The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “Well, this is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” he said finally.

  “Yes.” Ellen nodded. “The thing is, I’ve got a horrible feeling that I’ve seen the last ten years of my life slip by believing they were one thing when they were something else entirely. I thought I was one-half of a loving, committed marriage. That’s what Nick made me think, but I wasn’t—if anything I was his trophy for a while, his pet, and then… then I was this burden that he had to care for when all the time he longed to be with someone else.”

  “That’s not true,” Matt said.

  “Isn’t it? He was planning to leave me for my sister. Why did she have to tell me, Matt? Why couldn’t she have just let me go on believing in my sad little delusion? At least then I had some…” Ellen wanted to say “pride” or “dignity” but neither one of those words seemed to fit. “At least then I had something. I was his widow. It was my reason for never looking in the mirror, never going out, never trying to live life. Now? Now I have no excuse. Now I am just a pathetic, drunk old landlady who throws herself at her lodgers. Now I am a character from a seventies sitcom.”

  “Listen.” Matt seemed to be struggling with some emotion that Ellen couldn’t pin down. “If anyone ever had an excuse to be fucked up, it’s you, okay? You could dress in rags and never leave the house again and no one would blame you. But you can’t let that happen, Ellen—I won’t let that happen. Not to you. Some bloody, arrogant, selfish fuckwit didn’t have the brains to see what an amazing, wonderful wife he had, and I can promise you, if he were alive now I would kill him. And I am not letting him or Hannah or the road outside stop you from being who you are for one more minute. You’re great, Ellen, you’re funny and strong and a brilliant mum and probably a great copy editor. There is so much more waiting for you out there. Starting tomorrow, we’re going to get you back on track again.”

  “Really?” Ellen looked at him, trying to see if he was still drunk. “Only won’t you be a bit busy, with work and bedding girls and all that?”

  “I can handle work,” Matt said, grinning a little sheepishly. “And as for girls, well—you’re the only girl I can think about, and even if you need me to be there as a friend for you for now, that won’t change in a hurry.” Ellen dropped her gaze, not quite able to understand what she was hearing. “What I’m trying to say is, don’t worry, Ellen, you’re not alone. You’ve got me, Sabine, and Allegra—and that gay bloke who you work for, Simon Merry. And you’ve got Charlie. We all… care about you. Yes, someone’s gone and ripped a fucking huge hole in your chest and filled it with despair, but it will get better.”

  “I don’t know what I did to deserve such nice lodgers,” Ellen said sleepily as Matt pulled her to her feet.

  “Well,” Matt said as he escorted her up the stairs. “You make a lovely cup of tea.”

  For the first few seconds after Matt woke up, he was confused, wondering where he was. It was a familiar feeling, opening his eyes to an unfamiliar room, searching around for some kind of marker or clue as to where he had ended up after a drunken night out. The pressure behind his eyes, the ache in his limbs, and his bone-dry mouth told him that he had a hangover, and normally that feeling, coupled with a foreign pair of curtains, meant that he had gone home with a woman. With the familiar mix of excitement and dread that always accompanied that sober first look at a woman he’d just spent the night with, he turned his head toward the sound of steady breathing. And that’s when it all came back to him.

  Matt felt something like a silent rent in his chest when he looked at Ellen sleeping next to him. When he had taken her up to her room sometime early that morning, she had asked him to sit and talk to her for a while, explaining that she didn’t want to be alone because when she was alone she started thinking, and look what had happened the last time she’d done that—she’d decided to get drunk and throw herself at her lodger.

  Matt didn’t tell her that he didn’t want to be alone, either, for almost exactly the same reason, except that he would be thinking about what would have happened if he hadn’t stopped things when he had, so he sat on a chair by the bed, trying not to look at the strangely erotic array of sensible underwear that was scattered all over the floor and told her all about his drive-through-brothel assignment as she took a shower, struggling all the time with the image of the water running in rivulets down that body that he had experienced all too briefly. When Ellen emerged wrapped in a large towel, her hair dripping wet, Matt had been compelled to cross his legs and remove an embroidered cushion from behind his back and position it on his lap.

  Ellen had peered into her already open wardrobe. “I don’t know what to wear. For the last twelve months I’ve been wearing Nick’s clothes, so that I could feel close to him, and now I don’t want to. I don’t want to wear anything that I had from then.” She turned to Matt as if she’d just had a very controversial idea. “Maybe I’ll sleep naked, why not?”

  “I’ll be off then,” Matt said, feeling the heat sweep across his face. Ellen saw his expression of horror and her face fell.

  “Oh, God, Matt, I’m sorry—that sounded like I was trying to seduce you again, didn’t it? I promise I’m not. Here, this will do. Mum bought it for me at Christmas. I’ve never worn it.” Ellen stepped back into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later in a full-length white cotton nightgown with white lace trim. “I have no idea what she was thinking—I look like a heroine from a Victorian novel; any minute now I’ll catch a chill and die!”

  “It suits you, actually,” Matt told her, trying not to notice how her damp hair that trailed down her back had made the material of the nightgown slightly translucent.

  Ellen climbed into bed and pulled the sheet over herself. She looked around her, as if taking in every tiny detail of the room.

  “This was our place, mine and Nick’s. This was where we were alone. Do you know, I never guessed, I had no idea at all that he was seeing another woman, maybe even in love with another woman, let alone my own sister. There wasn’t anything, not any of the signs that you read about. He didn’t start changing his underwear more often or going to the gym. He didn’t treat me any differently at all. Do you suppose that means that the whole thing was incidental to his life here, irrelevant to it?”

  “Maybe it was,” Matt said, thinking of that conversation that Nick had had with Charlie about loving him no matter what. “But if you weren’t expecting anything, then perhaps you didn’t notice.”

  Ellen lay back, her head on the pillow.

  “Will you be very afraid of me if I ask you to talk to me until I go to sleep?” she asked. “You don’t have to, but if you will, I promise not to touch you.”

  “Of course I will,” Matt answered painfully. Ellen patted the side of the bed, and with some trepidation Matt had gotten up and gone and sat on the very edge, leaning back awkwardly against the headboard, keeping one foot on the floor like he’d read the censors made them do in old films with any scene with a bed in it, so as to indicate that no sex was going to take place.

  “Tell me about the Nevada hookers again,” Ellen said. “Tell me about the one who’s studying to become a doctor, what’s her name?”

  “Lola Lagoona, that’s her professional name, but her real name is Paige Anthony. She’s really clever, aced it all through high school even though her mum was an alcoholic and her dad was never around.…”

  At some point they had slept. Matt had no idea who had drifted off first or when, but here he was stretched out on Ellen’s bed with her sleeping next to him. The sight of her made him catch his breath.

  License my roving hands and let them go

  Before, behind, between, above, below.

  As he propped himself on one elbow to get a better look at her, another line from that poem, which Matt had had no idea he remembered, popped into his head. Quite suddenly he remembered something else that he’d forgotten. In class, along with all his mates, he’d studiously ignored the teacher, talking over her, passing notes, throwing chewed-up
bits of paper at the backs of girls he fancied. At the end of class he’d stuffed the photocopied handout into his bag and later that day when he’d been looking for something else he’d pulled it out and read it, and read it again. And then slowly, very slowly, he’d realized what he was reading. It was a man describing taking off his girlfriend’s clothes, and then talking about having sex with her. Matt had been unable to believe that olden-day people even knew about sex, let alone wrote about it so explicitly. And for that one evening, he’d read it over and over again, trying to picture in his head exactly what the poet was describing, and though he would never have admitted it to any of his friends, it had been one of the most erotic experiences of his life. The next day, he’d screwed it up and thrown it in the bin and never given the poem a second thought. Not until he had met Ellen, for whom, it seemed to him, the poem had been written four centuries ago.

  His head pounding, his mouth dry, Matt found that he was desperate to read it again, to know every line again, and, most uncharacteristically of all, to read it to Ellen. To experience it with Ellen. He turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling. What was happening to him?

  Then two things happened at exactly the same time.

  Ellen moaned a little in her sleep and, turning onto her side, flung her arm across Matt’s chest. At that precise moment, Ellen’s bedroom door opened and Charlie walked in.

  “Mum, I’ve made you break—” Charlie halted in his tracks, a tray with some toast, tea, and a near-dead rose in a beaker in his hands.

  “What?” Ellen sat up, confused.

  “Charlie, mate,” Matt said. “This isn’t what you think.”

  Ellen bolted upright, catching up with the situation vital seconds later than Matt and Charlie. Rapidly she clambered out of bed.

  “Charlie, Matt and I were just talking, that’s all, and we fell asleep.”

  Suddenly galvanized into action by the sound of his mother’s voice, Charlie flung the tray at the bed and ran out of the room. Ellen raced after him, and Matt ran after her, but as he reached the top of the stairs he could see that she was too late. Charlie had slammed the front door behind him, certain that his mother would not follow.

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  By the time Matt reached the bottom of the stairs, Ellen was beating her fists against the front door in frustration, tears streaming down her face.

  “What the hell is wrong with me?” she said. “I can’t go after him. I want to, I really need to, but I can’t. I’m stuck… I’m stuck behind this bloody door. I’m too scared to go after my own son when he’s upset!”

  She turned to face Matt, and he was shocked by the genuine fear he saw on her face; she really was terrified of going out—he thought that he hadn’t fully understood it until that moment.

  “I’ll go,” Matt offered. “Look, he won’t have gone far. He’ll be at the end of the road or down at the shops or something. Give me ten minutes.”

  Matt opened the door and jogged up the garden path and onto the street in his bare feet. It was quiet for a Saturday morning, a toddler and her mother ambling down the opposite side of the road, a couple of kids kicking a ball around on the corner. Matt jogged on to where the boys were, hopeful that he’d find Charlie among them. But the kid was nowhere to be seen. Where would a boy who thought he’d just caught his mum in bed with her lodger go? Matt wondered.

  Well, wherever it was, it was farther away than he could travel without shoes on. His hands on his hips as he caught his breath in the glare of the morning sun, Matt went back to the house.

  “Where is he?” Ellen asked desperately the second he came in. “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t catch him,” Matt said. “Maybe he got on a bus or something. What does he normally do on a Saturday?”

  “He normally stays here with me,” Ellen said miserably.

  “What’s happened?” Sabine asked, coming down the stairs, winding her long hair around and around one hand before tucking it into a knot at the back of her neck.

  “Matt and I stayed up talking last night,” Ellen explained, feeling heat flair across her cheeks as she thought of Matt pushing her skirt up and gripping her thighs. “We both fell asleep in my room and Charlie saw us, put two and two together and made five.”

  Sabine looked concerned. “He got the wrong idea and ran out?”

  “Yes, and now we don’t know where he’s gone,” Ellen said in dismay. “I should have gone after him, but I can’t. … I hate this, I hate myself, I hate my shitty life!”

  Ellen slammed her fist against the door again and again, making it rattle in its frame, her heart accelerating at the thought of being on the other side of it. “I can’t have him out there thinking I’ve betrayed his father that way. I can’t.”

  “Have you tried ringing him?” Sabine suggested.

  Frantically, Ellen called Charlie’s mobile, and she wasn’t surprised that it went straight to voice mail. “Charlie, it’s Mum. I swear to you, that wasn’t what you thought it was, okay? Matt and I were just talking and we fell asleep, that was all, I promise. Please come home, darling.”

  “What did Charlie see?” Allegra emerged from her room. “Honestly, if I had known that there would be more comings and goings in this house than Piccadilly Circus, I might have taken the insurance company’s trailer after all.”

  “He found Ellen and Matt in bed together, and ran off,” Sabine explained, eliciting an expression of pure delight from Allegra. “But apparently no intercourse took place.”

  Sabine and Allegra looked the other two up and down as if they were searching for visible traces of indiscretion, which Ellen was sure must be written all over her face.

  “How wonderful,” Allegra said. “Well, let’s go and have tea and you can tell me all about it. I want all the details, Ellen; it’s been far too long since I was in the grasp of a virile young man. It seems to me that Charlie is a very sensible young man, I’m sure he’ll be fine.…”

  “Oh no,” Ellen said, a thought suddenly occurring to her. “I know where he will have gone.”

  “Where?” Matt asked.

  “To the same person he always goes to when he’s angry with me,” Ellen said anxiously. “To Hannah. Oh my God, what if she tells him about his dad. … I can’t let him find out, especially not from her.”

  “Right, well, let’s go then,” Matt said, then remembered his bare feet and Ellen’s nightdress. “Let’s get dressed and go.” He saw the look on her face and revised his offer: “I’ll get dressed, you tell me where Hannah lives, and I’ll go. Maybe Sabine could come with me? She knows Hannah better than I do.”

  Sabine nodded. “Of course.”

  “No, no,” Ellen said, her body suddenly pumped full of adrenaline, her need to find her son eclipsing everything else. “No. I am not this person. I won’t be. I can’t be this person and be me. I can’t be a person who abandons their son because they are afraid of… of what, buses and noise and people and certain death? That’s not what a mother does. A mother does not abandon her child because she is afraid of anything. I’m going to Hannah’s.” Ellen’s look of determination wavered a little as she looked at Matt. “But you will come with me, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” Matt said. “Give me five minutes.”

  Sabine put her hand on Ellen’s forearm. “Ellen, are you sure? Agoraphobia is not something you can just get over because you feel like it. You’ll need a lot of help, therapy—medication perhaps. If you force yourself to go out now, you might make things worse.”

  “I have to go now, I haven’t got time for therapy or drugs. I need to get to Charlie before Hannah says anything. I have to go now, before I lose my nerve, and that’s that.”

  As Ellen and Matt rushed to get dressed, Allegra followed Sabine into the kitchen, where Sabine offered to make her breakfast.

  “I hope she knows what she’s doing,” Sabine said anxiously.

  “I think she does,” Allegra said. “I think she has finall
y decided to become the heroine in her own story, and she is strong, much stronger than she realizes.”

  “She will have to be, that’s for sure,” Sabine said as she tugged a full bag out of the kitchen bin and dropped it outside the back door.

  “So do you think anything else, apart from chatting and falling asleep, happened last night?” Allegra asked as Sabine looked for a replacement bin liner.

  Sabine paused for a moment as she opened the plastic-bag drawer and then gingerly picked up a pair of black lace panties. She turned to Allegra and said, “I would say something else definitely happened.”

  Ellen stood on the threshold of her house. She knew perfectly well that what was actually outside the front door was a street of redbrick Victorian gardens with modest and mostly well-kept front gardens nestled behind neatly trimmed privet hedges. She knew that the pavement would be a patchwork of different shades of tarmac, depending on which utility company had dug it up most recently, and that the road would be relatively quiet except for the thunder of buses full of Saturday shoppers, rattling past the end of the road. She knew that the air would be warm, scented with summer flowers and traffic fumes, and that the most threatening thing out there that she was likely to encounter was an angry wasp. She knew this with her rational mind, but no matter what she might see with her eyes when she opened that door, she felt as if she would be confronted with a cliff edge, a precipice so high that she could not see its foot and over which she would be compelled to throw herself.

  Matt opened the door and held his hand out to her. Ellen took it and stepped onto the path with him. Immediately the air rushed from her lungs and her head spun.

  “I can’t,” she said, closing her eyes and clutching Matt’s arm.

  “You can,” Matt said. “Come on, we’ll just get to the gate, let’s get to the gate and see how you feel.” Screwing her eyes tight, as if she were on a roller-coaster ride that would soon be over, Ellen let him lead her to her garden gate. He put his hands on the rough wood. “This needs replacing, really,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “The paint’s peeling off and the wood’s rotting around the hinges. A few more slams from Charlie and it’ll be done for, don’t you reckon? Ellen, don’t you think?”