The Heart Is a Burial Ground

by Tamara Colchester

  They would talk today, she decided, after her mother had finished filming.

  ‘Always yes, Caresse.’ Diana rolled her eyes at the sky so that blue met blue.

  ‘So much better, don’t you think, darling? So much bigger than the sad finality of no. A yes always fissures into a thousand possibilities.’

  But Diana knew what that really meant – always saying yes was to forever promise nothing.

  Pressing her foot down, Diana pushed her mother’s car faster so that the trees either side sped to a blur. Down to her left she could feel more than see the lake, dark-rimmed with trees and sky blue at its centre – an inverted eye.

  David’s slender arm lay across the back of her seat and, as Diana deftly steered the car along the winding road, she glanced over at him, at his tangled hair blown back from the tanned face.

  Under her gaze he turned and though he could only see his reflection in her cat’s eye sunglasses, they both smiled and felt the moment closing around them with the simple motion of a sheet pulled over two heads; a memory that would be pulled apart, separately and together, countless times over the years to come.

  The lake was quiet, the water’s edge marked by a thick line of trees and a strip of muddy sand, a single boat tied to a broken jetty that stretched a small way into the water. The season was not yet ripe for tourists and it was still too early in the morning for locals.

  They swam right out to the centre, naked bodies pushing through the water, and as Diana moved, her breath coming in rhythmic gasps, she noticed with appreciation David’s ability to remain silent with someone he still hardly knew. It was rare in the young ones. Her arms pushed through the warm surface of the water, as her legs kicked into the dark coolness beneath. She wanted to be alone here. Alone but accompanied; someone keeping an outside eye on things while she dug into her thoughts.

  Pulling herself up onto a pontoon, Diana sat up straight-backed and looked into the sun. A fine, straight stare that hurt her eyes.

  ‘Look at it, Rat,’ he’d say. ‘Keep your eyes open. Look at her, giving us everything and everyone too blind to take it. That’s the Sun of God right there.’ And she’d look and look and look until she could see nothing at all.

  She lay down on the warm wood of the pontoon and pictured herself, seven maybe eight then, climbing up the tower to sit with him, the noise of the babbling guests far below, her mother’s laughter softened by distance. She would sit and listen to him talking, face held in a profile that was a single line of beauty, watching his inked feet and hands move with slight, blind movements, his words riding close to his thoughts that were always actions so that listening to him was like running alongside a moving vehicle – let go and you were left behind, hold on and you would likely come to harm. They would lie side by side until Diana’s skin started to hurt. But it was better to burn. If you got up for water or to sit in the shade, he was always gone by the time you came back. She felt the sun weaken and shadow cover her body. Opening her eyes, she saw her mother standing over her, her face dark in the shadow. Harry lay with his eyes half closed, watching her. ‘Caresse,’ he said, and put out a hand. Without a word, she lay down and circled her arms round him and the back of her hand was cool against Diana’s hot skin.

  ‘Hey.’ She felt David’s hand cover her own and turning to him she saw he was watching her uncertainly.

  She smiled and put out a hand and he came forward and rested his head on the soft sweep of her stomach. He turned on his side and with his ear pressed against her, right where she had begun, he listened to the mysterious movement of her insides. Above those soft, inner sounds, David became aware of a whispered stream, and glancing up he saw her mouth moving gently with the insistent cadence familiar to him from countless services in a cold church on top of a hill in the Sussex downs. She was praying. He lifted his head up, waiting for her to finish. But the feverish voice was whispering something he did not recognise, the words cutting and dipping in a staccato rhythm too quick for the steady tread of Protestant prayer. When she finished and was quiet, he stroked the curve of her breast, causing the nipple to grow and harden, bringing her back to him.

  ‘What was that?’ He frowned, his voice a little hoarse.

  She curved towards him. ‘Habit.’

  ‘Do you believe in them? The words?’

  She shook her head, her hand guarding her face from the sun.

  ‘Why do you say them?’

  ‘I believed in him.’

  ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘It’s not something that translates.’

  His eyes moved over her face, wanting to know more, but it was some time before she spoke.

  ‘Once in India there was an old man they called the Sun-Gazer whose eyes had been burned out by his endless staring at the sun’s rays. Every morning he would be carried down the steps by his brothers to his accustomed place by the Ganges – he couldn’t walk as his legs had withered away from years of inactivity – so that he could turn his face towards the east. Slowly he’d open his eyes to greet the morning sun as it raised its head over the temple tops of the Holy City. He’d remain there the whole day with his eyes fastened on the blazing disc without once turning them away or closing them for even an instant until the dying sun had sunk once more below the horizon.’ She moved her hand in a slow arc that came to rest on the side of his face. She turned his face towards hers. ‘Ritual is important, David, it gives shape to things. You create the structure; time provides the meaning. Leave working it out to the others.’ She waved her hand away.

  He reached up without understanding, distracted now by a different need, and pulled her towards him, and soon they lay together as quietly as sleeping children.

  ‘Roberto?’ Diana knocked on the door of his study. It was the only one in the castle that was always closed.

  Hearing his voice, she pushed it open and on entering the room, stopped short. Surprised to find a boy standing in front of his desk doing up the top button of his shirt. Both he and Roberto turned towards her.

  ‘Diana.’ Roberto rose hastily. ‘Alessandro was just trying on the shirts your mother has bought for the new choir.’

  He spoke to the boy in quick Italian who, with a scornful glance at Diana, flicked down his collar and walked from the room, closing the door behind him.

  Roberto tented his fingers and sat back down. He wore a pale blue shirt, expertly ironed. ‘Would you care to explain where the car has been?’ His manner was different today, and as Diana took a seat, her wet hair combed back from her face, she looked over the carefully tended plants, the large Picasso, the inlaid walnut desk; and realised that Roberto was a man who benefited greatly from being seen in context. There was something in the room – the boy, his collar – that caused a sheet-tangled memory to surface (Roberto’s face just before he lost control) and Diana had to cross her legs. She was just considering reaching forward, when Roberto rose from his seat again, came round and sat on the edge of his desk, causing his trousers to ruche round his groin in an unflattering shape. Adjusting her dress, she sat up.

  ‘I wanted to swim.’ She smiled. ‘I would have asked, but you were still asleep. A very relaxed start to the day, I must say. Caresse normally likes her staff up and at it in the morning.’

  Roberto stiffened. ‘I always take breakfast in my bedroom and work there until midday.’ (Don’t rise to it, Roberto, he chastised himself.) ‘But I was meant to collect your mother’s prescriptions from the pharmacy in Rieti this morning, alongside a visit to the bank and the notary . . .’

  ‘Oh well, if I’d known it was for something as urgent as all that . . .’

  Patronising bitch, Roberto thought.

  ‘Diana, it is, in fact, serious. The pharmacy is now closed and she will have to spend an uncomfortable night until they can be collected tomorrow. You are aware that your mother is recovering from pneumonia. Her last heart attack was very recent and she needs to rest without any complications. The scar tissue has made it stronger, but she
is still very unstable . . . One day the importance of health will perhaps mean something to you. You will go and tell her what has occurred, please.’ He held his arm straight towards the door.

  ‘She’s having her interview, Roberto. I’ll tell her afterwards.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. After.’

  ‘No, actually, I’ll go and see how they’re getting on now. Something’s made me change my mind. What fun—’ She stopped suddenly. ‘But I did come for a reason, Roberto.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come to the bar with me?’ She smiled, looking for a moment exactly as she had when he’d met her on the day of her first wedding to that old French aristocrat almost thirty years ago. He had only met Caresse a few weeks before and had been surprised to be invited at all to the wedding of this wonderfully vital widow’s daughter. ‘Oh, but you must come,’ Caresse had said. ‘I can tell you are going to be in my life for some time and I don’t believe in doing things by degrees. If you’re in, you’re all in, so don’t stand on formality.’ The night before the wedding they had all eaten a vast meal of black sausages and galettes with raspberries and thick cream, along with bottle after bottle of Clos de Vougeot. He’d paid the price in the inn’s outside toilet in the early hours of the morning, bent over as though in prayer while a nightingale sang in the wood. It had been unclear to him why this woman had so taken to him until they sat together surrounded by the detritus of the wedding breakfast. He had only just completed his final legal exams and this seemed to please Caresse. ‘You’re still untouched by that dreadful system. You know it, which is important of course, but you haven’t become wired to it. I like outsiders who know how the insides work. You’ll be a great help to me, I’m sure.’ She’d patted the chair next to hers and he’d moved tentatively closer. ‘My late husband couldn’t bear lawyers. He felt they wasted time with their technicality-spotted bird brains.’ Roberto had laughed at that, safe in the outside position she had placed him in. ‘But my time in this life has shown me that it helps to have those around whose feet are firmly in the filing cabinet, even while their heads are full of dreams. You do still believe in your dreams, don’t you?’ And she’d looked at him with a face as fresh and open as a lily on a pond.

  ‘I was born in the mountains so was brought up with my head in the clouds,’ Roberto had said, pleased with the words that fell from his mouth. ‘So, yes, signora. Io voglio. I do.’

  He’d been surprised at the daughter’s choice of husband – he’d been old enough to be her father, in fact. She looked sinfully young in her stiff little dress as she made her way down the aisle of the chapel, trying to smile at everyone. He smiled to himself. If only the old boy had known what he was letting himself in for.

  ‘Why do you want me to come to the bar, Diana?’ he said, his voice softer.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’ And her voice was higher and softer too, as though she was following his thoughts.

  ‘No, Diana.’ He shook his head and walked behind his desk and firmly sat down, drawing pen and paper towards him. ‘Not again.’

  ‘No?’ she said sharply.

  ‘What happened in Rome was a mistake. A common mistake, but . . . inappropriate. We must revert to the previous contours of our relationship. It’s better that way. To draw a clear line, I mean. And you are a woman who needs very strict lines.’ He glared at her from beneath the storm of his grey eyebrows.

  ‘Well, I don’t make mistakes. But, you’re right, I do love a strict line. It’s always nice to know the exact moment one’s overstepped it. Oh relax, I just want to talk, you’ll be perfectly safe in the bar.’ She placed her finely boned hand on his large white one sprouted with dark hairs. Beast, she thought, and then noticing as though for the first time the gold wedding band circling her fourth finger, tugged it off and tossed it onto his desk. ‘I don’t need that any more. You can consider it a bonus.’ She smiled and rapped the desk. ‘You have some time to get ready. See you at six.’

  Boston, 1922

  ‘What’s divorce?’

  ‘Divorce . . .’ Her mother knelt by the narrow nursery bed and looked into Diana’s eyes. ‘It means the end of something old. And then the beginning of something new.’

  ‘Is the end for ever?’ The child’s hands played wonderingly over the delicate embroidery of her mother’s flower-sprigged dressing gown.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was low.

  ‘Is it like when you die?’

  ‘Nobody’s going to die.’

  ‘What about Father?’

  ‘He’s going to hospital to dry out.’

  Diana blinked. She knew about that. Her father was a soak. She’d heard the housemaids talking on the stairs.

  ‘What about us?’ Diana whispered fearfully, looking again at her mother’s pale face.

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes, will we have to get divorced too?’

  Her mother smiled and shook her head, running her fingers through the silk fronds of the lampshade that blushed rosy pink on the bedside table.

  ‘No, Diana, you’re staying with me. Now sit up and drink your milk. We need to make you strong.’

  Alderney, Channel Islands, 1993

  Elena hadn’t slept. She leaned towards the small plane window until her forehead met its coolness and looked below her at the island beginning to shape itself out of the surrounding grey sea.

  Another try.

  She peered through the rain-flecked glass as one drop met and merged with others until the whole window was running.

  Home.

  She shook her head. Hardly, Elena . . . And smiled wryly at her own sentimentality as she looked down at the scant island, beset by the waves. There was something of the left-behind about the place, with its disinterested islanders, the net-strewn harbour littered with diesel cans and green-bearded lobster pots, and the empty concrete forts that knuckled its edges. Pretty too, though, with the cobbled streets that ran like rivulets through the small town and the nettles and wild flowers growing round the war memorial.

  In front of her, her husband turned round in his seat, their two sons next to him. One dark, one fair, both wearing rough woollen army jumpers in dark green, their legs bare. He smiled at her.

  They took one another in for a moment and then he turned away again and Elena listened to him talking earnestly to the boys.

  ‘. . . nothing was left to chance.’

  ‘Who did the work?’ The blond little boy, Tom, spoke.

  ‘A vast number of prisoners. Russians, Spanish, also French. Political prisoners in the majority. Not soldiers. The few who survived and returned to their own countries were often shot as traitors.’

  ‘But they didn’t want to work.’ Jake the elder, darker boy frowned at his father. ‘That’s unfair.’

  ‘A rule of war – you can only be on one side. And whether they wanted to or not, those men had helped the enemy.’

  ‘But why did nobody rescue them?’ Tom asked anxiously.

  ‘The defences they were building for the Germans were too successful. Essentially, the men built their own prison, denying any hope of rescue. Thousands died. A terrible irony, really.’ Elena could just make out the largest of the forts standing alone on the north edge of the island, where the land heaved itself, white-faced, out of the sea.

  ‘After the war,’ her mother was fond of saying to the occasional person who still came for lunch, a glass of wine held loosely in her hand, ‘the lobsters the fisherman brought in weighed as much as small children.’ And closing her eyes, Elena began to murmur to herself a measure of words that ended in palm-pressed supplication.

  Another try.

  She moved back in her seat and her reflection appeared, vague and pale in the scratched glass. She habitually turned her head slightly to the left, following the contours of her face, searching for the familiar changes. What would her mother see? She peered closer, but then thought better of it and closed her eyes, denying herself the reflection. Still, Elena? Something shifted beside her and Bay, he
r youngest child, leaned across her to look out the same window, pressing against Elena’s rounded stomach.

  ‘Bay . . .’ she gently lifted her away, ‘careful, darling,’ and without looking the child tucked herself round the bump, and Elena wrapped an arm over the small body and held it tight.

  ‘Will she be wearing her tied-on shoes?’ Bay asked, looking up.

  Elena looked down at her. The little girl wore a small army jumper the same as her brothers, but rather than boots her thin bare legs were punctuated by a pair of red jelly shoes.

  ‘I doubt it. She doesn’t get out of bed much any more.’

  ‘Why?’

  Elena pressed her hand to the window and at the island below them.

  ‘Because if your grandmother doesn’t like something, then sure as champagne, your grandmother doesn’t do it.’

  As the plane circled, Bay pictured the square house with its garden of trees whose fruit always seemed to be lying on the ground waiting to be stepped on, soft and wet.

  Inside there was . . . she tried to picture the inside . . . but it kept collapsing like the walls of a failed den.

  She tried again, concentrating.

  Inside there were closed doors . . .

  A cupboard crowded with big men’s coats that were never worn . . .

  A hallway with a telephone that never rang.

  A big dark green drawing room that was like being inside a bottle, heavy silk curtains good to hide inside . . .

  A room upstairs full of books.

  And then, of course, there was her grandmother . . .

  Lying, like a strange animal, in the darkness of her bedroom.

  Bay felt her mother shift beside her and she remembered what she’d said in the car that morning on the way to the airport, turning in the front seat so that Bay and her brothers could see her eyes, her sunglasses on top of her head holding the short lengths of her dark hair back from her clean face.

  ‘It’s your home too. You must remember that.’ And her brothers had nodded and Bay had nodded too, without knowing what any of it meant or why they even agreed like that.