The Home for Broken Hearts (39 page)

Slowly Ellen opened her eyes and looked down at her garden gate, a waist-high picket affair that she and Charlie had painted green several years earlier. It had suffered from lack of attention since Nick’s death. Ellen ran her fingers over the rough and cracked surface, then glanced up at her house. It was the first time she had seen it from the outside in months. The wisteria had grown heavy for lack of pruning, its weight pulling away from the house in some parts, while in others it had begun to stray across the windows, including those in Ellen’s bedroom. At some point the old cast-iron guttering must have become blocked with autumn leaves, because a tidemark of where it had overflowed could still be traced running down the brickwork. The front lawn, now standing a good ten inches high, had gone to seed and yellowed in the unremitting sunshine and looked in a sorry state, except for where it had migrated into the cracks in the garden path, where it seemed to be sprouting quite happily.

As Ellen looked at the neglected house that she loved so fiercely, she realized that one of the reasons she felt so safe
inside it was that it had felt as if time stood still there. As if she were marking time, waiting for clocks to start ticking, hearts to start beating, and the world to start turning again. Waiting for order to be restored, for Nick to walk in through the door after work and her life to begin again. Ellen looked at Matt and her heartbeat slowed, the panic and fear subsiding a little.

“We’ll go to the end of the road and get a cab,” Matt told her. “There’ll be loads, this time of the morning.”

Casually, Matt opened the gate and, taking Ellen’s hand off the wood, tucked it through his arm and began walking them up the street.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “All of this is my fault. I didn’t mean to crash out in your room.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ellen said, fighting the rise of vomit in her throat as her stomach lurched and contracted painfully. She stopped walking, tried to turn back to the house, but Matt kept a firm grasp on her hand beneath his arm and walked her on.

“And I’m sorry about the other thing, the, you know… taking-a-lot-of-your-clothes-off thing,” Matt said. Normally he never would have brought it up, but he decided that he needed to take Ellen’s mind off exactly what they were doing and he didn’t think small talk would do it.

“Oh, God.” Ellen stopped for a moment, bending double and retching. “Oh, God, Matt… I have to go back. I can’t breathe.… Matt, let me go back, this is too much. This is too far. I can’t do it, I’m not strong enough.” An overwound clock began unraveling in her chest, time spinning out of control as she fought for breath. Matt would not let her go.

“It’s just as far to the end of the road as it is to get back now,” Matt said calmly, rubbing between her shoulder blades. “Just take deep breaths in and out, in and out.”

He paused while he waited for her breathing to even out a little, her eyes darting fearfully left and right.

“You know, I didn’t stop what was happening in the kitchen because I didn’t want to. I really wanted to, Ellen, a lot. But it didn’t
seem like the right time, I mean you were drunk and kind of throwing yourself at me.…”

Ellen straightened up, dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, and looked at him with watery eyes.

“I’m dying of a heart attack here and you’re reminding me of the worst and most humiliating moment of my life,” she gasped on a ragged breath. Matt smiled. His plan of extreme distraction seemed to be working.

He put his arm around her waist and propelled her forward as he talked. “You feel like you are dying, but you aren’t. You’re having a panic attack, which is pretty scary and very real, but it won’t kill you. The trick is to try not to think about it. Which brings me to the next thing I want to say.”

“You don’t need to tell me, I know,” Ellen said, looking around anxiously as Matt moved her forward. “I behaved ridiculously last night. I’m not exactly sure that’s going to help when it comes to having a panic attack.”

“No. Look, I’ve been thinking about you for a couple of weeks now. By which I mean I’ve become very attracted to you. You looked amazing last night, but you didn’t need that dress or that underwear to turn me on. I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to make love to you since long before that.”

“You… what? Are you trying to pull me now, when I’m on the verge of vomiting and there’s an aneurysm that I’m fairly sure is about to pop in my head?” Ellen asked, aghast.

“I’m just telling you the truth,” Matt said, aware that this was not exactly accurate. He was telling the truth about all his physical thoughts and feelings for her, but the emotional stuff, which seemed for the first time in his life to be tied up together with how much he wanted her, he kept to himself. If he thought too much about the emotional stuff he’d give himself a panic attack and then where would they be, two mental wrecks stranded in Shepherd’s Bush. “You are a very attractive woman, Ellen. And if… when the dust has settled a bit and you’re not quite so…”

“Insane?” Ellen asked, her eyes wide and wild as they approached the busy main road. She clung to him, winding her arms around his chest and pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “Oh, God, Matt, I need to go back. I need to go back. I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t. I’m going to die.”

“You’re not going to die,” Matt told her as he hailed a black cab. “Anyway, what I was trying to say was that if you want to have sex with me, then I’m up for it. Whenever you’re ready.”

As Matt had predicted, Ellen was so shocked that she allowed him to bundle her into the cab and close the door behind them. “Ladbroke Grove, please, mate,” he said to the cabbie.

Ellen sat wide-eyed in the backseat, looking like a wild cat that has been cornered, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Matt folded down the seat opposite and, reaching over, pulled her seat belt over her shoulder and clipped it into its catch, and for a second their faces were only millimeters apart. Matt sat back. He had no idea what or how she felt about him, if last night was just some crazy aberration brought about by everything that had gone on, or if it was based in something more, something that could be real. And he couldn’t exactly press her on it now, but he found that he wanted to know. He hated not knowing what she was thinking or feeling, especially about him.

“A London black cab is one of the safest places you can be in the world,” Matt told her as he looked at her wide, scared eyes. “No one knows the roads better than one of these guys, and these old things”—he patted the side of the cab—“are built for safety. You’ve done the hardest bit, Ellen. We’ll get dropped right outside Hannah’s front door, and after we’ve dealt with… whatever we’ve got to deal with, we’ll get a cab all the way back to your house. You know you can go to the end of your road without anything terrible happening, so now you’ve really got nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Ellen said, tucking her hands between her legs. “You just told me you’d have sex with me whenever I felt like it. Don’t you know that I’m an agoraphobic
widow who’s just found out that her marriage was a lie? I’m the actual definition of a… of a fuck-up.” For a second, she focused her gaze on him.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Matt said, ignoring her last comment. “We like the mad ones, the complicated ones. The ones who are going to give us loads of grief and might very well turn up standing over us while we sleep, with a carving knife in their hands. Sex tends to be better with the mad ones. Well, you were on the verge of proving that last night; what happened in the kitchen—that was the best it’s been for me in a long time.”

“Ha!” Ellen gasped, but this time with incredulity rather than for air. As she watched West London slip past, transforming gradually from grubby redbrick Victorian shop fronts to the graceful, shabby chic of Georgian villas, punctuated every now and then with an exclamation mark of 1960s modernist architecture, she realized that her heartbeat had slowed and she was breathing easily. She felt almost normal, and much, much less afraid of dropping dead at any second. She did feel safe in the cab, sitting opposite Matt. And there was something else—she felt exhilarated. God only knew what mess awaited her at Hannah’s place, but she had made it this far. With Matt’s help she had made it this far… and then it dawned on her.

“You’ve been distracting me,” she said. “All this talk of wanting sex with me, it’s been to distract me, take my mind off of what I’m doing.”

Matt hesitated, unsure of what to let her believe. But he saw the relief in her eyes and realized that his wanting her so much that every square inch of skin ached for her was the very last thing that she needed. So instead he grinned like a kid caught out planning a practical joke.

“It worked, though, didn’t it?” he said, flinching as Ellen punched him in the thigh.

“You bastard!” she exclaimed, but she was laughing, high on adrenaline.

“Whereabouts, mate?” the cabbie asked them as they
turned onto the top of Ladbroke Grove. Matt looked at Ellen and raised his eyebrows.

“About halfway down, just past the tube station on the left,” Ellen told him. As the cab pulled up to the curb, she looked into Matt’s eyes and smiled, resting her hand on his knee.

“You are not the man you pretend to be,” she told him.

“What are you saying? I’m a rubbish kisser?” Matt made himself joke, although her touch made him want to grab her and kiss her right there.

“No. In my admittedly limited experience, you are an excellent kisser. But you are not this man who doesn’t care, who goes from girl to girl without a second thought. You are a very kind and generous and clever man and I’m very lucky that it was you who answered that ad, because I don’t know how I would have managed if it had been anyone else.”

“That’s fifteen eighty then,” the cabbie said, a touch impatiently.

“Ready?” Matt asked her as he stuffed a twenty under the Plexiglas screen that separated them from the driver.

“As I’ll ever be.”

Matt got out first and held out his hand to her. Inhaling deeply, Ellen took it, and the pair of them ran to Hannah’s red-painted front door like children running through a rainstorm. When they reached the door, Ellen threw herself against it, pressing her palms against its hot, glossy surface; and as she stood there with her shoulders heaving, fighting to catch her breath, she remembered why she had come, and the light in her eyes faded as rapidly as the color in her cheeks.

“I’ve gotten this far,” she said, more to herself than to Matt. “I can do this.”

She pushed Hannah’s doorbell and waited.

It was Charlie who opened the door.

“Oh, thank God you’re okay,” Ellen said, flinging her arms around him and hugging his rigid body. “How long have you
been here? What’s Hannah said? Did you get my message?”

Ellen released Charlie but he was immobile.

“Charlie, Charlie—look at me! I came to find you. I came all the way here to find you and tell you that there is nothing going on between me and Matt. Nothing at all! Aren’t you pleased?”

Charlie looked at her and shook his head.

“Mum, it’s Aunt Hannah—I can’t wake her.” His voice was tearful and tight. “I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know what to do.”

Ellen swallowed, finding her throat painfully tight, fear flooding through her veins.

“Where is she, Charlie?”

“In there.” Charlie nodded toward Hannah’s bedroom door. “When I got here there wasn’t any answer, and I didn’t want to go home, so I took the key out of the window box and let myself in. I thought she was out, so I had a look around and she’s… she’s in there. In bed. She’s not moving. I can’t get her to wake up. Mum, I think she might be dead.”

When Ellen was confronted with her sister lying prone in her bed, two emotions tore through her in quick succession. The first was relief. Hannah was not dead; she stirred as Ellen came into the room, turning over onto her back. By her bed, though, was a packet of sleeping pills with two empty blisters and a bottle of vodka that was a quarter empty. Hannah might have been seeking oblivion but she had not been trying to kill herself. The second emotion was shame. Since the moment when Hannah had made her confession, everything else had seemed insignificant to Ellen; nothing else mattered anymore except that Hannah had betrayed her and her life had fallen to pieces. She’d forgotten that Hannah had been attacked and hurt. As she looked at her sister, lying on her back, her face swollen and misshapen, a livid rainbow of bruises tracking their way down her face and throat, ranging in color from
shocking pink to sickly yellow, Ellen felt her stomach heave. She had abandoned Hannah at the worst moment in her life, and nothing, not anything that had happened between them, could justify that.

Yesterday she’d been furious with Hannah for putting herself in this situation, for getting herself attacked; she had blamed her for searching out the ultimate distraction technique to avoid getting into trouble for having slept with Ellen’s husband. Ellen had been determined not to let her sister off the hook so easily. So
easily?
No one would choose to put herself through this to get off the hook, Ellen thought. She wasn’t sure that it would ever be possible for Hannah to get over it.

Belatedly, she realized that Charlie was standing in the doorway, twisting his fingers in the hem of his T-shirt.

“She’s not dead, Charlie. She’s just very deeply asleep.” Ellen pondered her sister for a second and then, turning, ushered Charlie out into the hall.

“You must have been very frightened,” Ellen said, putting her hands on his shoulders and looking into his eyes. It was something of a shock to realize that Charlie was now almost as tall as she was and that it would not be long before he towered above her, like his father had done.

“I thought she was dead, her face is so… hurt,” Charlie whispered. “And I didn’t know what I should do. I was going to phone you—but then you came.
You
came here for me. That’s brilliant, Mum.”

“I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression about me and Matt,” Ellen said, dropping her gaze. “You’re right about me, Charlie, I have got a problem. I wouldn’t have been able to come after you if it hadn’t been for Matt. He got me here, he more or less dragged me here, and I’m just as terrified of leaving here and going home as I was of coming. The world scares me to death, I think it always has, in a way—but when your dad died, when one of the things that I always told myself wouldn’t happen happened, that’s when it started. I lied to
myself, and I lied to everyone else. You were the only one who was brave enough to face up to what was happening.”