The Stopped Heart (31 page)

She holds herself very still, her cheeks still burning.

“It is, yes.”

“If you believe it is forever.”

She looks at him.

“What does that mean?”

He hesitates.

“Well, I suppose some people would say it's just this life—”

Mary shakes her head.

“I don't believe that.”

“You don't?”

“No. No, I don't. Why, do you?”

He keeps his eyes on her.

“Not really, no.”

They're both quiet again. Very gently, he places the tea in front of her.

“But they're not dead to you, are they? That's what you're saying, isn't it? That they aren't.”

Mary stares at him. She shakes her head. Tries to speak but finds she can't. He leans back against the kitchen counter, folds his arms, looking at her.

“You carry them around with you, don't you? All the time. Anyone can see it. They're in your eyes, in your gestures, the way you move your hands, your head. It's impossible to be around you without feeling and seeing them.”

She nods, tears now coming to her eyes.

“That's it. That's it exactly. How do you know that? How can you say it? Do you think it's mad? Doesn't it sound very strange?”

He shakes his head.

“Not at all. Not to me anyway. Though I think it's true that a lot of people might not get it.”

Mary looks at him. She smiles at him and he smiles back and then for a moment they both laugh. She gazes at his face, unable suddenly to take it properly in, to get enough of it.

“Some days it feels like they exist more strongly than ever,” she tells him. “Since we came to this place. I don't know what it is about it, the cottage, I felt it from the very first time. They never came here, never lived in this place, yet somehow there's a connection—a continuing. I feel them all the time. Everywhere. In the garden especially—”

“The garden? Why the garden?”

“I don't know. I can't explain it. I only have to walk out into the garden to feel them, to feel that they're right there with me. I didn't feel it when we first got the house—it was something that grew slowly, creeping up on me. Now it's unmistakable. They're in the garden. I spend time with them every day. You think that's mad?”

He smiles at her. Picks up his tea.

“What do you want me to say?”

She feels herself start to laugh.

“That it's not mad. That I'm not going out of my mind. That you think it's OK.”

He smiles.

“I think it's OK.”

Mary takes a breath, holding her hand out in front of her. Realizing she's trembling.

“Some days the feeling's so strong I almost don't know what to do with it.”

Eddie looks at her.

“Do you need to do anything with it?”

“I don't know.” She gazes at him now, a kind of euphoria building inside her. “Really, Eddie—I don't know.”

He is leaning back against the counter now, looking at her.

“What were they like?” he asks her at last.

She looks at him, her heart lifting.

“The girls? What, I haven't told you?”

He smiles.

“You've never told me anything. But I suppose I've never asked.”

“You told me all about your boy without my asking.”

He smiles again.

“That's right. You're right. I did. Well, then. Tell me. It's your turn. I'd just like to be able to imagine them, that's all. Your girls.”

Mary smiles and then she laughs.

“It's difficult. I don't really know how to describe them.”

“Try.”

She shuts her eyes, opens them again.

“I don't want to make you think they were perfect or anything like that. They were just normal children, I suppose. Quite a handful, quite annoying sometimes, same as any kids that age. Monsters. That's what we called them, the little monsters. They could be pretty impossible, both of them. Ella was probably the worst.”

“Ella was the big one?”

Mary nods. “Twenty-one months between them. She was just so bright, Ella was. Right from the start. She could read at three years old—I'm not exaggerating—not just the odd word, but proper books, a whole book. She'd make up stories as soon as she could speak and I had to write them down for her—” Eddie laughs and Mary smiles. “She was so bossy! Then later she wrote them down herself, of course.”

“You think she'd have been a writer?”

She shrugs. “I don't know. It's easy to get carried away. I mean, lots of kids make up stories, don't they? Maybe, though. But it wasn't just that. She could do maths too. Anything, really, she was so quick, she could pick up anything. She had such an imagination. I think it might have got her into trouble one day.”

“Why do you say that?”

Mary hesitates. “We worried about her sometimes. She couldn't always tell the difference between what was real and what wasn't—”

“She told lies?”

“Not exactly. Not lies. You wouldn't call them lies. She'd say things and you knew she really did believe them. But she seemed to live in a slightly different world from everyone else.”

“She sounds a lot like you.”

Mary smiles. “Me?”

“You don't think you're like that?”

“I haven't thought about it. But she wasn't that much like me. I can't do maths at all, for instance. She had my impatience, though. And my hair—”

“She had your hair?”

Mary laughs. “Exactly the same! Very long and dark and out of control. Always tangled. But she wouldn't let me cut it.”

He looks at her.

“I'd love to see a photo of her.”

Mary takes a breath, shakes her head.

“I haven't been able to look at pictures yet. Graham can. It's funny, isn't it? He can't speak about the girls, but he can look at them.”

“And you're the other way around.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“I don't know. I don't know why I can't. I don't mind talking about them, not at all. But I just can't seem to look at pictures yet. I think I worry that once I started . . .”

“What? Once you'd started what?”

She looks at the table. “I'd never be able to stop.”

She's silent for a moment. Eddie picks up his tea.

“And the little one? What was she like?”

“Flo?” Mary laughs. “About as different from Ella as it was possible to be. The most laidback child ever. Lazy, though. My God. She let Ella do just about everything for her. All our fault, I know that. We spoiled her, I think, it was hard not to, because she was such an easy baby, especially after Ella.” Mary lifts her tea, looks at it, puts it down again. “The big thing you need to know about Flo—the thing you couldn't have helped knowing if you'd met her—is she was absolutely mad about Peppa Pig—”

“Peppa what?”

Mary laughs. “Peppa Pig! It's a character, on TV. You won't know it. Your boy's probably too old. I'm sorry, but Flo was obsessed. She never stopped talking about Peppa Pig this, Peppa Pig that. Her lunch box, her trainers. She had this bathrobe that she never took off, she even wore it to school once. She wanted to go to Peppa Pig World—can you believe it, there's a Peppa Pig World? We were going to take her for her birthday.” Mary feels Eddie looking at her. “Oh God. I'm sorry. I'm going on too much now.”

He shakes his head. “Please keep going. I like hearing it.”

“It wasn't just Peppa. Flo loved all those things. She was never one for dolls, but animals, soft toys. She had this dog, a little blue dog called Tuffy. I think he was originally Ella's but somehow she got hold of him. He went everywhere with her. After they—when they were missing—I kept him with me. Partly I knew Flo would have worried about him, but also, well,
he had her smell on him. I even took him to bed at night.” She looks at Eddie. “It's ridiculous, I know—”

“It's not. It's not ridiculous at all.”

She hesitates. “We put him in her coffin. Tuffy. It's what she would have—well, it was just the right thing. It felt like the right thing. I can't tell you how hard it was, though, letting him go.”

She looks at her tea again. Then lifts her eyes, trying to smile.

“I haven't talked about all of this stuff in such a very long time. Peppa Pig. My God, I used to have to listen to those words about eighty-five times a day. And Tuffy too. Just saying it all aloud, sitting here in your kitchen like this—”

She notices that Eddie is very still, very quiet.

“What?” he says. “What about it?”

“I don't know. It's . . .” Mary thinks about it, hugging herself, her teeth chattering, suddenly very cold.

“Does it hurt?”

“I don't know. Should it hurt? Do you think it should hurt? Is it weird, do you think, that I'm sitting here, wanting to tell you all about Peppa Pig and Tuffy?”

She shakes her head, starts to laugh. Eddie smiles, looking at her.

“You love it, don't you? You just do. You love it.”

“What?”

“Talking about them. You love talking about them. Just now, listening to you. You came completely back to life. I've never seen you like that before. All lit up. You changed, you really did. For a few moments you were someone else.”

Still hugging herself, Mary looks at him.

“They were everything to me, my girls. My whole life. Everything. I suppose they made me who I was. When they died, my heart stopped. I ceased to exist. My heart just stopped when they died.”

Eddie is quiet. His eyes on her.

“And what happened?”

“What?”

“On that day.”

“You mean how did I lose them?” Mary takes a breath, looks at the floor. At last she lifts her head, meeting his gaze. “I took them swimming,” she says.

T
HAT DAY.
I
T TOOK JUST A FEW MINUTES FOR HER TO BRING THE
car around from the car park to the front of the leisure center. Expecting to see them waiting where she had left them, at the foot of that sloping, concrete walkway—wet hair and sandals and rolled-up towels. At first, not finding them there, she did not panic. She realized, angrily, that against all her instructions they must have gone back up to the snack machine. Flo, it would be Flo, moaning for chocolate.

Risking a ticket by leaving the car on the yellow line with the lights flashing, she ran up the slope to reception. They were not by the snack machine. And then, finding nothing, no one, in fact no children anywhere at all, not even in the small hallway that led down to the changing rooms, then she did at last panic. Running up and down the walkway and around the glass reception area screaming, calling, crying out to anyone she could find, demanding to know if the people waiting in the line had seen two little girls in identical purple fleeces—one with long, dark curly hair, the other shorter, fairer, in fact quite blond.

People started to help her. One of the tracksuited girls came out from behind the desk. Checking the changing rooms, the foyer, the poolside, then three or four of them going back out onto the walkway, rushing up and down that windblown slope, calling their names.

Might they have gone to the car park? Was that possible? they asked her. Could they have been looking for her there? Her heart banging hard enough by now to make her want to retch, afraid to leave any part of that place uncovered yet knowing that every single time she moved, she was going against her own perpetual instruction to them: if you are ever lost, if you ever can't find me, don't move. Stay put. Stay in the exact place where we said we would meet.

And then, after minutes or maybe longer, when the duty manager was called and then the manager and then, finally—after what seemed like a very long time but was probably still less than half an hour—the police, even then she refused to sit still or stop looking for them or to believe that anything could have happened in the brief amount of time it took for her to run to the car park and get the car and bring it around.

“You left the two of them alone?”

“It was less than two minutes. I've done it before. They're sensible girls.”

“It's a busy road.”

“They were holding hands. They know not to go anywhere near the road.”

“The older one would stay with the younger one? You're sure of that? She wouldn't leave her?”

“Never.”

“You're certain they wouldn't go wandering off?”

“Absolutely certain, yes.”

Two little girls, aged seven and five. Sisters, yes. One dark, one fair. Identical purple fleeces. Navy sandals. Rolled-up swimming towels.

“And the towels—what color are the towels?”

The towels. She froze, failing at this last hurdle, unable now
to see the towels—even though she'd been rubbing at her daughters' sopping hair with them at some point in the last hour, which now felt a hundred years ago.

“Blue,” she said, and then, beginning to cry, “or maybe green. I don't know. We have both colors. I don't know which ones they were.”

A moment as the policeman took this in.

“You say at first you thought they might have gone to the vending machine?”

Flo had been difficult all afternoon. Ever since Becky the babysitter left. Tired and scratchy. Moaning that the armbands pinched. Refusing to get in the pool and then refusing to get out. Naughty about getting dressed. Lashing out at Ella for no reason at all. And then insisting that she wanted something from the machine in the foyer.

“You can have a drink at home.”

“I want a KitKat.”

“Forget it. You've had a big plate of chips and that's enough.”

“But I'm still hungry!”

“You'll have to wait.”

“But I brought my money!” Flo's mouth, wobbling now, her whole face on the edge of tears. Unzipping the pocket of her fleece, showing the few dull coins nestling there among the screwed-up foil and fluff and crumbs.