The Home for Broken Hearts (25 page)

“Besides, if Simon is pleased with the new pages of our book, then it’s just as much down to you as it is to me; you are my muse, Ellen—and you have the best ideas. I insist that you come and take the credit that is due to you.”

Ellen chewed the inside of her lip, knotting her fingers together as she led Simon and Allegra into the kitchen and poured him a glass of cold water from the fridge.

“It’s just… if you’d called and I had realized that you were coming, I could have got ready, I’m just not good at being spontaneous, not without thinking about it first. You and Allegra go. Please. I’ll stay here and… tidy up a bit.” Ellen gestured around the immaculate kitchen, which sparkled like a new pin.

There were several seconds of discomfort while the three of them stood there, not quite certain how to proceed.

“Actually, Simon dear,” Allegra said, tucking her arm through Ellen’s, “do you know, I think she might have the right idea, it is terribly hot out there. Probably too hot for an old lady like me, we drop like flies in this weather, you know. Too hot or too cold and the grim reaper has a field day. So, as I’d rather finish this book before I shuffle off my mortal coil, perhaps it
would
be better if we had lunch here, if my gracious hostess wouldn’t mind?”

Ellen felt Allegra’s fingers tightening briefly around her arm and felt reassured.

“Oh, I’ve got loads—the supermarket delivered this morning.” Ellen went back to the fridge, letting the chilled air calm her hectic cheeks. “There’s smoked salmon, and Brie… grapes—oh, and cold chicken from yesterday, fresh French bread, loads of salad, and some wine—I’m sure I could rustle something up.” She turned back to look at Simon. “If you don’t mind, Simon. As Allegra would feel more comfortable here, that is.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” Simon said, looking a little bewildered. “Like Allegra said, the River Café is long past its best anyway. I’ll just cancel the car and come and help you chop something.”

Simon took Matt’s chair, and the three of them settled down for lunch, Ellen content to listen as Simon waxed lyrical about the latest chapters of
The Sword Erect.

“Who would have thought a suburb of Shepherd’s Bush would suit you quite so well, Allegra,” Simon said, leaning back in Matt’s chair, sipping a glass of wine. “I’m thinking of phoning the builders and telling them to delay the restoration of your house for as long as possible.”

“I must admit, it is far more tolerable here than I expected.” Allegra smiled briefly at Ellen. “I find Ellen rather refreshing,
a vast improvement on that last dreadful stain of humanity that I was saddled with. Shame she wasn’t washed away in the floodwaters, the ungrateful wretch.”

“Lord, I’d hate to get on your bad side,” Ellen said. “What did she do that was so terrible?”

“Breathed,” Allegra said, with such finality that Ellen considered the subject closed.

“And Eliza is really starting to live and breathe—do you know, I think she is your best female character yet,” Simon said, deftly changing the subject.

“That’s because in my mind’s eye Eliza is Ellen,” Allegra told him. “Or rather what Ellen could be if she would allow it.” Ellen expected Simon to laugh out loud, but instead he simply watched her over the rim of his wineglass, until she lowered her gaze.

“Yes,” he said, with just a trace of humor. “Yes, I can see Ellen rampaging around the countryside, offing assailants and saving the day. Leaving a trail of lovelorn men in her wake.”

“Did you know that Ellen has a suitor?” Allegra said, that mischievous meddling glint returning to her eyes.

“A suitor?” Simon sat up a little. “Whom, pray?”

“Her young lodger is quite taken with her. I am trying to persuade her to take him as a lover but she is most resistant. Don’t you think she should grasp the nettle, so to speak?”

“God, I hardly know!” Simon said, tucking in his chin and blushing. “But I would think that it would be something for dear Ellen to decide—and neither you nor I. Really, Allegra, when will you consider it time to stop being such a bad influence? It’s hardly seemly at…”

“If you say my age I will off you myself with this bread knife,” Allegra told him with some menace.

“Simon is right, though,” Ellen said. “Next you’ll be suggesting we put on miniskirts and go clubbing!”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.” Allegra smiled.

Simon shook his head. “Don’t take Allegra seriously, she’s
like Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
she can’t help but stir things up.”

“I always thought that whole debacle was more Oberon’s doing than his poor queen’s,” Allegra said mildly. “But there you are, that was ever the way of the world. Women get the blame for the actions of men.” Allegra leveled her attention on Ellen. “Except for women who take action, that is.”

“Is that the time?” Simon looked at his watch and sighed. “Ellen, thank you for a lovely lunch. It kills me to have to leave you with this old harridan, but I must get back to the office. We’ve got a launch meeting for our new series, we’re trying something modern day. Unbridled passion on the photocopier, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds appalling,” Allegra muttered.

“Just make sure she finishes the book,” Simon told Ellen, cupping her face in his hand and kissing her briefly before looking at Allegra.

“And as for you, remember you’re a pensioner.”

Simon escaped before Allegra had time to brandish her knife.

After he had gone, Allegra sat at the table while Ellen busied herself putting away the lunch things. It was almost three and she was secretly hoping that Charlie would come straight back from school today, that there wouldn’t be any tense minutes wondering what was happening to him, and that maybe, just maybe, when he came he’d be smiling, perhaps even want to talk to her. She worried about the anniversary of Nick’s death, which had started to loom large on the horizon; she worried about what her son was thinking and how she was handling it or even if she was handling it at all.

“Did you know that with just a little effort you could be quite the siren,” Allegra said as Ellen stacked the dishwasher, a loose lock of hair trailing down her back. Ellen did not reply, caught up as she was in her own thoughts. “Didn’t think so,” Allegra said quietly to herself.

Occasionally, so occasionally that when it happens you find yourself pleasantly surprised, things work out the way you want them to, which was how Ellen felt when Charlie came home just before four, bounding up the stairs and even humming.

She had been in her bedroom, released early from work by Allegra, who had decided that she felt a little tired (which was code for “tipsy”) and needed to rest her eyes (which was code for “nap”), and had decided on impulse to go through her wardrobe. Spread on her bed were a selection of dresses and skirts, vapid remnants of a past life when she used to think about what she looked like. Ellen picked up one of Nick’s favorite dresses, a pale blue cotton affair printed with tiny chintz flowers, with a square-cut neck, little cap sleeves, and covered buttons down the front. Ellen held it against her body as she looked in the mirror, smoothing it over her breasts and forming it to her hips.

Odd, how it didn’t look like her dress anymore, or even like anything she would choose to wear. The color clashed with her olive skin and green eyes and the length, which fell just below the knee, made her look a good deal shorter than she was. And if Ellen remembered rightly, the little covered buttons used to pull uncomfortably over her bust and made her feel that if she made any sudden movements with her arms,
they would ping off one by one. She had hated wearing this dress, and yet she had worn it because Nick had chosen it.

Hearing the sound of laughter on the street drifting in through the crack in her bedroom window, Ellen went to investigate, pulling back the thick, cream lace curtain that she habitually kept drawn. Standing on the street beneath her was her neighbor, wearing the red dress that she had seen on the line, and she was talking to someone else, perhaps another neighbor. As she hovered behind the curtain, Ellen peered at the man, but she didn’t recognize him. That didn’t mean anything, though, she realized—the whole street could have changed ownership in the last year and she wouldn’t have known a thing about it. She remembered that just after Nick’s funeral many of her neighbors had visited, most dropping cards through the letter box, wanting to show support but not intrude, but some knocking on the door and asking if there was anything they could do as if there was anything they could do. Ellen’s red-dressed neighbor, Laura something, if Ellen remembered correctly, had arrived with a casserole. It had been the first morning that Ellen was alone in the house and she wouldn’t have opened the door if she had remembered that she didn’t have to, but habit had moved her body before her brain could engage.

Laura had looked tired and drained as she held out the dish.

“It’s just chicken,” she had said by way of a greeting. “I remember that after my husband left me I didn’t have the energy to eat anything. You’ve got a little boy, haven’t you, so I thought you might want this. It’s nothing much, forty-five minutes in the oven at one eighty should do it.”

Uncertain of what to say, Ellen had taken the casserole, the faint earthy scent of chicken and vegetables wafting upward, incongruous on that summer morning.

“Thank you,” Ellen had said, at a loss as to how to respond.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Laura had said. “Just drop the dish back when you’ve finished.”

Now as she stood at the window, Ellen realized that she still had the earthenware dish sitting in the back of her pots cupboard. She hadn’t spoken to Laura since.

Laura laughed again and then leaned in and kissed the man, not on the cheek or even the mouth but on his neck, just beneath his jawline. Shocked by the unexpected moment of intimacy, Ellen withdrew farther behind the curtain, but she did not stop looking. It seemed that much more had happened to Ellen’s neighbor over the last year than losing a casserole dish and acquiring a dress. Ellen watched as the pair linked fingers in one last gesture of familiarity before parting ways, slowly, until their hands pulled apart, and one last over-the-shoulder smile was exchanged.

A lot had changed for Laura in the last year. As Ellen watched her walking purposefully down the street in her red dress, she wondered if her life would ever be something like that again, a world of possibilities, a view with a far horizon. Her heart quickened a little as she thought about feeling the sun in her hair, the touch of her man’s pulse beneath her lips.

Flinging her blue dress onto the bed, Ellen looked over her meager collection of clothes, wondering just for fun if there was anything in there that she might wear if she was going to seduce Matt. The thought made her chuckle as she rifled through sensible garment after staid dress. Even before Nick, her dress sense hadn’t been desperately daring. She wondered whether Matt had ever been seduced by a woman in a stitched-down pleat and turtleneck sweater. Hannah always knew how to dress, Ellen thought, eyeing a pastel-pink cardigan that she had no recollection of buying. If not for the invisible, unquantifiable obstruction between the two of them, she would have asked Hannah to give her some tips. Sometimes, Ellen thought as she sat on the bed and raked her fingers through the clothes, she wondered how she and Hannah could possibly be related.

“There must be something in here worth wearing,” Ellen muttered to herself. She had yet to find anything when Charlie came thundering in to her.

He stopped in his tracks when he saw her, as if he’d only just remembered that they’d been fighting.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” Ellen said warmly, biting off the word
darling
before it could escape her lips. “Good day?”

“Yeah, not bad, actually,” Charlie said, sounding surprised by his revelation.

“That’s good.” Ellen gestured at the bed. “Thought I’d sort some stuff out for charity.”

“Dad’s stuff?” Charlie asked, glancing at the half of the oak Edwardian wardrobe that was still crammed with Nick’s clothes.

“No, not Dad’s things. Not yet. My old things.”

“You should get some new clothes,” Charlie said, fingering a folded piece of paper that he’d pulled from his trouser pocket. “If you like, I could come shopping with you on Saturday. We could go to Westfield, it’s got millions of shops, there’s bound to be something you like—you should see it, Mum, it’s massive.”

“I know, with shiny floors and a cinema! You told me. Sounds like it would be an easy place to get lost.”

“I don’t get lost when I go there with my mates, I know it like the back of my hand!” Charlie told her. “I’d look after you.”

“Really?” Ellen smiled. “You’d really go clothes shopping with your old mum?”

“If you like,” Charlie offered.

“Well… shall we see, nearer the time?”

Charlie’s shoulders sank just a fraction of a millimeter and he handed her the piece of paper.

“What’s this?” Ellen asked, unfolding it.

“It’s parents’ evening, again. End-of-year things, you
know—see how we’ve been doing,” Charlie said as she read over the letter. “It’s next week, you have to fill in the time you want to come and give me back the slip. Mrs. Jenkins wrote you a note on the back.”

Ellen turned the letter over. Sure enough, Charlie’s teacher had written a message there in green Biro, with the fat round handwriting that all teachers seemed intent on passing on to their pupils.

“Dear Mrs. Woods—sorry to have missed you last term—really hope to see you here this time, it would be great to discuss Charlie’s progress with you. All the best, T. Jenkins,” Ellen read.

“Parents’ evening, that’s come round again quickly,” she said. “I didn’t know they did another one at the end of the year.”

“You missed the last one,” Charlie reminded her. “And the opening-evening talk about options. You didn’t go to that, either.”

“I know, Charlie. I’m sorry.” Ellen looked at the piece of paper. “It’s been a bit of a year.”

“But you can come to this one, can’t you?”