The English Heart

by Helena Halme

  Matti stretched his arms across the complicated wooden carving on the back of the sofa and said, ‘I bet your Englishman sailor took advantage of those girls, too.’

  Kaisa walked slowly out of the alcove kitchen, across the small living space and sat on one of the green satin chairs opposite him. ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘I need to sort out what I want.’ Kaisa had been looking down at her lap but now lifted her eyes towards her fiancé.

  Matti’s face was pale and his mouth was slightly open. For once, he looked dishevelled in the pale shirt and dark trousers of his Customs uniform. His tie was loose and the top button of his shirt was undone. He moved his hands down onto his lap and formed them into fists. Suddenly fear flared up inside Kaisa and her throat felt dry. Was he going to hit her?

  She thought about her father.

  ‘It’s not fair on you, or on me, if I don’t know what I want,’ Kaisa said quickly.

  ‘Don’t do this, please.’ Matti’s pleading voice surprised Kaisa. His brown eyes filled with tears. Kaisa got up and went to sit next to her boyfriend. She unfurled his hands and took them in hers, ‘I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  They hugged each other for a very long time. Matti didn’t cry, not really, but Kaisa did. Tears just fell down her face and onto his work shirt. She wondered briefly how she’d be able to live on her own without Matti. Would his aunt throw her out of the flat if she broke off the engagement? And would she break it off? If Kaisa didn’t hear from Peter, would she learn to love Matti again? She held her breath; was she really now in love with Peter and not Matti? Is that how easily it happened? She’d only met Peter twice – how could Kaisa possibly know he was now the man for her? Kaisa lifted her face up and looked at Matti. ‘I think you’d better go.’

  Matti put his head against Kaisa’s chest. She stroked his thick brown hair. She inhaled the familiar scent of his shampoo. Kaisa hugged Matti and he turned his face towards her and put his lips onto hers.

  ‘No,’ she said, and pulled away.

  ‘Please, I love you.’

  Matti was very close to Kaisa. He bent down and kissed her neck. His body was so familiar to her. His hands roaming her body seemed natural. Kaisa let him make love to her but afterwards asked him to leave.

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he shouted from the hall. When Kaisa heard the door slam shut she buried her face into her pillow and cried.

  * * *

  The first letter arrived ten days after Kaisa had said goodbye to Peter and twelve days after she’d met him at the embassy cocktail party. When she found the blue air mail envelope on the doormat, she nearly screamed. For a moment, Kaisa held it in her hand before opening it. It was thick and silky, and she recognised the handwriting immediately. She ripped the blue envelope open. The first sentences took her breath away.

  * * *

  ‘It rained when we sailed from Helsinki and the weather seemed to echo my mood. I am sure I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. I miss you so much.’

  * * *

  Peter was a poet. Kaisa read the pages over and over. Then, carefully, she folded the three full sheets of writing back into the envelope and held it against her chest. She thought about the grey weekend after the wonderful night with Peter in Helsinki. About the awful hours that followed, which she’d spent awake next to her fiancé, listening to his steady breathing, too afraid to sleep. The days and weeks that followed had been equally hard. Kaisa read the letter over and over; the words became engraved on her mind. Peter wrote that he lived in a house in Portsmouth, which he shared with three friends, all from the Navy. He asked if he could phone Kaisa one evening.

  She nearly danced to the bus stop and to her lectures in Hanken that day.

  ‘Guess what arrived today?’ Kaisa showed Tuuli the blue envelope.

  They were standing in the canteen queue. Tuuli looked away from the blackboard. Kaisa knew she was following a strict budget and had been contemplating whether to have the day’s dish of fish soup (the cheapest option) or just one of the rye bread sandwiches displayed in the glass cabinet. There were no Berlin buns today.

  ‘Wow!’ she said when she saw the letter.

  Kaisa smiled and picked up a rye sandwich.

  ‘So, what does it say?’ The two girls took their trays of food to the table.

  Kaisa leant over the table and whispered, ‘He misses me and wants to phone me!’

  Tuuli squeezed her arm and said, ‘So have you replied to him yet?’

  ‘Of course I did – I posted it on the way here. Imagine that he might call! What will I say to him?’

  ‘You’ll know when it happens,’ her friend said and picked up a bowl of grey-looking soup from the lady behind the counter.

  Kaisa couldn’t concentrate on the lecture afterwards. Instead she took out Peter’s letter and re-read it. He used such beautiful words, but what she kept lingering on over and over was the last sentence, ‘Missing you, Yours Peter’. Kaisa had replied to him in such a rush that morning that she didn’t even have time to check for spelling mistakes. She hoped he wouldn’t mind.

  When Kaisa put the letter down she noticed the other students around her were writing notes. This lecture was on international law, the part of her new course she’d been looking forward to. But Kaisa’s mind wandered and she kept forgetting to listen to the professor. She was regretting her choice of second-year subject. She couldn’t understand why she’d decided on business law. It was reputed to be one of the hardest subjects to study; there was a labyrinth of rules and regulations that determined how society worked. Kaisa had wanted very badly to be an expert on something, and to be a lawyer in a company had appealed to her. But the study texts seemed frighteningly complicated to her now. There were whole paragraphs just on employment law that she didn’t comprehend. On top of that, Kaisa found it really hard to remember legal cases – all the names seemed so similar. During the first seminar with her new tutor she couldn’t remember the name of one case. Kaisa was the only student out of the ten at the session who had failed to quote a ‘somebody versus somebody’. The tutor, a tall, lean man who always wore a dark suit and a grey tie, looked at Kaisa over silver-rimmed half-moon glasses. He didn’t speak to her directly but addressed the group as a whole, speaking into the wall behind them: ‘You will notice while you delve deeper into the fascinating subject that is commercial law that it helps if you make sure you learn the relevant legal cases by heart. The sooner you do this the better.’

  Kaisa knew it didn’t help that while trying to study at home she listened to the Pretenders tape. Instead of the legal cases, her mind would wander to the Esplanade Park and Peter’s kisses. She couldn’t stop listening to the tape.

  Eight

  Weeks went by without another letter from Peter, but Kaisa kept dreaming about him. The dreams were not all good. One night she woke with a start. Vividly as if she’d been at the cinema, she’d seen Peter in the arms of another girl. The images of him laughing into the dark-haired girl’s eyes, telling her how lovely she was, just like he had with Kaisa, had made her scream into the dark, empty bedroom. That same morning she woke up feeling groggy. It was a Saturday but she had a lot to do; she was falling badly behind in her studies. As she got up and dressed, she decided not to put on the Pretenders tape but to try to study without thinking about Peter. After a couple of hours’ hard studying, the doorbell rang. On the doorstep was her fiancé. She hadn’t seen Matti since she told him to go. He’d phoned a couple of times and asked if he could come over, but Kaisa had told him she was busy studying. Which was true in a way.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Kaisa said. The man standing in the doorway looked different. He was unshaven, and his dark leather coat was open, showing the brown jumper Kaisa had knitted for him.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asked in a low voice.

  Kaisa felt sorry for him. She touched the ring on her left hand and opened the door to let Matti in. He stepp
ed gingerly over the threshold and put his arms around her. At first she stiffened in his embrace, but then his familiar scent of pine cones and shampoo soothed her into submission. She relaxed and put her arms around Matti’s neck. It was comforting to be held again, to feel safe. Then slowly she moved away from him.

  ‘You OK?’ he said.

  Kaisa smiled, ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  That Saturday evening Matti stayed the night at Kaisa’s flat. All through their love-making that evening, Kaisa felt as if she wasn’t there – as if all the things that Matti always did, kissing her mouth, then her ears, moving slowly but methodically down her body, were happening to someone else. Afterwards, in the small bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror and tried to discover from her flushed reflection how she felt about it. Making love to Matti seemed right because Kaisa was technically still engaged to him, but even though she hadn’t promised Peter anything, she felt guilty. And that was mad too; for all she knew he could be in bed right now with his old girlfriend – or a new one. The image of Peter was fading in Kaisa’s mind by the day. She’d started to doubt whether she’d ever see him again. When Matti left early on Sunday morning to take his mother out for the day, Kaisa decided it wouldn’t be fair on anyone if she carried on taking Matti into her bed. But when he turned up on her doorstep the following weekend she was glad to see him. Matti’s body was so familiar to her that it didn’t seem at all extraordinary to be intimate. Yet it was different from before. Kaisa didn’t want to cuddle or kiss Matti afterwards; she didn’t feel the closeness she once had.

  On the third Saturday, as Kaisa and Matti lay in bed after making love, he said, ‘I love you and forgive you.’ Kaisa looked into his eyes, but she couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. She made an excuse and fled to the bathroom instead. She sat on the toilet seat and wondered how her life had become so complicated. It felt wrong to let her fiancé into her bed, yet it also felt wrong not to. Matti kept saying over and over again how much he truly loved her, how he’d loved Kaisa from the moment he’d first set eyes on her four years before.

  When Kaisa returned from the bathroom, Matti asked if he could stay Sunday night too.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Kaisa said and shook her head.

  He sat up in bed and took hold of her waist. She removed his hands and said, ‘Please don’t.’

  Kaisa decided to miss Monday’s lectures and stay at home instead, avoiding the Pretenders tape and trying to study. She hadn’t heard anything from Peter for over three weeks after his first, wonderful letter. She decided he must have forgotten about her. Kaisa touched the thick gold band on her left finger. It felt so familiar, yet heavy and overbearing. She couldn’t imagine life without Matti; at the same time she couldn’t bear the thought of being married to him. She no longer wanted to be tied down by anybody. But how was she going to tell Matti? And his mother? She shuddered when she thought about what Matti’s mother would do if Kaisa broke the engagement. She’d be homeless, that was for sure. She couldn’t imagine Matti’s aunt would allow her to rent the flat if she left her dear nephew. It was notoriously difficult to find rental accommodation in Helsinki. The student flats went like hotcakes, and were taken up as soon as the universities announced their intakes. But the Lauttasaari flat, just like the ring on her finger, came with a price tag that was too high; Kaisa’s freedom.

  It was past one o’clock in the morning that night in Helsinki, but only eleven in the UK, when the shrill ring of the telephone, sounding ten times as loud as it did during the day, woke Kaisa up. As if in a trance she clambered out of bed and into the hall, ‘Hullo?’

  Peter had just come home from the pub with his friends.

  At first Kaisa thought she must be dreaming. She’d got out of bed too quickly and had run to the phone in the hall, afraid she’d miss the call. She couldn’t tell how long the loud ringing had been going on. Then there he was, talking to her. Peter’s voice was low and manly, and when he said he missed her Kaisa nearly fainted. She hung onto the receiver, trying to press the coloured phone as close to her ear as possible.

  ‘I miss you too,’ she whispered. Until this moment, hearing his voice, Kaisa hadn’t realised how much she had longed for this stranger. How he was the reason for her doubts about Matti. How meeting Peter had changed her.

  Peter was quiet for a moment. Kaisa could hear his breathing, as if he was next to her in the cold, dark hall.

  ‘I wish you were here right now. The things I’d do to you...’ Peter’s voice had become even deeper. And then he said, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’

  Kaisa tried to control her voice, to keep it level, ‘Me too’. What she really wanted to do was shout those words to him.

  But international telephone calls were expensive, so Peter had very little time to talk. He promised to phone again soon. Kaisa replaced the receiver and climbed back into bed. The streetlight cast the zigzag shadows into her bedroom.

  On the following Saturday, just after six o’clock, Kaisa heard the door to the flat open. She was in the kitchen making coffee. Kaisa met Matti in the hall and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled of the outside and his green jacket was wet with drizzle. Unlike on the other weekends since they’d been together, Kaisa hadn’t bought any food. Since Peter’s phone call she’d lost her appetite and lost weight. All her clothes were hanging off her, including the black-and-white dress she’d worn when she met Peter. Kaisa was now wearing jeans that hadn’t fitted her for years. Matti took off his jacket and came close to Kaisa. She turned her face away.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Matti said.

  ‘Nothing, I’m just not in the mood tonight.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked and went to open the fridge door.

  ‘I haven’t had time to shop,’ Kaisa lied.

  Matti took Kaisa out to a bar that sold food a few streets away from the flat. The two of them didn’t usually go out to eat because Matti was saving money to buy a new car and Kaisa had only her student loan to live on.

  ‘Why doesn’t your mother just buy the car for you?’ Kaisa now asked. She was pushing the food around on her plate. They’d both ordered minute steaks with French fries. Kaisa had eaten half of hers and was playing with the side salad to buy time. Her stomach seemed to have shrunk – she ate only half the food she’d consumed before she met Peter. But Kaisa knew Matti would be upset if she didn’t finish the expensive dish.

  ‘Because I want to buy this one.’ The car Matti was driving now, an old green Opel Kadett, was his mother’s car even though she didn’t have a driving licence. ‘Are you going to eat that?’ he asked.

  Kaisa lifted her eyes to him, ‘Sorry.’

  He exhaled heavily and asked for the bill, which he paid with a crisp one hundred Mark note. The girl wearing a pink apron smiled at Matti and wiggled her bum as she walked away from the table. But Kaisa’s fiancé didn’t even notice. Why can’t he be interested in her, she wondered.

  ‘Why did you want to come out and eat if you didn’t want the food?’ he said. He was putting on his coat when the girl brought coffee: ‘You’ve paid for it – included in the meal.’ Again she flashed a hopeful smile at Matti. He sat back down. The place was almost empty; only one other table was taken, by a lonely man nursing a large pint of beer.

  This was the same place Matti had taken Kaisa on that first time. It looked dreary now, but then it had been a sunny, hot Midsummer’s Eve and Kaisa had been so flattered by the attentions of this older boy – or man. She’d just turned fifteen that same April while he was already 22. He was doing his conscript service in the army and behaved like a grown-up, opening car doors for her and replacing a cardigan over her shoulders when it slipped back. Kaisa looked at her fiancé now. His face looked strained. He must be tired from work. When they’d first met nearly five years ago now, Kaisa had no idea that this boy, a friend of the brother of her school friend Vappu, was interested in her. He’d shown no signs on the few times when they’d met at Vappu’s
chaotic house. Then, out of the blue, on Midsummer’s Eve when Vappu’s family – and everyone else in the city – was spending the holiday weekend by a lake somewhere in the country, he’d turned up at the kiosk where Kaisa was working for the summer. He’d driven there at lunchtime to ask when she finished work. She had nothing to do, even her mother was out of town. Kaisa had promised to work because, as usual, she needed the money.

  Kaisa now wondered how she’d let this man take over her life so easily. Everyone kept saying that she was too young – even Vappu’s mother, who was never around (she was divorced and had to work full-time), had asked to talk to Matti alone. When she’d been satisfied that his intentions towards Kaisa were nothing but the best, she gave her blessing. When Matti told Kaisa about his talk with Mrs Noren, his voice was tinged with pride at having passed the test. It felt strange to Kaisa to have been the subject of other people’s conversations. Surely it was up to her, and only her, who she wished to date?

  Kaisa’s own mother was much more suspicious. She could see Matti came from a very good family, a wealthy one, but after Kaisa brought Matti home one evening for coffee, her mother had asked to speak with Kaisa. Her face was serious and Kaisa thought she must have done something wrong.

  ‘He is very much older than you,’ Kaisa’s mother had said.

  ‘I know, but he’s very kind.’

  Kaisa’s mother had sighed and hugged her daughter hard.

  When, six months later, Matti asked Kaisa’s mother if they could get engaged when Kaisa turned sixteen, her mother replied, ‘No, she’s too young.’ She seemed shocked by Matti’s request.