John Harvey: Lonely Hearts

She hadn’t thought of him in a long time. The way he would hunch against the doorway, watching her as she dressed. Waiting to see which sweater she would choose, the soft green or maybe the red. You know it, don’t you? His voice, as she stood before the mirror, as clear inside her now as it had been those years before. Watching you like this, the way you do those things; I can’t keep my hands off you .

After they had started living together it had seemed that he could never leave her alone. She would wake in the night and he would be propped up in bed on one elbow, staring down at her. Once, he had parked his car across the street from the office building where she had been working and had sat there the whole day on the chance that she might walk past one of the windows. Whenever she had passed within reach of him inside the flat they had shared, his hands had moved for her, wanting to touch, to hold her. Just when she had become convinced it was going to be that way for ever, he had changed.

Tony.

Small ways at first, barely perceptible: he no longer held her hand when they were watching television; failed to dip his head into the corner of her neck as she stood at the stove, making Sunday morning scrambled eggs. She realized that she had dressed five mornings in a row without his coming through from the bathroom, shaving lather on his face, to watch.

After that there had been other things, clearer, impossible not to recognize.

“ Tony? ”

“ Uh? ”

“ Are you okay? ”

“ Does it look like I’m okay? ”

“ No. That’s why I… ”

“ Then why ask? ”

She looked at herself now in the mirror. A plain gray sweater over a calf-length black skirt; the boots she had had repaired for the second winter running. Her hair was dark, almost black, and she wore it down to her shoulders at the sides, the front cut thicker and short, clear of her forehead. This evening she had been more than usually careful with her makeup, not wanting to send out the wrong signals, certainly not too soon.

Something was not quite right. She pulled open the top drawer of the dressing table and took out a thin wool scarf, deep red; tying it loose at the side of her neck, rearranging it several times until it was right.

A smile came to her face.

“Shirley Peters, you’re not a bad looking woman.”

Her voice was loud in the small room, a rough undertow as if she might be going down with a cold.

“Still.”

The letter lay on the coffee table in front of the couch, a single sheet of notepaper, pale blue. Maybe the only reason she had read this one twice was that it had been written with a fountain pen. Black ink. Isn’t it strange how things that should be insignificant affect what we do?

Please be there between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty .

She carried it over to the narrow kitchen. A bottle of Italian red had been opened and recorked and she rinsed a glass under the cold tap before pouring herself a drink. The writing was distinctive, lowercase letters that were small and rounded, the capitals more pronounced and florid. The P of Please large enough to contain the whole word within its loop.

Shirley checked her watch again, plenty of time. Back in the living-room, she pushed a cassette into the tape deck and swung her legs up on to the cushions of the settee. One of her friends had told her it wasn’t fashionable to like Sinatra so much, but she didn’t care. There were not so many things she did like that she could afford to pass them up for the sake of fashion.

She smiled and, as Sinatra’s voice rose against a bank of strings, leaned back her head and, for no longer than a moment or two, closed her eyes.

The first ring of the phone merged with high-flown phrases, bits of a dream. As she went to pick it up, Shirley thought against logic it might be her date, canceling the evening. But then, removing one earring, that wasn’t the way it happened, no way for him to know her number, not yet; what happened was, he simply didn’t turn up.

“I thought I’d missed you.”

“Tony…?”

“Thought you’d left early.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Monday night, isn’t it? When did you ever stay in on a Monday night?”

She had a sense of her bones, fragile, pressing against the lightness of skin. Across the room a glimpsed reflection, the red scarf bright against the gray.

“Where are you? What do you want?”

“Long time since we talked.”

“We didn’t talk, we shouted.”

“That temper of mine…”

“I told you I didn’t want to see you again.”

“You did more than that.”

“I had to protect myself.”

“Oh, yeh…” His voice softening into a smile she could still see. “Tell me something, Shirl.”

“Go on.”

“Tell us what you’re wearing.”

Her eyes were closed as she set the receiver back in place. Damn him! In the kitchen she uncorked the bottle a second time. Court orders couldn’t free her from that look that had come back to his face after they had separated, couldn’t disguise the tone of his voice. She clunked the glass down in the sink and went to the wardrobe for her coat. He was right and it was Monday night and when had she stayed in on a Monday night these last twenty years? It was what got her through the rest of the week.

Careful, she released the catch, turned the key.

It was several moments before Resnick realized that one of the cats was sitting on his head. The radio was tuned to Four and a woman’s voice was trying to tell him something about the price of Maris Piper potatoes.

“Dizzy, come on.”

He turned slowly, coaxing the animal down on to the pillow. The clock read six-seventeen. A second cat, Miles, purred on contentedly from the patch in the covers where Resnick’s legs had made a deep V.

“Dizzy, cut it out!”

The cat, unbroken black and with its tail crooked in greeting, continued the rhythmic movement of its claws in and out of Resnick’s arm.

“Now!”

Finally, he lifted the cat away, lowering it to the floor as he swung his own legs round, hesitated for no more than seconds, finally bracing himself on to his feet. Rain clipped against the window and when he pulled the curtains aside it did little to raise the level of light.

Standing under the shower, Resnick massaged shampoo into his hair as vigorously as he dared; eyes closed tight, face tilted upwards, he lowered the temperature of the water until it reached minimum. When he looked into the mirror, his breath came back at him a mixture of German beer and sweet pickled gherkins. He was the usual eight pounds over on the scales. Cats swayed around his bare legs, almost slid under his feet as he pulled on his dark gray trousers, light gray socks.

By the far wall of the kitchen, Pepper peered out at him from between the leaves of the rhoicissus on top of the fridge.

Dizzy, Miles and Pepper-where was Bud?

The runt of the unrelated litter appeared, splay-legged and startled, as Resnick opened a tin of chicken and liver cat food and forked it into four bowls: green, blue, yellow, and red. Whenever he changed the position of the bowls, the cats would go to their usual one without fail-who was it claimed that cats were color blind? Or maybe the answer lay in the way each one had its name, printed in inch-high red ink, taped to the side of each bowl.

Too early for anything more strident, Resnick set a guitar album on the stereo and kept the volume turned low. He got the coffee pot going, cut three slices of rye bread for toast, and sat down to read yesterday’s paper. Both of the city’s soccer teams had played and lost; one was treading water in the Third Division, the other keeping close to the top of the First until the inevitable winter retreat. It went without saying that Resnick supported the former. Off-duty Saturday afternoons he would stand on the terraces with half-a-dozen refugees from the Polish delicatessen and search with growing desperation for something to applaud-a cross-field pass, a tasty back-heel, a shot on goal almost too much to ask for.