The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “Well, perhaps not as a life partner or a husband, those kinds of men are very hard to come by, which is the reason that I have never married. But lovers? Lovers are ten a penny. For example, what about your handsome houseguest?” Allegra’s smile was wicked, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “I’m seventy-three, I haven’t enjoyed ‘congress’ for many months, but I can still imagine that young man in a number of compromising positions.”

  Ellen’s mouth opened and closed as she tried to process all the information that Allegra had just given her, and then, deciding that it was none of her business, she decided to concentrate on the salient bits. “Matt? As if he would ever be interested in me!”

  “He’s a man, my dear, he’s interested in anything with a pulse, more or less—but that wasn’t the question I asked you. I asked you if you were interested in him.”

  Ellen blushed, thinking again of her hay-barn fantasy, her face betraying her without a thought of loyalty to its owner.

  “Well, he is very handsome,” Ellen confessed. “And quite, you know, masculine—he’s got very nice arms. Oh, look—the fact that he’s a man and that he wanders about the house in a towel sometimes—and he’s quite tactile—not in a sexual way—but let’s face it, any man touching you when it’s been so long, it reminds your body what it’s like and… I did enjoy that side of my marriage. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that all that is over for me. But Matt and I—I’m like his older sister, we’re friends.” Ellen dropped her gaze to the floor, not wanting to reveal quite how much she enjoyed her kitchen chats with her lodger. “I can’t think about him in that way, it would just be wrong!”

  “Rubbish,” Allegra said stoutly. “Matthew isn’t the kind of man to turn down any sexual experience. Here he is, a virile, experienced young man in your house. It’s almost as if the gods have brought him to you for your personal delight. He might be the kind of man who’d open a world of possibilities up to you, and bearing that in mind, you might want to consider taking him as your lover.”

  “My what?” Ellen all but shrieked. “Allegra, don’t be so ridiculous. As if I ever would, and even if I would, even if I could, as if Matt would ever look twice at me, as if he would ever want me! He just wouldn’t… would he?”

  “Certainly I don’t believe he would fall in love with you, propose to you, or cherish you in quite the same way as your late husband seemed to,” Allegra said thoughtfully. “And I’m sure that whatever interest he had in you would wane in good time. But I am also quite sure that, as long as you understood that and determined not to fall in love with him, that if you set your mind to it you could have him in your bed whenever you chose, at least for a while.”

  Words quite failing her, Ellen emitted a kind of strangulated squeak, and glancing at her watch was glad to see that it was past five in the afternoon; she had been so engrossed in her work with Allegra that she hadn’t heard Charlie come in.

  “Well, anyway—that’s that for today,” she said hurriedly, saving that day’s work. “I’m going to see what Charlie wants for tea—would you like anything before dinner, Allegra?”

  Allegra smiled, clearly satisfied with her meddling. “I am quite replete, thank you. I think I might take a nap now and indulge in some daydreams of my own. Thank you for today, Ellen. You don’t know how much it means to me to have found you to work with.”

  Ellen was so touched that she forgot to be shocked, and she was glowing with the after effects of the praise when she called up the stairs to Charlie.

  “Darling? Do you want tea yet, or do you want to wait?”

  There was no reply. She thought he was probably plugged into some contraption or other, listening to music on the iPod that Hannah had got him or playing his treasured DS. Wearily Ellen mounted the stairs and obligingly knocked on the door before opening it, as Charlie had made her promise to do. But the room was empty. He wasn’t back from school yet, Ellen realized, feeling a swell of panic balloon in her chest.

  “Well, that’s okay,” she said out loud. “I mean it’s only just five and he is nearly twelve. He’ll be in the park or with a friend. It’s perfectly fine. Nothing to worry about.” Yet she crossed to the landing window that looked out over street after street of houses and toward the park, which suddenly seemed so very far away. Ellen placed her palm against the glass and withdrew it quickly, as if she somehow might be sucked through it into free fall, like she had seen happen in a film once about a jetliner that had lost cabin pressure.

  “He’s just off somewhere and he’s forgotten that he’s supposed to phone me if he’s staying out with friends,” Ellen reassured herself, the tremor in her voice belying her calm words. Quickly, she went back downstairs to the phone in the hall and dialed the number of the mobile phone that she had been furious with Hannah for getting Charlie soon after Nick had died, as if gifts could replace his father, but for which she was now grateful. Or at least she would have been grateful if it hadn’t gone straight to voice mail, which meant that it was either turned off or didn’t have a signal.

  Ellen swallowed, staring at her telephone as if it were some kind of mysterious cipher that held more answers than it chose to reveal. Why would Charlie’s phone be turned off, and where might he have gone where there wasn’t a signal? There wasn’t anywhere around here that didn’t have a signal; Ellen knew that because there had been that campaign in the local paper about the phone masts that had been put on top of a block of council flats a few streets away. The residents had formed a protest group, anxious about brain cancer or something. They had lost in the end, proclaiming that people in private housing would never be subjected to such risk, which Ellen had felt bad about—but still, the place virtually bristled with masts. Where around here could Charlie be that could be out of reach of a mast—unless he had gone somewhere very far away? Or what if the phone was turned off? Ellen felt freezing fear settle on her chest like a block of ice. Had someone turned off Charlie’s phone to stop him from asking for help?

  Her hands trembling, Ellen picked up the phone again and pressed Redial and left a message: “Charlie, it’s Mum. Look, darling, it’s nearly six and you’re not home. Be a love and give me a call when you get this. I know you think I’m a silly old thing, but I worry.”

  She had successfully managed to brighten her voice, but the artifice dissolved the moment she put the phone down, and she stood uncertainly in the hallway, looking at the front door, willing Charlie to come in through it.

  Perhaps he was just down the road, she thought. Perhaps if she went to the garden gate and looked down the road, she’d see him coming, dragging his school bag along the pavement, his blazer tied around his waist by the arms, scuffing his shoes with every step.

  Ellen went to the front door and put her hand on the latch. Her heart leaped as she heard a key turn in the lock, and happily she flung the door open.

  Sabine stood there, her keys in her hand, surprised to find Ellen on the other side.

  “What are you doing there?” she asked. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “Oh, Sabine.” Ellen did not mask her disappointment, her eyes traveling over Sabine’s shoulder to the heat-hazed road beyond. “I was waiting for Charlie—he’s late and I was worried—did you see him coming up the road?”

  Sabine glanced at her watch. “Charlie is nearly twelve and it’s a lovely summer’s evening—he’ll be playing football or something with his friends. There isn’t anything to be worried about, I’m certain.” She put her hand on Ellen’s shoulder, frowning as she saw the concern etched on her face. “Ellen, you are shaking—please don’t be so afraid. I’m sure that Charlie is fine. I know you must worry about him more after what happened to your husband, but I promise you, dreadful things like that hardly ever happen. Statistically the chances of a terrible accident befalling another member of your family are very slim. Come, let me make you a cup of tea.”

  Not exactly comforted, Ellen nodded and let Sabine lead her into the kitchen. She knew that Sa
bine was probably right, that Charlie was probably fine and that probably he hadn’t phoned her because, as with everything he did right now, he was determined to prove to her that he wasn’t a baby anymore, but still it was a struggle for her to master the cold sweep of panic at the thought of her son, out there in some unknown place in the world.

  As the kettle boiled, Sabine smoothed four sheets of A4 paper out on the table in front of Ellen. Each side was filled with writing, divided into sections and color coded with a variety of highlighter pens.

  “You are a professional with words, would you look at my list—tell me what you think?” Sabine asked, taking two mugs from the draining board. “I would ask Matt to—but I was reading his column the other day and I think perhaps he would be on my husband’s side. Men! They are all the same.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Ellen said, briefly distracted as she gestured at the chair Matt had picked out for Sabine, a black leather affair supported over stainless tubular legs and arms. “He bought you a chair.”

  “This is true,” Sabine said, a mischievous smile playing around her lips. “Perhaps he has hidden qualities waiting for you to discover, hey, Ellen. Perhaps on one of your midnight trysts you will find out what they are.”

  “Midnight trysts!” It had never occurred to Ellen that anyone else would notice or even care if she occasionally chatted with Matt over a cup of tea in the wee hours. Ellen felt a blush deepen across the bridge of her nose. “Sometimes we just happened to be having a drink in the kitchen at the same time—hardly a tryst—as if!”

  “Of course.” Sabine straightened her mouth with some effort.

  “Right.” Ellen turned her attention to the sheets of paper in front of her. “What’s this, something to do with work?” Ellen scanned the list, temporarily distracted. “I’m not sure I’ll know what to think. Hannah’s the one you want to talk to.”

  Sabine snorted as if Ellen had just said something utterly ridiculous; then, seeing Ellen’s raised eyebrows, she shook her head.

  “No, this is not work. This is my list. My disgusting, treacherous husband and I talked and talked on the phone last night. He wants us to try again, he wants us to be together and have children and be a proper married couple like his awful parents. Well, I told him that I could not even consider it until he addressed all of the problems in our marriage. So he suggested we each write lists, lists of things that we don’t like about each other—he believes it will start a discussion and perhaps enable us to reconcile, the vile, whoring adulterer. So I said, ‘Yes, okay, I will do it.’ After all, we have been married two years now and I am not the sort of person who does not try her best, even though that scum-sucking arsehole does not deserve my best. He emailed me his list after we talked but I am still working on mine. Please, take a look, see what you think.”

  As she spread the sheets out in front of her, Ellen glanced at the kitchen clock as it ticked toward six. With Sabine here she did feel a little calmer. It hardly seemed anything out of the ordinary that Charlie wasn’t home yet, and Sabine was so sure he would be soon. If Sabine was unconcerned, then Ellen would do her best to be, too, at least for the next twenty minutes. After all, life would be impossible if every time things went a little unexpectedly she’d expect to see two police officers making their way up the front path. Ellen made a bargain with herself: if he had not appeared by six fifteen, then she would allow herself to be anxious and to panic again, but until then she would not worry. She tore her eyes from the clock and looked at the list as Sabine, sitting in Charlie’s chair, put a cup of steaming tea down beside her.

  “Pages one and two,” Sabine explained, “are highlighted in green and come under the category of irritants. Little things that annoy me but don’t especially mean the end of a marriage. There are thirty-seven items in this section. Please read it. I’ve written it in English so that I could ask your opinion.”

  “Why my opinion?” Ellen was puzzled.

  “Because you had the perfect marriage, you know what it takes to make a relationship work.”

  “Do I?” Ellen wondered out loud as she traced her finger down the first side of the green list: item one—failure to pick up own dirty socks from floor; item fourteen—refusal to ever see a film at the cinema that does not involve violence and scenes of a sexual nature; item twenty-six—mean when it comes to spending own money; and so on and so on right down to item thirty-seven—leaving unpleasant stains on the bedsheets without any attempt to share the laundry chores. Ellen didn’t care to know exactly what that meant.

  “Well, that is quite a lot of irritants,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Sabine replied. “Was your husband ever so annoying?”

  Ellen thought for a long while. It used to annoy her that Nick never remembered to put the milk or the butter back in the fridge and that instead of loading the dishwasher he’d pile all the dirty plates in the sink, filling it with water that would soon grow clammy and cold—but then she’d remind herself that he was out at work all day and that it was her job to make sure the house ran smoothly, and she’d put the butter back in the fridge and pull the lumps of sodden food out of the blocked sink drain, and her irritation soon passed. And she would happily have tossed out a thousand more cartons of curdled milk and unblocked a thousand more stinking drains if it meant that he would be back in the house again.

  “No, not really,” Ellen told Sabine apologetically. “And although those things are annoying, well—we are all human, aren’t we? We all have little foibles. If you love someone, you live with them.”

  “I thought as much.” Sabine sounded resentful as she put the next sheet of paper in front of Ellen.

  “Here is the amber list, the things that really upset me a great deal but which if he agreed to change sufficiently might not rule out us getting back together. There are twenty-one items in this section.”

  Item five—flirting with every single woman ever encountered, even my mother.

  Item eleven—always mentally undressing other women, even unattractive ones, even my mother, and being really obvious about it.

  Item sixteen—openly watching porn when my favorite TV shows are on.

  Item twenty-one—spending more money on lap dances than on my birthday present.

  “Oh my.” Ellen looked from the list to Sabine. “He really does that?”

  “Yes, he’s a member of a gentlemen’s club, the yearly subscription is hundreds of euros, never mind what he pays for lap dances while he is in there. And yet what did I get for my birthday? A juicer.” Sabine pressed her lips into a tight knot and crossed her arms. “True, I asked for a juicer, but a little something more—something he chose himself would have meant a lot.”

  “So it’s the fact that the strippers cost more than your birthday present that upsets you, not the actual strippers themselves?”

  Sabine shrugged. “Men will be men. For my odious husband, going to a strip club at the end of a night out is like an Englishman going for a curry.”

  “Really?” Ellen wondered what heinous crime Sabine’s husband could have committed for her to hate him quite so vocally, if it wasn’t his going to strip clubs.

  “So finally the red list.” Sabine’s expression dropped, pain etched across her face, and Ellen braced herself. “There is only one thing on this list.” She pushed it over so that Ellen could read it.

  Item one—writing love letters to another woman.

  “Writing… you mean you found out he was having an affair?” Ellen gasped.

  “Yes.” Sabine nodded sadly. “Not a sexual one—a sexual one I could have understood, perhaps even forgiven. No, it was much worse than that. He has always stayed in touch with his childhood sweetheart, I knew that. But then a few months ago I found these letters from her, so passionate, so full of love and regret that they could never be together. So I looked on his laptop; he thought he’d hidden them, but he never was very good at keeping a secret. I found copies of all of his letters in his accounts folders. Telling h
er how he would always love her, how if things had been different, if they had taken a chance when they had the chance. He was so tender, so romantic—he is never like that with me.” Sabine pressed her palm to her chest. “Honestly, Ellen, if I had come home to find him in bed with another woman, it would have hurt less. Now I know that I am second choice, that he settled for me because he can’t have her. How do I get over that?”

  Ellen looked at the words printed meekly on the page before her. A simple collection of letters that when organized in this one particular way became so brutal.

  Ellen felt another tiny rent in her heart as she realized again just what she had lost. Nick had been her first choice and she had been his; their marriage had been rare and fortunate indeed.

  “Sabine, I honestly don’t know. All I can say is that he does seem to be trying; I mean if you meant so little to him, then why would he try to save your marriage at all?”

  “She is a Catholic. She will not divorce her husband,” Sabine said wanly. “If she were free, would he still be trying to save our marriage or would he be running into her arms?”

  Ellen didn’t have an answer for that. “What did he write on his list?” she asked instead.

  Sabine’s laugh was hollow. “There are three items on his list in total. One of them is that I do not laugh enough. Laugh enough! I would laugh if only he were ever funny. But there is nothing funny about this.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Ellen agreed. There was Allegra, encouraging her to go out in the world again, even to take a lover, as if such a thing might be possible—and yet here was Sabine, living proof that men like her late husband were very rare indeed. She was lucky to have had a man who respected and loved her as much as he did, perhaps luckier than she knew. No one would ever care about her like that again.

  “That I should be more spontaneous, but I don’t like to be spontaneous. Not without thinking about it first.” Ellen thought that Sabine was joking, but she managed to stifle her laugh when she saw that the other woman was deadly serious.