The Home for Broken Hearts (3 page)

“I’ll try my best, okay? And in the meantime, please don’t call people trash. Or ‘gay,’ if you’re using it as an insult.”

“But it’s okay if you’re using it as a compliment?” Charlie quizzed her. “Like, oh, Simon Harper, you are so wonderfully gay!”

“Charlie.” Ellen repressed a smile. “You are nearly twelve years old. You know what’s wrong and what’s right—try and stick to it, okay?”

“Okay.” Charlie grinned. “I actually think Simon Harper is gay, though.”

“So, fish fingers?” Ellen smiled, ever hopeful that one day he’d change his answer.

“Yes, please, Mummy.”

Ellen didn’t know what broke her heart more, the scars left by his father’s death or the fact that sometimes, just for a fleeting moment, her little boy forgot to be all grown up.

Well, I would have thought it was obvious,” Hannah said, stirring her third spoonful of sugar into her black coffee. Ellen’s sister, younger than she by some nine years, lived on coffee, cigarettes, and sugar, and looked annoyingly good on it; “slender as a willow tree and just as bendy” was how she’d been known to introduce herself to potential lovers, which was pretty much any male within a five-mile radius. “You have to do what that accountant says. You have to consolidate, let the place out, and get somewhere small for you and Charles. I mean, Ellie, it’s only a pile of bricks. It’s not even as if you and Nick lived here all your married life, as if he carried you over the threshold on your wedding day. You’ve only lived here a few years and I never did get why you bought such a huge place when there was only going to be the three of you.…” Hannah faltered, realizing that she had put her foot in her mouth yet again, and stirred her beverage furiously, unable to meet Ellen’s eye for a moment. Both of them knew that when Ellen and Nick bought the house they had planned to fill it with children, a real family home for a real family. But circumstances had changed, and that had become an impossibility long before Nick died. Ellen smarted inwardly; it was just like her sister to pick up on the details that could wound her the most, calling her home a pile of bricks. It was so much
more than that—it was symbolic of what her life used to be—of what it should have been.

“Anyway—it’s just a place,” Hannah stumbled on. “A reminder of everything that you’ve… lost. A fresh start—that’s exactly what you need. If anything, this house is a burden, and it’s one you don’t need.”

Ellen said nothing for a moment. It had taken her two days since Hitesh’s visit to bring herself to call her sister, and of course she hadn’t really invited Hannah over for coffee to listen to her opinion or advice. The two sisters were so different in every respect that before Nick’s death they had barely seen or spoken to each other, apart from required occasions, birthdays, Christmas—that sort of thing. After his death, though, Hannah had been around much more, which Ellen supposed she ought to be touched by, her kid sister making an effort to be there for her when neither of them really liked or understood each other. But Ellen didn’t get that feeling from Hannah; for some reason, it felt like Hannah wanted to be around her and Charlie for her own sake, as if it were she who needed distracting from Nick’s death. Not long after the funeral, when Ellen had been at her lowest point, Hannah had found her lying in her room, her head buried beneath the pillow, and carefully sat on the edge of the bed.

“Mum’s made egg and mayo sandwiches,” she’d said. “Do you want one?”

Ellen had not replied.

“Look…” Hannah had reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Look, I know how awful this is, how horrific—but you have to think that at least you had him for a while. At least he belonged to you and everyone knew it. And now he always will.”

Unable to face her sister, Ellen had simply pulled another pillow over her head and cried herself to sleep. But later, when Hannah started making her regular visits, she thought about what she had said on that morning and wondered if her sister, who was so fond of personal dramas
and life complications, was a little envious of her. If Hannah somehow found grief and the attention it garnered glamorous… or perhaps it was just the attention that Hannah was envious of. It made Ellen remember the day she graduated from university. It had been one of the rare days of her life when she was the center of everything. Mum and Dad, a miserable and sulky twelve-year-old Hannah in tow, had traveled all the way from home to see her receive her degree. Hannah had moaned and complained the whole day, but what Ellen would always remember was that at the very moment she stood up to collect her degree under a blazing August sky, Hannah fainted, slipping off her chair like a wisp of chiffon and collapsing on the grass. Ellen’s parents had not been looking at her when she was awarded her first-class degree, and rightly or wrongly, Ellen blamed Hannah for that.

It should seem impossible that anyone would ever envy a widow, but much of Hannah’s life and the way she lived it seemed impossible to Ellen.

She often wondered if it was because of the age difference. She had been born at the beginning of the seventies, when the world was still an optimistic and gentle place. Hannah, however, a surprise baby if ever there had been one, had entered this world on the cusp of the eighties, kicking and screaming for more, seeming to embody the decade she grew up in, a brash and confident high achiever always hungry for more success, more possessions.

Now almost thirty-eight, Ellen was dark, olive skinned, with green eyes that Nick had loved, and what Allegra Howard would describe as a comely figure, comfortably curvy, not that she gave much thought to her shape, which she covered with supermarket-bought jeans and an assortment of T-shirts, most of which had been Nick’s. Ellen had never been one to care what she looked like, and Nick had often told her that was one reason he loved her so much. He’d called her his pocket
Venus in the bedroom, his goddess alone for him to adore, her hidden charms a veiled mystery to all but him.

Ellen inhabited the world that Nick had created for her and rarely strayed from it. She existed in her home, in her books, and for her husband and son. It had been a comfortable, comforting cocoon of a world, one that she struggled to find the energy to emerge from now, and one that she simply did not want to leave. Ellen did not want the world outside; she didn’t need it. Her life was small, detailed and rich in the minutiae that only she cared about, and that was exactly how she wanted it, especially now.

Hannah, on the other hand, thrived on being noticed. Taller than anyone else in the family, including her father, and unfeasibly leggy, she had long ago perfected her glamorous look, boosting her naturally reddish hair with a monthly shot of chemical auburn so that it fell in luscious and glossy waves to the middle of her back. She was one of the those lucky few for whom slim hips and a flat stomach did not rule out enough natural cleavage to put on a reasonable display for her many admirers. At just thirty, she was one of the few female fund managers at T. Jenkins Waterford Asset Management, and she had ridden out the financial storm of the last few months with better success than many of her colleagues, whom she’d left by the roadside without so much as a backward glance. Ellen knew that Hannah earned well in excess of six figures and that she probably had enough money in various accounts to buy her house outright if she wanted to. But Ellen would no more have dreamed of asking Hannah to help her out financially than she would have hammered nails into her eyes. At least she wouldn’t if it were not for Charlie’s ski trip. The real reason that Ellen found it so hard to ask Hannah to help her out was that she knew her sister would want to help her and Charlie, knew that it would give Hannah pleasure, and Ellen balked at that. It wasn’t an impulse that she was proud of, particularly when it meant that
Charlie missed out, especially when she didn’t really understand her motivation herself. Maybe if Hannah was envious of her, she was envious of Hannah, too—life had always been so easy for her. Even when she frequently got things wrong or made mistakes, it always seemed that the universe rearranged itself around her to smooth things over and make everything better. Ellen had given herself a good talking to before Hannah arrived, telling herself that this request was not about her, it was about her son—but still she hesitated, unable to bring it up.

“This house is not just a pile of bricks—it’s Charlie’s home,” she stated quietly instead, sipping the frothy cappuccino that she had made with the elaborate and expensive coffee machine that Nick had bought her for her last birthday even though she mostly drank tea. “And when Nick and I bought this house it meant something special to us, it was the house we always dreamed of. The place—the place we planned to get old in together. Nick was going to do up a vintage motorbike in the garage and I was going to take up writing stories, you know, just for fun, and read them to him in the evening. And when… when we realized there would be no more children, we decided that when Charlie was old enough we were going to convert the attic rooms into a little flat for him so he could have his privacy, and we were going to get a dog, two dogs—a Labrador and a red setter. Nick always wanted a red setter.”

Ellen glanced up at Hannah, whose features had tightened as she listened, as if just the very idea of such a mundane and domestic existence offended her. Ellen knew that Hannah understood so little of what she was saying that she might as well have been talking in a foreign language.

“Yes, but, Ellie—none of that is going to happen now,” Hannah said impatiently. “Don’t you get it? Nick is dead.” Hannah paused for a second, disbelieving, as if she, too, were hearing the news for the first time. She swallowed and took a breath.
“Your life has changed, it’s not going to be like you thought it was. You need to wake up and deal with it.”

Ellen sucked in a sharp breath. “I think you should go,” she said, pushing her chair back and handing Hannah her bag.

“Ellie—please—don’t.” Hannah leaned across the table and rested her hands on Ellen’s forearm. “Don’t throw me out, I’m only trying to help.”

Ellen shook her head. “No, Hannah—you’re not trying to help. You’re trying to march in here and tell me how pointless and pathetic my life is and how I should just sweep it all away, sweep everything that I have left of Nick away and go and live in a poky little flat somewhere because that’s the sensible thing to do, and because it’s only me, it’s only quite boring Ellen—what happens to me doesn’t really matter, does it? Well, since when have you ever done the sensible thing? Just because none of what matters to me matters to you, it doesn’t mean you have the right to trample all over it. I’m not going to let you.”

Hannah stared at her for a second, taken aback by her sister’s uncharacteristic outburst. “Is that really what you think?”

Ellen shrugged, surprised by the rapid acceleration of her heartbeat.

“Ellie, all the things that matter to you matter to me,” Hannah insisted. “I want the best for you and Charles. Look, you know me, Ellen—tact isn’t my strong point. Haven’t you heard of tough love? Look, I know I sound like a heartless cow—but it’s not just me that thinks this, there’s your accountant, Mum and Dad—we’re all worried about you, Ellen. You just can’t go on sticking your head in book after book, thinking that everything will turn out all right in the end—there aren’t those kind of happy endings in real life—there is no tall, dark, and handsome stranger waiting to rescue you.…” Hannah hesitated, and Ellen wondered if she heard a catch in her voice. “Or any of us. And I know it’s hard. I know Nick
did every single thing for you and Charles—you’re not used to coping. But now you have to. You have to, otherwise the mess you’re in is just going to get worse and worse until there’s no way out, and what about Charles then, when your house is repossessed and you don’t even have that?”

Ellen sank back down into her chair. Hitesh, Hannah, her dad on the phone last night—they were all right: she had to do something. But it wasn’t just that Ellen had no idea what to do, she had no idea how to do anything. She closed her eyes briefly, fighting the urge to tell Hannah to get out. Hannah was right—she had to do something, and if anyone could think of something to do, it would be Hannah, clever, resourceful Hannah. Her personal life might lurch from one catastrophe to the next, but when it came to problem solving and lateral thinking, Hannah was the expert.

“Okay,” Ellen said. “Okay, I know you’re right. But it’s Charlie that I’m thinking about. He’s lost so much—I don’t want him to lose his home, too. There has to be another way, doesn’t there?”

“Well, you could earn more, for a start,” Hannah said, chewing her bottom lip, the way she always had from girlhood. “I mean that job you do for that publisher, Naked Desires, or whatever it’s called—how many books do you copyedit for them?”

“Well, it depends—Simon knows which writers I enjoy, so he waits until he’s got a new work from one of them. Somewhere between one and two every couple of months.”

“Well, that’s crazy, for starters.” Hannah spoke quickly, words tumbling out of her mouth at a million miles an hour, as if there were never going to be enough hours in the day for her to say everything she had to. “Especially when you only get—what—fifteen quid an hour? You need to stop treating the manuscripts like a hobby and start thinking of them as cash-making opportunities. They publish hundreds of those books, don’t they? The horny old ladies can’t get enough of them, right?
If you stopped actually reading them and just concentrated on crossing the
t
s and dotting the
i
s, then you could probably do one or even two a week. As for that Simon—he is the one that’s gay, right?”

“We don’t know that he’s gay, just that he’s a bachelor,” Ellen interjected, although she had to admit that the chances of a man as well dressed and attractive as Simon Merry still being single in his midforties were unlikely, unless his preferences did not include commitment-hungry females, and even then he seemed to have a distinct lack of men in his life, too. Ellen suspected that he simply liked to keep his private life private, and she respected him for that.