The Other Half of My Heart (28 page)

But as Rufus searches newspaper archives and follows links, he thinks that he does recall the story. He certainly remembers working late with an eye on the 2000 Olympics from Barcelona and hearing Fred Flood, trainer, mentioned every time there was an equestrian event. The commentators had made much of the fact that his son would have been expected to be there. Rufus finds pictures of Aurora Fielden with her bronze medal and her golden smile, and recognizes her as a younger version of the woman who had accosted Bettina at the fête.

And he feels his love for Bettina growing, like bread in the oven, at the thought of all that she must have gone through. He calls her and suggests that they have dinner together. ‘I looked you up,' he says, ‘and I'd really like to talk.'

They meet at their usual table in the restaurant. By unspoken consent, they talk the way they usually do, asking about each other's day and sharing news. The first attempt at a pecan-maple plait had been disastrous, too sweet and dense for bread, too salt for cake, so that even Josh had refused to eat more than half a slice; Daisy's cough is clearing; the purchase of the land for Rufus's house has gone through; Verity has proposed that Bettina might consider a delivery service, and although her first impulse had been to reject such an idea out of hand, she's starting to wonder about the possibilities. Rufus mentions the planning of the house to her, and something in those hazel eyes lights up as she nods but he's not sure she understands that he's talking about a house for them to share. Tonight probably isn't the night to check.

They finish a bottle of Bordeaux with their meal, and then adjourn to Rufus's flat for coffee, but decide to have another glass of wine when they get there. They take an end of the sofa each, and turn towards each other, facing but not touching. Bettina nods: Rufus takes this as permission.

‘What I don't understand,' he says, because it's the thing his mind has kept on returning to, ‘is how you've managed at all. I don't understand why you're not more …' He flounders, trying to find the right word.

Bettina helps him out. ‘Damaged?'

‘No! Yes. I wouldn't have used that word. But people get – distorted – by things that happen to them.' Rufus is thinking of steel buckling from pressure in the wrong place, tree roots breaking concrete. ‘When terrible things happen, they can – twist you. You don't seem twisted.'

Bettina considers. ‘I don't think I'm twisted. But I think I might be stunted. My life stopped growing. Not altogether.' It's been a long time since she's permitted a conversation about herself that doesn't stick to what's visible from the outside. So she's careful with her words. She thinks about them before she says them, knowing that Rufus will take them seriously. He waits. ‘But it did go different ways. My life was more feeble, afterwards.'

He decides to let the ‘feeble' pass, for now, but he has every intention of letting her know, in word and deed, how much he admires her strength in becoming the woman that she is, free of self-pity, focused and strong. ‘Did you ever talk to anyone?' Even as he says it, it seems like the wrong question, the wrong place to start. But they have to start somewhere.

‘You mean, a therapist?' Rufus nods. ‘No. Well, sort of.' Rufus waits. He thinks of the counsellor Kate sees, less often and with less impact now, but a godsend when the post-natal depression had hit.

Bettina takes a mouthful of wine, a breath. Another mouthful. Another breath. She has known that this conversation would need to happen ever since she gave Rufus her old name. She's wondered if, in the speaking-aloud of these old griefs, she would cry, but her eyes are dry. ‘I tried,' she puts down her glass and her hands knead the air in her lap, ‘but – I've never had to talk a lot. Horses. My mother used to say that Sam talked for both of us. Bread. And then there was someone I really loved—'

She pauses, looks at Rufus, checking that he knows she isn't talking about him, that he isn't offended. ‘I understand, Bettina,' he says.

‘We didn't talk a lot. Me and Roddy. His name was Roddy.'

‘Roddy Flood? He was the one who was driving the car?' Rufus says.

‘Yes. He was my – he understood me, not exactly the way Sam understood me, but better than anyone else. He just let me be, and he behaved as though I was all he needed, just by being there.' Her voice is softening, sweetening, just a little, but enough for Rufus to see the truth of her past that wasn't written in newspaper reports. He wonders whether he has ever loved the way Bettina has, although he suspects that he knows the answer.

‘Yes,' he says, because she is looking to him to say something.

‘I couldn't see how to start talking about something so big. And there were no words for it. Losing a twin, it's like—' Tears are tightening her larynx now, making her voice thin.

‘I understand—' Rufus says.

‘But that's the thing. You don't understand.' She can feel tears on her face, although there are no sobs to go with them: it's more of a sadness overspill.

‘No, no, that's not what I meant.' He touches her knee, lightly, leaves his hand there. ‘I meant to say, I understand that there couldn't be any words for that kind of loss.'

Bettina pats the back of his hand, twice, leaves her palm on the backs of his fingers. ‘Yes, that's it. Thank you. So, when someone came to talk to me, and tried to get me to talk, I felt trapped. You see it in horses sometimes, when their eyes roll back and they can feel pain, but they don't understand the pain they're in, don't know why it's there or where it's come from. It was like that.'

Rufus nods. He doesn't trust his voice.

‘And there were things that words couldn't fix. My mother – she blamed Roddy. Roddy blamed himself. I blamed myself. It was – it was such a mess, Rufus. Not talking about it seemed best. And my parents decided to move away from Missingham, and so I made a run for it, to France.'

They fall silent. He is thinking of how it must be, to lose everything, so swiftly. The closest he has come was the night Kate almost drowned, and that had been unbearable, and it had been oh, so brief, and she had survived. So even such a terrible experience has no magnitude at all next to what Bettina has lost.

She knows that Rufus wants to talk more. She can see it in his face. But she's so tired, in so many ways. She can't think about herself all those years ago without feeling an echo of the pain in her body so real that she's not sure she'll be able to move. But her limbs and joints unfold as she wants them to, and she stands. Rufus stands too.

She's so close to leaving, wanting to be in her own bed, on her own, because Rufus knowing about all this means that being with him is no longer an escape, though not yet a comfort. But his face is all kindness and her heart is all sore, and she knows that if she is going to stop living half a life, she must start doing things differently. She sees how he is cautious with her, and she is determined not to spook. ‘Can we go to bed,' she says, ‘and talk some more another time?'

Both Bettina and Rufus are used to their own beds, their own space, their own habits. Most of all, though, they are both used to their own way, Bettina fiercely and Rufus passingly so, and so they are having to work hard to find a common way to live. Bettina sometimes wonders whether it would have been easier to move in together than to do things the way they are, every small step a courteous negotiation. She wonders about the house he is planning, and whether it's meant for the two of them. She shakes her head free of the thought. It wouldn't be. It's too soon.

Bettina had woken at three from a dream that she couldn't remember. Knowing that she wouldn't get back to sleep, and not wanting to lie and think in the not-quite warmth of the not-quite morning, she had risen and left Rufus's flat for her own flat, a shower and fresh clothes, and then her kitchen domain. As she moves into the quiet rhythm of her work, she can see that this settling-in is only to be expected, and wonders how they can manage it better, or if it's simply a question of time and mature compromise. She can see that having something to think about other than her mother is good for her.

She's been surprised, in the two weeks since her mother's funeral, by how many spaces in her life Alice has left. In the days when, one Monday a month, she would walk back to the train station from the nursing home, trying to find some blessings to count, she would acknowledge that what she was doing was slowly coming to terms with the loss of a mother who was already mostly lost. But now she is discovering just how often she stored up things to tell Alice, even though Alice might not acknowledge them.

She catches herself noticing the birds in the garden behind the bakery and the brightly coloured shoes that some of her customers wear, and realizes that she's filing these observations away to give her something to say to her mother that might just spark an almost-gone connection. She still puts aside newspaper articles that she thinks Alice would enjoy having read to her.

Every day, Bettina is tripped up by a baker's dozen of memories and reminders that she's motherless. The fact that there has been so little mothering for the last few years doesn't seem to matter as far as her feelings are concerned. This grief is different to any she's experienced before – she doesn't feel mauled by it, she isn't chewed and broken apart in its jaws. No, grieving for her mother is like wandering a maze, a dead end every time she comes to a thought of Alice. It's exhausting, and dispiriting, and made worse by the twin difficulties of not sleeping well and being honest with Rufus. Almost honest. Although she doesn't remember what her dreams have been about, she thinks they might be to do with Roddy appearing at the Green Dragon after Alice's funeral: certainly she wakes with the same sense of agitation and disappointment. Certainly she replays their conversation, over and over, wishing for a different outcome, although she's not sure what that should be.

But here in the kitchen, all is as it always is. Bettina is getting close to perfecting her new recipe, a honey and lavender loaf baked in a tin so that it can easily be sliced, put in a toaster, and eaten with olive oil and more honey, or butter flaked with salt. Once she's certain of it, she'll write it up and add it to Simon's file, and he will scale the quantities up and the loaf will be added to the repertoire of Adventures in Bread. Bettina will work out how often to put it in the cycle of baking, depending on how popular it is – although she prefers to under-supply, just a little, so that her customers feel lucky when they find their favourite loaves on the shelves. (‘You should be running a small dictatorship, not a bakery,' Rufus had said when she'd explained what she was doing, one evening. ‘Architects could never get away with that. You can't under-deliver on light.') Once it's a regular product, Simon will make it in one of the two big mixers. But for now, Bettina is testing the recipe by hand. She's making these loaves in readiness for today's bread-tasting.

She starts with the leaven – the plump, spongy wild yeast that she feeds every day and bakes from twice a week. She has other batches for the other days, each delicately different, although she knows that only she would really notice or care that the flour that feeds one is half rye, and another has a tablespoon of wild local honey added once a fortnight. The fact that only she knows makes it more special. She adds flour to the leaven, two-thirds white and one-third wholemeal, and pours on a steady trickle of water that she's boiled and cooled to blood heat. With the hand that isn't holding the water jug, she mixes, feeling the ingredients move from wet and dry to a warm, squashing whole. Once enough water has been added, she moves the mixture from bowl to bench and she begins to knead, scooping and slapping the dough until it becomes first consistent, then smooth, then a silky elastic that never stops being a miracle.

She pushes two fingers into the centre of the dough and adds runny honey – she thinks she's finally got the measure that makes for a flavour of honey without it being too sweet – and a tablespoon of dried lavender. She's experimented with drying and using the flowers from the plants that Rufus brought her, but they seem to lose their taste after baking, so she's bought culinary lavender instead and that's just right. It keeps its smell, and has an almost sour tang that balances the honey.

Now Bettina kneads again, changing the motion this time so that instead of picking up and turning the dough in mid-air she's folding it over and then pushing it away with the heel of her hand. Then it goes into an oiled bowl to rise. In a few hours Bettina will knead it again, divide it into loaf tins and leave it to rise again. When the mound of the loaf is above the edge of the tin, she'll bake it. Next year, or the year after, she might be baking some of her bread in the wood-fired brick oven that she is starting to research. For now, the kitchen ovens will have to do. The bread will come out plump and crisp and bursting with good smells and the promise of crunch without, softness within.

And then, after lunch, when it's still warm, she'll try it out on her customers and see whether she's got there at last. She needs the bread to be something that they love, exclaim over, and go home and talk about. Until it's that good, she won't be happy.

Almost as soon as the dough is out of her hands and into the bowl, Bettina feels something slip away from her: control, or peace, or both. And then she sits down and lets herself cry, and cry, because she knows she's just had the best part of her day.

When she's calm again, Bettina looks around for the next thing to do. Over the last fortnight she's cleaned and re-cleaned and re-ordered and re-labelled, and the bakery is more efficient than it's ever been. Rufus says it's understandable that she wants to keep busy. Bettina agrees, but what he doesn't know is what she's trying to keep her thoughts from. It's not grief or shock that are troubling her so much as an overwhelming sense of disorientation. In this world, everything she has dreaded has happened. First, her mother has died and left her the last one of the family, when after fifteen years she still isn't used to being a solo twin.