Learning by Heart (11 page)

‘I couldn’t stay in Paris,’ he said. ‘It seemed all wrong.’ He gave a wry, painful smile. ‘I wanted to surprise her,’ he said. ‘But it was me who got the surprise.’

‘Nick,’ she said, ‘she’s very angry. Perhaps you’d better leave her alone just now.’

‘I can’t do that,’ he told her.

They walked back down the hill, across the first orchard.

‘How did you get here?’ Cora asked, because Zeph had brought their car.

‘I hired a car,’ he said, sounding irritated. He took a deep breath as they came into the second orchard. ‘Everything’s looking real nice,’ he said.

She smiled inwardly at the compliment. Nick had always been charming with her, as he was with all women. When Zeph had first brought him home, Cora had liked him at once. Oh, of course it meant little, she could see that, to be able to say pretty things at the right times. It was a facility rather than a strength. But it was pleasant all the same to be noticed and complimented. And Nick was good at telling Zeph how wonderful she was, and how beautiful. Cora had watched her practical, pragmatic daughter melt, and felt pleased. She had only ever looked as happy as that with her father – although Nick was nothing like Richard.

Nick was laid-back where Richard had been hardworking, artistic where Richard had been practical. Richard would probably have criticized his wit and apparent carelessness, his philosophy of letting tomorrow take care of itself. Richard would have said that Zeph needed security and money, not the hand-to-mouth existence that Nick offered.

Looking at him through Richard’s eyes, Cora could see that a struggling writer was hardly reliable, hardly a provider, and she worried that it was Zeph, not Nick, who got the part-time jobs, a whole variety to make ends meet. When Nick and Zeph had first set up home together in a tiny flat, it was Zeph, not Nick, who worked in a bar and, at nights, as an usher in a theatre. She even went temping, doing days here and there in City offices, filing and running errands. Anything to bring in the money while Nick worked on his first novel.

It would pay off when the book was published, Nick would tell them, with a wink, a smile and that fantastic American drawl. That was how Nick got along, Cora saw. And the first book came and went, and couldn’t find a publisher; and the second found an agent and a publisher, but no money. Then the third. And by this time Zeph was pregnant, and the mortgage lender was about to foreclose, and Cora had even thought they would have to come to Somerset to live with her. But Nick had sold his screenplay, then got a job writing TV commercials, in the same ten days, and they were off, heads above water, not rich when Joshua was born, but no longer desperate.

They had come through all that, Cora thought, as they reached the gate to the farmyard and the house. Only last year Zeph had hinted at them buying a second home, somewhere near Cora, on the back of Nick’s success with his fourth book. Her heart had leapt in hope. Only last year. And yet, Cora considered, there had been a weariness in Zeph after Joshua was born, an uncharacteristic depression. When she asked Zeph how she felt, Zeph had brushed aside her concern. Yet it was almost visible: a barrier between her and Nick.

As he held the gate for her, Cora looked at him. He was very handsome. Not just attractive, but handsome. You almost never saw that now: a man who was glamorous, like a forties movie star. A dangerous man, the archetypal image of a womanizer, a seducer.
And that’s what he is
, she thought suddenly.
That’s exactly what he is
.

‘Why?’ she asked him, made abruptly furious by this, and by her own easy acceptance of his appearance. Richard would have thrown him off the land, she knew. He would probably have hit him. ‘What was it for, with this actress?’ she asked. ‘How could you have been so stupid?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘I thought you were better than that,’ she told him. ‘I’m ashamed of you.’

He looked wounded. ‘Are you?’

‘Of course! What do you expect me to feel? Proud?’

‘I never had it in my head to hurt Zeph, Cora.’

‘Well, you did. You have. You let a stranger tell her.’

‘I won’t see the girl again. It’s over – it’s been over for weeks.’

‘What rubbish,’ Cora retorted. ‘Zeph told me this morning that you’re working with her.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t stay to do any rewrites in Paris. I asked to work from home. I just saw who I had to, and came home by the first train this morning. I don’t want to see Bella. I don’t want her.’

‘Well, now nobody wants you,’ Cora said sharply. ‘Congratulations.’

She had begun to walk across the yard, but Nick stepped in front of her. ‘Cora,’ he said, ‘please help me.’

‘I can’t. What can I possibly do?’

‘I can’t lose Zeph,’ he said. ‘Or Josh.’

‘What do you expect of me?’ she said. ‘I can’t do anything.’

‘You can talk to her.’

Cora smiled grimly. ‘I can’t talk to Zeph, Nick. You know that. She wouldn’t take any notice of me at the best of times.’ She paused. ‘And I don’t think I should,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t get involved. I should help my daughter do whatever she wants to do.’

‘She doesn’t want this,’ he said. ‘You know in your heart she doesn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know that at all.’

There was a noise along the lane: the sound of a car.

As Zeph turned into the lane, she was thinking of her father. The thought had been triggered as she had come past the lower field, the one turned to pasture. The grass was full of thistles now, and seemed beaten by the winter cold; she saw the dark areas of scrub and moss in the far corner.

Richard had always been careful to keep that field properly; he had put the two horses in there and built them a stable. When she was only eight she had helped him with it, gone down on the tractor, towing the trailer loaded with corrugated-asbestos roof sheets; stood by while two other men helped him put up the girders. He had told her long, complicated stories about building the other farm, of how it had been a ruin, and how he had learned at night school to lay brickwork and to plaster walls. How the thatcher had come and he had passed up the reeds, and how they had set traps so that squirrels wouldn’t run over the ridgeline. And how the rain had rushed down the new thatch and washed away the loose stone path that he had put by the windows, and how he had got down on his knees and relaid them, mixing cement with a spade, angry that nature had tried to defeat him.

Her father could build anything. He told her how no one had wanted the land where the first house had been; how only one person had bid against him in the auction. He told her, laughing to himself, about her grandparents: they had been aghast at his plans to dig through the whole site for the drains; but her grandmother had relented, and come to see him one afternoon when he had been working all day, bringing him a tray covered with a cloth, and tea laid out beneath it, with a little white napkin and a silver knife, a pat of butter for the scones. ‘She was a very correct woman,’ he had told Zeph, smiling broadly.

She had no clear picture in her mind of her grandmother, who had died suddenly just before her fifty-second birthday, collapsing in the garden. Richard, from his vantage-point above the lane, working on the top-storey windows of the new house, had seen her fall.

He had gone down immediately, and found her by the flower-beds she had carefully tended. She had had a stroke, and was barely breathing. He had held her hand, felt the tension pass from it and realized that she was no longer focusing on him.

Cora had come home soon afterwards. She had not been back long from London, and that day had been trying to get work in Salisbury. She had driven a long way, he said, and had come into the driveway at speed, then got out of the car in a rush, slamming the door, and had seen him standing on the doorstep. ‘What are you doing here?’ she had asked.

Zeph had often wondered at the rest of the conversation, if her mother had wept and her father had had to support her. If he had played out his role as the knight in shining armour all day, all week, all month. All the weeks until they married. She had looked at their wedding album, and seen them standing in the stiff, formal group that did not include Cora’s mother. She had studied how Cora leaned almost too heavily on Richard’s arm. And she had decided that Richard had done everything you might dream of in a husband, or a man: he had rescued Cora; he had stood by her; he had given her his arm to hold on to.

He could do anything. That was Zeph’s unwavering impression of him. He had fought in the war and been a hero; he had come home wounded from Sicily and not let the injury deter him; he had built up what he owned from nothing. He had planted all the orchards himself. He had made toys, her bed and all the cupboards in her room, and carved little animals as door handles on each one. She opened them all daily, for the fun of pushing down the elephant’s trunk to lift the latch, or the tiger’s paw, or the donkey’s tail. He was clever like that, clever, resourceful and funny.

And he would sit with her at night, and not with her mother. Cora was always somewhere else.

Zeph had glanced again at the state of the field as she slowed the car. He would have hated to see how Cora had let things rot where they stood. He would have hated the state of the stable, with the roof panel cracked and letting in rain, the doors standing open. He would have hated the state of the lane.

She looked back to the road and the yard, and saw Nick and her mother waiting for her.

‘Oh, no,’ she murmured.

She pulled up and got out.

‘Shall I take Josh?’ her mother asked, worried.

‘He’s asleep,’ Zeph replied. She glanced at Nick.

Cora spoke again: ‘What did the doctor say?’

‘He thinks it’s asthma,’ Zeph told her.

‘Asthma?’ Cora repeated. ‘But he’s never had asthma, has he?’

‘Living in the city,’ Zeph said. This time she stared at Nick.

‘He hasn’t got asthma,’ Nick said. And there was something about the way he said it, with the American
z
instead of the
s
that seemed, unfairly, to set him apart from the two women, to mark or define him as separate.

There was an icy silence. Cora went to the car.

‘Don’t touch him, Mum,’ Zeph said. ‘It’s the first time he’s slept since five o’clock this morning.’

‘I thought I’d take him into the house,’ Cora said. ‘You and Nick can talk.’

‘No.’

Another silence. Nick hadn’t moved. He kept looking at the car.

‘I’ll go inside,’ Cora said. ‘Shall I?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Zeph said.

‘Yes,’ Nick countered. He looked almost pleadingly at his mother-in-law; she turned and left them, once glancing back anxiously at the car.

In the copse beside the chestnuts at the back of the house, rooks began to caw. Zeph frowned at the noise.

‘You lied to me,’ Nick said. ‘Why?’

‘Because I knew I’d never get out of the house otherwise.’

‘You think I’d have stopped you leaving, if you’d talked to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What – physically?’

‘No,’ Zeph said. ‘You’d just have talked and talked until I couldn’t think any more.’ She looked at her feet.

‘And that’s a bad thing, right? Talking?’

‘It is, the way you do it,’ she said. ‘What you call talking.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Never listening properly,’ she told him. ‘Just nagging and nagging about what you want.’

‘I don’t nag you.’

‘You browbeat me,’ she said. ‘You’re doing it now just by being here.’

Nick laughed shortly. ‘What did you expect me to do?’ he demanded. ‘Sit at home on my hands?’

‘Respect my wishes,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m meant to respect you when you lie to me and leave the house with our son?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re meant to try to work out what’s happened to us and think about how you caused it, not run down here making demands.’

‘I haven’t made a single demand,’ he told her. ‘What have I said?’

‘You’re about to tell me to come home. No,’ she corrected herself, holding out one hand, palm upwards, ‘you’re about to say that I
must
come home.’

‘You must. You’ve got to.’

‘There you are.’

Nick put a hand to his forehead. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.

‘I don’t care if you accept it or not. I don’t care what you feel,’ Zeph countered hotly. ‘Do you understand? I don’t care what you feel or what you want.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you don’t care.’

‘I want to be away from you,’ she retorted, her voice quivering. ‘I want to think. I
have
to think.’

‘Zeph,’ he said, ‘I can’t allow this.’

‘Allow?’ she echoed. Her expression darkened. ‘But you’ve got no power, Nick. You’ve got nothing. Don’t you get it? Do you want me to be understanding? Do you want me to forgive you? What – you want me to try to forget that you’ve had another woman, that you’ve slept with her?’

‘To forgive me, not forget. I made a mistake.’

‘And that excuses everything?’

‘Of course not. I’m just trying to tell you I’m sorry.’

‘I always thought it would be different – I thought you’d be different when Josh was born,’ she whispered.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not go around with your tongue hanging on the floor, for one thing.’

‘What?’

‘The way you are around everyone.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, confused.

‘You’ve always got to …’ She took a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Go ahead. You may as well tell me.’

‘Just always pawing people. Always got to kiss the women. Always got to be at the front. Always the one pouring the drinks and telling jokes – like – like—’ She was floundering.

Nick stared at her. ‘You’re criticizing me for being friendly?’ he said. ‘For
talking
to other people?’

‘You don’t just talk,’ Zeph replied, angry. ‘You … you’re false.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me,’ she said. ‘You’re not real. You’re fiction.’

He was staring at her, appalled.

‘Even Josh swearing at me is a joke to you,’ she muttered. ‘It’s a game. It’s a laugh.’