The Heart Broke In (43 page)

The day after Rose arrived they took the ferry to Zanzibar, Bec, Rose, Leo and Alex, and made camp on a quiet beach where the water was shallow far out to sea. Alex went to fetch drinks from a kiosk. Rose lay in her bikini on a towel, propping herself up on her elbows. Leo sat under an umbrella, digging a hole in the sand with a plastic spade under Bec’s supervision. In a moment, Rose decided, she’d run down to the water.

‘I like it here,’ she said. ‘You must be happy.’

‘I try not to think about it,’ said Bec. ‘It sometimes seems you’re only enjoying the present because you’re looking forward to the nostalgia you’ll feel for it later.’

‘Don’t think about it, then!’ said Rose. She jumped up and ran off towards the sea and Bec watched her go, thinking how the world threw off young girl after young girl, like flames in the air.

Bec reached out with her fingers and moved the hair away from Leo’s eyes, even though it would fall straight back, even though he didn’t want her to. She just wanted to touch him. She hated to think she might miss a touch that could never be made again. He moaned in protest and shook his head and
dug more fiercely. He was only two, and already she was having to work around his autonomy.

‘What do you think’s down there?’ she said. ‘Silver? Gold? Uranium?’ She began shaping his workings into neat cones of sand. The story of BabyBjörning had worked in her favour, but it had never happened as often as the legend had it. Carrying an infant around was one thing; lobbying with one was another. It was hard to work a baby into a presentation. They screamed, they shat, they puked, they demanded the nipple. What you gained in drama you lost in coherence. She’d come to rely more on Zuri and Alex. She’d begun to think about a full-time nanny.

The haemoproteus vaccine was still crawling towards production, along with the other malaria vaccines that didn’t quite do the job but in combination might. Now that she had a child of her own in Tanzania it wasn’t so obvious to her that a live parasite would be his best protection. She remembered what Ritchie had said:
They’re not going to thank you in Africa if you cure malaria and all the kids are wearing bottle-bottom glasses and bumping into trees
.

She hadn’t spoken to her brother since the day in the cemetery almost three years before. Her mother had been angry with her for not seeming to care enough when Ritchie split up with Karin. Ritchie had called and emailed her for a while, asking for forgiveness, and Bec hadn’t replied. His last message had been to tell her of the death of O’Donabháin, of heart failure, in his sleep.

In Northern Ireland her father operated, she’d been told once, at the margin of military control, with his own network, and it had never been possible to fix, from the notes he left behind, the identity of the informer whose life he’d saved by
keeping silent under torture. At his trial O’Donabháin claimed to have later found out who the traitor was from another source, and to have ordered his murder soon after her father was killed. There was a body; there was a name. Her father’s silence had given the informer a few extra weeks of life.

After he’d visited O’Donabháin in Dublin, when he was still trying to persuade her to let him make his film, Ritchie told Bec about what the old fighter had said, and Bec had been surprised and moved by O’Donabháin’s angry tribute to her father’s courage.
Having to play the fucking hero
, that’s what he’d said.

It seemed to Bec that she’d tried to be something like a heroine, to be something like her father, to draw from the same certainties he stood by. She’d looked hard for the roots of goodness holding up the world. She’d been ready to be supported and limited. She’d been ready for a moral foundation, but she hadn’t found one.

Had it been after Leo was born that doubts had set in, or had it been earlier, when she’d fallen in love with Alex? And had her doubts about whether O’Donabháin had told Ritchie the truth come of their own accord, or was it that she wanted to invent a different version of what happened when she realised there was a limit after all, and that she was constrained not by some universal structure of good and evil, but by the needs of the ones she loved?

She’d believed so strongly in her father the hero, who’d sacrificed his life so that another man might live. And now she found herself wanting to believe something else. She imagined him sitting bleeding and bruised in the chair in the farmhouse, looking up at the masked O’Donabháin yelling at him, with the two other masked Republicans watching and
pointing their weapons. She imagined him having recognised O’Donabháin’s voice at the beginning, and she wanted to believe that he realised eventually O’Donabháin was not, as he thought, going to find a way to help him.

She wanted to believe that at that moment her father decided he would name the traitor, not because he was a coward, but because he had a wife and children. She wanted to believe he thought of her, Bec, and that she was more important to him than saving the informer. She wanted to believe that O’Donabháin shouted again: ‘Who is it?’ and that her father began to form, with his swollen mouth, the beginning of the letter ‘Y’. And she wanted to believe that, at that moment and for that reason, O’Donabháin had shot him, before he could pronounce the word
You
, because the traitor was O’Donabháin.

Bec saw Alex coming towards them with a fistful of cold bottles, hopeful, distracted, loving, as he’d been in the village with the vaccines. Later Rose would look after Leo for the night and she and Alex would have a hotel room to themselves. Nothing could have been less like making love than the evening in Citron Square when Dougie, cumbersome, restrained, damp with fear, had impregnated her in the dark. And yet a strange turning-on lingered; in those moments when Alex seemed to forget her, when their family became all form and process and procedure, the memory of her transgression gave her heart a kick and her desire a dose she could use.

Bec would rather have been sure that she’d transgressed purely for Alex and for their happiness, for the idea that became Leo. But she didn’t think it wrong that her love for them was made more sound by the memory of a few minutes with Alex’s brother, a moment of choice and freedom and danger and being herself that had its own needle-like purpose,
beyond its aim. The memory of the tiny dose of selfish, raw desire contained in an unselfish act of will protected her now that she’d yielded so much to fate. After all, had her father fought his way back to her, she wouldn’t have begrudged him the longing for his own freedom, the longing to feel the wind and sun on his own skin again, if only it had helped him get home.

JAMES MEEK
was born in London, England, and grew up in Dundee, Scotland. His novel
The People’s Act of Love
won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It has been published in more than thirty countries.
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
won Le Prince Maurice Prize. Meek is the author of two other novels and two collections of short stories. His journalism has won a number of British and international awards. He lives in London. Visit him online at
www.jamesmeek.net
.

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The Heart Broke In
Copyright 2012 by James Meek All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41378-7

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

FIRST CANADIAN EDITION

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Meek, James, 1962–
The heart broke in / James Meek.

ISBN 978-1-44341-376-3

I. Title.
PR6063.E455H43 2012 823’.914 C2012-903097-X

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