Healer of My Heart

by Sheila Turner Johnston

  The last weeks of term brought presents from some of the pupils. Even though she had not been at the school for long, Robyn received a number from senior boys who suffered the agonies of having a crush. Some were accompanied by excruciating verse and some by quotations considered apt by the devoted pupil.

  After school, Robyn popped the latest offering into her bag – a copy of Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. She sat to ease off the shoes that had been hurting her all day. When the family shoe shop was in business, she had never had to think of buying shoes. She had first pick of any new stock. Now she had to shop like everyone else. These red open-toed creations were Gemma’s idea.

  “Just you, Rob,” she’d gushed. “You look great in red and these’ll match your red dress. Look, they’re almost exactly the same shade. Oh, go on! You can break them in.”

  Robyn stretched her legs and flexed her crushed toes. The shoes were breaking in her feet. She leaned back and rested her head against the wall behind her chair.

  Angus Fraser locked his room at the far end of the upper corridor. His last class had been boisterous and difficult, but he didn’t care. The easiest option was to let the little buggers riot until the bell went and then get rid of them as fast as possible. At the central stairs he paused and looked along to the English rooms. It looked as if Robyn Daniels’ door was open. He frowned. No-one turned him down as many times as she had. He was starting to get annoyed.

  Treading softly, he reached her door and peered round. Robyn was seated at the desk. Her bare feet were tucked up and partially hidden under the hem of her red dress. Her head was propped against the wall and her hair cascaded over the heart-shaped neckline and brushed along the creamy skin of her arms. She was sound asleep.

  Lust hit Angus so hard he gasped and gripped the door jamb. By God, he would have this one! The thought possessed his brain as, eventually, he backed away, the sight of her imprinted on him, branded, hot and deep.

  David Shaw leapt up the stairs three at a time, passing Fraser on his way down. He greeted the teacher, but Fraser seemed preoccupied. David walked quickly to Miss Daniels’ room, hoping she was still there. He knew it was her habit to work on after school. Seeing her door open he pivoted on the door frame and swung in.

  He had taken a breath to say her name when he saw her and stopped. His smile unfolded quietly. He was looking at a pose that his friend Tim Thompson would love to paint. The angle of the head, the exposed throat, the full red dress, the bare toes – it was the stuff of dreams. He backed out silently, wondering what could have made her so tired.

  He had a question for her but it would have to wait.

  2

  IN THE STAFFROOM at lunchtime on Friday, a telephone call came for Robyn. She had been hoping for peace in the company of a cheese and pickle sandwich and a mug of coffee. She picked up the receiver reluctantly. It was Neil.

  “Hi,” he said. “Got you at last. I tried twice this morning to get you but the damn office wouldn’t put me through to you.”

  “I’ve told you. The office won’t put a call through when classes are on.”

  “Well, I have to deal with calls when I’m working.

  It’s part of the job.” “It’s school policy. Nothing to do with me.” There was a short pause.

  “Or get a mobile, for God’s sake.”

  “So how’re things?”

  “Fine, fine. I’m in Belfast at the moment. I had to come up to see a client. I could bring you back down to your mother’s for the weekend. I can call at your place after you finish. Gemma’s not coming, this is her Saturday on.”

  “I was going to stay up this weekend…”

  “Oh, come on, Rob. It’ll save you a bus fare and I can take you straight to your Mum’s door. Besides, I called with your mother two days ago. She’s lonely. She’d like to see you… and so would I.”

  He was always glad to see her, tiresomely glad. Equally tiresome was her mother who never missed an opportunity to praise him, such an enterprising young man.

  “A business of his own, Rob,” she would say. “He’s always been very fond of you, you know. Sure, he isn’t perfect, but then no man is.”

  There would always be a bitterness in this. No, Neil wasn’t perfect but he had been an unwavering support when her father had died. Begrudgingly, her brother Stephen had come over from Canada for the funeral. He came the day before and left the day after. She had heard from him only once since. He didn’t want his new life sullied by memories of the past one.

  “I’ll be home for most of the summer…”, she began.

  Neil sighed. “Don’t you want to see your mother?”

  Oh hell. She said she’d be ready at six and hung up. As she swallowed the last of her sandwich, Angus approached the empty chair beside her.

  “There are some great movies on at the moment.”

  “Give me a rest, Angus. I’m not going to be about this weekend anyway.”

  Ignoring the empty chair, he sat on the arm of hers. A tide of alarm rose in her without warning. The buttons of his cream jacket brushed her shoulder. She fumbled to screw up her sandwich wrapper and stood up abruptly. Her hand was shaking as she set her mug down by the sink. It rattled on the ledge. Angus was watching her with a thin smile and raised brows. He stood up lazily.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had that effect on a woman before.”

  The bell shrilled the end of lunchtime.

  When Neil rang the doorbell for her flat that evening, Robyn put her weekend bag on the landing and went back for a folder of papers. She had promised one of her junior classes that she would have their exam marks for them on Monday. They had to be done, so they would just have to take a trip to Tyrone with her. She checked her purse for her key and slammed the door.

  By day the street door was open for patients, but after 5.30 it was locked. As she struggled through it, Neil reached in to help her.

  “Here, let me take that.”

  She handed over her weekend bag, shouldered her handbag and tucked the folder under her arm. Neil pulled the door after her.

  “Honestly, you’d take two trips up and down to get out rather than let me help.”

  He was right; she would, and had.

  His BMW was double parked. He opened the door for her and put her bag and folder in the boot. His dark blond hair curtained his cheeks as he bent. He wore it too long and parted in the middle. Robyn knew he thought it made him look trendy. It didn’t.

  “Good to see you, chicken.”

  Undeniably, it was so much better traveling in a comfortable car than alone on the bus with the prospect of a walk to her mother’s house – a short walk made long by the addition of a weekend bag. For the first fifteen minutes Neil concentrated on negotiating the tangle of traffic. As soon as he had eased his way off the sliproad onto the rush hour motorway and they were cruising west, he jerked his head towards the back of the car.

  “That looked suspiciously like work in that folder.”

  “That’s just what it is, I’m afraid. I’ll have to find some time to do it.”

  He was silent, his disapproval wrapping round her. For as long as she could remember, she never quite did the right thing. She tried diversionary tactics – something she was practised at.

  “So what’s all the news from the homestead?”

  He was in process of tailgating a Peugeot that was going too slow in the fast lane. He flashed his lights and the driver moved over.

  “Thank you!” He glared at the driver as he surged past. He answered her previous question and related various bits of news, most of which she had heard from her mother already.

  He flicked an indicator and veered to overtake an articulated lorry. Robyn stiffened and reached for the grab handle on the door. He noticed and laughed.

  “Don’t be a wimp, Rob! Honestly, if you ever took up driving you’d take forever to get anywhere.”

  “Actually, I was thinking I might take a few lessons. I’ve enough to put a deposit on a car.�
��

  He looked across at her, eyebrows raised. “What brought this on?”

  “Independence, convenience. The usual things.”

  He drove silently for a while, frowning.

  “Well, you must do what you want, of course.”

  The purring of the expensive engine and the comfort of the seat sent her into a doze. She was startled awake as the car turned suddenly to the right and racketed over a cattle grid. As she sat up, she saw that they had just passed through the cemetery gates, a mile from the town.

  “Neil! Where are you going?”

  “Sweet dreams?”

  “Why are you going in here?”

  “It’s on the way and I knew you’d want to visit your father’s grave.” He grinned triumphantly. “The headstone was put up last week. I didn’t tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  He drove slowly up the central pathway between older graves, to the derelict church which straddled the centre point. Newer headstones nestled on ground that gently sloped down behind the church to a thorn hedge. Pigeons churred in the light breeze of the flawless evening.

  Robyn hated it. Neil jumped out of the car and waited for her to follow. She forced her legs to move and walked round the church to the gleaming black marble of her father’s grave. She felt physically sick.

  An urn containing long-stemmed pink carnations was placed in the middle of white gravel. In gold lettering the headstone proclaimed her father’s name, his dates of birth and death. At the bottom of the stone there was the line: “Safe in the arms of Jesus”.

  Robyn drew in her breath sharply and pointed at it.

  “Who chose that line?”

  “Well, I suppose I suggested it to your mother. She liked it.” He sounded slightly aggrieved. “Why? Don’t you like it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Your father was a good man. People still miss him.”

  “I just wish you’d both consulted me.”

  Robyn turned away and walked down the bank towards the hedge, skirting the fresh flowers covering two new graves. The voices of evening golfers drifted through the leaves from the other side. There was a gash in the bank giving way to a patch of gravel. She jumped down and sat on the grass with her feet on the gravel.

  She threw a pebble with such force that it scared a small storm of sparrows into flight. As if it were possible to be safe in the arms of any man. Neil probably thought she was taking a moment to gather her thoughts, to pay her respects in silent reverence. He would approve of the way she was lovingly remembering her father.

  She wasn’t. She was thinking of what line she would have had engraved on his headstone. Just as Neil came up behind her, she settled on one:

  “Rot in hell, Dad.”

  3

  IRRITATED, NEIL COLLINS watched Robyn. He had been planning this surprise for weeks. Her mother, Anne, had left all the arrangements to him and he had given many hours of thought to the right and proper monument to mark the resting place of Matthew Daniels, one of the town’s most respected businessmen. Not that he had been in business when he died. First he had sold the shoe shop and retired. Then, after several years of denial, he and his family could no longer escape the doctor’s diagnosis of dementia.

  As Neil walked slowly to where Robyn sat with her head bowed, he felt a flash of pity for her. She still wasn’t over it, poor thing. The years of watching her father waste away to an incontinent skeleton had been very hard. He had been there for the family – “the son I should have had”, as Anne was fond of saying. When Stephen left for a job in Canada not long after his father’s diagnosis, Anne Daniels had dealt with the blow by not missing him and not needing him. Stephen became an acquaintance who phoned occasionally, and came over every few years to fulfill his obligations. Neil thought he probably only did that because his new Canadian wife insisted.

  He kicked aside a nettle and checked to make sure there were none nearby that Robyn might carelessly put a hand on. He stood and looked at her bowed head for a moment, appreciating how, even in the setting sunlight, there were natural copper highlights glinting in her long hair. Her Irish rose colouring had matured over the years from pretty schoolgirl to striking student and now to this enchanting young woman.

  A jag of anger stabbed him. What was so wrong with him that she could never see him as anything other than a family friend? He stooped and touched her shoulder. Her start of fright as she jumped and spun round, almost overbalancing, startled him.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She waved a hand dismissively.

  “It’s OK. Graveyards – you know. Anyway, let’s get going. Mum’ll be wondering where we are.”

  The Daniels had lived in this avenue for almost as long as Robyn could remember. When she was four years old they had moved from a terrace house near the town centre. The move was always spoken of with great pride. It was the moment when her father had declared that he was Somebody. No longer a small fish, he housed his family in ‘a most desirable residential area’, as the estate agent had boasted on the sales brochure. He had become a Councillor; he was elected onto local committees; he was asked to be a judge at fêtes.

  Yet Robyn recalled playing on the footpath outside the little house on the hill on one of the town’s backstreets as if it were a golden age. At the back of her brain there was a nugget of knowledge that she had been happy then. Happy to be tucked in at night and fall fast asleep in innocent, unthinking security.

  No memories like those attached to this house, this suburban bungalow in a tree-lined middle class avenue, where everyone’s grass was manicured and all the flowerbeds were trowelled into submission whatever the season. No memories like those at all.

  Her mother gave her a peck on the cheek and hugged Neil warmly.

  “Thank you for persuading her to come, Neil.”

  Anne Daniels was an immaculate woman. She was tall and slim and her greying hair was styled to perfection into a becoming bob which just skimmed the pearl studs in the lobes of her ears. Her friends admired the way she had coped with the illness and death of her dear husband; how she had refused to decline into sorrowful widowhood.

  The delicious smell of a lamb roast permeated the house. Robyn returned from leaving her weekend bag in the smallest bedroom, the room she always occupied on her visits home. It had been her brother Stephen’s room. Her mother had reinvented the bigger room, the room of her teenage years and it was now the spare room, a riot of cream and green, with pink roses sprawling over the twin quilt covers. The room it had been was obliterated.

  “Where’s Onion?”

  “I put him out. The meat smell was driving him mad. He’s probably huffing under a bush somewhere, washing a paw. Mash the potatoes for me, will you? I’ll just check the lamb.”

  “Honestly, Mum. Sausages would do. Do you eat like this when I’m not here?”

  She opened the back door but Onion wasn’t in sight.

  “Of course not. But I have to make an effort some time. Anyway, did you never see that programme about how they make sausages? I haven’t eaten one since.”

  Neil was reading the paper. He lowered it for a moment.

  “Quite right. Offal you don’t want to know about. Stick to good plain food. Never go wrong.”

  He resumed reading. Robyn reached for the potato masher and thought that he sounded just like her father.

  After they had eaten and Neil had left, Robyn shut the door of the dishwasher and turned to her mother, who was still finding ledges to wipe and cloths to rinse.

  “Mum, why didn’t you tell me that Dad’s headstone was up?”

  Anne smiled brightly. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Did Neil take you to see it on the way past?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s very… civilised. You could have left out the pious text, though.”

  “Neil thought it was very appropriate.”

  “But Neil doesn’t know that Dad was a manipulating bast
ard, does he?”

  “Robyn!”

  She fought to keep her voice calm. “And Neil doesn’t realise that you have thrived like a flea on a dog since the day and hour he went into that home.”

  “Your poor father! What he suffered…”

  “He didn’t suffer enough, Mum, and you know it. He was a twisted rat. Are you rewriting your marriage? My God, don’t you remember?”

  Her anger burst through its restraints, howling like a storm banging a door back on its hinges.

  “‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’! Were you ever safe in his arms? Were you?”

  She was frightening her mother but she didn’t care.

  “But Rob, that’s all over. We have to forget it and move on.”

  Robyn’s words came out on a snarl. “Well, I’m glad for you, so glad that you can do that. You’re the woman who could never cook meat the way he liked it; you never had the tea ready on time. You couldn’t even have the house tidy when he brought a visitor home. Remember the day you fancied changing the furniture round in the sitting room? Remember? Remember how he made you put it all back the way it was because you hadn’t asked his permission to do it? Stephen and I had enjoyed helping you do it too. But Dad made us watch you put it all back by yourself and he didn’t lift a finger to help you!”

  Anne put her hands over her ears.

  “Stop it, Robyn, stop it! He’s gone. It’s over.”

  Furiously Robyn pulled up her sleeves and thrust her upturned wrists into her mother’s face.

  “But what about the scars? What about the scars? They’re not gone, are they?”

  Anne ran from the kitchen. Robyn heard her slam her bedroom door.

  As if a plug had been pulled, anger drained out of Robyn and she felt very, very tired. It wasn’t fair, what she had said to her mother. She was right, after all. Why should she not grasp what remained of her life and celebrate freedom and independence and all those things that she had forfeited by marrying a middle-aged narcissist when she was too young to know what the word meant?

  With a chair wedged under the door handle of her bedroom, Robyn curled up under the quilt on the little single bed. She woke with a cry about three in the morning, shaking and sweating. She knew it was only the nightmares returning, as they always did in this house. She was not really being suffocated, terrified by a patch of blacker black in her room. But it was a long time before she slept again.