Learning by Heart (13 page)

‘Nobody wears hats now,’ Cora said witheringly.

‘They might not in the city, but they do here,’ her mother said. ‘You want to make a good impression.’ She smoothed Cora’s hair behind her ear and surveyed her.

‘I shall do very well without a hat,’ Cora snapped.

‘I wish you wouldn’t drive all that way by yourself.’

‘It’s not that far.’

‘Perhaps I’ll come with you.’

‘You’re busy.’ Cora had snatched up her bag and the car keys. ‘And I’m not a child,’ she said.

‘I can see that,’ her mother had murmured. ‘Be careful.’

Cora drove the Wolseley out of the drive, the street, the town. The road through the valley and rising up towards Shaftesbury was almost empty. She felt neither excited nor apprehensive: she felt nothing. The inside of the car smelt of her mother’s perfume, Evening in Paris, and of cleaned leather.

On the dashboard there was an invitation to the Ladies Circle Dress Ball. Cora had been invited last year: she had danced the valeta and the dashing white sergeant, watching her parents go down the line of dancers, her partner a boy from her father’s firm. It had been another life. A secure, familiar life. She recalled the heat of the Methodist hall, and the doors open to the night, the bowl of fruit punch, the politeness and ordinariness of it all. The local band playing slightly off-key; the reddened faces of the dancers; the women in their old-fashioned wartime crêpe-de-Chine; the food lined up as if for an army – tins of Carnation milk standing next to glass bowls of blancmange, the sandwiches curling, tinned fruit salad, slabs of home-made cake. Red, white and blue bunting strung above the fiddle-players, a relic from the Festival of Britain and the Coronation, brought out on every occasion afterwards.

She had a sudden mental picture of herself in a replica of her mother’s life, going down some other neat garden outside some other neat house, with a basket over her arm and scissors in her hand to cut the roses; sitting by the coal fire in winter, darning; arranging photographs in albums, fiddling with the little white corner stickers to hold them on the black pages. Setting her hair before a mirror, waiting to go down to dinner, asking the housekeeper to turn and sew sheets, and to keep camphor and lavender bags in the linen, because to be a good wife was to be solid and economical. Counting the weeks to a holiday by the sea, or to Christmas.

Half an hour later, Cora was driving along the Tollard Royal road, having gone south of Shaftesbury to pick up the faster route into the city and to get to the company where she had the interview, which was on the south side. Suddenly she couldn’t look at the road any longer. She turned down a lane she didn’t know, and found herself in a village she had never seen before. ‘Ashmore’, read the sign, and she found herself in a ring of old stone houses. A woman was walking along with a spaniel; behind her was an enormous millpond.

Cora got out, trembling.

‘Good morning,’ the woman said. ‘Can I help?’

‘I took a wrong turning,’ Cora said.

‘You’re in the Cranborne Chase,’ the woman told her.

It was a bright, warm morning. The reflection off the sandy path round the pond made her eyes ache. ‘If I go along here …’ she said, shading her eyes.

‘You’ll come to Fontmell Magna, and Sturminster.’

‘Thank you,’ Cora said.

The woman watched her get back into the car.

She drove for another half-hour. The Wolseley began to overheat. She pulled into a lay-by, looked at the temperature gauge, then turned the engine off and on again, lost as to what she should do. Eventually, she turned it off altogether, and stared at the landscape, the crops in the fields, the gently rolling hills. Nausea swept over her and she got out and took deep breaths.

What would she do if she was pregnant? she wondered. Did women feel like this when they were? The world looked as if it had been overpainted, the green of the trees too acid, the grey of the road too dull. The hedgerows were picked out in extraordinary detail, the hawthorn, the ivy and nettles. She would have to bring up David Menzies’ child. This was the fear that had been in the forefront of her mind for days. She closed her eyes, overcome with dread. The shame would kill her parents. They would never get over it. And she had brought it on them with her carelessness.

She got back into the car and, after twenty minutes or so, found herself far out of the way either for Salisbury or Sherborne. She had gone in the wrong direction: she was almost at Cerne Abbas, beside the giant figure etched in chalk on the hill. She put a hand to her head and felt her clammy, cold skin.

I’m going out of my mind
, she thought.
I must go home
.

Safe at home
.

It was one in the afternoon when she got back to the house. By then, her hands and arms were trembling as she gripped the wheel. All that she could think of was to get inside, get to her room. The sight of the roads had begun to terrify her. Disoriented, panicked, she couldn’t depress the brake properly, and came into the driveway too fast.

She gasped when she saw a man standing at the door. He was familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

The car stalled; she sat staring at her fingers on the steering-wheel. When at last she got out, she noticed that the man seemed apprehensive. He was holding the phone in his hand, the black Bakelite receiver. The heavy cord curled back to the hallway table. Stopped in the act of dialling a number, he looked almost frightened.

Cora faltered as she walked towards him. He put out a hand, as if he might be able to catch her, although he was ten or twelve feet away.

She thought she heard him say that he was sorry.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’

Eight

As soon as he walked back into the street, Nick saw her.

Bella James was standing on the doorstep, the mobile phone still in her hand. She glanced at it, then put it into her handbag. All the way along the street, she watched him.

She was very tall and slim, almost as tall as he was. Her long dark hair was caught up in a complicated arrangement at the back of her head, fastened with combs.

As he got to the three steps in front of the house, he stopped.

‘You look wrecked,’ she commented.

His hand lay on the guard rail. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he told her.

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘I want to see Zeph.’

‘Zeph?’ he echoed, aghast.

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s not here,’ he said. ‘She’s gone away.’

‘Because of this?’ she asked. And she held out the newspaper article, taken from her handbag where it had been folded into a small square.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought it would help if I came and told her it wasn’t true,’ she said.

He realized how insensitive she was to anyone’s feelings but her own. For a beautiful girl from a fabulous family, she was also, it transpired, very stupid. ‘Jesus, Bella,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she told him. ‘Not at all.’

He pulled the door key out of his pocket.

‘She knows everything,’ he muttered. ‘I told her.’

Bella raised an eyebrow, then stowed the paper back in her bag. ‘I don’t see why you couldn’t brazen it out,’ she said. ‘I would. I will, if you like.’

‘Why?’ he asked, confused.

‘Because I like you, Nick,’ she said. ‘Helping out a friend and all that.’

‘By lying to his wife?’

‘Make her feel better,’ she said. ‘Patch it up between you.’ She grinned at him. ‘Good girl, aren’t I?’ she asked. ‘Make it all right. Be a good fairy for you.’

‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t understand what’s going on here. It’s not something that can be patched up just like that.’

‘I’m good at lying,’ she said. ‘I do it for a living. I can act outraged. Like, it’s so not true that we ever had an affair.
So
not true.’

‘That’s not funny.’

He stepped up to the door and put his key into the lock. The first thing he saw as he stepped over the threshold was a pair of Joshua’s boots under the coat-stand. He slumped down on the staircase, and put his hands over his face.

‘So what happened?’ Bella asked, coming in after him and closing the door.

‘It was terrible,’ he said.

‘What did you expect?’

‘Do you know what I’ve been through today?’

‘She doesn’t deserve you.’

‘I can’t talk to you now,’ he said. He went into the sitting room, and she followed him.

‘Why did you come back from Paris?’ she asked. ‘I thought we’d have dinner, you know.’ She grinned at him. ‘Or whatever.’

She was standing coquettishly, hands on hips, swinging her body from side to side in a gentle, rhythmic motion.

He shook his head, and laughed at her expression. Half laughed, anyway. ‘You have the biggest fucking ego in the western world.’

‘No dinner? No whatever?’ She was still smiling broadly.

‘No,’ he told her.

Bella looked at him speculatively. ‘She’ll calm down.’

‘She’s keeping Joshua from me.’

‘It won’t last.’

He glared at her. ‘You have no inkling of what’s involved here. You haven’t got children.’

‘Thankfully.’

He returned his head to his hands. He didn’t want to look at her; he couldn’t think straight when he did. She had never been married and claimed she never wanted to be. She’d never even been in a long-term relationship. She had a reputation for being footloose, a free spirit, which had aroused his interest. He had had a kind of fascination for people like that, who seemed not to operate on the same rules as everyone else.

She was so pretty it almost hurt him to watch her, even now. She wore a permanent expression of elfin sweetness. She had been in one or two good films now, and her name was known; not so long ago she had been the girl-most-likely-to-succeed at RADA; she had done all the publicity stuff – morning telly, radio slots, and wearing next to nothing at premières.

‘I’m stopping at all the bases,’ she had joked, the first time they were together. ‘I’m putting together my portfolio.’

‘Sleeping with the writer isn’t a base,’ he had told her, laughing. ‘It’s not even in the bloody ballpark. In fact, you’re doing the fucking-around equivalent of sleeping with a parking attendant.’

‘I have to start somewhere,’ she had replied, rolling on top of him and letting her hair fall round his face.

But she had started before him, he knew that. He had seen a picture of her on the arm of a producer who was not known for his fidelity to his wife of thirty years. It was said that he had got her the part in the first film.

He had pulled her hair back from her face. ‘You don’t need to start anywhere,’ he had said. ‘You don’t need to sleep with anyone. You’re beautiful.’

‘Beauty doesn’t matter,’ she had replied. ‘There are thousands of beautiful girls. Talent counts.’

‘Well, you’ve got that.’

‘Yes.’ She had nodded. ‘I have. So have you.’

He liked the flattery. She had read the character of her part well; she had understood it. It was good to talk to someone who had enthused so wildly about the woman he had created on the page. It had been amazing to watch her bring his creation to life.

And he wanted her. No surprise in that. Every man on the set wanted her. She had something indefinable, an air of sensuality. She didn’t try hard at it; in fact, she didn’t try at all. She wore ordinary clothes: sometimes skirts down to the ground, sweaters that swamped her – she still looked fantastic. He found himself following the lines of her body under her clothes. She was catlike in more than one sense: lithe, lazy, and greedy.

She put her hand on his shoulder. He jumped.

‘Bella,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to think.’

She got down on her knees, took his hands from his face.

‘No,’ he told her.

Slowly, she ran her hand along the inside of his thigh, almost experimentally.

He took hold of her wrist. ‘No,’ he repeated.

She leaned forward and kissed him.

It was a strange thing to admit to, but when she had kissed him on that first afternoon, he had been taken aback by distaste. Her mouth, which looked so sensuous, which framed his words and repeated them to him, had been too insistent. He had wanted to make the move; she had made it for him. He had wanted to persuade her. She had needed no persuading, and she had fallen back on the bed, laughing, trying to take off his clothes, while he, in turn, had been going for the slow seduction.

He had thought that that was what women liked. In truth, he had had only the vaguest idea of what a woman such as Bella would like, because at heart he was old-fashioned, and he had had a picture in his mind of taking her out to dinner and bowling her over with his stories and jokes, the things that had made Zeph laugh, and had made Zeph look at him in that surprised, appraising way.

But Bella was not Zeph. She was nothing like her. She didn’t hold anything back; she appeared not to have moods; she didn’t seem to care what the world thought of her or what was the appropriate thing to do. She had no conscience. She pleased herself.

‘Come here,’ she had said to him, as she had lain there, and he had looked down at her in confusion and anxiety, wondering if he should turn for the hotel-room door before it was too late.

She was a bolt of lightning that knocked him off his feet, drowned the world and the rest of his life, and any sense of right or wrong.

She didn’t make a sound when he screwed her. He thought he had done something wrong, disappointed her until, when he was finished, she smiled broadly, her body stretched sideways across the bed so that her head hung over the edge.

‘You’re a demon,’ he said, meaning it as a compliment but feeling that it was the truth.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘A regular imp. The kind that’s supposed to prod the damned, you know.’

‘Prod?’ he repeated.

‘The damned,’ she confirmed.

He had lain on his side and gazed at her. ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ he had said.

‘Yes, you do. Check the CV.’

‘Tell me more.’

She had turned to face him. ‘That’s what you writers like,’ she said, ‘isn’t it? To know the details.’