With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

  Except that Paul never had that kind of father, and he wasn’t that kind of son. He bought seriously, going to serious shops as if he had a right to be there, and they took him at his own valuation. I didn’t have the knack. I had to keep reminding myself: If they were that classy, they wouldn’t be working in a shop. But I couldn’t ever quite make myself believe it. My mother bought her groceries on credit when I was little, and we were always a week behind. I was used to the idea that shopkeepers and restaurant owners judge their clients, not the other way around. Although that’s ridiculous, when you come to think of it.

  I loved Paul’s style. It was the way I was starting to dress myself, now I was earning. I think this is why Paul was attracted to me, at first. I didn’t look like the English girls in their throwaway skirts and tops. I’m talking about the mid-seventies here. I was English, really, but my mother wasn’t, and I’d watched her testing fabric between thumb and forefinger, looking at the seams to see how they were finished, checking the lining on a jacket in case it was cheap and would ruck when the jacket was dry-cleaned. Not that she bought much, because there wasn’t the money. But what she bought was good. She taught me how to wash silk, and how to look after fine wool so it didn’t lose its shape. When I was eighteen I saved up and had a couple of suits made. One was French navy, the other was black. Both wool, the best quality I could afford. I wanted them plain, and I knew they could be if the cloth was good enough. With a figure like mine, there was no need for the kind of cutting that draws attention away from bad points. There weren’t any bad points. That was another thing about my mother. She wasn’t English, so she would talk to me about my breasts and my hips and my waist. Just then, when I was eighteen, they were all perfect.

  I can say this now, because it’s gone. It isn’t vanity, it’s like talking about someone else.

  I was wearing the French navy suit, with a little coral-coloured jersey, the first time I met Paul. I was out for the evening with a couple of girlfriends. We’d been to the cinema and we were having coffee afterwards. I can remember exactly where we were sitting. It was warm in the cafe, and I took off my jacket. The jersey was new and it was cashmere, short-sleeved. I’d saved for a month to buy it. You know how it is when you wear something that fits perfectly, so that you don’t have to think about it. You can move just as you want, you can sit down or reach up for something and it will move with you.

  I stretched out to take a cigarette from Mandy, and I saw a man watching me. I thought ‘man’, not ‘boy’. He was twenty-one, a couple of years older than me. He was wearing a dark suit, and a dark-blue tie, and he was drinking an espresso. He was with a couple of men who looked as if they might be his brothers, though it turned out that they weren’t. It was just that they were the same type, dark, quite well-dressed, finished. They didn’t look English. But he was the one you noticed. I turned away from him, just a fraction, and lit the cigarette. I remember laughing and talking to Mandy and Sue with the extra concentration that probably never fools anybody. I felt a glow on me, as if lights were stroking my body. Everything was exaggerated: my jersey soft as a kitten, the coffee the blackest and bitterest I’d ever drunk. I swallowed the smoke from my cigarette, then narrowed my eyes as it seeped out. I thought that was so sophisticated. Of course I hadn’t even looked at him, but I knew he was still looking at me.

  I haven’t seen Anna for eight months. When she was little I used to wonder what she was going to look like when she grew up. I remember her running through from the bathroom to the bedroom, naked. She must have been about two and a half. And already her body wasn’t just a baby body, it was a little girl’s body. And I remember thinking how her hips and breasts would swell and her waist would seem to grow small. And I wondered if she’d look like me. I thought about going to buy clothes with her, teaching her how to spend money on herself, and get it right.

  He’s got plenty of money.

  Johnnie’s not handsome, like Paul. He’s much more… troubling. The first time I saw the two of them together it was like a light going on. You think, ‘So that’s it.’ And the whole thing suddenly makes sense. Who they were, where they came from, and why Paul was as he was.

  Johnnie wasn’t doing well at school. But that didn’t matter, because Paul was making money now, and he was going to take Johnnie out of the crap primary they’d both been to and put him into a private school, one of those livery-company schools. And he did, too. Johnnie passed the entrance exam, no problem. He was a bright kid, he wasn’t even lazy. He was just… easily distracted is about the best way of putting it.

  Paul started going to Parents’ Evenings. Fair enough, he had a right to do so, he was the one paying. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back it must have raised a few eyebrows among the teachers. Paul aged twenty-two, listening carefully to everything the teachers said, asking questions. Not quite the right questions at first, but he soon learned. Some of the teachers were twice his age, and Paul had never got past O-level. But he was the one paying their salaries, and he never forgot that. And more than that, he was quicker than most of them. I didn’t go, not even when we were married and Johnnie was living with us. Paul never asked me. Johnnie was his affair. And I was pleased he took so much trouble over Johnnie. I wasn’t jealous; I was never jealous. I used to think that if this was what Paul was like over his little brother, then he was going to make a fantastic father.

  I haven’t seen Anna for over eight months. I know Paul didn’t take her away because he loved her. He does, but that wasn’t the reason. He could have loved her, and left her with me. He took her away because he’d taken Johnnie away from his mother. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, if he loves someone.

  Anna writes to me sometimes, but she’s not good at letters. I could go up there. I could take a room in an hotel and visit her. He wouldn’t stop me. But I don’t think it’s what I should do.

  Paul’s been very, very clever. The most important thing is, he’s got self-control. It’s as easy to lose money in properly as it is to win it, because most people get too greedy. They want something more than the profit that can be made. They want something grandiose, a huge gesture fizzing up into the sky and taking them with it. This is what Paul says. The other thing that goes wrong is when someone can’t deal with losses. You’ve got to be able to write it off, and never think of it again. You’ve only got so much energy, Paul used to say, you can’t waste any of it on failures. Not even your own. I didn’t understand the full force of what he was saying then, because I didn’t understand then that failure is as much of a magnet as success. I do now.

  Paul always had a plan. By the time we’d been married five years he was moving out of houses into derelict land. He didn’t know anything about land contamination when he started, but he soon realized there’d be a lot of money in taking contaminated sites off local councils at low valuations, contracting out the decontamination, and then developing. He’d spend days with council officials, planning officers, environmental-health officers, clerks from Town Halls. Everything they told him, he used. He bought them, and used them, and each of them thought they’d given him no more than his money’s worth. They didn’t see the pieces adding up afterwards, or what Paul was able to do with them. He was making more money than we’d ever dreamed possible, but he never compared now with then. He wouldn’t be dragged back. Paul’s like that about the past. As far as he’s concerned, you can cut it off and never think about it again.

  Or he could have done, if it hadn’t been for Johnnie. Johnnie was already starting to dip his fingers in the dirty water. Paul just couldn’t believe it. Johnnie had had everything laid on for him. Paul didn’t see how anyone could be that stupid, when it was so easy to be sharp, and rich, and safe. Johnnie’d had what Paul never had: he’d had father and brother, all rolled into one, and a future that someone else had already paid for.

  I don’t know exactly what Johnnie’s doing now. I know Paul’s still trying to keep him in the business. There’s
a car and an office and good money for Johnnie. But so far none of it has had any real appeal. Johnnie left the school as soon as he hit sixteen. The thing that upset me about that was the thought of all those teachers saying how they’d known all along. Thinking they’d got the better of Paul, in some way, even though it was their job to educate Johnnie. Two years later Johnnie nearly got caught. He sat across the kitchen table from me, smiling, and told me there’d been a complete fuck-up over manufacturing acid in a farmhouse in Herefordshire. He would have made a million. It was always a million with Johnnie: some glittering amount of money that you couldn’t really pin down.

  The next thing, he had an interest in a boadoad of hash which was supposed to be brought into a little-known cove on the north Cornwall coast. So little known, as it turned out, that the skipper they’d hired couldn’t find it. At the time Paul pretended to take the view that this was all part of Johnnie growing up and taking responsibility for himself, but I could tell he was beside himself. It was the way Johnnie would look at you with his eyes glowing like a kid at Christmas, and say, ‘But it’s immaculate, Paul! Nothing’s going to go wrong this time.’

  We let ourselves think he was like a child. It was the angle we looked at him. When you see a cat play, if you can call it play, you thank God it’s the size it is.

  Twelve

  Anna and David are friends now. Nobody else knows. They meet in halfway places. ‘See you down the beeches tomorrow,’ one of them says, or ‘I’m going up the river tomorrow. You want to come?’ The spring wears on, buds thicken, catkins shake loose, and there’s a smell like sherbet from tassels of flowering currant. The Easter holidays come and the weight of school drops away as if it’s never existed. Anna forgets it; she’s good at forgetting things. She wakes and hears the wind rushing in the branches, looks out and sees light and shadow racing over the land. She doesn’t go up to the village in holiday time. Every morning she tells herself that it is more than two weeks before she’ll have to see Emily Faraday or Billy Arkinstall, or sit itching with boredom while Fanny Fairway prates about the rainforest.

  David’s waiting for her, down by the river, on the stone bridge. They lean side by side watching the race of brown water from pool to pool. If they were younger, Anna thinks, they could make boats and race them downstream under the bridge. But they don’t. They’re ten, going on eleven. Anna’s grown six inches in the last year, and under her brown knitted T-shirt there are the beginnings of her breasts. One is bigger than the other, but they’re nothing to get excited about yet. There was a programme on Schools TV which all the top-class girls watched, packed tight into the staff room. It was about breasts and periods, and at the end every girl got a free plain-white box. Outside, the boys were rampant. Billy Arkinstall knocked a box out of a girl’s hands and ran round the playground waving a stick-on towel.

  ‘Stick your mouth up with it, Billy!’ yelled Courtney, who’d fallen out with her cousin over money he’d borrowed and not paid back. ‘They should put proper locks on the girls’ toilets, instead of showing us a crap film like that,’ said Emily Faraday. Anna had to agree with her. Using the school toilets was a nightmare, unless you had a reliable friend to hold the door shut for you. Sometimes the boys poured in, banging on the doors and shoving them open, tipping out the sanitary bins the school had been forced to put in when Mrs Faraday had come up to the school in pomp to tell them Emily had ‘started’.

  David and Anna standing together, watching the long, muscular ropes of current twist through the water. They watch the brown shadows, and the skulking-places of fish. David knows everything about the river. The spring sun is sharp on their backs. In summer there’ll be no sun here, only thick, green shadow. The mill chimney stands at their back. Everything else has gone: the mill, the smoking chimneys, the chopping of wood for fuel, the harnessing of water, the pounding of metal-tipped clogs on the cobbled tracks, the flicker of innumerable fingers on the looms. The black-ribbed trees wait for their tide of green. Farther up there’ll be bluebells, smoky-blue under shallow-rooted beech. The river is full of heavy stones, kneading the water into pools and fast, foaming passages.

  ‘There’s a pool you can swim in, farther up,’ says David. ‘I swam in it all last summer. But someone’s dumped an old car.’

  ‘How did they do that?’

  ‘Pushed it up the track, shoved it over the edge. My dad says —’

  Anna ceases to hear him. She’s thinking about last summer. She wasn’t friends with David then, and she didn’t know about him coming to swim. What if she’d walked up the river some time, and seen him? She knows what he looks like in his swimming trunks, because they all get in a double-decker and go off swimming in Halifax once a week. But when she swam in the river she didn’t wear anything. She looked round and pulled her clothes off, and slid in. Once she was in it didn’t seem as if anyone could see her, even if they pushed their way up the tangled path. She was so broken up with light and shadow it didn’t look as if she had a body.

  ‘— you have to watch yourself, ’cos the edges of the metal are torn,’ David is saying.

  Anna puts her hand on his sleeve. ‘Hush.’

  There’s the whine of an engine in low gear, coming along the track that leads from the town, on the other side of the river from Anna’s house. The children flatten themselves against the stone parapet for the car to pass them.

  ‘Wow,’ says David. ‘Wonder whose that is?’

  Spring sunlight glitters on the car’s bodywork. It comes on slowly, growling, the wheels dug deep in winter leaf-slime.

  ‘It’s my uncle,’ says Anna, flushing all over.

  ‘Doesn’t he know he can’t get the car up to your house that way?’

  The track from the river up to Anna’s house is deeply ridged, ploughed by weather so that cobblestones stand out on end. God knows how long it’s been since anyone mended it.

  ‘Someone’s told him wrong,’ says David.

  The car’s alongside them, its scarlet flank inches from their legs.

  ‘Johnnie!’ yells Anna, ‘Johnnie!’

  He hears her. He turns his face on her, his flashing smile, his thin, hungry, beautiful face. He stops and leans across the passenger seat to open the door. ‘Get in,’ he says.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ says Anna. ‘You’ll have to turn round.’

  ‘They told me the way in the town,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘They told you wrong,’ says David.

  Johnnie looks from one to another of them. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he says. His eyes sharpen with yellow light. He shades them with his hands and stares up the track, at the spring-naked, brilliant side of the hill. ‘Are you coming in with me?’ he asks them.

  David strokes the side of the car longingly. But he can’t come up to the house. He knows it, Anna knows it, and it’s never had to be said. And anyway this is mad, what Johnnie’s trying to do. He can’t force that beautiful car up the broken track. It’ll be banged to bits.

  ‘It’ll take your exhaust off,’ says David.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be fine,’ says Johnnie. He judges the bare, dazzling trees, the too-bright light. The track goes on up, gashed and buckled with winter floods. Johnnie puts the car into gear and touches the accelerator so the engine growls. He looks at Anna and she finds her hand on the car door, her body sliding obediently into the thick, creamy leather of the seat. The smell of the car rises round her, taking her into a separate world.

  ‘Isn’t your mate coming?’

  ‘He can’t. He has to go home.’ She turns back to David with a baffled sense that she shouldn’t be leaving him here. But of course he’s all right. He knows every inch of this valley. It’s his, not hers, even though she lives here. David is frowning, looking at the car, gauging it against the climb which he knows like the back of his hand. He looks grown-up. And Anna thinks, surprised, that David looks older than Johnnie, even though Johnnie’s a man and David’s only a boy. And he judges Johnn
ie in the same way as the track and the car.

  ‘You want to put your seat-belt on, Anna,’ he says. But before she can reach for the belt, the car’s moving. Stones spurt as the tyres gouge into the track, and then David’s face slides past, pale as winter.

  ‘I’ll have to speak to Paul about this track,’ says Johnnie. His teeth are white, his lips laughing. But it’s not really laughter, it’s just the way of his face. How she wants to make him laugh. It’s like an ache that lasts all the time Johnnie’s here. To make him laugh, to make him turn to her and his eyes light in that sudden recognition that tugs her into the circle of being his. As long as he’s here, all she wants is to belong to Johnnie.

  ‘It’s not my dad’s, this part,’ says Anna. They are going very slowly, very carefully, over on the right side of the track. The crunching of the tyres sounds terribly close. They edge round the sharp bend.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Johnnie. ‘I see what you mean.’

  This is the steepest part, and the worst. Nobody ever drives up here. He’ll go back, Anna thinks. He can reverse to the bridge and then we’ll drive back into town along the track and come up through the village, and David can come too, for the ride.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ says Johnnie. He revs hard and a deep, animal sound of engine answers. The tyres leap. Little stones spatter and hit the wall. The car bounds, lurches, grappling the next ridge of cobbled stone. The tyres rasp like claws, then break off. The car jolts back into the rut it’s dug for itself.

  ‘Fuck it,’ says Johnnie. He’s still smiling. He presses down on the accelerator and the car churns against the ridge, tyres spinning, then falls back for the second time. There’s a smell of rubber and hot metal. ‘Ah, fuck it.’

  Anna clutches her seat. The car judders, its front tyres grinding. Then the engine roars, and all at once the car springs. There’s a grating sound of metal on stone. One front wheel is up on the ridge, the other whines at air. The bonnet flashes, rearing upward. To Anna it looks as if they are aimed for the tops of the bright, bare trees. Johnnie guns the engine again and the car surges up, zigzagging the next bit of rutted track.