My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  In Ilse’s room there was a wall-mounted shelf with books in German. Instead of a dressing table she had a chest of drawers with a mirror in a wooden frame, decorated with marquetry flowers. The mirror was the only pretty thing in the room, apart from a tortoiseshell writing box with silver edges, where Ilse kept special thin paper for sending letters overseas. On either side of the mirror were framed photographs of old people. Isobel imagined they must be Ilse’s parents, or even grandparents. It was quite hard to discover much about Ilse from looking at her things. She was nice though. She wasn’t pretty, but she had the nicest hair, the colour of corn that has been rained on, and shiny as water.

  From most people’s things you could tell, at least a bit, what they were like. With Granny Longden you knew she liked gardens because she had books about gardens around the place; and you knew she liked going to Mass because she kept her missal on her bedside table, her favourite passages marked with prayer cards carrying pictures of the Virgin Mary and various saints, which made the missal bulge. Emily collected china ornaments of animals. In Mummy’s room there were photographs of the girls everywhere, not even in frames but propped on the mantel shelf, the chest of drawers, even the windowsill. Uncle Christopher had his things all over the place; anyone could tell that he liked nature the minute they came into the house. The girls never went into his bedroom, even though no one had told them not to. Daddy had a picture of Mummy in his dressing room still, even though he was going to get married again.

  Mrs Proctor was Daddy’s fiancée. He had met her at Mass. She was a widow. She didn’t have children of her own because her husband had died of a heart attack before they’d had a chance to start a family, only weeks after their wedding. Nobody had known there was anything wrong with his heart at all – he was a young man, apparently healthy – but he had just fallen over, dead. Although they had not known Mr Proctor, the method of his dying made the girls uneasy for a time, until they forgot about it. To begin with, for a week or two, it frightened them to think that if this could happen to anyone, so suddenly, it could even happen to someone of theirs.

  Daddy had told the girls about Mr Proctor and said it had been a tragedy for Mrs Proctor, but when they talked about it by themselves later, they agreed that it wasn’t as bad as all that. They thought that if Mr and Mrs Proctor hadn’t been married for very long, then Mrs Proctor had not had time to get used to her husband. It was worse if someone you’d been married to for ages died, because then you would have had more of them to miss. It would be much worse to leave your favourite old teddy on a train than a new one. They thought that their mother probably missed their father much more than Mrs Proctor missed Mr Proctor. Mrs Proctor never looked as if she had been crying. Although Mummy was happier now, because she liked giving piano lessons. Daddy had sent her piano up to Malvern, in a removal van.

  Mrs Proctor wore patent-leather shoes with neat buckles, and stockings that were probably meant to be the colour of legs but were actually almost orange, like the cellophane wrapped around a bottle of Lucozade. She told the girls with some pride that she never crossed her legs when sitting down, only tucked one ankle behind the other, and that they must do the same. They didn’t know why. She never went outside without wearing a silk headscarf tied under her chin in a determined little knot. She had two Pekinese dogs. The dogs made snuffly noises all the time and their eyes watered, drawing ugly dark lines on the pale fur of their faces. They always looked terribly indignant. If you threw a cotton reel or ball for them they didn’t go after it but sat stubbornly, looking affronted. Isobel and Emily didn’t really mind that Mrs Proctor would be coming to live with them, but they would have preferred her to have some other sort of dog.

  At Malvern they did not mention Mrs Proctor. They thought it might hurt their mother’s feelings terribly, to learn that Daddy was going to marry someone else. And they were embarrassed for their father. Mrs Proctor was so old! She wasn’t like a bride at all. Her hair wasn’t very nice, it was stiff and dull-looking. Every week she went to the hairdresser for a shampoo and set, and then she sprayed hairspray from a gold tin onto her head each night, so the curl would stay in. They preferred their mother’s hair, which swung and didn’t have a style. The girls hoped that they would not have to be bridesmaids at the wedding. They got the giggles when they imagined the Pekineses being bridesmaids instead, dressed up in lace and ribbons, trotting along behind their mistress, looking furious.

  In fact Ruth did know about Harry’s marriage plans, but she had not mentioned it to her daughters because she did not want them to discover that she was angry with him and she could not trust herself to speak of it without resentment. She had never been cross with Harry before, because she had always had utter faith in his goodness. When he had suggested that they meet for lunch – he had something he wanted to talk to her about – she had consented at once. It was probably about the girls’ schools, where they should go next. Ruth was keen to have a chance to put the case for Malvern, so that they could be near her. It was, after all, the same school that his parents had chosen for Verity: she was pretty sure that Longden tradition would persuade him, even if their proximity to their mother would not.

  Oxford was halfway between them and they had agreed upon the Randolph Hotel at one o’clock. Her half-brother Jamie was up at Trinity reading mathematics; she would take him out for tea later the same day. Ruth had set off looking forward to the day. Not for one minute had she thought that Harry was going to suggest a reconciliation: by now she no longer even hoped for that herself. But she was fond of him still. She looked forward to seeing him, his dear face.

  It was only when their main courses had come that Harry looked very intently at her, so that she could tell he was brewing up to saying something.

  ‘You remember Father Leonard?’ he asked.

  This was not what she had been expecting. ‘Of course I do!’ she said. ‘He baptised the girls, surely you don’t think I’d forget? And he was often at your parents’ house.’ Ruth did not add that it had been he who had officiated at their wedding: it somehow seemed improper to mention it.

  ‘I don’t know whether the children have mentioned anything, but I have been, well, I’ve been seeing someone. We’ve got to know one another pretty well and I’ve grown very fond of her.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Ruth brightly.

  ‘And the thing is, we’d like to formalise things,’ Harry added. ‘What do you mean “formalise things”?’ asked Ruth. She tried to smile, to look gracious.

  ‘I mean to marry.’

  ‘Gracious!’ Ruth felt her face redden. She did not want to be with Harry any more, but somehow the idea of him marrying someone else seemed very final. She struggled to keep her composure. ‘Goodness, yes, if that’s what you want then of course I’m glad for you,’ she went on. ‘I suppose this means you’re asking me for a divorce, does it?’

  ‘We will need to sort that out, yes, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. The thing is, though, that Valerie is observant, as I am, and we’d like to be married within the Church. It’s been very difficult, my not being able to take Communion because of the separation.’

  This was a rebuke.

  ‘Golly!’ Ruth heard herself say. These exclamations kept popping out of her mouth, making her sound ridiculous to herself, like an overgrown schoolgirl, or Joyce Grenfell. ‘Surely you can’t get married in the Church, though, can you, while I’m about? Does that mean you’ll have to bump me off?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ruth. It wouldn’t affect you in any way. I’ve talked it over with Father Leonard and he is of the opinion that the annulment would be granted—’

  Ruth cut him off. ‘Annulment? What are you talking about? You can’t get an annulment! We’ve got two daughters, we—’

  Now Harry interrupted her. ‘Essentially, Father Leonard says that the marriage could be declared null ab initio, on the grounds that you did not give yourself freely. That you weren’t consenting, fully, at the time of the marriage.�
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  His shoulders drooped. He looked miserable.

  ‘Not consenting to what?’ Ruth saw an image, suddenly, of Harry and herself in the Italian hotel room where they had spent their honeymoon. She remembered him kneeling on the floor by the bed, how she’d looked down, unabashed, at her naked hips on the edge of the bed, and at his hips between her legs. It had been more than consent, with her. It had been complete abandon.

  ‘To having a family,’ he said.

  ‘What can you mean? I did consent to have a family. This is mad! I had a family. I had two daughters. Surely you can’t have forgotten.’

  ‘But then you did the other thing.’

  Ruth could not answer. For the first time in several years she wanted a glass of whisky. Ruth felt the searing indignation that only a person in the wrong can experience.

  ‘I think I was having some sort of breakdown then. You cannot imagine how much I have suffered as a result of what I did,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes. Well, we’ve all had a difficult time of it.’

  ‘There were times when I thought I—’

  He cut her off. ‘The thing is, we’ve come to an accommodation. Let’s not go backwards now. We’ve managed the separation and I believe I’ve been more than fair about your seeing the girls, having them to Malvern and so on.’

  ‘Yes, but you—’

  ‘Ruth. The annulment really won’t make any difference to you. You’ll still have the girls during the holidays and half terms and you can still come to London and see them at weekends occasionally. It won’t make any difference.’

  ‘But they will become illegitimate! Annulment is saying that we were never married and if we were never married then that means that they must be …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  ‘Actually not,’ said Harry. ‘The Church has it that children of putative marriages are legitimate.’

  ‘What does that mean: putative? What are you talking about? I was your wife! We had a wedding, we … it wasn’t putative. We were married. We were.’ Ruth felt tears puddling in her eyes.

  Harry sighed. ‘I have come to believe that the marriage was not valid. That is what Father Leonard agrees.’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Quite honestly, Ruth, that doesn’t make any difference. It’s out of our hands. I didn’t have to tell you, you know; I could just have let things go ahead without even informing you. But I thought it fairer to let you know. This way, you will be able to marry again, within the Church, if you should ever wish to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ever want to marry anyone else,’ said Ruth. Her voice was louder than she had meant it to be.

  Harry showed no sign of having heard her.

  Neither of them had finished their food. A waiter hovered, judging whether to take their plates. Then he swooped in like a jackdaw and enquired as to what desserts they would like to order.

  ‘Just coffee for me, please,’ said Harry.

  ‘Madam?’ said the waiter.

  ‘The same, please. No pudding, thank you.’

  The waiter, conveying slight disapproval, flapped away.

  They did not return to the subject of the annulment. Harry clearly believed there was nothing more to say, while Ruth felt too dismayed to talk about it any more. He asked after Jamie and her uncle Christopher. They limped on through their coffee, both relieved to conclude the lunch. As they parted under the glass canopy which stretched from the steps of the hotel to the pavement outside, he made to kiss Ruth’s cheek. She recoiled.

  After he’d gone she considered going back into the Randolph, to the bar, and ordering a large drink for herself, to calm her nerves. During the initial period of their separation she had drunk too much. It had gone on for almost three years. Christopher had been angelic, never made even a reference to it, although he must have known. It was only when she joined the choir that the desire to drink left her, simply evaporated. Ruth had wondered if singing choral music again, as she had when she was a girl, was a cure for the emptiness, like homesickness, which had so plagued her. Out for a stroll one warm evening she had wandered into the priory grounds and heard the choir practising through the open doors of the church. She had gone in and sat at the back listening. When they had finished singing and were making ready to leave, she went to ask if she could join.

  ‘Perhaps one spirit replaced the need for the other,’ Ilse had said simply, when Ruth told her about it.

  She had become a member of the choir before becoming a member of the congregation. Harry did not know that she had abandoned his church and she saw no reason to tell him. She thought Harry might perceive her return to the faith of her girl-hood as a rejection of him – another one – and, more importantly, she did not want to alert him to anything in her conduct which might prevent him from letting her see the children. To the Longdens, there was only one True Church. Apostasy was probably a terrible sin in their eyes; another to add to the catalogue of her wrongs.

  There had been no drama about her return to the Church of England. She had told no one except Ilse. It had hardly been even a decision, but more as if, out walking, she had simply taken one turn instead of the other. She liked the familiar words, especially the comforting liturgy of evensong:

  Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord;

  And by thy great mercy defend us from all

  perils and dangers of this night

  During Holy Communion services she sat still, head bowed. She did not know what the rules would be, about taking Communion in one church having converted to another, but she supposed it could not be so bad, this way round. It made more sense to her that the wafer should be just that, a wafer; it symbolised Christ’s body but no one claimed that it actually was his Flesh. She had never been entirely at ease with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which had always struck her as amounting almost to cannibalism. Even so, she was reluctant to participate in this part of the service, in case it was wrong. She wouldn’t want to get the nice vicar into trouble.

  Ruth did not go back into the Randolph, but walked instead to the High Street, to the music shop. She had more than an hour before she was due to meet Jamie. Ruth needed some sheet music for two or three of her more able pupils. The familiar inky order of staves and notes calmed her: the sixteenths, each with its little flag; the gentle arc of polyrhythmic scales; the way arpeggios in broken octaves looked like London taxis, whizzing along the narrow streets of the staves.

  Jamie, when she saw him standing by the railings of Trinity, looked more like his father than ever. He had Digby’s beakiness and height, the same gentleness and quiet humour. She had forgotten quite how fond of him she always felt. As they walked along Broad Street everyone seemed to greet him: two girls with long striped scarves, one in a skirt well above the knees, the other’s hem almost touching the pavement; an older man with a florid complexion and a tweed coat, looking too hot on this mild afternoon; a dark-haired boy with thick spectacles. Ruth felt touched by her brother, glad that people liked him. His hair was long now, well below his collar. He rolled his own cigarettes from a tin of tobacco and fumbled in his pockets for matches. They went to a café up a flight of stairs, where you queued at a counter and then carried your own food and drinks to a table. There were bare floorboards and shiny pine furniture and the pottery was a dull greyish-blue and heavy. When Ruth lifted her cup to drink her tea, its edge was rough against her lips.

  Jamie spoke of home. Digby’s aunt Hilary had died a few months earlier. Her sister Billa – his grandmother – who was almost ninety, had been pressed into coming to stay with them. She had brought her last remaining dog, an elderly Dachshund with bowed front legs and eyes which had lost their shine and were filmy, like the bloom on a ripe plum. Birdle pretended to be frightened of this harmless pet, which spent most of its time asleep. Whenever Billa and her dog came into the drawing room, Birdle screeched and flapped his wings theatrically, so that even Iris was fed up with him. Jamie thought Birdle was jealous
of Billa, because Billa and Iris got on so well together. Even Digby, who never complained about anything, complained that he had no one to talk to since his mother had arrived. Every evening after dinner Iris had been reading Charles Dickens aloud to Billa, until they had become gripped by a sort of story fever. Now Iris read an instalment for an hour or more before lunch and another in the early evening. Often the whole of dinner was spent talking about their favourite characters, who were invariably the villains.

  ‘But hasn’t your grandmother read them before?’ asked Ruth. ‘I seem to remember she was a terrific bookworm, always.’

  ‘She has. But she says it’s absolutely wonderful, because now she’s so old she’s forgotten all the plots. She says she wants to cram in as many books as she can, before she pegs out.’

  ‘Gracious!’ exclaimed Ruth. ‘Think of saying that about your own life.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jamie. ‘You can see why she gets on so well with Mum.’

  They wandered out into the Cornmarket. Jamie offered to walk Ruth to the railway station. She asked whether he was enjoying Oxford.

  ‘I love it. So much so that I’d like to stay on. Teach, if I can. What about you? Do you like being in Malvern still?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t like it to begin with. It felt so far away from the girls, you see. But I’m terribly fond of my uncle. It’s odd how things work out: I seem to have lived with Christopher longer than with anyone else in my life. Even Harry. And it’s familiar to me from being there so much when I was a child and the girls seem to like coming, and I enjoy teaching the piano and …’ She trailed off.