The Other Half of My Heart (17 page)

Of course he would never have given her Snowdrop – and his parents would never have agreed to it – if he hadn't known that Tina Randolph was The One. What he hadn't understood, until now, sitting on the stairs with a Siamese cat yowling round his ankles and the sound of at least seven conversations coming through the wall at him from the dining room, was how deeply love would affect him. He'd thought he would miss Tina, but ‘missing' had been an abstract concept, something that he didn't think would get in the way. He hadn't thought he would lie awake thinking about her, hadn't imagined that saying goodbye to her on the phone would mean that he would need to step outside the back door and breathe the warm evening air until his heart had steadied and he could go back into the house and play his part: Roddy Flood, rising star, down-to-earth sort, practically one of the family.

One night, he'd attempted to tell Tina that he missed her; but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, there was a fit of giggling from below, and Antonia and Amber, Fieldens three and four (Roddy thinks), clattered out from under the stairs where they had been listening in. So Roddy didn't even hear Tina's reply.

Still. It's only a week until his trip home for the Flood Ball, which falls in the middle of his time away. He'd hoped that Tina would come down to see him, or he would come up, some time before, but his show schedule is heavy and the Floods' stable yard staffing is stretched, partly by his absence and partly because it's the summer holiday season so they are at least one groom down every day. After the ball, it's only four weeks until he goes home for good. Or, if not for good, home for the last time before he makes things with Tina more permanent. He, Fred and Fran had always talked, in a one-of-these-days way, about converting one of the outbuildings for Roddy when he wanted to have his own place, but given the easy relationship he had with his parents, and the fact that they didn't mind his girlfriends staying over and didn't comment about who those girlfriends were, there has never been much of a need. Now, it feels like time for him and Tina to have their own place. He thinks Tina will agree. He thinks that she loves him. But he thinks, too, about the things she said about the two of them, that strange night when she'd cried.

He wishes he'd managed to tell her, better than he did, that he felt as though he was the lucky one, saved from the Auroras and Fudges of the world by her simple, quiet way of being. He's arrived at the place where he wants to be, and found it as solid and calm as a steady canter. He gets all the excitement that he needs in his life by jumping a clear round, and anyway life with Tina near him is quietly, viscerally thrilling, because he just cannot believe that she would want to put up with him and all that comes with him, the weight of expectation, the crazy years of competition coming up, the fact that he didn't even think about what effect his being away would have on her. He had been amazed to find that Tina would think any differently about the two of them, let alone see herself as a second-best option. He was glad that she was so moved by his gift of Snowdrop. There had been a moment, as they made their way down to the yard, when he doubted his wisdom. He had wondered whether she would turn to him and say, but don't you see, this just goes to show how different we are. You live in a world where you can give a horse away. But she had got it, and he had headed for the Fieldens' place as sure as he could be that all was well.

‘Still, not long to the ball!' Aurora says, as they walk the course that's set up for them today. The turns are tight.

‘Yes.'

‘Anastasia's agitating to come this year, but I've told her there won't be enough room in the car.'

‘You're coming?' He hopes he doesn't sound disappointed.

‘Yes, of course, we always come! Don't you remember our little … escapade?'

Ah, yes, he does. Well, barely. He remembers getting drunk and being pulled into a – what was it, a cupboard, a cloakroom? – by Aurora, who had tried to take his trousers off. She had been as drunk as he was, and she gave up on his cummerbund in giggles, and undid his zip instead. Her bracelet had caught in it, so they had to be rescued by – he can't remember who. He remembers a lot of whispering, though, and how the story expanded and expanded until it was a legend nothing like the tawdry, disorienting fumble Roddy can only half recall.

‘Anastasia might enjoy herself,' he says.

Aurora pulls a face. ‘Yes, but we'll have to listen to her jabbering all the way, and all the way back, and with Ma and Pa and you and me and Anastasia and all the dresses and everything squashed into the car, it will be a nightmare.'

Roddy laughs, enjoying Aurora's cheerful ignorance of her own non-stop talking. ‘Yes, it would be,' he says, ‘but I'll take the Cosworth, and then you can all travel in a bit more comfort.'

‘Oh, good,' Aurora says, ‘that sounds like fun! I'll come with you.'

Roddy's mother is rarely uncharitable, but she has been heard to say that when Aurora Fielden dies her epitaph will be ‘you couldn't knock her back with a stick'. This comes back to Roddy more than once as he tries to dissuade Aurora from travelling with him. He tells her that he has to take a detour to collect something for his father. She doesn't mind a bit. He says that he drives too fast. She says she likes speed. He had half planned to meet up with some old friends. That's all right: Aurora might know them, and if she doesn't, he can just leave her somewhere to do a bit of shopping, or she can join in the fun and he'll hardly know she's there. He might stay on an extra day or two to spend some time with Tina. Well, Aurora can make herself useful around the yard, see what else she can pick up from the Floods, and she's sure Fran won't mind a bit of girl-talk around the place for a change. Roddy laughs when Aurora says this. Aurora takes this as assent. And so the plan is in place.

Even though the Flood Ball has been the main topic of conversation between the Fielden women for what feels like weeks, on the night before the ball it seems that none of them has yet decided what they are going to wear.

Arabella is torn between three dresses that she already owns, trying to decide which will best set off the diamonds she has inherited from her mother-in-law since last year's event. Aurora has a new ice-blue strapless dress that she keeps taking off and putting on, and something that's the colour of blood with a full skirt, and wondering whether she shouldn't have had it altered. And Anastasia, who has never been to the Flood Ball before, seems to have a never-ending supply of things to try on, although some of them are Aurora's cast-offs. Sometimes when Aurora sees her sister in them she wonders about reclaiming them, and Anastasia pouts and shrieks about looking better in them than Aurora does, and Roddy thanks the moon and stars that he doesn't have sisters.

Aurora is able to remember not only what she's worn over the last several years, but what her mother, Fran, and almost anyone else the others could name had worn, too. Edward and Roddy are asked their opinion on several dresses, but soon ignored, as Roddy tactfully says that everyone looks lovely in everything, and Edward says that all dresses look the same to him.

Roddy manages to slope off to phone Tina.

‘What are you wearing to the ball?' he asks, hoping that there will be a simple answer.

‘Oh. Black,' Tina says as though that is all the description a dress needs and deserves, ‘and a choker and earrings of Katrina's. Quite nice shoes but I don't know if I can walk in them. My mother's been making me practise.' Her voice says everything about how she feels about this. ‘In fact, I'm wearing them now. With your shirt, to try to break them in a bit.'

‘God, Tina.' Roddy is practically growling with lust, not so much at the shoes as at the idea of Tina in the shirt that he's peeled off her so many times. ‘Let's just get the bloody ball over with. I can't wait to have you to myself.'

‘Me too,' Tina says, then, in fear of sounding ungrateful, or unsupportive, she adds, ‘I'm sure the ball will be fun, but I really don't see what all the fuss is about.' She tells Roddy about her mother and father bickering that afternoon, her mother having been climbing a ladder in a pair of high black slingbacks to try to persuade Flora down from the apple tree. Alice had thought that her behaviour was entirely reasonable: if I'm going to be dancing in them, she'd said, I have to be used to them, and so I'm wearing them all day. I'd forgotten I even had them on, which just goes to show that I was perfectly safe. She'd rolled her eyes at Tina, who was spending her day off in the kitchen, trying to replicate Fran's walnut and honey loaf, but without the walnuts as Sam didn't like them. (‘Look like brains, taste like dust,' he would say as he picked them off the top of coffee cakes.) Her father's talk of broken ankles and cats who can go up being able to come down had been ignored, even when Flora strolled in having got down from the tree unaided. And Tina had kneaded and watched and counted down the hours, not until the ball but to the time when the ball was over, when it would be just her and Roddy and they could be, she hoped, as they were. She tells Roddy about her mother, the slingbacks, the ladder, and then she hears herself saying, ‘I've missed you.'

Roddy says, ‘Yes. Me too.'

‘I can't wait to see you,' she says, her voice low. ‘I've missed you so much.' It's as though he can feel her heart pulsing its beat down the line.

‘Me too. Me too.'

The first and worst part of the separation is almost over – the ball sits just after the midpoint of Roddy's stay with the Fieldens – and that, coupled with the fact that this time tomorrow – tomorrow! – they will be together, is making a telephone line an easier thing to negotiate.

‘This has been harder than I thought,' Tina says.

‘I know.'

‘Still. Tomorrow.'

‘Yes.' He can't bring himself to tell her that he's got stuck with Aurora for the journey; there's such a calm accord between them now, he doesn't want even the thought of Aurora to get in the way. ‘I'll be glad when the ball is over and it's just us.' He knows there's something he's supposed to ask Tina – his mother had recited his duties to him down the phone earlier, and although it was mostly the usual meet-and-greet and making sure no one did anything really stupid, he thinks there was something to do with Tina, too.

‘Me too.' It's as though he can hear her smiling. Anastasia, in a satin dressing gown now and carrying four shoeboxes balanced with the point of her chin, comes past. Roddy reaches out from his perch on the third step up the stairs to kick the door open for her. She winks at him.

‘We can talk about what we do next, too.'

‘What we do next?' Tina sounds puzzled, a little bit frightened. A burst of laughter comes from the Fielden kitchen. At Tina's end of the line, a steady beep begins.

‘It'll wait,' Roddy says, ‘but it's all good.'

‘I need to go,' Tina says. ‘My bread's done.'

‘See you tomorrow, love,' he says. But she's gone. He wonders if she is as sure of him as he is of her. He's never known anyone who has made him think like this before.

The day of the Flood Ball is a short day at the Flood stables. All afternoon lessons are cancelled, and anyone who's not going to the ball takes on the bulk of the afternoon work so that those who are can go and get ready. Tina, who plans to shower, shave her legs and armpits, dress, and let Katrina do her make-up, cannot see how even in slow motion getting ready will take more than an hour and a half. So she stays at the stables until it's time for the hairdressing appointment that her mother has insisted on, and hopes that Roddy will get back before she has to go.

She hacks out on Snowdrop and then drinks tea with Fran, who is finalizing the table plan and swearing blind that they won't be doing this next year, which Roddy says happens every year. But the Flood Ball has been a tradition for twenty years, the Coach and Horses at Coltswell booked out for the night, dinner and dancing for two hundred, with a Flood guest list of staff and friends and the rest of the great and good scrambling over each other to pay fifty pounds per ticket, all proceeds to charity.

‘I don't know whether to pray for rain or hope that this weather holds until tomorrow,' she says, as Tina opens a window and props the back door open. After a fortnight of relentless sun, horses and people alike are getting tetchy. Every other conversation around the stable yard has been about how hairspray and make-up will behave in the heat at the ball. Tina has been sleeping with the window open, on top of her bedclothes, and still waking in a sweat, her hair damp.

‘Do you think your parents will mind sitting with us tonight, Tina?'

‘Not at all. Quite the opposite.' Alice is fascinated by the Floods. She can't quite get over the fact that her daughter is going out with someone whose photo has been in the papers. Tina has often heard her mother joke about how both of her children have ideas above their station. She hopes she has the sense not to say so tonight.

‘Good.' Tick. ‘I've put Aurora and Anastasia on a separate table to you and Roddy – I think he's fairly desperate for a break from them – but whether they'll stay there is another matter. Those girls are a law unto themselves. I'm sure Roddy's told you.'

‘He doesn't say a lot about them, to be honest.' And Tina can't help but wonder why. If Roddy really didn't care about Aurora, surely he would talk about her more – the two of them are spending most of every day together, after all. If there's nothing to hide, why hide it? The nearer their reunion gets, the more knotted up Tina is becoming; everything that's been lying buried is coming to the surface.

‘What about Sam? I've put him with you and Roddy and a few of Roddy's old crowd, is that all right?'

‘Of course.' Tick.