My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  It was only natural that Jacob should keep irregular hours during the rehearsal process. Isobel was busy at work too, preparing a show: paintings and works on paper by an artist who’d been a fellow student with Lucian Freud at the Dedham art school. Isobel was learning that some – in fact most – artists whose reputations had fallen into obscurity were neglected for a reason: they weren’t much good. But this work she liked: strange, intricate pen drawings of shells and leaves and small landscape paintings, redolent of Samuel Palmer, but executed in fierce colours. There were some ceramics too. Isobel was enjoying putting the pieces together. Instead of commissioning an essay from some worthy at the Slade or the Royal College, she had asked a young poet, whose evocation of a vanished rural England was drawing favourable comparisons with John Clare, to write something about the painter’s relationship with landscape. And she had interviewed the artist herself for the catalogue.

  Afterwards she wondered whether she could have read the signs more quickly. The one art form Jacob had never shown any interest in was music, yet he now professed to find the interminable dingle dingle of the santoor deeply moving. He had always washed in the mornings, but now began to take his bath every night, however late he came home from rehearsals. When she bagged up their clothes for the launderette – there was no washing machine in the flat, because Jacob didn’t like the look of machinery, nor the sound – his pockets were already empty, where before they had yielded ticket stubs, scraps of paper, receipts. Words he had never said before, words like alignment and meridians, issued from his lips, pronounced without irony.

  But as soon as she saw them, side by side at the private view party in the gallery, Isobel knew. Jacob had brought three or four people he was working with on Romeo and Juliet: the assistant stage manager, Tom, who painted in his spare time; a nice girl called Amanda who did costumes; a younger man with shaven hair like Fuzzy-Felt and a dazzling gold-toothed smile, presumably the one who was to play Tybalt. The other woman with them had thick curls which dangled over her shoulders and she was slender, with a back which curved like a dancer’s. Her silver bangles slid up and down her long arms as she gesticulated. There was something provocative about this woman. The spirals of her hair looked heavy, like jewellery, as if she had been adorned. She was sinewy, hard. Jacob was standing next to her, listening, his head inclined, nodding as if in agreement.

  Isobel felt two things almost at once. The first was a sense of wrenching, as when she was a little girl, when she and Emily had been in Malvern for weeks on end during the summer and then the morning came of the day when it was time for them to go back and not see their mother again for ages and ages, for what felt like an eternity; away from the hills and the long afternoons and the grass tickling your bare legs, and the creaking landing and the bath tap which dripped year after year; and the warm familiar smell of your mother’s neck as you buried your head against it, your nose in the hollow of her collarbone, and whispered, ‘Please don’t make me go. Don’t make me go.’

  And she felt tired.

  There was the rest of the party to get through, and then a dinner in honour of the artist in the private room of a nearby restaurant. As the party thinned at the gallery, Jacob came over.

  ‘We’re going to walk up to Old Compton Street, get some spaghetti. I’ll see you later.’

  She stared at him. He still looked the same, which was odd, because everything had changed now. He sounded the same and the faint smell of limes still came to her as he leant in to kiss her on the cheek. Over dinner, Isobel tried to decide what she would say when she got home. Whether she should confront him outright, or try to trick him into revelation. She wondered whether he would stall, lie, try to pretend nothing had happened. Whether he would weep and beg her to forgive him.

  By the time she returned to the flat, she felt too weary and too disappointed for guile.

  ‘I know you’re having sex with that woman you brought to the gallery. Is she the yoga teacher?’

  Jacob did not blench, nor colour. He merely looked straight at her.

  ‘Yes.’

  Isobel began to cry.

  ‘But we’ve only been married for five minutes! I thought you liked me. You’re meant to like me.’

  ‘Of course I like you. I love you. This doesn’t mean I don’t.’

  ‘What does it mean then? Is it that you don’t want me in bed?’

  ‘No! I love you in bed, in my bed. There’s no one else I want to wake up next to. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Then why? Why risk making me so unhappy for something that doesn’t even mean anything to you?’

  ‘It just kind of happened. It’s been really good for my back. You know I’ve had a lot of trouble with my lumbar vertebrae.’

  Isobel could scarcely believe her ears. She stopped crying and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Women, he explained – sex – they were one of life’s greatest pleasures. Enjoying them was like enjoying food, or wine, or art.

  ‘You wouldn’t expect me never to see Brecht because I like Chekhov as well, would you?’ he asked. ‘Or never to eat tuna again, just because I said I liked salmon.’

  ‘But dead fish don’t have feelings, and I do,’ Isobel wailed.

  ‘I just don’t see why marriage should mean that you don’t want the person you love to enjoy life,’ said Jacob. ‘Think of all the things that life has to offer. Where does it say that being married means being so ungenerous? Don’t you desire the happiness of the person you love? Why should a wedding band mean that you deliberately restrict that person’s pleasure? Anyway, you’re the one I want to spend my life with. You’re the one I want to talk to. We should celebrate how special we are together. This stuff is superfluous.’

  ‘So is this your way of telling me that you’re not going to stop, just because I’ve found out? Is that it?’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll never do it again.’ Jacob smiled and raised his hands as if in surrender. ‘I’ll come over to your view that loving someone should be all about sacrifice. You can make me a coat out of stinging nettles, like the girl in the fairy tale. Or a hair shirt.’

  Isobel sighed. ‘What is a hair shirt, do you think?’ she asked. She lacked the energy to argue.

  ‘A shirt made of hair, I suppose. It would have to be pretty long hair, wouldn’t it? To be woven.’

  ‘You’d think that would be nice and smooth, though, if it was made of long hair. Not a punishment,’ said Isobel.

  ‘Suits me,’ said Jacob.

  They’d got through it. But the yoga teacher turned out to be only the first. The next had seemed worse, horribly glamorous and threatening, a blonde in faded jeans and cowboy boots who produced cultural programmes for radio. Fiona. Isobel had come home from work one day to find this woman in the flat, drinking coffee with Jacob on the long wooden settle. She wore a chunky belt buckle and bracelet, Navajo-style pieces made of silver, inset with bold slabs of turquoise. Next to her, Isobel felt mousy and somehow uncourageous. Fiona hadn’t been Jacob’s favourite – that had been later, the Spanish actress with the annoying little-girly voice. Each time, Jacob managed to persuade her that it was shamefully bourgeois to get upset, that she was welcome to take lovers of her own. Their marriage was strong enough to withstand these things, because they were unique. Special.

  The girlfriends left traces on him. There was something he did to her with his hands, when they were in bed, that he had not done before, a way of flexing his fingers which made her gasp. The pleasure of it was shameful to her, that he should have learned some trick in the bed of another woman, then brought it back to perform on his wife. He started buying a different newspaper, another brand of coffee. Unfamiliar paperbacks, new tapes of music, appeared in the flat. When it was the Spanish girl, volumes of Lorca turned up on the bedside table. It was a disappointment to both of them that Isobel couldn’t prevent herself from minding. During the time she spent with Jacob she came to believe, at his insistence, that the blame for her unhappiness lay with
her own childishly conventional belief in exclusive love. It was so ordinary of her to be jealous, and Jacob prized the sense of not being like other people. It was as if she, with her common or garden emotion and not he with his unfaithfulness, were letting them both down.

  ‘Another adult can’t make you miserable. You can only do that to yourself,’ Jacob told her gently. ‘It’s a choice. You can choose. You can choose whether to be generous in love, or to be selfish.’

  She came to believe that he was right. And then, while Jacob was assembling French bread and olives and cheese for a Saturday lunch, Isobel, looking for something to read on the shelves in the hall, had taken out a book with a dark-green spine. It was called A View of the Harbour: on the cover was a painting of what looked like a little Cornish town, St Ives perhaps; painted cottages, their gardens gay with flowers, giving way to a glimpse of Atlantic blue water. A scene of innocence. She opened it at random and read a couple of pages, liked them, turned to the front to find out more about the author, and there it was, an inscription: ‘For Jacob, a souvenir of our perfect day by the sea, with my love, Sarah.’

  Nice handwriting. They always had nice handwriting. They were a type, women with long fringes and hoop earrings and arty aspirations, who wrote with calligraphy pens. Below the inscription was a date, not distant. Isobel’s heart lurched, then began to thump, as though a fugitive was tapping an impatient steel-capped toe within her chest. Her mouth tasted bitter, as if she had drunk too much coffee. A tangled knot of disappointment began a spin cycle in her stomach. She felt herself unravelling.

  If he had been able to keep them out of the flat, had he confined them to anonymous rooms, then she might have been able to go on. Instead they invaded every crevice of her life, her bookshelf, her bedroom, even her body. Just when she supposed herself to be alone with Jacob, they ambushed her, announcing themselves without pity or care.

  Isobel went into the other room and pulled a suitcase from under the bed.

  Rita followed, her brow furrowed. The dog’s shoulders had become bulkier with time, her neck thicker. From the protuberant moles on her cheeks sprang ever wirier hairs, now flecked with grey. Departures always made Rita anxious. She had a habit of sticking close to whichever of them looked set to be going somewhere, as if her vigilance would ensure she did not get left behind. Isobel generally did take Rita, since the dog had become an accepted fixture at the gallery. The thought that she would have to leave the dog behind – she was Jacob’s dog really – was even worse than leaving her husband. Isobel loved the dog. It wasn’t the dog’s fault.

  When she had filled the case and snapped the buckles shut, Isobel sat down on the edge of the bed, like a traveller in a distant hotel room, pausing to gain a moment’s composure before stepping out, a stranger, into the bright street. The dog came and put her heavy face into Isobel’s lap. She looked up balefully. Together they stayed still for a few minutes, regarding each other, until Rita seemed to become embarrassed by the unguardedness of her own emotion and licked her chops self-consciously and looked away.

  Chapter 13

  Everyone had been amazed that Emily’s baby was a boy, except Iris, who claimed she’d always known because she’d had a dream in which he had appeared.

  ‘Granny’s turned into such an old witch,’ Isobel told her sister. ‘She’s always on about signs and stuff. She told me that the morning Digby died, she went down to the river and a heron came and circled, just above her head. Herons are shy of humans, apparently. She said they never fly close. But this one did, for ages.’

  ‘And?’ asked Emily.

  ‘And she was sure it was Digby, coming to say goodbye. To show her he was OK, before he went.’

  ‘It probably was.’

  Isobel groaned, in mock horror. ‘Oh, honestly, Lem. Not you as well!’

  Emily laughed. ‘Was she all right though? It must be hard on her own.’

  ‘She seems OK, actually. She’d read somewhere that it’s not as bad to be widowed if you’ve had a happy marriage as it is if you’ve been miserable together. Because of the regret apparently. She was saying how lucky she’d been with Digby, how they’d never had a cross word. She says she likes solitude. Anyway, she’s got Birdle.’

  ‘Birdle’s always given me the creeps,’ said Emily.

  ‘Really? I thought you liked him.’

  ‘Not really. It’s the scaly grey legs. And there’s something cunning about him.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Isobel agreed.

  Emily had not told Gary to begin with. She didn’t know what to say, or how to choose the words to say it. They were propped up in her bed, eating bacon sandwiches, one Saturday morning not long before Christmas. He’d come to the flat early, before she was dressed, while she was still sleep-bleary, still in the pair of blue socks she wore to keep her feet warm during the night. After they had made love, both with their socks on, Gary still in his shirt, he had gone through to the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want ketchup in yours?’ he called.

  ‘No thanks, just butter,’ she replied.

  He brought the two plates back into the bedroom, balancing one on his arm like a waiter, two mugs of tea in the other hand.

  ‘Gary?’ she said.

  His mouth was full, so he took a moment to respond. ‘Yes, my princess?’

  ‘I think I’m pregnant. I am pregnant.’

  He had just taken another bite. ‘Flippineck!’ he said, his voice muffled by the toast. ‘Shit! Shit!’ Hot tea was spilling onto his fingers. ‘Shit! How did that happen, then?’

  She could think of an answer, but being facetious didn’t seem fair, after the shock of the announcement. Looking at him, it was impossible to tell if he was angry or horrified or just astonished.

  ‘You’re bloody joking, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m not joking.’

  He had got to his feet and stood now by the side of the bed, the remainder of the sandwich still uneaten. His shirt was unbuttoned. His genitals looked dark against the paleness of his thighs. Neither of them said anything. Gary went to his coat, took out his cigarettes and lighter.

  ‘I don’t want to not see you,’ she said.

  He didn’t answer straight away. ‘Look, it’s not that easy, this. I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m not on my own.’

  Emily blushed. ‘I didn’t think you were. The reason I never asked you was because I thought, I don’t have to feel bad, if I don’t know. But I sort of did know really. I mean, you’d have stayed the night. You wouldn’t always have had to get back.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ He looked away, drawing hard on his cigarette.

  ‘Are you actually married?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. Shelly. We’ve been married six and a half years.’

  ‘Jesus. You must have been awfully young!’ said Emily.

  ‘We’ve been going out since I was fifteen.’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Emily.

  ‘Our Nicole, she’s going on five. Be five next March. There’s another one on the way and all.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Emily.

  He gave no response, except exhaling. His breath sounded harsh.

  ‘That’s pretty heavy,’ said Emily. It seemed a stupid thing to say, but she couldn’t think of any other way to phrase their predicament. Of all the things he might have told her about his life when they were not together, she had never considered this.

  He came and sat next to her against the pillows. He put his socked feet back up on the bed and took her elbow, tilting her forward so that he could put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘So what are we going to do now?’ she asked.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ said Gary.

  Emily spent that Christmas with her father and stepmother in London. She wore a big jumper and didn’t tell them about the baby. She had no idea how she would ever be able to break the news to them. When Isobel suggested that it might be better not to say anything until an actual baby was born, she was onl
y half joking. They disapproved of things. Emily was glad she didn’t live nearer, so they could not involve themselves too closely in her day-to-day life.

  It was easier with her mother. Emily told Ruth the same thing she’d already told Isobel: that the baby’s father was married. Her sister had at once asked a flurry of questions: How long had it been going on? How could she have let this happen? Hadn’t she ever heard of birth control? Why didn’t he leave his wife? As ever, Emily did not know what to say. She only knew she could not face admitting the truth, that the father of her child already had a daughter, that his wife was also expecting a child, due to be born only weeks before her own. All of which made her not only a stupid, irresponsible person, but probably a bad one as well.

  So she lied. Lying was not difficult, as long as you kept things simple, resisted the urge to add what sounded like convincing detail. Other people didn’t need minutiae in order to believe what you told them, because they did not listen as intently as all that; the details were for the benefit of the teller, not the told. You could even start to believe yourself.

  She had liked fibbing as a little girl. Growing up, Emily had realised that not telling the truth was a way of escaping, without looking as if you were trying to. Her sister always wanted to know why, where, how, but sometimes Emily did not feel like telling her. Being a child had sometimes felt like playing in a scrap of garden, overlooked by many windows, never out of sight. The occasional lie, for Emily, was like finding a hidden door into a private, secret garden, where no one could see you. The person you were lying to could be right there next to you, believing you, but you were concealed from them because your truth was hidden. Even the simplest lie, like what you’d had for lunch at school, could give you a sense of escape. It was a small kind of freedom.