The Stopped Heart

by Julie Myerson

  I can’t lie to you, he told her. I just can’t do it. I respect you far too much to lie to you.

  Respect. What bollocks, she thought.

  Mary stands up. Picks up the forms they’ve been left with—a sheaf of printed papers, standard procedure for reporting the discovery of human remains, the police said. Yes, they said, almost certainly human, but that’s all we can tell you at this stage. Forensics will come and take them away, assess them for us.

  She sweeps other papers up off the old pine table—their presence there suddenly making her feel uneasy, almost ill—and she folds them carefully and puts them on a high shelf of the dresser. She turns back to look at Graham.

  “I just want to tell you that I’m not sorry,” she says. “Not for a single word I just said. I don’t take anything back. I mean every word of it and I don’t care what you think. I think I’d dare do anything now. Isn’t that frightening? It frightens me. But what the fuck else is there left to lose?”

  She watches him, sitting there as if he isn’t with her—as if he’s in another place entirely. He does not speak. Or if he does, she doesn’t hear him. And for a moment she’s not sure either whether she spoke those last words aloud or just thought them.

  At last, without looking at her, he gets up and he leaves the room. She does not go after him. A minute later she hears him in the snug and seconds after that, she hears a Springsteen track turned up very loud.

  The shock of the music—she didn’t know he’d got around to wiring up the speakers—stops her for a moment. It’s the first time in so long—and certainly the first time in this house—that she’s heard music. As she listens, everything else drains away and all she feels is the loud, lifting brightness of that old forgotten pleasure.

  ADDIE SANDS WAS THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER. SHE WAS kind. She used to give us bread dipped in salty water. She loved all children, and when I was still small, she’d sometimes keep me on after the class to give my ma a break and carry me around the village in her arms.

  You were a lovely babe, she told me once. I always liked to talk to you because you were so bright and beady and you listened to every word I said.

  The little ones still went to her for Bible class. Lottie and Honey liked going very much because they loved to collect the colorful ribbons that she gave out for good deeds and good thoughts. But Jazzy thought she was too old now and was always on at our mother to let her stop.

  I went to see Addie, but she was out. I peeked through her window, which was always clean and homely, and I saw a copper kettle and some plants and a hagstone hanging above the whitened hearth and a cup and saucer on the table as if someone had just that moment been sitting there. But when I knocked on the door no one came.

  I waited a while in case she’d just gone around the back. But still no one came, so I gave up and went back down her crumbly path with its double rows of orange snapdragons and pinks and phlox and stocks and all sorts of other cozy cottage flowers whose names I could not remember.

  I felt quite downhearted and lonely then. I thought it would have been quite a comfort to sit at that table with Addie and watch her lift that cup off the saucer and put it to her lips. I hadn’t known how much I’d wanted to talk to her, and I didn’t think I’d have had much of a problem getting up the courage to tell her my troubles.

  I knew that if James found me, he would demand to know if I’d got the medicine—and walking back down the lane I went over in my head what exactly I would say. In fact, I prepared my story so thoroughly that I almost began to believe it myself. Yes, I’d had a dose. Salts—or was it senna—something like that anyway. Miss Narket had, unsurprisingly, been a dead loss, but Addie had been very kind and she had helped me. Everything that he had been so keen that I should do, I had done. All I had to do was wait now. There was nothing else to it. Everything was going to be all right.

  THEY COME THE NEXT MORNING AND TAKE AWAY THE BONES and half of the soil from beneath them too.

  Mary and Graham stay in the house. They agree that they’d rather not have to see them—the two men and a youngish girl in their white clothes and masks. The dark van. The aura of studied respect that surrounds the whole operation. The memories it kicks up. They are very relieved indeed that there does not have to be a tent.

  She sits with him in the kitchen, neither of them speaking.

  “What is it?” she says.

  “What do you mean, what is it?”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  He doesn’t look at her. He seems to think for a moment.

  “I’m not angry. I’m just tired.”

  She leans back in her chair.

  “We’re both tired.”

  “That’s right. We are. We’re both tired.”

  At last he gets up and walks over to the sink, flings the rest of his coffee down it. Picks up his wallet and his keys. Calls to the dog. She watches him.

  “Where are you going?”

  He glances out at the garden.

  “I don’t know. I just know I can’t stay here while they’re doing this. Do you mind?”

  “Do I mind what?”

  “I’m going to walk the dog. I won’t be long.”

  “It’s all right. Be as long as you like.”

  He hesitates a moment in the doorway, looking at her hard as if he’s searching for something. She waits for him to speak, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything. At last, he turns and leaves.

  When the men have finished and one of them, the older one who earlier introduced himself as Nick, is putting his head around the door to say good-bye, Mary asks him if it’s all right for them to take the police tape away now—the blue-and-white tape that she can still see fluttering down there beyond the washing line at the end of the garden.

  Nick says of course. He’s sorry. It no longer needs to be there at all. They’ll go back and remove it straightaway.

  And that should be it, he says, glancing at Ruby, who for once is up and dressed and watching the men from her perch on a stool by the window. They’ll leave them in peace. He gives Mary a small printed card. The office will be in touch if anyone finds anything.

  “Anything?”

  “Anything that might affect your property. Anything requiring further investigation or whatever.” He smiles at her and glances again at Ruby and unzips the front of his suit, revealing the bright green and yellow of a Norwich City F. C. T-shirt. “But you shouldn’t worry,” he says. “It’s not likely that they’ll want to take it any further. Those bones, they’re pretty old. Well over a century is what we’re guessing.”

  “And they’re definitely human?”

  “Oh yes. We’re pretty sure of that, yes.”

  LATER, WHEN GRAHAM IS BACK AND THEY’VE STILL BARELY SPOKEN to each other, eating a subdued lunch of cling-filmed leftovers straight from the fridge, Ruby comes and finds them and asks if Lisa can come and stay just for one night. If they say yes, then she can get on the one-forty train and be at the station just after four.

  “She’s got no money or anything,” Ruby says. “But she reckons she can talk her way through it.”

  “Why hasn’t she any money?” Graham says. “And is it really worth her coming here for just one night?”

  “It’s worth it to her,” Ruby says.

  “What do you mean, it’s worth it to her?”

  She makes a noise of impatience.

  “She’s got to go somewhere. She doesn’t care where she goes. She just needs to get away. And I suppose I thought that maybe for once we could behave like normal human beings and help her just this one fucking time.”

  Graham starts to speak, but Mary interrupts him.

  “Away from what?” she asks Ruby.

  “What?”

  “What is it that she’s got to get away from?”

  Ruby scowls.

  “My God, I can’t believe it, do you really always need to know everything?”

  Graham glances at Mary.

  “I think we do, yes,” he
says.

  “All right, she’s had this great big fight with her parents, OK? Her dad hit her or something. Satisfied now?”

  Mary stares at Ruby.

  “He hit her?”

  Ruby folds her arms.

  “Yes, he hit her.”

  “That’s terrible. Why on earth would he do that?”

  “I can’t go into it. It’s not important. Look, she’s calling me back in a minute. I just need to know right now if it’s a yes or a no.”

  Graham says, “OK, tell Lisa she can come.” But Mary tells him she’s not sure.

  “You don’t think you should just have a quick word with her parents first? At least speak to her mum to check if it’s OK?”

  Ruby lets out a wail.

  “You can’t speak to them. Don’t you see, if you speak to them it’ll fuck it up completely!”

  “But do they know she’s coming here?” Mary says.

  “Of course they don’t!”

  Mary turns to Graham.

  “I’m not sure I’m happy about this. I just don’t feel we really understand what the situation is.”

  “I just told you the situation!” Ruby says.

  “Yes,” Mary says. “But if she was my daughter, I wouldn’t want other parents taking her in even for a night without them first telling me they were doing it.”

  “She’s not your daughter,” Ruby says. “Why can’t you stop acting like everyone’s your daughter? You don’t have any daughters left, haven’t you fucking well taken that in yet?”

  A quick, shocked silence. Mary feels something drop away from her. She feels suddenly exhausted.

  Graham folds his arms, his eyes on Ruby. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, stunned.

  “I’d like you to apologize to Mary right now.”

  Ruby says nothing. No one speaks. After a few moments, she turns and leaves the room. They watch each other’s faces and listen as she goes upstairs and along the passage. When she reaches her room, she slams the door hard.

  GRAHAM NEVER ONCE SAID HE BLAMED HER FOR LEAVING THE girls there at the leisure center. Not for a single moment. Even though the police questioned her hard about it, still it was not something they ever referred to between themselves.

  Partly, they both knew very well that he would have done the same thing. If anything he was more relaxed than she was, letting them wait in the unlocked car while he popped into a shop, for instance. Or insisting it was fine to drop them down the road from school some mornings and watch them walk up to the gate.

  When they finally did have a conversation about it—a very long time after they knew what had happened—she realized, with a lick of shame, that it was she who blamed him.

  “Why can’t you be angry with me?” she said. “Why can’t you just be honest and hate me for it?”

  “Hate you?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  He looked at her.

  “I don’t. I don’t know. I actually haven’t a clue. Why on earth would I ever want to hate you?”

  Mary looked at him, then. Taking in the maddening kindness of his face. His patient willingness to think well of her.

  “I left them standing there. At least four minutes, maybe more.”

  The timing was something they’d gone over and over. Was it three minutes, or four? Could it have been five? Six, she’d told the police at last in tears, I can’t honestly be sure it wasn’t six.

  “I’d have done the same,” he said. “You know I would. Many people would have.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not true. You’ve no idea, Graham. Many people wouldn’t have.”

  He blinked at her.

  “It was no time at all,” he said.

  “I left them there.”

  He shook his head.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “The fact will always be there, that I left them. I left them and I walked away and while I was gone, he took them.”

  He took them. There, she’d said it. Three words that she could hardly bear to utter. Words that took her straight to a place of stinging black terror.

  Quickly, as it always did, it played over again in her head. The moment in court. The careful adjusting of the shirtsleeves. Making himself comfortable. We will never be comfortable again, she’d thought. Even if we both live to be a hundred, proper, ordinary human comfort is something we will never know again.

  She saw that Graham did not know how to answer her. Good, she thought, I’ve finally shut him up. She waited.

  He came up and put his arm around her.

  “Why be so hard on yourself?” he said at last. “After all this time. I don’t honestly see what it’s going to achieve.”

  This was so far off the mark that she couldn’t help it—she laughed.

  TWO OR MAYBE THREE DAYS AFTER THEY’D LOST THEM, WHEN they were still stuck in that hellish place of un-life, waiting for news, any news, one of the family liaison officers had happened to ask Graham where he thought they were.

  “What, the girls?”

  “Yes. The girls.”

  Even at the time it had seemed an odd question. The only question, perhaps, but unaskable all the same.

  She’d watched with a cold kind of interest as Graham touched his face, running his fingers over his sleepless, three-day beard.

  He shut his eyes and he sighed.

  “They’re dead, Mike,” he’d said at last. “I think they are probably both dead.”

  She had never in her life hated anyone more than she hated him at that moment.

  MARY ASSUMES THAT LISA WILL NOT BE COMING. BUT WHEN she returns from walking the dog, she sees Graham standing in the lane with Ruby. Holding his car keys. He lifts a hand to stop her speaking.

  “Ruby and I have had a long talk,” he says. “It’s all sorted. I’ll fill you in later.”

  She stares at him.

  “What, you mean she’s coming? You can’t be serious? You’re saying you’ve given in? You’ve said that Lisa can come?”

  Graham looks at Ruby.

  “They’re going to keep right out of our way. And you needn’t worry about supper by the way. I’m sending them down the road for fish and chips.”

  THIS TIME, POSSIBLY FOR THE FIRST TIME, SHE’S THE ONE WHO calls him. He picks up so fast that for a second or two it throws her.

  “Look,” she says, “I wanted to say I’m sorry. About the other day.”

  “The other day?”

  “You were right. I was sulking. And I shouldn’t have been. It was silly. I overreacted. About the girls. I’m sorry.”

  She hears him suck in his breath.

  “You hung up on me.”

  “I know,” she says. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

  “And I called you, you know. After we found the—after the awful thing with the apple shed. I was quite worried about you. Yesterday and the day before. I called you several times.”

  “I know.”

  “I only wanted to see how you were. You could at least have answered your phone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Answer my phone?” She hesitates, searching for something truthful. “I don’t know. I just didn’t feel I could speak to you.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t know. I think—maybe I was afraid to.”

  She hears him laugh.

  “Afraid? You’re afraid of me?”

  Mary takes a breath.

  “Not of you. Of what might happen. Of what we might say to each other.”

  She hears him hesitate.

  “You mean of what I might say or what you might say?”

  “I don’t know. Both.”

  “You’re afraid of us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And now?”

  “What?”

  “What about now? Aren’t you afraid of what might happen now?”

  Mary thinks about this. She looks o
ut the window—looks right down to the garden, at the place where the police tape had been, the place where until this morning the bones were. A hundred years or more.

  “Mary?” he says. “Are you still there?”

  She says that she is, but at the same time she wonders if she really is. A hundred years, she thinks. And there’s her whole long empty life, hours and hours of it and years and years of it, stretching out ahead of her.

  Eddie is silent for a moment.

  “Why did you call me?” he says at last.

  “I told you. I wanted to apologize.”

  “Only for that?”

  “I think so.”

  “There’s something else, though, isn’t there?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “You do know.”

  “All right,” she says. “I’m going for a walk. To my bench.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes. Right now.”

  He hesitates.

  “And you want me to come?”

  “Only if you want to.”

  “If I want to? You know I want to.”

  “Well, then.”

  She hears his surprise.

  “You want to see me now? You really do? After all this?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I think so. Yes, I do.”

  WALKING UP THE LANE, I WAS INTENDING TO GO INTO THE house and up to my room but as I went past the kitchen door I heard such a commotion, what with the baby crying and Jazzy talking and everyone generally yapping at one another that I knew I could not face it. So I took myself around the back and down through the orchard instead.

  I did not know where I was going; in fact, I had no plan at all. But it did not surprise me when I found myself in our old familiar place behind the apple shed. And there I lay down on that piece of ground that used to be so full of excitement and sweetness and I couldn’t help it, I put my two hands on my chest, my knees, my thighs, trying to remember how it felt to be touched by him. And before I knew it I had slid my underclothes down and, licking my fingers, I put my hands where I knew that he would have put them and tried to do the exact same thing that he would have done to me.