The Heart Broke In Read Free Page B

that the missing half of vodka had gone into Karin. Halfway through she swigged from the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and as the make-up girl was moving in to rescue her face, let her head loll down into her chest, coughed, laughed, said ‘I’m taking this off,’ stood up and unzipped the dress. Ritchie saw then that his future wife was wilder than he was.
    It seemed to Ritchie now that his wife had deceived him. She’d allowed him to think that no matter how bad he was she was bound to be worse. He’d designed his future as the straight one to her wild woman of rock-ness. But while he was jerking his hips to the crowd and spitting lyrics into a mike, wondering about rates of return on offshore deposits, it turned out she was thinking about children; she was thinking about it even as she gouged lumps out of the air with a hard pick on the guitar strings, singing in deadly harmony with him and making the speaker stacks tremble. Ritchie hadn’t changed; she had. Years ago the virtue began to peep out from behind her hellraising disguise, and in a short time, Ritchie found himself watching helplessly as his wife’s moral platformrose from the depths, shot past his own, and continued rising until she stood high above him. She didn’t so much give up coke, cocktails, sleeping with boys and girls she liked and cigarettes as kick them off easily, like loose old shoes. ‘Let’s move to the country,’ she said, and they bought a house in Hampshire. She stood by him, beautiful, talented, funny, loving, his alone, the mother of his children, and he was dismayed.
    Karin came into the room and smiled at him in a way that Ritchie took to mean ‘Let’s not talk, shall we?’ She opened one of the wardrobes and began to leaf through her old dresses. The hangers clicked on the clothes rail and Ritchie felt the wordlessness inflating until it pressed against the sides of the room. Karin took a short dress sewn with cobalt-blue sequins and another covered in black beads and threw them on the bed. She hauled out a cardboard box, dug in it and emptied it on the floor. Dyed feathers, sequinned gloves and hats of metallicised raffia slid out and spilled across the varnished floorboards. She knelt down and hunted among her old treasures.
    ‘Are you going out?’ said Ritchie. Karin shook her head without looking up. She unwound a fake jade necklace from a gold plastic tiara set with blue plastic stones and tossed the tiara onto the bed.
    ‘I promised to find dressing-up clothes for Ruby. Her friend Deni’s coming for a play date,’ she said. ‘I have to make supper for them. I might have time to make a few calls afterwards before Deni’s mother comes to pick her up and I have to listen to her troubles. Once that’s done Dan and Ruby’ll need putting to bed and reading to sleep. I don’t think I’ll be going out.’
    It came into Ritchie’s mind, as it always did when his wife reminded him how her life was given over to Dan and Ruby, to ask Karin why she needed to spend so much time looking after the children when they paid Milena to do it. He didn’t ask the question any more, because he couldn’t argue with Karin’s answer, that she cared too much about Dan and Ruby to want them to be brought up by somebody else. When Karin said this, Ritchie believed it; why not? He loved them too. But even as he was thinking
Yes, of course, because she loves them
, a parallel thought came to him: that it was part of Karin’s long game of superiority and reproach. It was ingenious. She made herself look like the better parent, while depriving him of his great strength in the family, his generosity, his power to see his family’s needs and wants and open his wallet to satisfy them. In the beginning, these two ideas of Karin – as a loving mother, and as a devious partner – floated in Ritchie’s head together, with the first having more substance. But the idea of Karin as a loving mother was so obvious and simple