My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  ‘The Roger Hilton isn’t dated. Do you have a note of when it was made?’ She hadn’t heard the man approach the highly polished elm table where she worked. He had a funny accent, like an American accent and yet not. The sound of the dog’s nails on the hard floor must have been drowned out by the matching clack of her typewriter. If he recognised a Roger Hilton, she had been wrong to think he had no interest in painting. When people described a picture as having been ‘made’, it usually meant they were involved in the art world; ordinary people said ‘painted’. Maybe he was an important collector.

  ‘’Sixty-seven, I think. I can find out, if you’d hang on for a minute?’

  Again the man made no answer.

  ‘Would you like to wait, while I look out the details?’ asked Isobel.

  ‘Why not?’ said the man, brusquely.

  Isobel got up and went to the back of the gallery, where an office was concealed behind a plasterboard wall which formed the focal point of the gallery and where their best work was generally displayed: in this case, a large Ivon Hitchens, of sage green, moss green, and rust-coloured paint, with a startling bright-blue form – perhaps depicting a stretch of water – on its right-hand side. Isobel went to the file where information about the pictures was kept and re-emerged with a sheet of paper in her hand.

  ‘’Sixty-six, it turns out.’

  ‘Do you like it?’ the man asked her.

  Isobel cocked her head to one side and looked. The canvas showed a tip of black paint emerging from a large blob of black paint, pointing towards a red line and an orange square in the top right-hand corner.

  ‘I don’t know if I like it, exactly,’ she said. ‘But there’s something quite satisfying about it. I like the way the black looks like a witch’s hat.’

  For the first time the man smiled.

  ‘What’s your dog’s name?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s called Rita,’ he said.

  The man continued to stand at Isobel’s desk.

  ‘Will your next show be a group exhibit also?’ he asked.

  ‘No. It’s a one-man show. John Craxton. From the fifteenth.’

  ‘Good,’ said the man, and he left the gallery, without speaking further. As the door fell to, a faint cologne-like smell, half citrus, half spirit, reached Isobel’s nose.

  She thought no more about him until, three weeks later, her boss, Jonathon, handed her an envelope.

  ‘Fellow left this for you,’ he said.

  Isobel opened the envelope. Inside were two tickets for a production of King Lear. The theatre was one she had never heard of, near King’s Cross. The tickets were folded into a piece of lined paper with zigzag tears along the top, where it had evidently been torn from a spring-bound pad.

  ‘Bring a friend and we’ll have a drink afterwards. Jacob.’

  ‘I’ve no idea who these are from. Did he say anything else? What did he look like?’

  Jonathon, always dapper, noticed what people looked like. Today he himself wore a bespoke suit in brown wool, complete with a many-buttoned waistcoat. The point of a bright-orange silk handkerchief emerged from a breast pocket.

  ‘Well-covered. Well, fat, if you really want to know. Had a dog with him. My sort of age.’

  Isobel couldn’t think who she could ask to come with her to the play. She had done King Lear at school and remembered it as interminably long. She supposed the man – Jacob – was an actor and she wondered what part he would be taking. Perhaps he would be playing the King himself, although she didn’t think he was old enough. It was an odd sort of evening to subject a friend to, not exactly fun. In the end she decided to go by herself.

  Jacob didn’t seem to be in the play at all, unless he was so disguised that she did not recognise him. The cast all wore modern clothes, but grotty ones. The King, a belching slob of a man in slippers, had evidently won the football pools and his wicked daughters were tarty, shrill young women in skimpy halterneck tops with flamingo-coloured manicures; they kept filing and repainting their nails on stage. Lear’s loyal followers wore nylon football shirts and drank beer out of tins, while the Fool seemed to be a match referee, with a whistle on a string around his neck. The play had been compressed into an hour and a half, with no interval.

  As the lights came up, Isobel saw that Jacob was waiting for her in the aisle at the end of her row of seats.

  ‘Food or drink?’ he asked. He did not seem either surprised or curious that she had come alone.

  ‘Could we have both, do you think?’ she answered. She had not eaten before the play.

  Out in the dark street Jacob found a taxi, which despatched them to a Greek restaurant, somewhere behind Tottenham Court Road.

  ‘Where’s Rita?’ asked Isobel.

  ‘At home.’ The word home sounded like whom, the way he said it.

  ‘Where are you from, originally I mean?’

  ‘Toronto. But I’ve been in Europe for over ten years now. Hamburg to begin with, then Amsterdam. I’ve been in London six years, almost.’ Canadian: that explained the accent. His ‘O’s sounded like double ‘O’s.

  Isobel was not familiar with the things on the menu. She asked Jacob to order for her. A succession of little dishes kept appearing: rings of squid in salty batter, a drab-looking paste which tasted of bonfire smoke, slices of sausage with fennel seeds embedded in the spicy meat. Jacob ate quickly, but not coarsely, scooping the food onto little edible shovels of flat bread.

  ‘What did you think?’ asked Jacob, after eating in silence for what felt to Isobel like many, many minutes.

  ‘Of the play?’ asked Isobel.

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, I thought it was a clever idea to make Poor Tom be a drunk. Otherwise he’s so annoying and boring. I liked Goneril and Regan, doing their nails all the time. It was a good idea, having it set in the present, and Lear a pools winner.’

  ‘And what didn’t you like?’

  ‘I thought the Fool was too silly, even for a fool. Blowing his whistle all the time. And giving him that accent – Liverpool, was it? – was too gimmicky. But then the whole thing was a gimmick, really. It’s a bit long, even cut down like that, but that’s the play, isn’t it? It does drag on. Are you involved in the production somehow?’

  ‘Yes.’ He did not elucidate.

  ‘Oh. Should I have been more tactful?’

  He smiled. The rarity of his smiles seemed to imbue them, when they came, with an almost magisterial quality, as if he were bestowing a precious gift.

  ‘I like it, that you say what you think.’

  Isobel felt disproportionately thrilled.

  ‘But I don’t really know what I’m talking about,’ she admitted. ‘What did you do, then?’

  ‘I directed.’

  ‘Oh. Goodness. Well, well done! What a thing. What a lot of work that must be, all those people …’

  He took no notice.

  ‘If you’d like to see Rita, we could have coffee at my place?’

  Isobel had never seen a flat like it. It was more like the galleries where she had worked than someone’s home. Jacob seemed to own almost nothing, but the things he did have were all strange and rather beautiful. In the sitting room was a long wooden settle with a rush seat and beside it an old round oak table with a carved stone lamp set on it. There was a rug on the wall – Jacob told her it came from Isfahan and was late eighteenth century – but the floor was bare. There was nothing else in the room. The entrance hall gave onto a square kitchen and seemed to be where Jacob ate his meals, since it housed the only table a person could sit at. In the hall were a pair of dark ladder-back chairs and bookshelves from floor to ceiling on two walls; French windows opened onto a narrow balcony. Nothing was soft. The dark floorboards were bare; there were no cushions and no curtains. The windows all had wooden shutters.

  She followed Jacob into the small kitchen, where he made coffee in a pot which looked as if it was made of antique pewter. From a shelf he took a round wooden box with exotic writing on its
lid. Inside were rough squares of Turkish delight, their jewel colours barely visible beneath a drift of icing sugar. He set this and the coffee things on a bamboo tray, which he carried into the room with the rug on the wall. Rita lodged herself on top of his feet, grunting quietly. After a moment’s hesitation, Isobel sat next to him on the hard settle. There was nowhere else to sit.

  ‘Where does she sleep?’ asked Isobel. She hadn’t seen anywhere where a dog might get comfortable. There didn’t seem to be a television, to lie in front of, nor even a stereo.

  ‘With me. Luckily I have an enormous bed to push her off onto, because she’s like a stone.’

  He pronounced the word stone like a Scottish person would say town.

  When she asked where the bathroom was, Jacob told her it was through the bedroom: the room was furnished only with a vast bed, the biggest Isobel had ever seen. On one wall was a black and white close-up photograph of an oyster, its folds suggestively fleshy and viscous, framed above the pillows. By one side of the bed, on the floor, was a mound of books and papers. The bathroom beyond contained the flat’s only mirror, a sliver of dark antique glass above the basin. On the side of the basin was a shelf with toothpaste and two brushes in a glass. The sight of a second brush made Isobel’s tummy flip. There was a glass bottle with an old-fashioned label, gold lettering on dark blue. She undid the lid and inhaled a scent of freshly cut limes.

  Back in the room with the settle, Isobel felt peculiar, almost giddy, sitting in this flat with this man. This was only the second time they had met, and he had barely said a hundred words to her. He didn’t even seem particularly interested in her. He was fat, not good-looking, and he wasn’t easy company; he was too old for her and probably too clever; and – not that she set much store by these things – being Canadian just wasn’t cool. Even coming from some unheard-of part of rural America was cool, but being Canadian was almost an embarrassment, like coming from Lincolnshire or mid-Wales or somewhere. They hadn’t kissed. There was an unexplained toothbrush in his bathroom. But as she sat sipping her too strong coffee, Isobel felt a great certainty that this flat would become her home, that she would come to live here, with him. Rita would be her constant companion and that would be lovely, but Isobel found herself wondering what on earth she would do with all her stuff, her clothes and records and paperback books. Her things would seem awfully tatty, in the austerity of Jacob’s rooms. She had never felt this certain about anything before. Until now, things had simply happened: you met someone, you spent a night or more together; one job followed on from another.

  They were married five months later, on a Tuesday, at Old Marylebone Town Hall. Isobel took the afternoon off work, but went into the gallery for the morning. She could not concentrate on the catalogue she was meant to be editing, but catching the tube down into central London made her feel marvellously strong and exciting, as if she were a girl in a glamorous film, living a double life. Everything seemed to take on more intensity with Jacob, and more speed. She soon realised that he was not fat because he was lazy, but because he was a man of huge, impulsive appetites. Suddenly he might want to eat lobster, or make love, or find the best whisky sours in London, or go to an all-night cinema screening, and she would be swept up in his enthusiasms, carried along. She had always thought of herself as rather a cautious person, but Jacob made her feel otherwise, as if she were daring and capricious.

  It had come as no surprise that he had been married before, to a Turkish German who had insisted that she was a performer, an artist – an important artist, as the world would surely discover – in her own right, and not merely an actress. She had wanted Jacob to take her name when they married, as a gesture of feminist solidarity, although, Jacob remarked wryly, she had felt no such qualms about obtaining a Canadian passport. A touring production had brought her experimental theatre company to Canada. When they returned to Europe Jacob had gone with them. The marriage had lasted less than two years.

  It never occurred to Isobel that a man who had shown such little resolve to stay with his first wife might be anything less than fully committed to her, his second. Instead, she relished the flurry of her wedding, the spontaneity. Not waiting set their marriage apart from other people’s plodding, careful romances; it made her feel special. Isobel’s wedding guests were her two best girlfriends, Jonathon from the gallery, her mother and her sister Emily and her uncle Jamie, with his wife Shura. Emily had left the baby with Ilse for the day, which disappointed Jacob who, when Isobel had brought him to Malvern to meet her mother, had taken a shine to Ilse, talking to her in German, flirting slightly, so that she went a bit pink and laughed immoderately. This had pleased Ruth, who sometimes felt that Ilse did not get enough attention from the family. It made her favourably disposed towards the man who was about to become her son-in-law, despite knowing so little of him.

  Isobel’s father Harry and stepmother Valerie were away, a cruise to Madeira. Which was just as well, since Harry could barely disguise his consternation. Isobel was sad that her father would not be present to give her away, but in a registry office there wasn’t an aisle to process down, just a short length of royal-blue carpet; there wouldn’t have been much for him to do. She was relieved too: it always felt awkward to their children when Ruth and Harry were brought together, and Valerie didn’t help by always referring to Ilse as ‘your mother’s friend’, never by her name and never without a heavy intonation, thick with ridicule. And who was this Jacob, anyhow? That was what Harry wanted to know. Not English (though Canadians were nice enough people, he had to concede), not especially young. Didn’t have a proper job. Worse, not a Roman Catholic – and a divorcé! It was really too bad.

  ‘But, Daddy,’ Isobel had teased, ‘if they were married outside the Church and the Church doesn’t count non-religious weddings as proper marriages, that means you don’t have to believe Jacob even is a divorced man, surely?’

  Harry couldn’t remember when Isobel had become so diffi-cult. She had been a chattery, biddable little girl, with her lovely hair like Devon cream, and always smiling. If anything, it had been her sister, quiet, watchful Emily, whom he would have expected to become the wilful one. Not that Emily was any easier, now. One simply didn’t know what to say, when people asked about her. To begin with, he had only mentioned the child to his closest relatives. Poor Verity had been all for simply cutting Emily and the baby off altogether. But he had to acknowledge that his sister had become somewhat embittered, never having had a child of her own; and that frightful man keeping her hanging on all those years, until his invalid wife died at last. Then, instead of doing the right thing by Verity, he had married the nurse within weeks, and she nearly thirty years younger. Small wonder then that his sister was a little testy about Emily. But it wasn’t the child’s fault, after all, to have been born to an unmarried mother. Isobel had pointed out, naughtily, that Our Lord himself had been born to an unmarried woman and in a way, as long as she didn’t repeat it to Valerie, he had to admit she had a point.

  As soon as he’d held the child he was smitten, utterly. It wouldn’t be human, he felt, or at all decent, to disapprove of such a miraculous, perfect thing as a baby. And the surprise was that Valerie was just as taken with the child. She could hardly leave the house without coming back with some knick-knack for the new arrival: a knitted hat or a row of rattling ducks that fitted across the pram, or a spoon with a bunny on it. Being a step-grandmother was much nicer than being a stepmother. She was not the interloper who had come, uninvited, into Ruth’s place, not so far as this child was concerned; she was a fait accompli, someone to be accepted, even loved. And the child had all the more need for grandparents, with no father. Having seen her father soften so towards the baby, Isobel was confident that he would come round to Jacob once he knew him better.

  As his wedding guests Jacob brought only the young man who worked as his assistant, and Rita, with a big daisy-like flower tied to her collar in a flourish of dark-green satin ribbon. Rita hadn’t been allowed inside
the registry office, even though Jacob had told his assistant to wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind, so as to pass her off as a guide dog, the only kind of canines permitted; but neither man nor dog had given a convincing display and Rita had had to wait outside, tethered to a handrail. She didn’t like being left alone in an unfamiliar setting and her mouth gaped with worry, displaying a jagged expanse of mottled gum, half pink, half dark. By the time they emerged into the sunlit street, Rita had managed to work her collar round in order to chew off the flower. The ribbon was shredded, blackened with spit, and what remained of the petals stuck damply to the pavement, becoming transparent, like rain-soaked blossom. This was the closest the bridal pair came to confetti. There had been no bridesmaids, no hats. They’d kissed on the pavement before heading off, in a loose convoy of black taxis, for lunch at a fashionable fish restaurant that was a favourite of Jacob’s. Jonathon deposited Rita at the gallery on the way. The dog was becoming rather a fixture, since Isobel had moved in with Jacob: she even had her own water bowl at the gallery. Jonathon thought it gave the place character: an ugly dog had edge.

  ‘Fruits de mer and Sancerre,’ said Jacob into his new bride’s ear. ‘Then I think we should go back to bed for the rest of the day.’

  They were to take their honeymoon later, once the production Jacob was working on was up and running. Soon after they met, Jacob had been approached by a senior arts officer from a south London borough who had been impressed with his Lear. The idea was to stage a Romeo and Juliet in which ordinary members of the public, people with no experience of acting, would take the lead roles. Jacob had taken the notion a step further: the Capulets were to be played by white Londoners; the Montagues, by residents of West Indian descent. The idea was to see whether this piece – Jacob always called a play a piece, Isobel had noticed – about conflict could actually bring a community together. It had taken some months to get the funding together and find a rehearsal space. The guy he’d found to play Tybalt – he was perfect: charismatic, shaven-headed, with more than a hint of menace – had close affiliations with the National Front, if he wasn’t an actual member. Tempers had run high, had threatened at times to escalate into violence. Jacob had brought in a yoga teacher to work with the cast, calm them down, before each rehearsal. Theatre people were always going on about the breath, using it as an excuse for fluffing their lines, or emphasising in the wrong places, or mumbling. With an untrained cast, Jacob told Isobel, the breath was a real problem. You couldn’t make a play if the cast couldn’t control the breath adequately. The yoga was intended to help with the breath, as well as subduing hostilities.