The Home for Broken Hearts (24 page)

Oh, that’s awful,” Ellen said, looking up at Allegra. Ellen had typed breathlessly as Allegra described to her how, disguised as a man, Eliza had left the body of her assailant lying on the floor of the coaching inn and made her dangerous way to the shelter of the Tower of London, where she was certain her father’s childhood friend would offer her some much-needed protection. But Captain Parker had been charged with bringing her to justice for being a murderer and a spy—forced to hunt down the woman he loved and abduct her from the tower in the dead of night to escort her to her death.

“Yes, I know,” Allegra said thoughtfully. “The description is far too sketchy and halfhearted, it won’t do at all. We will have to go back and rewrite the section where Eliza discovers a Royalist traitor in their midst and saves her guardian’s life, otherwise the readers will feel cheated.”

“No, I didn’t mean that—I meant Eliza being captured and dragged off by Captain Parker. Surely he won’t see her hanged, not if he loves her. Surely he’d rather be hanged himself, wouldn’t he?”

“Would he, though?” Allegra mused. “We already know that he’s a scoundrel. Handsome he might be, and a sensational lover to boot—but he forced himself on Eliza and now is racked with guilt. Perhaps he’d rather see her dead, and not have to think about her at all.”

“Really?” Ellen was dismayed. “But I mean, doesn’t he love her, wouldn’t he do anything to save her? He is going to rescue her in the end, isn’t he?”

“Who knows?” Allegra smiled. “But I can tell you one thing, Ellen: it’s best that we don’t know, because if we don’t know, then neither does our reader.”

“Ohhhh.” Ellen smiled with relief. “But in the end he’ll save her.”

“Perhaps not. In life there isn’t always a hero to save a damsel in distress. Perhaps it would be better if we made Eliza clever enough and brave enough to save herself; women don’t always need men to rescue them, you know.”

Allegra raised her eyebrows and looked pointedly at Ellen, but it was a glance that went over the other woman’s head as she turned in her chair to gaze out the window, to the bottom of her garden, where her thoughts so often seemed to be drawn these days. Ellen saw a splash of color in the untamed greenery—the vivid blue of the irises that she had planted when they first moved in sang out against the lush green on the unkempt grass, and the hot orange of her lilies burned brightly in the sun, brought on early by this unlikely June heat wave. Across the fence, which was starting to rot and which sagged at one end since the spring storms had battered it, Ellen saw the neighbor’s wash drying on the line. The woman had a new dress, hanging limp and still in the dead heat of the morning; red cotton, buttoned down the front and belted at the waist, it was the sort of dress that made other women look smart and sexy. Ellen would see her neighbor sometimes, walking down the road in one of her outfits. She always walked purposefully, as if she had somewhere really important to go. Ellen tried to remember the last time she’d had somewhere important to go.

“Do you hope for a hero?” Allegra asked, quite out of the blue.

Ellen turned back to her. “Me? A hero? Whatever makes you say that?”

“Well, your husband took care of you and your son so well, and now you are all alone and putting up with strangers in your home in order to make ends meet. Don’t you wish some handsome man would come and whisk you off, take you away from all this? To float through Venice in a gondola, perhaps, or take you by the hand and lead you along the Great Wall of China. Or even just to kick pebbles on the beach in Suffolk. Don’t you wish for something to happen, something unexpected and wonderful to take you out of this house and away?”

A brief image of sea stretching into a boundless sky flashed into Ellen’s mind’s eye and she felt her heart contract.

“I don’t suppose I’ve really thought about going anywhere,” she said mildly. “I suppose that all I’ve thought about for the last year is how to stay here. So no, I don’t long for a hero.…” Ellen paused, thinking again about the way Matt had looked at her that morning. He couldn’t have been looking at her
that
way, she must have imagined it. Young, sexy men didn’t look at older frumpy women like
that.
It was simply impossible. She looked terrible and old and unkempt, and he looked young and fresh and like he could have any woman he wanted, and yet, just for that split second, their eyes had met and she’d felt like her fantasy version of herself, standing in a white dress in a hay barn, on the brink of ravishment.

“Just a lover then, perhaps?” Allegra asked.

“Oh, Allegra—stop it!” Ellen exclaimed. “I’m not at all sure it is seemly for a woman of your age to be constantly talking about sex.”

“A woman of my age! Pah! Let me tell you, my dear, the body might sag, decay, and crumble all around, but inside I still feel the same desires and impulses I felt when I was eighteen, which is why you should be making the most of what nature gave you while you still have it, instead of keeping it shrouded away like a museum piece. Besides, if anybody is allowed to be obsessed by sex, it’s me—it is rather my stock-in-trade.”

“I don’t keep myself ‘shrouded away’—I just like to be
comfortable, and besides, what’s the point of dressing up when you work from home?”

“When you have a very desirable and probably willing young man cavorting around half naked in front of you, then I would say there is every point.” Allegra stroked the tips of her fine fingers from underneath her chin to the top of her décolletage, as if she were remembering a lover’s caress. “I had a younger lover once. I was sixty-three, he was forty-two. I recommend it, it was most exhilarating. Be assured I’d be setting my cap at young Matthew if it weren’t for the fact that he is so clearly intrigued by you.”

“He is not interested in me,” Ellen retorted, surprised to find herself giggling like a schoolgirl. She looked up at the older woman, who regarded her with a kind of knowing smile that Ellen found quite disconcerting. “He spends his whole day with a bunch of half-naked twenty-year-olds!”

“Tell me what the best part about Christmas is,” Allegra said.

“Pardon?” Ellen frowned.

“The best part about Christmas is the anticipation. It’s looking at your presents, all so beautifully and temptingly wrapped, and wondering what on earth might be concealed beneath. In most cases, unwrapping the gifts is as good as it gets; usually there is something unutterably dull lurking beneath that requires you to look pleased and say thank you. But I think…” Allegra appraised Ellen for an uncomfortably long time. “Young Matthew would find delights equal to if not more pleasing than anything he might see at work beneath your wrapping.”

“Allegra.” Ellen flushed, briefly picturing Matt’s hands on the buttons of her shirt, slowly undoing… no—rapidly ripping them asunder before burying his face in her soft flesh. “It is hot in here, isn’t it?” Ellen said, glancing at the open patio doors. “I think I probably need to buy a fan if the weather’s going to carry on like this. I can probably get it delivered with the next supermarket shop. Or maybe we could get one of those air-conditioning units…”

“Ellen,” Allegra said over her. “Ellen. I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable. I can’t help it, it’s the prerogative of an old woman like me to meddle. Besides, I find that I like you, which is most unusual for me. I hardly ever like anyone. So if you feel my meddling goes too far, I give you permission to tell me.”

Ellen looked into Allegra’s hooded eyes and tried to imagine ever talking to her mother the way she talked to Allegra, and realized that it would have been impossible. Whenever she spoke to her mother, they discussed the weather, Charlie, Hannah’s latest achievements, the height of the neighbor’s privet hedge, and her father’s back issues. They rarely talked about anything… internal. In fact, now that she came to think of it, Ellen had never had that kind of friendship with anyone. At school she had been at the bottom of the social heap, the shy, lumpy, awkward girl; at university she’d spent more time in the library than at the bar, and when Nick had come along, the friendships she’d forged at the museum soon became redundant. This was what it was like to have a friend, Ellen realized, feeling a bubble of pleasure rising in her chest. This wasn’t uncomfortable; it was good. It was good to be rebuilding her life in her own modest way, finding her way in the world from within these four walls, forming friendships with people she hadn’t known at all a few weeks ago. Nick had been so convinced that she would never be able to manage if left by herself out in the big bad world that he had persuaded her not to try, and yet here she was—not out in the big bad world exactly. But coping—no, more than coping…
living.
Nick would be so surprised and, Ellen hoped, proud. She hoped he would be proud of her.

“Look, if I’m honest,” she said slowly, “I do think Matt is, you know… attractive, and I do sometimes wonder what it would be like… but even if he does want to unwrap me…” Ellen stalled as Allegra snorted with laughter. “Even if he did look at me like that this morning in the kitchen…”

“I knew it!” Allegra looked triumphant.

“Even then,” Ellen went on, “it’s not a year since Nick died, Allegra. The anniversary is in ten days, and to me it still feels like yesterday that the police turned up at the door and asked me to sit down in the front room. I love him. I love my husband. Thoughts and feelings and fantasies—they are okay, fun, even—like reading your books because they are safe, like you said. But I couldn’t ever do anything for real, not ever.”

“Not ever?” Allegra asked. “Ever is a very long time, Ellen. People will queue up to tell you that life is short, and you of all people have good reason to believe that. But I promise you, when you are alone, life can seem very, very long.”

“When you love someone as much as I loved Nick, and when you know that he loved you every bit as much, that doesn’t just go away, it doesn’t just evaporate. I felt that way about Nick since the first moment I saw him. I don’t think it’s possible that I will ever feel differently. After all, that’s what love is, isn’t it? It’s eternal.”

Allegra leaned her head back against her chaise longue.

“It would be nice if that were true,” she said. “But love is like anything else, it’s ephemeral, as fragile as a spider’s web on a windy day.”

“But in your books, love always conquers all,” Ellen said. “You’ve written some of the most romantic works ever; your job title is ‘romantic novelist’!”

“Yes, I have always felt a bit guilty about peddling that myth, but like you said, I write fantasies and women want to believe in romance.” Allegra shrugged. “Like children want to believe in Father Christmas and Christians are desperate to believe in God.”

“But—” Before Ellen could respond, the doorbell sounded, spreading a trickle of fear through her chest the way it always did since she had heard it chime on July twelfth nearly one year ago.

“Well, it can’t be Hannah,” she said, looking in the direction of
the front door as if she might be able to discern who the visitor was through a brick wall and two solid oak doors. “I wonder who it is.”

“You could try the radical approach of answering the door and finding out,” Allegra said dryly. The bell sounded again.

“I’m not expecting anyone. I had the supermarket delivery already,” Ellen said tentatively, remaining firmly seated.

“Oh, for God’s sake, woman—answer the bloody door before you force an aged woman to get up and do it for you.”

Utterly reluctant to open her house to whatever might be waiting outside, Ellen forced herself out of her seat and, her heart pounding, made herself place her hand on the latch. Taking a breath, she opened it, flinching against the invasive sunlight that flooded into the hallway.

“Ellen!” Simon beamed at her, his arms outstretched, ready for an embrace. “I was beginning to think you’d gone out.” He pulled her over the threshold and into his arms briefly before releasing her back inside. “Look at you, you look radiant. I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you, but I read the pages that you emailed me last night and they were so fantastic that I thought I’d come and take you and Allegra to lunch to celebrate. I’ve booked the River Café at one.”

“You’ve booked… but, Simon, look at me!” Ellen retreated into the hallway, gesturing down at herself. “I can’t go anywhere dressed like this.”

“My love.” Simon smiled. “A woman as beautiful as you could go anywhere in sackcloth and still outshine every other soul there, but it’s fine. I’ve booked a cab and it’s not coming for half an hour. Plenty of time for you to gild the lily while I tell Allegra what a literary genius she is.”

“And yet still no Booker nomination—where’s the justice?” Allegra emerged from her room to greet Simon, having discreetly reapplied a little lipstick first and with a fresh spray of her favorite perfume lingering in the air; she kissed him lightly on either cheek, one hand resting against his chest with
the practiced grace of a woman who knew exactly how to behave around men. It was an impressive skill, Ellen thought, realizing that she had only ever learned to behave around one very particular man. “I wondered when I might get the kind of attention that I deserve from you as the writer who single-handedly pays your bills. Did I hear you say the River Café? Of course it’s not as good as it used to be and it’s not the Ivy, but it will do, I suppose.”

“That’s settled then.” Simon took Allegra’s hand from his chest and kissed it before turning to Ellen. “Darling, before you go and improve on perfection, do you have anything cold to drink? It’s hotter than hell out there.”

Ellen looked from Allegra to Simon and back again, her feet firmly rooted to the floor.

“Simon, it’s just—I don’t have anything to wear. I really don’t have any clothes, nothing nice at all. I haven’t bought anything new since… well, since Nick’s funeral, and I just… I’m all grungy and hot and I’d need a shower… look, you two go without me. Allegra always looks so lovely, I’d just embarrass you.”

“Nonsense,” Simon protested, “you could never do that—Ellen, I’ve already said you look perfect just as you are. I mean that.”