The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “That would be very nice.” Sabine smiled. “I find that no matter how old or how well traveled I am, beginning work in a new place is still just like starting school. A friendly face makes things so much easier.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Hannah said, making Ellen feel bad for resenting her sister’s visit. Hannah was only trying to help her, she told herself. Hannah was being a good sister. Whatever it was, whatever dark little nagging resentment that kept on nibbling away at Ellen, whether it was left over from their childhood or was something new that had sprung up in the wake of everything else, she had to shake it off. She had to remember that she was lucky to have Hannah, and put all her irrational irritations aside.

  “While I was smoking in your beautiful garden I was thinking that it is such a pleasant evening, and I noticed a rather nice-looking pub down the road on an earlier shopping trip. Ellen, I wondered if you might take me for my first British drink?”

  “Oh, can we?” Charlie looked at Ellen hopefully, his eyes bright with expectation. This was the first time that anything—well, anything different or interesting—had happened at home for him in a long time, Ellen realized, glimpsing an insight into what his life had been like for the last year. This change, this shake-up that she dreaded, was exactly what he needed. Perhaps it’s what she needed, too.

  Ellen checked the wall clock; it was only just past seven, it was the weekend tomorrow, and she supposed an hour wouldn’t hurt. It would be nice to be the one giving Charlie a treat for once. Besides, Sabine did seem to have the most wonderful knack of pouring oil over troubled waters at just the right moment, her newness diluting the tension that always built between Ellen and her sister.

  Ellen thought of the pub at the end of the road. Right now it would be busy with commuters on their way home, enjoying a cold drink, standing in the evening sunshine. There’d be laughter in the air, a cacophony of voices, the scent of smoke mingling with the summer foliage. It would be crammed to the brim with happy, relaxed people. But she had so much to do for Allegra Howard and so little time to do it. Really she had to start right away.

  “You three go,” Ellen decided. “I’ve got to get on the internet, see if I can find someone who’ll deliver paint tomorrow and start sorting out the dining room. I want you back in an hour, though—okay?”

  “Marvelous! What fun to take my nephew for his first illegal drink.”

  “Hannah!” Ellen reacted just as her sister knew she would.

  “I’m only joking, Ellie.” Hannah giggled, winking at Charlie, who grinned delightedly at her in return.

  “Hannah,” Ellen heard Charlie ask as they walked out the door, the June evening still gilding the street with its warmth. “Can I have a cider?”

  “In your dreams, sweetie.” Hannah laughed. “Don’t want to give your mum any more reasons to be cross with me, do we?”

  Once they had gone, Ellen listened to the silence left in their wake for a second and then walked into the now-seldom-used living room, hoping to catch a glimpse of them walking by the hedge that was so desperately in need of trimming.

  Ellen took a moment to look at the border she had planted so lovingly in front of the window, packed full of tall blue and violet delphiniums; yellow, spiky stars like goldstrum; a multitude of multicolored pinks and mauve coneflowers. She hadn’t weeded or tended to the plants since last summer. In fact, she had a feeling that her gardening gloves were probably still where she had left them, wrung together and cast down, moldering somewhere in the depths of the border that she had been working on when the news came. And yet, despite being half choked to death with weeds and rogue grass, the flowers had fought their way through to bloom again.

  For a moment Ellen pressed her palm against the glass, remembering the smell, the feel of the soil between her fingers, the pleasure in seeing her planting design mature and take shape. And for a moment, she missed being out there, passing a polite word here and there with passersby, feeling the heat of the sun scorching the nape of her neck. Ellen watched as a fat bumble bee tracked its way first up and then down the pollen-heavy head of a delphinium, ensuring its bloom would soon be gone. She wasn’t ready for that yet, she wasn’t ready to see her plants blossom and die, another summer over. She wasn’t ready for it to be almost a whole year since she had last worked on that border, since the two very kind police officers had walked up the garden path and asked her if she would come inside so they could talk.

  Ellen turned her back on the golden evening outside, pulled by the drag of the empty room that used to be so full of her and Nick, sitting together on the sofa any evening he wasn’t working late. Holding hands, drinking tea, and sharing chocolate, talking about Charlie and where they would go, or what they would do next. Without having to look, Ellen knew that over the hedge the street was drenched with sunshine, and she could imagine the day’s heat, absorbed by the pavement, that would have radiated through the thin soles of her summer shoes. Perhaps she should have gone, Ellen thought, running her hand along the cool, painted windowsill, but somehow it didn’t feel right. Even when Nick was alive they hadn’t really gone out together, always content to stay at home, curled up on the sofa that Ellen was trying not to look at. Home had been Nick’s refuge, his break from real life.

  Things were difficult now, they were painful and harsh, Ellen thought, turning her face away from the glare of the outside to cool her cheeks in the shadowy room. But at least they were changing. At least there was some letup to the unrelenting grief that had characterized every single minute of her life since Nick had died. Was it wrong to feel optimistic and even excited about the recent turn of events? Perhaps it was too soon to attempt to get on with things; perhaps if she started to pull herself together now, that would mean that she hadn’t loved Nick enough. Queen Victoria had mourned the untimely death of her husband for over fifty years. Never again had she worn anything but black. She had made the rest of her life a mausoleum to her husband. Should that be how any grieving widow carried on, an empty shell, existing only because she had to?

  No, Nick would want her to get on with things, he’d want her to be okay. He’d be so surprised that she’d made it this far without him; he’d always joked that she wasn’t safe to be let out on her own. Besides, being okay, having something to look forward to, something to do, didn’t mean that she wasn’t still carrying a burning hole in her chest where her heart used to beat.

  Life could still be livable, Ellen slowly allowed herself to realize as her eyes roamed over the empty sofa. Even without her husband, her existence could still be bearable, even perhaps happy again, in a way. It was a previously unimaginable thought that, when it dawned, came as an enormous relief to her. The idea that the burden of grief she had become so used to carrying could, would one day be at least lightened made Ellen feel a little giddy, and she felt just the first stirrings of something that had lain dormant in her for more years than she could remember. The pleasure of finding her own independence.

  The outside world blazing at her back, Ellen found that she was smiling to herself. If two new people in her life could improve things for her so much, then a third could, at the very least, do her no harm. Like Hannah had said, Ellen would probably have hardly anything to do with Matt Bolton.

  It wasn’t too late to catch up with them, she could still go to the pub if she wanted to.

  Ellen thought for a moment, and then, drawing the curtains on the living room, she went to the dining room and started to clear out the sideboard instead.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  Matt Bolton blinked and pinched himself. He actually couldn’t believe his eyes. Here he was on his first day on the job at Bang It!, watching a photo shoot. A photo shoot with two glamorous models, who were getting much better acquainted with each other’s assets than they had been when they’d turned up a few minutes ago.

  “Life’s good, right?” Pete Grossman asked Matt. He was the features editor on the magazine and would be Matt’s immediate boss and
mentor. Standing a good four inches shorter than Matt, Pete was nevertheless an attractive and well-built man in his midforties. Matt could see with his journalist’s eye that Pete would have been considered handsome once, and had probably been something of a pinup in his youth. A life of drinking and smoking, however, and at least two expensive ex-wives had taken their toll on him, his skin thickened and ruddy and his possibly dyed black hair thinning around the temples. Once, he’d been a cutting-edge young investigative journalist who battled on gamely in the middle of whatever war zone was most readily available. When he had bagged the job of the youngest-ever editor in chief of Britain’s bestselling tabloid in his thirties, his future had looked golden. Something had happened to change all of that, though. Matt had heard dark rumors that there had been some incident between Pete and a lesser member of the royal family that had compelled him to resign from his job and be grateful for whatever work he could find since. And that had been as a feature writer at Bang It! for the last two years.

  Pete had invited Matt along to the photo shoot as soon as he walked in through the office door that morning. He’d barely had time to park his suitcase under his desk before Pete had whisked him out of the office.

  “Mag rules,” Pete had explained on their way to the shoot. “We always get the rookies along to one of these as quickly as possible; stops them wasting time they could spend wondering exactly what goes on here. Truth is, it gets a bit dull after a while; you’ve seen one pair, you’ve seen them all—know what I mean?” Pete tossed his head back as he laughed. “No, of course you don’t, it’s the best job in the world! Play your cards right and I’ll get you in on the next casting. That’s when the models come in and we get them to strip in the office for us. Sometimes, if it’s a bloke’s birthday or some poor sucker’s stag night, we hold a casting for them when there isn’t even going to be a photo shoot. Brilliant, all these girls taking their clothes off for free, doing whatever we tell them without a clue that we’re just having a laugh and there is no job at the end of it. Brilliant. When’s your birthday?”

  “Tomorrow?” Matt joked. This was his dream job: London, women, national-magazine journalism. This was what he had been working for, a room full of topless girls and a minibar in the corner. Some people might think that Matt was a little shallow, but he didn’t care. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of reporting that he’d had in mind when he set out on his writing career, maybe he had envisioned himself writing hard news from the center of the Gaza Strip, but life, his life, had brought him to a photo shoot for Bang It! magazine, and as far as he could see, there was no way a red-blooded man would complain about that.

  Matt had been a little worried, as he entered the closed set in a photography studio in Ladbroke Grove, that he would let himself down, that he’d drool, leer, lose the power of speech—or worse still, get an unwelcome hard-on, which would mean he’d have to cross his legs and stay seated until it abated.

  As soon as he was on the set, though, Matt realized that if he had done any of those things, he would have been the only one to care. The girls walked about in nothing but G-strings, laughing and talking as if they were fully dressed. The photographer took an interest in them only when they were in front of the camera, and the makeup-and-hair girl, a pretty redhead called Carla, dusted their breasts with glitter with all the erotic tension of basting a turkey. Even Pete seemed more interested in checking his emails on his mobile than watching what was going on.

  The real test came when, during a break, Lindsey, a twenty-one-year-old from Doncaster, came over to talk to him.

  “You’re from up north, too, right?” she asked with a pretty smile. Matt tried very hard not to look at her breasts, which was difficult, because they were big and naked. And breasts.

  “Yeah, Manchester—just got off the train this morning actually. You been down here long?” He attempted nonchalance.

  “A couple of months.” Lindsey’s voice was sweet and light, which didn’t seem to fit with her impressive physique, which Matt knew had to be natural because Bang It! didn’t do fake, it was magazine policy. “It’s all right once you get used to it—a lot like home really, only everyone’s got a funny accent.” Lindsey laughed and her natural breasts jiggled in Matt’s peripheral vision. He prayed to all the gods he could think of that he would not blush. Until quite recently, all the women he was really attracted to made him go red from the tips of his ears to the ends of his toes. He’d literally boil with embarrassment, finding it impossible to make conversation with a girl he liked, unable to believe that any woman would take him seriously, even as a candidate to buy her a drink, never mind as a prospective sexual partner. It had taken Matt well into his twenties before he realized that women actually liked him, and he didn’t even have to try that hard to make them. They thought he was funny, his girlfriends told him, charming, and, best of all, good-looking. They went on about his thick, blond hair and his intense blue eyes. Apparently he also had the kind of backside that a lot of women liked, and one girl had told him he had the sexiest hands that she had ever seen, although Matt failed to see how hands could be sexy.

  Gradually, Matt’s confidence had grown, and with it, his success with the opposite sex. He liked testing his luck, seeing how far he could get with girls who should, by rights, be well out of his league. He discovered that most women were accessible. All you had to do was make them laugh, look them in the eye, and really listen to them. Or at least appear to be really listening to them. He’d started writing a column about his dating exploits for the paper on which he was a music writer. It had started as a filler on the music-review pages one week when they didn’t have quite enough column inches and advertising was down. It was meant to be a one-off, but loads of people emailed in, said they’d liked it, that it had made them laugh. Before he knew it, it was a regular thing. Friday and Saturday he’d be out with his mates, looking to hook up. And on Monday he’d be writing it up for the paper. He never used girls’ real names, of course—but some of the things that happened, it was enough to make a grown man blush—only not him. Not anymore—not since the day he realized that a woman hadn’t made him blush in months and he believed that he was cured. But rarely were the girls he met already mostly naked, and he wasn’t sure if gently jiggling all-natural 34 Gs might set him off again.

  “I’m only doing this while I’m at university so I don’t end up thousands in debt.”

  “Wha… what are you studying?” Matt asked her.

  “Forensic science; I want to be like the one on Bones,” Lindsey told him. “So far I’m on track for a first, so not just a pretty pair, hey?”

  Matt could not have been more relieved when they were interrupted.

  “Back on set, please, girls, we need to get your school ties on,” the photographer bellowed.

  “God, I hate it when they make me wear a costume,” Lindsey joked, rolling her eyes. “Nice to meet you, Matt, and just between you and me, you should ask Carla out for a drink—she’s been eyeing you since you got here.”

  Matt watched as Lindsey strode back to the set, slipped a tie over her head, then handled her fellow model like she was assessing the ripeness of a pair of melons.

  “So are you cured?” Pete asked.

  “Cured of what?” Matt said.

  “Glamourous models.” Pete nodded at the girls, who frolicked with each other with a most professional élan. “Today was your treat—your story to tell your mates back home—but your job is to be an average bloke and write about things average blokes want to know about, cars, footy, bands, gadgets, and how to get girls, and on a weekly like Bang It! that means you’ve got to get cracking today. We’ve got to get to a features meeting now; don’t go in without any idea or your new god and our editor Dan’ll rip you to shreds. You’ll need to have uploaded all your copy, which means your column and two features to the features folder by Wednesday. We put that magazine to bed on a Thursday, we get bladdered on a Thursday night, and on a Friday we start all over again. So remember,
even though your job is to be the average bloke, you’re not. Average blokes don’t spend all day around naked women, they spend all day thinking about them—which is why our magazine is the field leader in the weeklies and the boss liked your column so much. So you know where you stand right until your probation is up? Work like a bastard or get dropped, there is no in between.”

  “Yeah—of course, I’m up to it,” Matt said with a bravado that he didn’t quite feel. “I’m stoked that I’ve got a chance to write for a national magazine. I’m going to give it my all, Pete—I swear.”

  “Good. Let’s get back to the office then and get you doing some real work.”

  While he waited, Matt noticed Carla leaning against a windowsill, powder brush in hand, the midday light igniting a fiery halo around her hair. She was about his age, maybe a couple of years younger, slender, with a nice figure under her shirtdress. Okay, it was only his first day here and he had to move into his digs later, but apart from the other articles he had to write, he needed to have his first installment of his column ready in two days—he needed some material. He could recycle something old, or make something up, but Pete had just made it perfectly clear that he needed to impress from the start, and what could be more impressive than bagging his first London date on the day he arrived. Perhaps hitting on a girl through work was a bit of a cheat—a bit lazy—but Matt’s motto was always to strike while the iron was hot. Never pass up an opportunity, he lectured his regular readers.

  “Hiya.” He approached her, his smile warm and friendly—open and casual.

  “Oh, hi.” Carla looked him briefly in the eye before studying her chipped fingernails.

  “This is all a bit mad, isn’t it?” Matt nodded at the models. “You’d think it’d be a turn-on, but to be honest, I’m more interested in a bit of mystery, someone who’s a bit less obvious.” Matt noticed a smattering of freckles scattered across the bridge of Carla’s nose. She had painted her fair lashes black but he could just see their natural pale gold right at the very roots, just where they met the near-translucent skin of her eyelids. It was these small vulnerabilities that really drew him to a woman, not how she was built or how she looked. It wasn’t the tricks a girl used to make herself look better that Matt went for, it was the frailties that she failed to hide that really touched him. They all had them, even Lindsey from Doncaster, for as much as she’d caught him off guard with her easy bravado, it had been the white patches behind her ears where she failed to fake-tan that Matt had especially liked about her.