There’s a bench. She knows it wasn’t put there just for her. But she can tell, mainly because of the lush, undisturbed brightness of the grass growing up between its slats, that she is the only person who ever sits on it. She did once find the foil from inside a packet of cigarettes here. And another time, a used scratch card, crumpled and soggy and torn. But apart from that.
She comes here often. Every day sometimes. She doesn’t bring the dog, even though she knows Graham would expect her to. The dog would want a walk. Or to jump in the ditches. Or to be allowed to go looking for rabbits. The dog wouldn’t let her sit alone in silence and think. And this is where she comes to do that. This is where she comes when she wants to think the thoughts that she cannot safely allow anywhere near Graham or her home.
She’s sitting here the day after the dinner at Deborah and Eddie’s when he calls her mobile. The sound, breaking the warm, green silence of the afternoon air, making her jump.
“Hope you don’t mind, I got your number off your daughter.”
Daughter. Her heart flips.
“Why?” she says. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Just felt like calling. Wondering what you’re up to. Wanted to see if you’re all right.”
“All right?”
“Yes. Where are you?”
“I’m out,” she says. “Out for a walk. Why? Where are you?”
He takes a breath.
“Oh, nowhere. Just at work.”
At work. She tries to picture it. A suit, a tie, a computer screen, perhaps some kind of hefty leather office chair. Or else she sees him standing at a window, tie loosened, hair mussed, phone in hand, looking out over something vast and wrecked and urban. A building site. Cranes. Maybe some water or a railway line.
“Are you all right?” he says again.
“All right?” She looks down at the sodden tissue in her hand. “Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
She hears him sigh.
“I suppose you just popped into my head.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did. Anything wrong with that?” He laughs. “I can’t tell you how glad we are to meet some interesting people at last. People worth knowing. You’ve no idea how dull most of the folk around here are.”
Mary tells him that the few people she’s come across in the village seem very nice.
“Very nice?” He laughs. “You mean very old. You should see Deb’s so-called book group. I swear there’s not a single person under sixty-five.”
She tells him that people can’t help getting old and hears him take a breath.
“Well, you’re a much kinder person than I am, aren’t you?”
She tells him she isn’t kind.
“All the same,” he says, “I mean it. It’s good to have some proper friends at last.”
She puts the tissue in her pocket, looks down for a moment at the long grass at her feet.
“But you must have friends.”
“What?”
“You and Deborah. You must have friends.”
He hesitates.
“We don’t. Not really.”
“Come on,” she says.
She hears him blow out smoke again.
“You don’t understand. We find it hard—I suppose we don’t mix that well. We’re very shy, Deb and me.”
Mary thinks about Deborah. Her smiling confidence and friendliness, her sheet of long blond hair.
“I don’t think of Deborah as shy,” she says.
He says nothing.
She lets the silence happen while she tilts her head back and watches a bird falling through the sky. About to swoop down on some poor little creature, probably.
“What?” he says at last. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking anything. I was watching a bird.”
She hears him chuckle and something about the sound of it makes her look behind her, glancing back at the tall reeds shuffling in the quiet breeze. She tells him she must go.
“Go?”
“I’ve got to get back. See to the dog.”
“The dog’s not with you?”
Mary hesitates.
“I need to take her home and feed her.”
She gets up from the bench, suddenly annoyed at being forced to explain herself.
“You don’t mind this, do you?” he says before he goes.
“What?”
“Me ringing you. Just because I felt like it. I suppose I just couldn’t stop myself. I hope you don’t mind it.”
Mary hesitates again, then tells him once more that she has to go.
Four or five minutes after they say good-bye, walking through the dark copse and back into the lane, she gets a text.
Forgive me! E
She stares at it for a moment, then she deletes it.
BACK HOME, RUBY AND LISA ARE IN FRONT OF THE TV WITH their feet on the coffee table and the curtains drawn. Both have cushions clutched against their stomachs. The dog is lying flat out on the rug. The moment she comes in, Ruby pauses the TV. Mary feels a lick of irritation.
“You don’t have to do that every time I come in.”
“Do what?”
“Pause the TV.”
Ruby blinks at her. The dog lifts her head.
“It’s very hard to concentrate with people coming in and out.”
Mary takes a breath and looks at the screen. The same well-groomed American characters frozen midgesture. She looks at the girls’ feet on the table—Lisa’s blue toenails; Ruby’s black leggings and socks with holes in them.
“It’s a lovely day outside,” she says.
Ruby looks at her and shudders.
“Well, it’s freezing in here. We’re really freezing.”
“Maybe you should try going out in the sunshine.”
“We did. We already tried it. We went outside for a bit but we were so cold that we had to come back in. I wish we could put the heat on.”
“Ruby, it’s almost June. It’s summer. We’re not putting the heat on.”
“Mum has the heat on in June,” Ruby says.
Mary is about to say something about Veronica’s heating bills being subsidized by Graham, but she stops herself. She’s about to walk out of the room when she remembers something.
“Did Eddie call and ask you for my mobile number?”
Still clutching the cushion against her stomach and shivering, Ruby nods.
“He didn’t call. He came around.”
“What? You mean he came around here?”
Letting her eyes go back to the TV, Ruby sighs.
“Where else would he come?”
Mary thinks for a moment.
“But—so when was this?”
“When was what?”
“When exactly did he come around?”
“I don’t know when it was. Earlier.”
“Can you tell me what time?”
Ruby gives a yowl of impatience.
“I don’t know what time! What does it matter? A while ago, OK? Anyway, it was Lisa that saw him.”
Mary looks at Lisa.
“You saw Eddie and you gave him my number?”
Slowly, Lisa turns to look at her. Sleepy-eyed, running her hands through her bleached hair—several thin bangles falling down her arm.
“He said he needed to talk to you. Is it OK? Rubes gave me the number.”
Ruby tuts.
“Look, is this important? Have we really got to talk about it right now? It’s just that me and Lisa have only got about three more episodes to watch.”
Mary gazes at her for a moment, then she turns and walks out of the room.
FIVE
I DID NOT LOVE JAMES DIX. NOT AT FIRST, AND NOT IN THE WAY he wanted me to. If love meant waking up and letting your thoughts go straight to that one person and then keeping them there. If it meant knowing you had a sweetheart and wanting to be near him all the time and breathe in every word he said and have his fingers wrapped in your hair, th
en this was not what I felt.
Sometimes I woke and I was afraid of what had happened between us, of what might still happen.
But James knew a lot. He knew how to entice me. He liked to promise me things and call me his love and his princess and make sure I knew that I now had his heart in my two hands and must take great care of it or else. He said that his heart had been broke in the past—not by the dead woman from Lowestoft but by another one he hadn’t even told me about—and he did not think he could take that again.
Who is the one you haven’t told me about? I asked him.
He said it was better for all of us that I did not know.
A private matter, he said. Don’t get the wrong idea, Eliza. But even though I love you, I would not want you to know the sad and tawdry details of that little romance.
Some of the things he said made me laugh, and not always in a good way.
You should have seen me, he told me when he was talking about the one who broke him. I was so mad with love that I used to rage and howl and throw plates around. Once I ran out in the street with no clothes on, I was so very upset at the way in which she had spurned me.
I looked at him and said I hoped he would not do that with me. And he looked very sad and serious then and said didn’t I realize that I was a whole different kettle of fish altogether? Could I not see that I had punctured his soul with my sweetness? And if so, why did I keep on laughing at the things he said, instead of gazing into his eyes with the kind of loving dedication he required?
I reminded him that I was only thirteen.
I thought you were fourteen?
Not till November, I said, suddenly not wanting to be old at all, but to stay as young and safe as possible for as long as possible.
He looked at me.
Thirteen isn’t young, he said, as if he could read my thoughts. You’re not a kid, Eliza. I’ve known much littler girls than you who had far better manners.
I didn’t like the sound of that and I asked him what he meant by it. He looked bashful.
I had a very young girl, he said. Much younger than you. Tilly, her name was. And we was going to be engaged and all that. And I even got a loan and went and picked out the ring, gold with a single jewel it was, and then she went and changed her mind for no reason at all.
It couldn’t be for no reason, I told him—thinking that if Tilly really was so much younger than me, then she must truly have been a child no older than Jazzy who ought not to marry anyway—why on earth would she do a thing like that if she properly loved you?
He threw me a sly look.
Well, but you see, the truth was she didn’t love me after all.
Why not? I said.
We fell out about something, didn’t we?
What do you mean? What kind of thing?
He kept his head down but he looked out at me from under his gingery lashes.
She would insist on seeing her family. Putting them first, before me. Her friends as well.
What? And you didn’t think she ought to?
They were silly girls, Eliza, with nothing to say. Airheads, you might call them. They worked at the dressmakers. They were always laughing and chattering about this and that. They did her no good at all.
I thought about this. I thought about how it might feel to have some friends that were real girls, people you could chat and laugh with like that. For as long as I could remember—my whole life, in fact—all I’d ever had was Jazzy and Frank and a whole bunch of silly little babies.
I sighed.
Maybe she just liked them, I said.
What?
Her friends. Maybe she liked them. Being with them, I mean.
Straightaway his face went hard and tight.
What? You think she preferred them to me?
She might have, I said, already regretting it.
He shook his head.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Eliza.
You’re right, I said. I don’t.
You don’t understand.
All right.
He reached out then and took my hand. I liked the rough hot feel of his fingers on mine, so I let him. Sometimes he squeezed a bit too hard but I didn’t say anything.
But is it really so wrong to want to see your friends? I said at last.
He gazed at me so hard this time that it gave me an icy feeling.
I thought if she wanted to be a wife, then she should cleave to me.
Well, I said, taking my hand away now. No man would ever stop me seeing my family and my brothers and sisters who I love so much, and that’s a fact.
I know that, he said, though his face told another story.
Not my friends either. Not if I had any, that is.
I folded my arms. I saw him watching me.
But you don’t have any, he reminded me.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to see them if I did.
He stared at me for a moment.
Let’s not talk any more about it, he said.
And that was it. He kept to his word and we spoke no more about it. Except that later I caught him looking at me in a very particular way. His head on one side. A little bit of light in his eyes.
What? I said. What is it now?
Are you my girl, Eliza?
I don’t know. Yes. I suppose so.
You suppose so? You only suppose so? You don’t love me passionately, then?
Maybe I do.
And would you do anything for me? Would you?
I don’t know, James. It’s not that I don’t want to, but I think it’s the wrong kind of question to ask.
What kind of question would be the right one?
I don’t know, I said.
And that was when he whispered it. He bent and whispered in my ear that even though he didn’t care at all for Phoebe Harkiss, he knew that she would do anything for him.
I looked at him.
Phoebe Harkiss is a child, I said.
No more than you, she isn’t.
She is. She’s a year younger than me and she’s a horrible girl, I said.
He smiled.
Ah, he said. I thought so. Jealousy.
It’s not jealousy. I’m just saying you shouldn’t go blowing about with a young girl like Phoebe Harkiss.
He took his hands off me and lay back and put his boots up on the kitchen table even though he knew my mother didn’t like it.
Then don’t make me, he said.
RUBY AND LISA LEAVE AND GO BACK TO LONDON. GRAHAM drops them at the station on his way to work. Mary, stripping the sheets in their room, even though she had asked them to do it themselves before they left, sees streaks of blood on Ruby’s sheets. She stares at them for a moment, then takes them down and sprays them with stain remover before putting them in the washing machine.
On the floor under Lisa’s bed are a scattering of the white nubs that she recognizes as cigarette filters and an empty pack of cigarette paper with strips of the cardboard torn off. On the windowsill, hairy brown remnants of tobacco.
Mary sweeps the windowsill clean and flings everything into the waste bin and takes it downstairs, but before she can even tip it into the bin, she has to prize several pieces of dried pinkish-gray chewing gum off the bottom with her fingers.
She feels like phoning Graham to complain about all of this, but she doesn’t. Instead, when Ruby rings from the train to say she left her phone charger, Mary tells her she’ll put it in the post first thing tomorrow.
A LITTLE LATER, SHE COMES IN FROM THE GARDEN TO FIND HIM sitting at the kitchen table. His jacket is off. Briefcase on the floor. Head in his hands.
She stares at him.
“What is it?”
“What?”
“What are you doing? I thought you went ages ago.”
He lifts his head and she sees that his face is all wrong. White spaces under his eyes. Has he been crying? It’s been a while since she saw him cry.
“I did,” he says. “I did go ages ago
, but—”
“But what? Darling. What are you doing? What’s the matter?”
He takes a breath. Letting it out. His hand on his forehead. Looking down at the table.
“I did go. I tried to go. I dropped the girls off and got part of the way to work and then I had to turn the car around and come back. I’m so sorry.”
He lets his hand slide down over his face, beginning to sob.
“What is it?” she says, her voice small and stupid now. She pulls out a chair and sits down next to him, stroking him, touching his shoulder. “You’re hot,” she says. “You’re sweating. Are you ill? Do you feel bad? What is it?” she says again.
He shakes his head, wiping his eyes and swallowing hard.
“I’m not ill.”
“What then?”
He looks at her, then back at the table.
“I haven’t been like this for a while, have I? You know I haven’t. Seriously. I’ve been great, haven’t I?”
She looks at him, suddenly afraid.
“You have. It’s true. You’ve been great.”
He nods.
“I know. I know I have. To be honest, I haven’t even found it very difficult. But then this morning. I don’t know what happened—”
He begins to sob again. She holds out her arms to him.
“What? Please—what is it? Did something happen?” She watches, trying to hold him as he continues to sob. “Just tell me what it is,” she says.
He looks at her.
“It isn’t anything.”
“It must be something. Is it because Ruby’s gone?”
“No. No, that’s a bloody relief, if I’m honest.” He shakes his head, trying to laugh.
“What, then?”
He swallows. Looking around the room.
“I hadn’t thought of him in a long time, really I hadn’t.”
Mary is silent. She knows who he’s talking about. Graham looks at her, his eyes wild and hard.
“But when I woke up today—for no reason at all, don’t ask me why—he was suddenly right here in my head. Almost as if he was here in the house with us. I can’t get rid of him. Nothing I do—” He gazes at her for a moment. “I’m sorry, my darling. I’m so sorry.”
The Stopped Heart Page 14