The Stopped Heart (9 page)

Anyway, I don't think she likes me very much, he said.

What? said my mother.

Your girl Eliza. I don't think she likes me at all.

It's true, I said. I don't like him.

My mother wasn't listening. I could see that her mind was
elsewhere as she punched and kneaded the dough. I looked at James and saw how hard he watched her. I didn't know if she was beautiful or not, because to me she was just my mother, but I saw how long and wavy her hair had grown and how it never stayed in her cap but fell in curls down her back and over her bosom. I saw how lithe and skinny her bare arms were, right up to the elbows in flour. I saw James noticing all of this.

But you like me, don't you? he said at last.

What? She lifted her head.

We get on like a house on fire, don't we, Sally, you and me?

I thought he was being very fly and fresh with her, but maybe she was used to it, for she just shrugged and smiled.

I think you're a rascal and a half, she said. But you're all right, I suppose.

Later, though, when she'd put a cloth over the bread and gone out of the room to go and see to the little ones, he put his feet up on the table and grinned.

She's a right bit o' raspberry, your ma.

What? I said.

He kept on laughing, running his hands through his hair.

As in jam. As in, she's the real raspberry jam.

I said nothing. He burst out laughing—an annoying laugh, as if he had forced it—then he stopped and looked at me harder.

Really, Eliza? You don't get it?

I shook my head and he put his feet back down on the floor and turned to me.

Well, Eliza, you're very young and innocent. Not to mention being a royal princess. I don't really know if I should tell you what it means.

Don't then, I said. I'd rather you didn't. I don't very much care what it means anyway.

And I put down my sewing and I tried to pick up the washing basket and walk out of the room, but in that instant he struck, quick as a snake, catching hold of my arm. The feel of his hands on me made me hot to the center of my bones.

He pulled me to him. So close that his breath was moist in my ear. I shivered.

It means she's a right one. A real stunner. A goer, it means she's a—

Shut up, I said.

I pulled away as hard as I could and at last had to smack at his wrist. After a second or two of struggling, he let me go. There was a long silence while we both got on with disliking each other.

Then in an instant he was all soft and smiles again.

Come here, he said.

No.

I said, come here.

I said no.

Please, Eliza?

No.

You don't want to?

No.

All right then, he said. Do as you please.

And I did. I did do as I pleased. I picked up the basket of washing and I walked out into the yard to hang it and I thought how stupid people like my mother were to fall for James and his wheedling and flattery and lies and how glad I was that I had a calm head on my shoulders and could see straight through him and out the other side.

I thought all of these things. But as I leaned down to pick the wet things out, my heart felt ready to jump out of my chest and I saw stars.

T
HEY ACCEPT AN INVITATION TO SUPPER IN THE VILLAGE.
T
HE
couple who live next to the post office. Deborah and Ted, Graham thinks. Or maybe it's Ed. Yes, that's it. Deborah and Eddie. He got talking to her in the co-op. Blond woman, very chatty and rather pretty. She seemed nice.

Mary stares at him.

“You mean tonight?”

“It's only supper,” he tells her before she can say anything or start offering up objections.

She is full of questions. How old are they? What are they like? What do they do? Have they got children? Do they know about us?

He lifts his eyebrows.

“A bit younger than us, I'd guess. I told you, she was nice, very friendly. No idea. Haven't a clue. Don't think so.”

And then the last question: Do we really have to go?

He straightens up from clipping the lead on the dog, looking around for his keys. His face is careful.

“I suppose the reason I said yes without even asking you is because I thought it would be good for us.”

“Good for us?”

He sighs.

“Darling. We never see anyone. We never do anything.”

She looks at him. Her heart turning over.

“I'm just not in the mood for talking to new people, that's all.”

“You never seem to be much in the mood for talking to anyone.”

Mary hesitates.

“It's the whole thing of getting to know someone,” she says. “It's almost like I've forgotten how to do it.”

He smiles.

“You haven't forgotten.”

“All right then.” She feels herself suddenly close to tears. “I'm just not sure I can be bothered to try anymore.”

He goes to her. An arm around her, lifting her hair off her shoulders. He kisses her neck. The dog gives a little whine and he hushes her.

“I know that. Of course I do. And it's exactly why it's a good idea to go.”

She leans against him, the dog tangling herself around their feet.

“You don't understand. I have nothing to say to anyone. Literally nothing.”

“No one expects you to say anything.”

“Come on. Of course they do.”

He looks at her.

“Anyway, they seem like very nice people.”

“What?”

“Well, she did. This Deborah.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

He looks down at the dog, who is whining again and pulling on the lead.

“No one's going to make you do anything you don't want to do.”

She sits down.

“Then I'm not going. You go.”

“I'm not going anywhere without you.”

“Why not? Why can't you?”

He sweeps some loose change off the dresser and puts it in his pocket. Wrapping the lead around his hand. Before he opens the door, he turns to her.

“Does it ever occur to you that I might not really be in the mood either?”

M
ARY SHOWERS, THEN SPENDS HALF AN HOUR OR MORE TRYING
on clothes—odd, frantic garments with zips and pleats and tucks, things that she hasn't touched in a very long time and that, when she puts them on, make her look like she's going for a job interview. At last she pulls back on the tired old jeans she's been wearing all day. Adding a silky T-shirt. Pumps. The first earrings she can lay her hands on. Perfume.

“Mary Coles,” says a faint, half-childish voice. She ignores it. It's happened too many times now for her not to know that it must be in her head. “Mary Coles, Mary Coles.” When she was a child, her mother says she would lie awake in the mornings and talk to herself in a language that sounded like Greek.

“It couldn't have been Greek.”

“That's exactly what I'm saying,” her mother agreed. “You were seven or eight years old. How could you possibly know any Greek? It must have been some kind of gobbledygook.”

Her mother also told her she once said she saw a man hanging from the ceiling in the corner of her room.

“You were terrified. You described it perfectly. His neck in the noose, everything. It really gave us the willies. You were far too young to know anything about hanging.”

Mary thinks that she must call her mother. She knows that she's been putting it off and she doesn't want to think about why.

Downstairs, Graham's waiting for her. He's shaved more carefully than usual and is wearing a bright shirt that she hasn't seen in a long time. He looks up from his paper.

“Can't think when I last saw you in earrings.”

“What?”

She touches them, still struck by how pointless it felt to push
a metal hook with an ornament hanging off it through a hole in her ear.

“It's nice, that's all.” He glances at her legs. “But jeans? You really don't have anything else?”

“I thought you said it was just supper.”

“But you've been wearing those jeans all day.”

She says nothing. She does not speak. Turning from him and going back up the stairs as fast as she can.

“Just the trousers,” he calls after her. “The rest is great. Seriously. You look great.”

She pushes the bedroom door shut and stands for a moment—the room suddenly softer and less rigid, seeming to exhale as it tilts around her. She tears off the jeans. Sitting on the bed in her knickers, gazing in a kind of desperation at the paleness of her thighs, knees, feet.

Outside, the light is going, birds growing quieter, sky velvety. She imagines herself sitting around a table in some kitchen with a pair of strangers. I can't do it, she thinks, I don't want to.

She thinks about getting back into the bed, drawing the duvet up and lying there, waiting for Graham to find her. She can hardly breathe, every breath she takes is an effort and she covers her face now with her hands, a sensation slowly building that she is not quite alone in the room.

When she takes them away, the little brown-haired girl is pointing at her, her eyes black and sly and furious. She has no voice, there is no sound at all, the lines all around them and between them wavy and silent and stopped up, the girl still pointing—she can barely see more than a finger, the babyish curve of a top lip, a twisted topknot of hair—but she knows what she's saying, it's something about skirts: where are your skirts?

Skirts!

The room properly altered now—somehow frayed and odd
and dirty—Mary tries to get herself up off the bed and move away. Her limbs slow, the air thick, resisting her. She thinks about crying out for Graham, but before she can make a sound, something unravels and relaxes and the idea of the girl is lost, the sensation gone.

Nothing.

All she can see is what was there before. Chest of drawers, pine mirror catching the evening light, the chair covered in all her familiar, flung-off clothes. And the room absolutely itself again—corners tight and sharp, birdsong shrill and certain, ordinary evening shadows moving over the white walls.

Then, just as she dares to take a breath—

“Mary Coles.”

A flush of heat goes through her.

“Go away,” she says. Then: “I mean it. Just fuck off.”

Pulling tissues from the box, she blows her nose, wiping at her eyes. She puts on the very first thing that comes to hand—some old red velvet trousers that always used to make her feel fat, hanging off her now.

Going back downstairs, her whole self oddly steady, buoyant, light.

“That's more like it,” Graham says, and he smiles at her with genuine pleasure and, putting down the paper, gives her a kiss.

D
EBORAH AND
E
DDIE ARE ALL RIGHT.
M
ID TO LATE THIRTIES.
Friendly, pleasant, pleasantly dull. And Graham was right, Deborah's very pretty. A perfect swing of long, blond hair, big eyes, lips that look like someone has drawn them on. Eddie is unremarkable. Boyishly timid, graying hair, glasses. They've been married only three years. “Leather anniversary!” says Deborah. “Let's not go there,” says Eddie. It quickly becomes clear that they have no children.

The dinner passes easily. Mary is glad that the conversation wanders around, snaking back and forth and looping itself around a great many not very interesting subjects, but never once coming anywhere near them.

They talk about the village, Eddie's apparently tiresome commute to his business, which assesses the infrastructure of software companies. His interest in fine wines and in local history. His many unsuccessful attempts to stop smoking. Deborah's passion for interior design and her hobby of jewelry making—“not silver or anything, just some beading, though I would quite like to get into the silver.” Her book group, which meets once a month. Their elderly Siamese cat is diabetic and needs daily injections—“I know, you don't need to say it, we're completely mad.” The extension they're planning so as to create a third bedroom that could also serve as a study for Eddie.

“I do feel a bit guilty,” Deborah says, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I mean, look at this house. You'd think it was more than big enough for just the two of us, wouldn't you?”

And Mary waits, her face hot with dread, waiting for the fateful words. Having a baby. Planning a family. Pregnant. Trying for a—

“We're just two people who rather like our space,” Eddie tells them cheerfully as he nips out of the back door for a cigarette.

Mary goes upstairs to the bathroom.

“Straight up the stairs and on the left,” Deborah says. “Don't trip over the cat. He sometimes forgets where he is and falls asleep on the landing.”

“Sounds a lot like me,” says Graham, and they laugh.

Safe behind the locked door, Mary looks around the large, immaculate bathroom. The claw-foot bath, the piles of thick towels, the basket of toilet paper, the rows and rows of bottles. Mary undoes her trousers. A small, dragging ache as if her period might
be starting, but when she wipes herself there's nothing. She pulls the chain on the big, old-fashioned toilet and the paper doesn't quite go down, so she does it again.

Coming out, she finds Eddie standing there on the landing, arms folded. He grins.

“Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you.”

“What?”

“I made you jump.”

“No you didn't,” she says, though he did.

She waits for him to say something else, but he doesn't. He stands there. She doesn't know what he wants. She tells him she loves the house.

“I can't believe how big it is,” she says. “It's lovely.”

He makes a face.

“Well, I guess it ought to be, the amount we've spent on it.”

Feeling his eyes on her, Mary looks around. She looks at the pastel wall, cream carpet, the antique grandfather clock made of some shiny dark wood. None of it tells her anything.