My Former Heart

by Cressida Connolly

  This comforting deceit, disused for years, returned to her when it came to the baby. She told her mother and her sister that the child’s father was not only married, but was moving to the North East, where his wife’s family was from. That they had stopped seeing each other anyway, at around the time of the baby’s conception. It had never been anything serious for either of them.

  ‘It will be all right,’ Ruth had said. ‘We’ll help you. We can work something out between us, so you won’t have to manage all by yourself.’

  Isobel was not so sanguine.

  ‘I was the one who played with dolls,’ she complained. ‘You liked animals. You never liked my dolls; I always had to dress them and undress them by myself, and give them their bath, when you wouldn’t play. I never liked animals.’

  ‘Yes, you did!’ said Emily. ‘You did. You always liked dogs, remember?’

  ‘I’m just saying …’ said Isobel.

  ‘I know,’ said Emily.

  ‘I wasn’t even sure that you, you know … Liked men,’ added Isobel.

  ‘What, did you think I was a lezzer, like Mum?’ laughed Emily.

  ‘Well, you never mentioned any boyfriends. How was I to know? Anyway, Mum’s not a lezzer! They’re just friends. Honestly. You’re so disgusting sometimes.’

  Isobel could never acknowledge Ruth and Ilse as a couple. She clung to the belief that Ruth still loved their father, citing the fact that she had never taken up with any other man as proof. When they were children Isobel had always believed that her parents would get back together, even after Harry married Valerie. It was a wish she had never entirely grown out of.

  Gary continued coming to the flat, every Saturday, early. Sometimes he popped in midweek too, but it was harder in the winter, with the dark evenings, to justify being out of his own house. They never talked about his little girl, but more and more they both referred to Shelly and to Shelly’s parallel pregnancy. By common but unspoken consent, they did not refer to her by name.

  ‘Has she got stretch marks?’ Emily asked.

  ‘She’s got some cream off her sister. It’s got vitamins in and that.’

  ‘Is it vitamin E oil?’

  ‘It’s cream, not oil. White stuff. I’ll have a look at the label if you want.’

  Morning sickness, tiredness, aching legs: Emily began to feel quite a bond with Shelly. After all, what wrong had she ever done to Emily? Shelly had grown up, trained as a hairdresser, married her first boyfriend, moved from the village where she grew up to the town where she’d gone to school; she had become a mother, was expecting a second child. None of this had happened in order to spite Emily. It was nothing to do with her. When Emily imagined Shelly, she imagined her as someone likeable.

  Nor did Emily feel guilt towards Shelly. Things happened in life, had their own momentum. You could judge people, or you could just accept, as she tried to, that nobody was perfect, that everyone was merely trundling along doing their best to be happy, to get the most out of life. It wasn’t as if anyone wished anyone else harm. Emily wasn’t expecting Gary to leave his family, or even to help with the baby when it came. And, anyway, she hadn’t done it on purpose. She hadn’t chosen to fall in love with a married man.

  If it was love. There were moments when Emily didn’t really know what she felt about Gary. She was always glad when she saw him, a little start in her chest when he smiled at her in greeting. Ease in his company. Laughter. Slight impatience, sometimes. There had been afternoons when, if she was honest, she felt relieved that he’d gone. Desire: that was the overwhelming thing and it never seemed to diminish. The desire extended to every part of his body, so that no place was out of bounds. Everything seemed beautiful, to her: his flat, wide wrists; the smell of his underarms; his teeth. The secret parts of him remained mysterious, as if they belonged in a marine world, not a human one. They were like the contents of a rock pool: the coral-coloured skin of his scrotum, like an anemone; the saline taste; the dark star of his anus contracting, muscular, like a sea urchin.

  She only saw him once in the month before their child was born. Shelly’s blood pressure had risen dramatically in her thirty-sixth week of pregnancy, and she’d had to be admitted for a Caesarean section soon after. The baby was a little girl, Vicky. Gary had rung her from a pay phone, to tell her the news.

  ‘What does she look like?’ Emily had asked.

  ‘Like a baby. She doesn’t look like me. Fair. She’s gorgeous.’

  ‘You’ll have to bring a picture of her. Next time.’

  ‘I will do.’

  Five and a half weeks later, Emily woke up in the night because she had peed in the bed. At least that was what she thought must have happened: she was woken by the sensation of warm wetness, turning quickly cold as it soaked the sheets. She got up and pulled the duvet off the bed, trying to prevent the liquid from getting through the linen, to clog the feathers. As she yanked at the cover, she was gripped by a spasm of tightness which squeezed until the breath was wrung out of her and she had to lean forward, gasping. She waited for a time, until the pain came again. She felt very calm, although her hands were trembling, and her legs too. She went to make herself tea, then sat in the front room for an hour and a half, until the contractions were coming more often and it was almost light. Then she went to the telephone and rang Pat.

  Roger and Pat had been wonderful. They had been the first people she told, even before her sister.

  ‘I won’t ask,’ Roger had said. ‘You just let me know what suits you. If you want to go part time, later on, we can sort it out. And after the baby comes.’

  For the past few months, Friday nights had meant a meal at Roger and Pat’s place. Their son Nigel was in his final year at university in Cardiff, but they were used to being three: they would be glad to have the extra company if she’d join them. Emily and Roger usually chatted about work, for the first half-hour or so, while Pat was in and out of the kitchen. Pat liked trying out new recipes from all over the world, with varying success. Her sister had given her a book, Continental Cuisines, which she was working her way through.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, love,’ Roger told Pat, as they negotiated a dish of something made with melted cheese, chilli and lime juice, grilled over what seemed to be a packet of crisps, ‘it’ll be a blessed relief to get back to shepherd’s pie and whatnot.’

  ‘It’s only once a week,’ grinned Pat. ‘Does you good not to get in a rut.’

  ‘So long as we don’t have to start wearing national costumes to match. Picture yours truly in a sombrero.’

  Pat batted his arm. ‘I don’t know how you lot put up with him all week,’ she said to Emily. ‘It’s bad enough having him at home in the evenings and at weekends. If he didn’t have his golf, I’d be considering divorce. That or murder.’

  Emily had been offered antenatal classes at the local health centre, but she hadn’t attended. It was partly that she didn’t want to run the risk of bumping into Shelly, and partly that she doubted that there was much you could actually prepare for. It was the same as with animals: once it was time for the baby to be born, it would get itself born, one way or another. The midwife went on about birthing options and personal choices, but a lavender-scented candle and a giant paddling pool weren’t going to make any difference. Choice didn’t come into it. She’d asked Pat to be her designated birth partner because she trusted her not to make a fuss, but just to be there, quietly helping her to get on with it.

  Pat had been fantastic while they waited for the child to come, calmly rubbing Emily’s back, murmuring encouragement. But when she saw the baby, she burst into tears.

  ‘He’s just so perfect,’ Pat said, hand over her mouth, nose reddening with emotion.

  And Emily agreed that he was.

  She hadn’t expected to feel so completely overwhelmed, looking at her baby. She hadn’t guessed what an individual this new person would be, from the moment of his very first breath. Not a tiny, mewling extension of herself or of his father, but
a new and different being, very much himself, composed and whole. And suddenly it came to her what an awful thing it was, to be born a boy, what a vast journey it would be: to have to turn from this entirely innocent, entirely gentle child into what the world expected a man to be, independent and reserved and brave. When there were wars, it was men who had to go and fight them. And all those soldiers in the battles of the past had once been like the baby she held now. And their mothers, too, had looked down at their little heads – only the size of a grapefruit – with such tenderness, and then, years later, had had to wave them off, trying not to remember, while the world armed them and sent them off to battle. Emily offered up a prayer that there wouldn’t ever be another war, that her boy would be safe, always.

  That afternoon, Ruth and Ilse came to see the baby. Ruth brought Lucozade, because Emily had always liked it when she’d felt ill as a little girl, and two packets of Garibaldi biscuits. Ilse produced a bonnet and cardigan she had knitted, in pale peppermint green. Emily didn’t really like the colour, but she was touched that Ilse had made the things herself. The sight of her mother holding her newborn son made Emily happy. Here they were, three generations together in a room.

  ‘Have you thought of any names?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘I know it sounds silly, but I’d only thought of girls’ ones. I just didn’t imagine a boy. I like Joe, though.’

  ‘Like Johann!’ Ilse exclaimed. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’

  Ruth smiled. ‘And Daddy would be pleased, too.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Emily. ‘I didn’t think there were any Joes on the Longden side. Or the Brownings, come to that.’

  ‘I don’t think there are, no,’ Ruth agreed. ‘I meant he’d be pleased, because it’s a biblical name.’

  That night on the telephone, Ruth told Isobel and then Isobel rang Iris to tell her about the baby’s name. Iris sent back the news that Jo or Joe meant ‘my beauty’. She knew this was right, because she’d used it so often in games of Scrabble. That sealed it. He was Joe.

  Ruth and Ilse had been able to come and see the baby straight away by leaving Carolyn and her assistant, Heather, in charge of the children, with an extra teacher she’d managed to rope in at short notice. After her uncle died Ruth had been amazed and thrilled when her father had told her that she was to have the house.

  ‘It was Christopher’s idea,’ he’d said. ‘Of course the house came to us both, after Mother died, but we talked it over a couple of years ago, agreed on a plan. He wanted you to have his share and, frankly, I wouldn’t want to come and live up there, not now. I don’t need to sell. We’ve got so used to being down here and as you know I’ve replanted the orchard. When you plant trees, you want to stay and see them grow up. But I should warn you there’ll be a fair amount of upkeep, with a house that size. A lot of roof. Although Victorian buildings are generally pretty sound, luckily. But still.’

  Ruth couldn’t wait to get back and tell Ilse the good news. The idea for the nursery had been suggested – afterwards, they couldn’t recall who had thought of it first – during those days of euphoria, when they knew they would not have to look for somewhere else to live. For Ruth, the house was more than a house, so much loved that it was closer to family. Ilse too had made it her home, growing vegetables in the garden, bottling plums and making jars of marrow and apple chutney in the autumn for the winter larder. They didn’t want to take in lodgers, but the house was large enough to accommodate their living quarters and some sort of scheme, to bring in a little income. They sat in the study most evenings, after having their supper at the red formica-topped table in the kitchen, but the formal dining room was never used, nor the front sitting room. There was bags of space; why not use the empty rooms as classrooms? At first they thought only of giving individual music lessons. Then they imagined what fun it would be to have a small group of children – perhaps younger children? – and let them learn the rudiments of music all together. They could have triangles and little tambourines and treble recorders and Swiss cowbells. Then they might get the children to do some painting, potato prints, say, or cutting out. Simple baking: biscuits or rock cakes or scones, perhaps. They could make the glass-fronted cupboard in the breakfast room into a nature cupboard – with some of Christopher’s collection of things, his fossils and birds’ eggs – and collect leaves and conkers in the autumn, with the children. Ilse had come into a small legacy when her mother died and it had been her idea to use the money to install central heating. Then the house would be warm for the children. The more they talked about it, the better an idea the nursery seemed.

  Carolyn sang in the choir with Ruth. She was much younger, hardly out of her twenties, with lots of fresh ideas and enthusiasm. She wasn’t particularly happy in her current job, teaching the reception class at a local primary, and when it was put to her she loved the idea of being involved in starting up a nursery school. She had thought of converting the breakfast room into a cloakroom for the children, with pegs for their outdoor things and a row of two loos and two handbasins on the opposite wall, tiny ones from a specialist supplier, the woodwork throughout painted with bright-blue gloss. The glass-fronted cupboard could be moved to the dining room, to take the place of the now obsolete mahogany sideboard. They would need low tables and chairs for what was now the sitting room and deep storage drawers for what was still the dining room. She doubted that cooking would be suitable, with such young children – they might burn their fingers – but she suggested Play-Doh for modelling. Apparently you could obtain syringe-like devices for the stuff, with different-shaped nozzles, rather like the ones people used for icing cakes. And they would need big primary-coloured building bricks that clipped onto each other and plastic dinosaurs and a sandbox on wheels. All children loved plastic dinosaurs, Carolyn said. And she knew lots of alphabet and counting songs to use as mnemonics.

  Ruth soon noticed a slight change in Ilse. Sometimes the picture on their old television set went rather woolly and faint, until one of them adjusted the brightness by twiddling the knobs at the back and the figures became clearer, sharper. This was what had happened with Ilse in real life. She hadn’t acquired new clothes, or changed the way she put up her hair, or even applied make-up, yet she shone somehow. She was more visible. There was an eagerness about her. Sometimes, when they were talking over arrangements with Carolyn, Ilse would go pink for no apparent reason, and when they were alone together, Ilse said Carolyn’s name more than she needed to. Whenever their conversation drifted elsewhere, she brought it back to their young associate, like a dog continuing to retrieve a ball after its owner has tired of the game.

  Ruth couldn’t imagine having romantic feelings for someone so young, man or woman. There was something slightly absurd about the freshness of her skin and the abundant bounce of her hair, as if she were a doll newly unpacked from its cellophane box, the almond smell of new plastic still clinging to her. Carolyn was nice enough, if rather conventional. She wore striped shirts in pastel colours and navy-blue skirts with big pleats, and what Iris would have called court shoes. Choral singing seemed to attract people of her type, sensible women with rather round, pretty faces and, Ruth couldn’t help noticing, thick ankles.

  Her husband, and then Ilse: these were the only people Ruth had ever wanted. She liked sex but the prospect of it unattached to an already loved and familiar body held no interest for her. She thought she had been lucky, for faithfulness to have come so readily. She knew Ilse had had the odd crush over the years: a school secretary whom she had invited to a couple of Sunday lunches and a theatre trip to Stratford once; a supply teacher who’d been drafted in from Worcester to teach French and whose colouring, Ruth had seen, had been striking in a Rubensesque sort of way, all yellow curls and pink dimpled cheeks. Both of these attachments had fizzled out of their own accord, unmentioned.

  Ruth didn’t feel put out by Ilse’s evident interest in Carolyn. She knew she had nothing to fear from it and that silence was the best policy. It would blow over, as the
earlier infatuations had. If anything, it increased Ruth’s solicitude towards her friend, mindful as she was that the younger woman might notice and quietly mock. It was easy enough to see what had caught Ilse’s interest: Carolyn was an attractive person, bubbly and capable. Ruth herself loved and was touched by the age spots across the backs of Ilse’s hands and by the gentle twist of her hair rising from the nape of her neck, held up always with the same tortoiseshell comb. But she was aware that, to a younger woman, these things were unlikely to hold such charm. To Carolyn, Ilse was probably just an old German woman in a cardigan.

  The nursery had opened with only nine children, several of them the offspring of the younger teaching staff from the various Malvern schools. Gradually word had spread, and by the third autumn there were sixteen and the following year they had had to split the children into two classes, one in each of the main rooms. They had to appoint a fourth adult, Heather, to help out. Heather had volunteered with the local Brownies for years, as well as being an expert first aider, and the children took to her at once. The kitchen simply wasn’t big enough to prepare lunch for nearly thirty, so the children brought packed lunches, with biscuits and milk provided at morning break time. Recently they had been obliged to turn applicants away for lack of space. Music remained a feature of each morning, either singing together around the piano or playing musical games or instruments, mostly percussion. The day finished at half past two, in time for mothers to collect older children from school. Carolyn and Heather stayed on for half an hour or so, clearing away. Once a week, on a Thursday, all four of them sat down together to plan activities for the coming week and iron out any difficul-ties. A cleaner, Mr Jelphs, came in every afternoon at four o’clock. Mr Jelphs had worked in one of the town’s ironmongers for most of his life and still wore the thick brown cotton coat that had been his daily clothing in the shop. He grew more vegetables than he and his wife could get through, and often brought things with him for Ruth and Ilse: courgettes, runner beans, sometimes a bunch of sweet peas.