The Other Half of My Heart (6 page)

‘It's not a competition.'

‘What?'

‘It's not a competition to see who had the most tiring day.'

‘I know that, Rufus.' Bettina is smiling at him still, bemused, and he realizes that she is puzzled by his behaviour because she's never seen him like this before. He takes a deep breath, and resolves to be the Rufus that Bettina recognizes. Because he really wants to be that man.

Bettina gives him just enough to make him long for her, but not quite enough to satisfy him. And so Rufus has remembered what potential there is in love. Something more fixed between them would seem, to Rufus, to be a deeply desirable and happy arrangement. At their ages, a twelve-year gap is nothing to write home about: Bettina is thirty-five, Rufus is forty-seven, but their intelligence, their quiet ambition makes them equals. Adventures in Bread might not yet have the scope or reputation of Light and Shade, Rufus's well-established architectural practice, but there's no reason why it shouldn't, in their shared future. They would make a well-matched, happy couple, he is sure. Tonight, he's frustrated that she can't see it. Tonight, his feet are cold and his arm is cramping as he waits on the bench for the indifferent song thrush, whose music might not, after all, be as sweet as he's hoped.

A prosciutto and artichoke pizza and a house salad later, Bettina asks, ‘Do you want to come back with me?' and he agrees, despite himself. They get the bill, which they split, scrupulously, down the middle – Bettina will never hear of anything else. She leads the way out of the restaurant and down the alley that separates the two buildings, then opens her own door.

‘Coffee?' she asks when they are upstairs. She makes it in a silver percolator on the hob. It's good coffee, for sure, but it keeps Rufus awake.

‘No, thank you,' he says, ‘I'll be awake all night. I don't know how you drink it so late.'

She smiles. ‘All bakers are the same,' she says. ‘We work such crazy hours that we do everything we can to stay awake, and nothing stops us from sleeping. Do you want something else?' She opens cupboards, curiously, as though she doesn't live here. ‘Peppermint tea? Brandy? I don't know how old either are. I don't know if it matters. Do they go off?'

He finds himself smiling, properly, at her efforts to make him happy. Decides to push it, just a little. ‘Am I staying?' he asks.

‘I'd like you to,' she says. His heart preens: at last! But then he realizes how easily she's said it, and so he knows that he's been misunderstood.

The first time Bettina had invited him into her bed, two things had surprised Rufus. The first was that she'd done it at all: she didn't really flirt, and so he hadn't thought it was going to happen, right up until the moment she had taken him by the hand, led him to her bedroom and said, ‘I haven't misread you, have I?' And the second was being sent home afterwards. He'd assumed that he would stay, sleep, wake with her. But no: ‘I have to be up early, Rufus, I'd only disturb you when I got out of bed,' she had said firmly. While he dressed, she had put on a charcoal-grey towelling dressing gown with a silk paisley lining that had seen better days, and somehow was all the sexier for it. Her feet, bare on the polished floorboards, had looked all the more naked next to his reluctant shoes as she had walked him to the door. ‘You won't disturb me,' he had said, aiming for nonchalance but hitting something closer to pleading, and she had smiled, and kissed his cheek, and said, ‘I'll see you soon. Thank you.' And so it has been ever since: friendship, yes, affection, yes, sex, yes, sleeping, no.

‘I meant,' Rufus says, ‘I'd like to spend the night here. Sleep.'

Bettina, standing over her coffee, tenses for just a second before she looks at him and says, ‘I've told you. I'd disturb you. I get up at four.'

‘I don't mind,' Rufus says doggedly. ‘I'll go back to my flat at four. Or I'll go back to sleep and let myself out.'

The coffee is ready. She pours it into a mug, broader than it is tall. Rufus knows that she will leave it until it's almost cold then drink it, black, in one go. He wonders if she ever thinks about how he drinks his coffee, although he knows that she doesn't. He tries to make himself stop doing this before it's too late. He's been in enough tricky relationships to recognize this territory, this conversation. God knows, he's often stood where Bettina is, trying to remain just committed enough without actually committing to anything.

‘Why does it matter so much?' she asks quietly, sitting next to him, not touching him, not looking at him. ‘The sleeping?'

‘Why does it matter so much to you that I don't stay?' he asks. His voice isn't as quiet as he thought it would be, and he tries a joke to soften the effect: ‘Do you snore? I've slept next to people who snore before.'

She sounds annoyed when she responds, ‘I don't, it's not that.'

‘Well, perhaps you should tell me what it is,' Rufus says, because he's too tired to be patient any more, ‘because this isn't really fair, Bettina.'

‘Fair?' She repeats the word, her whole face a question mark. ‘Are we not old enough to know that life isn't fair?'

Her hand is resting on her thigh and he puts his on top of it. She doesn't take it away, at least.

‘Life might not be fair,' he says, ‘but we can be, can't we?'

‘I am being fair,' she says, not looking at him. ‘You asked to stay. I said no. I don't see what's unfair in that.'

‘No,' Rufus says. His voice is matching hers in sharpness now. ‘I don't suppose you do.'

She looks at his hand as she says, ‘Rufus, I did a real relationship once, and I did it badly. Very badly. I promised myself that I wouldn't do it again.' The irritation has gone, not just from her voice but from the lines of her body; she's all sadness.

‘We've all felt like that,' Rufus says. He knows he can't compete with an unspecified past. But he can appeal to her logical side.

‘No, really,' she says, ‘I can't be your girlfriend, and I'm afraid that's what you want. I like you, Rufus. I like that you're clever, and you're kind, and I can see what an effort you make. Believe it or not, I'm closer to you now than I have been to anyone for a very long time. But I'm afraid that if you're hoping for more—' She shakes her head. She hasn't looked at him while she's been speaking, her eyes fixed ahead.

‘It's not just the sleeping,' Rufus says. His irritation has dissolved like mist over morning water; he can see more clearly now, to the bottom of the lake. He might be a better man than he used to be, but he's not the man he'd like to think he is, either. Suddenly he's tired. Suddenly the smell of the coffee is too strong, the scent of Bettina's rose perfume, more noticeable now that she's next to him, makes him want to sneeze. But he tries to explain: ‘I know almost nothing about you,' he says.

He knows that her mother, who has dementia, is in a care home. He knows that Bettina worked in France for a long time, until her father's death and mother's illness brought her back. He knows that she has scarring across her hips, up the side of her ribcage and down her thigh; when she'd seen him looking at the scars, she'd asked him not to ask her about them, and he never has. Not that she seems embarrassed by them. She is gloriously unselfconscious about her body, her unshaven legs and armpits and her willingness to walk naked from bedroom to bathroom, lie naked on top of her bed or his, never scrabbling for cover, never doing anything but let her body be itself. She has strong shoulders, a waist that he imagines hasn't grown since she became an adult, and a spine whose vertebrae bump-bump-bump when his fingers run down them, as though he is driving over cat's eyes in the road. Rufus wonders about trying to tell her that how she behaves with him, physically – the nakedness, yes, but also the way she knows what pleases her body and how to get it – is completely at odds with her closed-down, shut-off emotional self. But he doesn't quite dare: or rather, he doesn't trust his tiredness, his own need, not to get in the way.

Bettina is tired, too. When she had texted him to confirm their meeting she'd known almost immediately that she shouldn't have, because it was less about wanting to see him and more about not wanting to be alone. And now look where they are. She shakes her head, as though that will make her thoughts settle and clear. She can see how she must look from Rufus's perspective: inconsistent, wanting it all on her own terms.

The difficulty of every damn thing in Bettina's life wells up inside her. She wants things to be fair, though, even if they aren't, so she tries: ‘You know more about me than anyone has, for – a long time,' she says. She feels him lean towards her, and realizes that her voice must be hard to hear, as she is looking away from him as she speaks. She moves her head a little closer. There are unshed tears in her voice. ‘Honestly, Rufus,' she adds, ‘what I give you is the best I can do. All I can do. I'm sorry if it's not enough—'

‘So much seems to be off-limits,' he says. He's quieter now, too.

‘It's not off-limits,' she says, and then wishes that she hasn't because she feels him take in a breath, and realizes she's offered hope, ‘it's more that that part of me doesn't exist. What you've seen of me: that's what there is. That's all.'

He is quiet; she decides not to look, in case she cries, or in case he wants to say more about this, when she really has nothing more to say.

He sighs, and waits. Then: ‘I think I'll go,' he says.

‘Of course,' Bettina replies, and she leans towards him and puts her head on his shoulder for a moment, before getting up. As she looks down at him she sees how disappointed he looks and realizes that he had been hoping she would ask him to stay. She's so tired. She drinks her coffee as she waits for him to put his jacket on, which he does, slowly, as befits the man who just put all of his winnings on red and watched the ball fall on black.

‘I'll see you,' she says.

‘Yes,' he says. He reaches for her hand and she's ready for another protest, or to be told how badly she's behaving. She braces. But Rufus surprises her. He says, ‘Whatever you think, you're allowed to be happy. And you aren't too badly damaged to try. Remember that.' She nods, although she seems to be shaking her head at the same time.

‘Thank you,' she gets out. And she means it. When she goes to bed her hands and feet are cold, even though the flat above the bakery is always warm.

 

TINA RANDOLPH STARTS
helping out at the stables at the age of fourteen, when she realizes that a room full of horse posters and a weekly riding lesson is as close as her parents are going to be able to get her to a horse of her own. After a cautious enquiry of one of the friendlier grooms as to whether she would be welcome, she began turning up and making herself useful: lugging bales, sweeping down the yard, making tea, cleaning tack. She leaves the house while her parents and brother are still sleeping, and she walks the half-mile to the stables that sit among the hills above the quiet village of Missingham, and she works, quietly, with the clatter and hum of the yard around her. Two hours later, she returns in time to shower and get ready for school.

To begin with, her parents had tried to make her do this only two or three days a week, afraid for their daughter's school results and sleep. After all, Tina's twin brother Sam had to be dragged from his bed every morning, and he was only two minutes younger than his sister; it seemed impossible that she could really be so different in her needs. But Tina proved that she could keep up with her homework. She hovered around the middle of the class in test rankings, as she always had. Sam, on the other hand, was expected to be top at everything because he was So Very Bright. The phrase was whispered between adults, like a holy secret.

‘I wish I was the practical one,' Sam would moan as Tina finished her homework a good couple of hours before he did, ‘then I wouldn't get all this extra stuff to do.'

‘Don't forget you're Bound For Oxbridge, history boy,' Tina would reply, repeating another of the phrases that followed Sam wherever he went, ‘and you love it, really.' She would pack up her books and go to bed early, tousling Sam's hair as she went – it was finer and longer than hers, pleasingly different in her fingers – because she knew how much it would annoy him.

She and her twin are different in almost every respect. Sam is broad where she is wiry, academic where she is practical, sociable and easy where she is self-conscious and awkward. They have long since got used to people pointing this out. ‘The twins are so different' is not a whispered phrase, but one loudly broadcast at parents' evenings, family events and social gatherings everywhere. Their eyes are the only things that meet everyone's expectations of how well matched they should be. ‘Of course we're different,' Tina mutters to Sam, ‘we're basically a brother and sister who were born at the same time.' Sam is better at answering the twin questions than his sister. Yes, they are close. No, they can't read each other's minds. They suppose it is nice, but they've never really known anything different. What is good about it is feeling that there is always someone who, when it comes down to it, is completely on your side.

At sixteen, three days after her last GCSE, Tina starts her full-time job as a groom at the stables. Flood Farm is a riding school and livery, well thought of and busy, with stabling for twenty-six horses, six of which belong to the Flood family, the other twenty spots being for guest and liveried horses. There's always a waiting list for places, but Frederick and Fran Flood refuse to expand their operation, believing that getting to know all of their horses and riders is key to their success.

For the previous year Tina has been paid for her weekend work, which was mainly mucking out, grooming, and tacking up horses ready for lessons. Her anxious enquiry of Fred, about whether there might be any more work for her when she'd finished school, had been met with a clap on the shoulder and a laugh. Fred had said, we thought you'd never ask, Tina, we could do with more of your sort. Tina had been delighted, although she wasn't sure what ‘your sort' might mean. Her mother said reliable, her father said hard-working, Sam said dedicated. Tina had joined in some of the chatter around the stable yard about the professional riders the Floods trained – words like ‘brilliant' and ‘brave' and ‘unbelievable' used and overused – and tried not to be disappointed with the more prosaic words that applied to her. She knew that they were true, and that her dreams of being another Mary King, who she had idolized throughout her childhood, were not realistic. But when she mounts a horse, that doesn't matter. First there's the feeling of being high up in the world, then there's the moment of settling-in in the saddle, while she makes sure she's balanced and correctly placed, and she feels the horse shift and adjust to her weight. There are the smells of leather and flesh and heat and hay, which make a sweet whole that can only be horse. When they move, it's a wonder to Tina. She loves the sense of flow and purpose: she's fully aware that the horse is doing the work, but her whole world becomes reins and hoofbeats and whatever can be seen between two pricked, perfect ears.