The Stopped Heart (5 page)

“It's me. I'm the one who should be sorry.”

“Don't be silly.”

“I should have asked you. I wanted to. It was Veronica. She's in a state. I had to think fast. She put me on the spot, if you really want to know.”

Mary tries to breathe.

“You don't have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Blame it on her.”

“I'm not blaming it on anyone. I'm just saying it's what happened. She was quite upset. I suppose I felt responsible. But I shouldn't have sprung it on you. I should have asked you first. I'm sorry.”

“It's your home. You can do what you like.”

“It's your home too.”

Home. Mary shivers. She feels him looking at her.

“What? What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I'm not thinking anything.”

H
ER FIRST THOUGHT WHEN
R
UBY WALKS IN IS THAT SHE
'
S PUT
on weight. She's never been slender the way Graham is slender, and even as a child she wasn't exactly skinny, but there's an all
over heftiness to her now—face, neck, jaw, bust, wrists—which you might, if you were pushed, have to call fat.

“Hi, Rubes—what a nice surprise.”

She holds out her arms and, after a quick, sullen moment of hesitation, Ruby comes over and lets herself be hugged. The hug smells of exhaust fumes and cigarettes and something else faintly medicinal that Mary can't place. As usual, Ruby's hair is dyed the blackest black. Her clothes are black. Her unraveling fingerless gloves are black. Her skin isn't good and the dried-up smears of concealer do her no favors, but Mary notices that her eyeliner, two perfect inky wings of black, is gorgeously done.

Ruby plonks herself down on the bench and, frowning, starts to unlace her shiny maroon Dr. Martens boots.

“You don't have to do that,” Mary says. “We're in the country now.”

Ruby looks up, caught out for a moment. As a little girl in London, they always made her take her shoes off at the door.

“The floor,” Mary says. “Look at it, it's filthy. You can keep your shoes on if you want.”

“I don't mind,” Ruby says, pulling the boots off anyway, revealing lacy tights with plenty of ladders and a hole in the toe.

“But your feet will freeze.”

“I don't mind.”

Ruby picks up the boots and places them carefully side by side on the mat.

“Great boots,” Mary says. “Are they new?”

Ruby looks at her, says nothing.

T
HEY EAT THE SAUSAGES.
G
REEN BEANS AND EARLY NEW POTATOES,
which Ruby leaves. She leaves everything except the sausages, which she has second helpings of. She eats in silence, batting away
all of her father's bright, careful questions with shrugs and sullen looks. But when he asks her to clear the table, she does it without argument, scraping and stacking the plates with a solemn kind of care and carrying the big, heavy frying pan with its pure white layer of congealed fat, through to the back sink.

After that she stands by the door to the stairs and tells them she's going to the lavatory. Mary asks her if she needs to be shown where it is. She says she knows.

“Don't disappear,” Graham tells her. “There's dessert.”

“I don't want dessert.”

He makes a silly face.

“What, not even chocolate ice cream?”

“Not chocolate. The chocolate's gone. It's cherry something,” Mary says, suddenly embarrassed for him.

Ruby blinks at her.

“I don't want it.”

“All right, but anyway, don't disappear,” says Graham. “You and me are going to have a serious talk.”

Ruby is gone for at least ten minutes. Graham looks more and more bothered.

“What on earth's she doing up there?”

“Leave her. What does it matter what she's doing?”

“You think she's hanging out of the bathroom window smoking or something?”

This hadn't even occurred to Mary. She realizes how unfit she is to be the parent of a teenager.

“What, weed?”

“No, I meant cigarettes but I suppose now that you say it, yes, weed.”

“Wouldn't we smell it?”

“I don't know. Probably.”

They can smell nothing. Faintly, Mary thinks she can hear the creak of the boards upstairs. She catches herself hoping that Ruby isn't in their room.

“Maybe she's worried about what you're going to say,” Mary says at last. “Maybe she thinks you're going to tell her off.”

“I am going to tell her off.”

“Then she's not going to come back down in a hurry, is she?”

Graham looks at her.

“Well, she's not getting out of it either.” He drains his glass and gazes at the narrow door that leads up into the shadows of the stairs. “Oh, this is getting ridiculous. Shall I go and give her a call?”

Mary puts a hand on his.

“Don't hound her. You've got to stop treating her like a child,” she adds when Graham continues to watch the stairs.

He looks at her.

“What do you mean? I don't treat her like a child. Anyway, she is a child. She behaves like a bloody child. I'm furious with her, if you really want to know.”

Mary sighs. He pushes his chair back, throws his napkin on the table.

“All right, all right. I get it. You're right. She's a big girl. I just wish she would act like one, that's all.”

When Ruby reappears, her face is flushed, her eyes bright. She's tugging at the black and ragged sleeves of her sweater, pulling them down over her hands.

“You OK, darling?” Graham asks her.

Ruby sniffs and looks past him at the dark windowpane.

“I don't want to stay here.”

“What?”

“I can't stay in this house. I want to go home.”

Graham flicks a glance at Mary.

“Rubes. For God's sake. It's nine thirty. You can't possibly go home now.”

“Why not?”

Graham begins to laugh. “Well, there are no trains, for a start.”

“Why not?”

“This isn't Camden. We're in the countryside. The last train went at about eight.”

“Can't you drive me?”

“No, honey, I can't.”

“I'll call Mum.”

“What? And ask her to do a four-hour round trip to come and collect you in the middle of the night? I don't think so.”

“I'll hitch then.”

“Don't be so bloody ridiculous. For goodness' sake, Ruby, what is this? What on earth's got into you?”

Mary looks at Ruby. Seeing something blurred and wobbly and on edge about her and wondering for a moment if she's been crying. She hasn't seen her cry for many, many years, not since she was a child of ten or eleven, certainly not since she's been a teenager.

Even when they told her what had happened, even then, she didn't cry, but stared dry-eyed into space and then brought her fist down so hard on the table that a glass rolled onto the floor and smashed. “That girl needs anger management,” Mary's mother had said, forgetting that she herself was existing on a diet of rage, Scotch, and diazepam.

“What is it?” Mary says now as gently as she can. “Why don't you want to stay?”

Ruby pulls her attention away from Graham and squinches her eyes at Mary.

“What do you mean, why?”

“Well, you were perfectly happy to stay a while ago. So what's the matter? What's changed? Has something changed?”

Ruby looks at the ground. Graham makes a noise of exasperation.

“Come on, Rubes, we haven't got all night.”

Ruby looks at him.

“You're not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

Ruby draws her cuff farther over her fist and brings it to her mouth.

“It's this house.”

Mary feels her heart contract.

“What?”

Ruby looks at her.

“I don't like it.”

“What do you mean, you don't like it? What don't you like?”

Ruby doesn't move. Her eyes flicking over to the windowpane, then back to her father.

“I just don't like it, that's all.”

Mary looks at Graham. His face is calm.

“You're just not used to it,” she tells Ruby. “I know it feels very quiet after London. But that'll change, you'll see. You'll be all right when you've stayed here a few times.”

Ruby gives her a quick, startled look as if she'd forgotten she was there.

“No,” she says. “It's not that.”

“What is it then?”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“We might.”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

There's a brief silence, then Graham laughs. He picks up the bottle, pours more wine.

“Oh, I see. I get it. I know what this is. Look, my darling, I don't care whether you like this house or not. I don't care how many little distractions and red herrings you decide to chuck at us. You're not getting out of this talk.”

Ruby says nothing. Mary thinks she sees tears in her eyes. She gets up, heart banging, her chair scraping the floor.

“I'm going to leave you two to it,” she says.

Ruby turns her head and looks at her. Mary notices that her pupils are enormous. Dilated and as black as her clothes.

“Sit,” Graham says to Ruby.

With surprising meekness, she obeys. As Mary leaves the room she hears her sniff.

“I don't want some great big lecture, all right?”

B
UT LATER, MUCH LATER, GETTING READY FOR BED, HE STANDS
there frowning, unbuttoning his shirt.

“She says she saw a man out there.”

Mary sits up in the bed.

“What? What do you mean, a man? Out where?”

“In the lane. Outside the house. She was very definite about it. A tall young red-haired guy, she said. Smoking a cigarette and standing looking up at the house. She says she saw him when she was in the bathroom. She says that's why she was gone so long.”

Mary stares at him.

“She was sure he was looking at this house?”

“Apparently.”

“But—my God—who would be looking at this house? And anyway, why didn't she come and tell us?”

“Exactly.”

“What? You don't believe her?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't see why she'd make up something like that.”

Graham laughs. “She makes up almost every other bloody thing. Seriously, she lies about everything. I'm frankly disinclined to believe a single word she says. Do you know what she told her mother? That we'd moved here because we wanted to hide ourselves away from everybody, including her.”

Mary looks at him. “She's right about that.”

“What?”

“Well, it's true, isn't it?”

“What do you mean, it's true?”

“Not to get away from Ruby, obviously. But everyone else.”

Graham's face is perplexed, cold. She sees that she's upset him and she realizes that in some haphazard way she meant to.

“That's really what you feel?”

“Don't you?”

“No, I don't. But you clearly do.”

“Sometimes that is what I feel, yes.”

He takes off the rest of his clothes and chucks them on the chair. Standing there naked and sad, looking at her.

“I thought it was the opposite,” he says.

“The opposite?”

“I thought it was supposed to be the start of not having to hide. Of being able to do normal things again.”

Mary says nothing. She looks at her hands, thinking that they look like the hands of a very old woman.

“I don't know what normal things are anymore,” she says.

Graham looks at her. He goes into the bathroom.

“Is that what frightened her?” she says when he returns, toothbrush in his mouth.

“What?”

“The man. Was that why she didn't want to stay?”

“I don't know. We didn't really get into that. Anyway, she's here now, let's not worry about it.”

“She didn't ask to leave again?”

He shakes his head.

“And is she OK?” she says, picturing Ruby in the still-undecorated spare bedroom with two creaky single beds and pictures stacked against the wall and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. At least it looks into the garden and not the lane, she thinks.

Graham shrugs.

“She got a police caution and she's not allowed back to school till Monday. And she doesn't seem the least bit bothered about any of it. Still, there don't seem to be any substances involved, which is what Veronica was most worried about.”

Mary stares at him.

He goes into the bathroom and spits. When he comes back in and gets into bed, he tries to put his arms around her. She hesitates and then she lets him.

“I don't want Ruby to be frightened of the house,” she says.

“Don't be silly. Of course she isn't frightened. She just said the first thing that came into her head.” He looks at her. “I don't like you saying that, you know.”

“What?”

“About us hiding ourselves away. It's not true. I'm not going to let you say it. Who do you think you're hiding from?”

Mary says nothing. She thinks of her mother and father, her sister, Lynn Markham. She thinks of all the friends who said they'd get in touch and never did. Then she thinks of all the ones who did, whose cautiously upbeat and determinedly newsy e-mails she could never quite bring herself to reply to.

She sighs.

“All we ever do is watch TV.”

“What?”

“In this new life of ours. Haven't you noticed? It's all we ever do.”

He sits back in the bed. Picks up his watch off the bedside table. Puts it down again.

“I thought you liked it. I thought it kept your mind off things. All that rubbish. All those property programs.”

“That's the day. When I'm on my own. And anyway, I don't really bother with them anymore.”