The Other Half of My Heart (22 page)

‘Roddy,' she says, and he turns back to her, ‘you know where I am now. The shop.' It's not what she wants to say. She wants to say, maybe enough time has passed for us to see each other without unhealing the healing that we've managed to do. She wants to say, I'm looking at you and I feel exactly like I did when I was nineteen, before it all went wrong, and I know that it wasn't calf-love, now. I should have had the courage to come to you. And I've missed you. And I can't believe I ever thought Aurora was a threat.

He looks at her, a hubbub of putting-on of coats behind him but his own self, and hers, completely still.

‘Tina,' he says, ‘you always knew where I was.'

The train connections are not on Bettina's side on the journey back. She doesn't mind, because the three hours of journeying is three hours she would have spent doing not much wherever she was. At least no one tries to talk to you on a train. No one can ambush you, call you Tina and break your heart when you're not expecting it. She thinks she might drink, when she gets home. Not a gentle wine-with-dinner drink but solitary, focused, brandy-on-an-empty-stomach drinking that will give her – what? Distance, maybe, and sleep, for sure, and the distraction of a banging headache tomorrow. Even as she's planning it, she knows she won't do it. There's nothing to be done, now, but getting on with life as she knows it, because it's the only life she's ever going to have.

Her key is barely in the lock when Rufus emerges from his flat. ‘I was watching for you,' he says. ‘I brought dinner.'

Objections leap to the ready. She's had a hard day, she's tired, she needs to be alone. ‘Rufus—'

‘You don't have to eat with me,' he says, ‘I just wanted you to have something to eat. I know you haven't had a lot of' – he hesitates between ‘time' and ‘appetite', realizes that he's seen so little of her that he can't really make any assertions, ‘even you can't live on toast.'

He proffers a carrier bag. Rufus might only cook omelettes and risotto, but he knows about food. Suddenly, Bettina realizes she is ravenous, not only for food but for someone else's company, and news of things that are outside her little world of grief and disappointment. ‘Come up,' she says, ‘I need to have a shower and change, and then I'm all yours.'

Rufus persuades her that the food won't spoil and he can keep himself occupied if she would rather take a bath, which she does. Meanwhile he puts out the collection of olives, salads and meats he's brought, and opens some wine. After they've eaten, they talk. Bettina's hair is frizzing as it dries, although Rufus knows that as soon as she pulls a comb through it it will wave and curl. She tells him about the funeral. She hadn't planned to, but once she starts, it feels like a point of honour to describe everything exactly, from the flowers in the church to the words the vicar had used to the hats of her mother's old friends and the unbearable slowness of the walk to the graveside along the unfriendly gravel path.

She stops before she gets to the Roddy part. Already it seems too bad to be true, and she doesn't want to have to explain it all just yet, if ever. The thought had occurred to her, when she was in the bath, that if she was really going to have a relationship with Rufus she should stop doing it by half-measures, and that that probably meant she had to tell him about her past. He's already asked about Aurora a couple of times. But she can't bring herself to do it now. She doesn't know where she would begin. ‘Anyway,' she says, ‘that was it. All done.'

‘Yes,' Rufus says, ‘it sounds as though it went well. As well as these things do.'

‘Yes,' Bettina says, ‘and now it's time to look forward.'

‘I'd like that,' Rufus says. He thinks about the plot of land he's acquiring, below the town, beside the river, where he could build the house that he's always wanted to build, all light and space and curves and grace. And he thinks about how much Bettina would enjoy looking at his plans, making suggestions for the best way for a kitchen to work or thinking about the kind of environment that she would like to wake up in. Maybe, he thinks, the reason that he hasn't got around to building his perfect house is because it needs this woman to make it perfect with him.

‘Rufus.' Bettina looks tired but she's smiling, a little bit. ‘You look as though you're thinking serious thoughts.'

‘I am,' he says.

‘Penny for them?'

‘I'm not sure you'd want to know.' When Bettina proposed that they spend a few days away together, they had both known it was a big step beyond their usual, not-quite-casual-but-in-no-way-committed way of doing things. He doesn't think she's ready to hear that he is building a house for them, in his mind, and that he has put an offer in on the land.

‘Really?'

‘I'm planning ahead,' Rufus says, ‘but I know it's early days. I'm saying nothing.'

‘You have the patience of a saint,' she says.

‘Thank you.' He's not sure that she's complimented him before. She's thanked him, often, for things that he's done, and she's been complimentary about things that he owns – his ties, his butter dish, his mattress, so much more comfortable than her own. But this is new ground. ‘I try.'

‘I know you do. And I'm going to try too.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.' He smiles. Perhaps they should have two kitchens, one purely for Bettina's baking and the other kitted out for their life together, with a separate fridge for wine and a marble larder for cheeses.

But Bettina isn't smiling. She's looking more serious than he's seen her since he drove her to the nursing home the night her mother died. She takes a deep breath. Another.

‘Rufus, I need to tell you something, if we're going to take things any further.'

He shifts in his seat, leaning forward, ready. ‘I'm listening,' he says.

‘My full name is Bettina May Randolph. When I was a teenager, I called myself Tina. Tina Randolph. I worked at the Flood stable in Missingham. And – something happened, and I've never really got over it.'

 

TINA AND SAM
could hear the Cosworth before it came into view. And then it's there, and Roddy is handsome, and Tina feels as though she's in a film, where her brother and her boyfriend are James Bond lookalikes, and she herself is someone who can make her boyfriend do a double take. The rain has stopped, though it doesn't feel as though it's stopped for long.

‘Tina,' he says, ‘beautiful Tina.'

‘Handsome Roddy,' she says.

‘Gorgeous car,' Sam says.

And they are on their way. Sam clambers in past the folded-forward passenger seat and sprawls in the back. Tina sits neatly in the front, breathing in the hairspray and CK One perfume left behind by Aurora on her headrest. The smell at least takes the edge off the leather smell, which is different on a car from how it is on a saddle. Tina thinks it's because on a horse the leather has so much air to breathe. Enclosed, the smell is of nothing so much as a slow dying. She hasn't taken her motion sickness tablets because they don't go well with alcohol.

‘All right?' Roddy says, and Tina nods and closes her eyes.

‘How long?' she asks.

‘Twenty minutes, max. Ten if I floor it.' Her eyes jump open, like a doll moved suddenly to upright. Roddy touches her cheek with the back of his fingers, a promise. ‘I won't. I'm just showing off because Sam's here.'

‘Katrina will kill you if you make me sick,' she says. She winds down the window. Fresh air helps, especially this air, so new and living after the rain.

Sam says, ‘We could drop Tina off, and then you could take me for a quick show-off, if you like.'

Roddy pulls a face. ‘Another time. Duty calls. Not Tina, but all the glad-handing. Flood of Flood Ball.' He turns the key in the ignition. Tina risks a look to the side, a smile: she loves that he does the right thing. Of course he wouldn't do anything with Aurora. She's been ridiculous. He smiles at her. ‘I'll be glad when it's over.'

‘Me too.' Tina closes her eyes. The car moves away.

‘Here comes the rain again,' says Sam.

And it is sudden and heavy, plump drops hurtling towards the earth. ‘I'm glad the weather's broken at last,' Roddy says, ‘but it could have waited until we got there.' Tina knows exactly what he means. For the last two weeks there's been dust everywhere in the yard, dry air in the fields, stinging in your eyes from the grit the horse in front kicks up. The tack has taken so much more cleaning, the manes so much more brushing. A little rain will make tomorrow in the yard much easier. The windscreen wipers are going faster and faster. The rain on the roof is a staccato fall; the water is bouncing in through the window. Tina winds it up. Although it's early on the summer's evening, it's dark. The rainclouds have brought a November light with them. Roddy puts the headlights on.

‘This is one crazy amount of rain,' Sam says.

‘I'm glad I'm not driving the coach,' Roddy says. The route to the Coach and Horses takes a sweep around the hill, on the way out of Missingham, where there's a rocky outcrop which forces the road into a deep curve, with a lot of adverse camber. Most locals who fail driving tests fail it here, missing the sweet spot between going too slowly and having the tilt throw them into the wrong side of the road. Fred claims that when you drive a horsebox out of Missingham you can feel the horses hold their breath on this corner.

‘We're all glad you're not driving the coach,' Sam says, ‘especially if you drove it like you drive a horse.'

‘You don't drive a horse,' Tina and Roddy say in unison.

Sam laughs. ‘You two,' he says, ‘works every time.'

Tina laughs. She can't help herself. She sees Roddy looking at her, laughing too.

‘Roddy, you and I need a word. My sister tells me that you've been looking at another woman,' Sam says. Tina hadn't meant to say anything, telling herself that Aurora was just Aurora and Roddy had made his choice. But then at the hairdresser's, she'd picked up an old
Tatler
with photos of Aurora in it – she'd been at the wedding of someone Tina had never heard of, bare-headed and wearing a slim lilac dress, no jewellery, while everyone else was hatted and jewelled almost to the point of caricature. In the photos Aurora stood out like a beacon of beauty – and Tina, despite herself, had got a bit wobbly. So while Katrina was unpacking her make-up case and fussing about the light in Tina's bedroom, she'd told Sam about Aurora's jokes and what Roddy had told her about the Fielden place. ‘Don't worry,' Sam had said, ‘I'll sort him out for you.' She'd resolved to put the whole thing out of her mind, although she knew that as soon as she laid eyes on Aurora that might change.

‘God, Aurora, she's a bloody handful,' Roddy says. ‘You're not really bothered, are you, Tina? You know what she's like.'

‘No, of course not,' Tina says, but her voice comes out sadder, thinner, than she had thought it would.

‘Look at me, Tina,' Roddy says, ‘look at me.'

‘Actually, look at the road,' Sam says, ‘you two can sort this out later.'

‘Tina?' She moves her head to look at him although it makes the sickness worse. He's looking at her, willing her to understand. She wants to smile. She tries, but when she moves her mouth she blurts, ‘Why didn't you ask me to stay over at the hotel? Are you staying with her?'

‘What? Who?'

‘Roddy,' Sam says, his voice reasonable, ‘why don't you have this conversation later?' Roddy ignores him. He puts his hand out to reach for Tina's. She flails it away. All the worry and jealousy that she has tried to ignore has actually, it seems, been growing in the dark, and now it's coming out, unstoppable.

‘Aurora,' Tina says, ‘is she staying with you? Tonight?'

‘I hadn't even thought—'

‘You haven't decided?' Tina says. She looks ahead again, although she sees nothing but the rain. Her heart is not so much breaking as dying. Her head says: you knew this would happen.

‘Tina, that's not what I was going to say—' Roddy says.

‘For fuck's sake, watch the road,' Sam says, his voice stricken and sharp.

There's a sound, a sound that's bigger than the rain, bigger than the sound of the engine of Roddy's car and the water it's crushing as it moves up the hill. And although Tina wants to close her eyes – when she thinks of it afterwards she feels the tiny muscles at the outer corners of her eyelids start to spasm – she sees everything.

She can see the windscreen wipers working, back-forth back-forth back-forth, but raindrops endlessly gathering at the top of the glass and rolling down, warping the view before being caught and hurled aside by the rubber blades.

She can see Roddy's face, all determination now, his knuckles tight and his eyes wide, his mouth fixed and taut.

And she can see something coming towards them, something that manages to be terrifying although it makes no sense. Perhaps that's why it's terrifying. There's noise, but it's the wrong sort of noise. There are lights, but they're in the wrong place. The cab of an articulated lorry, side on to them, headlights glowing across the verges and the hillside, the side of it almost black, making a dark, solid wall that both blocks and brings the sound of screeching. Roddy's voice: There's a lorry in a skid but we can dodge it. We've got time.

And the driver does straighten his cab, and Tina hears the tension in the car release, for a second, feels Sam's arm, which has been braced against the back of her seat, relax, his elbow bending as her own lungs unbrace too, letting her breathe in again.

‘That was close,' Roddy says, his voice twitching with tension releasing.

‘This is going to be a story that the ladies at the ball will love,' Sam says, his voice striving for lightness.