My Former Heart

‘Mummy!’ said Ruth, shocked. ‘You’ve never said that before.’

‘Haven’t I? Oh, sorry, darling. It doesn’t mean one wasn’t simply thrilled when you appeared. We both were.’

‘But d’you mean to say you were actually having a baby when you and Daddy got married?’ Ruth could feel herself flushing with the horror of it.

‘Well, yes. But I mean it was quite early on. One wasn’t monstrously fat or anything. I had such a pretty dress for the registry office: silk crepe, in a sort of oyster colour. I don’t know what happened to it. Must have got lost during the war.’

‘Is that why there aren’t any photographs from the wedding, because you were pregnant?’

‘Don’t say pregnant, darling, it’s so coarse.’

‘But is it?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Iris. ‘There just wasn’t anyone there with a camera, that’s all. But it was all tremendous fun, on the day.’

‘But that means that I’m illegitimate, practically,’ said Ruth, tears gathering.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Someone either is illegitimate or they aren’t. You can’t be a bit illegitimate, I mean. And you’re not. So there’s nothing to get upset about.’

The thing Ruth liked best about school was the choir. Singing solo wasn’t nearly as good, because it didn’t give you the same sensation; a solo only came from your throat and then out of your mouth, the breath made shallow, even quavery, by nerves. But choral singing went through your whole body, reverberating in your ribcage. With choral singing it was as if you and all the other people you were singing with were one instrument, like the pipes on an organ. A choir was really an orchestra made of voices. When she sang, Ruth sometimes felt a rush of joy, like an extra lung full of happiness instead of breath inside her chest.

There was a feeling she’d sometimes had, out of doors, when she got to the top of the Malvern Hills and there were skylarks dipping above her head, or a lonely kestrel wheeling below. It was an apprehension that she was no different from the cropped grass and the rock beneath it, and the birds, and even their shadows flitting across the hillside. This feeling came sometimes at the river-bathing place across the orchard from her father’s house, when dragonflies touched the surface of the water beside her, their veined, transparent wings catching the colours of light, like soap bubbles. Sometimes the cows would pause to look down from the opposite bank, munching, and she would all of a sudden feel as though she had become invisible, had simply evaporated into the silky greenish water and the cows’ hot breath and the summer air. She could not predict when the feeling would come, but when it did it made her slightly giddy, this sense that she was just another living speck on the surface of the earth. Less than herself, and yet more. This sensation generally happened when she was on her own, yet what it brought was an overwhelming sense that she was not alone after all. When the whole choir was singing well it could feel the same.

Singing was the main reason Ruth decided to stay on at school after her School Certificates. If she stayed on for Higher School Cert., her teacher had told her, she might be able to get into a music school. She knew she wasn’t good enough to become a soloist, either at the piano or the voice, and anyway her ambition did not extend so far. But she also knew she would have to earn her own living somehow. Perhaps she could teach music and continue to sing in a choir for pleasure. She did not know what she might do otherwise. Her father had offered to find someone – another solicitor, or the friend who owned the local auction house – to take her on as an office clerk, but she wanted to get to London if she could.

There were advantages to being in the upper school: she did not have to share a dormitory any more but had a room all to herself. She enjoyed certain privileges, such as being allowed to walk into the town when lessons finished in the afternoons; and, the greatest luxury, having two baths a week, instead of the one permitted to the younger girls. The room next to hers was occupied by an older girl called Verity Longden, who would be leaving in the summer. She was tall, with skin so pale as to be almost transparent, almost as if it might tear. Her eyelashes were very straight and fair, and thick, like the bristles on a toothbrush, and she had big, bony hands that always looked chapped. Ruth could not tell whether Verity was very plain or rather beautiful, but trying to decide one way or the other made her stare at her whenever she had the chance. Verity was a Roman Catholic, one of only a handful at the school. The Catholics walked to Mass every Sunday and when they came back to school afterwards they remained slightly set apart, at least until the lunch bell sounded, as if they were holier or more important than the rest. Verity seemed especially solemn. She was generally rather a serious girl, certainly never giggly. Something about the curve of her mouth, though, suggested a sense of humour.

One Saturday afternoon, just before autumn half term, Ruth knocked on Verity’s door and asked if she’d like to come for a walk. They had barely said more than two or three sentences to each other, but they were neighbours, they might as well be cordial. And anyway, all Ruth’s friends were out on exeat, or rehearsing for the school play.

‘There’s a hotel over in Colwall where we could get a cup of tea if you want to go that far? Otherwise we could just go up to the tearooms at the well, what d’you think?’ Ruth asked her, as they began their climb. Since Verity was older – and, as it were, the guest – it seemed proper to let her decide things.

‘I think Colwall,’ she said, as if it were a matter of some gravity.

‘It’s rather a dismal place, I’m afraid, what my mother calls a brown Windsor. But I love that side of the hills. The view’s even better than our side, and you get the sun for longer.’

‘What’s brown Windsor?’ asked Verity.

‘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.