The Other Half of My Heart (12 page)

‘Do you want to go to bed?' Roddy asks, later, when they've eaten and had another beer and agreed that neither of them needs to try a pickled egg again, ever, and done the rounds of the stables in the half-dark. The stove is banked up with coal, and the animals are fed, fish for Whiskers and the rest of the leftovers for Dylan and Jenny.

‘Yes,' Tina says, ‘let's go to bed.' And Roddy smiles and touches the tip of her nose, and takes her hand and leads her up the stairs to his room, which is directly over the kitchen, although it's an up-and-round-and-back route to get there.

She has a moment of nervousness when he closes the door. Her own experience has been more fumble than fire, neither of her previous lovers had managed to make her feel even half as good as she can make herself feel. And – because Roddy's great gift is to be so utterly himself that it's impossible for anyone close to him to be anything other than themselves – she blurts, ‘I've only had sex about fifteen times,' as he looks up from her shirt buttons, which he has been undoing, ‘with two different people.'

Roddy's hand is resting on her breast now, moving slowly back and forward, the smallest amount. ‘So?'

‘I might not be as good at it as … as some people.'

He puts his hands on her shoulders. Her breast is not impressed. He smiles. ‘Surely it's not about how good you are, it's about how good you make each other feel.' He lifts her hair, applies his mouth to the skin underneath her ear, lifts his head again. ‘And I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty good.'

Tina has another moment where she wishes she's Roddy Flood. She has at least a couple of such moments in an average week. He sees everything so clearly; so simply.

‘You're right,' she says, and she raises her hands from where they had been sitting on his hips, pulls his shirt from his jeans, and starts to undo the buttons from the bottom, working up.

With Roddy, she blazes. With Roddy, everything makes sense. All the bits of her body have a purpose, and none of them is embarrassed, or wants to hide. Afterwards, Roddy sleeps, his legs and one arm sprawled over the bed while the other pulls her into his chest.

‘You should leave some things here,' he says in the morning, as they eat hot toast with unsalted butter by the Aga. Tina hadn't known that butter could be unsalted. She's never been in a house where tea is always made from loose leaves in a pot. She is careful not to mention these details to her mother, who is both hungry for insight into Flood life and defensive of any suggestion that the way they do things is any better than the way the Randolphs do them. Roddy feeds corners of toast to Dylan, the chocolate Labrador with the sixth sense for scraps. They'd slept until seven, unheard-of for both of them.

‘I brought some pyjamas,' Tina says. ‘They're in my bag, still.' They had woken in the night, cold where they had kicked blankets off, and Roddy had got up and brought her a checked flannel shirt of his to sleep in, although there hadn't been any more sleep for a while.

‘I like you in my shirt. And don't bring a dressing gown. You look just right in that one.'

‘Won't your parents mind?'

‘It's my dressing gown.'

Tina pulls a face at him. In a funny way it's a bit like spending time with Sam: she acts and speaks before she thinks. ‘Very funny. Won't your parents mind about me staying over?'

‘Of course they won't. Why should they? You're my girlfriend.'

And Tina decides that it can be that simple. Which it is, really. Until it isn't.

It's a Friday night in early June, and Tina is at the Floods', as usual, although this isn't going to be anything like one of their usual – comfortable, happy, settled – nights. It's goulash night, and she has arrived early to help make the bread with Fran. Tina has grown up with Alice baking cakes, biscuits and scones, and much to her mother's indignation has always considered cakes bought from a shop to be a great treat. But she has never met anyone who baked bread before, and she finds herself fascinated by the whole process. All the more so when she sees what goes into a loaf: flour, water, salt, and something Fran calls ‘leaven' which she says is also made of flour and water and ‘long ago, a little bit of honeycomb to get it going'.

‘I thought you needed yeast for bread,' Tina says, looking at the plump dough and wondering why it's rising.

‘Well, leaven is a wild yeast,' Fran replies, ‘and why would you go to all the trouble of making your own bread and use someone else's yeast?' Tina agrees. Like the flow of a horse beneath her, the simplicity of bread makes her tingle.

And so they sit around the table: Fred, Fran, Roddy, Tina. The last few weeks have been busy with visitors. Tina is getting better at talking to new people, although she sticks to asking questions and doesn't say a lot about herself.

‘It's nice to be back to just the family,' Fred says as he sits.

‘Yes,' Roddy says. Tina is more a part of the Flood family than Roddy is yet one of the Randolphs. Howard gets on well with Roddy, treating him as a replacement son in Sam's absence, and Alice is charmed by him, but Roddy's time at Tina's home still has the feeling of a special occasion. So Tina sleeps about half the week in Roddy's bed, and for the other half tries to be the best daughter she can be at home. On her days off, she goes shopping with her mother, buying skirts and camisole tops to humour her and enduring make-up counters for the sake of the pleasure it gives Alice, although mascara and tinted moisturizer are Tina's limits. But she has to admit that she feels herself moving differently these days, looking in the mirror more often, if only to try to see what Roddy sees. Yes, life is good.

Until.

Roddy says to Fred, ‘I'm all sorted for July and August with the Fieldens, by the way.' His tone is so casual that Tina almost misses the importance of what he's saying. She replays it, in her mind, in case she has misheard. But she doesn't think she has. She puts down her fork. Her appetite has gone, because her stomach has been replaced by a clenched fist of nervousness and dread.

‘What's this?' Tina is glad that Fran asks the question, because her throat feels too tight to speak. Edward and Arabella Fielden are breeders who live in the west country, about four hours' drive away; their eldest daughter Aurora is often mentioned in the same sentence as Roddy. The two have competed against and alongside each other for most of their lives. In fact, Tina knows that if she looks to her left she will see a photo on the dresser, of a twelve-year-old Roddy next to a slightly taller Aurora, both holding trophies and grinning proudly. There had been a photo in
Horse and Hound
earlier in the year that was not dissimilar in spirit, although these days Roddy was the taller and Aurora, who had once been spindly and crooked of tooth, now had a figure and a smile every bit as beautiful as the horse she rode. She wears her dark hair in a pixie crop, which makes her green eyes glow. Beneath them her face narrows to an almost pointed chin, and her lips are full and damask-pink. Wherever she goes she stands out, tall and sleek and confident. She has modelled sunglasses for
Tatler
and been featured in
Cosmopolitan
, talking about competing with men and photographed wearing a bikini. ‘Aurora Fielden on Medusa' is a tannoy announcement that has even the most weathered, weary and hungover of grooms rushing to the ring. Aurora had stayed with the Floods the previous summer, bringing Medusa for some training with Fred. Tina, low in the pecking order, hadn't been near the horse – Aurora had brought her own groom – and hadn't seen much of the rider, either. At the welcome drinks, Aurora had spoken briefly to Tina, and moved on as soon as it was decent. Although she tried not to let such things bother her, Tina had felt slighted, all the more so because Roddy was too busy with Aurora to call her name in the stable yard. She had been happy to overhear Fred saying to Fran that you could always tell who the most important person in a room was because Aurora Fielden would be standing next to them. This comes back to her now, along with a nauseous dread. Because surely, at the Fielden stables, Roddy Flood, Olympic hopeful, star in the making, will be the person Aurora will want to be next to?

Roddy says, ‘I'm going to stay with them for a couple of months. I want to see if I can bring Foxglove and Bob on a bit. We're all getting too comfortable here. And Foxglove is still unpredictable. I want to get his inside turns sorted out.'

Fred nods. ‘Edward will bring you on all right.'

Fran looks at Tina. ‘Did you know about this, Tina? No one told me.' Her tone is more quizzical than anything else. Fran's ability to take everything calmly is new to Tina. Her own mother tends towards the histrionic, either excited or appalled by most things. And her father tells people that he is a creature of habit as proudly as if he was telling them he was a Knight of the Garter.

‘I didn't know,' Tina says, trying to find the same light intonation for her voice.

‘I thought I'd said,' Roddy says. ‘Sorry. Weren't you there when Aurora and I were talking about it, at the Three Counties show? When we were waiting for the prize-giving?'

‘No, I wasn't. I was cleaning out the horseboxes ready for the trip home.' Roddy reaches for her hand under the table, squeezes it. His fingers are as familiar to Tina as her own. She hates the thought of missing out on such easy contact.

Fred says, ‘It's probably a good idea, if you're going to take this seriously.' They all knew what that meant: if you're going to make the British squad. Words like ‘high-flying' and ‘hopeful' and ‘rising star' followed Roddy around the way the Labradors did. The same had been true of Fred, twenty years ago, but a bad fall followed by a bad season meant that he went straight from hopeful to has-been without the honour in between. ‘Not like my career. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds.'

‘Oh, Fred,' Fran says.

‘Oh, Dad,' Roddy says, at the same time. Tina has encountered Fred with his dressing gown flapping open and seen Fran's bras drying on the radiator in the bathroom, but she has never felt as sharply as she does now that she is seeing something she shouldn't – a little bit of family business too intimate for outside eyes.

She doesn't want to appear sulky so she makes an effort to join in the conversation, talking about the work that Roddy needs to do with his horses, listening to Fred's anecdotes about Edward Fielden. She thinks she does quite well. She can't help but wonder whether this will seem like a natural point for Roddy to break things off with her. She's been living the last months knowing that this whole thing with him is too good to be true. After all, he took no notice of her last summer, when Aurora was around.

As soon as the door to Roddy's room is shut behind them, Roddy takes her by the hand and leads her to the sofa, sweeping a pile of magazines to the floor so that he can sit sideways on to her and lean against one arm of the sofa. He puts his feet on Tina's lap. He has a hole in his sock and his big toe is poking through. She touches the tip of his toenail.

‘If it makes you feel any better,' he says, wiggling his toe, ‘Aurora and I had a thing.'

‘Last summer? And how would that make me feel better?' Tina is glad that her words haven't come out sharply, because she isn't angry, although part of her brain is waving a flag to alert her to the fact that it would be all right to be angry, if she wanted to be. She's genuinely bemused as to how the idea of Roddy and Aurora having had ‘a thing', is supposed to make this any easier.

‘No, before last summer,' Roddy says, then adds, ‘mostly. It's out of our systems now.'

‘Is it?' Tina hears crossness in her voice this time. Roddy sighs.

‘I think we were about fifteen when it started. It was just – you know. Fumbling.'

‘Fumbling?' Now she puts her mind to it, Tina thinks she does remember some gossip. And of course there had been talk last summer, not that talk had been needed, Aurora arm in arm with Roddy everywhere you looked.

‘You know,' Roddy has his eyes closed, as though this conversation is too boring to be fully awake for, ‘adolescent stuff. It was more to do with proximity than anything else. And availability. She was always there. I was always horny.' Tina has options here. She could point out that, at the Fielden place, Aurora will once more be close, and available. Or she could shake this off and remind Roddy that he is still always horny, and let the evening go in a much more pleasant direction. She's tempted to. But Roddy speaks again, before she can say anything at all.

‘She's lovely, but—'

‘But what?' Her voice is getting sharper; she can hear it. Roddy sighs again. And now Tina is thinking, God, we're going to have a row. We've never had a row. She would rather pre-empt an argument with an apology (as she does with her mother) or a measured, reasoned assessment of where there may be difficulty or disagreement looming (as she does with her father). Not that the arguments at home are anything significant: who put the immersion heater on and forgot to turn it off, whether it's feasible to build a rockery.

She and Sam are too closely bound together to bother with arguing, or to have a need to. Another twin-question they are often asked is ‘Don't you ever argue?' to which Sam's answer is ‘Well, no. Would you argue with your own knees?' which pretty much sums it up. But she and Roddy, who always seem to be either working or with other people or with the horses or having sex or half asleep, have yet to find anything to argue about. Until now. Until Aurora.

She turns her own body sideways, to look at him, and the sight of him only reinforces the truth of what she's going to say. He's the only man she's ever seen who, she thinks, looks good with a five-o'clock shadow. His hair is straight when wet but curls a little as it dries. His eyes are so dark they are almost black, his eyebrows perfect curves above. She's changed her mind about the twisted mouth she used to think less than handsome. He's the best-looking man she can imagine, even when he's chewing his lip and pulling at the hole in his sock, as he is now.