Learning by Heart (9 page)

She thought that perhaps he was watching her progress as she stepped out and started across the green, but she didn’t look back. She walked down towards the car park behind Long Street, purposely looking into the shop windows, taking more time than usual. It wasn’t until she reached the car that she realized she had forgotten to buy the food she wanted, and the flowers for the table in the hallway. She had been going to get a few daffodils for there and for Zeph’s room to brighten the place up. She looked back across the car park, and it seemed a marathon, all the way back along the street and up the hill to the grocer and the florist, negotiating the cobbled lane and the uneven kerbstones.

For the second time that morning, she wanted to cry.

The first had been with her solicitor. The tears had sprung quickly as she had gazed down at the papers on the desk in front of her.

The solicitor had got to her feet immediately. ‘Oh, Mrs Ward,’ she had said, ‘there’s a solution, I’m sure.’ She had given Cora a tissue.

She was a nice girl, although Cora had never quite got used to Alan Rendall retiring and this pretty, black-suited professional taking his place.

‘Won’t you reconsider selling the land alone?’ Miss Miles asked now. ‘It would keep the wolf from the door.’

‘They would need to have access through the lane for their machinery,’ Cora said. She wiped her eyes.

‘You might build a separate access.’

‘I’d have strangers coming up and down the lane at all hours. There would be no privacy.’

‘But you would keep the farmhouse,’ Elizabeth Miles said. ‘Or you could reconsider selling the barn, perhaps, and keep the business.’

Cora put her hand to her head. She felt an overwhelmingly loyalty to Richard. She must keep together the farm and the land, everything for which he had striven so hard. But all she heard everywhere was ‘diversification’. Divide and rule. Or, more accurately, divide and survive.

All around her, farmers were selling off or letting their buildings and taking up sidelines: craft workshops, bed-and-breakfast, holiday cottages. But she couldn’t bear the thought of a continual stream of outsiders coming through the house.

‘Did you get a valuation for the barn?’

‘Yes,’ Cora said.

‘And that would be … how much?’

‘Fifty thousand,’ Cora said. ‘It’s the oldest part, older than the house.’

‘Fifty thousand is a great deal of money. It would solve your current problems.’

Cora had looked out of the window. Fifty thousand pounds would restock the orchards, replant the trees: the majority were coming to the end of their thirty-year life. It would pay for transport for the foreseeable future. It would renew the irrigation lines and pumps, and she could repair the roof of the house, which was long overdue. But it wouldn’t pay for anything to be done inside – the boiler, the bathroom, the kitchen. It wouldn’t pay for the lane to be resurfaced or for a new generator. She would be living in a house that was falling down around her, and forced to witness the barn’s conversion into some ghastly executive home.

And there would be people. Builders, contractors, then the family who moved into the barn. People under her nose, peering into the yard.

And she didn’t want people.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she murmured. And then, ‘I must replant the trees.’

‘Or there is the other option we discussed,’ Miss Miles said. ‘To sell everything, land, farmhouse, barn.’

‘I can’t,’ Cora said, recovering a little. ‘The terms of the will.’

Richard’s will lay among the documents in front of them. She could look at it more calmly now: the first time, it had been terrible – she hadn’t seen it since the funeral.

Richard had made it clear that the land and the house passed to her as an indivisible unit. When she died, it was to go to Zeph –
to Persephone, my darling daughter and only child
– and to her children. It wasn’t to be parcelled out, cut into pieces.

‘I’m sure that Mr Ward would have understood,’ Miss Miles said. ‘There would certainly be a legal way out.’

‘From the terms of the will?’

‘Yes. Would you like me to put it in writing to you?’

‘I’m not sure …’

‘Just to set out the various options, and how they might be achieved.’

‘All right,’ Cora agreed.

Miss Miles had given her a patient smile. ‘I’m afraid that simply doing nothing is no longer among the options,’ she had said quietly.

Richard had bought the farm in the spring of 1975. London retreated, with everything she had known and done there. For that, at least, she was glad.

It was the reason she had come home: to obscure London. To obliterate it. To erase it from her life.

She had met David Menzies the following Saturday, as she had promised.

It had been an unusually frantic week at work: Bisley had secured a new writer and a book that excited him and, on Thursday morning, the book had been accepted by a literary publishing house. There had been all sorts of talk about it being nominated for an award. Such was the luminosity of this young author, a man of twenty-one who had recently come down from Oxford with a first. It was a curious and clever little book about the history of common objects, and she had never seen Bisley so animated. She had been taken to lunch on Thursday and Friday, first with the author and then with his newly acquired editor. Bisley had introduced Cora as his ‘right hand’ and she had felt that her world had moved on a little. She could keep up with the conversations and the gossip; they laughed at her jokes; she understood some of the literary allusions.

So, when Menzies rang her on the Friday afternoon, she answered with a new sense of worth, of having some of the past week’s glamour. That day Bisley had remarked, as she brushed her hair before lunch, ‘Cora, you look quite reasonable today.’ He had winked at her as she smiled at him.

‘May I cook for you?’ David Menzies asked her, over the phone.

She was gazing out on to the street and the patch of green square they could just glimpse from the window. It was hot, and a faint trace of autumn hung in the air the leaves of the trees were turning dry and brittle under summer’s assault.

She didn’t think twice about it: she was still euphoric from the week’s events. ‘Yes,’ she said.

He gave her his address, somewhere different from the workshop.

‘Is that where you live?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘It’s a friend’s flat,’ he said. ‘He’s gone away until Christmas. It doesn’t smell so much as the other place.’ He laughed.

‘Shall I bring anything?’

‘Just yourself,’ he said.

It was a smart part of town, just behind Cheyne Walk. Unfortunately, the block of flats where David’s friend lived wasn’t as attractive as those that faced the river and the Embankment; but, nevertheless, it was Chelsea.

He answered the door with an apron tied round his waist, and a glass in his hand. ‘Champagne,’ he said, and gave it to her.

She took the glass on the doorstep. ‘You might have let me get over the threshold.’

He opened the door wide, and waved her in.

She was charmed. She had never seen her father make a cup of tea, let alone cook – or more extreme yet, wear an apron. No man cooked unless he was a chef. Men sat in chairs and waited to be served; they smoked cigars, as her father did; they cut lawns, as her father did; they went to work, as her father did. Nothing else. To do more, or to do different, was not being a man.

She watched David as he walked back across the room, and felt liberated and happy. David was different, and successful, and charming. Different enough, but not so very different that her father wouldn’t recognize the gentleman in him, his background of public school and European travel. She found herself wondering when she might take David to Sherborne and show him off.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said.

The flat was painted white, bright and modern, instead of being furnished, as the mews house was, with dark period pieces – she always felt a bit stifled there, in the house she rented with her friends; threading her way between vast mahogany tables and cupboards that the owner had evidently brought up from a bigger place in the country. Cora looked round the sitting room: there was nothing that would have been in her parents’ house. No fireplace, no piano, no panelled doors, no sideboard. Instead, one sofa, like a box with a straight back, in a red and blue pattern, a spindly-legged coffee-table, a starburst clock on the wall, two bright orange lampshades on two Chianti-bottle bases.

‘I hope you like fish,’ David said, from the kitchen.

She went in to him. He was cooking trout in almonds: she had only ever seen a photograph of it in a cookery book. ‘I’m impressed,’ she said admiringly.

‘You should be,’ he told her, and raised his glass as if to toast her.

‘Where on earth did you get trout?’ Such things were like gold dust; she and the rest of the girls in her house subsisted on toast with sardines, and corned-beef sandwiches.

‘Someone I know sent it down from Scotland.’

‘Sent it down?’

‘Packed in ice.’

‘They caught it themselves?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She caught it herself … Wild,’ he murmured. ‘She should have been a backwoodswoman. Follows hounds, shoots …’

‘Who is she?’ Cora asked.

‘A friend of a friend. Nobody important.’

There was another bottle of wine on the Formica table. He began to open it.

‘Let me help you,’ she said.

‘No, I’m rather good at this,’ he told her. ‘I’m rather good at everything.’

She didn’t know that the champagne, the wine, the dinner, the remark, meant anything in particular. She had not been brought up to know.

He was attentive through dinner, insisting that she sit while he served her. The dessert was crème caramel – ‘I cheated – I bought it,’ he had said. There was coffee, and liqueurs. He gave her a crème de menthe, which she didn’t say she disliked, both the colour and the taste. They sat on the hard sofa.

‘Anyone would think you were trying to get me drunk,’ she joked.

‘I am,’ he replied. And kissed her. She knew what kissing him would be like, and hoped that this time it would be more gentle, measured, romantic. But it wasn’t. He put an arm round her, held her chin with the other hand, and forced his mouth on hers so hard that he pushed her lips against her teeth. It was not a dry kiss. His mouth was wet. He smelt strongly of the brandy he had drunk.

She drew back, taken unawares.

‘Cora,’ he said, and pulled her towards him again, still with the arm round her shoulders. She straightened her back and tried to slide sideways a little. She didn’t like to ask him to stop: she felt obliged to let him kiss her. She had a feeling that women weren’t supposed to be awkward, or object.

‘Don’t tease me,’ he said.

She didn’t know what he meant. ‘I must go home,’ she told him.

He laughed. ‘Oh, darling.’

‘No, I must.’ She tried to push him away from her.

‘Didn’t you like the dinner?’ he asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Don’t you like me?’

His face was very close. She tried not to look at the wet mouth. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

‘Well, then.’

She submitted to another kiss. She wanted to feel affection for him; she wanted a romance. She liked him; she would have been pleased to let him put his arms round her waist and ask her out again. That was what she had expected. She tried not to mind his insistence. She waited for the end of the kiss, trying to keep upright, folding her hands in her lap. In her mind she could hear a schoolfriend saying that when men began to breathe heavily, they lost control. That was how naïve she was, how much of a child. She was listening to the pace and depth of his breathing, and it seemed normal.

It’s all right, she thought. I’m quite all right.

He moved his hand down her body; first, fleetingly, to her breast, then to her thigh.

‘I have to go,’ she repeated. She tried to get up.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he told her.

‘David,’ she said, ‘please let me go.’

His hand ran down her leg and quickly under her voluminous skirt. She felt it snag on her stocking. She closed her legs tightly and made a determined effort to stand up. ‘David,’ she said. ‘Please.’

He took away his hand, but only for a second. He pushed her backwards on the couch.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

He put his left arm across her, holding her down. He pulled up the skirt. She was wearing the usual net petticoats underneath: three starched layers that took so much trouble to wash and keep straight. Underneath them, she wore a silk slip to stop them scratching her legs. David Menzies’ hand found this now. He made a noise in his throat and forced his fingers higher.

‘Oh, don’t,’ she said.

His arm was almost on her throat. Her own right arm was pinned beneath her, but with her left hand she tried to pull his arm away. ‘I can’t breathe,’ she told him.

‘Will you lie still, for God’s sake?’ he said.

She trembled in panic. ‘Please let me go,’ she said. ‘I promise not to tell anyone.’

He looked shocked, then laughed. He stopped what he was doing. ‘Not tell anyone?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just let me get up,’ she said.

She had never let anyone touch her before. She had never made love to anyone. Over his shoulder, she could see the starburst clock on the wall. It was eleven thirty. She saw the minute hand move. She watched its progress, thinking that she would be home in an hour. She would be behind her own door. She could lock it and get undressed. She could wash at the basin in her bedroom. She would wash him away.

‘God,’ he said. ‘You are a tight little girl.’

When he had finished, he stood up and went out of the room. She heard water running.

That’s what I want to do, she thought. I want to wash.

He came back in. She was still lying where he had left her. He took a drink from the glass on the table, and regarded her for a moment or two. Then, he came over and pulled down her skirt. ‘Don’t lie there like that,’ he told her. ‘You look like a whore on her day off.’

She stood up. Her skirt was creased. She had spent ages ironing it that day, to look nice. I will have it do it all over again, she thought randomly.