The Stopped Heart (41 page)

The girls.

Mary is silent. Remembering her hands reaching for Eddie, pulling his face to hers. The quick shock of him against her. After she'd kissed him, after she'd felt his face, his mouth, the heat of him close against her, they didn't do anything else. They could have done, but they didn't.

The girls.

“Why did you do it?” she says to Graham, suddenly furious.

“What? Do what?”

“Decide we shouldn't have any more children.”

He looks startled.

“What do you mean, why did I? I didn't decide it. We both decided it.”

“Did we?”

“You don't remember? The conversations?”

“Not really.”

“We talked at length about it.”

“Flo was still tiny.”

He presses his lips together.

“She was almost a year old.”

“She was nine months.”

He shakes his head.

“Now I've no idea what you're saying.”

She looks out of the window. At the bluest of blue skies.

“I don't really know what you think about anymore,” she says to him. “Honestly. I don't know what's in your head.”

“What do you mean? There's nothing in my head.”

“Exactly.”

Graham makes a noise of impatience.

“I'll tell you what I think. I think that it's not any of that man's business to know those things. I was shocked, if you really want to know.”

“Shocked?”

“Yes, shocked. Very shocked. I'm still shocked. Shocked and—I don't know, I suppose I felt betrayed.”

Mary lifts her head and looks at him.

“Well, now at least you know how that feels.”

He stares at her.

“What?”

“To be betrayed.”

“How dare you?”

She lifts her head, suddenly calm.

“How do I dare? How do I fucking dare?”

She thinks of the day when he came and told her—after the school run, after she'd had to make a second trip with Ella's forgotten lunch box—how he was waiting there in the hall as she put her key in the door. Tears standing in his eyes. His lip trembling. So much pain on his face.

I can't lie to you, he told her. I just can't do it. I respect you far too much to lie to you.

Respect. What bollocks, she thought.

Mary stands up. Picks up the forms they've been left with—a sheaf of printed papers, standard procedure for reporting the discovery of human remains, the police said. Yes, they said, almost certainly human, but that's all we can tell you at this stage. Forensics will come and take them away, assess them for us.

She sweeps other papers up off the old pine table—their presence there suddenly making her feel uneasy, almost ill—and she
folds them carefully and puts them on a high shelf of the dresser. She turns back to look at Graham.

“I just want to tell you that I'm not sorry,” she says. “Not for a single word I just said. I don't take anything back. I mean every word of it and I don't care what you think. I think I'd dare do anything now. Isn't that frightening? It frightens me. But what the fuck else is there left to lose?”

She watches him, sitting there as if he isn't with her—as if he's in another place entirely. He does not speak. Or if he does, she doesn't hear him. And for a moment she's not sure either whether she spoke those last words aloud or just thought them.

At last, without looking at her, he gets up and he leaves the room. She does not go after him. A minute later she hears him in the snug and seconds after that, she hears a Springsteen track turned up very loud.

The shock of the music—she didn't know he'd got around to wiring up the speakers—stops her for a moment. It's the first time in so long—and certainly the first time in this house—that she's heard music. As she listens, everything else drains away and all she feels is the loud, lifting brightness of that old forgotten pleasure.

A
DDIE
S
ANDS WAS THE
S
UNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER.
S
HE WAS
kind. She used to give us bread dipped in salty water. She loved all children, and when I was still small, she'd sometimes keep me on after the class to give my ma a break and carry me around the village in her arms.

You were a lovely babe, she told me once. I always liked to talk to you because you were so bright and beady and you listened to every word I said.

The little ones still went to her for Bible class. Lottie and
Honey liked going very much because they loved to collect the colorful ribbons that she gave out for good deeds and good thoughts. But Jazzy thought she was too old now and was always on at our mother to let her stop.

I went to see Addie, but she was out. I peeked through her window, which was always clean and homely, and I saw a copper kettle and some plants and a hagstone hanging above the whitened hearth and a cup and saucer on the table as if someone had just that moment been sitting there. But when I knocked on the door no one came.

I waited a while in case she'd just gone around the back. But still no one came, so I gave up and went back down her crumbly path with its double rows of orange snapdragons and pinks and phlox and stocks and all sorts of other cozy cottage flowers whose names I could not remember.

I felt quite downhearted and lonely then. I thought it would have been quite a comfort to sit at that table with Addie and watch her lift that cup off the saucer and put it to her lips. I hadn't known how much I'd wanted to talk to her, and I didn't think I'd have had much of a problem getting up the courage to tell her my troubles.

I knew that if James found me, he would demand to know if I'd got the medicine—and walking back down the lane I went over in my head what exactly I would say. In fact, I prepared my story so thoroughly that I almost began to believe it myself. Yes, I'd had a dose. Salts—or was it senna—something like that anyway. Miss Narket had, unsurprisingly, been a dead loss, but Addie had been very kind and she had helped me. Everything that he had been so keen that I should do, I had done. All I had to do was wait now. There was nothing else to it. Everything was going to be all right.

T
HEY COME THE NEXT MORNING AND TAKE AWAY THE BONES
and half of the soil from beneath them too.

Mary and Graham stay in the house. They agree that they'd rather not have to see them—the two men and a youngish girl in their white clothes and masks. The dark van. The aura of studied respect that surrounds the whole operation. The memories it kicks up. They are very relieved indeed that there does not have to be a tent.

She sits with him in the kitchen, neither of them speaking.

“What is it?” she says.

“What do you mean, what is it?”

“Why are you so angry?”

He doesn't look at her. He seems to think for a moment.

“I'm not angry. I'm just tired.”

She leans back in her chair.

“We're both tired.”

“That's right. We are. We're both tired.”

At last he gets up and walks over to the sink, flings the rest of his coffee down it. Picks up his wallet and his keys. Calls to the dog. She watches him.

“Where are you going?”

He glances out at the garden.

“I don't know. I just know I can't stay here while they're doing this. Do you mind?”

“Do I mind what?”

“I'm going to walk the dog. I won't be long.”

“It's all right. Be as long as you like.”

He hesitates a moment in the doorway, looking at her hard as if he's searching for something. She waits for him to speak, but he doesn't. He doesn't say anything. At last, he turns and leaves.

When the men have finished and one of them, the older one who earlier introduced himself as Nick, is putting his head around the door to say good-bye, Mary asks him if it's all right for them to take the police tape away now—the blue-and-white tape that
she can still see fluttering down there beyond the washing line at the end of the garden.

Nick says of course. He's sorry. It no longer needs to be there at all. They'll go back and remove it straightaway.

And that should be it, he says, glancing at Ruby, who for once is up and dressed and watching the men from her perch on a stool by the window. They'll leave them in peace. He gives Mary a small printed card. The office will be in touch if anyone finds anything.

“Anything?”

“Anything that might affect your property. Anything requiring further investigation or whatever.” He smiles at her and glances again at Ruby and unzips the front of his suit, revealing the bright green and yellow of a Norwich City F. C. T-shirt. “But you shouldn't worry,” he says. “It's not likely that they'll want to take it any further. Those bones, they're pretty old. Well over a century is what we're guessing.”

“And they're definitely human?”

“Oh yes. We're pretty sure of that, yes.”

L
ATER, WHEN
G
RAHAM IS BACK AND THEY
'
VE STILL BARELY SPOKEN
to each other, eating a subdued lunch of cling-filmed leftovers straight from the fridge, Ruby comes and finds them and asks if Lisa can come and stay just for one night. If they say yes, then she can get on the one-forty train and be at the station just after four.

“She's got no money or anything,” Ruby says. “But she reckons she can talk her way through it.”

“Why hasn't she any money?” Graham says. “And is it really worth her coming here for just one night?”

“It's worth it to her,” Ruby says.

“What do you mean, it's worth it to her?”

She makes a noise of impatience.

“She's got to go somewhere. She doesn't care where she goes.
She just needs to get away. And I suppose I thought that maybe for once we could behave like normal human beings and help her just this one fucking time.”

Graham starts to speak, but Mary interrupts him.

“Away from what?” she asks Ruby.

“What?”

“What is it that she's got to get away from?”

Ruby scowls.

“My God, I can't believe it, do you really always need to know everything?”

Graham glances at Mary.

“I think we do, yes,” he says.

“All right, she's had this great big fight with her parents, OK? Her dad hit her or something. Satisfied now?”

Mary stares at Ruby.

“He hit her?”

Ruby folds her arms.

“Yes, he hit her.”

“That's terrible. Why on earth would he do that?”

“I can't go into it. It's not important. Look, she's calling me back in a minute. I just need to know right now if it's a yes or a no.”

Graham says, “OK, tell Lisa she can come.” But Mary tells him she's not sure.

“You don't think you should just have a quick word with her parents first? At least speak to her mum to check if it's OK?”

Ruby lets out a wail.

“You can't speak to them. Don't you see, if you speak to them it'll fuck it up completely!”

“But do they know she's coming here?” Mary says.

“Of course they don't!”

Mary turns to Graham.

“I'm not sure I'm happy about this. I just don't feel we really understand what the situation is.”

“I just told you the situation!” Ruby says.

“Yes,” Mary says. “But if she was my daughter, I wouldn't want other parents taking her in even for a night without them first telling me they were doing it.”

“She's not your daughter,” Ruby says. “Why can't you stop acting like everyone's your daughter? You don't have any daughters left, haven't you fucking well taken that in yet?”

A quick, shocked silence. Mary feels something drop away from her. She feels suddenly exhausted.

Graham folds his arms, his eyes on Ruby. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, stunned.

“I'd like you to apologize to Mary right now.”

Ruby says nothing. No one speaks. After a few moments, she turns and leaves the room. They watch each other's faces and listen as she goes upstairs and along the passage. When she reaches her room, she slams the door hard.

G
RAHAM NEVER ONCE SAID HE BLAMED HER FOR LEAVING THE
girls there at the leisure center. Not for a single moment. Even though the police questioned her hard about it, still it was not something they ever referred to between themselves.

Partly, they both knew very well that he would have done the same thing. If anything he was more relaxed than she was, letting them wait in the unlocked car while he popped into a shop, for instance. Or insisting it was fine to drop them down the road from school some mornings and watch them walk up to the gate.

When they finally did have a conversation about it—a very long time after they knew what had happened—she realized, with a lick of shame, that it was she who blamed him.

“Why can't you be angry with me?” she said. “Why can't you just be honest and hate me for it?”

“Hate you?”

“You know what I'm talking about.”

He looked at her.

“I don't. I don't know. I actually haven't a clue. Why on earth would I ever want to hate you?”

Mary looked at him, then. Taking in the maddening kindness of his face. His patient willingness to think well of her.

“I left them standing there. At least four minutes, maybe more.”

The timing was something they'd gone over and over. Was it three minutes, or four? Could it have been five? Six, she'd told the police at last in tears, I can't honestly be sure it wasn't six.

“I'd have done the same,” he said. “You know I would. Many people would have.”

“No,” she said. “It's not true. You've no idea, Graham. Many people wouldn't have.”

He blinked at her.

“It was no time at all,” he said.

“I left them there.”