The English Heart

by Helena Halme

  ‘What time is it?’ Kaisa spoke into a silence in which all the women were staring at her, as if in a trance, through the mirror.

  ‘Goodness,’ Kaisa’s mother said, and she rushed to the kitchen window, ‘the cars are here already!’

  Kaisa’s grandmother and sister went off in the first car with Heli, all air-kissing Kaisa in turn as they disappeared out of the door. Sirkka looked as nervous as Kaisa should have been. She took Kaisa’s hands into hers and said, ‘See you after the ceremony!’ Kaisa guessed that for her the most difficult part was to come. She’d arranged everything concerning the wedding reception, stuff Kaisa didn’t even know to think about.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Kaisa’s mother said. Kaisa could see she was fighting tears. She nodded and they started to gather up the veil into Kaisa’s arms. Suddenly Kaisa stopped. ‘I think I need the toilet,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Kaisa’s mother turned sharply at the door.

  For a moment they all stood still in the hall, wondering what to do.

  ‘You can’t wait?’ Kaisa’s mother asked.

  Kaisa felt like laughing out loud, ‘Of course not – what if…?’

  ‘No worry,’ Kaisa’s Polish ‘auntie’ said. She opened the door to the little downstairs cloakroom and took hold of the veil. ‘You sit, we hold, and how do you say, what do you call it…you…?’

  Kaisa struggled to get herself free of the layers of fine tulle fabric and onto the toilet seat. But with all the fabric, it was impossible to shut the door. ‘OK, now,’ Kaisa’s mother said and smiled. They’d all been giggling and now grew quiet.

  But it was no good. After a few minutes, Kaisa said, ‘I can’t go when you’re watching.’

  Kaisa’s mother looked at her watch. She lifted her eyes to her Polish friend, whose face suddenly brightened up, ‘We close door so, and we go here.’

  The two women arranged the veil and the overflowing fabric of Kaisa’s dress so that the door could be left just a little ajar. Still holding onto the veil, they moved themselves behind the door. Finally Kaisa could let go.

  In the car the women giggled like schoolgirls. Kaisa’s Polish ‘aunt’ was sitting in the front seat, her hat touching the roof of the car as she turned her head back and forth.

  ‘That will be the one thing you remember about this day,’ Kaisa’s mother said, and she squeezed her hand. ‘Just like the time when you were a little girl. When Father Christmas came you were on the lavatory, nearly missing the whole visit!’

  Kaisa laughed, ‘But it was only my father dressed up as Father Christmas!’

  Kaisa’s mother looked down at her hands. Her smile waned and they fell silent in the back seat.

  The car pulled into the bridge over Tammerkoski. Kaisa saw the fast flowing water of the steep rapid. She remembered how, as a child, she’d been afraid she’d fall into the foam created by the water and be lost forever in the strong current. They drove slowly through the edge of Tampere centre, onto Satakunnankatu, and then turned up the hill towards the Cathedral. Kaisa’s mother squeezed her daughter’s hand and Kaisa realised she thought Kaisa was nervous. She still didn’t know that Kaisa was already married. Kaisa smiled at her reassuringly and pulled the veil over her face while she waited for the others to get out of the car.

  Kaisa’s uncle’s smiling face was waiting for her on the steps of the church. He was a tall, slim man with slightly thinning, fair hair. Kaisa hadn’t seen him for years and it seemed strange that it was not her father who was waiting for her. Kaisa swallowed the sudden tears and nodded to him.

  ‘Well, this is an honour indeed,’ he said and offered Kaisa his arm. Slowly they made their way up the steps. At the doorway Kaisa had to stand still for a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness of the church. The organ started playing Mendelssohn’s wedding march. As they began the long walk down the aisle, Kaisa could see Peter, looking smart in his dark suit, start towards her from the top of the aisle. When he moved forward, his mother also got up and took hold of his sleeve. Peter whispered something into her ear. Kaisa now suppressed a giggle; she guessed no one had told her that in Finland the bride and groom meet in the middle of the aisle, where the bride is handed over. She must have thought Peter was about to make a run for it.

  When Kaisa and Peter walked out of the church, now properly man and wife in the eyes of God as well as law, Peter whispered into her ear, ‘You look stunning.’

  * * *

  Kaisa’s father stood alone, a little to the side of the path leading up to the church. As Kaisa and Peter stepped out into the bright sunshine she saw him right away and found that his presence didn’t surprise her in the slightest. It was as if Kaisa had known he couldn’t possibly keep away. She wondered briefly how he’d known the time of the wedding. Had he waited there all day? He wore a light-grey suit and was carrying a camera case. He smiled to Kaisa and lifted his hand as if to wave, then changed his mind and lowered his hand again. As Kaisa and Peter walked down the steps, followed by the wedding guests, her father met them half way down. He was standing two steps below the couple, squinting against the sun.

  ‘I brought you a wedding gift. It’s just money but I thought you might find a hole for it.’ He gave Kaisa a boyish grin and moved towards her. He was holding a white envelope in his outstretched hand. Kaisa looked at his hand.

  Kaisa’s father took another step towards her, then turned to Peter instead and said in English, ‘For you.’

  Peter took the envelope, ‘Thank you very much,’ and shook hands with Kaisa’s father. He nodded to Peter and turned his eyes to Kaisa again. She loosened herself from Peter’s grip and took a step closer to her father. They were now at the same level on the steps of the Cathedral. He put his arms around Kaisa and squeezed hard.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said. His voice was dry and low; Kaisa could hardly hear him. His eyes looked pale blue, almost grey. Kaisa felt something fall onto her shoulders and realised it was a combination of rice and confetti. The noise from the crowd behind them grew stronger. Kaisa smiled, wiped a tear away from her eye and slipped her hand through Peter’s arm.

  When Kaisa turned back towards her father again, he was gone.

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  The exclusive, unpublished chapter is from the end of the book and is only available to members of Helena’s Readers’ Group.

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  Turn the page for more books by Helena Halme

  The Faithful Heart

  If you enjoyed The English Heart, Helena’s next novel, the long-awaited sequel, The Faithful Heart is now out and available to buy from good bookshops and online.

  Another page-turner from Helena Halme! A bittersweet love story between a determined Nordic heroine and a dashing stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. – Debbie Young, Author and Book Blogger

  Is there a happy ever after?

  Newly married to her dreamy Navy Officer husband, Kaisa’s happiness is shattered when she discovers her hard-fought degree from Finland is less than useless in Britain. She’s suddenly faced with a lonely life, lived in the shadow of Peter’s brilliant career, which takes him away to sea, unreachable during his long submarine patrols.

  Luckily help is at hand in the form of the charming and rich Duncan. With his contacts, he helps Kaisa get a job in a fashion magazine in London. But at the same time, Peter is sent to serve on a Polaris submarine and Kaisa has to give up a glamorous career to move with her new husband to far-away Scotland.

  Unemployed, lonely and frustrated, Kaisa begins to question her decision to marry a British Navy Officer and Peter’s career choice: how can he bear their constant separation and on top of
that serve on a submarine carrying nuclear warheads, which could kill millions of people?

  When Kaisa's loneliness, anger, and frustration with her circumstances is at a boiling point, Duncan makes a surprise visit to Scotland …

  The Faithful Heart is the second, standalone, book in Helena Halme’s acclaimed Nordic romance series and explores what happens after your dreams come through and you get your man. Can two people with different backgrounds ever be happy together? Can Peter and Kaisa’s love stay on course?

  Turn over to read the first chapter of The Faithful Heart now!

  Chapter One

  King’s Terrace, Southsea

  * * *

  KAISA WOKE to the sounds of the seagulls calling to each other in the distance. She opened her eyes and felt the empty space next to her. An involuntary smile spread over her face when she remembered the night before, and where she was. After two weeks of married life, she still couldn’t quite believe that she was finally living with Peter as his wife in a married quarter in Portsmouth. She looked at the radio alarm clock, a wedding present from a distant aunt of Peter’s, and saw it was past 9am. Although Peter had gone back to work after their honeymoon in Finland, Kaisa still felt as if she was on a long holiday. Poor Peter had to wake up early, and although he didn’t seem to mind, Kaisa felt guilty that she was able to lie in bed all morning.

  Again Kaisa smiled as she remembered Peter’s first day back at work. On the Monday – Peter was on a training course at the submarine base in Gosport – she’d got up at the same time as Peter and made him bacon and eggs for breakfast while he showered. She’d struggled to operate the gas hob, even though Peter had shown her how to turn on the hissing gas and light the ring the night before. It all seemed so dangerous to Kaisa, who was used to an electric cooker, especially when Peter stressed how important it was to make sure the gas was properly turned off. ‘Leaking gas will cause an explosion,’ he’d told her. Kaisa was horrified. How did people in England manage?

  ‘This is the life,’ Peter had said, grinning at her from the other side of the small kitchen table. Kaisa had still been wearing her dressing gown, shivering in the bleak, unheated kitchen. It had all felt so romantic; Kaisa the young Navy wife cooking breakfast for her husband. But as she’d lifted her head for Peter to give her a kiss goodbye at the door, Kaisa had felt like a 1950s housewife from a black-and-white film. Kaisa went back to bed and thought, ‘This is not why I got married – to serve my husband breakfast before he goes off to work.’ So on the Tuesday, she stayed in bed. Peter thought it funny that it had taken Kaisa only one day to get over the sentimental notion of making him breakfast in the morning, and joked about it in the pub the following weekend.

  ‘If you wanted a conventional Navy wife, you should have married one of the many English girls with a crush on you,’ she’d said when they were back in their new flat.

  ‘Shh …’ When Peter had placed his lips on hers, Kaisa had abandoned her mouth to Peter’s kisses and let herself be led upstairs to bed.

  Kaisa sighed and forced herself out of bed. She pulled on her bright blue satin sports shorts and a heavy cotton T-shirt with a boat neck, and tied her hair back with a satin ribbon. It was a beautiful sunny day, the seagulls were still calling to each other in the distance, and she was going to clean the flat. As she began clearing the living room of a couple of weeks’ worth of detritus, she thought how wonderful it was to be living in a huge married quarter, right in the centre of Portsmouth. King’s Terrace, a large red-brick Victorian building, where each married quarter occupied two floors, had one of the best situations in the city. The shops at Palmerston Road were within walking distance, as was the seafront at Southsea.

  When they’d found out where they would be living, Peter had said they were lucky to be in Southsea – many of the junior submarine officers’ families lived on the other side of the water, in Gosport. That would have been difficult for Kaisa. As well as the job interviews she anticipated attending, all of Peter’s friends lived on the Southsea side, and, as Kaisa didn’t drive, it would have been costly and tedious to take a bus and a ferry across the Solent every day. And the maisonette was huge: there were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large (but cold) kitchen and a separate lounge. But the Navy issue furniture didn’t please Kaisa’s Finnish eye. Every piece was – in one word – awful. She hadn’t told Peter how she felt about this, of course. And she had to admit, the ugly solid teak sideboard, dining table and chairs, the moss-green flower-patterned curtains, the red-and-yellow three-piece suite, were better than having no furniture at all. It was just that so many of the wedding gifts from her Finnish friends and family didn’t go with the decoration. The straight lines of the Aalto vase that her friend Tuuli had given her looked completely out of sync with the teak dining table and the old-fashioned, intricately carved chairs. If only they’d been able to afford new pine furniture. Then Kaisa could imagine how to arrange their things.

  Still, she knew she was lucky. Living like this, together in Pompey – the Navy’s nickname for the city – was what she’d been dreaming about during the many painful years she’d been apart from Peter, when she was living in Finland trying to finish her studies and he was in the UK pursuing his naval career. This is what she had wanted: to be Peter’s wife – a Navy wife. She looked around the messy living room, and began cleaning it with renewed vigour.

  ‘Isn’t it nice that we have one more week together, with me coming home every night?’ Peter had said as they had walked home from the pub the night before. The routine they’d got into during the first two weeks of their married life seemed like a dream to Kaisa. When Peter got home, hot from a day spent in a stuffy classroom, they’d drive down to the quieter part of the seafront in Eastney, swim in the sea, come back home, make love, and go to the pub. Because Jeff, Peter’s best friend and best man, was still away in the Falklands, they didn’t often go to Jeff’s father’s pub in Old Portsmouth, preferring instead to go to places like the India Arms, or King’s in Southsea. Wherever they went, Peter bumped into people he knew. Often he would make arrangements for them to meet up with friends from the naval base in the evening. Kaisa didn’t usually know the people, but they were all outgoing young men like Peter: carefree, good-looking, and full of jokes. Kaisa’s old life in Finland seemed dull in comparison to the sunny days and jolly evenings in Pompey.

  Although Kaisa didn’t always understand everything that was being said, she didn’t mind sitting next to Peter, holding his hand under the table and soaking up her new life. Occasionally they met other young couples like themselves. During their first week of marriage, Peter introduced Kaisa to Mary and Justin. They’d been married for less than a year and Justin was a submariner, just like Peter. Kaisa liked Mary straight away. She was a tall, lanky girl, with a black, even bob, and a fringe that just touched her eyelashes. She didn’t look like any of the other Navy wives Kaisa knew, and she certainly didn’t act like one. Even though she was pregnant, she always had a pint of beer, and wore high-waisted jeans.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you,’ she said to Kaisa.

  ‘Oh,’ Kaisa said. She didn’t know how Mary knew about her, but guessed Peter had told Justin all about his new Finnish wife.

  Mary laughed at Kaisa’s confusion, and added, ‘I hope you wanted to meet me, too, right?’

  Mary told Kaisa that she’d known Justin since school, and that her father had been in the Navy too. Kaisa could hear from the conversation between the men and Mary that she knew a lot of technical details about the course Justin and Peter were on, and about the various submarines and ships. Kaisa tried to listen and learn, but she invariably switched off when the Navy talk started in the pub. It wasn’t that she was uninterested in Peter’s career; she did want to know about these things, but felt stupid asking questions, because she knew so little.

  ‘Sorry, Peanut, we’re boring you.’ Peter had his arm around her waist and squeezed her closer to him so that he could give her a quick peck on the fo
rehead.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Kaisa replied and lent into his embrace. She smiled at the silly nickname Peter had coined for her during their honeymoon. When she asked him where it came from, he’d just kissed her and said, ‘You just are my little Peanut.’

  ‘We’ll miss them and their boring submarine talk when they’re away, won’t we,’ Mary said.

  Mary didn’t need to remind Kaisa that soon she was going to be on her own. She knew this blissful state wasn’t going to last – and that she should make the most of Peter’s presence. But she didn’t want to think about his impending absence. They didn’t as yet know which submarine he was going to be appointed to, nor where he was going to be based. Because Kaisa knew Portsmouth, and some of Peter’s friends, from her many visits to the city, they’d decided she’d stay in their married quarter on King’s Terrace wherever he went. Now that she had her degree from Hanken, the school of economics in Finland, Kaisa planned to apply for jobs. But she hadn’t yet filled in one application. There’d be plenty of time for that when Peter was away.

  Kaisa viewed the mess in the large lounge, which had two tall sash windows facing the road. An ironing board was out, on top of which teetered an insurmountable pile of washing. Most of it consisted of Peter’s heavy cotton uniform shirts, which took Kaisa an age to iron. She spotted the bone china mug her mother-in-law had given her on her first Christmas together with Peter in Wiltshire. She could see only half of the beautiful italic text on the flower-patterned mug, but she knew it read, ‘Oh to be in England, now April is here!’ She remembered how tearful she’d felt when she opened the present and saw those words. And how surprised she’d been that her mother-in-law, who barely knew her, could understand exactly how she felt. To be living in England, with her beloved Englishman, was barely a dream then, nearly four years ago. Now the mug was half-empty of cold, milky tea, left there by Peter, as he’d hurried out of the door that morning. As well as the dirty tea mug, on the table were leftovers of their evening meal – a takeaway burger and chips from the new American-style restaurant a few doors down from the flat. This was fighting for space with opened letters, most of which were bills, old recipes, and a few job applications, which Kaisa had planned to fill in. Kaisa speeded up her cleaning and felt good when after an hour the place looked spotless. Peter would be so pleased with her.