The Other Half of My Heart (9 page)

‘Ah yes,' Fred says, ‘you're a twin, aren't you?'

‘Yes.' She wonders what will come next: already sees herself talking to Sam later, telling him about how she got the are-you-telepathic question or the do-you-like-all-the-same-things question or the observation that it's impossible to answer because they have never known anything else: ‘that must be odd' or ‘how is it different to having an ordinary sibling'. But Fred just nods, and goes to open a bottle of wine, and Roddy definitely squeezes her shoulder this time, and Fran brings plates and cutlery to the table, and Tina feels something unclench a little as she feels, for the first time, the possibility, the simplicity, in being next to Roddy.

When the meal is ready, and Roddy gets up and reaches out his hands for Tina's to pull her up, he keeps his right hand in her left as he leads her the few steps to the table. He stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders for a minute or two when she sits.

‘It's goulash,' Fran says, ‘Fred's favourite, so Roddy and I tolerate it, once a fortnight or so. I hope you'll like it. Roddy thought you would. He said you wouldn't want fuss.'

The next morning, as Tina sits in the kitchen at home, eating toast and idly watching the birds so she can tell her mother what she's seen, the thought of Roddy and Fran discussing what she would like to eat still makes her feel warm. She had promised to tell Katrina all about the meal last night – and Sam had asked for ‘the edited highlights' – but she can't really find words for the way she had felt as the evening progressed.

As they'd eaten Tina had felt comfortable, welcome, gradually more relaxed, gradually more at home, so much so that when Fred and Fran had excused themselves – ‘Our bones are a lot older than yours and if they're going to get up at six they need to lie down by ten,' Fred had said – she hadn't felt the need to wonder what would happen next.

Roddy had put on the lamp and switched off the overhead light. He'd leaned over Tina's chair and tilted up her chin and kissed her. Then, in a rewound version of what had happened earlier, he had taken her left hand in his right, led her back to the sofa, sat down with her, put his arm around her shoulder, and kissed her again. They had kissed for a long time, their familiarity as workmates and people-you-see-every-day meeting the newness of this new relationship. Roddy's mouth had been soft but the skin on his hands was like any rider's hands, rough and well worn by leather, sun and wind. As he ran them over her arms, up her neck, into her hair where the dry skin caught on the kinks and then let them go, Tina had felt her body wonder at what was happening to it.

And then Roddy had stood up. Tina thought she knew what was coming next: she knew his reputation for one-night stands and easy-come, easy-go girlfriends. She had thought about what she would say in just this situation, although she hadn't been sure it would come to this at all, and certainly not on an evening that began with a meal with his parents. She had remembered the first part of her planned speech about being someone who didn't really rush into things but she couldn't remember the rest, and anyway her mouth didn't seem very keen on saying any of it. Her body had been very keen, all of a sudden, on the idea of a one-night stand.

But Roddy had smiled and said, ‘I'd like to walk you home,' and his voice had sounded deeper than usual so Tina had had to spend a moment replaying the words, understanding them. Wondering what test she had failed that meant he wasn't leading her to his bedroom, hadn't even tried to get under her clothes.

The walk home through the dark streets of Missingham had been friendly and chatty, but Roddy's hands had stayed rammed in his pockets, and so Tina had kept hers in her pockets too, and when they had got to her gate he had kissed her on both cheeks – although the kisses had been gentler, less formal, than the standard peck-peck she saw him use with visitors to the yard – and said, ‘Thank you,' and he'd watched her to her door and – well. And what? Tina has no idea.

And then the phone rings. Flora, who has been quietly licking butter from Tina's fingers, looks at her as if to say: that's probably for you. It's before eight. Tina guesses it's the stables calling, as only someone from there would assume that anyone else was up and prepared to have a conversation at this hour.

She's right. It's Roddy.

‘I know it's your day off,' he says, and he sounds so formal, his voice so clipped and matter-of-fact, that Tina immediately thinks that she must have read way too much into all that kissing, not enough into the formal walking-home, ‘but I wondered if you wanted to come into town with me, to take a look at those blankets?'

‘The blankets?' she says. Her voice sounds thin and dry: this was the last thing she was expecting.

‘Are you busy today?' His voice still sounds as formal, but of course he will be in the yard, using the phone in the office there. Tina can hear the clatter and shouts of the morning's first round of work coming to an end.

‘No,' she says, ‘I'd love to come.'

‘Oh, I should have said, I thought we could get the train in. We could walk to the station. I can come and pick you up on my way.'

‘That would be great. If you don't mind.'

‘Of course I don't mind,' she thinks she can hear him smiling, ‘I wouldn't have suggested it if I did. Shall we say ten? Once we've looked at the blankets and stuff we can have lunch. I don't really need to be back here until five.'

‘That sounds great,' Tina says.

‘It's a date,' he says, and puts down the phone.

When he comes to collect her, Roddy introduces himself and shakes hands with her father and kisses her mother, who twitters like a thrush about how even though they aren't horse people they always watch when he's on the TV. He smiles, and explains their plans for the day – Tina's heart does a little pirouette when he says ‘Tina and I' – and how much he and his parents had all enjoyed the gingerbread. ‘We had some of it for breakfast,' he says, ‘with butter. It was just the thing.'

‘Oh, my!' Alice says, as though this is the single most exciting thing she had ever heard. Howard catches Tina's eye and smiles too, a smile that says ‘everyone your mother meets for the next three weeks will hear about the Floods having gingerbread-and-butter for breakfast'. Tina smiles back. Roddy is talking about birds now, saying that he'd seen a buzzard when he was out riding that morning, and Alice points out the tree in the garden where the wagtail likes to sit.

Roddy takes Tina's hand as they get on to the train, and keeps hold of it until they are sitting down together. Then he puts his arm around her and his feet up on the seat opposite, and Tina surprises herself by saying, ‘Other people will be sitting there,' and he grins his funny twisted grin and takes his boots off the worn brown velour, and she adds, because she doesn't want to sound like his mother, or hers, or one of the bossy girls in the yard, not that it would occur to most of them to catch a train, ‘I do like your boots, though.'

Roddy turns his ankle this way and that. ‘Thanks. My mother says they're a bit much.'

‘They are quite a lot of everything,' Tina agrees. The cowboy boots have a long, tapering toe, and there isn't an inch of them that isn't tooled with twirls and scrolls. Above the heel, a band of silver sits. ‘I think you're wise to leave the spurs off. But I like them. They are just,' she indicates proximity with her finger and thumb, ‘just this side of classy.'

Roddy laughs. ‘Tina Randolph, I could get into a lot of trouble with you,' he says.

And he kisses her, on the lips, just like that, and she realizes that being with Roddy is as easy as falling off Bobby Dazzler when he has the wind up his tail; that there might be something else as good as a gallop on winter mornings when the sun is just starting to shiver into the sky. In short, Tina Randolph admits that she is in love. Lost to it. And she hopes that that's what Roddy means when he talks about being in trouble, because if he doesn't love her too, she doesn't know what she'll do.

 

THE MEMORY OF
the conversation with Rufus keeps Bettina awake at night. She turns over, rearranges pillows, sits up and sips water, as though finding physical comfort will make her emotions lie smoothly too. But her gut is agitated and her mind goes over and over what she said to him. She hears her own voice, in her head, explaining that the part of her that could really love is missing, and wonders if that is true. At one lonely 2am, Bettina wonders whether it's easier for her to think that the part of her that could love is dead than it is to consider that it might be dormant, and could be coaxed back to life, with all of the risk and heartbreak that that might involve. She doesn't know the answer. But thinking about the question brings tears to her eyes. She's tempted to put on some shoes, step across the street and knock on Rufus's door, but she can't bring herself to do it. Because if she did it she would have to be sure that it was what she wanted, and all that she is really sure of is that she has had enough of heartbreak for one lifetime. Rufus has been into the shop once or twice. He has been friendly, formal, polite. Bettina had been hurt, just a little, her heart as though it had brushed against a nettle, until she realized that Rufus was treating her the way she was treating him.

One night, late/early, giving up on sleep and striving to understand her misery, she takes a shoebox from under her bed and finds the letter from her father that she hasn't read since she settled in Throckton. It was waiting for her when she returned from France after her father's sudden death, three years before.

My dear Bettina,

I hope you never have to read this, because I hope that I will outlive your mother and you will never have to experience her illness at close quarters. I know that you have noticed how strange she is on the phone with you sometimes, when she talks about people we haven't seen since before you and Sam were born, repeats herself, sometimes stops talking mid-sentence and hands the phone to me as though it's a cup of tea she's just made. Forgive me for telling you that her distraction was caused by tiredness, or an unusual bird in the garden.

The doctors say that the fall is what triggered the dementia. How I wish I had been the one who'd gone out to feed the birds that day; such a simple decision, with such monstrous consequences, to start on the washing-up instead, not to insist that your mother put her garden boots on, and to let her go out in those ridiculous slippers. But whatever began it, only you and I know the dark, deep well it drew from. There is so much strength in old misery.

Her decline began slowly. A forgotten message, a jumbling of speech forgivable in someone tired or depressed. But then she started putting her clothes on in the wrong order – blouses over sweaters, dress back to front – and she would lay the table for the four of us.

I didn't tell you because I have always been sure that your decision to be far away from us was your only way of coping with the tragedy in our lives. I couldn't see how I could justify bringing you back to something that was difficult to cope with in itself. It would have been like asking you to bear two impossibly heavy weights.

And, as I am confessing, I will confess all. Before your mother got to the point at which she is as I write – with most of her sense of herself gone, and only a few memories remaining – in her lucid moments she said some things that were not easy to hear. She talked about Sam as though he had stepped out of the room, and she talked about you as though you were still the hard-working young woman with all of her life waiting. She speculated about your future, and Sam's, and talked about wedding hats and grandchildren as though we still had nothing to worry about. It was unspeakably difficult to hear; worse, somehow, than the moments when she didn't know who I was, or even have much of a clue who she was. It was like watching the person she would rather have been. And so, out of a father's desire to protect, I decided to keep you in ignorance. I have no defence, except my desire to do the right thing, in a situation where there wasn't really a right thing to do. I hope that, in time, you will forgive me, and perhaps also learn to forgive yourself.

And now, some last advice, or perhaps it is a plea. Please, Bettina, don't give up your life to care for your mother. Although it's a difficult, heartbreaking job, that's not the reason why I don't want you to do it. I want you to keep on having the life that you've rebuilt for yourself, and I want you to have the future you deserve. You've always allowed yourself to be outshone, but I have always seen how you shine.

You've suffered enough. We've all suffered enough. There are people who are much better equipped to care for your mother than you are, and there's no shame in that. (They are, doubtless, better equipped to care for her than I was, but you know that I am nothing without your mother, and so I have been selfish in keeping what remains of her close to me.)

There is money, and insurance, and most of all there is my wish. Find a place where your mother will be happy and well cared for, and let her go.

Love

Dad.

Bettina sits on her bedroom floor and cries, softly, as though there is someone she might wake. Her memories of her return from France overwhelm her. When her father described a ‘difficult, heartbreaking job' it was an understatement. She found the pain of being close to her confused and diminished mother unbearable. What had made it worse was her own grief for a man that his wife barely remembered. Alice spent a lot of time snoring in front of the television, blissfully unaware that she was a widow. And Bettina watched her and missed France, the easiness of a life that meant being ever-so-slightly disconnected from the world as others experienced it: rising in the dark, working in silence. For a month after her return, Bettina read books about dementia, and talked to the people her father had relied on, and saw the bread she baked while her mother slept become as dull as Alice's skin and as tasteless as her own tears.