The Heart Broke In (35 page)

On Monday morning, forty-eight hours after Alex left, Bec had the first meeting of her new job. At lunch she turned down an invitation from an Indonesian-Austrian WHO official and went by herself to a sandwich bar, dazed by the number of things she had to do and by the knowledge that in the year to come she would have to make speeches at banquets and circle the world. On her way she passed a woman walking in the opposite direction who caught her eye, slowed down and turned her head to follow as they drew level. Bec didn’t recognise her. She smiled a quick uncertain smile and went on and into the sandwich bar. She stood in the queue and glanced round when the bell fixed to the door rang. The woman entered and came up to her.

‘Are you Rebecca Shepherd?’ asked the woman.

‘That’s my name,’ said Bec.

‘I recognised you from your picture in the paper. I’m Maria, Alex’s ex.’

She had short black hair, chestnut eyes and dark skin, with little constellations of olive freckles on her cheekbones. She was shorter than Bec, a few years older, and prettier than Bec had imagined. Maria’s black coat was open over her loose white top and black leggings and Bec could see that she was pregnant.

‘Congratulations,’ she said.

Maria laughed, thanked her and looked to the side with a quick I’m-not-worthy hunch of her shoulders.

‘It’s due in March,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I came in after you. You must think I’m a stalker.’

Bec told her not to be silly and instead of waiting in the queue for a sandwich she led Maria to a table by the window, where a waitress served them. Bec had lost her appetite and felt that she must look miserable. A horrible thought came to her.

‘This isn’t some sort of delayed IVF thing, is it?’ she asked. ‘From when you were together?’

‘Oh no!’ Maria held Bec’s arm. Her sympathy and apparently sentimental rather than visceral concern for Alex’s wellbeing unsettled Bec. ‘We made it the natural way, me and my new partner.’ She became grave. ‘So he told you about the IVF? Of course he did, of course he did, why wouldn’t he?’

Bec wanted to give herself time to think, but her mind didn’t come up with the pleasantries, and she stared at Maria with an expression that must have provoked pity in Alex’s former lover, because she grasped Bec’s hands and wrinkled her forehead and made a long, motherly ‘Ooooh’ sound. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you. My office is just around the corner, though, we were bound to meet. Your institute’s near here, isn’t it? I have been a bit of a stalker. I didn’t see your picture in the paper, I saw it on the Internet. I did a search and found the pictures of you. You’re quite a celebrity. I was a bit shocked, to be honest.’ She looked at Bec as if she’d swallowed something bitter. ‘Of course he went for someone younger.’

‘There was nothing going on between us while you were together. And you’ve obviously found someone you like.’

Maria showed by smiling and looking away that Bec was right. She became serious and said: ‘I haven’t told Alex I’m pregnant. Are you going to tell him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘He’ll find out eventually.’
She’s showing that she knows him better than me
, thought Bec.

‘He won’t find out so soon. We’re moving to Italy for my partner’s job. I don’t know how things are between you. It’s none of my business. But if he told you about the IVF he must have talked about why we broke up. I’m sure you asked him.’

‘Is there ever one reason?’

‘He never said but I’m sure he always thought it was my machinery that was broken, not his. He has this crazy pride. Ego.’

‘Why shouldn’t he find out?’

‘It’d be too cruel. It’d seem so final.’ Maria drew in breath and put her hand to her mouth. ‘My God I’m sorry, I haven’t been thinking clearly. I was thinking about him, not about you.’

Bec shrugged.

Maria said: ‘The thing I resent him for is never being prepared to countenance artificial insemination. If he’s so liberal, why does he have to insist the child’s genetically his? What does it matter if the father’s some anonymous donor you’re never going to meet who wanks into a pot in a kiosk in Doncaster?’

‘Why Doncaster?’

‘I don’t know. I imagine sperm donors coming from places
where there’s not much else to do on your days off. Have you met his mother? I always thought she was hinting at something. That I should
take matters into my own hands
. I thought about it. I’m sure it happens more often than we know. If there’d been a decent man I liked and he didn’t look completely different from Alex, I would’ve taken the chance, as long as I was sure Alex would never find out.’ An absent expression came over Maria’s face as if she were remembering an old story and finding new nuances in it. ‘I don’t see anything wrong with that. Everybody would get what they wanted.’

‘What about the other man?’ said Bec.

Maria shrugged. ‘Having sex with random women, impregnating them and never having to worry about the child? Isn’t that what men fantasise about?’

‘Not all of them.’

Maria looked at her coolly. She pushed herself back with her hand on the end of the table so that the front two legs of her chair lifted a few inches off the ground.

‘If I was in that situation again,’ she said, ‘if I was sure, I’d do it. I’d do it in a moment.’

The time difference made it hard for Bec and Alex to catch each other to talk. She was moving offices, to a government building; a promising young parasitologist, Isobel, would run her research group while she was doing her new job. But these changes didn’t distract her as she would have liked.

On the Friday after Alex left, Karin came to town to consult with her label. She met Bec afterwards, looking as if she’d stepped out of
Vogue
. She’d dyed her hair crimson and wore a short tweed dress, red tights, brogues and a jaunty feathered hat. The label gave her a car with a driver. When they arrived at the restaurant Karin chose, two photographers came up to them, took their picture and stepped back without saying anything.

‘Is it always like that?’ said Bec.

‘Maybe it’s you they want.’

‘Why should they?’

‘You and Alex are public figures now.’

‘Are we?’

Karin told Bec how the boys of The What – my young men, she called them – were on tour, and how she missed them, and what good work they’d done together in the studio in Petersmere, and how their album would soon be out. ‘We did
a cover of I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight. It’s so Seventies, I sound like Suzi Quatro doing Devil Gate Drive,’ she said. ‘My boys started kicking their feet in time.’ She laughed and wrinkled her nose.

‘I’d love to meet them,’ said Bec, touched that Karin thought she’d know who Suzi Quatro was, and she wished she’d been there in summer in her brother’s garden, making daisy chains and dreamily fending off the boys’ paws, listening to them sing. ‘Do you need somebody to stand on stage with a tambourine?’

In the past, Karin’s terror of being contaminated by scientific knowledge had been an obstacle between them. Now that Bec was able to talk about her immediate future of foreign trips, banquets and escorting film stars on tours of malarial Africa there were no barriers. After a couple of glasses of wine Bec told Karin that trying to conceive had changed her sense of time.

‘It used to be that there was work-world and there was not-work-world, and they stretched in and out together,’ she said. ‘If something big was happening in work-world, like malaria, not-work-world would shrink to make space for it, and if something big was happening in not-work-world, like …’

‘Love?’

‘Exactly like love. Then work-world would shrink for that. It was like one breath passing from lung to lung.’ She held up her hands and stretched one open and closed the other into a fist, then opened the fist and closed the other.

‘You look as if you’re showing somebody how to milk a goat,’ said Karin, and some wine went the wrong way up Bec’s nose. Even while she laughed she was annoyed that Karin wasn’t taking her seriously.

‘But you know what I mean.’

‘Of course.’

‘Now there’s a third world. It’s not work, although it would
be
a lot of work, and it’s not exactly love, although it would be all
about
love, I suppose. Anyway, it isn’t happening.’

‘It’s too soon to worry. It hasn’t even been a year.’

‘You mustn’t tell Alex this, but I saw his ex, Maria. She’s pregnant. The old-fashioned way.’

Karin said something quiet, but Bec didn’t take it in as fully as she took in the tilt of Karin’s face and the sorrowful, slightly pitying compression of the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

‘Why wouldn’t you tell him?’ said Karin. ‘If the two of you want to have children he needs to know he’s probably the one with the problem.’

Bec smiled, feeling less close to Karin than a minute earlier. ‘It’s not a scientific standard of proof. I don’t know what he would do if I told him. He might leave me.’

Karin rolled her head and lifted her eyes upwards. ‘Then what kind of a lover is he? What kind of a man? You make him sound like a terrible mix of martyr and coward, and vain with it.’

‘What if it was you? If you wanted to have a child, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with you, and the one who breaks it to you that it’s your problem is the person you say you love the most, the one you’ve been trying to have a child with?’

‘He needs to know. He needs to be brave and face up to it. There are other ways. What does he need to populate the world with a whole lot of mini-Alexes for?’

‘Why does anyone need their own children?’ said Bec. ‘He’s
proud.’ She was looking down at the surface of the table. ‘Maria said I should sleep with someone else to get pregnant and not tell Alex.’

Karin put her hands down flat on the table and leaned sharply forward into Bec’s face. ‘What? Would you
do
that?’ Her grin was wide and her eyes shone. Bec felt she had never held another woman’s attention so completely. She went red.

‘I told her I couldn’t.’

‘I’m sure it happens,’ said Karin.

‘Do you know anyone who …’

‘No, but I’m sure it happens.’ Karin laughed in wonder and shook her head, staring at Bec as if she’d thought for years that she was dealing with an entirely different person, and only now saw the actual her. Bec watched her sister-in-law’s beautiful famous face and felt the warmth of her affection. Wonder from an artist, wonder from a beautiful woman and a mother who had seen, no doubt, so many sexually transgressive wonders in and around the playgrounds of the great, seemed like approval.

Ridiculous
, she thought, and wondered what was ridiculous, Maria’s suggestion or assuming that it was impossible. She wanted a child with Alex, and she wanted Alex to be happy, and there was ridiculousness in the obstacle that stood in the way of such a good outcome.
This is not the old world
, she thought.
Sex can’t ruin us now. Not in London, not in our time
.

Bec avoided Dougie. Perhaps, she thought, he was avoiding her. How else could two people alone in a house not cross paths more often? Their hours were different. They seldom ate in. They kept to their rooms. Bec would hear the boards creak as Dougie passed her door, keys in locks when he went in and out and his whistling from the bathroom. When they did see each other they nodded and said hello. He was like a lodger, except that he would try to hold Bec’s eyes and she avoided his. At these moments he seemed to her to become very large and still and she felt herself to be a scurrying creature scampering for cover from a storm-laden sky.

Once she went into the living room with her laptop and sat down on the sofa not realising until she’d began pecking at the keys that Dougie was already there, cross-legged in a dim corner, reading. Bec’s heart galloped and she blushed.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ she said.

Dougie stood up.

‘I like to be by myself when I’m working,’ she said.

Dougie went out of the room and Bec sat still with her face on fire.

Late on Friday evening, a week before Alex’s return, Dougie came to Bec in the living room. She was watching a film.
Dougie stood on the threshold and apologised for bothering her. He wanted to let her know that he was leaving the next day.

‘Going fishing?’ said Bec. She stopped the film.

‘I’m heading back up north. For good.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Any particular reason?’ She was cold and polite. She sounded what foreigners would call
English
.

Dougie looked at her without speaking for a moment and said: ‘I came to let you know. I’ll try and take as much as I can. I’ll come back for the rest later.’

Bec stood up and hooked the loop of her top over her shoulder where it had slipped down. ‘I’m sorry I was a bitch yesterday. I don’t know why I lost my temper.’

‘I know why.’

‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘You just don’t like us, Bec, it’s normal. I’m not the kind of guy you want to have around the place.’

‘I thought you said you weren’t going fishing?’

‘See that’s funny, Bec, that’s the old Bec, and if me leaving’s what it takes to bring her back, I’m better just getting the hell out of Dodge, eh.’

He turned to go and Bec called him back and asked if he wanted a drink. Dougie said that it was all right, he wouldn’t, and Bec asked if he’d sit with her for a while. Dougie came and sat down at the far end of the sofa. He sat on the edge, leading forward, looking down at his hands.

‘What were you thinking when you tried to kiss me?’ said Bec.

‘I told you, I wasn’t thinking.’

‘I can’t hear you very well.’

‘That’s you and Alex’s way, working everything out in advance,’ said Dougie. He hunched his shoulders and made a mime with his fingers of a mean, sneaky animal.

‘And if I said that there was nothing wrong with thinking ahead, you’d say, “Oh, I know, I just haven’t got the brains for it.”’

‘You can’t do my accent.’

‘I can do you, can’t I?’

‘Go on, then.’

Bec met his eyes and swallowed. ‘You thought, “I want her, and maybe if I kiss her, she’ll like it, like me and like being wanted by me, and like my boldness in taking what I want, and I’ll fuck her, and maybe she’ll like that.”’

Dougie tilted his head and blinked, like a horse bothered by a fly.

‘“And maybe she’ll fall in love with me.”’ Bec waited for Dougie to speak. He stared at her. She went on. ‘“And if not at least I’ll have got a fuck out of it.”’ She paused. Still silence. ‘“I’ve got nothing to lose.”’

‘When you say “I’ve got nothing to lose”, is that you or me?’

‘You. I’ve got plenty to lose. But maybe I have something to gain.’ Bec was beginning to tremble.

‘Something to gain,’ repeated Dougie. Bec searched his face for a sign of mockery, greed or triumph, but she could see none.

‘For me and Alex,’ she said.

‘Is that really what you want?’

‘Of course not. I mean yes, maybe. A way.’

‘What about me?’

‘You get what you want.’

She thought he might disagree, but he only said: ‘I am in debt to Alex.’

Bec heard ‘indebted’. She meant to say ‘There are terms’, but her mouth was so dry that the only word that came out was ‘terms’.

‘Terms?’ said Dougie.

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’

‘No light. No light at all.’ Dougie nodded. ‘No kissing. No touching.’

‘No touching?’

‘You know what I mean. And no words. You mustn’t say a single word.’

Dougie nodded.

‘Once.’ Bec held up an index finger. ‘Once. And then you get up and leave and we don’t see you again for a long time.’

‘Once?’ Dougie looked away. ‘Are you …’

‘I counted days.’

‘Aye, but once! I’m a gambler, but that’s staking a lot on one roll, and the odds aren’t good.’

‘I’m going upstairs to my room,’ said Bec. Her voice was cracked and shaking. ‘I’ll be in bed. I’ll be on the bed. Remember what I said.’

She went upstairs and into her room, leaving the door open and the lights off. She was trembling so much that it was hard to take off her clothes. She stripped and by touch in one of her drawers she found a thick old hoodie. She put it on, pulled the quilt off the bed and lay down on the cold sheet on her back. She lay still. All she could hear was the sound of her heart and a roaring of blood in her ears. Her eyes were open but it was dark and she felt as if she were alone in the universe,
floating through grainy space. Her mouth was dry. She got up and went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror. She took off the hoodie and showered and dried herself quickly and took out her contacts and put the hoodie back on and lay on the bed.
What if he doesn’t come?
she thought.
What if he didn’t understand? Would it be better?

She heard Dougie pass her door and go to his room and invocations rose in her for him to come and not to come.
Why do I trust him to do what I ask?
she wondered.

She heard him come back and approach the bed. She closed her eyes. She sensed him standing at the side of the bed. Could she hear him breathing? Could she smell him? She felt threatened and excited.
I should tell him I’ve changed my mind
, she thought, and opened her legs a little. Her skin moving across the sheet sounded loud to her. She opened her eyes just as he moved onto the bed, resting one knee on the edge and swinging over to straddle her left leg, barely touching it. He was naked. She closed her eyes. She felt Dougie shift and the mattress creaked slightly as he lifted his knee over. He was kneeling between her legs. She parted her thighs a little more widely. She felt the back of Dougie’s hand, the little hairs on the back of his hand and the knuckles, stroke her inner thigh as he held his cock, then she felt it butt softy against her as Dougie sought the entry.
He’ll hurt me
, she thought, and
How can he be hard when I’ve been unkind to him?
It did hurt for a moment when Dougie pushed in, and then he slid into her easily, and Bec felt ashamed that it slid in easily.

It was quick and Dougie did his best to do as she’d asked him, keeping his body supported on his arms and just his belly moving against hers. She didn’t come close to coming; a
moment of distraction was the nearest thing to pleasure and she half-spoke a word involuntarily, she didn’t know what, before she remembered what she was doing. When just before the end Dougie put one hand over the base of her spine and pulled her more fiercely onto him she didn’t resist.

Dougie gasped and croaked in finishing and pulled out of her. He rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed. Bec opened her eyes and saw his dark form there. She lay still for what seemed a long time, wondering if she should try to stop it leaking out.

‘Why are you still here?’ she asked Dougie.

He didn’t answer and she asked again. She rolled over and pushed him in the back. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Get out.’

‘No,’ said Dougie.

‘You promised.’

‘Did I?’

‘I’d like you to leave.’

‘Too bad,’ said Dougie. He turned round and laid his hand on her calf. She snatched it away. ‘I think you enjoyed it.’

‘You’re wrong. I didn’t.’

‘You were wet.’

‘You don’t know anything about women.’

‘It’s no a science, Dr Bec, is it?’ said Dougie. His voice was strange. He made a hop and he sat astride her, holding down her wrists. He was very heavy.

‘I’m going to stay,’ said Dougie.

‘No you aren’t. Get off me.’

‘I’m going to fuck you again.’

‘That would be rape.’

Dougie’s hands tightened on Bec’s wrists and his body tensed and Bec got ready to fight.

Dougie shuddered and she flinched as a warm drop fell on her chest. Another one fell. They were tears. Dougie’s shoulders shook and he began to sob. He rolled off her and fell off the edge of the bed with a thud and lay on the floor, heaving up sounds from his chest. Bec got up and switched on the light and looked down at the great pale slab of man shaking at her feet, his face scarlet, his mouth open as if in pain, his eyes screwed shut and heart-tearing sounds coming from him, like a newborn. Bec put her hand on his shoulder and he pulled it away as if her palm burned him. She kneeled down and tried to pull him up, telling him it was all right, and got him up with his back against the bed, still weeping.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

‘It’s all right.’ Bec sat next to him with her arms round his shoulders.

‘You shouldn’t touch me.’

‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right.’

‘Nothing’s right.’ Dougie’s voice came high and thin through sobs. ‘You know I love you, and you tried to let me show you by letting me do one simple wee thing for you and Alex, just one nice, simple, wee thing, just one wee fuck in the dark, and I can’t bear it, Bec, it just makes me want. It just makes me want. It just makes me want so much.’ He bent his head and was overcome by crying.

‘It’s all right,’ said Bec.

‘No,’ whimpered Dougie.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve treated you badly.’

‘It’s fine.’ Dougie got up and went to his room. Bec followed him and saw him start to get dressed, sniffing, avoiding her eyes.

‘Don’t go,’ said Bec. ‘There’s no need to go. I thought you’d like it. I thought it was what you wanted.’

Dougie was dressed. He gave her a single look and put some things into a rucksack. At eleven o’clock that night he left the house.