Learning by Heart (7 page)

‘For six months,’ he said. ‘To learn the trade. In Murano.’ And he talked for a while about Venice and its islands, about boarding the waterbuses for Murano, Torcello and Burano; about the colours of Burano, strung between a bright blue sky and the bright blue lagoon; about the fishing-boats with the great ferries passing between them as the evening light faded, and the mist came down over the water, and the isolation of the marsh-strewn approach to Torcello, and the cypresses forming green avenues on its neighbour, San Francesco del Deserto.

He talked and she listened. After twenty minutes or so he asked her where she had visited.

‘I’ve never been out of England,’ she admitted.

He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘You’ve got to go to Italy and Greece,’ he said. ‘And Spain. Go to Spain. I’ll take you there.’ And he went on to explain how the trains were unbearable down into the heart of Andalucía, but the journey was worth it; and all the time she felt his hand on hers, that brief, warm pressure; and she knew that she could never tell her parents she was going to Spain alone with a man and, because she could not lie to them, this meant that she would never get off the train in Andalucía, at some little station that David was intent on describing to her.

She had an overwhelming sense of life passing her by.

She thought of the family visits to Cornwall, and of pier concert parties, and of sitting on the windswept beach outside Padstow, shivering in her woollen swim-suit, and of her mother and father carrying tea-trays across the sands, the complicated orchestration of deck-chairs and parasols, sandwich tins and Thermoses. That was all she knew: the road down to Cornwall’s north coast in August. They had not even crossed the Channel to France. They had been nowhere at all. She felt again the irritated shame she had experienced with Bisley, and a hunger to sit facing the sea on Murano, in Bordeaux, or Tuscany.

‘Where is Fréjus?’ she asked abruptly.

‘On the Côte d’Azur,’ David replied. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, someone I know went there on holiday,’ she murmured. ‘Someone at school. She said it was wonderful.’

‘All of the Mediterranean is wonderful,’ he said.

At last she looked through the plate-glass windows at the street.

There was a narrow frontage opposite, with navy blue curtains across the windows. A man stood in the doorway and spoke to people as they walked past. It was some minutes before she grasped that the photographs stuck haphazardly among the curtains were of naked women, and that the foyer where the man stood was the entrance to a strip show.

Her face must have dropped.

‘I’m sorry,’ David said, ‘but the food here is good. And cheap. Best not to gaze at the scenery.’ He smiled at her.

David didn’t look across the road at all. He didn’t seem interested. It was only she who stole curious glances. The bill came, and David counted his money. Cora saw a woman come out into that dingy foyer opposite, lean against the door and cadge a cigarette from the man, talking to him and laughing at what passers-by said to her. The woman – she seemed very young, maybe not even twenty, Cora’s age – wore a sweater and a pencil skirt, not so very different from Cora’s. When David got up to go to the lavatory, Cora saw a man come up to the woman; he stepped forward and she stepped back. Cora saw him put his hand almost casually between her legs. She saw his fingers move. The woman tipped back her head and held his gaze until, just as casually, she removed his hand and placed it on her hip. Cora caught her breath.

Then, there was an unspoken law for any girl: you could kiss a man, but never let him touch you below the waist. She had endured all the usual teenage fumblings, but the idea of taking any pleasure in it was terrifying. Nice girls didn’t. Nice girls wouldn’t let themselves be touched in the street either. The look on the woman’s face, of calculated interest, had also astonished her. Cora felt like a voyeur, an embarrassed witness.

David came back, and Cora gathered up her bag and gloves. He helped her into her coat, and as they walked out, she looked in the opposite direction from the doorway and the photographs. But in her mind’s eye all she saw was the moving fingers, and the way that the woman’s legs had parted to accommodate them. Every image felt shameful.

‘Shall we go to a club?’ David asked, as they turned into Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘A jazz club? Do you like jazz?’

‘Oh, I …’ She put her hand to her head.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Nothing, really.’

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I think I’ll make my way home.’ She smiled at him. ‘Thank you for the meal.’

‘It’s very early,’ he told her. He seemed intrigued, puzzled.

‘Yes. I have to be at work early,’ she said.

‘On a Sunday?’

‘Yes,’ she said. But she couldn’t lie well. He took her hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Something I’ve said?’

‘No,’ she replied. The sensation of his hand against hers was electric.

‘Come here,’ he told her.

He walked her back towards the strip club and stood in another doorway, a closed shop, and she leaned against the door. When he kissed her, she trembled. She couldn’t help it. All evening she had been battling a feeling of excitement, of schoolgirlish anticipation; and now, with her back pressed to the door and his hands on her shoulders, she wanted to drop through the ground, and sink. The image of the man’s fingers, and the more distant, slowly increasing voices of the books, the poets with their intimacies, swept her out of the street into a kind of sweet, rushing darkness.

He parted from her. ‘Oh, Cora,’ he murmured, amused.

‘I must go home,’ she said. ‘I must catch the bus.’

She couldn’t let him kiss her again. The thought went through her mind that if she kissed him again she would lose herself. She would lose her grip on everything she knew, everything that was comfortable. She felt she was in great danger, and she hated it yet wanted it at the same time.

‘Come home with me,’ David said.

‘Oh, no,’ she replied, and stepped out of his grasp, horrified.

He took her hand again, then walked her down Charing Cross Road to her bus stop, with the evening crowds going past them in laughing, noisy groups.

She felt old as they waited at the stop, as if she had lived a dry, uneventful life, and possessed a body that was featherlight, desiccated, mummified, wasted.

‘May I see you next Saturday afternoon?’ he asked.

It was the politeness of it.

She would never have said yes if he hadn’t been so polite.

Four

In the end, it was easy for Zeph to get away. It took just one lie. Nick had followed her upstairs and watched as she got into bed. ‘You’re acting cold,’ he had said. ‘But that’s all it is. An act.’

Zeph didn’t want to waste words telling him that he had never been more wrong. She wanted to say that he would soon find out, and the bitter triumph of knowing that she meant what she said was on the tip of her tongue.

Nick stood at the end of the bed. ‘I won’t let you out of the door,’ he had said.

Despite herself, she had almost smiled at his bravado.

‘There you are, you see,’ he went on. ‘Just acting.’

‘You look exactly like your father,’ she had said. A deliberate jibe.

It had struck home. His widowed father had brought Nick to England when he came in pursuit of a job. Selfish and critical, smug to a fault, he had hardly been mourned when he had died five years before. Nick’s face dropped. He walked to the window, to the closed curtains, then to the wooden box at the foot of the bed and sat down.

‘I’m going in the morning, Nick,’ she said.

‘I won’t let you,’ he had murmured. ‘You’re not leaving.’ Stubborn, sulky.

Contempt for him nudged the deadness she had felt all day. She had seen the fear cross his face when she had held out the newspaper cutting to him, and it was hard to say, but perhaps if she had seen shame in his face, she might have relented. Just might.

And now he wanted to fight his corner. She wondered at the man she had married, where he had gone. This wasn’t him at all, this person sitting at the end of the bed.

‘Please, Zeph,’ he said quietly, ‘Please.’

He irritated her, and that was why she could lie. ‘All right,’ she had said, in a sad voice. ‘I won’t go.’

He had glanced up, then got to his feet. ‘You won’t?’

‘If you don’t want me to.’

‘Oh, Zeph,’ he said. He almost ran to her, clasped his arms round her, tried to get her to sit up so that she could put her own round his waist. He had kissed her in desperate gratitude, and not noticed that she didn’t kiss him back. ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ he said. ‘I promise – that’s a real promise, Zeph. Cross my heart and hope to die.’ And he demonstrated by running an index finger across his chest. ‘Do you forgive me?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. It’ll take time, right? I know.’ He looked earnestly into her face. ‘I know I’ve done it all wrong, Zeph,’ he continued. ‘I look back on it and think, Was that me? Why did I do it?’

‘You were very stupid,’ she said.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Stupid.’

She disengaged his arms. ‘We’ll talk about it when you come back,’ she said. She pulled the sheet over herself.

‘I love you,’ he said, suitably contrite.

She didn’t reply. She saw him glance at the other side of the bed, obviously wondering if he would be welcome. ‘Do something for me,’ she said.

‘Anything.’ She heard the relief in his voice.

‘Sleep next door. Don’t wake me when you go.’

He paused, unsure.

‘Go,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll sort this out when you get back.’

He held her gaze for a second longer. She could see that he believed her. ‘I’m so sorry, Zeph,’ he said. ‘Do you believe me when I say I’ll always be sorry?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her heart lurched.
You will be sorry
, she thought.

He left at five. She heard him open the door and look in at her. She lay on her side and willed him to go away.

As he went down the stairs, and out of the street door, she heard him whistling softly. His keys jangled as he spun them round his finger. He always did that in anticipation of travelling. He was happy – she could tell by the sound of the keys and the jaunty whistling. She stiffened as she turned on to her back and stared at the ceiling, arms crossed tightly over herself. She listened to the taxi draw away from the kerb.

An hour later she got up and packed two cases for herself and two for Joshua. Her son regarded her with interest from the breakfast table as she went in and out, picking up toys, taking washing from the tumble-dryer, folding everything neatly and compactly so that she had room for more. ‘My toy,’ Joshua observed, just once.

‘We’re going to see Grammy,’ Zeph told him. ‘See the horses at the end of the lane.’ She glanced at him. ‘Ride one, if you like. You want to learn to ride a horse, Joshua?’

He gazed back at her, slightly unfocused, thinking of something else. ‘Harry party,’ he murmured.

‘Hey,’ she said, smiling, ‘how about your own horse, Joshua?’

He frowned at her. She picked him up and sat him down in front of the television. ‘I’ll just be a few more minutes,’ she told him.

When she had cleared her clothes from the wardrobe upstairs, she found that there was nothing else she wanted. She paused for a moment over the photographs on the bedside tables: one of her and Nick at a formal dinner, one of their wedding day, one of her, Nick and Joshua on a beach. She stood by the last one and bit her lip. Then, methodically, she took the photo out of the frame and tore it carefully so that she had the picture of herself and Joshua, and left the image of Nick. She put it back into the frame and looked at it. She felt nothing. But she hoped to God that it would hurt him.

She didn’t glance back at the house as she turned out of the street, the home they had scrimped and saved to buy, that they had renovated themselves. On the day that they had bought it, it was crumbling, neglected. They had put in the new kitchen and bathroom themselves. She had even learned to plaster walls. They had dug out the garden together, and made the patio. A memory nudged into her mind as she pulled out of the street: a mattress on the newly laid stones, in the pocket of ground where they were not overlooked by neighbours, and the sweet-chestnut tree in next door’s garden hung over them. Sweet dark shade in the day. They had lain there naked, far too drunk for Nick to achieve anything, but he had set about loving her with determined fervour, the two of them laughing. Sweet, sweet darkness. His tongue and hands on her. It seemed like another world, long ago.

She put her foot on the accelerator, trying to obliterate the memory.

It was almost one o’clock when she reached her mother’s house. Coming down the lane, she felt nervous. She slowed the car, trying to avoid the potholes in the track. Everything looked the same: the trees still overhanging the lane, the roof of the house showing through, a red patch in the green. The blackthorn was just starting to blossom.

She had not been down since the end of last summer, and felt a little frisson of guilt that she had left it so long. At Christmas, she, Nick and Joshua had gone with friends to Scotland, guests at a house party. At the time it had seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, and it had been the first time that Zeph hadn’t seen Cora over the festive season; but the sound of her voice on Christmas Day, far away, but purposefully bright and cheerful, had made Zeph feel low all holiday.

Whenever she rang her mother, Cora always said that she and the farm were fine, but Zeph knew she was lonely. Or, at least, that she felt alone. She knew it not because her mother complained of it but because Cora would talk at some length about going into town, or about someone she had met in a shop, or a conversation she had had with the factory about spraying the crop. These things seemed to preoccupy her to an exaggerated degree. It was aloneness, or loneliness, one of the two. Now, as she turned the last bend and saw the house and the yard, a greater pang of guilt touched her.

The yard was in as bad repair as the lane, she noticed. She stopped the car and leaned on the steering-wheel, frowning. Why did her mother never get anything repaired? If Zeph lived here, she would have had the lane and the yard resurfaced. There were plenty of farmers about with the right machinery, she reasoned. But her mother wouldn’t ask for help, wouldn’t trade something in return for the favour of the road repair. Cora liked to keep herself apart. Insanity, Zeph thought. Something she would have to talk to her mother about if she was going to live here.