The Other Half of My Heart (8 page)

Over the weeks and months that follow, her name is called more often than all the others, and there is no hope of this going unnoticed. ‘Roddy wants you,' the others grin, not unkindly, but are still delighted when Tina blushes, her freckles no longer brown, but becoming a pale dapple across her skin as her face reddens. The attention doesn't last long, though. As the months move, and Roddy has another stellar season, the yard finds other things to gossip about. During the summer, when other riders come for training, she barely sees Roddy at all, or if she does, he's with at least one of his fellow riders, most often the beautiful Aurora, who can't seem to be close to Roddy without touching him or leaning against him. He seems always to catch Tina's eye when he passes. Or maybe she imagines it.

‘It's funny, your hands are a lot more confident than the rest of you,' Roddy says one day as he and Tina sit in the tack room. Autumn is here and the yard is getting quieter again with the summer visitors gone. He is cleaning bridles while she is working on a saddle, deftly pulling the straps from their fastenings so that she can make sure that every part is clean, soft, supple, as it should be.

They so often work in silence that she is a little surprised by the sound of his voice. She thinks that, maybe, she bores him. When Roddy is with other people he seems to have a lot more to say. She looks up into his face and finds herself studying his mouth. It's a bit too full to be properly handsome; twisted, slightly, by a small scar from an old fall, when he had bitten through his lip. It's the most interesting mouth that Tina has ever seen. She goes back to her leather. Roddy was right: her hands, still steady, are not betraying her, although she is shaking inside at the attention, and at the idea that he is thinking about her.

‘Did you hear what I said?'

‘Yes,' she risks a glance, ‘but I wasn't sure what to say.'

Roddy laughs, mellow and low. ‘My mother is always saying, “Roddy, if you've nothing to say, say nothing,” but I've never been able to. She'd love you.'

Tina is glad when they go back to silence. But then:

‘My father says that he can trust you more than he can trust anyone else who works here. He says because you've earned your place, he knows you mean it.'

Tina feels her blushes spreading up from her neck. She wiggles her toes; Katrina read in a magazine that that's a good way to stop yourself blushing, because it sends the blood to the other end of your body. Tina thinks it might be working. She cannot believe that she's a topic of conversation around the Flood table, or that she has been so noticed, so praised. But then Roddy makes her blush again.

‘I think you should be more confident than you are.'

Tina finds her voice. ‘Why do you think I'm not confident? Being quiet isn't the same as being unconfident, is it?' This is something that Sam said about her, once, when her school report had said that she needed to have the confidence to speak up in the classroom. Her father had nodded and said, well, empty vessels make most noise, you know. And Alice had made a little pursed mouth and said, guilty as charged, and they had all laughed.

‘True,' Roddy says, then, ‘I suppose because everyone else pushes themselves forward you look as though you're holding yourself back.'

‘Maybe,' Tina says. Roddy is partly correct. Tina also knows that she doesn't have that spark, part courage, part instinct, that marks the great riders like him out from the ones like her. What she really wants to do is manage this yard, but she hasn't met a yard manager yet who isn't male, forty or fifty, and hasn't had an accident that put paid to a serious riding career. She's too in awe of Charlie to ask him what her chances are, and anyway, he always says that they'll carry him off the farm in a box. She almost asks Roddy, then, because she thinks of him as a friend. But: we never talk, she reminds herself, this relationship is all in your head, he likes you because you don't talk.

And then Roddy changes direction.

‘Have you always been travel sick?' he asks.

She has got the hang of travelling to events in the front of horseboxes and Land Rovers. She takes her tablets well beforehand, gets in, sits tight and stares at her hands, placed in her lap as though she's holding the reins of the steadiest Shire there's ever been. So long as she doesn't look up, or try to talk, she should get there without being sick, although sometimes she retches with relief as soon as she feels the ground under her feet again.

‘Always.' One of Tina's earliest memories is being stripped out of her travel clothes, washed, and stretching up her little arms to have a bridesmaid's dress slid over her head by her mother, who had hugged her, kissed her head and said, it will get better, sweetheart, I promise. It hasn't, really. She manages not to vomit, if she concentrates and medicates, but there's the same feeling of roiling, the panic, the sense of her insides flailing for solid, unmoving ground.

‘But you're OK when you're on a horse.'

‘Yes.' She thinks of Roddy polishing his car on a Sunday afternoon, stripped to the waist if the weather is warm. He must think she's ridiculous.

‘I've seen the colour of you when we get to an event,' Roddy says, glancing at her. ‘I feel for you.'

‘I'm used to it.' He feels for her. Tina lets this thought expand; she tastes its sweetness. He has moved to sit next to her; holds her hand. Her fingertips pulse. She wiggles her toes. She smells leather, straw, CK One. Her own perfume – rose oil from the Body Shop – seems too simple against it. She feels like a little girl.

‘I suppose you've tried all sorts of things.'

‘Yes,' Tina says. A homeopathic remedy had worked, briefly; it seemed to take the edge off. She likes to be tightly belted in. It's easier if there's no talking. The smell, though not the taste, of mint soothes her. Anti-sickness tablets work, but only if she gets the timing right. Roddy is still holding her hand. Her fingertips are pulsing, but her toes are still and her cheeks cool. Perhaps he's right and her hands are confident.

‘So if I want to impress you,' Roddy says, ‘taking you out in the Cosworth isn't going to work, is it?'

‘I suppose not,' Tina says. She looks away from his hand and into his face: he's smiling. She's smiling.

‘I'll have to think of something else, then,' he says.

He stands up, stretches and walks back out into the afternoon's activity. Tina sits there in the quiet for a minute or two longer, wondering, absorbing, trying to calm the flutter behind her solar plexus. Roddy Flood wants to impress her. It's too good to be true, but she likes it.

There is a joke in the Randolph household that Flora, their sweet and sociable tortoiseshell cat, always knows which family member needs her most, and from the day in October when Roddy asks Tina if she wants to ‘come up to the house for supper on Friday', a week after their conversation in the tack room, Flora has followed Tina as a seagull follows a plough.

Katrina says it's definitely a date. Unsure, Tina asks Sam when he makes his weekly phone call.

‘He's giving up a Friday night, and he's inviting you home, and his parents will be there, and no one else has been invited?' Sam asks.

‘As far as I know, it's just me, Roddy and his parents.' You can never quite tell who will be in the Flood farmhouse. But visitors – buyers, sellers, prospective livery clients, trainers, riders – are written up on the blackboard in the yard office; Tina can't recall anyone in for Friday night.

‘That's actually a fourth date. Maybe a fifth.'

Flora jumps into Tina's lap. Katrina beams and says, ‘We need to decide what you're going to wear.' And Tina wishes that she'd kept the whole thing quiet. She refuses to wear heels, but borrows Katrina's new lilac top to go with her smartest jeans, and consents to mascara. Nervous of taking the wrong wine, instead she bakes a gingerbread with her mother, and in doing so remembers the days when the best treat of the week was to stand on a chair by the kitchen bench and help with mixing and measuring. As Alice was a devotee of teatime, they baked at least twice a week: cut-out biscuits that Tina would decorate when they cooled, tea-loaf, chocolate sponges baked in separate tins and sandwiched together with coffee buttercream icing. This was Tina's time to have her mother to herself; they talked of everything and nothing, drama group and Flood Farm, the starlings and the fuchsias. As they made the gingerbread for the Floods they talked about holidays, and how, this year, for the first time, Howard and Alice would be caravanning – or ‘hitching the wagon' as Alice called it – without Sam and Bettina. Everything changes, Alice had said, but I think it gets better. Even when it was good to start with.

And now, after a few days that have both dragged and flown, here is Tina, sitting in the Floods' kitchen, watching Roddy's mother Fran take a loaf of bread from the oven, turn it upside down and knock on it. Seeing Tina's face, she says, ‘If it sounds hollow, it's done.'

She knocks again, a question on her face, and Tina nods: ‘I see – well, I hear.'

Fran puts the bread in the middle of the table and sits down next to Tina. ‘Those boys of mine are always late down. Fred will be asleep in the bath. Roddy will be getting his hair just right for you. Shall we do the crossword while we're waiting?'

It feels strange to Tina to be here as a guest. She's been in before, of course, running errands for Fred or squashed around the table with the rest of the staff for updates or celebration drinks. During the day this is a working kitchen, an Aga with a dog bed in front of it at one end, piles of papers and catalogues on the table, boots in the corner, dust on the dresser, an unruly crowd of mugs and plates ever growing by the sink. But this April evening, with the heavy curtains half drawn against the apricot sky beyond, lamps lit and the smells of bread and meat and the quiet of a day's work done, it feels like a home.

Roddy comes down first, before they are halfway through the across clues. He is wearing jeans and a checked shirt that's buttoned at the cuffs, loose at the neck. He is barefoot. Tina is even more glad she's refused heels: apart from being out of place on her, they would have been out of place here. She looks at Roddy's toes. He lost a couple of toenails after a tussle with a new arrival last summer. The horse had stood on his foot while being unloaded from the horsebox; the nail of the big toe on his left foot is half growing back. Tina remembers Ells saying as much as lascivious proof that she had seen Roddy naked; Tina blushes at the memory. Roddy kisses her on the cheek and ignores her blush, or doesn't notice. Tina isn't sure whether ignoring or not noticing would be preferable. She wishes there was a recipe for starting a relationship, or that everyone had the same set of rules. He says, ‘I'm glad you came.'

‘Tina brought gingerbread,' Fran says. She's put it on a plate, a long china oval with blowsy roses and a chip on one end. The sticky surfaces of the cake gleam.

‘Lovely,' Roddy smiles, ‘I didn't know you could cook.'

‘My mum helped,' Tina says, then wants to bite off her tongue because it makes her sound twelve, not nineteen.

But again, Roddy either doesn't notice or doesn't comment. He just sits down next to her with a tack catalogue. ‘I was hoping you'd help me choose. We need new flysheets and stable blankets for Snowdrop and Foxglove, at least. Bea's and Bob's are getting a bit hard up, too. There's only so long TLC will hold them together.' Tina is sitting on the chesterfield that takes up the wall opposite the dresser. It's cracked from the heat at one end, piled with cushions and Whiskers, the ancient cat, at the other, so she and Roddy sit close together in the middle. Most of the horses at the stable are at livery, and their owners provide all of their kit: it's the Floods' own mounts that Roddy is shopping for. Here's something Tina can get absorbed in, forgetting that she's on a date, let alone a fourth or fifth one, if Sam is right. She and Roddy are comparing the dimensions of different blankets when Fred walks in. Tina makes to stand, but Fred waves her back into her seat. She realizes as she leans back that Roddy has stretched his arm along the back of the sofa. Of course, that might be to make it more comfortable as they peer at the catalogue together. Her stomach gives a happy churn anyway. He's just a little taller than she is, and the way her shoulder fits against him when she leans back feels just right. Maybe he squeezes her to him, just a little; it's hard to tell, because Fred bends and kisses her cheek at the same time.

‘Welcome to chaos,' he says.

‘Tina's brought gingerbread, Fred,' Fran says.

‘How marvellous. And thoughtful,' Fred says. ‘We've got so much wine that we need to start washing the yard down with it if we're ever going to be rid of it.'

Tina laughs. ‘My dad built a wine rack under the stairs, but he says it won't seem to stay stocked.'

‘My dad's exaggerating,' Roddy says, then, ‘Dad, Tina and I are sussing out new blankets for Foxglove and Snowdrop. Maybe Bea and Bob, too. Mr Darcy and Blaze got new kit not long ago, so I think they should be all right.'

‘Good. Good. I was thinking the other day that our horses are the worst turned out of any of them. There's only so long TLC will hold these things together.'

Fran catches Tina's glance and they smile at each other. ‘Tina will think she's in some sort of repetitive conversation hell,' she says. ‘Is your house like this?'

Tina thinks about the meals she shares with her parents these days, the fourth seat at the table so very empty. She has realized that she thinks most about how much she likes being a twin when Sam isn't there. Being a de facto only child she finds crushing, exhausting, with too much responsibility and so many moments when she turns round to say something to someone who isn't there, and should be.

‘Yes and no,' she says, ‘it's a bit odd with my brother away at university.'