The Home for Broken Hearts (27 page)

“May I ask why things are so difficult between you and Hannah?” Sabine asked carefully, peeling the label off the beer bottle with her thumbnail.

“Half the time I don’t even know, Sabine. When she was little we were so close. I would have done anything for her, and then… the older we got, the more different we became. I always felt as if she didn’t want me to be good at anything, to have anything that was mine. Everything I did, she was always there doing it better; everyone I liked, liked her more; everyone I loved, loved her more. Mum and Dad always saw her as their sunshine girl—‘Sunshine’ is their name for her.
They didn’t mean to play favorites, or treat me differently, it was just that Hannah is like… she’s like a single star in a dark night—you can’t help but look at her. Since she was a teenager I’ve felt like I was living in her shadow. That was, until Nick. Nick loved me, he wanted me—he was the only person who wasn’t seduced by Hannah, and I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. When I had Nick I finally had
my
life. And then Nick died, and now after years of barely ever seeing each other Hannah is here all the time, interfering, trying to take over. And I know I should be grateful that she cares and that she is trying, but you know what? I feel like she’s doing it again. She’s hijacking my grief.” Ellen paused, caught off guard by her outpouring; all the feelings that had been building in her over the last few weeks had flooded out of her.

“None of that makes me sound like a very good person, does it,” Ellen said as Sabine watched her.

“It just makes you sound like a person.” Sabine shrugged. “Do you wonder, though, if maybe the way you see things isn’t the way they are?”

Ellen frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean look at it another way and everything you’ve just told me could describe a younger sister who is in awe of her big sister. Who looks up to her and wants to be like her, who tries to emulate her, who wants the people her sister loves to love her. Maybe a woman who sees what a wonderful mother you are and what an amazing family you have and who looks at her own life and finds it wanting. A sister who understands how hard it is to lose something that she herself has never known and is trying in her own way to help you. You said you and Hannah used to be close—I don’t know what’s going on with Hannah now, but I do know if you want it, you could be that close again.”

Ellen pressed her hot cheek against the cool glass beer bottle. She felt as if she were almost, but not quite, on the verge of working out a riddle.

“I don’t know, Sabine,” Ellen said. “I don’t—she just… she drives me crazy. There’s something, something between us that she’s thinking and not saying, and whatever it is, just having her standing in the same room makes me… well, quite frankly it makes me want to slap her, so there.” Ellen sat up in her chair and lifted her chin with an air of defiance.

“Oh well, that’s just sisters all over the world.” Sabine appeared not to be shocked by Ellen’s latent violent tendencies. “If we are not tearing each other’s hair out or scratching out eyes, then there is something wrong.”

Ellen smiled. It had been years since she’d had any women around to talk to, and now she had two, three of them if you counted Hannah. Allegra’s fascination with her had forced her to really think about herself, not only her thoughts and feelings but her physicality, from the tips of her fingers to the ends of her hair. And Sabine—Sabine reminded her of that wonderful gift of female friendship that she had let slip away when she married Nick, believing that if she had him, she didn’t need anything else. But the truth was you never laughed so much, cried so hard, or talked so deeply as you did with your girlfriends.

“So, my husband received my list,” Sabine said, leaning back in her chair and running her fingers through her heavy blond curls.

“And?” Ellen asked, touched that Sabine chose to confide in her. “What did he make of it?”

“He thought it was a little long. He said if he’d known that we were going to nitpick over every little thing, then he could have made my list much longer. He could have included things like I let my bikini line grow out or that I stopped putting makeup on for him, which isn’t true. I just don’t like to slap it on like a prostitute, that’s all.”

“So, what did you decide?” Ellen asked, sipping her beer and wishing she’d added some for herself on her supermarket delivery.

“I told him to go to her,” Sabine said.

“To the woman he’s been writing to?” Ellen gasped.

“I have to, Ellen. I thought about it and I realize I have no choice. After all, as Sting says, if you love someone, let them go. I’ve told him to go and see her, to see if he can be with her. How can I be happy living with a man I know is always dreaming of someone else? I can’t, so I told him to go to her.”

“And what did he say? Is he going?”

“Yes.” Sabine nodded bleakly. “He is going to take leave next week and go and see her in Austria. She is
Austrian,
Ellen,” Sabine added, as if that added insult to injury.

“And that’s it, your marriage is over?” Ellen asked.

“Not quite.” Sabine glanced at her watch. “We have an appointment for a Skype chat in a little while. To talk about my decision.”

“So he’s not rushing off to be with this woman then, even though you told him to go?” Ellen asked, as curious as she was shocked. “He still wants to talk? That’s a good sign.”

“Is it?” Sabine sighed. “Or is he just absolving himself? After all, if I’ve told him to go, given him my blessing, then he has no reason to feel guilty, does he?”

“Goodness,” Ellen said. “Are you sure you want to give him that freedom?”

“Not really.” Sabine sighed again. “But what other choice is there? If I force him to stay, I will always be wondering if he would rather be somewhere else.”

“And you wouldn’t think of, oh, I don’t know, finding someone here to have a revenge fling with, or something?”

Sabine looked appalled at the idea. “Englishmen leave me very cold,” she said, adding as an afterthought, “Well, Matt is very sexy, and you can tell by looking at him that he knows his way around a woman’s body.”

“Do you think so?” Ellen leaned a little toward Sabine, realizing that the third of a bottle of wine she had drunk earlier at lunch combined with the strong German beer had made her
a little tipsy, almost tipsy enough to numb her body’s physical tic. “Do you think he’d be a passionate lover?”

“Do you?” Sabine asked, amused.

Ellen leaned her chin into the heel of her hand but missed her mark, so that her head slipped and her neck jarred. “Allegra thinks I should take him as my lover, as if I could just sort of lift him off the supermarket shelf and get him to satisfy my every whim. Stud on a stick sort of thing.”

Sabine spluttered beer as she laughed. “Allegra is probably right—Matt would go to bed with you. I’m sure you wouldn’t have to go to much effort if that was what you wanted. But don’t think it would be love, Ellen, or anything like it. For him it would be a sexual experience and nothing more. Don’t go down that road unless you are prepared to accept that.”

“Oh, God, I’m not going to go down that road at all.” Ellen laughed. “Going down roads is the last thing I want to do, at least according to my son! No, I’m a widow and a mother. I’m thirty-eight, boring, and old. Besides, I have a lot more things to worry about. A sister who’s lost her job and a son who thinks I’m agoraphobic, can you imagine?”

“Agoraphobic?” Sabine repeated the word as a question. “Interesting.”

“Yes—you know, someone who is afraid of going outside. He’s got it into his head that that’s me. That I’m scared to set foot outside my own front door. Just because I’m a homebody, and I don’t like people or crowds or a lot of noise. But that’s just me, I’m quiet, and shy. I am a very quiet and shy person, Sabine. I am not at all the sort of person to be having emotion-free sex with a much younger man.”

“Really? Are you sure?” Sabine looked in turn amused and then thoughtful. “Actually, Ellen, I have lived here nearly a month now and I hope you don’t mind me saying that I don’t think I have seen you go out once, not even into the garden.”

Ellen shrugged. “Well, I’m not sure I have been out in the last month. But that’s not that unusual for me. I mean, I work
from home, I have to be at home for Charlie when he gets in from school. My life is in this house—there isn’t any need for me to go anywhere.”

“No need, perhaps, but don’t you even want to go for a walk to the park, sit on a bench and enjoy the sun on your face?”

“That would all be very well if I had time, but I don’t have time. Time is not something I have,” Ellen insisted. “I really don’t think it’s that big a deal.”

Sabine glanced at her watch again. “I expect you are right. Now I must go and talk to my husband. I hope you manage to get in touch with Hannah. I’m sorry that I worried you and Charlie so much.”

“Don’t be; I’m glad I know that something’s going on with her, it sort of explains why she’s been the way she has recently. It will be some big Hannah drama, some man at the bottom of it no doubt. Sooner or later I’ll find out what it is and it will all blow over. Good luck with Eric.”

“Thank you,” Sabine said very politely, leaving Ellen sitting alone in her kitchen once again.

After a second Ellen rose from her chair and preheated the grill for Charlie’s fish fingers. Then she started to get out the ingredients she needed to make Allegra’s risotto primavera.

As she stood at the kitchen sink filling a pan with water, she looked down the length of the back garden toward the back gate, which had long been obscured by undergrowth, at the line of rooftops that serrated the skyline beyond it, silhouetted against the stubbornly faultless blue sky.

When
was
the last time she had gone out? she wondered as the water began to run over the edges of the pan, numbing her reddening hands as she stood there motionless. Ellen thought of the empty calendar that lay open on the table behind her, void of dates and memories. Her mind tracked back over the preceding months, struggling to recall anything particularly memorable in any of them. There had been Charlie,
her books, and the pain—the horrible gaping, seeping, open wound that losing Nick had dealt her—and that was all she could remember. Each day—which at the time had seemed like an uncrossable desert that she had to claw herself across from dawn ’til dusk—now seemed like one featureless globule of time, a mass of existence that had been occupied by very little besides her treacherous body’s continued insistence on staying alive, no matter how she felt about it.

The truth was that Ellen couldn’t remember the last time she had ventured farther than her front door. Dropping the pan in the sink, and slopping freezing water everywhere she turned, with numb fingers she picked up the pristine calendar of Sussex views, gazing at each empty month, stretching her mind as far back as it would go, to last Christmas.

It had been a dark, desolate affair made all the more despairing by the effort that had gone on around her and Charlie to make it at least bearable. Her parents, confused and embarrassed by her grief, were driven up from Hove by Hannah, bringing Christmas lunch with them packed neatly in her mother’s twenty-year-old Tupperware. After giving and receiving unwanted gifts, the five of them had labored over lunch in what would have been silence if Ellen’s mother hadn’t insisted on filling them all in on the details of Mrs. Hopkins’ hysterectomy. Hannah had drunk herself slowly into oblivion; Charlie had bolted to his room at the first available opportunity; and Ellen, paralyzed by the memory of how Christmas used to be, of what it should have been like then and how it would never, never be the same again, had sat through the queen’s speech with her mother while her father snored in the corner.

With a shock Ellen realized that she had no memory of going out of the house even then. What little shopping she had done had been online. Her family and a succession of well-meaning but unwanted visitors had come to her. Was it truly possible that she hadn’t left the house in six months?

Suddenly feeling sober and filled with the kind of dread that she got when she had forgotten something important but wasn’t exactly sure what it was, Ellen forced herself to scratch around in her memory for anything, any detail or incident in her life since Nick had died that would allow her to get some foothold on some happening. As much as she racked her brain, she could find no landmark event in her life until just a few weeks ago, when Hannah had told her that she had to take in lodgers.

Ellen sat in her chair and looked around at her kitchen, frigid with horror as she realized the truth.

She had not left this house since her husband’s funeral. She had not been out in almost a year, and worst of all—she had not noticed.

Your round, rookie,” Pete told Matt, his sweaty, booze-saturated face looming far too close for comfort. “Get ’em in, son.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay—when do I stop being a rookie?” Matt asked, gathering up a selection of half-empty glasses and taking orders for the assembled staff of
Bang It!
magazine. It was Thursday night and that week’s issue had just been put to bed, after what Matt was beginning to realize was a routine that involved panic, shouting, and large amounts of swearing blind that the whole thing was going to shit, even though somehow it didn’t. Naturally, after they had pulled off their weekly miracle of getting
Bang It!
to press, everyone went down to the pub to celebrate by getting as many beers as possible straight down their throats in the shortest period of time, or in Pete’s case, the whiskey that seemed to seep out of his pores. It was an exhausting and strangely dissatisfying routine that Matt still struggled to really feel a part of. He’d expected to thrive on the adrenaline rush of putting a weekly magazine together in a matter of days, but when the first fresh copies rolled in, looking and reading almost exactly like the previous week’s, he’d found himself wondering what the point was. Then he’d reminded himself that this was his dream job, and that soon enough he would have killed so many brain cells through alcohol abuse that he wouldn’t worry about it anymore anyway.