She gazes at the staircase, straining to listen. Thinks she hears a tap dripping in the bathroom. She tells her mother that it’s not a good moment, that she’ll call her at the weekend.
THERE’S NO ONE UPSTAIRS. THIS BECOMES VERY CLEAR AS SHE wanders quickly from room to room, her own bare feet sticking to the dusty boards, the sound of her own breath in her chest, her throat. Throwing a pile of towels onto a chair, she kicks off her shoes and lies down on the bed. She lies there and watches the sun make its slow way across the walls. Reaches out and flicks the radio on. Hears a man’s voice going on and on. Flicks it off again. She feels very calm. She realizes without much surprise that she has been crying.
Outside, she can hear children shouting, playing. Several of them, two or three at least, maybe more. A whole crowd of little children. The sound comes and goes, very loud sometimes and then for a while barely audible. She thinks that one of them seems to be crying. Nothing dramatic—more a toddler’s fed up chuntering. Silence, then a shout, and then laughter again.
She holds her breath, not upset, just mildly curious, wondering whose kids they can be. Their nearest neighbor, who they’ve nodded at once or twice, is an elderly man, apparently alone and without children or grandchildren, and she remembers how heartened she was to discover that. The shouts grow louder, though the crying has stopped. Mary waits, listening. At last, unable to resist, she gets up and crosses the room, floorboards creaking under her bare feet, and goes to the window to look.
Out in the sunny lane, there is no one, nothing. Only a very large magpie, wings half-spread and dragging in the dirt, hopping backward and forward, clucking and screeching.
She watches it for a moment and then she walks back across the room and lies down again on the bed.
HE COMES HOME TO FIND HER THERE. SIX HOURS AT LEAST HAVE passed, maybe seven.
“Darling?” His voice on the stairs. “Didn’t you hear me? I was knocking and knocking. The door was bolted. I couldn’t get in. I had to go around the back.”
She does not speak. Something heavy and warm in her arms. Not wanting to wake. Trying as hard as she can to hold on to it.
“Why on earth did you bolt it? What’s going on? Did you realize you’d done it?”
He comes and stands over her. Keys in his hand, his jacket still on. She hears his worried breath.
“Mary? Are you all right?”
She says nothing. Lifting her hands to cover her eyes. He stands looking at her for another moment, then she feels the bed sinking as he sits down. His arms around her. His face on her neck.
“You’ve been here all day, haven’t you?”
When she still doesn’t speak, he lets go of her. Twisting around and sitting up. His head in his hands.
“I heard someone say my name,” she says, realizing only as she says the words that they might be true.
He looks at her.
“What? You mean like before?”
Mary blinks. She’s almost forgotten that odd, shrill morning with the estate agent.
“Yes. Like that. I heard it again. The same thing. Like someone calling out—they called me.”
He shakes his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where?”
“I thought there was someone in the house.”
“What? It’s not possible.”
“I know. It’s not possible, is it? It was weird.”
Graham puts his head back in his hands.
“There’s no one here.”
“I know.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
He is silent for a moment.
“I thought you were better,” he says. “I thought you liked it here. I honestly thought you were getting better.”
She looks up at him with interest.
“I do like it here.”
His eyes back on her.
“You do?”
“I do.”
He sighs.
“I think you need to see someone. Just an hour a week or something. What do you think? I could ask at the clinic.”
“The clinic?”
“The doctor’s surgery. In the village. I’m sure if we asked they could fix you up with something.”
She thinks about this.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says.
He makes a noise of impatience.
“For Christ’s sake. You need to tell someone about this. Talk about how you’re feeling.”
“I’m not feeling anything.”
He takes her hand. Her warmth in his cold one. She can feel him thinking. Hears him sigh.
“Darling. My darling. Look at me.”
“What?” She looks. His face—once so alive and familiar to her, now alien with worry and sadness. He shuts his eyes for a moment.
“I can’t live like this. Neither of us can. We can’t live like this.”
She blinks at him. Pushing herself up on her elbow.
“But we are.”
He reaches out and lifts her hair, holding its dark, hot weight in his hand, looking at her.
“Are what?”
“We are living like this.”
He lets go of her hair and looks at her, exasperation—or is it relief?—in his eyes. I can’t read you anymore, she thinks. She knows it’s what he’s thinking too. She almost smiles.
“You’re cold.”
“What?”
“You’re cold. Come here. I’ll warm you up.” She laughs, taking a breath—reaching out with her other hand. “Come here,” she says, trying to pull him onto her, tugging at his belt, beginning to undo him.
He hesitates, still looking at her, then he lets her pull him down. She smells the warmth of him, his skin, the roughness of his chin and jaw, his neck.
“I don’t understand you at all,” he says.
She says nothing, laughs to herself.
“I’m concerned about you. You can’t lie in bed all day. Am I crushing you?” He tries to shift his weight off her.
“No.”
“No?”
“I like it. Crush me.”
He sighs.
“What are you doing now?”
Mary does nothing. Says nothing.
“Seriously, darling, what are you doing?”
She shakes her head. Lies there. Feeling him on her. His warmth. The crushing of her. Tears at last beginning to come.
HIS NAME WAS DIX. JAMES H. DIX. WE KNEW BECAUSE HE HAD it written on a small silver box that he kept in his jacket pocket. The box was in the shape of a diamond, and the name was carved into the metal with some very fancy slopes and flounces.
When Jazzy tried to ask him what the box was for, he wouldn’t say.
It’s just a box, isn’t it?
He turned it over and over in his hands, looking as if he’d only just laid eyes on it for the first time himself.
All right, said Jazzy, but what do you keep in it?
He scowled.
None of your bloody business.
Then what’s it for?
He made a face.
You don’t give up, do you?
Jazzy smiled. The smile was wobbly because of all the teeth she’d lost. Our father said she looked like a bat and had the habits of one too. Hanging upside down by her legs at dusk from the nut tree by the henhouse, or climbing the old metal gate and tipping herself upside down till her hair hung in the dirt.
Is it for pennies? she said.
Pennies? Ha!
Snuff, then?
Snuff? James reached out with his finger and thumb and tweaked the end of her nose.
Ouch, she said. That hurt.
That’ll teach you to talk about a man and his snuff, he said. And he pushed her down on the ground and tickled her till her legs flew up in the air and she kicked him in the teeth.
When he’d stopped cursing and she’d got her breath back, she asked him what the H was for.
H?
James H. Di
x. What’s it for?
Hargraves, he said, still rubbing his face.
Hah—what?
Graves. Hargraves. You know? Like the big dark hole where they chuck you in when you’re dead.
Jazzy’s eyes grew large.
But is it yours?
James snapped the box open and shut.
What d’you mean, is it mine? What kind of a question is that? Why wouldn’t it be mine?
She rolled her eyes.
I mean the name. Is it really your name?
Now he looked very angry.
What is it that you’re accusing me of now? he demanded to know, and he fixed his eyes on her as if he was considering whether he should box her ears.
But then along came Frank, who punched her so hard on the arm that she forgot all about James and got into a fight with him instead.
Next time I saw them together, James was back to being all soft and smiles. But when she asked if she could have a go at holding the box, he wouldn’t let her.
You ask a lot too many questions for a little squitty nothing of a girl, he said as he tucked it back in the pocket of his jacket and patted it to make sure it was there. You need to learn to shut up. Be a nice quiet kid who lets others get on with their business. Like your smart big sister over there.
Jazzy looked over at me.
She’s not smart.
Oh yes she is. Smarter and a whole lot prettier and if I had to bet, a whole lot more difficult too.
When he lifted his eyes to see if I’d heard, I looked away. And when he seemed like he might be working up to say something else, I turned on my heel and walked out the door.
MARY GETS AN E-MAIL FROM LYNN MARKHAM. CAREFULLY worded, upbeat, generous, kind. It has a PS.
“It goes without saying that if you ever find yourself missing the good old, permanently thankless world of PR, we could fling something your way. Rufus never stops moaning about his workload, and Fiona has a couple of little projects coming up that would hardly involve any meetings in London. Just a thought, in case you want to give me a ring once you’re settled. I’m pretty sure we could set you up with something.”
She knows Lynn only means to be kind. She imagines her sitting there at the desk in Holborn covered in all her silver and turquoise Moroccan jewelry and thinking, What could we do to draw Mary back into things? But the idea now of putting any kind of passion into a job that involves persuading journalists to write about old paintings or vases, well frankly it makes her want to laugh.
When she tells Graham about the e-mail, she expects him to laugh too. But he doesn’t. He tells her she should consider taking Lynn up on it.
“Isn’t it time you started to think about doing something?” he says.
She stares at him.
“You want me to go back to work?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“All right, but you do?”
He holds himself still for a moment. Then, as if this is something he’s been building to, he gets up and goes over to the sink, fills the kettle.
“I suppose I worry that you’re spending too many days alone. You’re giving yourself too much time to think.”
“You think I’m being self-indulgent?”
“Of course I don’t think that.”
“Soft on myself, then?”
“I didn’t say that either. I just wonder if you’d feel better if you did something.”
She thinks about this.
“I told you I might think about doing something in September.”
“Why wait until September?”
“I feel I need the summer to—”
“To what? To lie on the bed all day and cry?”
Mary says nothing. He sighs.
“Look, it’s only because I care about you.”
The kettle boils. She watches as he makes her a cup of tea. Hooking the tea bag out at the exact right moment, getting the strength and color just how she likes it. She notices that he hasn’t shaved. She thinks that he looks tired, his eyes pouchy and gray.
“All right,” he says, “forget Lynn, forget PR or whatever. Why don’t you just go out and get yourself an ordinary job?”
“Ordinary? What kind of job would that be?”
“I don’t know, at a shop, a receptionist or something. You could look at that little library in Framlingham.”
“I’m not qualified to work in a library.”
“Stop looking for obstacles. You could at least inquire.”
“I don’t think I’d earn very much in a library.”
He looks at her.
“It’s not about the money. You know it’s not. I just think it would be good for you to get out of the house, go out into the world.”
“The world?” She makes a face.
“All right, I’ll be honest. I think you need something where you’ll be forced to talk to other people.”
People. The idea fills her with horror.
“You’ve been thinking about this,” she says.
“I just can’t bear to see you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Hiding yourself away. Losing your confidence.”
“I’m not hiding.”
He says nothing. She looks down at her hands on the table. The rough old pine table, the one that came with the house. Sometimes she thinks it looks like it has teeth marks on it.
Though she could never have faced their own table with its dents and scratches and crayon marks and ancient cereal encrusted around its edges, though she’s glad that one’s still safe in the cool, untampered darkness of Big Yellow Self Storage, still she’s not sure about this one.
“Just pick up the phone,” Graham says. “I’m not saying it’s easy, God knows, I know how hard it is. But I think that once you do it, you’ll start to feel a little bit better. Work is the saving of me. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without it.”
Mary believes him about this. She knows that every weekday, and sometimes on a Saturday too, he walks out of the cottage and gets in the car and drives to his small new office in Ipswich. She knows what he does there. She knows that he parks in the neat, gravel parking space at the back by the bins, then goes around and puts his key in the door and, bending to pick up the mail off the transparent plastic mat, walks into the single large room with its glazed partition and its forlorn smell of paper and cartridge and desk and new beige carpet.
She knows that he throws the mail on the desk, his jacket on the chair, then goes into the tiny kitchenette with the small carton of milk he’s bought on the way in. Placing the milk on the counter, he fills up the glass jug and turns on the coffee machine. Beginning, as he waits for it to bubble through, to rip open letters, bills mostly—gathering envelopes and fliers for recycling.
After that, he checks e-mails, sends texts, drinks coffee. A bit too much coffee, he said recently. It’s making him jittery. He probably needs to cut down.
It’s not the coffee, she told him.
He looked at her for a second.
Still. I need to cut down.
All day he works there in that small room. All day, at his drawing board or his desk, making calls, costing jobs, talking to site managers, drawing up plans, drinking coffee, tapping the keyboard, sharpening pencils.
Stopping briefly at lunchtime to get a turkey or a tuna-salad sandwich from the deli. Taking his place in the line and talking pleasantly to the girl with the long dark hair and the nose ring who knows nothing whatsoever about him and is therefore one of the most engaging and heartening people he knows.
Taking the sandwich back to eat at his desk or the drawing board, before going on with his work. He might pop out again later and get a Snickers or a Twix. But he tries not to. It’s not a great habit to get into, is it, a chocolate hit at four o’clock.
All of this he has told her. Or else she has imagined it. Or else he has told her the bare bones and she has filled in the details for herself.
She knows that he works there in that of
fice all alone, earning the money to keep their lives rolling along. She asked him once if he ever got lonely, and he looked at her with a relaxed kind of interest, as if she were asking him to think of his favorite color or a number between one and seven.
She knows that he did once relent and have an assistant for a bit, the son of a man he used to play squash with—straight out of university, thinking about doing architecture, keen for workplace experience.
But he wasn’t keen enough apparently, always watching the clock, bunking off early. And his personal hygiene wasn’t great. And then someone complained about his phone manner, so in the end—embarrassed, reluctant—he had to let him go. (She still can’t think about this episode without a twist of pain because she knows how Graham placed his trust in that boy, how much he wanted to help, how little he deserved the discomfort that the situation caused him.)
But he likes working alone, he says. In fact, he prefers it. He does his best work when no one is watching over him, when he can think freely, without anyone making suggestions or bothering him with questions. He is very happy on his own, deep in his work. It’s a comfort to him, a solace and sometimes, even now, an unexpected source of pleasure and satisfaction.
This is what she knows. Sometimes, though—
Sometimes he comes home and his eyes are baggy and tired as if he’s been punched or beaten. Not work-tired, but sad-tired. The skin of his face smelling of old man and solitary sandwich lunches. Or maybe he can’t face the cheerful, unknowing girl at the deli and he doesn’t eat at all. She worries about that.
Or perhaps it’s worse. Maybe sometimes he doesn’t do anything. How does she know that he doesn’t just drive there and hang up his jacket and lock the door and sit there all day with his head in his hands? How does she know that he doesn’t simply wait in that place, counting the minutes, staring at the smooth, deadwood veneer of the desk, marking out time until it’s the hour when he should return home?
Sometimes she thinks he looks like he hasn’t eaten or breathed or done a stroke of work. Sometimes he looks like he’s spent the day weeping.
AFTER ISAAC ROPER WAS PUT IN THE HARD AND FROSTY GROUND, our mother took the baby and went to bed. For a few days, or maybe it was about two weeks, we did not see her.
The Stopped Heart Page 3