He shakes his head. “Please keep going. I like hearing it.”
“It wasn’t just Peppa. Flo loved all those things. She was never one for dolls, but animals, soft toys. She had this dog, a little blue dog called Tuffy. I think he was originally Ella’s but somehow she got hold of him. He went everywhere with her. After they—when they were missing—I kept him with me. Partly I knew Flo would have worried about him, but also, well, he had her smell on him. I even took him to bed at night.” She looks at Eddie. “It’s ridiculous, I know—”
“It’s not. It’s not ridiculous at all.”
She hesitates. “We put him in her coffin. Tuffy. It’s what she would have—well, it was just the right thing. It felt like the right thing. I can’t tell you how hard it was, though, letting him go.”
She looks at her tea again. Then lifts her eyes, trying to smile.
“I haven’t talked about all of this stuff in such a very long time. Peppa Pig. My God, I used to have to listen to those words about eighty-five times a day. And Tuffy too. Just saying it all aloud, sitting here in your kitchen like this—”
She notices that Eddie is very still, very quiet.
“What?” he says. “What about it?”
“I don’t know. It’s . . .” Mary thinks about it, hugging herself, her teeth chattering, suddenly very cold.
“Does it hurt?”
“I don’t know. Should it hurt? Do you think it should hurt? Is it weird, do you think, that I’m sitting here, wanting to tell you all about Peppa Pig and Tuffy?”
She shakes her head, starts to laugh. Eddie smiles, looking at her.
“You love it, don’t you? You just do. You love it.”
“What?”
“Talking about them. You love talking about them. Just now, listening to you. You came completely back to life. I’ve never seen you like that before. All lit up. You changed, you really did. For a few moments you were someone else.”
Still hugging herself, Mary looks at him.
“They were everything to me, my girls. My whole life. Everything. I suppose they made me who I was. When they died, my heart stopped. I ceased to exist. My heart just stopped when they died.”
Eddie is quiet. His eyes on her.
“And what happened?”
“What?”
“On that day.”
“You mean how did I lose them?” Mary takes a breath, looks at the floor. At last she lifts her head, meeting his gaze. “I took them swimming,” she says.
THAT DAY. IT TOOK JUST A FEW MINUTES FOR HER TO BRING THE car around from the car park to the front of the leisure center. Expecting to see them waiting where she had left them, at the foot of that sloping, concrete walkway—wet hair and sandals and rolled-up towels. At first, not finding them there, she did not panic. She realized, angrily, that against all her instructions they must have gone back up to the snack machine. Flo, it would be Flo, moaning for chocolate.
Risking a ticket by leaving the car on the yellow line with the lights flashing, she ran up the slope to reception. They were not by the snack machine. And then, finding nothing, no one, in fact no children anywhere at all, not even in the small hallway that led down to the changing rooms, then she did at last panic. Running up and down the walkway and around the glass reception area screaming, calling, crying out to anyone she could find, demanding to know if the people waiting in the line had seen two little girls in identical purple fleeces—one with long, dark curly hair, the other shorter, fairer, in fact quite blond.
People started to help her. One of the tracksuited girls came out from behind the desk. Checking the changing rooms, the foyer, the poolside, then three or four of them going back out onto the walkway, rushing up and down that windblown slope, calling their names.
Might they have gone to the car park? Was that possible? they asked her. Could they have been looking for her there? Her heart banging hard enough by now to make her want to retch, afraid to leave any part of that place uncovered yet knowing that every single time she moved, she was going against her own perpetual instruction to them: if you are ever lost, if you ever can’t find me, don’t move. Stay put. Stay in the exact place where we said we would meet.
And then, after minutes or maybe longer, when the duty manager was called and then the manager and then, finally—after what seemed like a very long time but was probably still less than half an hour—the police, even then she refused to sit still or stop looking for them or to believe that anything could have happened in the brief amount of time it took for her to run to the car park and get the car and bring it around.
“You left the two of them alone?”
“It was less than two minutes. I’ve done it before. They’re sensible girls.”
“It’s a busy road.”
“They were holding hands. They know not to go anywhere near the road.”
“The older one would stay with the younger one? You’re sure of that? She wouldn’t leave her?”
“Never.”
“You’re certain they wouldn’t go wandering off?”
“Absolutely certain, yes.”
Two little girls, aged seven and five. Sisters, yes. One dark, one fair. Identical purple fleeces. Navy sandals. Rolled-up swimming towels.
“And the towels—what color are the towels?”
The towels. She froze, failing at this last hurdle, unable now to see the towels—even though she’d been rubbing at her daughters’ sopping hair with them at some point in the last hour, which now felt a hundred years ago.
“Blue,” she said, and then, beginning to cry, “or maybe green. I don’t know. We have both colors. I don’t know which ones they were.”
A moment as the policeman took this in.
“You say at first you thought they might have gone to the vending machine?”
Flo had been difficult all afternoon. Ever since Becky the babysitter left. Tired and scratchy. Moaning that the armbands pinched. Refusing to get in the pool and then refusing to get out. Naughty about getting dressed. Lashing out at Ella for no reason at all. And then insisting that she wanted something from the machine in the foyer.
“You can have a drink at home.”
“I want a KitKat.”
“Forget it. You’ve had a big plate of chips and that’s enough.”
“But I’m still hungry!”
“You’ll have to wait.”
“But I brought my money!” Flo’s mouth, wobbling now, her whole face on the edge of tears. Unzipping the pocket of her fleece, showing the few dull coins nestling there among the screwed-up foil and fluff and crumbs.
She ignored her. When Flo was building to a tantrum, it was sometimes the only way. Keep on going. Distract her. Keep up the momentum. Don’t lose pace; don’t get caught—
“I’m going to get the car now.” Pulling keys out of her bag. “You going to come or wait for me here with Ella?”
“I want KitKat!”
“I said are you coming or waiting?”
Flo began to cry.
“Right,” she said. And she turned and left them and went to get the car.
MARY LIFTS HER HEAD AND LOOKS AT HIM.
“This really has been the strangest afternoon.”
“Strange in a good or a bad way?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s like you said—I don’t feel like myself at all.”
“Who do you feel like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve no idea. Someone very odd. My old self perhaps.”
“I like your old self.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. She’s lovely. She’s so bright and awake and alive. Look, you haven’t drunk your tea.”
“I know.” She looks at him. “I’m sorry. I actually don’t think I can.”
Eddie sighs. Shakes his head.
“Mary,” he says.
“What?”
“I don’t know. Just that. Just Mary.”
Neither of them speaks for a few moments. Mary thin
ks, vaguely to herself, that she should go. But the thought feels like no more than a bunch of words, not especially important or true, and she lets it float for a moment and then wobble, bend, and burst—
“What are you thinking about?” he says.
She smiles. “I was thinking about those bubbles. You know, that you get in a little bottle with a wand and you wave it around or you blow them.”
He laughs. “My God, that takes me back. I remember those. Do they still make those?”
“The girls loved them, especially Flo. She tried doing it with detergent once, but it didn’t work as well.”
He nods. “It can’t just be ordinary old soap, can it? They must put something else in.”
“Maybe.”
“Either that or it’s just very cheap soap. And that’s what makes the bubbles.”
“You think so?” Mary says.
He looks at her.
“I can’t tell you how badly I want to kiss you,” he says.
THEY SIT TOGETHER ON THE VAST L-SHAPED SOFA. DEBORAH’S sofa, with its acres of linen cushions, its neutral-colored throws. They haven’t kissed, but he’s insisted on opening a bottle of wine. She doesn’t know what he wants. She doesn’t really care. At least three feet of sofa separate them.
“Come here,” he says, patting the clean linen cushion next to him. “Come on, come and sit closer to me.”
Mary shakes her head. Trying not to think about what it might feel like to be closer to him. Her head on his shoulder. His hand inside her shirt.
She blinks.
“I have this stash of pills,” she tells him. “Stuff they gave me when it happened, to keep me calm, to calm me down. I’ve saved them up. I’ve got loads of them.”
She sees that his face changes.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re saying you’ve thought about killing yourself?”
She glances down at her knees in their blue jeans, her feet on Deborah’s startling cream rug.
“I probably wouldn’t do it.”
“But you think about it.”
“Yes. Of course I do. Yes.”
He says nothing. At last he picks up the bottle and comes and sits beside her. Puts a hand on her knee.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she says, and for a sudden strange moment they both look at his hand. He doesn’t take it away. “And I don’t know why I just told you that. About the pills.”
“You can tell me anything. You know you can.”
She looks at him.
“I’m dead inside, Eddie. My heart, it’s empty. It’s what I tried to tell you, before. I have nothing to give anyone.”
She sees him smiling. He takes his hand off her knee.
“Ah. Your great big empty heart. I have to say, I’ve never met a less empty person in my whole life.”
She picks up her wine, looks at it, puts it back down.
“Will you forget what I told you? Everything I’ve said today. Please forget it.”
He sighs.
“It will go no further. But can I just say I’d like you to throw those pills away?”
Mary looks at him. She picks up her glass, drinks from it.
“I like Deborah,” she says.
“I know. I know you do. She likes you too.”
She sighs. Looks again at her feet on the rug.
“He almost left me, you know, Graham did.”
Now Eddie stares at her. “Graham?”
“You’re surprised?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. Very surprised. Why on earth would he do that?”
“The same reason anyone would. He fell in love.”
“Love?”
“Well, supposedly, it was love. He had someone else anyway.”
He sits back on the sofa.
“You’re telling me Graham had an affair?”
She bites her lip.
“I don’t know if he’d call it that. This woman he met through work. A designer. Not even that young or anything. Older than me. A nice person, apparently. I’m sure she was. I never met her. But I knew people who knew her.”
Eddie is still staring at her.
“This was recently?”
“Yes. No. Well, two or three years ago is when it began. It only stopped when—well, it stopped after the girls—”
She hears him take a breath.
“I’m not sure he even slept with her. I don’t know. But what does it matter? It was real.”
“Real?”
“He said he loved her. He did love her. What can I say? If you think you feel love for someone, then you do. You love them. He loved her.”
Eddie is staring at her.
“And he knows? He knew. That you knew?”
She takes a breath. “He came and told me. He was very confused. Confused and upset. And guilty. He didn’t like lying. In fact, he hated it. He’s honest in that way.”
“Honest? You call it honest?”
Mary shakes her head, hesitating a moment.
“Before it—before what happened—he was going to leave me. Or I was going to leave him. Whichever. We were talking about it seriously, about separating. It seemed like the only right thing—but we hadn’t told the girls. That was the part I didn’t think I was going to be able to bear. What to say to them. I mean, of course, Flo wouldn’t really have understood, but Ella—”
Eddie puts out a hand, taking hers. She glances at him, allowing herself a breath.
“But then, well, I suppose what happened—it meant we never had to tell them. And then, somehow, time passed and—”
“And what?”
“Well, look at us.”
He looks at her.
“You stayed together? Some people would be driven apart.”
“I know.”
“But not you.”
“No. I’m sure it’s all down to him. Anybody else—well, I can’t imagine—but he is a good man. We need each other.”
“And love?”
“What?”
Mary looks at him.
“Do you love each other?”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t think about love.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“All right. We love each other. I love him, anyway.”
“And does he love you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
She hesitates.
“I don’t think it’s about love. I’m not sure that love is always enough. I think that you perhaps also need imagination.”
“Imagination?”
“If you’re both grieving, you do.”
Eddie is silent.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says.
She looks at him.
“You don’t?” She shuts her eyes. “He loves me. I think he does. But sometimes I come into a room when he’s not expecting me and he thinks I can’t see him and I find him sitting there and he just looks so—completely alone. He looks—” She takes a breath. “He looks like someone serving a life sentence.”
Eddie says nothing. Both of them silent for a long moment. The little clock on the mantelpiece whirring the half hour. He pours her more wine.
“Don’t,” she says. “I mustn’t. I really should go.”
She feels him looking at her.
“I love you,” he says.
She lifts her head.
“What?”
“I love you, Mary. I wasn’t going to say it. In fact, I promised myself that whatever happened today, I wouldn’t say it. But there you are. I broke my promise. I’m sorry. I just love you.”
She feels herself tense.
“You can’t.”
“But I do.”
“No—you mustn’t say it.”
“Why mustn’t I?” His voice—his face—suddenly elated. “I’m an adult. I’m not stupid. I know what love is. I knew it the first time I saw you. Ever since that time you both came to dinner.
”
She looks at him.
“One meeting? It’s not possible.”
He smiles.
“What, you don’t believe in love at first sight?”
“No, I don’t. Of course I don’t.”
He shrugs.
“Well, whether you believe it or not. It won’t change what I feel. I love you. Like you just said, if someone feels it—and I feel it. That’s it. It’s a fact. It’s the truth.”
The truth? Mary looks at the fireplace, the huge stone fireplace. The rug. The firewood neatly piled, not a piece out of place. The interior-decorating magazines. The collection of carved figures, angry faces, weapons raised.
“I should go,” she says.
He reaches for her hand. Holds it in his.
“Do you remember that time? When we met? The first time you came here for dinner? You were very flustered.”
“Flustered?”
He laughs.
“You weren’t in the greatest of moods. You surely remember that. You didn’t want to be here at all, did you?”
“I don’t remember,” she says, though she does.
“You looked gorgeous. You had on these red trousers. Silk, I think.”
“Velvet.”
“What?”
“They were velvet.”
“Well, they suited you. You looked amazing. You should wear them again.”
“I gave them to the charity shop,” she says, remembering with a sliver of relish the pretty things she chucked in a carrier bag and dumped there the next day.
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
He strokes her hand, holding it in both of his.
“Well, that was a mistake. A big mistake. I’ll have to buy you some more.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“It’s not silly.”
“I don’t want you to buy me anything.”
“I will. I want to—”
“Eddie,” she says. “I mean it. I have to go.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Not yet.”
“I must. I have to.”
“Please. I’m saying please. Mary, just look at me. I don’t want you to.”
She turns to look at him. Thinking that he looks so young, suddenly, like a boy, that he could be about sixteen.
The Stopped Heart Page 27