The Home for Broken Hearts (26 page)

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really, of course really. We’ll go downstairs now and write it on the kitchen calendar.”

“I’m not allowed to come with you,” Charlie said as he followed her down the stairs. “You know, so they can talk about me behind my back—but I was thinking that if you didn’t want to go on your own, you could ask Matt.”

“Matt?” Ellen frowned. “Why would I ask Matt to go to your parents’ evening?”

“Because he wouldn’t mind, and if you didn’t want to go, you know, on your own, Matt would go with you. Matt’s cool.”

“Is he? Is Matt cool?” Ellen asked, amused. “When did you decide that?”

“He came to see if I was okay last night and he walked a bit of the way to school with me this morning.” Charlie shrugged. “We talked a bit about stuff. He’s a mate.”

“Really?” Ellen was touched. Whatever they had talked about, it had obviously helped Charlie in some way; he seemed much brighter. She just had to remember that all the effort that Matt was making for her and Charlie was because he was a decent young man, not because he had any ulterior motives with her.

“I’m glad, Charlie, but I don’t really think I can ask him to come with me to parents’ evening. I’m sure he’s got better things to do.”

“I’ll ask him then.” Charlie was insistent.

“But there’s no need—”

“Mum, I really want you to go to parents’ evening this time. I
really
want you to go,” Charlie said slowly and carefully, as if he were talking in a language that Ellen didn’t understand.

“I will go,” she said, pulling open a drawer and taking out a pen. “Here, pass me the calendar.” Charlie took the calendar, “Seasonal Scenes of Sussex,” which her mother always gave her every Christmas when they visited, just like she always gave Ellen a tin of Cadbury Roses every Easter visit, and passed it over to her. It was still folded open on January, showing a steel-skied blustery beachscape, snow dusting the wet sand. Ellen shivered when she looked at it before riffling her way through an entirely empty half a year, each month’s page almost indecently bare of notes, dates, or events. Finally she stopped on June, and then, realizing that this month, too, had almost expired, she exposed July, illustrated with a park of flowers in full bloom, children in sun hats paddling in a toddler pool.

“There.” Ellen scrawled the words
parents’ evening
on July 2. “Now I won’t forget.”

“And you have to fill in the form, say what time you want to go,”
Charlie reminded her, spreading out on the kitchen table the form that she had left on the bed. “Do it now and I’ll put it in my bag.”

“Fine,” Ellen said, wondering why she had begun to feel a little pressured by her son. After all, this was what she wanted, time with him, talking to him. She filled in a time slot, folded the letter along the dotted line, and tore off the response slip. “I’ll say eight o’clock.”

“Cool, Matt will be home from work by then.”

“Charlie, for the last time, I’m not asking Matt to come with me!” Ellen exclaimed.

“Aunt Hannah then?” Charlie pressed.

“No! Why do you think I need a chaperone?”

“Come on, Mum, you know why,” Charlie retorted, heat rising in his cheeks.

“Well? Are you worried I’ll embarrass you or something? Get drunk and try and hit on the headmaster?” She had hoped to make Charlie laugh, but his expression didn’t change.

“No, I’m worried that you won’t go,” Charlie said.

“But I’ve told you I will, I’ve written it on the calendar!” Ellen waved the article in question at him as proof.

“You said you’d watch me try out for the school football team,” Charlie reminded her.

“Is that what this is about? You know I had a migraine that day, and anyway I thought that you’d rather not have your mother standing on the touchline embarrassing you.”

“And you promised we’d go down and visit Gran and Grandpa this half term—”

“Yes, but Grandpa’s back went out and I thought it would be better not to trouble them, they are getting old, you know; besides, they came up in the end.…”

“We haven’t had one day out this year. If Dad were here we’d have done something. Gone to Thorpe Park, maybe—something.”

“I know, I know, Charlie. I know I’ve been an awful
mother this year. The truth is I just haven’t been able to face things—”

“That’s not the truth!” Charlie said furiously.

“What then? Tell me, Charlie, what is the truth? Why are you always so angry with me?”

“The truth is you
never
go out. You
never
go anywhere. You never leave this house, and you haven’t since Dad’s funeral! That’s the truth, isn’t it? Admit it, Mum, just admit it—you’re too scared to go out anymore. You’ve got that thing.”

“What thing?” Ellen asked, reeling as each word her son had spoken was like a physical slap.

“I looked it up on the internet, and it’s you. It’s exactly you.”

“What is?” she asked, with an exasperated laugh.

“Agoraphobia. You’re agoraphobic, Mum.”

Before Ellen could react, Sabine walked into the kitchen, dumping her bag on the table, her face set in an uncompromising frown.

“Ellen, I’m sorry, but I think Hannah is in trouble.”

It took Ellen a second to register what Sabine was saying, because she was still reeling from Charlie’s bombshell. This was why he was so angry with her and so distant. He’d got it into his head that she had
agoraphobia
?

“What’s wrong with Aunt Hannah?” Charlie asked Sabine before Ellen could.

“I went to see her today, to ask her to lunch—she hadn’t answered her extension or email—and when I got to her floor she wasn’t in her office, so I asked her assistant to leave her a message. He told me Hannah had left, that she had been summarily dismissed over a week ago. For that to happen, without a verbal or written warning, means that she must have done something… bad.”

Ellen sat down with a bump, struggling to process all the words that had been hurled in her face. First Charlie and now this… She looked at Sabine.

“What—wait a minute. You’re telling me that Hannah’s lost her job, that when she took Charlie out yesterday she’d already lost it—but why? Why wouldn’t she have told us, and what could she have done that was so bad that she didn’t even get a warning?”

Sabine shrugged, holding her fingers under the cold tap and then patting her face and neck. “The assistant wouldn’t say, but I asked around. There are rumors. They say she’d lost her focus, made some bad decisions that cost a lot of money and…” Sabine glanced at Charlie.

“What?” Ellen asked.

“They say she was… turning up at work under the influence.”

Ellen stared at her hands, which were pressed flat against the tabletop so firmly that the tips of her fingernails blanched white.

“Under the influence of alcohol?” Charlie questioned.

Sabine looked uncomfortable but didn’t reply.

“What
do
you mean?” Ellen asked.

“I heard… I heard she’d been caught drinking on the job, but like I say, they are only rumors. I don’t know anything for sure.”

Ellen and Charlie looked at each other, each equally disbelieving. Hannah liked to party, and she enjoyed a drink. And Ellen wasn’t so naïve that she didn’t imagine her sister had taken part in some of the other excesses that were prevalent in the city. But it was incomprehensible to her that Hannah would have let things get so bad that she was drinking during work. Her career, her professional reputation, the way she looked—all these things were paramount to her. Ellen could not imagine what could have happened to change that.

“That can’t be right, that doesn’t sound like Hannah at all. Her work has always meant everything to her. Something really bad, really big must have happened to make her throw that away.” Ellen thought of her sister’s ever-increasing visits
over the last few months, her sudden, uncharacteristic desire to be around. Ellen had been so caught up in her own emotional maelstrom that she hadn’t stopped to think that Hannah might have problems of her own. “No, she would have told me if something really bad had happened.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Charlie said. “She knows you hate her.”

“Rubbish! We fight and fall out and she drives me mad, but we’re sisters. Hannah knows that I’d always be there for her. I mean, she’s the strong one, she’s the tough and together one.”

Sabine shook her head. “All I can tell you for sure are the facts. She doesn’t work for the bank anymore, that’s all I know. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I didn’t know what to do about it.”

“I’ll call her,” Ellen said, fetching the telephone from the hall.

But when Ellen called Hannah’s flat there was no answer, and her mobile went straight to voice mail.

“Perhaps it’s because she knows it’s you. I’ll try her,” Charlie said, fishing his mobile out of his pocket and dialing his aunt. Again, Hannah didn’t pick up.

“Maybe Gran and Grandpa have spoken to her?” Charlie looked disappointed that his aunt appeared not to want to speak to him, either. “Call them, Mum—see what they know.”

Ellen shook her head. “No, I’d better not ring, not until I know something. I don’t want to worry them, not with Mum’s blood pressure, and Dad’ll just worry. He’ll just want to come up here and look for her like he did that summer she ran off with that busker. No, Hannah is still Hannah; she’s still a grown-up. I mean we only saw her yesterday and she was a bit off—but she was okay. We’ll wait, she’ll turn up or call. If she doesn’t, it’ll be the first day in months that I haven’t heard from her in one way or another.”

“But what if she’s in trouble, what if she can’t call or come round? We could go round to her place.” Charlie suggested. “It’s only a couple of tube stops to Ladbroke Grove.”

“She’s not there, Charlie, she’s not answering the phone,” Ellen said edgily, irritated that her son was picking this moment to illustrate his preposterous point.

“That doesn’t mean she’s not there,” he insisted. “She might be lying on the floor choking on her own vomit or something. She might be dying and really, really need rescuing.” As he spoke, he eyes filled with unshed tears. Ellen pulled him to her and put an arm around him. “I don’t want Aunt Hannah to die.”

“Charlie, Hannah’s better at looking after herself than anyone I know,” Ellen told him.

“So was Dad,” Charlie said quietly. “Can’t we just go and check?”

“Charlie,” Sabine said softly and calmly. “I’m afraid I’ve panicked you. I’m sure that your aunt is fine. After all, it’s been a week since she lost her job; you saw her just yesterday and she seemed okay, didn’t she? There is no reason why she wouldn’t be just as okay today.”

“Yes, I suppose…” Charlie sniffed, brushing the back of his hand across his eyes. “If anything, she seemed even happier than normal, really cheerful, full of energy. I didn’t say anything because… well, because I know you were cross, but she was talking about taking me on holiday to New York or somewhere,” Charlie said.

Sabine and Ellen exchanged a look.

“Then she is probably fine, maybe even happy about what’s happened. I expect she wants time alone to work out whatever is going on. She will tell you and your mum everything when she is ready. Your mum is right to want to wait.”

Charlie looked at his mother. “But if she rang you now and asked you to go round, you would?”

“Of course I would, Charlie,” Ellen told him levelly. “Look, I’ll try calling again in a little while. In the meantime, let’s get dinner on and get your tea sorted and try not to worry, okay? You go and play with your DS for a bit and I’ll call you when
things are sorted.” Charlie looked to Sabine, who nodded—he seemed to need her extra affirmation—and then he picked up his school bag and slouched out of the room.

“How serious were these rumors?” Ellen asked her as soon as she heard Charlie’s footsteps on the stairs.

“There was talk of some CCTV footage showing her drinking from a bottle of whiskey at a reception after hours. But I don’t know, Ellen, it could just be gossip. It’s a big office, a lot of people are very jealous of Hannah, they’d like nothing more than for her to have left in disgrace. Keep trying to call her. That’s all you can do.”

“Perhaps Charlie is right, perhaps I should go round there.” Ellen pictured the street outside her front door, the yawning expanse of road that stretched to the tube station, with another four roads and an underpass to negotiate on top of that. Ellen didn’t want to go, that was true. She didn’t want to tackle the heat and noise and the throng of people who would be crowding the hot and stinking tube trains. She did prefer to stay at home, she did enjoy the quiet tranquillity of her house, and yes, the world that revolved around her here was enough for her. It always had been. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t go to Hannah if Hannah needed her. That didn’t mean she couldn’t go, if she had to.

God only knew where Charlie had got this idea that she was agoraphobic.

“Ellen, forgive me, I don’t know you or Hannah very well. But I do know sisters, I have a big sister myself, and there is nothing I hate more than her seeking me out to tell me how wrong I am and how right she is—you should have seen her crowing over what happened between Eric and me.” Sabine went to the fridge and took two bottles of beer from her shelf. “If you want to be friends with Hannah, then it is best to wait for her to come to you. After all, if she wanted your advice now, she would have told you everything already, and she hasn’t. Beer?”

Ellen nodded, and Sabine slid a bottle over to her. She hoped that a drink would quell the niggling feeling of discomfort that wormed its way into her gut and the underlying sensation that something was very wrong with Hannah.
That’s just the way I’m built now,
Ellen told herself, pressing her hand against the fold of her belly as if she could physically quiet her concern. Anything, anything at all, that nudged her out of her daily routine set her heart racing as if she were balancing on a high wire. Something worse, something like Charlie arriving home late or Simon threatening to take her to lunch, made it pound and twitch, missing beats with reckless abandon, and for a fraction of a fearful second she felt nothing but a hollow, lifeless sensation in her chest until it thundered on, leaving her breathless and afraid. But that was her weakness, her legacy of losing her husband, not some prescient supernatural power. It couldn’t be, because she hadn’t sensed a single dark thing about the day that Nick had been killed. She’d been in the front garden, picking the dead heads off the roses, when the police car pulled up. There hadn’t been a moment of discomfort or distress even then, even when they had walked up the garden path, not quite able to look her in the eye. Not until she’d sat down on the sofa in the front room and looked in the policewoman’s eyes had the truth hit her like a sledgehammer. She’d felt short of breath, winded ever since.