LATER ON THE DAY OF THE CONSTABLE’S VISIT, JAMES CAME AND found me.
I was pegging out washing, the sun hot on my back. I had not been alone with him in a long time and at first I couldn’t help it, even though my mind knew it was hopeless, my body felt a quick, hot rush of hope. In the old days, he would have looked around to see that no one was near, then he would have grabbed me hard and held me tight, whispering to me about the things he intended to do to me later.
But of course he didn’t do that. Instead, he just stood there considering me with so much coldness on his face that my knees felt weak. I told myself it was better that I didn’t notice. I picked up a sheet from the basket.
Did he come and find you? I said.
Did who come and find me?
The constable. Did he ask you some questions? What did you tell him? Did he ask you if you knew her? What did you say?
James kept on looking at me as if I was some stranger he’d just met in the street. Worse than a stranger, since he might have been polite to a stranger, yet now his eyes were terrible, quite hard and dead. When he still didn’t speak, I put the wet sheet back in the basket and turned to face him.
Speak to me, I whispered. James, it’s me, remember? Please, I beg you, talk to me.
He took a step back away from me. At last he shook his head.
I haven’t the faintest what you’re on about, he said. Knew who? Why would he ask me if I knew someone?
I stared at him.
Why Phoebe Harkiss, of course.
Straightaway, almost before I could finish getting the name out, he stepped forward and gripped me by the wrist, his fingers so tight on me that it burned.
Don’t! he said.
What?
Don’t ever say that name to me again, he said. I mean it, Eliza. Never again as long as I live do I want to hear that name on your lips.
I stared at him, my heart up in my chest.
All right, I whispered.
I mean it, you know.
I know. I know you do.
He looked at me for a moment, then he let go.
Anyway, he said, I didn’t come here to talk about that. I came to tell you that you need to take a dose.
What? I said. A dose? A dose of what?
He frowned at me.
Salts, I think. Salts or senna. There’s some I’ve met in the city who use gin, but I reckon you’re too young for that and I doubt anyone here’d give it to you.
I stared at him. Felt my blood beginning to rise up into my head.
What do you mean? I said. Take a dose for what?
What do you mean, for what? The thing you told me about, of course. So you will get your—you know—
I told him I did not know what he meant. He stared at me.
Your courses. The thing that should happen if you—What, you’re saying you don’t know what that is? You’ve never had that?
Had what?
Eliza, for goodness’ sake, the thing that happens to all women!
I bit my lip and looked at the ground.
I don’t know if I am a woman yet, I told him, because it was the truth and also because I did not know what he was talking about.
He folded his arms and looked at me. I knew that look. It meant that something had taken him by surprise and now he was turning things over and over in his mind.
All right, he said. Well, in that case you’ve been very unlucky. And I am even more sure that I had nothing to do with it. But you still need to get yourself a dose of something.
I stared at him. The way he said it—get yourself a dose of something—made me feel like the loneliest person on earth. It was a struggle to keep the tears from coming.
I don’t know how to get whatever it is, I said. But I suppose I can ask my mother.
No, he said quickly. Not your mother. How about one of the Narkets?
Miss Narket’s white accusing face came into my head.
I’m not going to Miss Narket about this, I said.
Well, you can’t go to your mother either.
Why not? Why can’t I?
I watched as a shadow went across his face. I waited.
Why not? I said again.
He took a breath.
If you tell your mother about this, I will never speak to you again as long as you live.
IF I HAD WONDERED WHY HE DID NOT WANT ME TO ASK MY mother, it wasn’t long before that question was answered. That night her time was up and she began to scream.
My mother generally slid babies out between one household job and the next and, more often than not, got up and cooked the dinner afterward. But not this time.
We’d never known the pain go on so long or heard her scream so hard and loud with nothing to show for it. In the end our father could not stand it any longer and he sent me to fetch the doctor. By the time I got back with him it was beginning to be light. Ma’s face was yellow and the room smelled nastily ripe, like blood. The baby was stuck, half in and half out. Jazzy was sitting at the bottom of the stairs with the twins and all three of them were crying. My father had his face in his hands.
The doctor rolled up his sleeves and pushed his hands in and twisted. Out the child slipped. I stared at the long, blue body. Its eyes were black and open wide but it wasn’t moving.
I gasped.
Is it dead?
The doctor smiled and thumped it hard. A loud cry came from somewhere. I realized it was the child. My father looked up.
Another bonny boy, the doctor said—and because my mother could not take him, he handed him to me.
My father was weeping.
Will she be all right? he said, not looking at the child in my lap but at my mother, who was drenched and feasy and did not quite seem to be in the room with us.
The doctor said that he thought Ma would live, but that this had better be the last time.
The last time of what? said Jazzy.
Never mind what, my father said.
The last baby, idiot, I told her.
And I looked at him, my new brother. I held him in my arms as the sun came up. He had a slick of dark black hair that made me think of Frank, and his hands were like brown wrinkled walnuts just out of the shell.
But it was only as Jazzy handed me the cloth to dry the cheese and wet off him that I rubbed at his hair and realized that it wasn’t black at all. It was the brightest, most flaming red.
THE GIRLS’ ROOM. AT FIRST GRAHAM AND MARY DID NOT TOUCH it. It was impossible. They could not face it. They left it exactly as it was. Duvets, crumpled and slept in. Old vests and socks. Ella’s meerkat poster, its corner curling off the wall where she had picked at the Blu-Tack. A fairy skirt. LEGO bricks. Farm animals. The doll with its face scribbled on by Flo. A one-legged Action Man that she liked to take in the bath. Ella’s bead-making set. Crayons tipped on the floor—
For a long time—apart from one shameful vodka-drinking night when she crept into the bottom bunk only to wake, hours later, dribbling and sobbing, among the warm, Flo-smelling nest of soft toys—she did not let herself go in there. Neither, as far as she knew, did he.
Instead, she began to focus on the guest room, the room they never used. She had never before paid much attention to this room, but now she saw all of its possibilities. Sunny and spacious, clean. Best of all, no one ever slept there. It was empty.
She changed the bed. Washing and even ironing the linen. Making it up with piles of pillows and layers of neatly folded blankets and quilts.
“What are you doing?” He stopped in the doorway, staring at her as she attended to it. She lifted her head, flushed, caught out. “Who on earth are you expecting?” he said.
She looked down at the quilt. It was the one she had made herself from patchwork odds and ends when she was a teenager. Laura Ashley remnants. She hadn’t got around to finishing it until almost fifteen years later, needing something to occupy her restless, excited fingers as she waited for Ella to be born.
Each hexagonal patch was differe
nt. A sprigged floral here, a stripe or a check or a polka dot there. She put a finger on it. Looked at him.
“I’m not expecting anyone,” she said.
When they moved, someone else came around to pack up the girls’ room. A friend, or she thinks it was a friend, it seems awful now that she cannot remember. Someone they used to know, anyway—one of the many who faded so neatly and completely from their lives afterward.
Some of the stuff went straight into boxes, some in the bin, some of it to charity. Mary knows exactly which shop it went to, and for a while she had to take a long and stupidly inconvenient detour through the town, simply so that she could be certain of avoiding its window.
I WENT TO MISS NARKET. I TOLD HER I WAS SICK AND NEEDED a dose of something. She made a point of not looking at me, but her face went stiff and she sat up straight. You could see it was the best thing that had happened to her since Phoebe Harkiss didn’t turn up to help with the hymnbooks that day.
At last she stood up and came over. I knew she wanted a closer look at me. I had to let her, but I did not like it. Although she was called young Miss Narket, she was not young. Her skin was smooth but it had hairs on it and just like all people who are close to God, her breath smelled bad.
What is it? she said. Is it your stomach?
I nodded and touched the part of me where the trouble was. The part that had recently begun to flutter as if a butterfly was stuck in it.
Have you been bilious?
Somewhat.
And the other? Can you do it?
The other? I didn’t know what she meant, so I told her I wasn’t sure.
She tutted.
When you go to the privy, young lady, how is it? Do you manage it or don’t you?
I told her that I managed it.
She sat back down in the big brown chair and picked up her sewing. Her nails were thick, like claws. I did not know how she got the needle in and out. I saw that there was a fat black Bible on the table next to her with a lump of cheese on top. The cheese had a bite taken out of it and yellow crumbs had fallen on the Bible’s cover. She saw me looking at it.
I don’t know what you’ve come to me for, she said at last.
I felt my cheeks grow hot. I could not tell her that James suggested it.
I don’t have anyone else to ask, I said.
What about your ma?
I can’t ask her. She’s just had a baby.
Miss Narket’s face twitched. She lifted her eyes from the sewing.
And I hear the child’s a carrottop, is that correct?
I nodded. She kept her nasty, glinting eyes on me even as she pulled the needle through the cloth.
So what do you make of that, then?
What?
The red hair. What do you make of it?
It’s from my father’s side, I told her. My father’s uncle Perry. He had two girls, twins, both of them more than six feet tall and both with the brightest red hair down to their waists.
This was what I’d heard my father telling people and I didn’t see what was wrong with it as an explanation.
Miss Narket looked at me in silence for a moment and then she laughed. I realized for the first time how much I hated her. Understanding it gave me a funny feeling. Like having to run up a hill when you knew you’d much rather go down it instead.
I turned to go.
Where are you off to now? she said.
I told her I had some errands to run.
She didn’t ask me what the errands were. She carried on sewing.
You should go and ask Addie Sands, she said. About your little problem. You tell her what’s really wrong with you and I expect she’ll sort you out.
WHEN THE POLICE—AN UNNECESSARILY LARGE GROUP OF THREE men, two dogs, two cars, and all their noise and talk and radios—have at last gone, and when Graham and Mary have explained everything to Ruby and sent her off to walk the dog, Graham says he’s going to shower.
But a few minutes later, he comes and stands in front of Mary.
“All right. I’m sick of this. I need to know what’s going on.”
“What?” Mary glances up, confused, her head still full of it all: police, garden, shed. She looks at him—towel around his neck, hair still dripping from the shower.
“You two. What exactly is going on between you?”
“What?” she says it again, feeling the blood leave her face. “What do you mean? Going on in what way?”
He breathes out, blotting at his face with the towel. Looking out the window, then back at her. Pain, or fury, or perhaps something else, in his eyes.
“You know who I’m talking about, though, don’t you?”
She looks at him. For a moment she doesn’t know what to say. She says nothing. At last she takes a breath.
“I assume you mean Eddie? And when you say going on, can you please be more specific?”
“Specific?”
“Do you mean, am I having an affair with him?”
She watches as he closes his eyes.
“What?” she says. “You don’t mean that?”
He looks at her.
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“Well, then.”
He shakes his head.
“There’s something—an atmosphere—between you two.”
She thinks about this.
“An atmosphere?”
“An excitement, then. Something significant. Call it whatever you like. I’m not an idiot. You can pick it up a mile off.”
Mary says nothing. She feels him watching her.
“You’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“The way he looks at you. Or doesn’t look at you. All that stuff about you sulking. And anyway, you were in the strangest mood this morning.”
She stares at him.
“Why does that have to be about Eddie?”
Graham looks at her for a long time.
“He seems to know things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. It’s the way he talks. He mentioned a friend who’d gone and had the snip. A vasectomy. Why would he go out of his way to mention that? The way he said it, well it was just so obvious he knew about me. Does he know? Did you tell him about me?”
Mary shivers. Suddenly knowing that she can’t lie.
“I’m sorry. It just came up. I didn’t mean to tell him and I probably shouldn’t have. But we talked about a lot of other things too. He’s just a friend. A good friend. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. He’s been very kind to me.”
“Kind? Is that what you call it?”
Mary looks at him.
“Why? What do you call it?”
Graham says nothing. He holds the towel against his face. For a moment they are both silent.
“So what else does he know?” he asks her at last. “This very good friend of yours. Did you tell him that we never manage to have sex anymore? Is that why he looks at you like that, thinking he’s maybe in with a chance? In fact, perhaps he is—in with a chance, I mean—because did you tell him that you can’t really stand to have me anywhere near you these days?”
Mary looks down at her hands on her knees.
“You know that’s not true.”
Graham sits down. Pulling the towel from around his neck and staring at it for a moment. His shoulders sagging.
“Isn’t it?”
She tries to look at him.
“You know it isn’t. I’ve tried. I try. I keep on trying. All the time, I try.”
He looks away.
“Oh, well done. Aren’t you wonderful? Heroic. It’s always some great big, valiant effort for you, isn’t it?”
Mary swallows back something that might be anger, might be tears.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You know it’s not.”
He looks at her for a moment.
“I just can’t believe you’d d
o it.”
“Do what?”
“Tell him that. Why would you? And talking to him about the girls as well. What kind of a relationship can you have that you would tell him all these intimate and private things?”
The girls.
Mary is silent. Remembering her hands reaching for Eddie, pulling his face to hers. The quick shock of him against her. After she’d kissed him, after she’d felt his face, his mouth, the heat of him close against her, they didn’t do anything else. They could have done, but they didn’t.
The girls.
“Why did you do it?” she says to Graham, suddenly furious.
“What? Do what?”
“Decide we shouldn’t have any more children.”
He looks startled.
“What do you mean, why did I? I didn’t decide it. We both decided it.”
“Did we?”
“You don’t remember? The conversations?”
“Not really.”
“We talked at length about it.”
“Flo was still tiny.”
He presses his lips together.
“She was almost a year old.”
“She was nine months.”
He shakes his head.
“Now I’ve no idea what you’re saying.”
She looks out of the window. At the bluest of blue skies.
“I don’t really know what you think about anymore,” she says to him. “Honestly. I don’t know what’s in your head.”
“What do you mean? There’s nothing in my head.”
“Exactly.”
Graham makes a noise of impatience.
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think that it’s not any of that man’s business to know those things. I was shocked, if you really want to know.”
“Shocked?”
“Yes, shocked. Very shocked. I’m still shocked. Shocked and—I don’t know, I suppose I felt betrayed.”
Mary lifts her head and looks at him.
“Well, now at least you know how that feels.”
He stares at her.
“What?”
“To be betrayed.”
“How dare you?”
She lifts her head, suddenly calm.
“How do I dare? How do I fucking dare?”
She thinks of the day when he came and told her—after the school run, after she’d had to make a second trip with Ella’s forgotten lunch box—how he was waiting there in the hall as she put her key in the door. Tears standing in his eyes. His lip trembling. So much pain on his face.
The Stopped Heart Page 34