The Home for Broken Hearts (36 page)

Nick walked in and chuckled. This wasn’t exactly the response that Ellen had expected, but still she tried her best seductress smile on him.

“Dinner’s in the oven, Charlie’s fast asleep, I thought perhaps…?”

Nick had sat on the bed and kissed her on the cheek. “Bless you,” he had said. “But, Ellen, you don’t need to do all this for me. To be honest, I’m exhausted and I want a shower before I eat. Why don’t you get dressed and talk to me while I clean up, okay?”

He hadn’t been cruel or unkind, he hadn’t mocked or insulted her, but as Ellen dragged on her clothes she had been awash with the humiliation and rejection.

Ellen felt the humiliation again as she relived the memory now. This was not going to be it, she decided. The way she had folded in on herself over the last ten years, losing herself to her house and her husband, was not going to be the sum total of what her life amounted to. She refused to let it be. True, she didn’t know exactly what had happened between Hannah and Nick, but she knew that something had, because
whatever Hannah was, she was not a liar. But even if she hadn’t found that out, Ellen had been changing these last few weeks. She had been evolving and now she was determined that a wife, a mother, a flawed sister, a lost widow… an agoraphobic would not be the sum total of her existence. She would not let one more minute of her life slip away unlived to its fullest potential.

Spontaneously, she slipped off the clothes she had been wearing since last night and stepped into the underwear that she had bought all those years ago. After hooking the bra, she returned to look at herself in the mirror, shying away from making full eye contact with her reflection for some moments. The bra was now a little too small, so her breasts gently swelled over the lace trim, but Ellen was surprised to see that the effect wasn’t too disgusting. She ran her fingers down her torso and into her waist before meeting the curve of her hips. Her gently curving stomach still bore the silvered stretch marks that her pregnancy had left her with, and her bottom was dimpled and a little more generously proportioned than it used to be, but as Ellen turned first to one side and then the other, she found that her body wasn’t nearly as old or as repulsive as she had imagined. After a moment she slipped the dress on. It didn’t fit her the same way it had all those years ago, it strained across her breasts and clung more to her bottom, but unless Ellen was very much mistaken, it didn’t look that bad.

Impulsively she sat down at her dressing table and rummaged through her drawer. Thoughts and feelings about Hannah, Nick, and everything else clamored for her attention, but Ellen ignored them. She was certain that somewhere in here there was some mascara and lipstick.

After several minutes of looking, Ellen finally found a long-neglected tube of lipstick. Very slowly and carefully, her hand trembling, she applied the dark red gloss to her mouth. Nick had never liked her in lipstick, he’d always said it made her
mouth look too big. But when Ellen checked her reflection in the mirror, she was fairly certain that the result gave her already-generous mouth a little more definition and color.

“Fuck you, Nick,” she said out loud, utterly unaware that she had spoken at all. Then she unscrewed a mostly dry and caked tube of mascara and batted her lashes at the wand. The effect here was less pleasing: there were black clumps that she had to tease out of her lashes with her fingernails and a fine powdery dust that collected on her cheeks, which when she tried to wipe it away left a smudge—but after several minutes with a damp cotton-wool pad, Ellen thought she’d done the best job possible, and what remained of the black mascara did seem to intensify the green of her eyes.

After dragging a brush through her hair, Ellen knelt down and slipped a shoe box out from underneath her bed. Unwrapping the tissue paper they nestled in, Ellen took out her one pair of smart shoes, black and plain with a low heel. They were her funeral shoes.

Ellen looked at them for a long time, so sedate and sensible, the dull, smooth leather emitting a faint shine. She realized for the first time that she hated these shoes, they were ugly and frumpy—the kind of shoes that Nick would have picked for her, but that she had picked for herself, choosing only that which he would approve of, unaware that she despised them. Without a second thought, she took them to the window and threw them out, hearing them clatter on the path below. Then, just as purposefully, she marched to Sabine’s room and knocked on the door, even though she knew that Sabine was still out with Charlie. Sabine had very many pairs of shoes and Ellen borrowed the highest, shiniest pair she could find, a pair of silver stiletto peep-toe sling-back sandals. Sitting on the edge of Sabine’s bed, she fiddled with the minute jeweled buckles for several minutes before she finally managed to secure the shoes to her feet. They were a little small and the straps pinched her toes but Ellen didn’t care. They were her finishing touch, the final
element to a plan that she barely knew she had been formulating until she took her first teetering steps in those shoes. Just as she was about to leave, Ellen spotted a bottle of wine on Sabine’s dressing table, a Rioja with a screw-cap top. Next to it was an unwashed glass, and from what Ellen could tell, about one glass’s worth of wine was missing from the bottle. Pursing her lips and shrugging, Ellen picked up both the bottle and glass and took them with her.

Returning to her room, Ellen heard Charlie and Sabine coming in from the pub, which meant it must be about eight. Hastily she climbed into bed, pulling the covers over her head as her son’s feet thundered up the stairs, hoping that if he did come in he wouldn’t notice her makeup.

“Charlie,” she heard Sabine whisper, “let Mum sleep, okay? It takes a long time to get over a migraine. We could hook up our DSs if you like and play Mario Kart.”

“You’ve got a DS?” Ellen heard Charlie outside the door, sounding clearly impressed.

“Of course, and I’m pretty good, too. Come on, let’s go downstairs and see if we can’t teach Allegra how to race, too.”

“Okay,” Charlie said after a moment’s hesitation. “Yeah, all right then, probably best to let her sleep it off.”

And then it was just a matter of waiting, taking one more sip of the warming, numbing wine and waiting for Charlie, who came in to see her around ten o clock.

“Mum? You okay?”

Ellen regarded him from over the edge of her quilt and nodded. “Yes, Charlie, I’m fine. I think I just overheated a bit, that’s all.”

“Your headache—it’s not because of me, is it? Because of what I said and made you look at the leaflets?”

Ellen held one bare arm out to him, careful not to let him see any of the ensemble that she still wore beneath the covers, complete with the silver sandals; most of her lipstick had worn off now anyway and she suspected she’d have to reapply the mascara,
too, which had flaked all over the pillow while she’d been waiting, dozing, thinking. “No, no—not at all. And you know what, Charlie? You were right. You were utterly and totally right. I have got a problem and I do need some help, I finally realized that today. I don’t know if I ever would have if you hadn’t been brave enough to tell me. I’ve a few other things to sort out, but I promise you, I will get better. I will be a good mum again.”

“You are a good mum,” Charlie insisted, taking her hand. “Anyway, guess what? I had scampi and chips in the pub. It was nice.”

“Charlie, that’s great!” Ellen said, sitting up to hug him, forgetting her secret ensemble for a moment. Fortunately, to an eleven-year-old boy, a green dress and an old shirt were virtually the same.

“Calm down, Mum. It’s no big deal. It’s just today I fancied a change, that’s all.”

“I know,” Ellen said, “I know what you mean. Good night, love.”

She kissed Charlie on the forehead and waited for what would be Sabine’s inevitable follow-up visit. It came less than two minutes later.

“You borrowed my wine, I see,” Sabine said, sitting down in the place Charlie had just vacated.

“Yes, do you mind?” Ellen asked.

“Of course not. I think under these circumstances alcohol is really the best remedy. Also it will help you sleep.”

“And Charlie, he doesn’t know about anything that’s happened?”

“No; he was in good form actually. A little worried about you but not unduly. He seems… lighter.”

“I think he is,” Ellen said. “I think he’s been carrying around this worry for months all on his own, and now he’s found the courage to talk to me about it, he feels better. Which is exactly why he mustn’t know about anything that has happened with Hannah.”

Sabine nodded in agreement. “Allegra has retired. I think Charlie and I wore her out. Would you like me to make you some food before I go to my room? I’m having another Skype conference with Eric, but not for twenty minutes.”

“No.” Ellen mustered a smile. “I couldn’t eat anyway. … It all seems so surreal. So artificial. Like I’ve just read it in a chapter of a book.”

“I know,” Sabine said. “Well, tomorrow when the sun is up and you have rested, we will think what to do next. For now, drink the wine and sleep and let it all seem unreal.”

“Thank you, Sabine,” Ellen said. “When I took in lodgers I never expected that I’d be taking in friends, too, but you and Allegra and Matt, that’s exactly what you are.”

“Well,” Sabine said, “most people are good. Most people apart from my stinking, evil, good-for-nothing husband, that is.”

When Sabine had gone, Ellen looked at the clock; it was almost eleven. Not much longer to wait and the house would be quiet and asleep. She would be able to go downstairs, find another bottle of wine, and implement her plan.

Because tonight, giddy with a kind of reckless abandon that she had never thought herself capable of, Ellen had decided not to let another minute of her life slip by unlived. Tonight she was going to take charge of what happened to her next. Tonight she was planning her second-ever seduction attempt.

Tonight, Ellen was going to have sex with Matt Bolton.

It took Matt several seconds to locate the keyhole with his key. He hadn’t considered himself very drunk at all, at least not by
Bang It!
standards. When he’d left the pub, the others had gone off to find a legendary and possibly mythical drinking club that was supposed to be open all night under an adult-entertainment shop called Venus Videos in Soho. Matt had questioned the point of an illegal drinking den when there were plenty of legitimate places that stayed open all hours these days, but he had been shouted down and pelted with a good many offensive insults regarding his sexuality and gender assignment. His sleepless night catching up with him at last, he’d bowed out and saved his reputation by telling them that he was off home to sort out his landlady.

Despite the weariness that crowded his head with ill-advised thoughts of Ellen’s hair spread out across her pillow, Matt had elected to take the half-hour walk home, preferring the enduring heat of the evening to the crowded and noisy night buses that careened along the streets with the kind of reckless capriciousness that seemed to say “get out of my way, I’m out on the town.”

Living a little dangerously, he’d tipped his head back as he walked, hoping to find some stars in the sky, but the city lights obliterated any chance he had of communing with the cosmos. Matt didn’t know why he had the urge to chat to
the heavens anyway, it wasn’t as if he’d spent his childhood in some rural idyll, at one with nature. He’d spent it growing up on a Manchester council estate where nature was comprised of grass verges and the occasional privet hedge. But something had happened to him, something that made him remember snippets of love poetry from some sixteenth-century poet, that made him dream about curling a tress of glossy dark hair around his fingers, that made him want to look at the stars and try to find some meaning to his life in the random patterns of the universe.

“Fuck,” Matt mumbled to himself as he tried to find the keyhole again. “I’ll be reading my star signs next.”

He took great care to close the door behind him and stood for a second in the quiet, cool hallway, appraising the situation. There was no light in the living room or under Allegra’s bedroom door. But there was a low, greenish light coming from the kitchen, which meant that Ellen was in there having a cup of tea, because she always switched on the under-the-counter lights when she was in there alone, thinking. Matt considered his weary and confused mind, his exhausted body numbed by alcohol, and thought he probably had better not go into the kitchen to talk to Ellen now, not in his current state. Before he knew it, he’d be quoting her poetry and telling her that he loved her or something equally insane, taking risks, putting himself out there or whatever it was Lucy had said. Yet, even as the last tiny rational part of his brain was making these decisions, the rest of his body was propelled to exactly the last place he knew he ought to be.

He pushed open the kitchen door, but Ellen was not there.

Well, not there in any sense that Matt understood, at least not at first. She was not sitting at the table in some oversized shirt, with her hair tied up, embracing a mug of tea. She was leaning against the countertop directly opposite the door—more like lounging, actually—and she was wearing a dress. And not just a dress, but a
dress,
dark green and so figure-hugging that in one single second all the mysteries that had
been Ellen’s body were laid almost bare to him, and he was unable to tear his eyes from the curve of her breasts, the deep cleavage that ran between them, or the delicious flare of her hips, undulating from her waist with what seemed like a glorious decadence. Matt had heard the phrase
all woman
many times but had never really had cause to use it before, at least not so accurately.

Ellen smiled at him and tilted her head so that her long, glossy hair strayed over one shoulder. She had lipstick on, Matt noticed, confused. Why was she wearing lipstick and a dress?

“Glass of wine?” Ellen asked, pouring from a bottle that was on the counter into an empty glass that had been standing by.