The Heart Broke In Read Free Page A

safely on the turf, as if some goblin up in the branches had slipped the knot, the swing tumbled onto the grass and the rope fell on top of it with an angry slap. Ruby yelped and the others drew in breath and began to laugh. Ritchie caught Karin’s eye and smiled. It seemed to him that this chance moment of small fear had snapped the family neatly together. He almost heard the click.

4
    In the bathroom Ritchie took off his filthy t-shirt and shorts and showered. He washed, conditioned and dried his hair and fixed it with oil. He shaved, applied moisturiser and scented lotion from a bottle marked
après-rasage
, plucked wild hairs from his nostrils, ears and eyebrows, cleaned his teeth, flossed and rinsed his mouth with Listerine and spent half an hour choosing a shirt.
    Karin had already caught him cheating twice, once just before the children were born, and once just after. ‘If you do it again,’ she told him, ‘I’ll divorce you, see you don’t get custody, and take you for every penny.’
    The idea of being stripped of what he had was frightening, but it was hard for him to imagine. The moment of being exposed seemed worse than the consequences. He’d discovered that he felt no shame about cheating on Karin until she found out. It was the great discovery of his adult life, greater than the discovery that he was a good businessman, or that he was making more money than contemporaries who were more talented musicians. His conscience only troubled him when somebody pointed out that he had one, and that it was bound to trouble him. As long as this didn’t happen, he was a man doing his best to be good to two women who hadnothing in common and never needed to meet. He loved his wife; he would never leave her. Apart from Ruby and Dan, Karin’s happiness was more important to him than anything. That was why he would do whatever he could to protect her from the knowledge that he was having sex with someone else.
    Ritchie took the clothes and went to dress in the room where Karin kept her wardrobe. It had better mirrors, and it was closer to the main staircase. If Karin came looking for a row, and the door was left open, it would force her to keep her voice down to prevent the children hearing. The disadvantage was that he had to be in the room with the big photograph of young Karin covering the whole of one wall. It had been taken when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one and the band’s hit had charted in London, New York and Tokyo. One night that year in North Shields, from the window of a limousine stopped at red, Ritchie had watched a chain of girls marching arm-in-arm down the centre of a wet street, singing his and Karin’s song, their coats open and the wind driving the rain onto their faces and low-cut frocks till their cheeks and throats shone.
    In the photograph Karin was on a park bench at night. She was wearing short boots, a white chiffon scarf and a white bra and knickers. She sprawled on the bench with her elbows hooked on the back and her forearms hanging down, a cigarette in one hand, her legs open. A half-empty litre of vodka stood on the bench beside her. Her skin was bone-white in the flash although the resolution was so good that it was possible to make out the goose pimples and fine hairs on her limbs. Those were the days she was filling herbody with poisons, not, as the newspapers said, because she hated herself, but because she loved herself, and her body’s resistance to all those poisons was the exact measure of how indestructibly young and beautiful she felt she was.
    The illusion of spontaneity was spoiled by the lacquered golden waves of Karin’s hair and the artful black outline of her eyes, but Ritchie knew it wasn’t an illusion. He’d been there in the park for the shoot. Karin had pulled off her dress and left it lying on the frosty leaves on the edge of the park road because she wanted to. The stylist had raised her hand to stop her and realised it was pointless. Ritchie knew