A Half Forgotten Song (10 page)

“Yes, well, I didn’t think of it. I said I was sorry. I didn’t get to tell her a story either, you know. She was out before she hit the pillow.”

“Yes, but you get to put her to bed and kiss her good night and be with her all day. Don’t you?” he said, not caring how childish he sounded.

“Look, I’m tired too. I don’t want to argue.” Her shoulders were braced against the chair back behind her. She flicked her eyes away from the screen, a look of appeal, of exasperation. To Lowell, of course, the hidden listener. Zach was at least grateful that he wasn’t watching the screen, so he couldn’t see how shabby Zach looked. He sighed.

“Fine. Tomorrow night then. For the story, not the argument.”

“Tomorrow night she has a sleepover . . . Sunday night?”

“Okay. Same time. Please—” He wasn’t sure what he’d been about to ask. Or beg. That weariness again. He shut his eyes and rubbed the lids with his thumb and fingers until red blooms spangled across his vision.

“Sunday night. I promise,” Ali said, nodding emphatically, as if to reassure a child.

“Good night, Ali.” He cut the call before she could respond, but it was a pathetic gesture and gave him no satisfaction. He switched off the computer and stumbled up to his room in darkness.

Ali had always been in control, right from the very beginning. Zach could see it now, in a way he hadn’t at the time, blinded by love, and by wishful thinking. When he proposed, she took forty-eight hours to decide. He’d waited in a state of almost unbearable anticipation, knowing that she must say yes, because he loved her so much—because they loved each other—but at the same time plagued by the underlying notion that she might say no. When she finally accepted, he was too happy to reflect on this long hiatus, but now he saw that she really had been of two minds, that she really had needed all that time to weigh up the pros and cons and decide he was worth the risk. He had vowed to reward this trust of hers, this gamble. He had vowed to make her happy, to be the perfect husband and father, but once Elise was born, there were a thousand tiny comments, a thousand fleeting frowns to let him know he was falling short.
Give her to me,
he heard again and again, when he couldn’t get Elise to sleep, or get her arms into her cardigan sleeves, or stop her crying.
Give her to me,
in a tone of stifled exasperation.

It was around that time that they began to talk about moving out of London, about moving to the West Country to see if Zach could make a better go of a gallery there. For a year, they both resolutely pitched this plan as a step forwards, as an expansion of their lives, not as a step away, a contraction, a last chance. Only once or twice, as they were shown around disappointingly small apartments, did he catch her looking at him with something like contempt in her eyes—gone when she blinked but shocking enough to chill him. Bath didn’t suit Ali. She missed her law firm in London, and their social life there, and when Zach’s falling income meant she had to return to work to support the three of them, she found the work stultifying and dull. Zach suspected that Ali made up her mind a long time before she finally decided to leave him. He suspected that she made the decision calmly, rationally, and chose her moment with as much care as she had chosen to marry him in the first place.

F
irst thing in the morning he took the car into Swanage, one of two small towns nearby that he guessed would have a butcher. It was a bright morning; the sun was warm but the light seemed paler than even a week ago as the turning season stretched it thinner, sapping its strength away. The dusty gorse bushes lining the road were more gray than green; all spines and shriveled yellow flowers. Swanage nestled around its sandy beach and harbor, the streets still busy with late holidaymakers; but without any children, now that the schools had gone back, all the bright little shops seemed somehow bereft. Zach found a popular butcher’s shop, the stock of meat in the chiller disappearing rapidly and leaving only its bloody tang to hang in the air.

“How old are your hearts?” he asked when he got to the front of the queue.

“Oh, everything’s perfectly fresh, sir,” said the young man behind the counter.

“No, I mean—I’m sure it is. But I need a . . .” He paused, feeling foolish. “I need a bullock’s heart no more than a day old.”

“Right,” the butcher said with a smile, and if he thought to ask why, he thought better of it. “Well, all the hearts we have are from bullocks, generally, so no need to worry about that. As for less than a day old . . . well, these came in to us yesterday morning, so they’ll have been slaughtered the day before, probably. So more like thirty-six hours rather than less than twenty-four. But really—they’re perfectly fresh. I don’t see how you’d tell the difference. Have a sniff if you like.” He picked one up in his gloved hand and hefted it a couple of times before holding it out to Zach.

“No, thanks, I’ll take your word for it,” Zach said, recoiling. The heart nestled perfectly in the palm of the butcher’s hand. He was suddenly sure that Dimity Hatcher didn’t want it for culinary purposes, and if it wasn’t food then it was . . . what? Entrails. He swallowed.

“Do you ever get any in less than a day old?” he asked, aware that he was beginning to sound weird. But the young man smiled affably. Perhaps he was used to even odder requests.

“Well . . . let me think. Tuesday’s probably your best bet. I can keep one back for you, if you like? If you come in first thing it’ll still be less than a day old.”

“Tuesday? That’s longer than I wanted to wait.” Zach eyed the heart still sitting in the butcher’s hand. “I’ll take that one. Like you say, I’m sure it’ll be fine even if it’s a bit over the time limit.” The butcher wrapped it up with the hint of a smile on his lips. Zach decided that the damage was done, and to go all out with the weirdness. “Is there a haberdashery near here? Somewhere I can buy pins?”

He found the shop, thanks to the butcher’s directions, and after being briefly bewildered by the range of pins a person could buy, he picked plain old-fashioned ones. All steel, no plastic heads, no fancy sizes. As he came out of the sewing shop, he saw a small stationer on the opposite side of the street, and he paused. He was reluctant to attempt to paint or draw anything, in case it turned out every bit as flat and disappointing as his last efforts. He felt a kind of dread, in case that hadn’t been a blip, or a lack of inspiration at the time. In case he really had spent whatever talent he’d once possessed. It was over a year now, since he’d tried. He went in just to see what they had, and came out with two large sketchpads, some chalks, some inks, pencils, a tin of watercolors with a mixing tray in the lid, and a couple of brushes, one fine and one as thick as the tip of his little finger. He hadn’t meant to spend so much, but being in possession of such fundamental tools felt like seeing old friends. Like remaking a childhood acquaintance. He drove back to Blacknowle with the underlying excitement of having a present to unwrap, waiting for when he arrived.

But the first present wasn’t for him, it was for Dimity Hatcher. He parked at the pub and walked down to her cottage, not trusting his car to make it along the rutted, stony track. As he reached The Watch, he looked down the hill to Southern Farm, eyes searching for a dark-haired figure, moving quickly, precisely. Strange that the way she walked had already embedded itself so firmly into his memory. But there was no sign of life, other than a scattering of beige sheep in the big field behind the house, so he knocked loudly on the door of The Watch.

When Dimity Hatcher opened the door, she peeped out through the crack just as she had previously, and every bit as suspiciously, as though they’d never met before. Zach’s heart sank. Her hair was loose again, hanging down around her face. A loose blue dress, almost like a caftan, and those same fingerless red mittens.

“It’s Zach, Miss Hatcher. I came to see you before, remember? You asked me to come back and bring you some things . . . and maybe to talk about Charles Aubrey a bit more?”

“Of course I remember. It was yesterday,” she said, after a pause.

“Oh, great. Yes, of course.” Zach smiled.

“Did you bring it? What I asked for?” she said. Zach fumbled in his bag for the well-wrapped heart, and held it out to her.

“I wrapped it in newspaper, to keep it cool until I got here.”

“Good, good. Can’t have it gone bad,” she said, almost to herself, and then murmured under her breath as she unwrapped it, wordless sounds that might have been a tune. As soon as the heart was unwrapped, she sniffed it. Not a quick, cautious sniff like Zach would have given it, but a long, deep inhale. The sniff of a connoisseur, like an expert would sniff wine. Zach fidgeted a little, uneasy in his deception. Dimity poked the heart with her index finger and watched the flesh return slowly, refilling the dimple she’d made. Then she stuffed the paper bundle back into Zach’s hands with a shake of her head. No irritation, just something like disappointment. “No more than a day old,” she said, and shut the door.

Speechless, Zach knocked on the door again, but Dimity clearly had no intention of opening it. Cursing, he went to the window and put his face up to it with his hands on either side to block out the light. He was well aware that this was unlikely to aid his case.

“Miss Hatcher? Dimity? I brought the pins you asked for, and I can get you a . . . newer heart, on Tuesday the butcher said. I’ll bring it to you then, shall I? Would you like the pins now, though? Miss Hatcher?” He peered into the gloom within and was sure he saw movement. As a last-ditch attempt, he pulled a copy of
Burlington Magazine—
a glossy art-world periodical—out of his bag, opened it to a drawing of Dimity and Delphine together, and held it up to the glass. “I was going to ask you about this picture, Dimity. If you remembered when it was drawn, and what game you were playing? And what Aubrey’s daughter Delphine was like?” He thought of the drawing of Delphine, hanging in his gallery, and all the long hours he’d spent gazing at it. Again came that frisson, that sense of the unreal, that here was someone who had seen his idol made flesh. Had touched her skin, held her hand. But there was no sound from within, no further movement. Zach dropped his hands and stepped back from the window, defeated. In the glass he was a black reflection, an outline, and behind him the sea and the sky were shining.

He walked past the cottage and down to the cliff top, where he sat cross-legged and squinted out at the water. The breeze moving over the sea made the surface smooth and then puckered; alternately matte and then incandescent with light. There were great swells on it, seeming to rise up from beneath the surface; long trails, which might have been the ghostly wakes of boats that had moved out of sight or the telltale sign of a current pulling away from the land, all unseen. Imagining its strength, the inescapable pull of all that water, gave Zach a shiver. Faintly, just behind his eyes, came the urge to try to paint the dazzling scene in front of him, but then a flash of something pale and moving caught his eye. Hannah Brock had appeared on the beach below him. He couldn’t see how she’d got down there, since she certainly hadn’t come past The Watch and there didn’t seem to be any other way into the little cove below. But there she was, and as he watched, she stripped off her jeans and shirt and picked her way to the water’s edge in a faded red bikini. Her hair, free of the green scarf this time, flew about in the wind, and she was soon up to her ankles in the water. Zach saw her fingers extend, spread wide, and then clench into fists. It must be cold. He smiled slightly. Hannah propped her fists on her narrow hips and stared out to sea, just as he had done a moment before. Such a long, flat horizon always drew the eye; it was irresistible. Zach hunkered down as low as he could, and shuffled as far back from the edge as possible while still being able to see her. To be caught looking again would be the death of it, he warned himself seriously. No coming back from that. The thought caught him off guard—the death of what?

Eventually, Hannah turned to her right and moved along to the edge of the cove. Her skin was light brown, not the ghastly white Zach knew was hiding under his own clothes. Her spare frame looked pared down, with nothing superfluous. Flat breasts and thin arms, only a narrowing at the waist to stop her being boyish. But at the same time she seemed as far from frail as was possible. Every inch of her looked poised and vital. Poised for a fight, perhaps. He remembered the challenge in her eyes when she’d spoken to him in the pub.
What do you want with her?
She climbed up onto the rocks at the far edge of the beach, and walked along them where they jutted out into the sea. When she got to what looked like the edge, she kept going for another fifty feet or so, wading through lapping water up to her knees. Zach watched, fascinated. There must be a shelf under the water, a rock flat enough and wide enough to walk along even if the water meant you couldn’t see your footing clearly. She paused at the end for a second, tensed, and dived in with one clean movement.

She didn’t come up for a long time. Zach had a horrible vision of concealed rocks, and an undertow, but of course she must know the beach, and the water, far better than he. She surfaced a long way east of where she’d gone in, virtually opposite Zach as he perched on the cliff. She raked her hair back from her face, trod water for a moment, and then, with a splash, was gone again. For fifteen minutes or so she swam, over the water and under it, sculling idly on her back, and Zach stopped worrying about her spotting him, since it seemed she wasn’t going to. When she climbed out, her shoulders were high and tense, and he could see she was cold in the breeze. He wanted to go down to the beach and meet her, just then. With her hair streaming water and a drip hanging from her chin, and goose bumps all over her body. She would taste of salt. She dressed quickly, pulling her clothes over her wet skin with careless ferocity, and then she vanished from view, too close to the cliff for him to see where she went.

H
e was down by the cliff edge a long time. Dimity could see him from the kitchen window, and she returned to check every few minutes. Technically, it was her land; technically, he was trespassing on it. Valentina wouldn’t have had it—she’d have been out in a flash to chase him off with her violent eyes and that voice of hers that could carry a half mile if she wanted it to. She hesitated at the window for a while, wondering if she should have asked him in after all, wondering if she still should. But she had been so hoping to make the hearth charm today, so hoping to stop any more unwanted visitors getting in. And maybe to get rid of one who’d already come back and let herself in. She peered out at him again. That fleeting first resemblance he’d borne to Charles had gone completely. This man’s hands and head were still instead of moving, glancing, switching fast like Charles’s had. He had none of the fire, none of the energy. The young man on the cliffs looked more like someone walking in their sleep, and she was half afraid he might fall forwards and tumble over the edge.