My Former Heart

‘Brown Windsor? Have you never had brown Windsor? Gosh, you’re lucky. It’s a sort of ghastly thick soup, like liquefied meat. They have it in places like station hotels. You know, the sort of dreary places where old people don’t say a word to each other the whole way through lunch, so all you can hear is scraping spoons.’

Verity did not laugh. She nodded, but said nothing. If Verity didn’t like jokes after all, Ruth thought their walk was going to seem very long.

They went on up the hill in silence. Presently Verity began to speak.

‘When I leave here I’m going to train to be a doctor,’ she announced. ‘I have a place at University College Hospital, once I’ve done my Highers. I want to be a surgeon.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Ruth. ‘Are girls even allowed to be surgeons?’ She didn’t recall ever having heard Digby speak of a woman colleague; certainly not a senior doctor. The only women he worked with, so far as she knew, were nurses.

‘Of course we are! Girls – young women – are allowed to be anything they want to be. We want to be. Nearly anything.’

‘Golly,’ said Ruth. ‘I thought you had to be a nurse, if you wanted to go into medicine. I mean, I haven’t really thought about it much.’

‘That’s the trouble with this place,’ said Verity, ‘we’re never made to think about anything at all.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Ruth. ‘Learning about Gladstone made me think about history quite a bit. And when we did Oliver Cromwell. What things must have been like, you know, in the past.’

‘But not science?’ Verity looked at her.

Ruth suddenly felt doltish. ‘Not really, no. To tell you the truth, after we dissected a frog in the Lower Fifth, I was never quite up to science again.’

Verity laughed. Ruth glanced at her, just to make sure it wasn’t a laugh of derision, before she joined in.

After they’d had tea at the hotel in Colwall, Verity suggested that, rather than walking back, they saved their legs and caught the train to Malvern through the long tunnel instead.

‘Let’s play “I went to Harrods”,’ Verity suggested, as they took their places on the seats, which prickled through their stockings.

‘I don’t know how,’ said Ruth.

‘Well, it’s a memory game. You have to remember all the things that I say I’ve bought, and I have to remember all yours. And we both have to remember our own as well. And it’s in alphabetical order. The first to forget is the loser. So, I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark.’

Ruth paused. ‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark and a bun. Will that do?’

Verity nodded, smiling. ‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark, a bun and some china plates.’

‘I went to Harrods and I bought an aardvark, a bun, some china plates and … and some delicious dates.’

‘Are all your turns going to be food?’ teased Verity.

‘It rather looks like it.’

From that afternoon, they spent all their free time together. They went to teashops, or sat on walls in the sun, or talked in each other’s rooms. Sometimes Verity was very serious and Ruth felt rather awed by her cleverness, but at other times she was girlish, even silly. But they never ran out of things to say. Verity’s family lived at Richmond upon Thames. There were three brothers, Verity the only girl. She had told Ruth a long story about her parents’ courtship, involving letters put in envelopes addressed to other people and misunderstandings and the wrong brother, but Ruth hadn’t really followed it all. It was all meant to be fearfully romantic, but when she met Verity’s mother and father she was disappointed: they were just ordinary, middle-aged people, who both wore glasses. Verity told her what her mother had said to her once: ‘Daddy and I love you all, but we will always love each other best.’ Ruth was not sure whether this statement wasn’t rather unkind to the children or, as Verity evidently believed, rather magnificent.

Ruth had other friends, but she missed Verity during her final year at school. She spent the last Easter holidays in Richmond with her, and the two planned to rent rooms in London together, once Ruth started at the Royal College of Music in September. An old girlfriend of Ruth’s uncle Christopher had a tall, thin house in South Kensington, where she took paying guests. The girls went to see her and liked the place, even though it smelled of cats. They would take up residence in the autumn. One of Verity’s brothers was in his final year at Cambridge, and the eldest had joined the Foreign Office and been posted abroad, but the middle brother, Harry, was living in London. He was working in some sort of insurance firm in the City.

Harry laughed easily and had the same fair, oddly blunt eyelashes as his sister, as though they had been chopped in a straight line with miniature garden shears. Among the Longdens he was teased for being the least clever and for the fact that he blushed easily. It was true that he wasn’t in the slightest formidable, as the rest of them were. He had ugly hands with stubby fingers, the knuckles whorled like knots of cross-graining in a piece of timber. It was his hands – or rather, the way she felt such peculiar tenderness towards his hands, a mixture of affection and pity – that made Ruth realise she liked Harry in a way that she had never liked anyone else before. His hands unsettled her. Whenever she was with him she glanced at them constantly. Harry had joined his sister and Ruth at a concert at the Wigmore Hall one evening and, sitting beside him in the dark, Ruth had spent the whole evening looking at his hands, folded loosely around the concert programme in his lap. By the time the music stopped she felt quite cross with him. The phrase: ‘He can’t keep his hands to himself ’ came into her mind. Such a condition seemed very desirable to her.

Once Ruth was established in London that autumn, Iris came down to visit, leaving Jamie with his doting great-aunt Hilary.

She was staying with her old friend Jocelyn for a few days. Ruth was to meet her for lunch at a little Italian place, by the corner of the underground at South Kensington.

‘You don’t mind if someone joins us, do you, darling? An old friend, I mean?’ said Iris.

Ruth felt the familiar tweak of disappointment which so often occurred within minutes of seeing her mother. They hadn’t met for months and she had been looking forward to their being alone together, without the distractions of little Jamie, or even the oddly menacing presence of Birdle. And she had never cared for Jocelyn. But it was a man who came into the restaurant and, smiling, approached their table. He bent to kiss Iris before holding out his hand to Ruth.

‘You remember Bunny, darling? He was a friend of Daddy’s, from Cambridge days.’

Ruth pretended she did.

The lunch wasn’t much fun. Bunny kept ordering bottles of raisiny red wine and talking about horses, and people who lived in Newmarket, while Iris smoked continually and laughed sharply, even though nothing was particularly funny. By the time they were having their coffee, Bunny was openly flirting with Ruth, offering to take her to the opera one night, to a box. He kept insisting that he would see her home in a taxi, although it was broad daylight and her digs were only a few streets away. Iris’s laughter had died away by the time the waiter had removed the plates from their main courses.

‘Actually I’ve got a class up at the College and I’d prefer to walk,’ Ruth lied. ‘Thanks though,’ she told him, once they were all out on the street.

‘Heavens, that man has become a bore,’ said Iris crossly, when Bunny had gone. ‘He used to be so original. Drink of course. Fatal.’

Iris had a plan for the afternoon: they would walk across the park and up Piccadilly to Bond Street. Jocelyn had told her that Fenwick’s had the smartest clothes, and she was determined to buy Ruth a coat for the winter. Iris was generous in fits. The October sunlight shone thinly through the plane trees, whose trunks bore a dappled tracery, as if they were half shadowed, half bleached with light. Iris walked fast, as always. In the store, a tired-looking assistant wearing thick, too-pale face powder brought out coats for Ruth to try on: one a dark chocolate-brown gabardine, belted; the next a pale-green swing coat with raglan sleeves which puffed at the wrists; then one in red bouclé, with big black buttons.

‘Oh, I think the green, don’t you?’ Iris asked the assistant.

‘The cut is very much of the season,’ the woman said.

‘It moves prettily at the back,’ said Iris.

Ruth surveyed herself in the glass and was not happy with what she saw: a young woman with dark hair that wouldn’t lie flat and bright eyes. Her calves were lean enough, but somehow lacked the curve necessary to make them look like the limbs of a real woman. They were a child’s legs, straight down, stumpy. The green coat accentuated the flaws of her figure and concealed its attractions: her trim waist and firm bosom were utterly lost within its folds. The colour reminded her of the drabness of hospital corridors. She thought it made her look like a huge broad bean. She wished the assistant would stop hovering so she could say so.

‘I’m not sure, actually,’ she said.

But Iris was.

‘That colour’s terribly fetching on you, darling,’ she said firmly.

‘But I don’t think I’m tall enough. I think I’d be better with a belt,’ said Ruth.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Belted coats are for Norland Nannies. Swing coats are all the thing, for the young, I mean. Aren’t they?’ she asked the assistant, who murmured in assent. Iris was already reaching into her bag for her chequebook. Before Ruth could voice any further objections the coat was being whisked towards the counter and wrapped in tissue paper, like egg whites being folded into cakes. She was handed an important-looking paper bag, with the box containing the coat inside. The bag was grass green, with black lettering swooping across its sides, and thick string handles. Iris looked expectantly at her, for thanks.

Ruth was not going to let her mother see the tears which stung her eyes, so she bent as if to tighten the lace of her left shoe. She suddenly felt much younger than her years, forlorn and childish and mutinously ungrateful.

‘Well, I want to go down to Simpson’s and buy some tea,’ Iris announced briskly. ‘I’m going to be frightfully extravagant and get all sorts of exotic things one can’t find in the country, like Lapsang Souchong.’

‘It’s lovely being able to have as many cups as one likes now,’ Ruth said. Tea had only just come off the ration. ‘Last week it went to our heads rather. Verity and I drank so much tea that we felt quite sick.’

‘Darling! Really! You do say the queerest things.’

They had reached Piccadilly and Ruth could feel her mother invisibly tugging away from her, like when you tried to push one magnet against another. ‘Thank you for the lunch. And the coat. It’s really very kind of you.’

‘Well, we can’t have you freezing to death,’ said Iris.

Ruth was able to muster a thin smile.

Chapter 4

It was all most awkward. Iris and Digby had barely even been in the same room as Edward and Helen, let alone for a whole afternoon. They had certainly never sat down to eat at the same table before. Iris would no doubt talk too much, Digby too little. Edward’s manners would prevail of course, but Helen prattled so. And all the Longden relations were Catholic and obviously disapproved. Ruth herself had received Instruction, so that it could be a Catholic service, to please Harry’s parents. She had had to undertake to bring up her children within the Faith, in due course. It was rather wonderful, to think of all those saints constantly interceding on her behalf and to learn that Mary never, ever refused a prayer. She kept quiet about the aspects of her new religion in which she could not quite believe. The only difficulty occurred when Verity suggested she make no mention as to how she was related to Jamie, who was to be her page.

‘But why?’ asked Ruth. ‘Aren’t you allowed pages who are your half-brothers?’

‘It’s only that Father Leonard might find it difficult about him being your mother’s child from her second marriage.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you know we don’t go in for divorce. It may be – and I’m not sure, it may be that I’m erring on the side of caution – that the Church would not recognise your mother’s second marriage. In which case, Jamie—’

‘You can’t mean it! That’s absurd!’

‘Father Leonard doesn’t need to know that he’s your half-brother. You can simply give his name. After all, it’s different from yours.’

‘But isn’t that terribly hypocritical? And what about “Suffer little children to come unto me”? It’s not very Christian, is it, to declare Jamie a … well, illegitimate? It’s not his fault, after all.’ Ruth had flushed with anger. ‘He’s innocent. He’s a child.’ It was the first time she had ever been short with Verity.

‘Nobody said anything like that, Ruth. It’s a question of whether or not he was born in sin. And after all, we all are. That’s why we are baptised, as you will no doubt have learned. I could very well be wrong about this question. It could very well be that there is no reason why he shouldn’t participate in the wedding Mass. But Father Leonard’s rather a stickler. I just wouldn’t want there to be any unpleasantness.’

But it was too late. The question over Jamie lodged in Ruth’s upper chest painfully, like hiccups that have gone on too long. At first she was determined to bring it up with Harry, but she thought better of it. If he did not disagree with his sister, Ruth knew she would struggle to forgive him.

Ruth had other worries. She feared embarrassment: Iris was practically a pagan, went about with bare legs, seldom did her hair. ‘You will wear a hat, won’t you, Mummy? Only, all the Longdens are,’ Ruth dared at last to ask her on the telephone.

‘Of course I will! What do you take me for?’ said Iris hotly.

‘Of course. I didn’t … it’s only that—’

‘Just because one isn’t absolutely hidebound with formality doesn’t mean that one doesn’t know how to behave,’ Iris interrupted. ‘I am a doctor’s wife, you may recall. One may live in the North, but that doesn’t make one an absolute Eskimo.’

Ruth thought that Eskimos generally did wear hats, but judged it wiser to say nothing. Getting married seemed to necessitate a lot of not saying things.

At least Iris was not intending to come south in advance of the wedding. And the thought that the reception might take place at her house seemed never to have crossed her mind: there were advantages in her failure to observe convention. It was tacitly accepted that Ruth would marry from Edward’s house. After the service at the Catholic church in Cheltenham (Father Leonard would officiate, by special arrangement with the diocese) they would repair there. There would be champagne in the dining room and then the guests would go into a marquee in the garden for the wedding breakfast.

Ruth could hardly wait for the day to be over. She and Harry so seldom had time on their own; that was the only snag of his being Verity’s brother. Harry had been sharing a flat in Bayswater with two friends, one who worked at the Treasury and one who, like Harry, was in the City. Ruth’s room in South Kensington was too small to sit about in; anyway, Verity always seemed to be at home when her brother called. Their courtship had been conducted in crowded coffee shops, concert halls and museums. It would be the greatest luxury to spend ten whole days together, just them.

Parts of the wedding day passed slowly and Ruth felt oddly disconnected at those times, as if she were a ghost, watching.

She saw smiling faces turn towards her as she processed up the aisle, a blur of goodwill like a ripple propelling her towards the altar. After the service she and Harry stood in the dining room to greet the guests; several of the women told Ruth she was radiant, which she knew was their way of saying she looked happy, if not ravishingly pretty. She hardly minded. Harry’s face became pink from the exertion of shaking every guest’s hand, his hair somehow tousled. To his bride he looked like an adorable little boy, come downstairs after being put to bed with a slight fever.

Every time she thought about anything, it seemed to have a bed in it. In her suitcase was a small round tin, housing a dome of thick dark rubber the colour of a flypaper. Absurdly, this would prevent her from having babies, at least for the time being – she had a final year at the Royal College to see out. Her father had suggested she quit now that she was to be a wife, with wifely things to do, but Harry saw no reason why she should not carry on and Ruth wanted to. The gynaecologist in Portland Place had instructed her to practise inserting and removing the device before the honeymoon. She must first lie down. Get the thing in. Then after use – a prescribed amount of hours later – she was to remove the thing, wash it in tepid water; never hot, for very hot water could cause the rubber to perish. At last she must dry it carefully before sprinkling the barest coating of talcum powder over the dome, like dusting icing sugar onto a fairy cake.

In her room she had blushed, alone, as she removed it from its tin. The bed felt too high, too exposed, so she lay on the narrow rug beside it. First she tried lying on her back, then on her side. The base of the dome was a sprung ring; the trick was to narrow it between two fingers, while probing with the other hand. Once in place you could let go, and the ring would resume its circular form, fitting over what the doctor had told her was called the cervix, like a tiny brimless hat. There was a knack to it apparently. Evidently it was a knack she did not possess. The device kept springing out of her hand and across the rug. On one attempt it jumped several feet, as far as the door. Ruth began to laugh. But laughing alone was ridiculous and made it harder to concentrate, which made it more difficult to get the wretched thing into place, which only made her laugh more, with the helplessness of it all. It was quite impossible. It would never fit. It would leap out at Harry, on her wedding night, startling as a frog, and she would be too ashamed ever to face him again.

For several days she made no further attempts. The tin sat undisturbed, a shameful secret in the drawer among her under-garments. Then, intrepid after a day of studying, she strode home and went straight up to her room, unlaced her shoes, unfastened her suspender belt and pulled down her woollen stockings and knickers and tried again, in broad daylight; not lying down as the doctor had told her, but standing up in her bare feet, one foot raised on the chair at the end of her bed. This was the way a Valkyrie would put in her Dutch cap, she thought, and it brought victory. Getting it out – which had worried her: what if it got stuck? – turned out to be much easier than putting it in. There was a way of hooking your finger under its rim, and yanking. It was rather like gutting a fish.

None of this augured well for the honeymoon. There was nothing pleasurable in the probing necessitated by the contraceptive device. How could actual lovemaking be any different? Ruth didn’t mean to keep thinking about how it would turn out in that department, but somehow her thoughts always came back to settle on it, like a bee returning again and again to the same plant. She liked kissing – she and Harry had done plenty of that – but she did feel anxious about the next bit.

Their room at the hotel by Lake Garda had long wooden shutters and a paper of big orange-ish flowers. The candlewick bed cover was an anaemic tangerine: not the bright colour of a tangerine’s skin, but the colour of the tight, pithy inside of an under-ripe fruit. At first Ruth disliked the room’s decor – it embarrassed her somehow – and she gravitated towards the window, which framed a view of blue water, distant villas and air. But by the second morning she loved it all: the ugly tufted bedspread, the coyness of the spindly chairs, even the stiff bath taps. No wonder people spoke of married bliss! It turned out that what happened in bed was perfectly lovely. You could kiss all the way through, which had surprised her: she had imagined that kissing was only a preliminary, a first course. Nor did you have to keep your eyes shut. You could look, you could kiss, you could kiss any part of each other, you could take as long as you liked. It seemed there was nothing you couldn’t do, there were no forbidden zones, and all of it was just the best feeling ever.

Their time in bed made her love Harry more than ever, in a slightly dotty way, at once hypnotised and ravenous. It also had the strange effect of making her fall rather in love with herself. Ruth’s body was not something she had ever thought much about. She carried it around, dressed it, fed it when it was hungry. When she looked in the glass before going out for an evening she occasionally tutted at her unshapely legs, her disobliging hair. Now she found herself amazed at her own flesh while she bathed, at her heavy breasts and the freckles on her forearms. She suddenly felt for the first time that she was beautiful.

Back in London they took a first- and second-floor maisonette in Pimlico, in Alderney Street. On the lower floor was a drawing room, with a pair of graceful windows to the floor. The boudoir grand piano which had been Harry’s wedding gift to her was here. There was a dining room and, at the back, a kitchen with a tiny larder off it. Upstairs was their bedroom, a dressing room for Harry and – the thing that Ruth loved best about their new home – a bathroom much bigger than any other she knew of in London. As if to do justice to their ample surrounds, the basin and bath were enormous. Ruth installed a chaise longue under the bathroom window, so that she and Harry could keep each other company while one of them was soaking.

She rode her bicycle up to the Royal College every morning, while Harry took the underground to work. A char came in three times a week, to launder Harry’s work shirts and do the heavy cleaning, such as it was. Ruth arrived home well before her husband in the afternoons, in plenty of time to start preparing their dinner. Usually she practised the piano for an hour, or sang. She taught herself to cook out of a book: steak Diane, chicken à la King. Often they went to bed as soon as Harry got home, almost before he had had time to take off his coat. Afterwards they sat flushed and naked in bed, and drank sherry out of the prim cut-glass glasses they had been given as a wedding present. Sometimes they did not get up again, but one of them went down to the kitchen in a dressing gown to fetch cheese and water biscuits, which infested the sheets with huge prickly crumbs.

It was after their first Christmas as a married couple that Harry began to make noises about babies. Ruth secretly blamed his family, who – perhaps reminded of infants by the festivities attendant on the baby Jesus – kept dropping heavy hints. Even Verity, who showed no inclination of her own to reproduce, was a culprit. Ruth found this treacherous of her old friend, who had always made so much of women’s careers. Harry was so genial, so dear: they never quarrelled. She never denied him anything, because he asked for so little, only her affection and interest, which came naturally. Sometimes it was rather a slog, getting up early to catch the train to Richmond every Sunday for Mass with the Longdens, followed by lunch back at their house, but it was only natural that they should see more of his family than of hers, because they lived so much nearer. And they were a proper family, she reminded herself, not like hers.

She adored Harry, she wanted to please him, but she did want, too, to finish her studies before having a baby; or at least, that was the official reason.

‘They don’t come overnight, you know,’ said Harry. ‘We could start now and you’d still be fine for your exams in June. I mean, it wouldn’t arrive ’til ages afterwards.’

‘I can’t appear at the College bulging! It would be too … I don’t know. Too odd. Conspicuous. I’d just feel funny, being the only one. I’m the only one who’s married as it is. Everyone else goes back to boiled dinners in digs. I’m the only one with a home of my own, who cooks.’ She frowned.