With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

  There are times when you think your life has changed for ever, and it can never go back to the way it was. That night in the hospital was one of them. By the time Anna was born it wasn’t night any more, it was morning. The midwife left us to have a few minutes with the baby before they cleaned me up. Paul went to the window, looked out. He said, ‘It’s raining,’ then he came back to the bed and knelt down beside it so his face was level with the baby where I was holding her wrapped in one of those towels that have the hospital name printed on them. She was fast asleep. He didn’t touch her. He just looked and looked, for a long time. And I said, ‘We did it,’ and he nodded. There wasn’t room for questions, because all the answers were wrapped up in my arms.

  Paul was wiped out. So tired, and younger-looking than I’d ever seen him, even when we first met. Paul’s one of those men who’ve never let themselves look young. He always had to look older than he was, so people would take him seriously.

  He didn’t touch her. I remember that quite clearly. I think he was frightened, that’s all it was. There was this new person in the room with us, and we didn’t know her. It shouldn’t have troubled me, because there was plenty of time, but it did trouble me. I felt as if he hadn’t reached out and claimed her. It pressed down on me, even then in the moment that she was born. I had my knowledge of where she had come from, and it pressed down on me. My mother would have said that it trod on my tongue. It stopped me saying to him to all the little senseless things I wanted to say to someone, about the beauty of her and how I couldn’t believe it. How there was nothing else in the world like her, and we had made her. It trod my tongue down, because it would have been a lie.

  I wish he had touched her. I wish he’d held her. I wish I’d put her into his arms. He’s claimed her now, but not in the way it should have been, with both of us there and knowing it was right.

  I could hear the rain, now that Paul had told me it was there. We were on the fifth floor of the hospital, in a private room. The wind threw rain against the windows, then let it go so it streamed down the glass. It rained all the five days I was in there. I used to lie and watch it. I wasn’t going to feed Anna myself, because Paul didn’t like the idea of it when I was pregnant. Lots of men don’t. But after he left that morning I told the sister I’d changed my mind, I wanted to try. She was pleased with me.

  Paul came in twice a day, though he never stayed long, because he had a thing about hospitals. And he was busy with the flat he was buying for Johnnie. He didn’t know how I could stand it, being there all the time, and I didn’t say that I enjoyed it. It was a little world of its own. I used to take Anna along the corridor to the lounge where the other mums watched TV. I liked having a private room, but I wanted to talk about Anna and my nipples and stitches and all that stuff you can’t imagine not being disgusted by, until it happens to you.

  Paul used to come in and talk about money. I knew it was because there was no one else he could talk to about it, not freely, as if he was wandering about in his own mind while he talked. His business associates knew the bit they needed to know, and no more. He kept them in the dark deliberately.

  He’d just lost nearly all the money he’d put into a property company called Bluebell Securities. He didn’t let on exactly how much for a while, but I knew it was a lot. Paul didn’t say much about it. What was gone was gone: he was always very pragmatic like that. But he was angry with himself because he’d been completely taken in by this man, Christopher Ross. Chris Ross. We’d been to his house, been out with him and his wife for dinner. Chris paid. He had everything: the voice, the car, the house, glossy-looking kids and his wife in designer jeans, white linen shirt and just one heavy diamond on her left hand. I quite liked her. She was nice to me about the baby, but she was so on edge that you couldn’t really relax and talk to her. I didn’t understand why, at the time.

  We all went for a weekend in Paris, and stayed in a little grey hotel off the Boulevard St Germain. I loved it. There was a courtyard with tubs of flowers. They were mostly hydrangeas, with big, loose white flowers that spilled over the sides of the tubs. Then there was another courtyard inside, dark and secret, with a goldfish pool and spindly metal chairs and tables. Everyone in the hotel was very quiet and correct, and they didn’t bother you. I didn’t feel like going out much. I was perfectly happy to sit in the chairs and order coffee and read the magazines that were piled up in the salon. All the latest issues, French Vogue and English Vogue, French Elle and English Elle. One thing I really enjoyed about being pregnant was that you could look at pictures of beautiful, slender models without any sort of worry that you ought to be looking like that.

  Paul went out with Chris and Alicia. They showed him everything, took him to all the restaurants everybody wants to go to in Paris. I was glad he was having such a good time. I thought it was great that for once he could mix business with really good company: friendship, almost. Chris spoke brilliant French and he was always teaching phrases to Paul, and saying how quickly Paul picked it up, that he had a real gift for languages and he ought to develop it. I sat there daydreaming by the little pool where the goldfish tickled my fingers if I kept them still enough, and I thought maybe we’d come here lots of times, and we’d look back on our first visit, with Chris and Alicia.

  Paul learned a lot through that. He knew all about real villains, but he was still a bit naïve when it came to crooks like Chris. Both of us learned a lot, really. I realized it had nothing to do with money or education or background. Chris had to con you. It was much more important to him than sex, or even money, though you’d have thought money was the whole point of it. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d given Chris a million pounds, the next day he’d have started again. He had to have that moment when he knew he’d got you to trust him, and he could do what he liked with you. In a way he really did love you, just for that moment, because you’d let him have what he wanted. That second day in Paris, you’d have thought Paul was his brother.

  We never went back to Paris, which was a pity, really, a whole city spoiled like that.

  ∗

  I don’t hate Sonia. I feel sorry for her if you want the truth, though she’d never believe it. She looks down on me all right. Anything to hide from herself the fact that she’s frightened, deep down, of all that me and Paul have had, and she’ll never have.

  I sent Anna some money with the letter. I told her to put it away in case she ever needed it. I meant, don’t think because I don’t come to see you that I’m not your mother any more. I made sure I wrote the letter in the morning, when I was feeling all right. Where’s the use in upsetting her?

  People think if you’re a mother who doesn’t have her kid living with her, then you must be some sort of devil. They think there’s a reason. But I love Anna. Sometimes I think about the other mums in the hospital, and how we talked about everything. We knew we were all going back into our own lives, so it didn’t matter what we said.

  No. It wasn’t really like that. The others were already making plans to get together after they got out. Get the babies together, have a coffee and a laugh. But I said nothing, because I knew with Paul it wouldn’t work. He never wanted me having friends round to the house; not what I would call friends. People he was doing business with, yes. And their wives, too, so sometimes it could look almost like friendship. Couples coming and going and laughing. like it did with Chris and Alicia.

  I remember Paul, in Paris, going out through the courtyard with them, and waving back to me. When he came back he told me all about where they’d been, and what they’d eaten. I knew he’d have been watching Chris without seeming to, so he wouldn’t make any mistakes. He sat on the side of the bed taking off his shoes and we were laughing and feeling great, as if we’d bought Paris all for ourselves.

  But it turned out it was Paul’s hundred thousand pounds Chris and Alicia were after. At first I said to myself it was just Chris, and she didn’t know. I wanted to believe that, because she was nice to me about the baby. But
I knew it was both of them, really. Alicia was part of what made people trust Chris, and they both understood that. He knew it happily, and she knew it unhappily, but that was the only difference between them. They were a couple of Judases. They should have stuck to money, but they had to mix it up with love.

  I used to talk to Johnnie more than anyone. He was the closest friend I ever had. I could tell Johnnie anything. Paul didn’t like it, because he wanted Johnnie to himself. That’s why he bought the flat. It took me a long time to understand that. I thought he was jealous because of me, but it was the other way round. He was jealous because of Johnnie.

  For a long time it frightened me, and when I’m not careful it still does. On a bad night, I keep seeing Anna in my arms in her yellow shawl, wrapped up tight the way the midwife taught me. And then I lift her up and put her into Paul’s arms. Then I look from his arms to his face, and I see it isn’t Paul, it’s Johnnie. The way he’s holding her isn’t right, and I’m afraid he’s going to drop her, so I hold out my arms to have her back. And he says in a voice which is half Paul’s, and half Johnnie’s: You gave her to me. You can’t have her back.

  Seventeen

  That flat for Johnnie. The first time Paul went into it there was nothing. It was empty, with the smell of air that’s been in prison. Flies on the window-sills, fag-ends on the floor. It’d been empty a long time. Nobody else’d seen what Paul saw, that this area was going to come up. The flat was a repossession. Paul had an instinct for changes in property values, the way other people have instincts for a change in the weather. He didn’t know himself how he did it. He knew things. Information clung to him like dust on static. He knew when a sink school got a new head and suddenly the word was out among the parents that things were changing. He knew which way planning committees were bending over the route of a new road. He could have licked his finger, held it up in the air and told you which way the money was blowing. Except he didn’t tell you. He bought.

  The flat smelled of failure. Paul knew that smell and he hated it. He wanted to wipe it out. He didn’t tell anybody else what he was doing, not even Louise. Buying another property, that was nothing to her. At the time he was going through with a deal to buy up fifteen ex-council flats. They had asbestos problems which made them unsuitable for direct sale to tenants. A job lot. He knew the problems and knew he’d sell the flats for three times what he’d paid, once the asbestos was sorted. The surveyor had done his bit, making the most of things, putting a spin on the costings.

  This flat now, though, Johnnie’s flat, this was something different. Plaster mouldings, cornices, beautiful wide floor-boards under the cheap, felted carpet. There was a narrow kitchen, a bathroom with a cracked acrylic bath.

  He wanted the place empty. He wanted it clean. He started coming to the flat every day, as if he was visiting a woman. The work went fast, with men diverted from the council flats to steam-strip layers of wallpaper, make good the walls and paste them with lining-paper. There was some replastering needed, not much. Most of it only wanted a skim. He skipped everything in the bathroom and kitchen, and started again: white cast-iron in the bathroom, plain, pale wood in the kitchen, new cooker, new fridge. Not that Johnnie cooked, but it all had to be there. He bought Italian tiles, hand-made, so you didn’t come out with a dead block of colour staring at you across the room.

  The place was taking shape. He paid the men a bonus and sent them back to the flats. He wanted to sand the floors himself, paint the walls, choose the rugs and sofa and bed. He was spending two or three hours there every evening, more at weekends. He told Louise he had a lot on, what with the flats and the negotiations on a former bonded warehouse with planning permission for conversion. For once, he didn’t give a fuck if he got the warehouse or not. He was back where he started, making something out of nothing. The floors were as good as he’d thought. He hired the machine and sanded and sealed all through the flat. He’d forgotten it could be like this, the sun moving across the big empty windows, the jar of coffee and the jar of sugar, the cans of beer in the fridge. He had the radio on and he ate take-away sitting on the floor, his legs stretched in front of him, a fresh pack of cigarettes on the window-sill. It felt like home.

  He spent an evening brushing the walls down, after the sanding was finished. This was the way he’d been when he started out, with the first house he’d bought, borrowing the money from Charlie Sullivan because no bank would look at him then. Charlie screwed him, and thought Paul was too green to know he was being screwed. That was his mistake. Paul worked all the hours God sent on the pissy little bedsits, the plasterboard partitioning, the crap plumbing and the electrics that hadn’t been touched in forty years. He knew what he was after. Three two-bedroom flats, one of them a garden flat which could be sold at a five-thousand premium. The garden was a junkyard of broken concrete, old tyres, a dumped fridge, a dumped washing-machine. Paul didn’t even look at it. There would be plenty of time for that at the end.

  He borrowed more money off Charlie for labour and plant hire. He saw the smile Charlie didn’t quite hide. At night he woke and counted the speed at which the debt was growing, then he got up and drove to the site and got working. There was always something that could be done. He knew what the kind of people who were going to buy his flats would want. He could see them as if they were standing in front of him with their wallets open: it was his vision. They wouldn’t have much money once they’d signed the mortgage agreement, so they didn’t want to buy work. They’d want everything to look finished, but they wouldn’t notice detail the way he did. He could get away with cheap pine doors that were wrong for the house, as long as they were lime-washed, but there had to be a power shower, and as many work surfaces as he could cram into the narrow kitchens. He made sure Charlie came round to look at the house when it was at its worst.

  ‘It’s a big job you’ve taken on here, Paul,’ said Charlie.

  ‘It is,’ said Paul. He let his fingers play with a cigarette. He cleared his throat. ‘You don’t need to worry about your money, Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Charlie. ‘I never worry about my money. I know when it’s safe.’ And he showed his teeth again, in the way he thought was a smile.

  The flats were done in seven months. Paul painted every wall himself, in airy, neutral colours. He ran a 50 per cent wool, 50 per cent polypropylene carpet in a warm pinky-beige through all the flats, and in a darker shade down the common stairways. He carpeted the garden, unrolling slabs of green turf on to the cleared, levelled earth. And then the final touch: a huge terracotta pot full of trailing geraniums, visible from every window. He tore out the front garden with its mean privet hedge and sickly lawn, had it brick-paved for three cars. And he saw Charlie driving past, slowing down, looking hard. A dull, classy-looking terracotta paint on the front door, brass door furniture, plain white paint everywhere else. It was time to sell.

  Paul was lucky. Property went on up, hand over hand, all the months he spent on the flats. Looking back, he felt frightened at the risk, but at the time he knew, he just knew it was right. Even when he felt dizzy calculating Charlie Sullivan’s interest, there was never a doubt in his mind that he’d be able to pay it back. No, his doubts about Charlie Sullivan were of another kind.

  And the buyers came, just as he knew they would. Young couple after young couple. He thought of them as young, though they were older than he was, but they were young in a way he’d never been. He wore a dark suit to meet them when the agent brought them to the house. He was slow, measured, a little reluctant, as if the privilege of owning one of these flats was something he was loath to part with. He didn’t need to think about how to play it. There was one way, the right way, the way that was going to work. They looked at what he wanted them to look at. It wasn’t real looking, anyway: it was a sort of grazing over what they knew from the first moment that they wanted. The price was right. High, but not greedy. And they could see, just looking around at the new electric sockets, the new radiators, the sparkling
taps, that there’d be nothing more to pay. The work was done for them.

  All three flats went in a week. He picked cash buyers. When the money came through he went round to Charlie Sullivan to pay him off. He wasn’t going to pay an extra day of Charlie’s interest.

  Charlie greeted him warmly. ‘Nice job, Paul. Didn’t I tell you you were on to a good thing there?’

  ‘I’ve got your money, Mr Sullivan.’

  He counted it out in front of Charlie Sullivan, note by note. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds. But less than half of what he’d made, and by now Charlie knew it.

  ‘There’s something missing,’ said Charlie at the end, after he’d signed off the debt.

  ‘Is there, Mr Sullivan?’

  ‘It’s what we call goodwill, in the trade. I’ve given you your start, Paul. You need your goodwill if you’re going to get on in a business like yours.’

  ‘You do, Mr Sullivan. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  ‘You and me should be partners,’ said Charlie, turning his back.

  Money buys all sorts of things. Paul knew that now. He went to a club where he knew he’d find the man he wanted.

  ‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘It’s a little bit of veterinary work. You know Charlie Sullivan?’

  The man rested his cue on his forearm, let it sway and balance there. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘He’s got a little dog. Cocker spaniel.’

  ‘I’ve no objection.’

  ‘I want you to get hold of it.’

  ‘Could be tricky.’

  ‘Could be a very fair price.’

  ‘What’s a fair price?’

  ‘A grand.’

  ‘A grand for Charlie Sullivan’s cocker spaniel? You’re barking.’

  ‘I don’t want it. I want you to break its legs.’