Marble Heart

The house was chilly during the day but on a winter’s evening, with the coal fire well stoked, there was nowhere cosier. When Gran arrived back from work they would make pilchards on toast and she’d tell them how she’d machined twenty skirts that day, or stitched three dozen collars. Sometimes she brought back clothes she’d got cheap because they were seconds. Joan was the first girl in the street to have a pair of loon pants and Eddie cut a dash in hipster trousers when they were just reaching the shops.

Joan was fifteen when Eddie disappeared. By then he had rented a tiny flat in Islington but he often stayed with them on a Friday or Saturday night and his room was kept ready for him. Gran would put a hot water bottle between his sheets on winter weekends to make sure that they were properly aired. His chest, weakened by bouts of childhood asthma, was easily affected by damp.

After they heard the terrible news Gran insisted on maintaining his room just as it was on the last Sunday morning they had seen him. She literally wasted away in front of Joan’s eyes, worn out with grieving for him. Joan would hear her crying in the night, deep sobs against the pillow in her bed by the window, sobs that went on month after month. Joan stopped crying after a couple of weeks. She seemed to have used up all her tears. She felt dry and tight inside and remote, as if nothing much would ever matter again. She didn’t know how to comfort her gran. She was a young fifteen, tongue-tied and awkward. What could she find to say to a woman of sixty-six who had raised two families and outlived a child and grandchild?

Her grandmother died when Joan was eighteen. She was alone in the world then apart from an aunt who’d rowed with Gran and kept her distance and a couple of cousins who’d moved out to Essex, shaking the dust of the inner city from their feet. They had never been one of those close cockney families who were supposed to inhabit London. Joan would wonder if those families ever truly existed – she had never met any of them. At times it occurred to her that she had been handed a raw deal, orphaned and then deprived of the two people closest to her. The sight of her single plate and cup on the kitchen table could make her heart knock.

Gran left her exactly one hundred pounds. Joan put it in a building society and carried on renting the house. She had left school at sixteen with four O-levels. The teachers said that she was good enough to stay on and do secretarial training, maybe head to college eventually. Eddie had been of that opinion too; he’d said that when the time came he’d help her choose a course. But then he’d gone, everything changed and Joan couldn’t see herself as college material. She didn’t have much self-confidence to start with and what had happened to Eddie made her inclined to keep her head down. The world seemed an unpredictable place. She preferred to tackle the small, domestic issues of life, move in a familiar groove where there were certainties. That was why the agency work suited her so well; things had to be done on set days at set times and this pattern rarely varied. The wider scene – politics, the environment, world problems, the chaos resulting from wars and famine – she ignored; other people were welcome to worry about and deal with those problems. She never bought a newspaper and watched only variety shows, soap operas and films on TV.

When she left school she went to work in a bakery, then in the ladies’ clothes shop where she stayed until she moved to Alice’s agency. At twenty-two she married Bernard Douglas, who had been in her class at school and turned up at her door now and again when he wasn’t driving long-distance lorries. It hadn’t lasted long and she had felt relief tinged with only a shade of melancholy when he had written from Düsseldorf to say he’d got a job based there and he wanted a divorce. She had married him because of panic, seeing that other women of her age were setting up home, choosing curtains and carpets. His motives were unclear. His absences had pervaded the house and even when he was there he imposed so little of himself on it that he left no vacuum when he took off for a trip to the continent. He was capable in a slow, unwitting way, good at practical tasks and she had confused this with dependability, ignoring the evidence that a man who chose to let his work regularly take him far from home might not have domestic interests at heart. The divorce left her with mended window latches, a new drain pipe and guttering. Occasionally she would recall the stale plastic-and-oil smell of his lorry cab and the duty-free brandy fumes he breathed on her as he came through the door.

Resolutely she put her mistake behind her, saved regular amounts and eventually had enough for the deposit on her flat in Leyton. It was on the first floor of a three-storey fifties block, one-bedroomed with no garden but she’d loved it the moment she had set eyes on it. There was a Grace Ashley verse that said:

Give me a room

And I will paint it with love’s loving colours,

Cushion it with heart’s ease

And it will be our cherished home.

Joan had worked those lines into a tapestry when she moved to her flat. It hung in its frame on the living-room wall. She went and read it over to herself on that night when Nina had appeared depressed about her marriage. It meant even more now that she was preparing a home for herself and Rich. The paint for the living room was standing ready inside the front door. They had selected white with a hint of buttercup for the walls and deep yellow gloss for the skirting board and radiator. Joan had spent the previous weekend stripping off the old wallpaper and putting up lining paper. When she told Alice what she was doing, her friend had offered to come and give her a hand with the painting. She was lonely herself, that was why she spent so much time at work. Joan understood that her business had replaced her family, who had abandoned her. Her one son had become a drug user, then joined a road protest group and was living up a tree somewhere. Her husband had taken off with his optician years ago, clearing out their joint bank account the day he left. According to Alice, all that had remained of fifteen years of marriage were his golf clubs and a stack of pornographic magazines stashed in the back of the wardrobe. It was generous of her to root so strongly for Joan and Rich, advising that they should grab whatever happiness came their way. Some people’s scars made them resentful of their friends’ good fortune.

Alice arrived promptly at eight that evening, dressed in overalls. She had brought her own roller and tray so that they could do two walls each.

‘How are you getting on with that new woman, Nina Rawle?’ she asked as they worked.

‘Okay. I thought she was a bit stand-offish to start with but it’s just her manner. She’s very weak physically. It must be terrible to be able to do so little when you’re comparatively young.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Something wrong with her tissues, that’s all she’s said so far. She moves like an old woman. I think she’s quite depressed.’

‘You’ll be good for her then, Joan, you’ll chivvy her along. We’re survivors, you and me, aren’t we? Get on and make the best of things.’

‘You have to, don’t you?’

‘Suppose so. Any vermouth going?’

Joan poured two glasses and they took a quick breather while they sipped.

‘It’s a lovely colour,’ Alice said. ‘Warm. I hope Rich appreciates all this. I’ll be having words with him if he doesn’t.’

‘I don’t think you need worry about that. He’s a smashing man, Alice, he really is. Will you be a witness when we get married? His brother’s agreed to be the other one.’

Alice raised her glass. ‘’Course I will. It will be a pleasure, as long as you promise me you won’t want to do anything daft like give up your job.’

‘No chance. I love the job. Anyway, we’ll need the money.’

They carried on painting, finishing by ten-thirty. Alice washed out the rollers while Joan wiped splashes off the skirting board.

‘That Nina Rawle,’ Alice said, ‘did she tell you who recommended you?’

‘No. It was probably Jenny Crisp, the young woman with the baby in Crouch End.’

Alice shook her head. ‘That’s what I’d assumed, but it wasn’t her. I know because she rang today and she said she hadn’t mentioned us to anyone. I’m sure we haven’t any other customers from Crouch End.’

‘I don’t know then. I must be more famous than I thought!’

Alice was sniffing the air. ‘There’s a very scented smell in this kitchen, sort of musky. What is it, some kind of air freshener?’

Joan pointed to the cantaloupe sitting on top of the fridge. ‘It’s that melon. Strong, isn’t it? They were on a special offer, I thought I’d try one.’

They had another vermouth as a nightcap and Alice left. Joan knew she wouldn’t be going straight home, though; she’d be calling at the office to check the answer-phone. She couldn’t wait to introduce Alice to Rich; she knew that they’d like each other. Her life felt good. For the first time in many years, everything was coming together. She raised her glass to Rich’s photo in the kitchen and said goodnight, sleep tight to him, as she always did.

3

NINA

‘Cara Majella,

‘I wonder if you are asleep now in your dormitory, breathing in dry Ethiopian air? I have no idea of time-zone differences between our respective continents. You’re probably toiling in the daylight, helping with irrigation or holding a health class. You used to refer to sleep as “John O’ Dreams”. It was a name you’d got from your mother, one of those comforting childhood sayings that adults cleave to. “I’m ready for John O’Dreams,” you would yawn at the end of a long evening in the students’ union bar, shaking your hair out. When I was bleary-eyed after listening to one of Finn’s lengthy position papers on Irish capitalism you would say that John O’Dreams was after me. He would steal gently into a room, unnoticed, relaxing tired muscles, softly closing the eyes. My mother used to warn me that the Sandman was on his way. When I was reluctant to settle down, she would say that she could hear his footsteps on the stairs. He was as bold as John O’Dreams was self-effacing, a threatening figure in my childhood imagination who threw stinging dust under the eyelids.

‘“Sleep offers us escape from grinding reality. It says, ‘that was then, this is now”. A balance evolves through sleep, an acknowledgement of the need for order. People say “sleep on it” when they mean that you need time to consider something, put a shape to it. That’s the kind of truism my new acquaintance Joan Douglas would utter: “sleep on it, things always seem different in the morning”. I’m sure that for most people, those with everyday anxieties, it does happen; they wake and smile, realising that in the light of day, things aren’t so bad after all.

‘Depriving someone of sleep is a form of punishment or torture; apart from the physical effects, it disorders their world and makes them crazy. But then we both knew that back in 1970; do you recall that we demonstrated outside an RUC barracks, protesting about the harsh treatment of political prisoners? We sprayed the reinforced concrete wall with yellow paint to signify police cowardice and ran before they could catch us.

‘I woke at two o’clock this morning and I immediately thought, some of us punish ourselves and some of us punish others. My father punished himself for losing his job by drinking his way to an early death. My mother punished him for never being the husband she aspired to by criticising every move he made. You punished yourself for what we did by becoming an exiled voluntary worker. I have delivered punishment on two fronts, pursuing retribution against myself for what I did with you and against Martin for loving me when I didn’t deserve to be loved.

‘One form of my punishment has been to wake at two every morning since the day I got married fifteen years ago. As my eyes open I look at the clock face and there it is, exactly two, as surely as if I had set the alarm. John O’Dreams and the Sandman linked arms and vanished from my life without warning on my wedding night. It is as if I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have the comfort and pleasure that Martin wanted to give me. The memory that lies always just beneath the surface was rising up in the silence of the night. Why should you sleep, it asked, why should you know warmth and companionship? So instead of the sanctuary I had hoped for, my marriage delivered me to bleak stretches of the night when I would lie and watch Martin sleeping. Contemplating another person sleep while you ache with tiredness becomes a kind of torture. There he was sailing a balmy sea of dreams while I stood shivering on a desolate shore. I knew all the little noises Martin made, the snuffles and sighs; I counted the number of times he turned in an hour and the pattern of his movements on the mattress. I tried copying his breathing, wondering if I could catch on to the shirt tails of his sleep and join it.

‘I could never make the night my friend. It pressed down on me, a heavy, alien blanket. I had intimate knowledge of all the phases of wakefulness. I could have written a thesis on them. First the sudden, dry-throated exit from sleep, eyes heavy but watchful, then the awareness of a rapid heartbeat, the twitch of tired limbs, the efforts to find a magic position that would lure slumbers back; left side, stomach, back, right side, foetal curl, left side again. As the minutes slid into hours there would be unsuccessful attempts to clear the mind, the random racing and crashing together of thoughts. Often in the thick darkness I would see you, your hair misty with smoke from the turf fire, jazzing on Finn’s grand piano or playing duets with him. Snatches of the songs you used to sing echoed in my head, particularly that rousing chorus from Brecht:

“So left, two three,

So left, two three,

To the task that we must do;

March on in the Workers’ United Front

For you are a worker too.”

‘I could hear the thump of your ankle boot as you kept time on the ancient carpet, dislodging years of dust: left, two three, left, two three. The march would go on and on, resounding along the years.

‘Sometimes I would be awake for three hours, sometimes four; on a very bad night, five. I learned the different qualities of darkness, from the impenetrable blackness of two AM through the thinning greyness that preceded dawn and finally the pale, lemony light that illuminated the striped curtains. In the summer months I regularly heard the day stealing in. A feeling of panic would take over as the first birds whistled or a milk float whined along the street; another episode of my life was about to begin and I had had no respite from the previous one. All order, all balance had vanished. Then I might cry from sheer frustration, tears of tension and self-pity, but very quiet tears so that Martin wouldn’t wake. My poor Martin. God knows what he made of it all, watching me mutate into a semi-zombie. He must have thought the woman he’d married was cursed with a schizoid personality.

‘On campus each day I would lock my office door at lunchtime and doze in my chair, the kind of sleep where you are half alert to voices and noises, where you twitch and jitter. My watch alarm would warn me when my time was up and I would come to, dazed and hot, eyes pricking. I took to not eating in the middle of the day because food made me more sluggish. My afternoons were spent sleep walking. I delivered lectures through an obscuring haze. It was as if I was inside a tank and my students were sitting on the other side of the scummy glass. I have no idea how I managed to keep going for so long. The students were kind and long-suffering. It is just as well that I had to resign when I did. No doubt in these days of mission statements and quality monitoring one of them would eventually have complained about me and I would have been inspected and found wanting, perhaps dismissed.

‘I have separated from Martin. I left him some months ago. I was mistaken if I hoped that giving him up would mean that I could sleep again. Deep down I believed that if I denied myself my husband, made a conscious sacrifice, some pity might be afforded me. My gesture of self-denial might be taken into account, weighed on unseen scales and go some way towards restoring the order I had helped to disrupt. But of course there is no unseen dispenser or order and justice – the responsibility for that lies within ourselves. And so I continue to wake at two. I suppose that the habit of fifteen years is hard to break. Returning to a single, friendless bed made no difference. It simply meant that I had no one to watch but myself, no breathing to listen to but my own.

‘I lied to the woman you will hear more about, Joan Douglas. She asked if I had tried sleeping tablets and I said I had. I knew that if I told the truth she would have encouraged me to get some; I would have had to listen to advice about breaking the pattern of insomnia. I’m sure that at some point she would have said, “You won’t know yourself once you’ve had a couple of unbroken nights”. Joan is one of those people who needs to think that every problem has a solution. I won’t allow myself sleeping tablets because I don’t deserve them. I deserve to lie awake and contemplate shadowy demons.

‘As the clock ticked this morning I imagined Joan lying asleep in her bed, snugly lulled by her own medication. She confessed that she is sometimes wakeful. Any wakefulness you experience will have skulking in its depths our shared memory, that icy hammer that shatters the warm layers of unconsciousness. I have no idea how the passage of time might have assisted you in reshaping that memory. I know that when I turn on my computer I will find exactly what I committed to it previously but the mind shifts and transforms, illuminating the past with the light of present experience. I only know that I can describe what happened in a certain place at a certain time.

‘We last saw each other in 1972. The annual letters we have exchanged since then have been paltry things, lists of domestic trivia. We have been unable to let each other go but we never allude to what we did. Our short notes have summarised the passing years; my teaching and marriage, my ill health, your involvement in crop planning and health promotion. Neither of us ever mentioned Finn until 1994 when you wrote that you’d heard from a cousin that he had been shot with two other men by a Protestant paramilitary. It was a pub shooting and that phenomenon all too familiar in Northern Ireland, a case of mistaken identity, the drinkers taken for IRA activists. That was all; one stark sentence sandwiched between paragraphs about the orphanage you were working in. “Peter said he was sure he heard the name Butler on the radio report.” When I read it I felt a gentle lift of the heart; he had, after all, been the instigator of what we did. He had presented us with the idea, urged us on, set up the plan. Then, as I re-read the news I thought, that deals with him, that settles part of the account. Now, what about us? His going was like a crack of light entering a dark room; the knowledge that he was dead allowed me seriously to consider what I should do to resolve my own unchallenged guilt. And so I pondered and recognised that no amount of charitable work or self punishment would do. I came to the decision that has prompted this letter and will unravel the past.

‘Joan, my new paid helper, will maintain me while I marshal my energy to write. She will be here again in the morning with her exhaustingly breezy manner and skirt that is just a little too short, making her plump knees look oddly naked. She will say how nice the bookshelves are looking now or aren’t the roses in the conservatory coming on a treat or I’ll feel better once I’ve got a nice breakfast down me. I will smile at her and when she’s bustled to the kitchen I will sink my head onto my chest and breathe deeply.

‘When she arrived the first time, wearing an awful apron, I was amazed at what I had let myself in for. I hid my feelings behind a businesslike mask. Cowardly, I almost told her that I had changed my mind or that we wouldn’t suit each other. I nearly cried out when she said that she’d have to be careful with her grammar now that she knew that I had been a teacher. Joan is the kind of person I would normally avoid, one of life’s surface optimists and lover of shallow wisdoms. When she touches her cheek and says that she speaks as she finds or you have to put your best foot forward, I want to run and hide.

‘But I won’t run, because I need Joan, I am no longer able to function alone. The days are too onerous without someone to do all those time-consuming tasks that can easily take hours when one moves at a snail’s speed. I am willing to endure recitals of the dreadful poet she likes, one Grace Ashley. Joan informed me that she has six teddy bears on her bed and in the early hours of today I pictured them watching her, open-eyed, just as I used to watch Martin. Then I reached into the drawer under my bed and took out this lap-top computer, a leaving present from my fellow lecturers. It wasn’t a surprise gift, I had told the head of languages what I wanted. As the parcel was handed to me I surveyed the uneasy figures in the room, standing awkwardly with their paper cups of cheap wine. I thought how horror-struck they would be if they had an inkling of the story that was going to be typed on their token of farewell, how their embarrassed sympathy would turn to outrage. An echo of the kinds of comments often uttered to reporters when a neighbour has been discovered in a crime came to me: “She always seemed a nice, quiet sort of person, kept herself to herself. Nobody round here would have thought she’d been involved in anything like that.”

‘As I waited for the blue glow of my computer screen to appear I propped my pillows higher, then took a couple of sips of brandy from my flask. It doesn’t stop the constant ache in my joints but it helps me bear it. Since this illness took hold I am always hot when I wake at night, chilled during the day. I had left the window open as usual and I turned my head towards the sharp air before I started writing.

‘The record that I am confiding to this screen, this long, painful series of letters, will serve several purposes. It is primarily for you, Majella. I want, I need you to have my account, my version of what happened. I want to say those things that could not be said then, when life raced away with us and words had to be so carefully chosen. Martin will receive his own personally tailored copy, a coward’s gift. I can summon up courage for many things but not for him; his reproachful eyes sear me. This is also a general confession for a wider audience, a purging of shadows and demons, a mapping of a blight that fell from the Belfast air. My frailty means that it will be in instalments but I will wait until I have completed it to send it to you, a small package bearing love and agony in equal proportions.

‘I am convinced that you confessed to a priest somewhere in Africa. You made a point of writing that you had returned to the church. I pictured you in a simple confession box in a tin-roofed chapel, a dusty village of thin people and animals around you. An ebony-skinned priest or perhaps a sandy-haired Irish missionary would have listened, his shocked breath freezing despite the heat before he raised his hand to bless you. What penance could he have given? What would the tariff be? I envied you your confession, your unburdening. My jealousy of it has grown with time. I wished that I could believe in a God who listened and forgave through human mediums. I have had to find another way of unburdening, lacking divine channels.

‘I find that I have addressed you in Italian, the language that we both excelled in, that we often talked in, that Finn didn’t speak and that first brought us together on an October morning in 1969.

‘You are going to have to forgive me, Majella, for the plan I am going to execute. I have taken a decision to clear the decks. I feel like a person who has been meaning to sort out a cluttered attic for years and finally gets down to it. Your mother didn’t like Finn, she thought he was a bad influence on you. I think that one of the reasons she was so kind to me was that she saw me as a polite, well-brought-up girl who would counteract Finn’s dogmatism. She once said to me in the cow shed that Finn was a cold, unfeeling character, that he had a marble heart. You will recall that I used to wear my emotions on my sleeve; when I loved I loved without reservation, hungry for affection. The cold clutch of guilt has made me guarded and watchful. Over the years it has frozen my spontaneity, slowly icing over my feelings. I have fashioned myself a marble heart in order to effect my plan. I have deliberately reduced my life to a small flat and a single purpose, abandoning Martin in order to concentrate on my task. Finn would have applauded my single-mindedness: “There is only one goal, comrades,” was his constant refrain.