The Home for Broken Hearts (43 page)

“You first,” Matt said as he and Charlie sat on a bench in the park behind the house.

“Well, I thought you should go first, because you are an actual writer,” Charlie said, fingering a grubby piece of folded paper that looked like it had been ripped out of the back of a notebook.

“Which is why you should go first,” Matt told him, tapping the closed lid of his laptop. “I don’t want you to feel intimidated by my skill.”

“Hah.” Charlie rolled his eyes. “Coward.”

“Look, just read me what you’ve got and let’s get on with this. Neither of us wants anyone to see us sitting in a park talking about poetry, right?”

“Right,” Charlie said, glancing over at a group of his mates who were kicking a ball around a few yards away. Sighing, he unfolded his piece of paper and flattened it on his thigh.

In the sunshine your hair looks like honey,

Running down the handle of a spoon.

And your skin as smooth and soft as the petal of a rose.

I like the way you laugh, like you don’t care what anybody thinks.

And I wish that I could be more like you.

Hastily Charlie folded up his scrap of paper and stuffed it in his pocket.

“It doesn’t rhyme and I’m not sure about the last line, because maybe she might think that I want to be a girl and that makes me look a bit gay.”

Matt said nothing for a moment and then he clapped his hand firmly over his laptop lid.

“That’s it, I’m not reading you mine,” he said. “Yours is a million times better than mine.”

“Really?” Charlie seemed appalled by the prospect.

“Yeah, yours is simple and heartfelt with imagery and shit. Mine is bollocks. I’m not reading it to you.”

“You have to, that’s the deal!” Charlie protested, eyeing Matt’s laptop as if he was considering snatching it.

Sighing, Matt flipped open his laptop, angling the screen away from Charlie so that he would not be able to read over his shoulder. He looked at it for a second, opened his mouth as if he was about to speak, and then slammed it shut.

“No. Sorry, Charlie, I know it was the deal. But the thing is, your mum, she makes me feel weird and a bit soppy. This poem sucks; I can’t ever show it to anyone. Not you and especially not your mother. She’d laugh me out of London.”

“But are you still going to ask her out?”

“Are you still going to ask Emily out?” Matt hedged.

“I am if you are,” Charlie said. “But now you’ve chickened out of the poem thing, you have to do it first. You have to do it tonight.”

“Tonight?” Matt shook his head. “You don’t impose a deadline on a man about to make a romantic declaration, mate. It’s an organic thing—you have to bide your time, wait for the right moment.”

“Tonight,” Charlie repeated. “When we get back. Like how hard is it to go up to my mum and say, ‘Ellen, would you like to go out with me?’ How hard is that?”

Matt shifted uncomfortably on the bench. Never before had he hesitated about asking a woman out; in fact, he’d asked out a good many women without giving it a second or, on some occasions, a first thought. But this time it was different, it was very different. It mattered if Ellen turned him down. If Ellen turned him down, then he’d… Matt didn’t want to think about it.

“You do it tonight, I’ll do it tomorrow. After music. Deal?” Charlie held out his hand and fixed Matt with his steady blue gaze.

“It’s great being nearly twelve,” Matt said as he shook on the deal. “Everything’s black and white, right or wrong, deal or no deal. Life is so simple.”

Charlie shook his head. “All I can say is that you must have a very bad memory.”

Ellen and Hannah stood in the kitchen doorway, each with a cup of coffee in her hand.

“So you don’t even want to go down there?” Hannah asked, nodding at the cacophony of unruly color that was splattered all over the rear of the garden.

“I didn’t… I didn’t have the impulse to go anywhere, but now—I want to go. I just… can’t.”

“We could hold hands,” Hannah offered. “Like you did with Matt when you came to rescue me. Or wouldn’t that be quite the same thing?”

Ellen gave her sister a sideways warning glance, but it was accompanied by a small smile. It was good that Hannah was here, it was good that they were talking again, that Hannah was well enough to be teasing her ever so gently. Ellen only wished that she could remember why they had stopped talking like this in the first place.

“When I came over to your house I was pumped up full of adrenaline and still half drunk, most likely. Matt more or less dragged me there, talking all sorts of nonsense on the way over to keep my mind off things. Now I don’t feel that way. I feel… okay.”

“So feeling okay means you can’t get to the bottom of the garden?” Hannah said. “Freaky.”

“Yeah, thanks, sis, freaky—that sums up my condition perfectly,”
Ellen said mildly. “If I tried now, the world would turn inside out, I’d have a panic attack, and you’d have to scrape a gasping, gibbering wreck up off the patio. It’s quite something that I’m standing here with the door open, and that I’m thinking what fun it would be to take a trimmer to that grass and sort my plants from the weeds. That’s progress—after all, I haven’t got my hands dirty in quite a while.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Hannah muttered into her coffee.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.” Hannah paused and then shrugged. “It’s just Sabine happened to mention in a bid to cheer me up that she’d found a pair of panties in the plastic-bag drawer that didn’t belong to her or Allegra.”

“Oh, I forgot about those!” Ellen exclaimed before she could clap her hands over her mouth. “How embarrassing.”

“So?” Hannah asked. “Come on, it’s your duty to spill. Take
my
mind off things. What happened between you and Matt that meant your undies ended up… off?”

Ellen hesitated. The truth was that she was desperate to talk to somebody about what had happened so that she could make sense of it herself—but she wasn’t sure it should be Hannah, not when most of the reason it had happened in the first place was because of Hannah. And yet… maybe Hannah was exactly the right person.

“I’d just found out about you and my husband,” Ellen said. “I was angry and drunk and I just wanted to be seen again—the way that Nick used to see me, the way that Matt sometimes looked at me. So I waited for him to come in and I threw myself at him in the most unseemly way. And for about a minute or two it, we… well, it was pretty exciting, and then I realized what was about to happen and Matt sensed I wasn’t sure and he developed the most annoying conscience about it all and was ever so gentlemanly and sweet. So my knickers came off but that was about it really.”

“Wow,” Hannah said. “Matt’s gorgeous. I would.”

“Well, we all know
you
would,” Ellen said before she could stop herself.

There was an awkward silence between the two women. Since arriving back from the hospital, neither of them had mentioned what had happened with Nick, as if in some unspoken pact or truce. But Ellen supposed that they couldn’t go on like this, not if they were ever to be really close again. There was no point in shying away from it. Hannah and Nick had had an affair, Nick might have even loved Hannah—there was no way of knowing now. And somehow Ellen had to live with that, she had to accept it just as Hannah had to accept that the man she had fallen for would never, ever belong to her.

“I’ve hurt you so badly,” Hannah said, turning away from the garden and retreating inside to sit at the table, as if she were the one who was suddenly afraid. “I don’t know how you can even stand to look at me, Ellie, let alone have me here.”

Ellen followed Hannah inside and sat down, too. “The only reason I find it hard to look at you is because of the state of your face. When I think about what happened to you…” Ellen paused as Hannah turned her face away, aware that her sister was not ready to think about that yet, perhaps would not ever be. “The odd thing is, Hannah, now I’m over the shock and the anger, I don’t hate you, in fact I’m sort of grateful to you.”

“Grateful?” Hannah looked at her, perplexed.

“You’ve given me the key to moving on. I was stuck with this memory of my marriage, a perfect, happy, loving marriage—but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t awful—as far as I knew. But it wasn’t perfect, either. Whether he meant to or not, Nick diluted me, he watered me down. He made me dependent on him and he spent so much time caring for me that when he’d gone I could barely care for myself, let alone Charlie. I loved him, I loved him with all my heart, and he was the best dad that Charlie could ever have had and I miss him and I’ll still grieve for Charlie, for the family life that he had and he lost. But I can move on now, I can be myself
again, once I’ve worked out exactly who that is. And I think if it hadn’t been for you telling me what you did, it would have taken a lot longer. So, yes, I am sort of grateful to you.”

Hannah nodded, chewing the tip of her thumb, waiting for a wave of emotion to pass before she could speak.

“I miss Nick,” she whispered, tears streaming over her bruises. “I’ve missed him so much for every second of the last year. I’d watch you getting all the flowers and the sympathy and I’d want to shout, ‘What about me? He loved me, you know. I lost him, too!’ But I couldn’t, so I just tried to be near the nearest thing I had to him—you and Charlie. But the more time I spent with you, the more I realized that what I had with him… it was nothing compared to the life he had with you and his son. And the more I came around, the more annoyed you seemed to get with me for being there. I used to think that you knew, that you’d found out somehow but hadn’t told anyone. Do you think you sensed it, sensed something was wrong?”

“I doubt it,” Ellen said. “I don’t think I could sense anything very much for most of the last year. I think I was just caught up in all the pain. I don’t suppose I wanted to share it.”

“I was jealous of your pain, jealous of you,” Hannah said thoughtfully. “Just like we always have been since we were little girls.”

“Jealous of me?” Ellen exclaimed. “Don’t be so ridiculous.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t I be jealous of my beautiful, clever, kind big sister who everybody always admired, always said was so lovely, such a wonderful mother with such a wonderful family? And then there’s me, going from one bad relationship to the next, always single, living alone, working all hours because I had no one to go home to. Of course I was jealous of you.”

Ellen laughed, “Well, that’s just crazy—because I was always jealous of you. Younger, thinner, prettier, with your life all sorted—direction, a career—your independence. I felt old and frumpy and useless next to you.”

The two sisters regarded each other across the kitchen table, and after a moment Hannah extended her hand tentatively across the table, where Ellen regarded it for a second and then covered it with her own.

“Hey,” Hannah said. “Do you remember that time when Charlie was about five and he lost his favorite bear down at the park… what was it called?”

“Midnight,” Ellen recalled. “Black fluffy thing. He couldn’t eat, sleep, or even go to the loo without it. I told Nick not to let him take it out of the house, but he was insistent. Said it would be fine. Typical Nick, he always thought everything would be fine.”

“And they came back an hour later, with Charlie howling his head off because Midnight was lost and they couldn’t find him anywhere. I was here… why was I here?”

“Because Mum and Dad were coming up for the weekend,” Ellen reminded her.

“I just remember Charlie sitting at this table asking you if Midnight was dead and you said, don’t be so silly, he’s just gone on a little trip to visit Father Christmas. You said he’d be back on Christmas Day. And suddenly Charlie stopped crying and he was all smiles again, laughing about what fun Midnight would be having with the elves. You made everything all right.”

“Until I found out that they didn’t make Midnights anymore and he was obsolete,” Ellen said.

“We searched high and low for another one of those blasted bears, didn’t we?” Hannah laughed. “And Christmas was getting closer and Charlie was getting more and more excited, and we couldn’t find one anywhere and then…”

“And then you paid about ten times what it was worth for one on eBay,” Ellen remembered. “You were so pleased with yourself, and I was so relieved.”

“So we spent ages writing a letter from Santa, explaining why Midnight looked so new and his bow was back again and that missing eye had been replaced with a new one…”

“And on Christmas Eve I crept into his room and lay
Midnight on the pillow beside Charlie’s head,” Ellen recalled. “I don’t think I’d ever been more excited about giving him a present.”

“And the next day… Charlie didn’t even notice he was back. He didn’t even play with him once. Because that was the Christmas he went off bears and on to train sets.”

The two sisters laughed.

“I can’t keep up with how fast he’s growing up,” Ellen said. “It makes my head spin. It seems like five minutes since he was a tiny baby in my arms, or howling his head off over Midnight. And now here he is interested in girls, giving me advice, sorting
me
out.”

“He’s a brilliant kid,” Hannah said.

“Yes he is,” Ellen agreed.

“So you’re going to do what he wants, get some help—some treatment so that you can go down to the bottom of the garden and weed again? Maybe even have alfresco sex with Matt?”

“Hannah! Poor Matt must be scared to death of me by now, I shouldn’t think that would be in the cards again. And yes, yes—I am going to get help. I am going to get down to the bottom of the garden and out of the house again. I am.”

“Good,” Hannah said. “Because then I’ll be able to take you out and buy you some decent clothes at last.”

When the doorbell sounded, Ellen assumed that it was Matt and Charlie, even though both of them had a key, so she was a little surprised to find a stranger standing there, a fair, shortish, stocky man in a pair of Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.

“Hello?” Ellen said, eyeing him up and down.