The Other Half of My Heart (30 page)

Bettina nods.

Fran keeps talking. ‘Someone said they thought they'd seen you, at the church, and I went down and looked and I realized that your father had died. And your father always told me how you were, and what you were doing, and I didn't realize how much I needed to know that you were all right until I no longer had any way of knowing. I never told Roddy I was seeing your father, because I didn't want to get his hopes up. The last thing I heard, you were in France and working in a bakery, and I knew you moved around a lot. I googled you every now and then, but of course all that comes up is the accident. I never thought about you changing your name.'

‘It is my name, still. I didn't change it.' Bettina, who knows that she ran away and hid, finds that she doesn't want Fran to think that she ran away and hid. Fran doesn't even acknowledge that Bettina has spoken; she's in a quiet fever of confession, of years of unspoken words finding an exit route at last.

‘And then Aurora said that she'd seen you, here, in Throckton, and I thought, at last, I can find you. I came here, one Monday, but the shop was closed, so I thought I'd come back. But of course Aurora had told Roddy as well, and you'd said that Alice was in a nursing home, so he decided that it would be a place you could travel to easily or you may as well still be abroad. He and Fred called everywhere until they found her, and then when I saw that Roddy was hell-bent on going, I insisted on going with him. I didn't know whether it was the right thing to do, but I wanted to see Alice, and I wanted to be there just in case.' She shakes her head, and doesn't seem able to articulate just in case of what. Bettina knows exactly what she means. ‘I'm sorry if it was the wrong thing to do, Tina.'

Bettina waits for the next wave of confession, but it doesn't come. She shakes her head in an echo of Fran's feeling of hopelessness. ‘It's all right. She was past – past being upset. She didn't always know that Sam was dead. She used to say, “Lovely boy, Roddy.”' Although Bettina thinks about her mother a lot, she rarely speaks of her; and so when she does, when she hears the past tense out loud, she startles herself into tears. Fran moves to sit next to her, and takes her hand.

‘It was nice to see her enjoying her birds still. She was a lovely woman. I remember her as being …' Fran searches for the word, ‘bright. Lovely clothes, and a big smile, and laughing.'

‘Yes. Once.' Bettina thinks of Alice, so wan from the moment Sam died.

‘Of course.' Bettina has forgotten Fran's ability to do this: to understand not just words but what's behind them. She catches herself thinking about how much easier the aftermath of the accident and Sam's death must have been for Roddy: no lost brother, no lost mother, just understanding and honesty. No. No. Don't be this person.

Fran presses a tissue into Bettina's hand. She dabs and blots at her face.

‘I thought she recognized me,' Fran says quietly, ‘but it was hard to tell.'

‘She mentioned Roddy,' Bettina says.

‘Did she? Well, that's something …'

‘None of it meant anything. She sometimes recognized me as myself, she sometimes thought I was her sister. She used to ask where Sam was. There was no way of knowing what was real to her.'

‘I can't imagine how awful that must have been. For her and for you,' Fran says.

Bettina nods. ‘She never mentioned my father. If you showed her a photograph of him she couldn't tell you who he was.' There's relief in saying this to someone who knows just what it means, because they'd known her parents as the people they had been.

‘I'm sorry. I've never forgotten your father. He was a lovely man,' Fran says.

‘Yes,' Bettina says. They are quiet for a minute, two. She asks the thing she most wants to know: ‘Why didn't Roddy come here? Once Aurora told him?'

‘I think Roddy thought that if he saw your mother, if he could make peace with her, then you wouldn't have a reason not to speak to him. And of course once we'd seen her again – and realized …'

‘I'm sorry,' Bettina says, though she's not sure what for. She feels sorry, though.

‘I persuaded Roddy to do nothing until I'd been to see you. But then Aurora rang Roddy because Verity told her that your mother had died—'

‘Verity did?'

‘She came into the shop and asked for you, and they told her.' Fran pauses, finds her place again, and Bettina remembers coming into the shop the day after Alice had died, and a cheerful note from Verity scrawled on the back of a
Throckton Warbler
compliment slip waiting for her. ‘And, well, I'm sorry he came to the wake. I'd have stopped him if I'd known. Which is why he didn't tell me, of course.'

Bettina nods. She lets her tears dry on her face. They make her skin cool and contract. She quite likes the sensation. It's not unlike the feeling of opening a hot oven door, or riding on a windy day.

‘I'm so glad I've found you,' Fran says.

‘Why did you want to find me?'

Bettina thinks of Roddy's indifference, at the wake. This fever of searching makes no sense when he was so formal, so cold. Back in her memory sits the sight of her mother, crying, saying ‘I don't want to talk about it'; her father, shaking his head, ‘let sleeping dogs lie'. Fran seeking her out when their shared history is so grim seems perverse.

‘Tina, I don't think you ever understood that you were like a daughter to us. You were part of our family. We thought you would always be part of it. Roddy was so serious about you, so devoted. And then you were gone, and although you, understandably, didn't want to see us, we still cared about you.'

‘It wasn't that I didn't want to, but my mother found it very difficult—' Bettina says. She hears how defensive she is. ‘You remember that day.'

‘Oh, I remember it,' Fran says. She thinks of the welcoming committee at the stables, dismissed by Roddy's scowl; Roddy wheeling himself around his new home without comment, hauling himself into bed, not coming out into the air for three days, while she told herself to be patient and sat in her kitchen with worry and loneliness for company.

‘My mother always saw things as being very simple. Even when they weren't. She was always a bit like that.'

‘They were good people, your parents. We were all good people.'

‘I wasn't. I distracted him. In the car.' Bettina's impulse to confess is sudden and unstoppable.

‘What?' It's taken Fran by surprise, too.

‘We were talking about something, and he thought I was upset, and he kept looking at me even though Sam told him to watch the road, and the next thing we knew—' And the next thing we knew, she thinks, was nothing.

The tears, again. Fran is holding both of Bettina's hands. ‘Listen to me, Tina. We were all good people. We none of us did anything wrong. It might have been easier if someone had. Then we could blame them, instead of all blaming ourselves, and each other.' It sounds as though Fran is crying, too. When Bettina looks at her, her eyes are dry, though her face is mournful.

‘Roddy seems – all right.'

‘He is, I think. Though—' Fran looks at Bettina, deciding, ‘though he was upset after he saw you at your mother's funeral.'

‘Really? He didn't seem upset. He was very – matter-of-fact.' Her heart still shrinks at the thought of it.

‘Oh, come on, Tina, you know he was never matter-of-fact about you. I don't believe you've forgotten a thing about him.'

‘I didn't know what to think. I—' remembering, Bettina is determined to do better, to find words that will say something real, ‘I couldn't find a way to start talking to him, because I was so thrown by him being there, and then he was going, and—'

Fran sighs; smiles, her face as gentle as the morning, before the sun comes up. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't come here to rake over the past. I came to say how sorry I am for everything you've been through. And that I wish there had been a way to resolve things.'

‘I'm not sure that we could have done a lot differently,' Bettina says, although when she thinks about her past it's nothing but an endless ribbon of ‘if only'.

‘I didn't mean—' Fran shakes her head. ‘I'm not saying anything as well as I could. I know nothing was going to bring Sam back, that's not what I meant. I meant – I wish we'd been able to help each other. That you and Roddy had been able to—' Fran is crying like someone who has nearly used up their life's allocation of tears, without sound, without volume, but with feeling.

‘It was a long time ago,' Bettina says. She has picked up Rufus's tie, and is twisting it through her hands.

‘Well, yes, but that doesn't matter, does it, when you live with the effects every day of your life.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘Really, what I came to say was – I'm sorry about so many things, but I'm really sorry Roddy came to the funeral. I hope he didn't upset you. I'm glad you've moved on. Maybe now Roddy will.'

‘I don't know that I've moved on.' Bettina has a vision of herself: never very assertive before the accident, she has since moved from place to place simply by waiting until to move was easier than to stay.

‘You're married. You have a child. I'd call that moving on. And there's nothing wrong with that.'

‘What?'

‘Aurora saw you with your family. A little blonde toddler, she said, a man with good shoes.' She smiles; her eyes say, typical Aurora.

‘Oh, no, that wasn't my little girl – I'm not married.'

‘Roddy said you were wearing a wedding ring.'

‘It was my mother's ring. They took it off her when she died and gave it to me, and I put it on my finger—' Bettina doesn't want to start explaining about her lack of a jewellery box, the holes where her ears were pierced closing over because she didn't wear earrings from the time when, presumably, the ones she was wearing for the ball were taken out when she went into surgery.

Her hands are bare now. She hasn't yet had the courage to go through her mother's personal effects, collected by courier from the nursing home. But she did take out Alice's jewellery box and put it on her bedside table, and put her wedding ring in it. She holds her hands out to Fran, turns them over, as though they are evidence, as though merely saying that she's not married isn't quite proof.

‘But there's someone?'

‘Well, yes. Rufus.' Bettina holds out the tie. It is as good as the shoes. More proof.

‘That's good.'

‘I don't know.'

‘You're allowed to be happy, Tina. We all are.'

‘Yes,' Bettina says, feeling as though Fran has said something theoretically true but that seems utterly irrelevant, like the laws of physics that hold the universe together. ‘Are you happy? Is Fred? Roddy?'

It's Fran's turn to hold her hands in front of her, her palms up. ‘I don't know. Sometimes. Fred seems to be trying to work himself to death. Roddy acts the same as he always did, but he has never forgiven himself for the accident—' she tries again, ‘for what happened to Sam—' once more, ‘for Sam's death. Roddy has never forgiven himself for Sam's death.'

Bettina almost smiles. It's on the tip of her tongue to say, I've missed you. But Fran is talking again.

‘Are you happy with Rufus?'

‘I don't know. He's kind.'

Fran nods. ‘I see.' She looks as though she's going to cry again, but instead she picks up her handbag, takes something from it.

‘I brought you something. I've no idea whether I should have or not. It seemed like a good idea when I set off, when Aurora said you seemed happy and Roddy said you were married. But it's up to you.'

She hands over an envelope, thick and smooth.

‘It's the ball next week. We didn't do it the year after Sam died, and the year after we were still getting Roddy sorted out. But the third year, Roddy said he wanted to do it again, but none of us wanted to go back to the Coach and Horses, and we couldn't have it on the same date, so we have a marquee in the bottom paddock and we do the whole thing there, on the anniversary of us buying the place to begin with.'

‘That's good,' Bettina says.

‘Really? I've never been sure.'

‘Well—' Bettina wants to say, life goes on, but can't quite bring herself to. Instead she offers something that's definitely true: ‘When I think about your place, I feel as though I'm watching a film. It feels like another world. It always did, a bit.'

‘You mattered to us. We missed you. We still do.'

Bettina has opened the envelope. She sits with the card in her hand, looking at it as though it will tell her the answer. It doesn't.

‘I don't know, Fran.'

‘When I came here, I thought you were settled. I thought you might like your husband to see the place where you worked. We were a big part of your life for a long time, Tina.'

‘Yes.'

‘I can see it's a bit more complicated than that. But you'd be welcome.'

‘Does Roddy know you're here?'

‘Yes.' She makes a sad sound that is probably meant to be a laugh. ‘I gave him such a going-over for not telling me that he was going to Alice's funeral, I couldn't have avoided telling him even if I'd wanted to.'

‘Does he want me to come?'

‘Roddy thinks you're married.'

‘Yes.'

Fran reaches up and cups Bettina's cheek, running her thumb across the hollow under her cheekbone. Her skin is rough and chapped. The feel of it is familiar, as though Bettina has, somewhere, logged the shape of Fran's fingertips and waited to come into contact with them again. ‘Isn't it time you started pleasing yourself, Tina?' she says, gently. ‘It's allowed, and it always has been.'

Bettina nods. She can't say anything; there's no one sentence she can pull from what she's feeling.