The Stopped Heart (4 page)

She stares at him.

“You want me to go back to work?”

“Don't say it like that.”

“All right, but you do?”

He holds himself still for a moment. Then, as if this is something he's been building to, he gets up and goes over to the sink, fills the kettle.

“I suppose I worry that you're spending too many days alone. You're giving yourself too much time to think.”

“You think I'm being self-indulgent?”

“Of course I don't think that.”

“Soft on myself, then?”

“I didn't say that either. I just wonder if you'd feel better if you did something.”

She thinks about this.

“I told you I might think about doing something in September.”

“Why wait until September?”

“I feel I need the summer to—”

“To what? To lie on the bed all day and cry?”

Mary says nothing. He sighs.

“Look, it's only because I care about you.”

The kettle boils. She watches as he makes her a cup of tea. Hooking the tea bag out at the exact right moment, getting the strength and color just how she likes it. She notices that he hasn't shaved. She thinks that he looks tired, his eyes pouchy and gray.

“All right,” he says, “forget Lynn, forget PR or whatever. Why don't you just go out and get yourself an ordinary job?”

“Ordinary? What kind of job would that be?”

“I don't know, at a shop, a receptionist or something. You could look at that little library in Framlingham.”

“I'm not qualified to work in a library.”

“Stop looking for obstacles. You could at least inquire.”

“I don't think I'd earn very much in a library.”

He looks at her.

“It's not about the money. You know it's not. I just think it would be good for you to get out of the house, go out into the world.”

“The world?” She makes a face.

“All right, I'll be honest. I think you need something where you'll be forced to talk to other people.”

People. The idea fills her with horror.

“You've been thinking about this,” she says.

“I just can't bear to see you like this.”

“Like what?”

“Hiding yourself away. Losing your confidence.”

“I'm not hiding.”

He says nothing. She looks down at her hands on the table. The rough old pine table, the one that came with the house. Sometimes she thinks it looks like it has teeth marks on it.

Though she could never have faced their own table with its dents and scratches and crayon marks and ancient cereal encrusted around its edges, though she's glad that one's still safe in the cool, untampered darkness of Big Yellow Self Storage, still she's not sure about this one.

“Just pick up the phone,” Graham says. “I'm not saying it's easy, God knows, I know how hard it is. But I think that once you do it, you'll start to feel a little bit better. Work is the saving of me. I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.”

Mary believes him about this. She knows that every weekday, and sometimes on a Saturday too, he walks out of the cottage and
gets in the car and drives to his small new office in Ipswich. She knows what he does there. She knows that he parks in the neat, gravel parking space at the back by the bins, then goes around and puts his key in the door and, bending to pick up the mail off the transparent plastic mat, walks into the single large room with its glazed partition and its forlorn smell of paper and cartridge and desk and new beige carpet.

She knows that he throws the mail on the desk, his jacket on the chair, then goes into the tiny kitchenette with the small carton of milk he's bought on the way in. Placing the milk on the counter, he fills up the glass jug and turns on the coffee machine. Beginning, as he waits for it to bubble through, to rip open letters, bills mostly—gathering envelopes and fliers for recycling.

After that, he checks e-mails, sends texts, drinks coffee. A bit too much coffee, he said recently. It's making him jittery. He probably needs to cut down.

It's not the coffee, she told him.

He looked at her for a second.

Still. I need to cut down.

All day he works there in that small room. All day, at his drawing board or his desk, making calls, costing jobs, talking to site managers, drawing up plans, drinking coffee, tapping the keyboard, sharpening pencils.

Stopping briefly at lunchtime to get a turkey or a tuna-salad sandwich from the deli. Taking his place in the line and talking pleasantly to the girl with the long dark hair and the nose ring who knows nothing whatsoever about him and is therefore one of the most engaging and heartening people he knows.

Taking the sandwich back to eat at his desk or the drawing board, before going on with his work. He might pop out again later and get a Snickers or a Twix. But he tries not to. It's not a great habit to get into, is it, a chocolate hit at four o'clock.

All of this he has told her. Or else she has imagined it. Or else he has told her the bare bones and she has filled in the details for herself.

She knows that he works there in that office all alone, earning the money to keep their lives rolling along. She asked him once if he ever got lonely, and he looked at her with a relaxed kind of interest, as if she were asking him to think of his favorite color or a number between one and seven.

She knows that he did once relent and have an assistant for a bit, the son of a man he used to play squash with—straight out of university, thinking about doing architecture, keen for workplace experience.

But he wasn't keen enough apparently, always watching the clock, bunking off early. And his personal hygiene wasn't great. And then someone complained about his phone manner, so in the end—embarrassed, reluctant—he had to let him go. (She still can't think about this episode without a twist of pain because she knows how Graham placed his trust in that boy, how much he wanted to help, how little he deserved the discomfort that the situation caused him.)

But he likes working alone, he says. In fact, he prefers it. He does his best work when no one is watching over him, when he can think freely, without anyone making suggestions or bothering him with questions. He is very happy on his own, deep in his work. It's a comfort to him, a solace and sometimes, even now, an unexpected source of pleasure and satisfaction.

This is what she knows. Sometimes, though—

Sometimes he comes home and his eyes are baggy and tired as if he's been punched or beaten. Not work-tired, but sad-tired. The skin of his face smelling of old man and solitary sandwich lunches. Or maybe he can't face the cheerful, unknowing girl at the deli and he doesn't eat at all. She worries about that.

Or perhaps it's worse. Maybe sometimes he doesn't do anything. How does she know that he doesn't just drive there and hang up his jacket and lock the door and sit there all day with his head in his hands? How does she know that he doesn't simply wait in that place, counting the minutes, staring at the smooth, deadwood veneer of the desk, marking out time until it's the hour when he should return home?

Sometimes she thinks he looks like he hasn't eaten or breathed or done a stroke of work. Sometimes he looks like he's spent the day weeping.

A
FTER
I
SAAC
R
OPER WAS PUT IN THE HARD AND FROSTY GROUND,
our mother took the baby and went to bed. For a few days, or maybe it was about two weeks, we did not see her.

Our father was very patient. He went up and down the stairs taking her things. Cups of water and pieces of bread and cheese and eggs boiled in their shells and a jug of milk. He took her dinner up, but she would not eat it. He brought the plate back down with the food still warm on it and when Frank asked if he could have it, he said he could even though Lottie had already taken the potatoes off.

Once, I saw my father with his head in his hands. I don't think he was crying, but there was noise coming out. Another time I saw him standing in the yard and staring and staring at the wall as if it might tell him something worth knowing. Sometimes I heard them yelling and screaming at each other.

Don't you tell me what to do! she was saying. Don't you talk to me like that! Don't you dare give me orders!

And my father said something back but it was quieter and I couldn't hear what it was, and then the baby started crying and it felt like the house would explode with so much noise and kerfuffle going on.

Meanwhile there was still the problem of the old elm that was lying right in front of our house. Our front room was in darkness because of the leaves and branches squashed up against the window. They brought two cart-horses from the village to try to shift it. But even though the beasts got down on their knees, they couldn't make the thing budge even half an inch and a third one had to be fetched. In the end, the tree was got no farther than the bottom of the orchard, where it lay on its back in the long grass just as if it grew that way.

The day after that, I found my mother down in the kitchen. The baby was cooing and kicking on a shawl on the floor, and Honey was tied in the chair next to her while Ma kneaded the dough for the loaf, banging it and turning it as if she intended to beat the dear life out of it.

The baby looked as if he too had risen like a loaf and doubled in size, but maybe it was just because I hadn't seen him in a while. But most of all I was shocked by my mother's face. It was shrunken and loose, as if someone had ripped her open and shaken all the feathers out.

She didn't say much but she asked me if the young man was still with us.

What? I said. You mean James?

I thought that Father would have told her that when James Dix had been with us about a week and showed no signs of moving on, he'd told him that if he had no particular plans and wanted to stick around, he could set him to work.

I'd looked up at James to see what his face did at this news. Just as I expected, it sprang to life. He said that he would like that very much.

You've really got nowhere else you need to be? my father said. No folk missing you or whatever?

James shook his head and scratched at his hair. I saw that there was a big bulge in his neck when he swallowed.

Not that I can think of, he said.

My father frowned. Coming from a big family himself, he probably couldn't imagine being alone in the world.

A few weeks, he said. We'll see how it goes. After that, I can't promise anything. You happy with that?

James was happy with that. He was very happy indeed.

He walked around whistling for the rest of the afternoon, and when he saw Lottie pulling Honey along in the old dogcart, he took it out of her hands and bumped it so fast along the brick path that the chickens flew up in all directions and Honey screamed at first with laughter and then with something more like fear.

M
ARY HEARS THE CAR DOOR SLAM.
G
RAHAM THROWS HIS
jacket and briefcase on a kitchen chair and drops a white plastic bag on the table.

“Sausages. From the farm shop.”

“Oh,” she says. “That's nice.”

“That's the good news. I'm afraid the not-so-good news is that I'm picking a certain young lady up from the station in a minute.”

Her face falls.

“Ruby?”

“That's the one.”

“What, she's coming here?”

“Don't panic. I said she could stay one night and that was it.”

She says nothing. Picks up the bag of sausages and puts it by the cooker. He walks over to the sink to wash his hands.

“I don't actually think she wanted to come, but her mother gave her no choice.” He picks up the tea towel to dry his hands. “I'm afraid the even worse news is she's been suspended for a few days.”

Mary catches her breath.

“What, you mean from school? My God. What's she done?”

She hears him sigh.

“Something to do with hanging around the town center after school or maybe it was the lunch hour. The word
shoplifting
was mentioned. I don't know if it was her or another girl. She was certainly involved. Don't worry, I've promised her mother I'll have serious words with her.”

Mary looks at him.

“Why you?”

“What?”

“The serious words. Why do they always have to be done by you? Why can't she do it for once?”

She watches as his face changes. The sober, slightly flinching look he reserves for anything that has to do with Veronica.

“It's not easy for her, darling.”

Mary looks at him, sees pain on his face.

“What? What's not easy?”

“Doing all of this all on her own.”

“All of this?”

“Ruby's not easy.”

“It was her choice—”

“That doesn't make it any easier.”

“What, you mean she can't deal with her own daughter?”

She hears Graham let out a quick breath.

“You don't have any sympathy for her?”

Mary says nothing. Thinking about the day many years ago when she was finally allowed to meet this child—this little girl who seemed to be the cause of perpetual heartbreak and long telephone conversations—and her heart jumped. Not because of what she saw in Ruby, but because of what she knew she would now always see when she looked at Graham. Chaos in waiting. The
dark-eyed stroppiness of an abandoned five-year-old, biding her time, waiting to make him hers again.

Now he comes over, touches her arm, her shoulders, pulling her to him.

“Look, I don't want to fight about it. All I'm saying is we've no idea what it's like to live full-time with a hormonal teenage girl.”

Mary blinks. “And we never will.”

He stares at her. For a moment neither of them can speak.

“I'm sorry,” she says, her voice a whisper now.

He pulls out a chair and sits down.