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Authors: Stephanie Butland

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BOOK: The Other Half of My Heart
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‘I've tried that, it's lovely,' Verity says, nodding, ‘not very local, though – and you're not local, either? I'd like to emphasize the Throckton angle, if there is one.'

‘No, I'm not local,' Bettina says. ‘I grew up in the south-east of England, in a little town no one's ever heard of, about a hundred miles from here, and I trained in France, mostly small boulangeries, where I learned everything I could about breadmaking.' And that, she thinks, is all you're getting of my past. ‘I moved back to the UK two years ago, and soon afterwards I started to look for a suitable place to start my own bakery. Throckton is that place. The business is one hundred per cent local. I use local water and flour to make my own yeast, I use Throckton people's suggestions for my breads. Even the water makes a difference to the finished loaf, so the bread I make here I truly couldn't make anywhere else. I consider myself to be a Throckton person now. I have no plans to be anywhere else.' Bettina realizes her voice has risen, quailed. She stops talking, hopes that her tone has gone unnoticed.

It looks as though it has. Verity is flicking back through her notes, several pages of what Bettina thinks will make very dull reading. Verity looks up with a smile. ‘I think I have everything I need. Thank you for your time, Bettina.' She pronounces the name carefully, as Bettina had explained it, which makes her interviewee give a small, real smile. ‘I appreciate that you're busy.'

‘Not at all,' Bettina says. ‘Why don't we go downstairs, and I can show you around and make you up a hamper? I'll be doing a bread-tasting in a little while, too, and you'd be very welcome to join in.'

‘I'd love to, but I have to get back,' Verity says apologetically, ‘though I'll take the hamper, if I may – it will go down very well at the office, I'm sure.'

‘Of course.' On their way towards the door of the flat – just as Bettina is catching her breath and thinking that the worst is over – Verity stops at a bronze sculpture, not even ten inches high. It's a horse. He looks exactly the way he used to look when Bettina called his name – alert, ears sharp, sense of readiness perfect in every line and curve. Her heart quickens as Verity picks it up. ‘How beautiful this is,' she says.

‘Yes,' Bettina says. There needs to be a better word than beautiful, really. When she feels the cool bronze in her hands, it's as though she can also feel the firm, true muscle of a horse's croup under her fingers, and smell the warm leather of a well-used saddle. It's strange how a tiny lump of metal can act as a conduit to her younger self, making her remember – whether she wants to or not – the thrill of letting an animal bred for speed run as fast as he wants to. Sometimes, her heart leaps up the way it used to when her mount cleared a fence and they were airborne; sometimes she feels sick with longing. Rufus has admired the bronze too. She had told him that she was given it as a gift and braced herself for further questions, but he'd just said, ‘How lovely,' and put it down again. It doesn't look as though Verity will move on so easily, though. It's only the fact that Bettina doesn't know whether to panic or cry that stops her from doing either. She thinks about her breath, the way a nurse taught her to, long ago: feels it pass, cool, into her nostrils, notices how it's a little bit warmer as it leaves her body.

‘My husband deals in art,' Verity says, ‘and you can't help but get an eye for good things. Do you know who made this?' She's turning it over, looking for the maker's mark. Bettina's fingers twitch, as she quells the urge to snatch the bronze back.

‘No, I'm afraid not,' Bettina says. ‘It was a gift. A long time ago.'

‘Well, it's beautiful,' Verity says, holding it at arm's length to take in the wholeness rather than the detail, and so giving Bettina the opportunity to take it back into her own hands, ‘so lifelike. My daughter-in-law is a bit of a horsewoman, her house is full of paintings and photographs and ornaments and whatnot, but it's not often that I've seen something so …' Her words run out, and Bettina wants to agree, but she can't speak. She knows exactly what Verity means. This little statue could be breathing. It's the one thing in the flat that she cares deeply about, and one of only two mementoes from her past that she's allowed herself to keep. Her leg is throbbing again as she makes her way down the stairs. She feels her foot start to drag across the kitchen floor, as she explains her processes and introduces Verity to Simon, her baker.

For once, it's a relief for Bettina to throw herself into the tasting; what she usually dreads makes her feel safe by virtue of being at least familiar. From there it's not long until the lunchtime rush begins – Angie makes the sandwiches, while Bettina deals with everything else. At two-thirty Angie leaves, and at three-thirty Josh arrives from college to do his afternoon shift until five. Bettina heads for the kitchen once Josh is in the shop, and shapes the loaves that will prove overnight and go into the oven tomorrow morning, in the half-light.

Tomorrow is croissant day at Adventures in Bread, so she puts the ingredients for the dough into the mixer, and while the hook slowly turns the flour, leaven and water to something smooth and stretchy, she beats the butter flat with a rolling pin and puts it into the fridge. In the morning she will roll the dough, lay the butter on to it, fold dough around butter, then start rolling, rolling, rolling it flat, doing the whole thing again, until the dough is the right colour and has the right give and all that there is to do then is to cut it into triangles, roll the triangles into crescents and bake them. She wonders how many croissants she has made over the years. People always exclaim how light they are, how flaky and soft. Well, she always says, I did more than ten years in French bakeries, so if I couldn't make a decent croissant I'd be in trouble.

Bettina's times alone in her kitchen – first thing in the morning, before Simon comes in, then after Josh arrives in the afternoon – are her favourite parts of any day, a safe, warm space that nurtures her. Today, though, there's no magic and no healing as she works. Her leg aches and so does her head. Her heart and lungs seem too small, so that there's no finding evenness of breath. The skin on her temples feels stretched. Her head is stuffed with heaviness; she hasn't eaten anything since the bite of coffee cake, so her stomach is an acidic lightness that aches. Her mind goes back to all the parts of the past that she usually makes such an effort to keep it away from. A day that began as the new, happier, more settled normal for Bettina has thrown her back into the past. If she worked for anyone else, she would make an excuse, hand in her notice and pack her bag tonight. Tomorrow she would find a place that had none of today's feelings in it and she would start again. But all she can do is go upstairs, move the bronze to the bedroom, close the curtains, and hope that the world will leave her alone.

It does. After two quiet days, working in the kitchen and going straight to bed at the end of the day, Bettina feels better: or, at least, her sense of perspective has returned. She has been remembering the times at the beginning of her recovery, when anything and everything could send her spinning off into chaos and despair; the feelings triggered by Verity were no more than a pale echo of those times. Of course, she has told herself when she's been awake and working in the morning, there will be bad days. The fact that you haven't had a bad day in a long time is, really, a good thing.

On the third day, Rufus is her first customer. He comes bearing gifts – two pewter planters, brimming with lavender.

‘I was going to bring you flowers,' he says, ‘but I remembered what you said. I thought you would like living things.'

‘Thank you,' Bettina says. She feels awkward; she threw the peonies away last night.

‘I'm learning,' Rufus says, with a smile.

‘I'm grateful,' Bettina says, and she is: she knows that she doesn't deserve such consideration in view of her verging-on-rudeness. She reminds herself of how lucky she is to have someone like Rufus to be so thoughtful and full of care for her. She can sense that Angie is all agog behind her, as she kisses Rufus on both cheeks. When Angie first discovered that Bettina and Rufus were having what she insists on referring to as ‘a thing', she had spent several mornings in the shop regaling Bettina with the complex history of Rufus's love life and the reasons why he ended up living in a flat above a restaurant while his ex-wife is happily ensconced in the former matrimonial home with a policeman. Bettina had half listened – she'd already had versions of the story and its backdrop, the most shocking thing that had happened in Throckton for many years – but refused to join in the gossip, and so Angie had eventually given up. Bettina knows that all Angie's friends will know about Rufus's gifts before the week is out. Although she'd like to think that they cared as little for gossip as she did, she's lived in enough small communities of one sort or another to know better. ‘You have to decide whether you care more about what other people think, or what you think,' her father had said to her once, when she had been teased at school by people who had seen her mother in a play. He'd wrapped her into a hug as he'd said it, and she'd known that he was right. He was still right, later, when it got more difficult: when the knowledge that she and the people she loved were being talked about had made her sick to her heart. But, she reminds herself, a little bit of chatter about some lavender is not going to do her any harm. Not everything about the past has to colour the present.

Rufus looks as smart and dapper as always. Bettina likes his hands – his fingers are long, and his nails clean and cared for. His eyes are the unrepentant blue of the first July cornflowers and his hair is short and a little grey, something that he doesn't trouble to hide. She thinks what she likes best about him is his confidence. He never doubts himself, or if he does, he doesn't show it. He expects to be successful, and he is. Bettina cannot imagine him lying in bed at night, awake, wondering about the places in his life where he went wrong, worrying about the future.

He takes half a dozen croissants. ‘I guess these are for Kate and Daisy?' Bettina asks as she hands them over.

‘Yes,' he says, ‘I just called. I'm dropping them in on my way to work.'

‘Would you like to meet in the restaurant, later,' Bettina asks, ‘about seven?'

‘That would be lovely.' Rufus positively beams. He has good teeth, too.

‘Great,' Bettina says, ‘and thank you again.' Already she is wondering what a sweet lavender loaf would taste like. It would be easy enough to make a lavender cake – unrepentantly sweet and finished with orange drizzle and brown sugar crystals – but a bread would be better, for lavender. She imagines the semi-sour rind on her tongue while the sweet scent fills her nose. It will be a grown-up loaf, good with cheese: the sort of thing that Rufus would like. She might talk to him about it later. She promises to text him to confirm their meeting for dinner, and waves him off to see his daughter and granddaughter.

‘Morning, Rufus,' Richenda says, when she lets him in, ‘are they croissants? You'll be popular.' She's wearing a plain blue dress that grazes the top of her ankles. There's a pashmina that he remembers buying her thrown around her shoulders, fastened with a silver brooch he doesn't recognize. She smiles in welcome, as usual. It's as though he is a visiting neighbour. He wishes he could feel the same way. Having to knock on his own front door still pinches at his guts.

‘Good morning,' he says. He doesn't respond to her remark about popularity, as he can't always tell if she's being sarcastic or not. Of late, the shrewishness he associates with her has been replaced by a confidence that is both galling and sexy.

To begin with, on Rufus's morning drop-ins on Kate and Daisy, who live in the family home with his ex-wife, Rufus had gained great satisfaction from seeing his wife's lover standing, unshaven, in the kitchen, and felt all of the confidence and superiority provided by his good tailoring and freedom from his unhappy marriage. But he had got his comeuppance: there came the time when he arrived unannounced to find Richenda barefoot in an eau-de-nil satin dressing gown that Rufus had never seen before. She had been all politeness to him, and had told him the latest news of Kate and Daisy, who were still asleep. And she had been leaning against Blake as she talked, her lover's hand curving the side of her waist, and Rufus had realized that, maybe, the reason his marriage was unhappy was not because he had married the wrong woman but that he had treated her badly. If he had been more like Blake, more considerate, more kind, perhaps he and Richenda would have been happier. And he had known that he was the one at a disadvantage, gold cufflinks or not. Since then, he has always called ahead.

Not that he regrets their divorce. Not really, not now; although on some days he wonders how he could have been stupid enough to think that moving out was a good idea, on others he blames himself for not making more effort to fix things way earlier. He can admit that the speed with which Richenda has moved on to a new relationship galls him. He wasn't sure why he'd been surprised when she asked him to leave. Their marriage had been long but unhappy, his infidelities frequent and intense, their relationship barely more than a mostly civil habit.

And then the bombshell had struck. Their daughter, Kate, eighteen at the time, was headed for Oxford one minute, then pregnant the next, in the worst circumstances imaginable. The baby's father, Mike, was a married policeman who drowned pulling her out of a lake before anyone knew about the baby. So he and Richenda had struggled on for the sake of Kate, but before baby Daisy was six months old his wife had taken him to one side and said, quite matter-of-factly, that she thought he should go. He was no help with the baby, and having Caroline drop him off at the end of the road rather than outside the door didn't actually count as discretion. Caroline had been a fling, a respite from their complicated life at the time, little more; she'd been, he thinks, just part of his habit of faithlessness. And his marriage had been like the sky in the morning, so unremarkably present that he had never bothered to wonder how the world would look if it wasn't there.

BOOK: The Other Half of My Heart
12.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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