Learning by Heart (10 page)

‘Did you get a taxi here?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘A bus.’

‘I’ll walk you to the stop,’ he said.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

He yawned. He glanced at the kitchen, then smiled at her. ‘Don’t bother about the washing-up,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

She stared at him, and he continued to smile at her.

She picked up her handbag and went out into the hallway to where he had hung her coat. She put it on, thinking of nothing except that she must get out as quickly as possible.

‘You’re a nice kid,’ he said.

She went down the steps into the street and walked quickly to the embankment. At the river she stopped, put her hands briefly on the wall and looked down at the water. She could feel something soaking her underwear: she wondered if she was bleeding. She pressed herself against the wall, feeling sick, and closed her eyes.

Behind her, two buses came and went.

They passed, rattling along the road, their destinations backlit in black-and-white, their interiors yellow oblongs. Faces looked out at her. Eventually, she turned back towards the street and watched the tail-lights passing towards Chelsea Wharf and Battersea Bridge. She watched the taxis come and go. She watched the lights being turned off in the flats opposite her.

And when next she looked at her watch, it was twenty past midnight.

She turned east, and began to walk.

When she got home from Sherborne, it was past two o’clock and she saw her daughter’s car in the driveway. Zeph was sitting on the doorstep with Joshua.

Cora got out quickly. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she called.

Zeph stood up. ‘I was beginning to worry about you.’

She walked forward and kissed her mother’s cheek. Cora bent down to hug Joshua. He hung back behind his mother’s legs. ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ Cora asked.

‘Where have you been?’ Zeph said.

‘I had to go to the solicitor’s, and then I forgot the food. I had to walk back. How long have you been here?’

‘An hour.’

‘Oh dear,’ Cora murmured. ‘There’s a key here – look – under the stone pot by the door.’

‘You didn’t tell me,’ Zeph said, ‘and you didn’t take your phone. How can I get in touch with you if you don’t keep it with you? And how am I supposed to know where the key is?’

‘I know,’ Cora said. ‘I was in a rush this morning …’

‘It’s what it’s for,’ Zeph said, ‘the phone. For keeping in touch. You should always have it. You should make it a habit.’

‘Yes,’ Cora said, hearing the note in her daughter’s voice. She looked from Joshua to his mother, and back.

‘You’re bloody hopeless.’ Zeph sighed heavily. ‘Let me help you with the shopping.’

They took it into the house, and as they crossed the doorstep Cora saw disorientation in Zeph’s expression. Joshua went straight to Denny’s bed in the hallway under the stairs, and lay down in it. He curled himself into a ball, and stuck his thumb into his mouth. She hadn’t seen him do that since he had started to walk and made a beeline for the Labrador slumped lazily in the big wicker bed.

‘He’s all right,’ Zeph said. ‘Leave him. He’s tired out.’

Cora followed her daughter into the kitchen. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

Zeph had sat down at the table and put her head into her hands, surrounded by the laden carrier-bags. Cora hesitated by her side. When Zeph took away her hands, she looked defeated. ‘Mum, sit down,’ she said.

Cora obeyed.

Zeph glanced briefly at the hallway. She got up and pushed the door almost closed on Joshua. She came back to the table. ‘I’ve left Nick.’

‘What?’ Cora wondered if she had heard her correctly.

‘I’ve left him. This morning.’

‘But why?’

‘He had an affair.’

There was a beat of silence. ‘Oh, no,’ Cora said. ‘Oh, no.’

‘He admitted it.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’

They stared at each other. ‘Please don’t think of defending him,’ Zeph warned. ‘Not over this.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ Cora said.

Zeph closed her eyes briefly. ‘You always seem to take his side.’

Cora was astounded. ‘You think I’d support him in this?’

‘I’m not going back.’

Cora reached across the table, but Zeph didn’t take her hand. ‘Don’t try to persuade me,’ she said.

‘I’m not going to,’ Cora said, ‘and I’m not going to defend him.’

At this, Zeph began to cry softly, her shoulders shaking. Cora got quickly to her feet, went to the other side of the table and put her arms round her. Zeph sat rigidly, closed in on herself. ‘Where is he now?’ Cora asked.

‘In Paris. Working.’ Zeph took a crumpled tissue from her pocket.

‘He’s gone to Paris – after this?’

‘He went because I promised not to leave. I waited until he’d gone.’

Cora dropped her arms. ‘But he’ll come after you,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter. I can’t go back. I can’t bear it.’

‘What about Joshua?’ Cora went back to her chair and looked at her daughter, distressed.

Zeph sighed, as if she might be trying to find words. Eventually, all she asked was, ‘Can we stay here or not?’

‘Of course you can,’ Cora said.

Zeph glanced back, once, towards the almost-closed door to the hall. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but you don’t know what it’s like. You and Dad were always working together. You never had to worry. So please …’ She frowned, shut her eyes, and held the palm of one hand outwards as if to ward off further comment or criticism.

Cora hesitated, torn between taking the hand, and frightened that the gesture might drive her daughter out of reach. ‘All right,’ she said.

Zeph stood up and went out to the hall, where Cora could hear her whispering to Joshua. She picked up the nearest shopping bag, and took it to the cupboard. There, she stopped. The brown-paper package that had come in the post was still sitting there, unopened. She put her hand on it, on the Italian postmark.

‘Mother,’ Zeph said, from the doorway.

Cora looked around. ‘Is Joshua all right? Does he want a drink?’

‘In a minute.’

‘You’d better lift him out of Denny’s bed. It’s not very clean for him.’

Zeph walked a pace or two forward. ‘Do you know where Denny is?’ she asked.

‘I couldn’t find him,’ Cora told her. ‘I looked everywhere this morning.’

‘If I can get Josh to sleep in a little while,’ Zeph said quietly, ‘we’d better go up to Border Wood. Just you and I.’

La Lettura

My letter is returned to me. The letter I sent you has been returned to me. There is my handwriting, across the envelope. I wrote it down exactly as you told it to me, so it cannot be wrong. It cannot be
.

Yet it has come back unopened again. This is the second time that it has come back inside another envelope, a larger one with the note attached that I sent when I returned it – the note, the little letter. Did you see it, darling? I write, I write. Did you not see the little letter, Cora? and I do not recognize the handwriting because it is simply printing in capitals. I have looked and looked at it, wondering if you printed the capitals across the envelope, sealed it over my own letter to you, and returned it. Nothing else in the envelope, no letter, no note. Nothing. Just my own letter and note, opened and resealed
.

It is two months since you were here, Cora
.

I wonder if you know what you have done to me with this. Not only with your absence, but with my letter. It is an insult. It is not right for a woman to insult a man. A man should be respected: he should not be ignored. I am not one of the village boys who hangs around the street. Never did I insult you. You told me you knew that many Sicilian men wanted to marry a rich girl from abroad, an English or American girl, and you smiled when you told me that some had already proposed to you, without asking if you were married. Proposing within an hour of meeting you, in the days before I saw you. How funny you found this, too: you found my country funny, I suppose. Perhaps you found me funny. Perhaps when you got home you laughed at me, and I have been insulted without knowing it
.

But I know this is not true. Even as I write it, even as I am angry, I know it is not true. You were not lying when you told me all your heart
.

Something must have happened to you to make you return my letters and not write to me. I am in despair that it is something bad. This is why I shall do exactly as you have done. I shall put the first letter – it is myself, Cora, at least look at me, at least open the letter – and I shall put a third letter inside a larger envelope, and I shall return it to you. You will have three letters. And if there is anything bad, if you are ill, if you have changed houses, gone away, if you have a new address, you must tell me it all, Cora. For I have a right to know. You are mine in every way that truly matters
.

I shall be more careful about the third. I will prove to you that I am patient and that I can wait, even if this would be shameful to any Sicilian man, to be made to feel like a child waiting for his mother’s approval
.

What is wrong? Is there trouble with Richard? I can’t write that name. I can’t write it again. I wonder if he touches you. That is what I wonder all the time, if he is touching you as I am sitting here alone in the house, writing these lines. He is touching you, and you allow it. That is what I think. Right now, as the ink drains from my pen and stains the page, he is drawing you out like thread through fabric, a needle sewing up the divisions between you
.

That is his work, to make the seam tight, to bind the two of you together. That is his right, and your duty. I would not deny a man his duty or right, and what I ask for myself is sinful. I know that I have sinned and that I continue to sin. I go to church but it is all for nothing. It has no more meaning. It is terrible to lose the centre of your life like that. The pity of Christ I feel will pass over me: even He will exclude me because He knows that I think of what is denied me; He will know that I thought of the needle and the thread. And that needle passes through me, too, tying my heart to my spine. That is what it feels like. I have shrunk inside until my heart touches my backbone and ribs. I am so full of shame
.

But I will still write the letter
.

I cannot bear this separation any longer. And something keeps you from me and from the promises you made to me, I must understand what it is
.

Write to me. Write to me
.

For you made me promises, and I gave an oath to you
.

Six

Cora was in Border Wood when she saw Nick. She had gone back to Denny’s grave – they had buried him where he lay, at almost midnight, after Joshua had gone to sleep for the day, walking up through the trees and finding the dog with the aid of torchlight. It had been eerie, in the darkness, digging among the knotted undergrowth, branches brushing their shoulders, the wind pulling at the tops of the birches and sycamores. Cora had been worried that it was worse for her daughter, almost, than it was for her. She had brought Denny home as a puppy when Zeph was sixteen.

It had been one of those teenage years when Zeph had felt nothing was going right. She had no boyfriend, she had fallen out with her closest girlfriend, and she had spent long hours in her room. Cora had hoped that Denny would bring Zeph out of herself, and it had worked. Denny had been Zeph’s slave until she had gone to university in Kent two years later. For weeks afterwards, Denny would go to the bottom of the lane and stand by the gate, where Zeph had got off the school bus. Once or twice Cora had noticed the vehicle slow as it rounded the corner. Denny’s tail would give a tentative half-wag as it went past.

The dog had represented Cora’s own lost feeling: an empty house, with no one coming home at night. They had rattled around together, Denny following her as she moved from the kitchen to the sitting room, with her supper tray, to watch television. She had turned on the radio and TV constantly, so that she could hear voices, and it seemed like company. After a week or two, she allowed Denny to come upstairs and lie by her bed at night. He never had before, but she couldn’t bear the sound of him walking up and down the flagstone hall, stopping by the front door. She couldn’t look at his almost comically mournful face: she saw too much of her own self-pity in it.

But last night Zeph had borne the task with resignation. When Cora couldn’t roll the dog’s inert body into the ground, it was Zeph who, with a grimace of unhappiness, did the job. Cora had reached down and felt him.

‘What are you doing?’ Zeph had asked.

‘I’m trying to make him comfortable,’ Cora had replied, out of breath.

‘Oh, Mum,’ Zeph had said, with sympathy. ‘It doesn’t matter which way he’s lying, you know.’

‘It does,’ Cora had whispered, as Zeph scooped earth into the grave. ‘It does.’

They had come back very cold, and saying little. In the relative warmth of the kitchen, Cora had switched on the kettle and held up a cup to Zeph. Zeph had merely shaken her head, and Cora’s heart had gone out to her child, who looked ghost-like.

‘Not a particularly good day, all round,’ she commented, hoping to see a smile of black humour.

‘I’ve had quite a few better ones,’ Zeph replied. She paused. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Cora had replied. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Zeph had gone slowly out of the room and upstairs to bed.

Now Cora saw movement on the path out of the corner of her eye. She looked up and Nick was standing there.

The two gazed at each other. There was no greeting. ‘Where is she?’ he said.

‘She’s out,’ Cora said. ‘She’s taken Joshua to the doctor.’

Nick glanced briefly at the ground behind her.

‘We had to bury Denny last night,’ Cora told him. ‘He died out here during the day.’

‘I’ve been looking for you for a while. What’s the matter with Josh?’

‘It’s just a sore throat. A cough. And she wanted to register him.’ As soon as she had said it, she realized how tactless she had been. She walked away from the grave and on to the path.