The Heart Broke In (36 page)

Bec woke up at seven the next morning and remembered what she’d done. She didn’t understand how she’d slept so long and deeply and with such gentle dreams. It was as if another self worked inside her at night to smother her conscience. Daylight made it merciless. She put on a coat and walked out into the bright grey morning. Every sound was angry – the thunder of an aircraft, the cry of a braking bus, the snarl of a scooter – or seemed to reproach her behind her back: the ticking of bicycle wheels, the breathless laughter of girls, the tapping of heels. And this was only the rustle of the world, a world incorporated against her. It watched severely, the severity an authority waits in when it has asked a question you cannot avoid answering yet cannot answer without lying or incriminating yourself.

Bec walked down Upper Street, down City Road and east towards Shoreditch. There was a rupture between the Bec of this day and the Bec of other days preceding. She saw bars and clubs she’d been in and it didn’t seem to her that she could go into them as Bec again. She forgot she’d acted for Alex’s sake. All she could think of was that she’d lived without betraying anyone, and now she lived a traitor’s life.

Once all a woman had to do to pick up a poisonous secret
was to have sex without being married. There were girls in London who still lived that life. Muslim girls. Rose, perhaps. For Bec’s caste, the liberals, all the post-religious girls, sexual freedom was old. Bec’s mother had boyfriends before her father. Her grandmother had lost her virginity to a soldier when the Germans were bombing London. Sexual freedom took the poison of infidelity, the lies and the secrets, the cruelty of abandonment, and distilled it into a single drop, sufficient for two or three doses. Before it was a matter for the world: now the world didn’t care. Only Alex would care, and Bec and Dougie, and it was still poison. Sexual freedom was old and it wasn’t really freedom. It was just the domestication of disgrace.

It was as if there were two separate worlds for which hypocrisy was too simple a term: the world of names and the world of deeds, and life was less a matter of concealment than of keeping deeds and their names from touching. An unnamed deed was harmless, and a name was just a name. Put together they were toxic. And if you named your deed to yourself? Then you were carrying a poisonous secret.

The first betrayal, before Alex, had been of herself. She’d put up with Dougie’s kiss but avoided naming it. And the name was
Alex’s brother is in love with me
. The night before, she’d done it again.
I deceived Alex
.

If she didn’t name her deed to Alex, the secret would poison her and spread to him. Her friends would advise her not to tell.
They’re wrong
, she thought.
They think what’s done is done and can’t be undone and you have to live with it but they’re wrong, they’re wrong, the confessed deed is a different action to the secret deed. You can pull out the thorn and it will hurt terribly and it may kill you but the thorn won’t be inside you any more, it will be out
.

She leaned over the wall of London Bridge and whispered ‘I cheated on Alex’ to the choppy black Thames.

A middle-aged man with a kind face and silver-rimmed glasses passed her on the pavement and Bec said to him: ‘I slept with my boyfriend’s brother.’ The man hurried on, frightened.

For many minutes Bec stared at her phone, thinking that she should call Ritchie and ask him what he thought she should do. Her finger hovered over the button so close that she might have called him by accident, but she didn’t call him.

When the aircraft carrying Alex to California pirouetted over Los Angeles and he looked out at the squares of the city stretching to the horizon in every directon, as if it covered the entire planet, Alex felt like a conqueror. He forgot London for a while. He was busy, learning the arts of the popular science documentary.

His first disappointment was the amount of transparent fakery in the documentary. He was filmed moving through San Francisco in a tram, as if he were on his way somewhere, when they actually got around in taxis and rental cars. He’d knock on a scientist’s door and the scientist would get up and say ‘Hello’ and they had to pretend they were meeting for the first time when really they’d been talking for two hours, working out what they were going to say, and the scientist had been prepped by a production assistant in half a dozen phone calls over three months. The documentary would be fifty minutes long; how much substance would be left, Alex wondered, once the sham shots of him gazing at the sunset or walking along the beach were included, along with panoramas of snowy mountain ranges, horses in the desert haze and helicopter shots of the Golden Gate Bridge? The crew and the producer were friendly, but there was a level of warmth
beyond which they wouldn’t go. Once he overheard them refer to him sarcastically as
the talent
.

They shot him in dusty hills, kneeling by clumps of tough, gnarled bushes, and he looked into the camera and said that the plants were more than ten thousand years old, that they had been growing in this place when Britain had only just been released from the ice age, when humans were learning how to farm. He said it five times before he got it right. He tripped over his words and put the emphasis in the wrong places. He didn’t like the script. It was too respectful towards the mean patch of scrub that had lived so long without learning how to die. Speaking into the camera he composed a different set of lines in his head.
Look at this gnarled, bitter old survivor. It doesn’t have the dignity to step aside and let green shoots take its place. It can’t bear to be replaced. It won’t let go
.

The love of knowledge in the scientists he interviewed had been spoiled by their quest to lengthen human life. Each had experienced a moment of fame for one discovery, then been sought out ever since by visitors asking the same questions about the same discovery, and even while they grew bitter because their new work was being ignored in favour of the old, their desire to recapture their earlier glory had driven them to travel further down the same dead-end road towards immortality; and that journey had made their own ageing, their own failing powers, so much harder to bear. As the days in California went by Alex thought about Harry, how ungraciously he’d treated Matthew, and how his desire to be literally immortal had poisoned the alternative immortalities he might have claimed in the lives of those he left behind.

After two weeks, as the trip neared its end, he was longing to be home. He wished he’d taken Bec’s first advice and not
left the institute to make the film. He wanted to show her that he’d stay with her until the end, whether he could father children or not. He would marry her if she liked. When they spoke on Skype he was preoccupied with this and didn’t notice how quiet she was and how she did all she could to get him to talk and tell her about his time there while telling him as little as possible about herself.

She told him that Dougie had left without giving a reason. Alex told her that it was time for his brother to move on and he saw her smile quickly on the screen. He asked if she was relieved, too, and she nodded and said she was.

Alex’s flight got in to Gatwick in the middle of a workday morning and there were people Bec had promised to meet so it wasn’t until six in the evening that she got home. Alex had been there since the early afternoon. He’d slept for an hour, washed and fidgeted about the house nervously, checking the time every few minutes, changing his shirt twice, eager and anxious, going over what he wanted to say.

Bec had been deciding whether to tell Alex what she’d done. She’d already sent Dougie a message, which he hadn’t replied to, saying that she was going to tell him. But as she opened the front door of the house and called Alex’s name she still hadn’t made up her mind. She was beginning to get used to the mental barrier that stood between knowing she should tell him and actually speaking the words out loud. The barrier between knowing the right thing to do and doing it became a shelter for her to crouch behind.

She heard Alex coming downstairs and hesitated, feeling she should have taken more care about how she looked. She rubbed her hands together – they were a little damp – and not knowing what else to do ran them down over her blouse
and skirt. When Alex appeared she moved her hands away from her body and rubbed the fingertips against her palms. She smiled, and in her acutely self-conscious state it seemed to her like a guilty smile. He was bound to ask, she thought. He was tanned. It made him attractive.

Bec wasn’t as Alex remembered. Her colour was high and he felt he could hear her heart beating. He’d just travelled here from the far side of the world, and she’d walked in off the street, and yet he felt as if he’d been nowhere and she’d come from far away, from a place he’d never been to where she would, if he wasn’t bold, go again without him. She looked as if she’d been breathing different air and been under another sun. If it was possible for her to run away from him and surrender to him abjectly with the same gesture, he thought, she would do it. Panic swept through him and he thought that all along she’d been on a journey past him to a greater destiny and that he hadn’t risen to her. In the wake of fear came a thick hormonal cloud of aggressive lust and as it drove him towards her the only thing resembling a thought in his head was that to hold and keep Bec was more to him than life or death.

For a moment she followed the path of greeting and tried to kiss him. She meant to speak. Their lips touched and Alex grasped the hem of her narrow skirt with both hands and pulled it up round her waist and she drew her head back and looked in his eyes. She unbuckled his belt as his fingers found her.

Lying on the floor of the hall, when they began to feel the cold on their bare skin, Alex said: ‘We could get married.’

‘What about children?’ said Bec.

‘I’m going to be less proud about it. I’m going to be less
selfish. I’m not going to care if they don’t have my genes. Why are you crying?’

‘You can’t just change your mind like that.’

‘It’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Bec felt his unhappiness swell. He said: ‘You don’t want to get married.’

Bec pressed her face into the dark of his chest. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

Fourteen days later Bec went back to the chemist. This time there was a single word in the window of the tester.
PREGNANT
, it said.

It was mid-morning. Alex had left the house to do voiceovers and Bec was by herself in the kitchen, looking at the items on the table next to her hand: a pen with the logo of a drugs company down the side, a block of Post-it notes with the corners fluffed up and a pregnancy testing kit. In a way, nothing had changed. There were still two possible futures, one with children, one without. But the appearance of a word on a pregnancy tester spoiled one future. Childlessness was something she’d probably have to go out and get if she wanted it now. It wasn’t that motherhood had instantaneously become more desirable; childlessness had become less. And yet she felt pleased, as if, in this, the relative and the absolute were one and the same.

She left the house and walked to Angel station.
The doctor
, she thought,
clothes, space, work, belly, diet, feed the beast
. She imagined telling Alex that she was pregnant, letting him be happy, and telling him that the child might be his brother’s. She imagined telling him that she’d slept with Dougie first, letting him react – and how would he take it? Would he run away? She would chase him.

Or she would keep it a secret. That was easy to imagine. Nobody would find out; how could they? Years would pass
and the secret would be overgrown and covered by new events. The child would grow, and it would be a Comrie-Shepherd child.

Bec passed through the station entrance and caught sight of herself in the CCTV monitor over the ticket barriers.
How ordinary and anonymous I look
, she thought.
Like pictures on the news, like the last pictures of someone before something terrible happens to them, before they’re murdered or raped
. She didn’t look, she felt, like a mother; but how was a mother supposed to look?

A long time seemed to have passed since Dougie lay on top of her, and the pregnancy gave her confidence. It belonged to her in a way it could never belong to the father. It was easier for her now to talk to Ritchie. She called him and asked if he could see her. He answered on the second ring and sounded pleased to hear from her. She told him that she needed his advice about something important and he told her that he could see her that morning, if she would come to the studio.

No one outside Ritchie’s household knew that he’d almost hung himself. He wore scarves and polo necks in public and was mocked for it in paparazzi picture spreads. Karin told him she’d found him lying asleep on the floor of his study, surrounded by beer bottles and empty cartons of chocolate pudding, with a noose on the floor and a rope burn scarlet round his neck. In the weeks that followed he told her so many truths about his deep fears that the truths he didn’t mention – that he’d exchanged his celebrity, his time, his attention and about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of gifts for flattery and sex from a fifteen-year-old girl, and that this information was about to be made public – didn’t seem to him to be great omissions.

He told Karin that Bowie and Bono were right; he was a poor singer. He’d been a fool to imagine he could be treated as an equal by artists like them. Karin was the talented one. Everyone said so. It had always been his destiny to end up running a show that championed mediocrity. Bec’s high moral principles had destroyed his last chance to do something great by stopping him making the O’Donabháin film. When he was away Ruby and Dan didn’t miss him as they would have missed a better man. He’d always been surrounded by more
extraordinary people; his brave father, his brilliant friend Alex, his wife Karin, who wrote wise, tender songs with the clever boys from The What, and, most extraordinary of all, Bec. How could he compete with his sister? No wonder she’d been their father’s favourite. She was kind, clever, hard-working, good, humble and beautiful. She didn’t cheat or lie. Everybody loved her. Why wouldn’t they? She’d found a cure for malaria. She deserved her wonderful life, the fame, the beautiful house, the ideal boyfriend, the glorious future. She deserved success in a way that Ritchie, coarse, fat, trashy old Ritchie never would.

Karin didn’t let him down. She picked up Ritchie’s broken hopes, carefully, one by one, like toys he’d thrown to the ground and smashed, and gave them back to him mended and wrapped, transformed into building blocks of confidence. He was a wonderful father, she said. He was a creator and an artist with a great love of music. Without him, she said, there would have been no band and no songs. Was David Bowie so perfect – was Bono? Wasn’t it possible they’d been jealous of a rival? Couldn’t it be that for Bowie it was a compliment to compare someone to a dog howling? Wasn’t Hound Dog Taylor one of Ritchie’s favourites? She mentioned the musicians who’d praised Ritchie behind his back and he was glad to hear her recite those names again. And did he suppose, she said, that the millions of people who watched
Teen Makeover
every week were stupid, were ignorant? Some of them were, no doubt, but wasn’t that the wonderful thing about popularity, that among the vast mass there were bound to be some of the best people in the world, who loved the show for its special magic? Life was hard. Life was full of pain, Karin said – and here Ritchie could tell she was making a great effort of
logic – imagine, she said, if there was no malaria, and people in Africa lived as long as Europeans, and had the same amount of time and money? Wouldn’t they be just as bored and depressed as Europeans were, and need popular talent shows to fill the emptiness in their lives?

Ritchie nodded and said he supposed they would, but Karin’s reasoning didn’t entirely satisfy him, and without noticing how often he was doing it he began to say out loud, whenever he felt low and in response to the softest of cues, how base he was compared to his sister. A mood of fatalism crept over him.