Learning by Heart (14 page)

‘The key to all things.’

‘Suck out people’s souls.’

‘What?’ he said, leaning up on one elbow.

‘Suck us in and churn us out. For research.’

‘You have very warped ideas.’

She had run her hand down his body and caught hold of him. ‘Oh, you don’t know the half of it,’ she had whispered. ‘I’m going to show you how—’

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said.

‘You’ll see,’ she had replied, laughing. ‘No stopping now.’

She had slithered down his body and taken him into her mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time that that had happened to him. When had it gone away?

‘Oh, God,’ he had murmured, and he had tried, just for a second, to hold on to a picture of Zeph stepping out of his reach, walking away down an empty road. He saw her quite clearly for a second, dropping his hand and striding away without once turning back. And then she vanished, and he rushed headlong down the same empty pathway, the landscape fragmenting behind him, caught up in a torrent, a whirlwind. Shreds flickered past him, parts of conversations, flashes of places, scraps of the look and feel of things he knew. And then he was standing nowhere.

Bella was getting off the bed, smiling.

‘You blast me away,’ he said. And he meant it: he had been thrown out of his secure places.

‘Good,’ she had said.

He didn’t question what had happened. It sounded bad to say so, but he didn’t think of it much, and he didn’t feel guilty. He woke up the next day at six o’clock in the morning and, full of anticipation, had run five miles through crystalline streets. They had looked like pale, clean versions of kaleidoscopes, a slowly rotating jumble of cool colours with hard edges: kerbstones, the chrome on cars, the reflections in windows, the closed doors of shops, their lettering. It all seemed wonderfully highlighted and precise, every few yards another tableau to be wondered at. He had stopped half-way round, out of breath, leaned on a wall and watched the lime trees moving gently in the wind. He felt as if he had taken mescaline. Once he had used it for a few weeks; given it up years ago. Now he remembered its heightened perceptions, the curious taste in his mouth. He wanted to run off the edge of the world and keep running.

He had thought of Bella that morning as he worked, and eventually gave up and rang her. She did not answer her phone, and he left a message. There was no reply that day, or the next, and by the time she answered on the third he was disoriented by the need to see her.

He had gone to her flat. As she opened the door, he pushed it away from her hands, slammed it behind him and almost forced her in the hallway.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, entertained by his need.

‘I want you,’ he told her, pushing her backwards. ‘Where have you been?’

‘What’s it to do with you?’ she said.

He went on for perhaps two weeks in this numb need, giving Zeph barely a thought. His wife and child moved through him like shadows; he couldn’t recall anything she asked him to do, and there were arguments when he forgot.

‘What on earth is the matter with you?’ Zeph had asked, one day. ‘Do you feel ill? Is something wrong?’

He put his phone on redial for Bella’s number. He drove past her flat time and time again at night, waiting to see the lights come on. He once drove past early in the morning, at about six, and saw that the curtains had not been drawn the night before. He had stopped his car at the end of the street and crouched over the wheel, crippled by the thought that she had been with someone else.

When he worked, when he looked at the keyboard, he couldn’t conjure up the images he was supposed to be concentrating on. All he could think of was her, the things she did. Once, at a read-through, he had followed her out on to the grimy terrace where other actors went to smoke. The concrete floor was littered with cigarette ends.

She had rested her back against the door, pulled up her skirt. He knew they might be seen from the street; there might be a knock on the door at any moment.

‘You shouldn’t do any of this,’ he said, turned on by the casualness of the action and the sight of her.

‘I shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

He would lie awake at night. It was a puzzle to him how wanting Bella made him want Zeph all the more. For moments at a time, the two women became indistinguishable. He would think of one while making love to the other. It was during one of these times when, for a second, he was so lost in the act, so driven by a kind of raging, blinding emasculating thirst, a lust so out of hand, that the desire broke, and he realized he didn’t know the woman beneath him, and looked up to see Zeph’s eyes closed, her hand flung behind her head. It was the first time in a long time that they had made love, and he was struck with terrible guilt.

He had stopped suddenly, and buried his head in the pillow next to her face.

‘What is it?’ she had asked.

He couldn’t look at her.

‘What have I done?’ she had asked, trying to turn his face to her. ‘Tell me, Nick, please.’

‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘I’m sorry.’

It had been two weeks, almost three, until he had felt the guilt.

There had been not a moment of it beforehand.

The next time he saw Bella, he told her that it was over. ‘I never wanted to hurt you,’ he said.

‘You call this not hurting me?’

‘It wasn’t for always,’ he told her, trying to be truthful, and seeing at once how dismally he was handling it.

‘Well, it didn’t last long,’ she said.

He felt staggered, mortified. He had thought she would be more upset. ‘I’ve got a wife,’ he said, trying to justify himself. ‘A son.’

‘You had them six weeks ago.’

‘I know.’

‘So, what’s changed?’

‘I can’t do this,’ he told her. ‘It’s like cutting myself in two.’

Bella had put her arms round his neck. ‘Then don’t cut yourself in two,’ she said.

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said.

‘You make it difficult,’ she said, ‘when it isn’t. You hardly ever speak to each other. You told me that yourself.’ She dropped her arms from him and walked to the window. They were in another hotel; the view was of a corner of Hyde Park. ‘You can give me up, just like that?’ she asked, with her back to him. ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s a waste.’

‘Don’t be angry with me.’

She pulled an ironic face.

‘I should never have started this,’ he said.

‘You’re right.’

He couldn’t understand her reaction. ‘Are you angry?’

‘I don’t know what I am,’ she said. ‘I thought it would last longer than this,’ she murmured, ‘but why should it? You got what you wanted.’

‘Don’t say that.’ He was hurt.

She glanced up at him, shrugged. ‘It’s true,’ she said. She walked to the chair and picked up her coat.

‘Don’t go,’ he said abruptly.

She smiled as she put it on.

‘I mean it,’ he said.

‘I’m late already.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m meeting Peter Maynard.’

The actor who played opposite her. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’

The answer shocked him. She picked up her bag. He jumped to his feet. ‘Is it work?’ he asked.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘it really doesn’t matter one way or the other, does it? Not now.’

‘Are you seeing him?’ he asked. ‘Are you sleeping with him?’

‘What difference would it make?’

‘Every difference!’ he said, and a surge of jealousy went through him.

‘I don’t see why,’ she told him. ‘You sleep with someone else, don’t you?’

‘Bella,’ he murmured, ‘please don’t go.’

‘I’m doing what you want,’ she said.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘It’s not what I want.’

She regarded him for a second or two, then leaned forward and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Why can’t you leave her?’ she whispered. ‘I could make you very happy. I want you more than she does.’

He didn’t think so, but he didn’t care. He would have sold his soul at that moment to put his hands on her, to have her in bed with him, to possess her, keep her with him. ‘I will leave her,’ he lied. He stroked her neck, then wound her hair round his fingers and pulled her head back so that she was looking up into his face. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said. And he tried to draw a deep breath. The thought of her with some other man was crushing, asphyxiating. He felt as if someone had put a match to his throat, his chest.

‘Please,’ he had said, and pulled her close, opened his fingers, felt the weight of her hair, its texture. ‘Please, Bella,’ he repeated, ‘tell me you’re not sleeping with him.’

He opened his eyes to the sight of her on her knees in front of him. Two months had passed since that day; and he knew now that she had lied to him. She had been with Peter Maynard all along. He had found that out after they had parted. And he had felt, when he was told the truth, that Bella had been right when she told him so carelessly that he was damned.

He saw that he had been standing at the gates of the underworld, and condemned himself freely to hell.

‘Get up,’ he told her.

She sat back on her heels, smiling. ‘There’s no reason why we can’t take up where we left off,’ she said, ‘if you like.’

His eyes ranged over her. ‘You are unbelievable,’ he said.

‘That’s what you always told me.’ She put her head on one side and accepted what she thought was his appraising gaze.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking of,’ he said softly.

‘I do,’ she retorted.

He stood up, grabbed her wrist, pulled her to her feet.

There was a moment as he gazed into her lovely face, felt the flesh under his fingers, when he could willingly have gone back down the road. He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second. ‘Just go,’ he said. ‘This is real life, now. Please. Just go.’

Nine

In those days, there was no accurate, accepted description for what Cora had, and there was no discussion of it. Of course people knew that she had not been at the funeral, and that she was not at home.

At the nursing-home she was allowed to sit out, and the gardens were pretty. From a seat by the main house, she could see the driveway and the Somerset levels beyond. The flat plain of fields was mesmerizing: a haze hung over it in the morning and late in the evening; during the day, in the heat, ripples ran over it, currents of air drugged with a sweet green scent.

All she did in the first ten days was sleep, sent into oblivion by sedatives. It was like being in a boat, far away from the shore, on a whispering ocean.

Her father came to see her every day.

‘What have you told everyone?’ she asked.

‘That you’ve gone back to London,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you tell them the truth?’ she asked.

‘Because I don’t know what the truth is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened.’

She saw the shock in his face. He had aged since her mother’s death. ‘I feel a fraud,’ she told him softly. ‘You should be here, being looked after. Not me.’

‘Cora,’ he replied, ‘you’ve had a breakdown. It’s not your fault.’

A nervous breakdown
. People would say that about her for a long time afterwards.
You know that she had a nervous breakdown when her mother died
? They would say it at the wedding; she would overhear them. And Richard would be spoken of in admiring terms, as the man who had brought her back to life; the kind man who was not afraid of being with a woman whose personality could not withstand a death in the family.

‘Richard Ward has asked about you,’ her father said.

She looked down at the teacups, neatly arranged on the tray in front of them.

‘Would you like to see him?’

‘Not here,’ she said.

‘When you come back?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘He was very good that afternoon.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘He was.’ She glanced up again to see her father’s worried expression. ‘Cora,’ he said, ‘I’ve been speaking to Jenny.’

‘When?’

‘She phoned me. She’d heard about your mother.’

‘I see.’

‘She tells me she’s getting married.’

‘Yes, she is.’

He hesitated. ‘She mentioned a man,’ he said. ‘David Menzies.’

Cora closed her eyes. In the room behind them – the windows were open – someone had put a record on the gramophone. The scratchy, tinny tones came drifting out into the garden. It was an old Frank Sinatra song from seven or eight years before: ‘Three Coins In The Fountain’. They had the same record at home, all the ballads: ‘Cara Mia’, ‘Oh Mein Papa’ and ‘Outside Of Heaven’. When she had been a teenager, those were the tunes that were played after dinner. Sometimes, if it was a party, her mother had put on comic songs, like ‘She Wears Red Feathers’. She could remember her dancing about, a glass held high. One Christmas. One new year.

‘Who is he?’ her father asked.

‘No one significant,’ she told him.

‘Did he cause this?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She could see that her answer disappointed him. ‘I’m coming home,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to stay here and cost you a fortune.’

He had put a hand to his eyes. ‘I only want you to get better, darling.’

‘I am better,’ she said. ‘I am.’

When she got home Richard came to see her. He walked into the house in the middle of a morning about a fortnight later, in the first week of May, through the open kitchen door, calling her name. ‘Cora?’

She was standing at the big kitchen table, with the crockery laid out in front of her and all the cupboard and pantry doors open.

‘You’re busy,’ he said.

‘Everything’s dusty,’ she told him. ‘I’m washing it all.’

She had been up since six. She didn’t sleep well. After she had seen her father off to work, she had emptied the linen closet, bringing down all the sheets and towels, napkins and pillowcases. She had inspected them minutely, opening them out. Some bore yellow lines, starched and unused for years. Some smelt of lavender, sprinkled by her mother. These she held to her face before she plunged them into the washtub. She worked relentlessly, as she had seen her mother do sometimes with the cleaner who came on Mondays and Thursdays. It was hard, manual work, taking the linen through the mangle and carrying it all, dripping, to the vegetable patch where the clothes-lines were. Now, at lunchtime, the rows of washing slapped in the wind.