The Stopped Heart (2 page)

N
OW SHE WALKS UP THE PATH WITH ITS FRINGE OF GRAYING
forget-me-nots and, shielding her eyes, peers in through the dark kitchen window. There it is again—the steep, narrow staircase with its flimsy wooden door, the range, the rough, old scrubbed-pine table that the estate agent said came with the house.

She feels him behind her.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just everything. The kitchen.”

“That room needs a bloody good lick of paint.”

“Yes.”

He takes her hand.

“Come on. Come with me. I have a plan.”

He takes her around the back. Across the surprisingly big yard—once a real farmyard, she supposes—with its old stone trough and water pump. “Nice old original feature, nice that they kept that,” he says. And then on into the overgrown garden where they find a white wrought-iron bench under an apple tree. He brushes fallen blossoms and a crust of bird shit off it and they sit down.

Insects are hovering all around them, alighting on the tired, half-dead cones of lilac and buddleia. They watch a bee crawl over
a bloom before falling backward into the air and then lifting off and away.

At the bottom of the garden, just beyond where they sit, an enormous tree—or the vast, rotten trunk of one, anyway—lies in the long grass.

Graham is looking around him, interest and delight and expectation on his face.

“All it needs is a bit of TLC,” he says.

“Yes.”

She tilts her head back to look at the sky.

“It's huge,” he says. “The garden. Do you realize that? The other day, with that silly boy, we only saw about half of it. I don't think he had a clue. It goes back even further than you can see.”

“You can show me,” she says. “In a minute.”

He smiles.

“I think that's a walnut tree over there. And see the apple trees? Loads of them. I told you—I'm sure this used to be an orchard once upon a time.”

Once upon a time. She turns to look at him and as she does, he opens his old corduroy jacket and shows her: a bottle and two paper cups. He smiles.

“I told you I had a plan.”

T
HEY THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD BUT HE WASN
'
T DEAD.
H
E WAS
the luckiest man on earth. He was alive. The tree had missed him by about an inch.

I waited for them to find this out. I watched as my father went out in the solid sheeting rain and bent his head and said something to him. And I saw the man lift up his own head and say something back.

My mother gasped.

He's alive. Bloody hell. Thank God.

I said nothing. My heart jumping now.

My mother shouted at Frank to run and wake Isaac Roper. I watched as my father touched the man on the shoulder and said something else. Maybe he told him he was going to be all right or one of the other things people say when they think someone's going to die.

I wonder if he'll lose his legs, my mother said.

I stared at her.

The legs? Why would he lose them?

She shook her head.

A man's legs would snap like barley sugar under the weight of a tree like that.

It took all of them—Isaac Roper and my father, with Frank mostly just getting in the way—to bring him inside. My mother spread a blanket on the floor and bunched some straw under his head and they laid him down.

Just look at that hair, she said.

We looked. His hair was bright red, the reddest I'd ever seen on any person. Thick on top, but shaved short around the sides and over the ears. His face was rough and bitter. He had the look of someone who'd just walked out of a room where bad things had happened.

Not a farm boy, Isaac Roper said. Not from around here.

He's got city written all over him, my mother agreed. But how come the boots are so clean?

I looked at the boots. They were brand-spanking-new without a doubt. Not a speck of mud on them.

He stole them, I said before I could stop myself.

My mother gave me a sharp look.

How ever could you know that, Eliza?

I don't know it, I said, blushing to my roots. But anyway, he might have.

L
ATER, HE LIES DOWN ON HIS BACK IN THE LONG, PALE GRASS.
Two or three cups of prosecco in him, face already pink from the sudden warm sunshine—arms spread out, fingers loose.

“Come here,” he says. “Please. Come over here right now and kiss me.”

He does not look at her; he stares up into space. She watches his face. The words floating upward into the bright blue air. She hesitates.

“Come on,” he says again, laughing.

She shakes her head. She says his name. But she does not get up. She sits there on the bench in the sunshine looking at him. His body so familiar, so known to her, so loved. It ought to be possible, she thinks.

“I want to hold you,” he says. He laughs again. “There's no one around, so why not?”

Why not? she thinks. Trying to remember how it used to feel to want to do such things. The warmth of sudden hugs, the way you could twine yourself around the flesh and blood of another human being just like that, as if it were nothing.

He sits up, putting his hands to his face now, laughing. And she starts to speak to him but he stops her.

“It's all right,” he says. “It was a joke. I was joking. You don't have to.”

She watches as he gropes in his pocket for a handkerchief.

“I'm so sorry,” she says at last—seeing that he isn't laughing at all, but crying.

J
AZZY HAD CREPT DOWN THE STAIRS.
S
O HAD
L
OTTIE, BAREFOOT
and half-undressed as usual, followed by the twins, Minnie
and Charlie. I think Frank was with them. Honey came behind, holding on to his knees.

Jazzy was ten years old, and Frank was seven. The twins were five, and Lottie was only four. Nobody could remember how old Honey was but she used to be the baby until the new one came along, so she wasn't that old. Our mother had had some other children too after I was born, but they had died and these were the ones that were left and what with the new baby to boot, she said it was quite enough.

The dog saw the kiddies and wagged her tail and rushed around trying to nip at their hands and feet while they laughed and screamed. At last Frank caught hold of her. But when she saw the man she went stiff all over and began to growl.

What's up with her? my father said, because our dog was the least suspicioning animal you ever met.

She's afraid, said Frank. Who's that man on the floor?

Yes, Jazzy said. Who is it?

I'm afraid! said Lottie, and she looked at Minnie to encourage her, and then they both lifted up their skirts and jumped up and down on the spot, laughing and squealing.

Be quiet, all of you, my mother said.

My father bent down to the man and asked him what his name was. The man groaned.

I knowed his name, Lottie said.

No, you don't, said Jazz.

I did! I used to know it when I was a little bit dead.

Can you move your legs? my father said to the man.

The man tried. At first he couldn't do it, but then he could. He moved them a little bit.

Jazzy looked excited.

Are his legs broke?

Not if he can move them, my father said.

My mother was shaking her head and looking at Isaac Roper.

I thought the tree was on top of him, she said. Right on top of his legs, I honestly thought it was.

Well, it wasn't, my father said.

All the same, she said, still looking at Isaac, I can't believe it. How is it possible? How can no bones have broke?

What's broke? said Charlie.

I want it! Lottie shrieked.

It's a miracle, Isaac Roper said.

Merricales! Lottie said, and then, because she couldn't think of any more stupid things to say, she began to cry.

My father's face didn't move. Anything to do with Isaac always washed straight over him.

It is what it is, he said.

The dog was still growling. I put my hand on her. The growl went down through my hand and into my bones.

Can't someone shut that animal up? my father said.

She's afraid, Frank told him again.

She doesn't want to be killed, sobbed Lottie, even though she was under the table now and no one was listening to her anymore.

Look at the poor lad, my mother said. Whatever on earth is there to be afraid of?

I did look at him then. I looked at him and I knew straightaway that he wasn't a poor lad. I looked at the dirty face and the bright hair and the eyebrows that met in the middle. I looked at the blue-and-black tattoo of something that went curling right down his neck.

He hadn't any jacket and his shirt was half-open. You could see a nipple and some reddish hair. I didn't want to look, but I couldn't help it, I did look.

Something cold crept through me.

I don't like him, I said.

T
HEY LEAVE MOST OF THEIR THINGS IN STORAGE, MOVING IN
with the barest minimum, just a few pieces of furniture and the stuff they can't do without. Kitchen equipment. The sofa and armchairs and the TV. Their bed, of course, and towels and linens. Not even all their clothes.

They don't bring their books or CDs. We'll get new ones, Graham says, though neither of them believes it. They both know it's going to be a while before they can face reading or listening to music.

Even though it's late spring, the house is dark and cold. Some of the plug sockets don't work and the bath takes half an hour to drain. They find mouse droppings in the kitchen cupboards, and the curtains they got for the bedroom window don't fit, so they're woken at dawn with the sun in their eyes.

“It feels like being on holiday,” Mary tells him, when he apologizes for everything that's wrong with the place. “Except that I don't quite know what to do with myself.”

His face softens.

“You don't have to do anything.”

“I know that.”

“It's all going to take some getting used to.”

“I know.”

She watches his face as he comments on the beauty of the old flagstone floors, the huge brick fireplace, the sturdy whitewashed walls with their original thick wooden beams.

“It's all just as it would have been,” he says. “No one's gone around ripping out the period detail. It's all here. Even these little latches on the doors, for instance.”

Mary raises her head from the peas she is shelling and looks
at the narrow wooden door that leads to the stairs. The stripped pine with its iron latch. The steep, shadowed staircase just visible through it; the pale, grubby whiteness of a child's bare foot as she comes bumping downstairs on her bottom—

Her heart twists. She takes a breath, blinks. Looking back down at the colander of peas. Inspecting the green pea sludge under her fingernails.

“Oh,” she says, “Ruby rang.”

“Ruby? What, here on the landline? When? You didn't tell me.”

She glances at the stairs again.

“It was only just now, about ten minutes ago.”

He sighs, muttering something under his breath.

“I'm not going to rush around after her all the time as if everything's an emergency,” she says.

He looks at her.

“Quite right. Of course not. No one expects you to.”

“She expects us to. And so does Veronica.”

He sighs again.

“All right. I'm sorry. I'll deal with it.”

“You don't have to apologize. And I'm not sure there's anything to deal with anyway. She said she just wanted a chat.”

“A chat. It's never just a chat. How did she sound?”

She hesitates.

“OK. She was perfectly polite, if that's what you mean.”

“Did she ask how you were?”

Mary laughs. “Of course not.”

“And sober? Did she sound sober?”

“You mean not drunk?”

“I mean not under the influence of anything.”

She thinks about it.

“I don't know. I think so.”

“You think so?”

She lifts her head.

“I didn't know it was my job to police her.”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“I know you didn't.”

He sighs.

“All right. I'd better go and call her.”

I
T WAS NEARLY MORNING.
T
HE STORM HAD WORN ITSELF OUT.
All that was left was a sour yellow flashing in the sky over toward Laxfield.

The man was lying on the floor with his eyes closed. Isaac Roper and my mother were smoking and laughing and passing the time together like they always did. I saw my father noticing and, as usual, I felt my stomach bunch up. The dog was still growling and my father told Frank to put her in the cupboard. He didn't want to do it, but he did.

Why doesn't she like the man? Minnie said.

Is it because he's bad? said Charlie.

Of course he's not bad, my mother said.

We don't know the smallest thing about him, Isaac Roper pointed out. He could be a felon or a murderer.

Well, the dog doesn't like him, Frank said.

She thinks he's bad, Minnie said.

Bad! shouted Honey, as she pulled herself up to stand, holding on to the arm of the chair. Ba-ba-bad.

Lottie had crept out from under the table. She had her eyes on the man. She was sucking her thumb and fidgeting with her chemise, which only half covered her.

I used to be a dog, didn't I? she said.

Lottie, I said when I saw that she couldn't keep still and kept on twisting about and clutching at herself, do you need the pot?

She blinked at me as if I wasn't there.

All right but a long time ago when the bad man came and he kicked the door down and he stamped all over my head, I did?

Did what?

Used to be a dog.

You were never a dog, my mother said. You're talking nonsense, Lottikins. And Eliza's asking if you want the pot.