eddie's astonished face. Her husband's eyes, frozen with recognition and pain.