The Heart Broke In (30 page)

‘What if I haven’t done anything wrong?’

‘I’m not authorised to discuss what you might or might not
have done, Mr Shepherd. I’m just informing you that on the twenty-eighth of February—’

‘Isn’t there a law that says a man’s supposed to be told what he’s accused of?’

‘If you’ve done something wrong, Mr Shepherd, you must know what it is. If you are a good and righteous man you have nothing to worry about.’

‘Can I speak to Val?’

‘Mr Oatman doesn’t take calls, Mr Shepherd.’

‘Tell me what you’re going to write about me.’

‘I’m not authorised to discuss what you might or might not have done, Mr Shepherd. I can only suggest you look at our website to see examples of notable people we’ve caught sinning in the past. In your case I can only give you a hypothetical example of the kind of thing we might know about you. It might be, for example, that we know you had sex with a child who appeared on your show. But I must stress that’s a hypothetical example.’

‘If Val’s so holy, why’s he set himself up to make judgements on us, as if he were God? Isn’t that some kind of sin?’

‘You’d have to ask Mr Oatman about that, Mr Shepherd.’

‘Can I speak to him?’

‘Mr Oatman doesn’t take calls. I have to give you a code, Mr Shepherd.’

‘What code?’

‘Can you write it down for me, Mr Shepherd? It’s very important. It’s A35ZX47. That’s your code.’

‘Why should I write down your fucking code?’

‘Please don’t use profanity, Mr Shepherd, it won’t help you. You’re under no obligation to write the code down. But you need it to verify your identity if you choose to guarantee your
exclusion from Foundation scrutiny by giving us information on the moral failings of another person close to you.’

‘Such as who?’

‘I can only give you a hypothetical example,’ said Maggie. ‘A hypothetical example would be if you had a prominent sibling. A brother or a sister.’

‘I know what sibling means, you condescending bitch,’ said Ritchie.

‘Please don’t use profanity, Mr Shepherd. It’s out of keeping with your status.’

‘You know I don’t have a brother.’

‘Would you like me to repeat the code, Mr Shepherd?’

‘You’re the sinner! You! Trying to get me to betray my sister to save myself. You can tell Val I won’t do it. Write what you like about me. I’ll see you in court.’

‘Would you like me to repeat the code, Mr Shepherd?’

‘Tell me if you like, it won’t make any difference,’ said Ritchie, and wrote it down.

Bec wasn’t aware of being happy that spring. She only thought about it when one of her friends told her she seemed happy, or when she noticed a man watching her curiously in the street and realised she’d been walking with a smile on her face.

Her paper reporting on the trial of the malaria vaccine was published and although it still seemed to her that it was a failure, everyone else appeared to think half-immunity for infants was a worthwhile thing. Multiple vaccines, that was the buzz; they’d overlap. Melinda Gates called to congratulate her. Vaccine company reps and panjandrums from the WHO sprinkled themselves into her diary.

The centre arranged dozens of interviews, and for a few days old friends who’d lost touch sent messages to say that they’d seen her on a website or in a magazine or heard her on the radio. It seemed to Bec that Alex never had to go into a supermarket and see a stack of newspapers with his face on the front of every one, as she had. Bec didn’t understand why they couldn’t use a photograph of a sad African child in the way they usually did. In each interview, Bec told the journalists that they should talk to the Tanzanians. They wrote down the phone numbers and email addresses of Issa, Mosi and
Mbita, but if they did contact them, nothing they said ever appeared.

Alex told Bec the covenant in Harry’s will was so ingeniously worded that, if they didn’t live in the house, it would stand empty. There seemed nothing to do except move in.

Matthew took everything away, apart from the wine, which Harry had bequeathed to the new tenants. One bottle came in a box addressed to Bec personally.
Chateau Lynch Bages, Grand Cru Classé, Pauillac
; it was dated 1972. A note that came with it read:

She read the note several times, folded it and put it away somewhere safe without showing it to Alex. She asked him what year Matthew had been born.

‘1971. Why?’

‘So he’s a year older than you? I just wondered.’

Alex and Bec’s possessions diffused rapidly through the house. Their books took up barely a quarter of the bookshelves and they didn’t have curtains. They liked the bareness of the rooms, the few items they had spread out in a house of white walls and floorboards whose varnish was wearing thin.

They got used to the patterns of daylight, darkness and lamplight furnishing the rooms in a way their scatterings of things didn’t. They put the bed they’d brought from Bec’s house into the big first-floor room Harry had used as a sitting
room and spent a great part of their weekends in it. They felt as if they were squatting in the house of a rich family who might at any moment return. Lying in bed on Saturday mornings they imagined who would burst in on them. A tanned white-haired man smelling of musk, said Bec. In a black suit, black tie and sunglasses, said Alex. Wearing driving gloves and carrying a shooting stick. He would open the stick, sit down on it, peel off his gloves carefully.

‘Watching us all the time,’ said Bec.

‘Of course. Then he’d take out a gold cigarette case, remove a cigarette, light it with a gold lighter, inhale, and rest his hands on his knee.’

‘Would his legs be crossed?’

‘I think so. Big gold ring on his smoking hand. And then he’d say, with an Italian accent …’

‘Fuck, per favore!’

‘No, no,’ said Alex. ‘He’d say, “Please, would you mind waiting for my wife, she loves to watch intruders fucking. She’s just parking the car.”’

But they weren’t intruders, and they weren’t poor. Between the two of them they were bringing in more than a hundred and fifty thousand a year. The actual family they were waiting for, Bec knew, was a lanky man in his early forties and a red-cheeked woman about seven years younger, a little overweight, with a baby in her arms.

What Bec did feel the house lacked, as long as they hadn’t started filling it up with their own children, was people. They were talking about giving a room to a deserving post-grad when Alex got a text from Dougie asking if he could stay with them while he looked for a job in London. The way Alex put it to Bec made her think that he expected her to say no, but
she was glad. ‘We’ll put him in Matthew’s old room,’ she said. ‘We can get another bed.’

May and June were warm, the air still and the sky clear in the long dawns when the plane and chestnut trees in the streets, squares and parks unclenched their leaves. To the ears of people sleeping in the grass on hot afternoons, the aircraft and the traffic came like ocean surf beating on a reef, far from shore. Cafés and pubs spilled their tables and drinkers outside and the fractal branching of brick terraces smelled of hot tar, firelighters and grilling meat. Boys rocked bare-chested to the park with cans and footballs and slyly watched girls unclip their bras to tan their backs. The sighs of cricket and tennis crowds eddied from open car windows and Asian boys’ sound systems in tiny tricked-out cars shook the city like thumbs plucking at slackly strung strings. As it was the change of season memories of a hundred years of summer songs, on every continent, came to the surface in the heads of the old people of London. Flags hung limp and the city’s towers and spires and battlements, its wheel and clock, grew legendary in grainy haze. Strange, beautiful faces appeared that were only ever seen outside when the sun shone.

One Sunday afternoon Alex and Bec borrowed a bike for Dougie and the three of them cycled along the canal to London Fields to meet a couple of Bec’s schoolfriends. They took wine and food and sat around their picnic with the bikes laid on the grass beside them forming an outer circle of wheels. Across the expanse of grass were scores of other circles of picnickers and bicycle wheels. Some had brought barbecues in tinfoil boxes and the half-dozen columns of smoke gave the park the appearance of the courtyard of a caravanserai. They talked until the shadows lengthened. Everyone around them was
conversing as if the reporting to each other of their lives, their moods, their memories and their dreams was the qualifying condition of their existence. Where did all these conversations go when they died, Bec wondered? Were people learning and growing when they sat and chatted for hours on these summer days? Were they drawing conclusions? Some of the groups in the park – perhaps her own – were only talking in the way humming a tune is making music, while the real exchanges were between eyes, light and bodies. Her friends stretched and tossed their hair in their summer dresses, and Alex answered them with his own smiles and frowns and leanings forward and hand gestures, without ever interrupting the flow of possession that passed between her and him. But Dougie didn’t flirt with Bec’s single girlfriends as she’d expected, or try to impress them with his extreme self-deprecation. He had an unexpected talent for shyness around strangers and Bec wondered how it was that he’d been so confident with her.

They mounted their bikes and rode to Broadway Market, where they sat on the edge of the pavement and drank pints, then went to a club in Shoreditch. It was early for the club, the queue hadn’t built up outside, and they sat at the edge of the empty dancefloor. After half an hour the music started, the lights began to twist and track spots of colour across the floor and the room filled up. Alex and Dougie stood a little to one side. Bec saw that Dougie was asking Alex for something and Alex was refusing. Dougie seemed to find the rejection funny. He said something more; it looked like a joke, or perhaps Dougie asked again, because Alex shook his head and looked down into his drink as if he were ashamed. A song began that Bec liked and she tried to pull Alex onto the dancefloor. He laughed and refused.

‘If you could only rock me in your arms,’ he said. He stayed talking to one of Bec’s friends while Dougie, Bec and the other friend merged into the dancers. Dougie couldn’t merge, he stood out, and made a virtue of his standing out. He wore a short-sleeved shirt he’d picked up at Oxfam, white with a pattern of bluebirds, three buttons open, and danced with his arms held away from his body, moving his hips as if he were about to begin bending into the limbo position, throwing his long blond hair from side to side with sharp twists of his head. His thumbs and fingers made snapping motions without actually snapping. There was something of the ruined hero about him, as if in his head he was dancing with a long-lost love. Bec leaned in close to Dougie’s ear to make herself heard over the music and asked if he’d like a drink. He smelled of sweat and soap.

‘It’s my shout,’ said Dougie. ‘But I’m skint.’

‘Were you trying to get a loan from Alex just now?’ asked Bec.

‘Aye,’ said Dougie. ‘It’s OK. I’m a wee bit behind on paying him back for an old loan, as a matter of fact.’

Bec put twenty pounds into Dougie’s hand and he told her he’d pay her back as soon as he found a job.

The three of them cycled home drunk at one a.m., when the streets teemed with clubbers. Bec was ahead. She cycled past a group of skinny men in tight trousers and pork pie hats. They turned their heads, stopped and watched after her. The hem of her dress was billowing up over her bare legs and one of the men yelled something in her wake, bending backwards and gesturing at his crotch. Coming up behind him Alex reached out and grabbed the hat off his head and accelerated away. Bec heard the commotion and
looked round to see Alex pedalling frantically towards her wearing a pork pie hat and shouting ‘Go! Go!’ A man was sprinting after him until Dougie, bringing up the rear, stuck out his foot and upended the pursuer into a heap of arms and legs. They cycled off up City Road to Angel and rode round and round Citron Square before going into the house. Alex and Bec rode side by side, holding hands, Bec with the stolen hat on her head, while Dougie cycled behind them with his hands off the handlebars, clapping and chanting: ‘Science’s golden cou-ple, science’s golden cou-ple, da rah rah rah, da rah rah rah.’

They went inside and sat slumped around the kitchen table. Dougie poured them all a shot of spirits, which none of them drank.

‘Chess set’s laid out,’ said Dougie. ‘The dust gathers.’

‘The one in your room? It used to be Matthew’s. It was the only thing he left behind.’

‘Pool’s more my game,’ said Dougie.

‘You used to play chess,’ said Alex. ‘You used to beat me.’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Dougie. ‘You used to beat me every time.’

‘It was Matty boy.’

‘It was you. I always wondered what was going on between the queen and the pawns,’ said Alex. ‘Are they her soldiers, her servants or her children?’

‘Her kids,’ said Dougie. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘A big line of kids. It’s a big family.’

‘And loyal,’ said Alex. ‘Ready to lay down their lives for their parents.’

‘If the pawns are children,’ said Bec, ‘the king isn’t the father. He’s so feeble. He must be ill, or very old. He makes
these little tottering steps, one at a time. I think the queen is much younger, and very good-looking, and she’s always going off and leaving the king. She tells the king it’s for his own protection, and maybe that’s what she tells herself, but I think it’s so she can spend more time with her lovers.’

‘Her lovers?’ said Alex. ‘You mean the knights?’

‘They wish!’ said Bec. ‘They’re too much in love with themselves and all their fancy sidestepping for her to be interested in them. And not the bishops, either. The bishops are only interested in sex.’

‘Because they look like little penises?’ said Alex.

‘I think the queen loves the rooks,’ said Bec. ‘She likes them because they’re strong, straightforward and patient. They’re reliable, but they’re still mysterious, because they’re not easy to get to, and they’re conflicted, because they’re loyal to the king.’

‘There are two of them,’ said Alex. ‘How does she choose?’

‘Maybe she doesn’t have to,’ said Bec. After a moment’s silence, all three of them laughed.

Bec took off the hat and gave it to Alex. He turned it over in his hands and smiled. ‘Eminent scientist steals hat,’ he said. ‘I’m interviewing post-docs all day tomorrow.’ He went to bed. Bec told him she’d come soon. They heard him singing softly as he walked upstairs.

A Mars a day

Helps you work, rest and play

‘How come you’re so chilled for a brainy chick?’ said Dougie. ‘See if it was me, just the thought of having to make choices for other people, and give them a hard time if they didn’t jump to it? I couldn’t handle it. And when there’s life and death at the end of it all. I can hardly run myself, like, and you bring other people into the mix: no way.’

‘It’s the same for your brother.’

‘Aye,’ said Dougie. ‘But he’s no one for shaking his booty on the dancefloor. Everything with Alex comes from talking.’

‘He got the hat for me tonight.’ Bec wondered how to tell Dougie that his eyes, seeking her own, made her uncomfortable, without using the word ‘uncomfortable’.

‘Hey, I’m no saying he’s no a superior human being to me. Of course he’s a better man.’

‘You don’t know all there is to know about him.’

Dougie got up, came round the table, put his hand on Bec’s shoulder and when she looked up to see what he was doing he tried to kiss her on the mouth. Bec turned her face away, stood up and took a step back.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ said Dougie. He looked beaten and scared. He sat down and hung his head so that his hair covered his face.

‘Don’t hide your face,’ said Bec. ‘Why did you just do that? You’re not so drunk. You know I’m in love with your brother.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dougie. He looked up. ‘I’m such a fucking arsehole. Everybody knows it. The folks must’ve told you. Alex must’ve told you. It’s always the same. When anybody decent tries to give me a hand up I end up trying to take what I’m not entitled to. I’m just a fucking loser, Bec. I shouldn’t have come. I’ll pack my stuff.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself,’ said Bec. ‘You’re not going to get out of this by telling me that you know you’re a loser, or by running away. You know I’m in love with your brother, don’t you?’