Half Broken Things

effort of making this woman go away. What did she want from him?

‘Got any money?’ Of course. She had seen him count out the notes for the man in the pickup and must have noticed that he hadn’t given him the lot. Michael leaned forward again and covered his face, feeling the backs of his hands soften in the first heat from the fire. Steph picked up the backpack from the floor, watching him carefully, pulled it open and brought out two crumpled magazines. Michael lifted his face but said nothing while she shook them about as if there might be banknotes lurking in them. Then she peered again into the empty backpack, stuffed the magazines into it and dropped it back on the floor.

‘Haven’t you got any? Go on, give us some money and I’ll go out and get us something to eat. Go on.’ She spoke with an odd mixture of authority and impatience, like somebody much older than she appeared. Like somebody much older than he was, Michael thought, looking closely at her face for the first time. Like she was his mother or something, and she must be twenty years younger. He pulled a tenner from his pocket.

‘Give us another. Go on, twenty’s better. I’ll bring you the change.’ As she folded the second note she said, ‘I could do with a bath. Don’t suppose there’s any hot water, is there? While I’m out you can put the hot water on, OK? And don’t turn the fire off.’

Michael cleared his throat to object, but sank back in the sofa.

‘Bloody freezing out there,’ Steph said, lingering. Would he not volunteer to go instead?

There was a silence while Michael looked at the slice of pink mottled belly between Steph’s T-shirt and skirt. Clumsily he stood up.

‘Take this,’ he managed to say, pulling off his jacket as if he had just remembered what it was for. Holding it out, he said, ‘It’s warm.’ He retreated back into the sofa.

It was better than nothing. Steph slipped on the jacket, smiling in the manner of all women trying on something new with somebody else waiting to see her in it. It fitted over her bump. She did up the last button, thrust her hands in the pockets and looked up, but Michael’s eyes were closed and his face was crumpled again with crying. Upstairs the dog barked and was yelled at once more.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, fingering the two ten pound notes in the pocket.

Michael’s eyes blinked open. ‘Michael.’

‘Mine’s Steph.’

It may have been in the exchange of names, but when the door closed behind her Michael felt oddly certain that she was not going to disappear with his jacket and twenty pounds, and Steph was confident that when she returned he would not still be weeping.

***

That evening winter returned. It was dark by the time I came in from the garden, knowing that the sunshine that afternoon had been only the illusion of spring. I ached all over and I was chilled from being out for so long. My exertions had kept me warm for as long as I worked, but as soon as I stopped I could feel that the cold had got right into me. I ran a very hot bath in my lovely white, green and yellow bathroom and lay in it, luxuriating in the knowledge that the drawing-room fire which I had just lit would be blazing for me when I came down. It crossed my mind that it was burning unattended, but I didn’t worry. It was such a benign presence, the drawing-room fire, I knew no sparks would fly from it and burn the rug. A fire can be a great comfort.

After her bath Jean sat by the fire in her alpaca dressing gown and silk pyjamas. Her face burned from the warm water and the tingle of soft cream after the punishment of the wind in the afternoon. Beneath the pyjamas, that were slipping over her shoulders and breasts and across her stomach as she breathed, her body felt and returned every stroke of the supple silk, yet it was stiffening up after all her work in the garden. The hardness in her arms and legs made her slightly triumphant, aware less of the age of her limbs than of their strength, as if she were a schoolgirl flexing them ready to make a long jump. But although the skin all over her body was soothed, at her core she was still cold and it was difficult to tell if she felt better than usual, or about to become ill. Better, she decided. Better, and more than that: it was as if her mind had just made the discovery that she actually had a body, and her body, just very slightly sorry for itself, was basking in the attention.

The body might, she also thought, be telling her that she was actually very, very hungry, a thing it had not told her, or that she had not heard it say, for years. In fact she ought perhaps to be listening a little more carefully, because she had the feeling that since she had arrived she had grown if anything a little thinner. As Jean had begun to enjoy the loosening of the customary austerity with which she managed her physical needs, she had been considering herself with a new gentleness. Her habitual tone of self-chastisement had quietened down; if she felt like resting in the afternoons, she did so, the word lazy barely crossing her mind. And she did now recall that she had made a little half-promise to herself, on what she now thought of as Wardrobe Day, that she would try to fill out her new clothes a little more convincingly. She was still a little small for them. Now, she recognised, if she were properly to fit her new life, the time had come to attend to the matter of feeding herself as if she still had some growing to do.

First, though, the chill in her joints called for a drink. She had noticed without concern or surprise on her first or second day that the decanters in the dining room were empty. She should have preferred to make her first visit to the cellar in daylight and when she was feeling less tired, but she rose, fetched the key, opened the low panelled door in the corner of the dining room and descended the cellar steps.

In the sudden fluorescent light and thick underground smell, Jean paused. From the bottom of the steps she could see, stretching down both sides of the cellar, a series of whitewashed, arched bays that were filled with metal racks laden with bottles. At Jean’s end, close to the steps, stood an old oak table. She looked at it closely. It was like nearly everything else in the house: old, imperfect, beautiful, and although the wood now looked hungry, having been left so long unpolished, Jean could imagine it being used as a dining table in many houses not much humbler than this one. On it sat a small torch, a candle in a metal holder, a leather-bound book and a number of corkscrews, one of which had, inexplicably, a brush on one end. There was also an unnerving sort of circular cutter that looked as if it had been designed for removing fingertips. On the wall behind the table a pair of metal tongs hung from a hook. Jean immediately felt intimidated, as if she had happened upon the instruments of a painful, semi-surgical religious ceremony of quite Masonic abstruseness. She scraped quietly along the flagged floor, peering into the racks and reading labels which told her nothing except how ignorant she was: Lйoville- Poyferrй, Batailley, Domaine de Chevalier. The shape of the bottles changed; she read Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanйe and sighed, unenlightened. It was easy to recognise the champagne bottles by their corks but it was not champagne she wanted now. Some treacherous-looking bottles on the lowest racks had lost their labels altogether and bore only a number and a daub of white paint, presumably having been caught by a swipe of the brush when the cellar was being whitewashed. Passing by them, knowing better than to open such dangerously old, unlabelled bottles, she walked on, reading names she could not pronounce and feeling, rather aggressively, that the whole thing was unnecessarily complicated. A nice red wine, or a glass of port or sherry, was all she wanted. It was absurd to be frightened by a lot of foreign names, but the trouble was not simply that they were the names of places she had never been to and of wines she had never drunk. They spoke of qualities she did not possess. Permanence and graciousness, let alone pedigree, had scarcely been the hallmarks of her life so far, she thought, lapsing for a moment into old habits and almost forgetting that she was not that Jean any more. She pulled out another bottle, of which there were at least half a dozen identical ones in the rack. Above the words ‘Chвteau Palmer 1982’ was a picture of the chвteau and she sighed again, this time with relief. At last, a name she could read, a nice ordinary English name. She recalled that there had been a Palmer family in Oakfield Avenue. And the chвteau on the label was, really, just a house when it came to it. Or rather not just a house like the one in Oakfield Avenue, it was a house like this one, Walden Manor. Her house. The thought gave her confidence. She scanned the drawing, imagining the heavy French furniture behind the tall drawing-room windows. There might be a pretty boudoir upstairs with another window looking over the back perhaps, onto a view of a terrace and gardens and vineyards. She turned the bottle in her hand, almost as if she thought that the far side would show the back of the house, and turned it back to the drawing. Who would live in this place? A woman, certainly. Madame, a woman of Jean’s age, would be at her dressing table under the window attending to her hair, pinning it into a simple, elegant chignon. I shall grow mine, Jean thought, patting her own, which was still damp at the ends from her bath. In fact, now that she thought about it, she would have to grow it, since she was not going to go out any more. The label drew her attention again. What a delightful