My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  In Putney she wrote a note to Iris, asking her to come and stay. The wartime habit of her childhood, which meant using the telephone only for emergencies or immediate plans, had stuck with Ruth. That night while they were undressing she asked Harry, ‘Is it all right, darling, if Mummy comes next week for a day or two? Only I’ve got to have a little op, the doctor says, and they’ll need to keep me in overnight.’

  Harry stopped undoing his cuff links and came at once to her side. She could smell him, an innocent smell it was, like soap.

  ‘Ruth, Speckle. What sort of operation? Not something serious? We can get Verity to refer you to the best—’

  Ruth interrupted him, ‘It’s just a women’s thing. It’s nothing. Nothing to worry about, honestly. We don’t need to concern Verity.’

  ‘If you’re sure. Of course your mother can come.’

  The anaesthetic was like being dragged underwater, as if someone stronger were pushing and pushing her down below the Plimsoll line of consciousness. When she came to she could not remember where she was, nor why. A nurse offered her some sips of water. Her head was leaden. She seemed to smell gas and a sort of burnt rubbery smell. Then she went back to sleep. When she woke up Harry was there, stroking her arm. He smiled gingerly.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked him.

  ‘Nearly six,’ he said.

  ‘Six in the evening? It can’t be.’

  ‘It is. You’ve been asleep.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Not too long. Don’t worry about that, darling.’

  ‘Are the children all right?’

  ‘Of course they are, darling. You’ve only been gone today.’

  ‘Oh yes. I couldn’t remember.’

  Back at home Ruth felt weak. Her limbs were heavy and she kept bursting into tears. Iris was uncharacteristically gentle. She brought tinned consommé up on a tray and kept Isobel amused with colouring books and follow-the-dots, while dandling Lem. When she left on the Friday, Ruth clung to her neck.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going, Mummy,’ she said plaintively.

  ‘Darling. Well, you must come and see us soon.’

  On Saturday Verity appeared.

  ‘Poor you,’ she said after lunch, while Harry was out in the garden pushing Isobel on the swing. ‘You do look pale. What was it that you had done exactly?’ She turned her pale gaze on her old friend.

  Ruth blushed. ‘Nothing. I mean, a little women’s thing. D and C, I think it’s called.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Verity.

  Verity knew, Ruth understood all of a sudden. She felt her groin and underarms prickle with fear. If she begged Verity not to tell Harry, she would incriminate herself irrevocably. Yet if she said nothing, she ran the risk that Verity might tell him, or at least voice her suspicions. The only way to prevent anything being said was to make sure that Harry and his sister were not left alone together for the rest of the day.

  But there would be other days, she understood with a sinking heart. She could not keep them apart for ever. There would be family lunches in Richmond when they might find themselves alone together for a little while. There was the telephone. They could meet for lunch during the working week, as they did occasionally. Then one day Harry might come home from work with an unfamiliar expression on his dear, open face, a look of utter bewilderment and pain that his wife had so betrayed him. This was something that Ruth could hardly bear to imagine. She could not bear to think of him, travelling home towards her one rainy evening, with the knowledge of what she had done newly lodged in his heart. She could not stand the thought of coming into the hall to greet him and seeing at one glance that he knew. She understood that ending the pregnancy was not something she had done only to herself.

  The day went on. Verity stayed for tea but left soon after.

  Ruth put the girls to bed and came down to make a start on her and Harry’s supper. As she was laying the table it came to her that she had no choice, now that Verity had guessed: she had to tell Harry herself. She must tell him before Verity had the chance, which meant today. And so, when they were sitting together on the sofa after dinner, with a record playing quietly on the gramophone, she told him the real reason that she had been in hospital.

  Chapter 6

  The nausea was bearable, she was used to that. It wasn’t a deep or urgent sort of sickness, down in the pit of her stomach, as sometimes occurred. This was a fluttery, light nausea, struggling to gain a purchase in her chest and lower throat. If she ate dry oatcakes and drank weak tea it would go away; if she took coffee without food it would intensify. She found that gulping water, too, made it worse, even though she felt so thirsty. How could she be so thirsty when she had drunk so much the night before? She did not understand that. The thing was to take things slowly. No sudden movements. The neck was crucial: you could sit up and look around you, but you had to keep your neck rigid, as if you were wearing a surgical collar. Today the headache was worse than the nausea: insistent and metallic, like an iron brace tightening around her head. It sat behind her eyes, pulsing slightly, like a toad’s throat. Any movement magnified its grasp.

  When she sat up in bed she felt a lurching sensation. It wasn’t just physical. Lying still, monitoring the complaints of her body, she forgot about the children, but the action of upending herself somehow triggered her memory. She reeled, like someone trying to pick up too heavy a suitcase. It was peculiar how missing them could simultaneously be experienced as a physical weight, an unmanageable load, yet also as a loss of mass, as if the whole centre of her had been scraped away. Ruth felt emptied by sadness but weighted down with it too.

  Talking aloud helped a little. She coaxed herself up, like a nurse assisting a fractious patient.

  ‘There you are. You’re all right. That’s it.’

  She shuffled along to the bathroom. Sometimes brushing her teeth helped with the headache. Sometimes the headache spread into the roots of her teeth, tightening her jaw, clamping with pain. You could poke the toothbrush down into the pockets of your cheeks and scrub along the bone then. That helped. But it wasn’t that kind of headache today. On other mornings brushing her teeth had to be undertaken gingerly. It was something she had always done automatically, with vigour: start at the front top, then front bottom, working backwards. But she had had to unlearn the process, gentle it, separate out its components. There had been mornings when the brush approaching her molars had made her sick and she had had to clutch the cool edge of the washbasin to prevent her legs from giving way.

  After the headache and the nausea came missing the children. She missed the smell of their heads; the first sight of them flushed with sleep against their pillows. She remembered making Isobel’s bed and straightening Lem’s cot in the mornings, how the girls left residual pockets of warmth in the sheets where they had lain; how delicious those patches of heat had been to her hands, like the warmth of new bread through a paper bag. She missed holding their feet loosely in one hand when she read to them, the hinges of their knees loose, so that their calves could be jiggled up and down. She missed Isobel’s questions, her certainty. She missed Lem’s arms, skinny in her woollen cardigan.

  Then the shame spread through her. It gripped her innards like a cramp, a shame so intense that very often it made her cry out. When she was a child she had gone to church with her father and stepmother sometimes, at the abbey in Tewkesbury. There was a tomb there, carved in stone, showing a man whose stomach was being gnawed by a rodent, presumably as a punish- ment for some wicked act during his lifetime; she had never known what. But this was how Ruth felt now, as if her entrails were being devoured by shame. The shame was so profound that it blocked all thoughts of Harry, obliterating his image like ink spilled on a photograph. Some nights Ruth dreamed of him and on those mornings when she awoke she wondered whether it was possible to die – literally die – from unhappiness.

  Harry had not answered her letter.

  After she had told him about the termination,
he had not slept in their room with her again, retreating to the narrow bed in his dressing room, which had never been used for anything but laying out his work clothes. That first night she had heard sounds from his room. She had gone out onto the landing and stood there, shivering, not knowing what to do. Eventually she had opened the door quietly and gone to kneel by him without switching on the light. He had not answered when she said his name, so she had slid one arm under his neck and the other around his head and cradled his face against her chest silently. She had felt the wetness on his cheeks against the thin skin below her collarbones. He hadn’t moved, that was what had been so terrible. If he had embraced her or even pushed her away she would have had hope. As it was she could not reach him: he lay completely still, immobilised with grief. He had not so much as glanced in her direction at the breakfast table the next morning, nor on the mornings that followed. His frame suddenly seemed clumsy, as if his sadness had heft. In the mornings his face was lined. Realising that he could not bear to look at her was what had made her decide to go away for the time being.

  It was peculiar to be back in her grandparents’ house. Waking in her old room, she wondered whether she wasn’t trapped in some awful dream in which she was condemned always to be in this wintry house, always missing the people she loved most. Now that her grandmother had died her uncle Christopher had the place to himself. The haircord carpet on the upstairs landing had become threadbare in patches, whitening like an old dog’s muzzle. The clock still ticked heavily in the tiled hall. Dust gathered in corners. The things Christopher collected were gradually filling the rooms, so that they could barely be used to sit or eat in. The dining-room table was covered with birds’ nests, while one half of the sideboard was occupied by a game of chess which Christopher was playing by post with a friend from university, so that the pieces were only moved every few days, when a postcard came. Her grandfather’s old study was piled high with papers. By the sofa and armchairs in the sitting room teetering pillars of books grew like many-coloured stalagmites. Even the little telephone table at the foot of the stairs was covered with pieces of paper, loose change, pencil stubs – and the odd slightly greying mint imperial – indicating that her uncle had absent-mindedly emptied the contents of his pockets onto it while taking a call. Only the breakfast room remained as it had been when her grandparents were alive. They now took all their meals there.

  She had gone from London to her father’s house, leaving the children with Harry’s mother, while he was at the office. Ruth had lied to her mother-in-law, saying that her stepmother had broken her ankle and that she must go to help out for a day or two. She hadn’t thought anything through. She hadn’t thought how long she would stay away, nor what she would tell Harry; she hadn’t dared to think how things might be when she got home. All she knew was that home was insufferable at present.

  Neither her father nor his wife asked her why she had come, but on the third morning her father put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘It was lovely to see you, darling. But you don’t look awfully as if you’re enjoying it here and we thought, perhaps, you might like Helen to run you to the station when she goes up to Malvern this afternoon?’

  He had reddened slightly. ‘Yes, of course,’ said Ruth. ‘I expect they’ll be needing you at home,’ Helen had added, helpfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  So she had gone with Helen, but instead of getting on the train she had waited until her stepmother’s car was out of sight and then taken a taxi to her uncle’s house. She had not planned to stay on in Malvern, but she did not feel ready to go home, not yet. When she got to the house Christopher was not there. It was too cold to wait outside. She did not know what time he generally came back from work, so she pushed a note through the door:

  Dear Uncle Christopher,

  May I come and stay for a few days? Please don’t mention this to Daddy if you speak to him before you see me. I will be at the Abbey Hotel in the meantime.

  Love,

  Ruth

  She hid her case by the back door and walked up to the hotel to wait. A little under an hour later, after she had asked the elderly waitress for a second pot of hot water to replenish her tea, Christopher appeared.

  That had been more than three weeks ago. On the first morning she had written the letter to Harry, a long letter asking his forgiveness. She had written the letter in bed, the paper propped on a tea tray on her knees. After posting it, she felt as though she were exhaling for the first time since leaving Putney, as if she had been holding her breath for weeks. She felt unencumbered, light. She decided to walk to the very top of the hill, even though she had no scarf or gloves. The steep climb warmed her a little. From the summit she could see the counties far below, stretching away to either side, the fields fading from vivid greens and browns until they blurred into a single colour, the hazy grey-blue of the distance. She leant into the wind. It occurred to Ruth that if she were to let go, to simply lift her feet, she could surely float down like dust, or like a leaf, the wind soft and cosseting, and the clumps of trees below would receive her, yield to her form, like moss.

  Verity was surprised by the monotony of looking after small children. She had always enjoyed seeing her nieces, laughed at their little antics, and been suitably amused by the humorous tales Ruth and Harry told of them. But being virtually alone with them all day – Mrs Lane kept an eye on them for only an hour or two each morning – was a different thing. No one knew what to do quite: whether Harry should employ a nanny for the duration, or if his sister and sisters-in-law would be able to manage the children between them, until things were more decided. Verity was the only one who worked, of course, so it was only for this one week that she could step in.

  Was it captious to observe that Isobel was really rather maddening? The child was excitable, bossy and quickly moved to tears, a temperament very different from the Longdens, although she looked so like her father. The baby was quieter, only staring around darkly like a bushbaby. Emily was the opposite of her sister and utterly unlike Harry in colouring and appearance. Verity had wondered lately if she was in fact his child. She wouldn’t put anything past Ruth now.

  It was obvious that Ruth had been having an affair. Why else would she have committed the terrible, immoral act which had precipitated her departure? It amounted to murder practically: it was unconscionable. Thinking back over the past few times she had seen her sister-in-law, Verity remembered Ruth as increasingly silent and edgy, almost as if she was becoming uncomfortable among the Longdens. As well she may have been! Heaven knows, they were accommodating enough, as a family, always deferring to Ruth if questions about music came up, never criticising that peculiar mother of hers. Poor old Harry hadn’t got a clue of course.

  That was why she had taken the letter. It had arrived in the morning’s second post, after Harry was at work, and Verity had recognised the writing at once. It was lucky that she was here when it came, to protect her brother. She had no intention of opening the letter, naturally; she wasn’t the sort of person who would read private correspondence. But something about its weight – it was pages long evidently – together with a slightly frantic quality to the writing on the envelope, gave her the strongest feeling that there was a confession folded inside it. And Verity believed that learning his wife had been unfaithful would destroy Harry. He had burdens enough already.

  Verity now regretted having confided in Ruth. She had told her about the affair with Peter soon after it began, three years ago. Peter’s situation was a delicate one. It was important that no one at the hospital should learn that they were lovers, for the sake of his professional position and, of course, Verity’s. Her discretion meant a great deal to him, she knew. There were no children from his marriage, for his wife had begun to suffer various health crises soon after they first began to live together. Mental problems. There had been hospitalisations, rest cures; he had tried everything to restore his wife to health, but even during her best times she had become too fea
rful to leave the house and at her worst – at her worst there had been smashed crockery, awful scenes, even attempts on her own life. It was terribly hard for Peter. Not only did the onerous duty of care fall to him, but his own manly impulses found no outlet within the marriage. Verity was able, at least, to provide him with some respite, some comfort.

  She had told no one at work about the affair, but Ruth was her oldest friend and an ear at safe remove from the hospital. Verity guessed that Ruth would tell Harry, but she knew her brother would keep the matter to himself.

  ‘D’you not mind, that he’s married?’ Ruth had asked.

  ‘Of course I do. Dreadfully. It means we can’t ever be together and he’s so unhappy at home. Sometimes I mind so much I think I’ll have to run away.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just be somewhere else, somewhere where he isn’t. Seeing him most days at the hospital makes it harder somehow. You’d think it would make it easier, but it doesn’t.’

  Ruth felt herself reddening. ‘Have you confessed? Does Father Leonard know?’ She knew she shouldn’t ask, but she could not help herself.

  ‘My conscience is clear,’ said Verity smartly. ‘Peter’s life would be unendurable if it weren’t for—’

  ‘No, quite,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s your … I didn’t … Quite.’

  That had been a long time ago. They hadn’t discussed it since, and although Ruth tended to ask after Peter, if they found themselves alone together, she did not press Verity on the subject. Harry, if he knew, had never so much as alluded to it. Anyway, she reflected, her own case was so very different from Ruth’s. Ruth was a mother for one thing. Her first duty lay with her young family. And she and Harry had obviously been happy together, unlike poor wretched Peter. Why Ruth should want anyone else, why she was prepared to risk jeopardising such happiness: it was a mystery. It spoke of a horrible greed in Ruth. Rapaciousness even. Yet that was clearly what she had done. But then look at the mother, Iris: she’d gone off with someone in the war apparently, and she was the most frightful flirt. Even at Harry and Ruth’s wedding she’d batted her eyelashes at someone’s uncle. The bride’s mother! Ruth had always seemed so demure. But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, thought Verity.