The Home for Broken Hearts (19 page)

“I have a splendid idea,” Allegra went on. “We’ve worked so hard these last two weeks, we haven’t been out of the house! How about you and I go on a research trip to the tower, you know, soak up the atmosphere, find out a little more about the history, and afterward we can make Simon take us to lunch at that Conran restaurant—the one at the foot of Tower Bridge—what’s it called? He’s been promising me a good lunch for weeks now.”

“Pont de la Tour,” Ellen said slowly. “And yes, that would be a good idea—but don’t forget—it’s peak tourist season. We wouldn’t be able to move for the crowds, we’d get no sense of atmosphere at all. And in this heat, with all of those people, I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, Allegra.”

Ellen thought of the throngs that were always pressing into every nook and cranny of London’s tourist hotspot, and her heart raced at the thought of being caught up in that great, indifferent crowd of strangers. She swallowed and shook the image from her head, choosing instead to focus on a ladybird that was crawling up the glass of the open french door. Now that the inside had been freshly painted, Ellen noticed that the outside was peeling and cracked. Vaguely she wondered if all the external woodwork was in need of similar repair.

“You have a point.” Allegra wrinkled her nose at the thought of the mass of the great unwashed. “Although it rather irks me that I am getting too old for crowds. During my life I’ve found that almost all of the best things happen in crowds, parties, orgies—
that sort of thing. Still, how are we to know our locations if we do not visit them?”

“Easy!” Ellen smiled. “Google maps.” She opened the Web browser on her laptop and brought up the right page. After a few minutes she found the location and brought it over to show Allegra. “See, you don’t actually need to go anywhere anymore, you can walk down almost any street without ever leaving the house. It’s brilliant!”

“Good Lord.” Allegra peered uncertainly at the screen. “I wonder that anyone will ever leave their homes soon; we will all be living virtual lives in a virtual reality.”

“Yes, but when you think about it, that’s sort of what a novel is, isn’t it?—a virtual reality,” Ellen said. “I don’t think it’s all that bad, is it? There’s nothing wrong with having a place to escape to. A place to feel safe in.”

“Perhaps.” Allegra watched her. “But I tend to think that life is made up of the muck and grit, the dirt and danger of the real world. The world we are born into, kicking and screaming and gasping for air. To try to escape the daily fight is to excuse yourself from living, isn’t it? And you want to be a writer, Ellen, and to be a writer you need to live life. Not watch it go by out your window.”

“I don’t want to be a writer!” Ellen smiled. “I don’t have the talent for it. I just love reading and sometimes I’ve had a go at writing for fun, but I could never do what you do, Allegra. It’s just not in me.”

“Well, that is arguable, but if it isn’t in you, then perhaps that’s only because you are not in it.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ellen asked, but Allegra shrugged the comment away.

“Very well, agreed that we will not visit the tower in person, but I am still determined to have my good lunch and I am determined that you will come with me; after all, you are just as deserving as I am, if not more.”

“Well, um, thank you,” Ellen said, her smile wavering. “Thank you. I’m
sure that would be really nice and I’d love to come—if I can.”

“That’s settled then, I shall telephone Simon about it this afternoon,” Allegra said. “Now let’s talk about Eliza and Captain Parker. She hates him, and with good reason; after all, he took from her what was hers only to bestow. But now she’s had that terrible experience with her uncle and the man she’s killed, she might perhaps see a subtle difference. The captain did not hurt her and he made her feel the awakening of desire that she is unable to forget, so although she hates him she yearns for him, too.”

“Mmmm,” Ellen said. “The thing is, I’ve read all of your books and I love them, but I’ve never quite been able to get my head around the fact that the man who forces himself on a woman at the beginning of a book can be the same man she falls in love with at the end. I mean, while I’m reading it, I’m swept along with it, it all makes sense, but afterward, I wonder—would that really happen?”

“Of course not, but this is fantasy, dear—and whether we admit it or not, many women fantasize about being overpowered by a man, to be absolved of any responsibility for whatever sexual pleasure might be about to befall them,” Allegra said. “Don’t forget, most of my readers are married or older women, they are not practiced seductresses—in real life they would never stray from the right path, so in their fantasies they often have no choice. Goodness knows, the debate about whether my fiction glamorizes rape has raged on for each of the thirty years I’ve been writing, but what I’m writing isn’t real, it’s a safe environment where a woman can indulge in certain thoughts—I haven’t met a woman yet who would not secretly like to be tied to the bedpost with a silk scarf or two and toyed with a little by her lover.”

“Haven’t you?” Ellen exclaimed, genuinely shocked.

Allegra’s smile was mischievous. “Well, didn’t you?”

“Me? Tied up and… No, it was never like that with me and Nick.”
Ellen found herself blushing, flashes of the last time that she and Nick had made love materializing before her eyes for one painful moment, him moving above her, his eyes closed, her watching him, willing him to look at her, just for one moment—to see her the way that only he ever could. It had been a quiet, sacred, special thing, the last time that they had made love, and afterward she had rested her head on Nick’s chest and listened to his heartbeat as he slept.

“What a shame. So what was sex like?” Allegra asked flatly. Ellen hesitated; one thing she had never done was discuss her sex life with anyone other than her husband. Not even with him, to be honest—it simply wasn’t something they ever sat down and talked about.

When she first met Nick, she’d been working as a research assistant at the British Museum, cataloging and dating the reams of various artifacts that the museum owned but did not have the room to put on permanent display. And when she’d come into work glowing after a night out with him, her friends and colleagues would quiz her on every tiny detail of her date, even on his prowess in bed. Ellen had told them nothing, partly because she was far too shy to talk about anything like that and partly because there was hardly anything to tell. For the first few months of their relationship Nick had barely touched her, their physical contact hardly stretching beyond a good-night kiss, his hand resting chastely on her waist, which would invariably leave Ellen on the wrong side of her front door, wondering exactly what it was he saw in her when he seemed to desire her so little. Once, after months of dating him, over dinner after one glass of wine too many, she had asked him flat out if he fancied her. Nick had laughed, making Ellen feel, she remembered, rather foolish.

“Do I fancy you?” He’d repeated the question. “Have you seen yourself, Ellen, with your black hair and green eyes and those curves… my God, I don’t think there is a man alive who
would not want you.”

“But then why haven’t we… I mean it’s been nearly six months and we haven’t even, you know.” Ellen had leaned across the table, feeling the excess of wine slosh around inside her skull. “You haven’t even tried to put your hand up my top.”

Nick had given her this look, as if he was very slightly disappointed in her for even asking. It was a look that had set her back in her chair.

“Don’t you get it, Ellen?” he’d asked, looking a little offended. “You are the woman I’m going to marry. The woman who’s going to have my children and who I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. What’s six months in a lifetime? When we make love for the first time I want you to know that it’s special, that it’s forever. When I make you mine, I want to make sure that you
are
mine—we have all the time in the world, Ellen. We have forever, after all.”

Ellen remembered how breathless she’d felt when his fingertips had reached across the table and touched the back of her hand, the electric shock that had shivered through her body at the merest suggestion of contact. She had been overwhelmed by the romance of the moment, consumed with happiness at her luck in finding a man who would cherish her so.

“Yes,” she’d whispered happily. “Oh yes, Nick, I will marry you.”

“Hang on, darling.” Nick had chuckled. “I haven’t asked you yet. All in good time. You’ll find out when I’m ready—and in the meantime, let’s just take our time, shall we?”

And after Nick had chosen his moment, proposing to her over a picnic held on the banks of the Seine, and they were married on the date that he chose, Ellen had decided to take Nick’s advice and give up working for the museum. Her female friends had gradually dropped away, and little by little Nick, and then a little later, Charlie, had become her life, a life that she reveled in. It was funny, but in all those years, up
until that very moment, Ellen had never once missed the tipsy nights out that she used to enjoy with the girls, but somehow talking to Allegra brought back to her what it used to be like, how she never laughed in quite the same way or as hard with her husband as she had with her female friends. And yet now she wasn’t at all certain that any of the numbers she had for them in her battered address book would still be relevant. She’d lost all of those people who had once been so important to her without even noticing, she’d been so caught up in her new life with Nick.

Once, Hannah had asked her with a raised eyebrow what her sex life with Nick was like, and Ellen had told her to mind her own business. She never talked about that kind of thing with anyone, and especially not with Hannah. Nick would have been appalled. And yet somehow it sort of felt okay to talk about it with Allegra. Allegra was impartial, like some Greek goddess reigning over a chessboard of mortals. Her interest in Ellen’s sex life wasn’t salacious or intrusive, it was impartial.

Ellen slid her bottom up onto the surface of the desk, forgetting what Allegra might think as she pondered her question.

“It was quiet—you know. Nick was always so gentle with me, so tender. I mean, he made me feel unbelievably beautiful. He used to love that he was the only man in the world who got to… well, look at me, you know—that way.”

“You are unbelievably beautiful, that’s simply a fact,” Allegra told her. “It’s a rare beauty when even in those sacks you insist on wearing, with your hair all scraped up and having clearly been nowhere near makeup in several years, you still have that glow about you, that look of a woman, to paraphrase Margaret Mitchell, who needs to be kissed, and well, by someone who knows how.”

“I’m not sure about that.” Ellen’s eyes widened as she was haunted momentarily by her fantasy vision of Matt gripping her firmly in a hay barn.

“So your husband was gentle with you; was he passionate,
too?” Allegra persisted.

“Oh yes—well, I mean he didn’t rip off my clothes or fling me about. That just wasn’t Nick, but he was very passionate about our marriage, about the way it should be.” Ellen smiled fondly as she remembered. “He was an old-fashioned boy with old-fashioned ideas. He was the man who went out in the world, the breadwinner—and I was his sanctuary, his wife waiting for him at home. I know it seems outdated and archaic now, but the truth is, Allegra, that Nick was exactly the kind of man I needed. I’m not a go-getting career girl like Hannah; I don’t… didn’t… function all that well on my own, I haven’t got what it takes. Nick made me realize that I didn’t want to be out in the world, fighting for my corner. I wanted to be there for him and he wanted to make a safe place for me. When we bought this house, he closed the front door behind us and told me that I was home now, and I never had to worry about the world outside the door again. I felt so… cherished.”

“And your husband was your only lover?” Allegra asked. “You were a virgin when you married him?”

“No, of course not! I was twenty-four when I married him. I’d had two other ‘proper’ boyfriends but it was nothing special with them. With the first one, I remember I was scared because I hadn’t told him I was a virgin, and I didn’t want him to think I was inexperienced, so I just lay there totally rigid with fear, until eventually he stopped and asked me what was going on. I had to tell him then and he was really sweet about it, turned out he was a virgin, too; we muddled through somehow. That was Graham. We went out together for a year, and then after him there was this man at the museum, my boss, I’m ashamed to say.”

“And did he throw you across his desk, rip a hole in your tights, and take you?” Allegra asked hopefully.

“Goodness no, he was a lot older than me and he had a reoccurring slipped disk. We never really clicked in
that
way. Anyway, it only happened a couple of times before I met Nick,
and then I realized for the first time in my life what it meant to really want someone.”

“What did Nick think of your lovers? Was he jealous?” Allegra asked.

“No—Nick never asked me and I never told him. It was as if when we came together we started on a new page, as if nothing that had happened before mattered. It was us two against the world.”

“I see,” Allegra said thoughtfully, eyeing Ellen, whose tawny skin was a little flushed from the conversation, the slight breeze that found its way through the french doors lifting tendrils of her dark hair away from her skin. “And now?”

“Now?”

“Ellen, you are still a young woman, a young, attractive, and clearly passionate woman. Now surely is the right time for a new chapter in your life. So—who will make love to you now?”

“Oh, God—no one! No, no one. I was, I am, Nick’s wife. I always will be. I could never… not with anyone else. It would be a betrayal. And besides, what about Charlie? I have to think of him; the last thing he needs is me, you know, doing it.”

“Are you sure?” Allegra asked. “Perhaps a more fulfilled and satisfied mother is just what he needs—either way, it’s clear to me, even if it isn’t to you, that you are a very sexual person.”