The Stopped Heart

by Julie Myerson

  “That’s nice. That’s a lovely thing to say,” he says at last. “I like it. It feels hopeful. Fluid anyway. Flexible. And true. I suppose things always do. Change I mean.”

  Mary takes a breath.

  “Sometimes they change for the worse.”

  “That’s right. Sometimes they do.”

  From where they sit, she can just about make out the outline of the old fallen tree. For a moment, as she watches, it isn’t there at all. Just an open, empty space. She gasps.

  “What?” he says. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Just for a moment I thought—the tree. It wasn’t there.”

  “It’s very dark.”

  “No. I don’t mean that. I mean it suddenly just wasn’t there at all.”

  He yawns.

  “That tree’s been there a very long time. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “I can see it,” Mary says. “I can see it now.”

  Still unnerved, she watches the tree as its outline comes back into focus.

  Graham sighs.

  “This garden,” he says. “I hope we can still—I wish I’d never done it now, of course. Pulled that thing down. It could have just stayed there, couldn’t it? You were right. If only I’d left it. We’d never have known.”

  “Wouldn’t we?” says Mary. She hesitates, feeling him looking at her. At last he reaches for her hand.

  “Of course,” he says. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary says.

  “Yes, you do. You did.”

  Neither of them speak for a moment.

  “Anyway, I guess it will fade, with time,” he says. “I suppose one day we just won’t think about it anymore.”

  Mary looks at her hand in his.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You don’t want it to fade?”

  “No.”

  He smiles.

  “All right,” he says. “I won’t say it.”

  She lets go of his hand. Glances back at the tree. Not allowing her eyes to go beyond it, though—to the place where the apple shed stood, open now to the fields, the stars. She shivers and takes a breath, tilting her head back, looking up at the vast blackness of the sky, pricked with stars.

  “But it feels like home,” she says.

  “What?”

  “This place. It does to me. I love it.”

  “You do?” He leans forward. “I never thought I’d be able to feel it about a place where we don’t have them. Where they’ve never lived.”

  “But you do feel it.”

  It’s not a question. She doesn’t expect an answer. There is no answer. No answer, probably, that she could bear to hear.

  She breathes in then, a deep breath. After a few minutes, he puts his arm around her. She’s glad of it. She leans her head against him.

  She thinks again about Eddie, his constant talk of love. Love is nothing, she thinks. It’s nothing. Just the very smallest sliver of a so much larger and more complicated thing.

  He asks her what she is thinking.

  “I’m thinking about magpies,” she says.

  “Magpies?”

  “Well, a magpie actually. Just one. I thought I saw one, just now as we walked back. In the lane.”

  He turns to look at her.

  “Do you even get magpies at night?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the bird person. You didn’t see it?”

  “No, I didn’t. I thought one magpie was bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad luck.”

  “You don’t believe that,” she says.

  He laughs.

  “You really think it was a magpie?”

  “I don’t know. I saw a black-and-white bird in a country lane in the middle of the night, that’s all.”

  “That’s all? That’s not enough for you?”

  She laughs and he hugs her to him.

  “That’s nice,” he says.

  “What’s nice?”

  “I’ve forgotten what your laugh sounds like. I like your laugh.” She laughs again, puts her lips on the bristle of his cheek. Warm, familiar, slightly stale and tired. “I’m sorry, by the way,” he says. “Sorry about the way I behaved. Over you and Eddie.”

  “What?” She feels herself stiffen.

  “I think I was just jealous of your friendship. All that talking. All that intimacy. I didn’t want you to be telling him things that you wouldn’t tell me.”

  Mary takes a breath.

  “I didn’t. Tell him things, you know. I didn’t tell him very much anyway.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you did.”

  “I’m saying I didn’t.” She doesn’t add that she did a lot of other things, things that she now feels so ashamed of she can hardly bear to think of them. She feels Graham hesitate.

  “All right. Don’t worry. I believe you.”

  “And he didn’t tell me much either. Nothing that was true anyway.”

  Silence as they both think about this.

  “Poor Deborah,” he says.

  “Yes. Poor Deborah.”

  He pours her more wine.

  “And you,” he says, still holding her. “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Are you all right?”

  She swallows. “Interesting question.”

  “You’re not all right?”

  “I’ve no idea. Are you all right?”

  “It’s been a very difficult day.”

  “Yes. Yes, it has.”

  “Tomorrow will be better.”

  “Will it?”

  He squeezes her to him.

  “Well. We can hope.”

  They sit very still. Far off, there’s a noise, sudden and low and thrilling.

  “The owl,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. And then, “It’s Flo’s birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  Flo. She does not miss a beat.

  “Today, you mean.”

  “What?”

  “It’s today. It’s already today.”

  Listening to his breath in the darkness as he realizes. The damp, dewy darkness. Everything is changing—yes, she thinks, she can feel it. Something is over. It doesn’t even feel like summer anymore.

  She shivers. Waiting.

  “Of course,” he says. “You’re quite right, of course you are. Today.”

  THE GIRLS ADORED TO HEAR THE STORIES OF THEIR BIRTHS. They knew every single detail off by heart. Each time it all had to be told in the exact same order—the timings thrillingly precise, the narrative almost biblical in its momentum.

  They knew that Ella was born in winter and took eight hours to make her way into the world.

  “Eight whole hours!” Ella counted under her breath. “But that’s more time even than we’re at school.”

  “That’s right,” Graham said. “And it was the middle of the night. Your poor mummy. The middle of the night in a freezing January. You certainly picked your time, Ella.”

  “I was the easiest!” Flo said. “I taked no time at all. I came out at lunch.”

  They all laughed.

  “That’s right,” Mary said. “Four hours. And you did—you arrived on the dot of one. Just in time for lunch.”

  “Typical Flo,” said Graham, ruffling at her hair. “Her mind always on her tummy.”

  “And did she eat lunch?” Ella said, looking at her sister with a flash of envy in her eyes.

  “Lunch? Babies don’t really eat lunch.”

  “No, I know that! But did she have some milk?”

  “I’m sure she did,” Graham said. “Babies always seem to be born hungry.”

  And Mary looked at him and she smiled, remembering something that he had almost certainly forgotten. That while she fed Flo, while she watched the small miracle of that newborn face and felt the first prickle and tug of the milk coming down, he unwrapped a sandwich, cheddar and tomato on rye, that they’d bought that morning in the hospital canteen—only five or six
hours earlier, but already a whole other universe ago—and as Flo sucked, he fed it to her, bite by perfect bite.

  AT LAST GRAHAM LOOKS AT HIS WATCH.

  “One thirty? I don’t believe it. Where have the last few hours gone?”

  “Go on,” she says. “You go in.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “I just want to sit out here a little bit longer.”

  “On your own?”

  “It’s fine. Look, it’s still warm. It’s lovely.”

  He looks up at the night sky.

  “I’m sorry. I think I’m just too exhausted.”

  She smiles at him. “I know you are. Go on. You go. Take the dog in with you.”

  He looks at her.

  “You want the wine?”

  “Take it in. I’ve had quite enough.”

  He bends, a hand on her shoulder. Kissing her head.

  “Don’t be long, will you? I mean it. Don’t get cold.”

  “I won’t.”

  He hesitates.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  She watches as he picks up his glass and hers, the bottle too, and makes his slow way toward the house, the dog trotting after him.

  He’s not old, she thinks, but right now he could be. Suddenly old and tired and a little bit frail.

  Almost afraid for him, she watches, holding her breath, willing him to get there, to make it. For a second or two as he nears the house, the night swallows him and he is gone. Then he turns on the kitchen light and it is all the other way round. He is illuminated. She and the garden plunged into darkness.

  SOME TIME BEFORE THE POLICE OFFICER WHOSE NAME WAS Claire came and told them—several hours in fact before she was woken again from that terrible, drowning sleep and they were down together in that room and given the update that they’d been dreading—Mary knew. She knew with a dreadful, piercing certainty that it had happened: her daughters were no longer alive.

  The way she knew was this.

  Early afternoon. Outside it might have been raining. She got up and went to the bathroom, sat numbly on the toilet, trying not to think of anything, not to think, not to hope, it was a habit now. All she needed was to relieve herself—a basic thing, an animal thing. And when she was done and she went back into the room, blank and silent, her eyes still barely open, ready to put herself back into the dark safety of the bed, there they both were—

  She cried out.

  She saw them for a good few seconds. Both of them standing there in their unzipped fleeces, warm and present and rosy and certain. And she thinks they were smiling, that they seemed quite happy (though later, when she tried to think about it, tried desperately to conjure their faces, she could no longer be so sure).

  What she did know was that despite them being right there in the room, they were also somehow beyond, apart, out of her reach. She could not have gone to them, could not have gone any closer, could not have touched them. And before she could do anything—before she could even call out for Graham—they were gone.

  And a cold dread began to take root inside her. A choking sensation. A feeling of such blunt and grim hopelessness that she did not think she would survive it.

  Graham held her. She knows that she made no sense at all when she tried to tell him. His fingers were rough, unfamiliar. His clothes smelled of ash, of fire.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  He put her in the bed and she went back to sleep. She slept. She dreamed of nothing. The afternoon rolled on. But she knew exactly what would happen next and it did.

  Someone came and woke her. A police officer, the woman called Claire, was downstairs.

  “We have a significant update for you,” she said.

  Mary saw that Claire’s face was steady but her hands were trembling. Graham was fetched and the next thing that happened was that someone drew the curtains in the sitting room.

  MY FATHER AND THE OTHER TWO MEN, THEY DIDN’T FIND JAMES. Or at least I don’t think they did. I don’t know where he was, but I would guess it wasn’t in the wood.

  Maybe he did come to the house. Maybe he walked right up to the gate and in through the door and into the kitchen. Or maybe he went to the orchard, to the apple shed. Maybe he sat for a while on the old fallen tree—the thing, after all, that had brought him right here into the center of our family—swinging his legs, having a smoke. I’m not sure what he would have been thinking. I suppose that he would have been looking for me, waiting for me.

  My father wasn’t a harsh man. I don’t think he liked to fight. He hadn’t the chops for it. But he was brave enough when he had to be, and he was fair. And though he was quite a bit older than James and a bit more brittle and sad and a whole lot less strong, still he could have been brutal if he felt that it was called for. If he felt that his family might be harmed. If he had managed to find him.

  I don’t know what would have happened then. I don’t know who would have hurt who or taught who a lesson. My father had two men with him, but I also know that James would have fought quite viciously, wild and cornered and bloody, with nothing to lose. Still, I don’t see that anything good is to be had from thinking about it or trying to guess. It makes no difference to what will happen next.

  What will happen is, James will go to the cowshed. He will climb up that sturdy wooden ladder and haul himself into the loft where the tools are kept. He will stand for a moment, his hands hanging loose and ready by his side, looking along the rows of all those familiar and useful instruments, some of them honed to sharpness, some of them not.

  He will look at the dibbers and the scuppatts and the flails and the drain spades. The scythes and the rakes and the swabs. He will look at the small blades with teeth on them that are kept for slitting the pigs. He will look at the weedhooks—the sharp curved sickles fitted to a long wooden handle, which my father taught our Frank and me to use to chop weeds off right at the base where they grow in the ground.

  He will look at all of these tools. He won’t be in much of a hurry. He will think about it all quite properly. It will take him a while to decide.

  Will his heart be banging? Will he feel crazy? Or angry? Righteous? Or ashamed? Will he tell himself that it was love that did this to him, love that brought him here—that a girl has put a hex on him, has put him on edge, stuck him in a tight corner, fixed his mind and scrabbled his thoughts and thrown him on a path that must surely lead to hell?

  Or will he tell himself that God will surely forgive him for what he is about to do? That it’s all part of his plan for those innocent little children that dare to laugh and play without thought or care or fear on this dark, dark earth?

  It is too late for me to answer any of these questions.

  All I know is that he will stand there for quite a few minutes staring at the different sharpened implements hanging ready on their different nails. Then he will reach out his hand and take down two of the whetted pig knives and put them in his jacket. And last of all he will select the biggest and the sharpest of the weedhooks.

  Then, whistling to himself, he will set off down the lane to the school. And less than ten minutes after that, Addie Sands will start to scream.

  AT FIRST, STANDING THERE IN THE KITCHEN DOORWAY, MARY’S confused. Knowing very well that Graham left the kitchen light on, waiting for her to come in and lock up and come to bed. And knowing that if it weren’t for the fact that the room is lit—actually quite brightly lit by the overhead light—she might be forced to doubt what she is seeing.

  On the kitchen table, their metal coffeepot from this morning. A trivet. The old chipped white jug with the wooden spoons and ladles in it. A plate with a knife and some browning peel, the core of a pear. A folded section of the newspaper. And next to that, a small pink rosebud, broken off from a larger stem and saved, standing in a jam jar.

  And right next to all of these things, her head resting on her arms, long, fair, almost colorless hair spilling across the old pine ta
ble, a young girl.

  Mary catches her breath.

  Looking around the kitchen: everything else exactly as it should be. The steady hum of the fridge. Their wineglasses and the rest of the bottle where Graham left them by the sink. A couple of pans on the wooden draining board. The dishcloth draped over the tap.

  She looks at the dog, curled in her bed and asleep, not even barking. Why isn’t she barking? The air smells all wrong—of blown-out candle.

  Mary looks again at the girl. Her heart begins to race.

  IT WASN’T ADDIE’S FAULT. SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO EXCEPT come and find us. What else could she have done? They needed help. It was already too late for most of them, yet even so she swore she would have done anything rather than leave them.

  She could hardly speak as she staggered up the lane. Her tongue stopped, all thought gone. Blood on her skirts, her wrists, her neck. Her mouth wide-open. Hair falling down.

  They’d been clearing up. Folding up the mats, stacking the slates, putting the chalks in the pot, tidying up the baskets of ribbons that Lottie and Honey were so keen on.

  Lottie had been quiet all morning, Addie said. But she had ribbed her and jollied her along and finally she had begun to brighten a little. She and another girl, I think it was Effie Saunders, had been asking about her canary, which was singing in a corner of the room. Addie let them each give it a pinch of seed and they laughed and clapped their hands, even Lottie did, as he cocked his yellow head and, watching them with his beady eye, pecked it up.

  She said that when James Dix walked into the room he looked so purposeful and was smiling so hard that the little ones thought he must have come to bring them home.

  She said that Jazzy whooped at him and Honey jumped up and laughed and held out her arms. It was only Lottie who turned and screamed. And when Addie saw what it was that he had in his hands and, frozen tight to the spot, said—What is it, what is it?—and when he didn’t reply but just stared wildly at them all, then she hushed the children and told them to keep themselves very still.

  The first swipe he took wasn’t even one of our kiddies. It was Mrs. Brand’s son, Thomas, who was only three and had a poorly eye. They didn’t know if he was killed or not, but Addie said that he lay there without moving, with his feet sticking up in the air and the blood pouring out of him.

  It was at that moment that Addie began to scream, praying to God to please have mercy and help them.