The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  But love – falling in love. I know about that. I knew for instance that I wasn’t in love with Daisy. That my affection for her was ordinary; more like fondness. I knew it by a process of elimination. That it was nothing like my feeling for . . . for Helen, as an example. Throw your fond in a pond, Daisy once said. Lines from some God-awful poem. What I actually thought was this: Daisy doesn’t believe in love because she’s never yet experienced it, and so to her it is unimaginable and therefore can’t exist.

  But then, how to explain Daisy’s behaviour afterwards? Was it that I’d taken her at her word and assumed that she would prefer our break-up to be in rational language – not dressed up in the rhetoric of love or regret? (My brief foray into romantic language in my emails to her, the ones she showed to the Board – was that my mistake? But at some level I’d thought that Daisy, given all she said, Daisy, an educated, cynical young historian, would take them in the right spirit, would see the irony.) What had motivated her complaint to the university about me if it was all so . . . rational? A four-month affair. Plain vindictiveness? A desire to punish me?

  An accident waiting to happen, Helen said. Meaning, I suppose, that I had broken a heart once too often. Or that I should have kept my affairs out of the workplace. Grudgingly, I know that she has a point.

  Helen and I met at Oxford. She switched to Law in the final year. I clocked her in that first year; several of my friends fancied her. I was learning, at eighteen, something peculiar and I swear it was an unasked-for gift. Girls seemed to fall for me. I never had to try, I never really understood it, but just enjoyed how it was all – strangely easy. Helen had her own theory, of course. She swore I knew damn well what I was doing and that even if I’d been as thick as shit (which, she conceded, I clearly wasn’t) I’d have had an easy time of it with my brown eyes and naughtiness and how I could make her laugh. Plus ‘all those masculine straight lines’. She would look at me sometimes, and come out with comments that let me know she was musing on this: ‘I wonder if it’s just that you’re so cocky, so certain, like sort of solid and hard, maybe that’s what women like?’ Or other times: ‘It’s your teasing. Maybe women like to be teased.’

  In darker days she’d say; ‘God’s gift. That’s what you think you are.’

  Those comments came later. In the Lucy years. In the beginning Helen was much sweeter. Skinnier too. She used to wear this elongated striped scarf, Doctor Who style; wrapping it around her so I thought of her like a barber’s pole or stick of rock – red and black, long and slim and endlessly shifting, never still. She was studious even then, harder-working than me and resentful that she had to be, that things didn’t come so easily for her. I’d had every chance in life, she said, expensive education, well-off family. Her other favourite phrase for me was ‘You don’t know you’re born.’

  I suddenly long for photographs. I don’t seem to have any. Nothing to match the strapping, brisk Helen I know now and the girl I seduced that first night, as I crept into the sleeping bag I’d rakishly offered her on the floor of my Corpus Christi room. I remember smiling into her face, white as moonlight; the ripping noise of that zip as I unpeeled her for the first time. Her eyes were alarmingly young without her black make-up.

  She was shivering. She had a real fit of the shakes, as I tried to slot my naked self into her, and I had to pause for a bit and defrost her with slugs of brandy. I regretted immediately my clumsiness, my attack on her, the unruly shapes of my desires. I tried to go more slowly, to be more precise. I kissed her breasts and her white neck. She closed her eyes. But in the end I’d drunk too much for restraint. I felt huge and swollen, made what felt like a feverish, unadulterated assault on her. She didn’t protest. In my eighteen-year-old way it seemed to me that she liked it.

  I remember that it was a new LP we listened to: Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure. And afterwards I made us a snack of tea and raw mushrooms on crackers because that’s the only thing I could find in the fridge. Mushrooms: white dense flesh, the butter cold and salty. Water biscuits splintering on your tongue. Glowing Helen, sleeping beside me in a damp patch of student semen; the delicate taste of mushrooms.

  To my surprise Helen told me shyly the next morning that she sang in a band, would I like to come and see her sing next week in town. I expected something smoky and obscure, all fierce guitars and shouty: Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Slits. I felt the dread that she might be no good, wondered how easy I’d find it to continue shagging her if she was talentless.

  It was a pub in Oxford. I waited for her to come on stage, glad she couldn’t see me – standing at the back, pretending to eat a packet of crisps.

  She stood in a strange pool of light in heels, elongated; looking like somebody else. Her auburn hair was piled up. She wore a bottle-green dress – straight up and down. A slender, glass bottle. Or a fragile red tulip atop a stalk.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong about the kind of music her band played. Not The Doors or punk or any of that druggy stuff. No. She sang my mother’s favourite Dusty Springfield number in a voice that rolled through me like blood. Dark, coarse, a voice cracking slightly in the range just above middle C, a crack she exploited – it seemed to me rather deliberately, rather pointedly – for all its power and poignancy.

  Helen gave up singing in the band not long afterwards. She was beginning to think about switching to Law, beginning her transformation from smoky siren to the fixed form she eventually took. I had asked her to marry me and we’d both stopped smoking the roll-ups, progressed to Benson and Hedges. She asked me to promise not to unpeel other young women from their sleeping bags.

  All of this brought on by the simple email from Helen this morning.

  I’m bringing your BMW up. I’ll leave it by the flat and push the keys through the letterbox, then I have booked a cab back to the station so that I can be back in court by 9 a.m. So I won’t be able to pop in and say hi. You probably won’t be up.

  I remember that student room again, the smell of hyacinths floating up from the courtyard at Corpus Christi, blue and dizzying the next morning, and moments after coming Helen sitting up and letting the sheets fall off. She started rolling a cigarette.

  ‘How sad,’ she said, ‘that we’ll only have this moment once.’

  I felt the blood drain out of my face. My limbs turned icy.

  ‘Hey, honey, we can do that again, any time. Give me ten minutes – I’ll be right with you.’

  ‘Never exactly the same,’ she said. ‘Nothing is, is it? No two moments. Exactly the same.’

  Helen – so clever, so infuriating, so unlike anyone else. How could I have known that then, at eighteen? It needs time, perspective, to show you that someone might be original. And yet what do you want to do when you start out? Make a comprehensive study. Compare. Never pick the first restaurant on arrival in a new city. Wander round a bit – do your research. Make sure there’s not something better round the corner.

  Hard to know if that’s self-justification or the reasoned perspective of age. All I know is that it’s a long time since I remembered that student bedroom. The hot squeak of the bed. I mean really, of course, since I thought of Helen with affection; with indulgence. Remembered my own part in things. I wanted always to enter Helen like a dream, like stepping through a boundary. I loved that she could do that to me. That’s what I wanted: what she could do to me. And then it stopped.

  So, when Dr Burns mentioned the daft days or whatever he called it, it got me thinking. Christmas. Christmas in this tiny flat, on my own, with only my new ticker for company, and no doubt a few ghosts. I email Helen. Her reply comes back pleasingly fast.

  Sorry, Christmas Day itself is out – but Boxing Day would be fine. Alice says that’s great. Can she bring her boyfriend (his name is Jake)? I’ll bring the rest of the turkey and we can make a risotto. Perhaps you could get the rice and something to drink? The right kind – arborio rice.

  PS. Why don’t you invite Ben and Lucy?

  Ben and Lucy. Jesus. Has she g
one mad? We’ll already be pushing it to squeeze four of us around this card table, which might well collapse if we actually put plates on it. It chafes me, this PS of Helen’s. I find myself furious, somehow, all thoughts of a moment ago melting. Why does she always have the moral high ground, what is it about women, always behaving so well and thinking of things we should have thought of first and shaming us?

  In the end I text Lucy on my BlackBerry. Her reply, too, comes quickly.

  Sorry. In India 4 xmas with Ashok. Ben on his own. Says he’ll come. Send him directions.

  She’s leaving our seventeen-year-old son on his own over Christmas, while she swans off to India with her new bloke? And if I hadn’t texted (admittedly, only at Helen’s prompting) I would never have known. I fling the BlackBerry on the sofa and myself down after it. Once again all my failings as a father – as a person – are writ large. What she could do to me. Helen. Reflecting me at twice my natural size. Yes, that’s all very well. But when the mirror breaks . . .

  It bothers me that Helen is suddenly willing to see Lucy, too. Ben I can understand, but Helen was never subtle in what she said about Lucy over the years, the years when we tried to stay together and limped towards our divorce. There could be no doubt what she thought of her. Especially the fact that I ended up paying, sending money every month, and yet Lucy was still living in that Housing Association place and still coming up with wacky ideas of starting a stall at Greenwich market or becoming a lesbian or whatever.

  ‘Flaky’, ‘neurotic’, ‘the world’s worst mother’, ‘that dreadful woman’, ‘hopeless’, ‘a nightmare’: just some of the things Helen said about Lucy, long after our divorce, long after she had any reason, in my view, to continue to hate Lucy, since there were so many other women Helen could more justifiably have hated (students mostly, sometimes wives of colleagues). Helen, a pull-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps kind of person who despises weakness, especially her own. That incident. On the roof garden of the old flat.

  Theatrics, I remember saying, later. Bloody emotional blackmail. She wouldn’t get me that way. I was in love again by then; my heart beating to a different drum as the cliché goes. The drum – well, the arse, to be strictly accurate – of Lucy.

  Remembering that incident now makes me close my eyes as if I had just glanced into a livid wound – something red and shocking. I haven’t thought of it in years. We’ve never mentioned it. Both women quickly had children, small children. I stayed married to one and kept shagging the other. It’s all a blur of mess, mess. Helen – and Lucy – shouldn’t have put up with me, given me that glimpse of power. I was just . . . I was . . . Where was I in all of this?

  Maureen turns up and suggests we go ‘out and about’ for a ‘change of scene’. She must know Helen has dropped the car off; it’s there outside the flat. She’s looking rather cheerful – this time she’s wearing a bright yellow woolly hat (no doubt also knitted by her own fair hand) and a fluffy scarf in the same Easter-chick colour. I find myself wondering about her ridiculous surname and how soon I can get a reference to it into the conversation. Also: if she has so much time for knitting, she can’t be going out much? Must still be single? (Unless she knits during dating or sex, as Helen, with her superior logic, would no doubt suggest is at least a possibility I ought to consider. Why do you always assume everything is the way you want it to be, Patrick?)

  Maureen’s brought me something. She hands it over rather sheepishly as she gets into the passenger side of the car. ‘Dr Burns mentioned that he’d told you about this, so I thought you might like to borrow it.’

  A book. A hardback, looks like a library copy, lurid green cover. Claire Sylvia – A Change of Heart: The Extraordinary Story of a Man’s Heart in a Woman’s Body. I turn it over, suppress a groan as I stare at the back, read aloud from the puff by Bernie Siegel MD:

  ‘While I can’t necessarily explain the amazing things that have happened to Claire, I have no trouble believing them. That’s why I enjoy speaking with astronomers and quantum physicists, who are continually dealing with mysterious and unexplained events . . .’

  I throw it onto the back seat of the car. Maureen closes the car door on her side and says nothing. To cover any dismissiveness in this action I quickly add: ‘Thanks! Looks great. I’ll read it later.’

  Maureen is putting her seatbelt on and chatting; she doesn’t seem offended. (She’s difficult to offend, I’ve noticed, despite my best efforts). ‘This woman, Claire Sylvia. After her transplant she has all these strange dreams. She dreams of a boy called Tim and she’s convinced that’s the name of her donor, though, like you, no one told her anything about him. And in time, she gets to meet the family and discovers – yes, that is the donor’s name.’

  I take a deep breath, soaking up all that is familiar and beloved about my car: the dangling piece of Chinese jade – gift from Alice; the specks of crisps on the dashboard; the familiar grey leather of the seats, the pleasant heaviness of the key in my hand, the pulse of that engine revving up beneath me.

  Maureen is still talking. It’s like the floodgates have opened or something, me giving her permission to tell me about it.

  ‘She mentions that, after the operation, she reported peculiar changes like cravings for beer and chicken nuggets, neither of which she had a taste for prior to the transplant. She later discovered that these were favourites of her donor. She even learned that her donor had chicken nuggets in his jacket pocket when he died in a motorcycle accident.’

  ‘Are most donors young men who die in motorcycle accidents?’

  ‘That’s just a coincidence.’

  ‘St Ives, is it?’ I ask, going through four gear changes as fast as I can, just for the pleasure. I’ll have to take it easy, this first drive. That’s why Maureen’s coming too, she says. In case I pass out in the car park, or something. Of course that’s just an excuse. Her excuses to see me are cute. I like that she has pride and doesn’t come right out with it.

  ‘And after this book was published, there were more studies done. One by this Dr Pearsall who was a transplant recipient himself and so more open to listening to the ideas his patients expressed. He says in one a forty-seven-year-old man received a heart from a fourteen-year-old girl gymnast who had problems with eating disorders. After the transplant, the recipient and his family said this man had a tendency to be nauseated after eating, a childlike exuberance and a little girl’s giggle.’

  ‘But it’s just – anecdotal, yes? No offence, Maureen, but it wouldn’t exactly hold up in a peer-reviewed, scientific journal, now would it? Has this theory been advanced in The Lancet?’

  ‘One thing I’ve noticed about you, if you don’t mind me saying,’ she begins, and I see out of the corner of my eye that I’ve finally succeeded; she’s bristling. ‘You don’t find it easy to value the opinions of women, do you? I mean, it’s all about the opinions of your colleagues, esteemed peers . . . by which you mean: other men.’

  ‘Jeez! Where did gender come into it suddenly? I don’t think I said anything about women or men, did I?’

  ‘Anyway, what about this example? A baby boy was transplanted with the heart of a dead baby who had had cerebral palsy. And the baby developed some shaking on the left-hand side, the same side as the donor baby had. How can that be anecdotal? The baby’s not old enough to be cooking up the evidence, is it?’

  ‘No, but it was the parents presumably who noted these changes? And the parents would have known or been told about the donor baby and so – they imagined they saw shaking in their own child. Or even maybe this doctor asked them questions in a leading way: did you notice anything in your baby after receiving a heart from the donor baby with the cerebral palsy who shook on the left-hand side of his body?’

  I can’t see her face but it strikes me she’s crestfallen, so I change tone: ‘On the plus side, there is a lovely fluffy angel protecting me. I definitely think so.’

  ‘You’re cynical, aren’t you?’

  ‘It has been noted before. Shou
ld I take this left?’

  The route I’m driving is a dizzying assortment of mini-roundabouts. I keep hoping for a glimpse of the countryside, and wanting to interrupt Maureen’s discourse on transplant recipients and their changed personalities with facetious remarks and whoops of joy: ‘So this then is the beloved Fens of which you speak?’ But it’s a short journey. We arrive soon enough at this market town of St Ives. I remember Helen mentioning it now, on her first visit to Papworth. I follow signs to the Cattle Market car park, trying to think of ways to get this conversation with Maureen back on track; on friendlier, neutral territory.

  ‘My ex-wife did once accuse me of treating my own needs as if they were instructions and everyone else’s needs as impediments. She says this is the fundamental difference between men and women – men don’t acknowledge their feelings as much but they act on them without compunction.’

  That should mollify her. Always worth a good quote, Helen, since at the very least her arguments are coherent. (Unlike Lucy, who would just yell a bit and then pop like a balloon and dissolve into tears.) We’re out of the car now, and I’m surprised to discover I have a giddy, thrilled sensation – like bunking off school – mixed up with a nauseous one, as if there’s something wrong with my stomach. Maybe the drive, the unaccustomed exhilaration. Obviously I’m a bit delicate. Maybe even ropy. I’m still on medication and am likely to be for the rest of my life. One theory (mine) is that the drugs themselves might have a psychotropic effect. Be affecting my consciousness and my moods. I mean: giddiness. Excitement. Joy. Not characteristics I’m especially known for.

  So, our purpose in this odd little town is to buy plates and cutlery so that I can serve a Boxing Day dinner to five people. (I don’t know if this is within a transplant co-ordinator’s remit or if this is on Maureen’s own time. I’ve figured out by now that her job is part-time and she’s employed by the Hospital Trust but pretty much freelance. She’s some sort of counsellor the rest of the time. And I know this is vain of me, but she fancies doing a bit of overtime, in my honest opinion.)