The Other Half of My Heart (33 page)

‘He's still yours, you know. I never gave up, Tina.' There's no reproach in his voice.

‘I did.' Tina sits down on the bench. Roddy brings himself next to her, so they are side by side, looking out over Missingham. She thinks about touching him, but doesn't dare. ‘I'm sorry, Roddy.' Her heart is beating in her throat. She's not sure whether he heard or even whether she's speaking aloud. She thinks of how many conversations she has had in her head, over the years. Roddy, Sam, her father, her mother. So much better to have said it all out loud.

‘On the day Sam was buried, they all stood here,' he says. ‘We were both in hospital.'

She shivers at the thought of it, of those awful days of trying to understand how it was that she was a twinless twin, how such a thing could even be.

‘My parents come down here still, a lot. So we put this here. Even the new people who don't know the story know that this is a place to come and be quiet.'

‘That's good.' Sometimes what seems most unfair is the lack of a mark that Sam made on the world. He didn't have time enough for much that would outlive Tina and her memories. So she likes the idea of a quiet place for the most unquiet of brothers.

‘I suppose it is. Nothing seemed to be enough.'

‘I know,' Tina says.

‘Of course you do,' Roddy says. Then, after a moment where they watch Snowdrop as he watches them, ‘I'm sorry I hurt you, Tina.'

‘I'm all right,' she says.

‘You lost your brother. You limp. You had an impossible choice. You felt you had to run away.' Roddy makes a point of not wishing for legs that work, but right now, he would do anything to be able to kneel in front of her, look up into her face, understand better what she's feeling from the look in those eyes that, it turns out, he has remembered perfectly, in every detail. She's not looking at him now. He could ask her to, but he decides to keep talking instead. Thinks of being curled into her back, the side of his face resting on the back of her head, talking into her hair.

‘Those things are not your fault,' she says. She is thinking about the wheelchair, and how often she has thought about Roddy in it: Roddy stuck, Roddy limited, Roddy unmanned. Something else she was wrong about.

‘I'm so sorry,' Roddy says, quietly. She glances to the side. He is looking straight ahead, but sensing her, he turns to look at her. ‘I didn't think you would take Aurora seriously—'

‘I was just afraid,' she says. ‘I never had – what you had. That fearlessness.'

‘And look where that got us. I thought—' Roddy's voice sounds quieter now, because he's pushing his words out through a set, unmoving jaw; his hands are clenched on his lap. ‘I thought we would be together always. I couldn't imagine life without you. That was how I knew.'

‘I just thought I was lucky,' Tina says. ‘I used to watch you sleeping and think, it's only a matter of time.'

‘You were the love of my life, Tina.' That ‘were' hurts; balances the fizz and pop of the rest of it.

‘We were young,' she says. Her own voice is soft, now; scared.

‘Yes, we were. Are you going to tell me that that means what we felt wasn't real?'

‘Of course not, Roddy. It was always you.'

Geese fly overhead, calling. From the marquee comes a round of applause as a song ends. There's a count of one-two-three-four and then the music starts again.

‘Before this,' Roddy strikes the wheelchair with the flat of his hand, ‘I took everything for granted. Including you. I thought I'd always have you.'

‘I know you did. I didn't dare hope for that.' She's crying. She uses the edges of her wrap to blot her tears.

‘I know. That's why we worked. I was too sure and you were too doubtful, so we balanced everything.' He smiles, though he looks as though he's about to cry, too. ‘I've had a long time to think about this. Years and years.'

‘You didn't say anything, at my mother's funeral. You were – friendly. I thought—' Roddy's head and shoulders kick back in a mirthless, soundless laugh as he remembers what that friendliness cost him, his guts aching for all the time they spoke.

‘You were wearing a wedding ring,' he says, his voice quiet. Snowdrop leans over the fence, ears forward, as if to hear. ‘I'd screwed your life over once. I wasn't going to make it hard again. I thought you'd moved on.'

Tina gets up and goes back to her horse, to touch him again, but also to give her a reason to turn and look at Roddy, drink him in. She has forgotten how easy it is to be around him, and how difficult it is to be close to him without touching him. ‘Not really. I ran away.'

Roddy comes towards her and reaches for her hand. He takes it and lifts it to his chin, where he holds it against his face. ‘It's hard to move on when you know you'll never have it as good as you did.'

Her thumb finds the notch in his jaw, sits there feeling his blood beat. ‘Yes.'

‘I'm so sorry about Sam,' Roddy says, after a moment.

‘I know.'

‘I wanted to talk to you. I waited for you. Your mother was in such a terrible state, but I thought it would pass. Not that she would stop missing Sam, or blaming me, but I thought she would let you find your own happiness.' He remembers Fran saying how you could never predict what grief would do to people, but he had hoped that he could. He'd been wrong.

Snowdrop turns and makes his way down the field, away from them. Tina nods. She doesn't seem to have any words. She doesn't like looking down at him. So she takes back her hand, goes back to the bench and sits. Roddy follows, but this time he puts himself at right angles to her. They can look each other in the face, and if they lean forward, they can clasp their hands together, which they do.

Roddy says, ‘I've spent all these years having conversations with you in my head, and now you're here, and I can't seem to find anything that means anything. There isn't a way to say it all. It all sounds—'

‘I know what you mean,' Tina says, then, ‘We had everything, and we didn't really understand.'

‘You're right there,' Roddy says. Then: ‘What about Rufus?'

‘Oh,' in this collision of her old life with her old self, everything Throckton seems a long way away, ‘that's – that's not what it looks like. He's not – he's my neighbour, really. I let him think there was more. I thought there might be. Until you came to the wake and I thought you didn't care. And then I thought, well, if you don't care, then I'll try not to care. And now I know how much I do.'

‘Are you sure?' he asks.

‘It was always you, Roddy,' she smiles.

Roddy needs to be sure: ‘Really?'

‘I've told Rufus that there's not going to be anything. I told him tonight.' Her face is serious. ‘I should never have let it start.'

‘So it's just us?' She has always remembered the openness of his face, his bellwether eyes. But remembering it is different to experiencing it, here, now, with everything that there is to him in front of her, waiting to be understood. She can't believe that so many years have passed since they last sat so close to each other. She thinks of the question she never had the chance to ask her father: how he managed to look after her mother, love her, even as her spirit then her health left her. It seems as though the answer is here. Roddy is the same to her now as he always was, and she to him. Love is love. Everything else is sortable.

‘It's just us.' He smiles. That smile. He's leaning towards her, pulling her towards him. She's never forgotten the look that's in his eyes now, sheer joyful lust and longing. She thinks of everything she has thought about saying to him, if she ever has the chance: ‘But, Roddy, I need to say some things.'

‘Fair enough.' God, he wants her. But he's waited this long. Now that he knows she isn't married to the man with good shoes – Aurora has never got any more tactful – Tina can talk or be silent or anything, for as long as she wants to. Now that she's in reach again and they have no one to stand in their way, Roddy doesn't care what Tina does, as long as she doesn't disappear.

‘When we were together, I loved you, and when we were together, I knew you loved me, although you never said so.'

‘Didn't I?' He looks perplexed; the man who has come home to find his front door open, but sure that he closed it behind him.

‘No. You didn't.' Of course, she hadn't either. It seems so ridiculous now, so trite, as though saying that you loved someone made it the truth, and not saying it meant that you didn't love them at all.

‘But you knew that I loved you?' And then he can't resist it; he lifts her hand to his lips, kisses it. ‘Love you?'

‘Yes. Almost.' Tina brings his hand to her lips now, kisses it back, her heart vaulting. She can't believe that this is happening. She's going to do it better, this time. ‘I love you too,' she adds. She curves her hands around his face. Her face hurts with the width of her smile. Her eyes are stinging with the need to cry. She wants to kiss him and never stop. He slides his hands up to cover hers, then pulls them down and holds them, tightly, in his, against his knees. He sighs the sigh of the man who has been holding his breath for more than a decade.

He knows that before Tina will let him talk about the future, she needs to finish her turn at talking about the past. ‘What was the almost?'

‘When you weren't there, it was harder. I kept thinking about how you should be with someone – different.'

He laughs. ‘You spent more time trying to fix me up with Aurora than anyone else did.'

‘Maybe,' she smiles, but then her face becomes serious again, ‘but after the accident – everything was different. I had no Sam. It was like – like – Sam used to say, when people asked what having a twin was like, that you never really thought about it, like you never thought about your arm. It's hard to explain.'

‘Like you never think about your legs, until they don't work. All you can focus on is the loss.' Roddy still experiences a shadow of this feeling, every day, as he puts socks on to as-good-as-dead feet.

‘Exactly,' Tina says, ‘and my mother – you know she blamed you. So when I missed you – when I wondered how you were – I couldn't ask anyone, because she was always there, or listening, and if your name was mentioned, she'd – she just – it was awful.' If Tina closes her eyes she can still hear the wailing.

She smiles a sad smile to match Roddy's, and then she's crying again. ‘When I got better, every time I put one foot in front of the other, I thought about you, and how you'd never walk, and I'd done that to you.'

Roddy reaches inside his jacket and hands her a handkerchief. ‘My mother always cries, at some point during the ball,' he says. ‘I like to be prepared.'

Tina blows her nose and looks away, past Roddy, down to the graveyard.

‘It wasn't your fault,' Roddy says, gently.

Tina's gaze is fixed on the place where her brother and her parents lie. She feels as she did in the car with Rufus: hurtling, on course, heading faster, faster, faster to the place she's aiming for. ‘I just couldn't see how we could get past it all. And my mother was so – furious and so desolate – and my father was so stoical, and I walked around thinking that they must be thinking that the best twin had died, because Sam was so much more – everything – than me.'

‘That's crap, Tina.'

‘That's what I thought, though. And I mentioned you to my mother, it must have been nearly two years after the accident, when I thought things might have healed, a little, for her, and she said I should be thinking about losing Sam, not losing you.'

Roddy makes a sound that's somewhere between growl and cry, frustration and anger and sadness for Tina, and for the thought that she has suffered all this without him, and because of him. Tina looks away from the graveyard and into his face. ‘I just couldn't upset her. I didn't dare. I didn't think about the long-term consequences. I wasn't thinking of you and me and our future, because there didn't seem to be a future any more. I just thought about keeping my mother calm. All we did, Dad and me, was try to stop her from hurting.'

‘I can understand that,' Roddy says.

‘And then—' Tina doesn't really know what she is going to say, but she knows it's coming from somewhere true, and so she lets it. Roddy has taken her hand again, or she his. She's given up on wiping her face, letting the tears shiver down her cheeks in the cooling air. Roddy is crying too, quietly, and she hands his handkerchief back. ‘Once I realized that I'd lost Sam, and I'd lost you, then nothing really mattered. And I liked making bread because it was such a basic, uncomplicated thing. And being able to do something made me feel that I could be useful. This all sounds so stupid now, when I say it like this. It sounds more thought out than it was.'

‘It's not stupid.'

‘And then we decided to move, because my mother wouldn't go out in case she saw one of you, and I thought I would go away. It felt as though she couldn't bear to look at me, so I went away to make bread. And that was it, really. I drifted. I got to be not unhappy.'

‘Oh, sweetheart.' He holds out his arms, she stretches across to him, but there's the arm of the wheelchair in the way, and the end of the arm of the bench poking her under her ribs as she leans, and it's like trying to embrace someone through a window. So now they are laughing, and crying, as this first lovers' embrace of their new beginning won't work.

‘How do we do this?' Tina asks.

‘Sit on my lap?' Roddy says. So she does, arms looped round his neck, the crook of her knees over the arm of the wheelchair. They are still crying. Still laughing. Snowdrop meanders back over to look at them again.

‘This is about as comfortable as your old sofa,' Tina says.