The Secret in His Heart

He walked away, going out onto the veranda and curling his fingers round the rail, his hands gripping it so hard his knuckles were bleached white while the memories poured through him.

Cathy, coming into their bedroom, her eyes bright with joy in her pale face, a little white wand in her hand.

‘I might’ve worked out why I’ve been feeling rough …’

He heard Connie’s footsteps on the boards behind him, could feel her just inches away, feel her warmth, hear the soft sigh of her breath. Her voice, when she spoke, was hesitant.

‘James? I’m sorry. I know it’s a bit weird, coming out of the blue like that, but please don’t just say no without considering it—’

Her voice cracked slightly, and she broke off. Her hand was light on his shoulder, tentative, trembling slightly. It burned him all the way through to his soul.

‘James? Talk to me?’

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘Joe’s dead, Connie. He’s gone.’ They’re all gone …

Her breath sucked in softly. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you really think that in the last two years I haven’t noticed? But I’m still here, and I’m alive, and I’m trying to move on with my life, to rescue something from the wreckage. And you could help me do that. Give me something to live for. Please. At least think about it.’

He turned his head slightly and stared at her, then looked away again. ‘Hell, Connie, you know how to push a guy’s buttons.’ His voice was raw now, rasping, and he swallowed hard, shaking his head again to clear it, but it didn’t work this time any more than it had the last.

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a bit sudden and unexpected, but—you said you would have considered it.’

‘No, I said I might have considered it, for you and Joe. Not just for you! I can’t do that, Connie! I can’t just hand you a little pot of my genetic material and walk away and leave you on your own. What kind of person would that make me?’

‘Generous? I’d still be the mother, still be the primary carer, whatever. What’s the difference?’

‘The difference? The difference is that you’re on your own, and children need two parents. There’s no way I could be responsible for a child coming into the world that I wasn’t involved with on a daily basis—’

‘So—what? You want to be involved? You can be involved—’

‘What? No! Connie, no. Absolutely not. I don’t want to be a father! It’s not anywhere, anyhow, on my agenda.’

Not any more.

‘Joe said you might say that. I mean, if you’d wanted kids you would have got married again, wouldn’t you? But he said you’d always said you wouldn’t, and he thought that might be the very reason you’d agree, because you might see it as the only way you’d ever have a child …’

She trailed off, as if she knew she’d gone too far, and he stared down at his stark white knuckles, his fingers burning with the tension. One by one he made them relax so that he could let go of the rail and walk away. Away from Connie, away from the memories that were breaking through his carefully erected defences and flaying him to shreds.

Cathy’s face, her eyes alight with joy. The first scan, that amazing picture of their baby. And then, just weeks later …

‘No, Connie. I’m sorry, but—no. You don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t. I just can’t …’

The last finger peeled away from the railing and he spun on his heel and walked off, down the steps, across the garden, out of the gate.

She watched him go, her eyes filling, her last hope of having the child she and Joe had longed for so desperately fading with every step he took, and she put her hand over her mouth to hold in the sob and went back to the kitchen to a scene of utter chaos.

‘Oh, Saffy, no!’ she wailed as the dog shot past her, a slab of meat dangling from her jaws.

It was the last straw. Sinking down on the floor next to the ravaged shopping bags, Connie pulled up her knees, rested her head on them and sobbed her heart out as all the hopes and dreams she and Joe had cherished crumbled into dust.

It took him a while to realise the dog was at his side.

He was sitting on the sea wall, hugging one knee and staring blindly out over the water. He couldn’t see anything but Connie.

Not the boats, not the sea—not even the face of the wife he’d loved and lost. He struggled to pull up the image, but he couldn’t, not now, when he wanted to. All he could see was Connie’s face, the hope and pleading in her eyes as she’d asked him the impossible, the agonising disappointment when he’d turned her down, and it was tearing him apart.

Finally aware of Saffy’s presence, he turned his head and met her eyes. She was sitting beside him, the tip of her tail flickering tentatively, and he lifted his hand and stroked her.

‘I can’t do it, Saffy,’ he said, his voice scraping like the shingle on the beach. ‘I want to help her, I promised to look after her, but I can’t do that, I just can’t. She doesn’t know what she’s asking, and I can’t tell her. I can’t explain. I can’t say it out loud.’

Saffy shifted slightly, leaning on him, and he put his arm over her back and rested his hand on her chest, rubbing it gently; after a moment she sank down to the ground with a soft grunt and laid her head on her paws, her weight against him somehow comforting and reassuring.

How many times had Joe sat like this with her, in the heat and dust and horror of Helmand? He stroked her side, and she shifted again, so that his hand fell naturally onto the soft, unguarded belly, offered with such trust.

He ran his fingers over it and stilled, feeling the ridges of scars under his fingertips. It shocked him out of his grief.

‘Oh, Saffy, what happened to you, sweetheart?’ he murmured. He turned his head to study the scars, and saw feet.

Two feet, long and slim, slightly dusty, clad in sandals, the nails painted fire-engine-red. He hadn’t heard her approaching over the sound of the sea, but there she was, and he couldn’t help staring at those nails. They seemed so cheerful and jolly, so totally out of kilter with his despair.

He glanced up at her and saw that she’d been crying, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, her cheeks smudged with tears. His throat closed a little, but he said nothing, and after a second she sat down on the other side of the dog, her legs dangling over the wall as she stared out to sea.

‘She was injured when he found her,’ she said softly, answering his question. ‘They did a controlled explosion of an IED, and Saffy must have got caught in the blast. She had wounds all over her. He should have shot her, really, but he was racked with guilt and felt responsible, and the wounds were only superficial, so he fed her and put antiseptic on them, and bit by bit she got better, and she adored him. I’ve got photos of them together with his arm round her in the compound. His commanding officer would have flayed the skin off him if he’d known, especially as Joe was the officer in charge of the little outpost, but he couldn’t have done anything else. He broke all the rules for her, and nobody ever said a word.’

‘And you brought her home for him.’

She tried to smile. ‘I had to. I owed it to her, and anyway, he’d already arranged it. There’s a charity run by an ex-serviceman to help soldiers bring home the dogs that they’ve adopted over there, and it was all set up, but when Joe died the arrangements ground to a halt. Then a year later, just before I went out to Afghanistan, someone from the charity contacted me and said the dog was still hanging around the compound and did I still want to go ahead.’

‘And of course you did.’ He smiled at her, his eyes creasing with a gentle understanding that brought a lump to her throat. She swallowed.

‘Yeah. Well. Anyway, they were so helpful. The money wasn’t the issue because Joe had already paid them, it was the red tape, and they knew just how to cut through it, and she was flown home a month later, just after I left for Afghanistan. She was waiting for me in the quarantine kennels when I got home at the end of December, and she’s been with me ever since, but it hasn’t been easy.’

‘No, I’m sure it hasn’t. Poor Saffy,’ he said, his hand gentle on her side, and Connie reached out and put her hand over his, stilling it.

‘James, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just—it was the last piece of the puzzle, really, the last thing we’d planned apart from bringing Saffy home. We’d talked about it for so long, and he was so excited about the idea that maybe at last we could have a baby. He didn’t know what you’d say, which way you’d go, but he was hoping he could talk you into it.’

And maybe he could have done, she thought, if James had meant what he’d said about considering it. But now, because Joe was dead, James had flatly refused to help her because she’d be alone and that was different, apparently.

‘You know,’ she said softly, going on because she couldn’t just give up on this at the first hurdle, ‘if you’d said yes to him and then he’d been killed in some accident, for instance, I would still have had to bring the baby up alone. What would you have done then, if I’d already had a child?’

‘I would have looked after you both,’ he said instantly, ‘but you haven’t had a child, and Joe’s gone, and I don’t want that responsibility.’

‘There is no responsibility.’

He stared at her. ‘Of course there is, Connie. I can’t just give you a child and let you walk off into the sunset with it and forget about it. Get real. This is my flesh and blood you’re talking about. My child. I could never forget my child.’

Ever …

‘But you would have done it for us?’