The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae

by Stephanie Butland

  Lucy answers the door and leads Ailsa through the house, stage-whisper voice trailing over her shoulder as she goes. ‘Mum thought this might be a bit much for her, so she and Dad have taken Louisa to the zoo. We’re doing OK. Libby’s finishing off the interview with the liver. Come and meet Jules; she’s waiting to do the kidney. You’re after that.’

  The shoot is taking place next to Lennox’s tree, which is flanked by reflectors; there’s a tripod in front of it, unattended for the moment, ungainly and purposeless on the lawn. The photographer is standing with her back to them, hunched, apparently headless. When she hears Lucy and Ailsa, she turns, smiles, holds up the camera she’s been looking at.

  ‘We’ve got some nice shots here.’ Then, registering that she’s looking at Lucy and not Libby, ‘Oh, sorry.’

  ‘No problem,’ Lucy says. ‘This is Ailsa. The heart.’

  ‘Hi,’ Ailsa says. ‘The rest of me is my own.’

  ‘Hello!’ One stride, two, a handshake, and then Ailsa is being scrutinised. ‘I’m Jules. You’ve great skin. We won’t have any problems with you. What did you bring to wear?’

  ‘These,’ Ailsa says, opening the bag she’s folded her clothes into. Libby’s guidelines had ruled out her new dress. (She’s become perversely fond of the yellow roses.) Instead, she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a heart-shaped cloud motif on it. In her bag she has a Breton-striped sweater that’s a bit too big now – but if she has to hold up her word in front of her it won’t matter – and the purple-striped blouse that Hayley chose for her before they went to London. Tamsin had not only sewn on a press-stud to make sure that the top of Ailsa’s scar was covered, but also replaced the original white buttons with vintage pewter ones, in the shapes of tiny butterflies and hearts.

  Jules looks her over, noticing her earrings, which are blue ceramic heart studs. ‘I like those – very witty.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ailsa says. Jules must have read her blog, to understand the significance. She feels herself relax, a bit.

  ‘Do you want to keep your glasses on?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ Jules says, ‘except that some people don’t. It depends on if you think of them as you. They’re great.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ailsa says, and then, ‘yes, I think they’re me.’

  ‘Fine. Let’s go with this,’ Jules says, holding up the striped shirt, ‘and tell Pip – ah, no, I’ll tell her myself.’ Jules heads for the house, Lucy and Ailsa behind her. An anxious-looking man in a dark grey shirt smiles shyly at Ailsa as they pass in the kitchen. Lucy tells him it’s time for his photographs and takes him out to the garden.

  The dining table is covered with make-up, pots and pots of colours, each one working through every version of itself: blues from navy to the transparent tint of a drop of rain, pinks that start at blazing sunset and move to the memory of a blush. An older woman – bare-faced, big-smiled, hair tied back behind a purple bandanna – is waiting.

  ‘Here’s Ailsa,’ Jules says. ‘I’d like her really natural, very little around the eyes, lips something around’ – she scans the table in front of her, picks a lipstick – ‘this. Hair down. She’s wearing her glasses.’

  ‘Your wish is my command,’ Pip says, making a kiss with her mouth. Jules laughs, and Ailsa thinks: Everyone has someone. Except me. And my mother, who doesn’t want anyone.

  Having her hair and make-up done is an intimate-not-intimate feeling, like a medical examination: touch with concentration, without eye-contact, without feeling. Breathe. The room is quiet, the heat from the rollers and the steam from the iron, where Lucy is pressing her shirt, reassuring.

  Propped on the sideboard is a piece of board, about three feet by fifteen inches, the word ‘torchbearer’ scribed on it in a bold lower-case script, the vertical strokes thick and strong, the curves moving from fine to broad and back again, like the beginnings and endings of gusts of wind. Just looking at it makes Apple beat louder, and Ailsa feel like crying. She thinks about Juliet’s words, as she prepares to part from Romeo after their wedding night, denying that the sun is the sun: ‘It is some meteor that the sun exhales/To be to thee this night a torchbearer’. When she’d blogged about this she’d struggled to express how it made her feel, and ended up with something half right, half true. She is not brave or blessed, just the person who happens to be showing the way.

  Twenty minutes later, Ailsa is made up and outside, in front of the camera. It would feel odd, but she has her word for protection, and Lennox’s tree makes a safe shelter. So she can manage. She can. If Apple does her bit, she can take care of the rest.

  Jules doesn’t ask her to pose, apart from directing her in the way she holds the word: ‘It’s not a shield. Drop your arms a bit, that’s it, and don’t hold it tight, just balance the bottom corners between your fingers. Let your shoulders take the weight, let them be pulled down.’ Once she’s comfortable, Jules keeps her moving: ‘Do you see there’s an apple coming, just above you? Can you look towards the kitchen window, lovely? Now can you take a look at the toes of my boots? Grand. And over my left shoulder?’

  She’s just starting to feel cold in her feet and tired in her arms, when Seb appears on the back step, sunglasses on, a trilby on his head. He holds up his word – ‘Revived’ – and Ailsa recognises it as belonging to Romeo, although she’s not sure where from. He kisses his fingers, waves them at her, and she laughs at the sight of him, at how foolish she has been to be churning over all that didn’t happen that night after the tango club. Seb is just Seb. She is just Ailsa. She’s been thinking about the five seconds where it went wrong, and had forgotten everything else. Although she hasn’t forgotten Lennox; can’t. She loses her balance, puts her hand out to the trunk to steady herself.

  Jules says, ‘I think we’re done. Here, look.’ Ailsa braces herself for the photos, but she didn’t brace hard enough. Jules scrolls through the images she’s taken – laughing, looking up, looking away – and Ailsa feels a rush and glut of anxiety. She didn’t realise the lipstick was red. And not any red: the carmine of transfusing blood, on a day when there’s nothing to do but watch it flow, and hope, even though there’s hardly any point in hoping anymore. Oh, Lennox.

  ‘I look really different,’ she gets out.

  Jules’s hand is on her back. ‘OK? This has got to be a bit emotional.’

  She nods and excuses herself, goes to the downstairs loo and scrubs her mouth clean, before she goes to do her filmed interview. If Libby notices that her lipstick has gone, she doesn’t comment.

  9 June, 2018

  Ailsa’s hair smells unfamiliar to her, hairspray-scent in her nostrils when she moves her head. Seb turned up to the photoshoot in a plum, peach and silver-grey paisley-patterned shirt, in glorious disregard of Libby’s rules, and even though he does, presumably, have other clothes in the overnight bag at his feet, no one asked him to change. They are eating olives, waiting for salads. Looking at each other. The Northbridge Brasserie has, it seems, become their bar.

  There’s a bottle of wine on the table. Seb ordered it – it’s Sancerre, his favourite wine and something that Ailsa has developed a taste for. Water first, though.

  ‘What’s new?’ Seb asks.

  ‘Well, we did ganchos at tango this week,’ she says. ‘That was fun.’

  Seb winces. ‘In theory. It’s a bit nerve-racking when you’ve got a three-inch stiletto flying at your crotch.’

  ‘Like I said . . .’ They look at each other, properly, for a moment; even with the sunglasses, Ailsa feels the intensity of the look. She’s back in the bar on their last night in London, stepping out onto the dance floor, feeling Seb’s hand on the small of her back. She wouldn’t say she’s smiling at the memory. It’s more that the corner of her mouth is moving upwards at the taste of lust and shared memories.

  Seb laughs. ‘We’ll agree to differ,’ he says. ‘I like your hair.’

  ‘Oh, Pip did it,’ Ailsa says. She’d thought it might have been straightened for t
he shoot. Its natural wave is neither curl nor straight, and means if it’s not tied back it looks as though she doesn’t care what she looks like. But heated rollers have made soft, deliberate waves.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Seb says. ‘I hate how everyone straightens their hair. They all look the same.’

  ‘I can’t tell men with beards apart, either.’

  Seb laughs. ‘And this is why I miss you,’ he says. ‘You’re like a moral compass. But fun. I did not mean that all women look the same. I meant to say that – like men with beards – it’s like a uniform. Which is unhelpful. In telling people apart.’

  The thought of Seb missing her gave her a flare of happiness; being a moral compass extinguished it. Plus, she’s annoyed with herself for caring. She has more important things to think about.

  ‘So, I can make a decent espresso, according to my manager,’ she says. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks.’

  Seb laughs. ‘I’ve drunk some awful coffee. I believe you. Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘I think so. I like being with people and – I’ve never earned money before.’ She offers the heel of her left hand for inspection. There’s a welt where she caught it in the steam, when she was making tea. He takes her hand in both of his, inspects, and for a moment it seems that he will kiss it. Ailsa holds her breath and at the same time tells herself off. If she didn’t know otherwise she’d think Apple’s last owner was fifteen.

  ‘Ouch,’ he says, and lets go.

  ‘I know,’ Ailsa says. ‘I won’t show you my blisters.’ It’s tiring, being on her feet, of course, but the time flies past, and the steps rack up – an easy three thousand an hour. Getting home, taking a bath, she feels as though she’s achieved something. And she’s sleeping better. She used to be afraid that she was depressed. Now she thinks she might have been bored.

  ‘You look well on it, though. Are they new glasses?’

  ‘No, same ones.’

  ‘Thinner face, then.’

  Ailsa still likes this non-judgemental way Seb has, of talking about the physical.

  ‘I’m getting there,’ she says. ‘It was good of you to come up.’

  He shrugs. ‘I wanted to see you. And to help with this calendar thing. And I told Roz I was coming up, so we’re meeting Juliet tomorrow.’

  ‘Three birds with one stone.’

  Seb laughs. ‘Meredith is flying back from somewhere in Europe. She’s been filming some – I’m saying perfume ads, not with much conviction – some sort of ads. Roz talked her into flying into Edinburgh. We’re meeting her for lunch then she and I are taking the train back to London.’

  ‘Right.’ Roz, Ailsa thinks, would be a good person to be shipwrecked with.

  Seb adds, ‘Meredith used to be in a TV show . . .’

  ‘I know who she is,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb grins. ‘Really? That’s offensive. If you didn’t know who I was – you should be consistent.’ And then he opens the overnight bag that he tucked between his chair and the wall when they came in. ‘I brought you something.’ He pulls out a parcel, in silver paper with gold and purple ribbon hanging from it, big enough to be held in both hands. He puts it on his lap, pulls at the ribbon in a way that reminds Ailsa of Pip, teasing out her hair when the rollers were removed. ‘It’s all got a bit squashed. I had it wrapped in the shop. The ribbon was,’ groping for the word, ‘ringlets. A sort of waterfall of ringlets. Camp as you like.’ He hands it across to her.

  ‘Wow,’ Ailsa says, ‘that is a lot of ribbon.’ She’s not used to receiving gifts, unless they are of the basket-of-fruit or get-well-chocolate variety. She balances this one at the space to the right of her cutlery, but Seb flinches.

  ‘Not on the table,’ he says. Then, ‘You’ll see.’

  Ailsa pushes back her chair so there’s room on her lap for the box: it’s shoebox-sized.

  The ribbons are tight and the edges of the paper taped down with precision and force. In the end, Seb takes a Swiss army knife from his pocket and runs the blade around the slackening waist of paper where the lid fits the box beneath.

  ‘There you go,’ he says.

  Ailsa takes off the lid. Black tissue paper, and inside it, tango shoes. They are patent, black with an ankle strap, a closed toe, tiny silver buckles, silver-coloured crystals scattered across the top of the foot. She turns them over. Smooth leather sole. Heels maybe a half inch lower than Fenella’s. Ailsa has never been much of a shoe person, but these she can appreciate.

  ‘Well?’ Seb says. ‘What do you think?’

  Ailsa exhales slowly, looks over at him. ‘They’re lovely.’

  He smiles. ‘Just don’t gancho some poor bastard with them. They should fit – I took Fenella’s to the shop, said I thought you’d want something not so high, and a bit wider. I saw the look of relief on your face when you took them off.’

  ‘I know what tango shoes cost, Seb. I’ve been looking. I can’t accept these. It’s too much.’ Since she’s left London she’s been telling herself that she and Seb are just – passing. He’s like the best kind of doctor, the one that makes you feel that you, Ailsa, and your trying, failing heart, are the only reason she/he went through years of training. Of all the hearts that they will ever see in their career, their consultations seem to suggest, yours is the most interesting, the most important. And then, when that doctor moves on, to a new rotation or a different post, or another hospital, your sense of loss is out of all proportion because you thought you were special. And some other ailing patient is feeling that theirs is the broken heart that this doctor has been searching for all of their professional life.

  ‘Try them on,’ he says, as though she hadn’t spoken. This ought to be annoying. Actually, it is.

  ‘I’ve got trainers on,’ she says.

  Seb’s eyebrows arch, and he says, ‘I’m rolling my eyes behind here. I didn’t think you were barefoot. Try them! No one’s looking.’

  Ailsa is minded to refuse – no one gets to tell her what to do with her feet – but there’s a naughtiness to Seb’s suggestion that reminds her of her and Lennox in the hospital garden in the dark, when visiting hours were technically over and he should have been in bed. She pushes her left trainer off, from the heel, with the toe of the right one. She slips off her sock, puts the shoebox on the floor and pulls out the left shoe. She’s afraid her feet might stick, but actually –

  ‘Does it fit?’

  Ailsa smiles and raises a leg so he can see it. ‘Like a glove. For feet.’ She takes the shoe off and rewraps it in the tissue. She’s about to pick the box up, then remembering, asks, ‘Why not on the table?’

  ‘Shoes on the table is bad luck,’ Seb says, matter-of-factly. And then, ‘This is a thank-you. If it makes you feel better, the ladies at the dance shop I go to do me all sorts of deals, because I got my StarDance kit from there, and I did selfies with them and generally bigged them up all over social media.’

  ‘Did they wrap them up for you?’

  ‘They did,’ Seb says, ‘though I resent your implication that I couldn’t have made my own ribbon ringlet waterfall, if I’d wanted to.’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘I would not doubt that for a minute. Thank you.’

  ‘No worries,’ Seb says. Then, ‘You’re great to dance with. Plus, with the show coming up, I can’t have your footwear making me look bad.’ The sexy-cute-flirtiness of his smile is so deliberate that Ailsa feels sick at the thought she has ever lost sleep over Seb. He’s impulse-bought some tango shoes and sent a couple of emails. She needs to get a grip. ‘How’s it going, anyway?’ he asks. ‘The tango classes, I mean? Apart from the ganchos?’

  ‘It’s good. And at the beginning of dance class every week we make a circle and Edie says, “What is this about?” and we shout, “Make Sebastian Morley look great!” and we all clap and cheer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Idiot.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Seb says, ‘you just couldn’t see my eyes. Look.’ He pulls up the sunglasses, pulls a face. He�
��s OK, when he’s not acting.

  *

  Here’s the food: two chicken salads, a side of chunky chips to share. Ailsa picks out the croutons and lies them on the side of her plate. She can’t be bothered to remove the flakes of parmesan, and, not having eaten it for so long, the tang on her tongue is sharp, salty, sweet, too good to exclude. Her fridge-freezer these days is a virtuous place, full of nut milks and vegetables, dark chocolate that she has broken into chunks and wrapped, individually, in cling film. She has frozen spinach and berries for smoothies, avocados to make lunchtimes interesting.

  Ah, but this cheese. There’s not a lot of it and it’s worth the extra thousand steps she’s going to walk tomorrow to compensate for eating it.

  ‘I liked your word,’ Seb says.

  ‘Sorry?’ She was miles away, as her mother would say. In a place where looking at a photograph of herself wouldn’t make her blink and wonder if that’s what she really looks like. Or where the sight of red lipstick, bright and beautiful on her pink-cream skin, bringing out the blue of her eyes and the gold in her hair, wouldn’t make her shaky.

  ‘I liked your word. Torchbearer. To light me on my way to Mantua.’

  ‘I liked yours. I knew it was Romeo, but I couldn’t place it.’

  ‘   “I dreamt my lady came and found me dead –/Strange dream to give a dead man leave to think!”   ’

  Ailsa nods. ‘Of course. “And breathed such life with kisses in my lips,/That I revived and was an emperor.”   ’

  ‘Precisely,’ Seb says. ‘I’m glad you like it. It took me ages to find something.’ A pause. ‘I chose it myself,’ he adds.

  ‘I chose my options,’ she says. ‘I picked three I would be happy with.’

  ‘Fair point,’ and his face goes from serious, to smiling, to serious again, ‘I suppose. But – don’t you think it’s a bit weird?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not making your own decisions? And doesn’t it make your “torchbearer” not so . . . not so meaningful?’