Page 5 of The Key to My Heart

It was two and a half years, last month, that Russ died.Thirty whole months. Well, thirty-one now.And my friends never say the words, but I know they thinkit.Why isn’t she over it yet? Why does she not want to move on? It’s been over two years. Two!And I know how they feel, because I feel the frustration too. I read a post on a forum once that it was after two years that someone – and she was my age – suddenly noticed she wasn’t waking and instantly thinking about her husband anymore. And seeing our matching ages as evidence it would happen for me too, I waited for the same. I waited the way someone waits for a break, for a holiday, for a notice period to end at a shitty, toxic job. But the two-year milestone came and went, passed like a season, and the thoughts are still the same. Watered down a bit, but the same. Sometimes I even think they’re worse, which I dare not say out loud for fear of Mum carting me off to some sort of institution while squawking, ‘She can’t move on! We’ve tried everything! She simply isn’tdoingit properly, doctor.’ I think it’s the worrying I’ll forget that’s worse. Russ’s smell, the groove of the scar on his gorgeous hands, the deep, gentle voice, the shy chuckle and blush on his cheeks when I’d say something too loudly or kiss him in front of too many people. I test myself sometimes, and I’m always relieved when I can still recall everything – like getting all the answers right at some sort of dark, messed-up pub quiz.

The driver clears his throat. ‘Three Sycamore, yeah?’ he says again, and when I answer, ‘Yes, please,’ I realise just how much I’ve been crying. I sound like Brian Blessed. But worse somehow. Brian Blessed with a cold. Brian Blessed post-tonsil removal (with perhaps an unfortunate post-op infection thrown in for good measure).

The car turns into the familiar and true-to-its-namedarkDark Lane and I watch the landscape pass in a blur through my window. Trees, trees, trees, thatched chocolate-box set-back cottage, field, field, trees, another picture-perfect chocolate-box cottage. I still find it hard to believe we ever managed it: buying a house here, in beautiful little Bournebridge, with its actualfordand farm, and ivy-blanketed houses with honesty boxes and gardens shown on BBC2. And it never matters how tired and deflated my heart feels, that fact never fails to make it beat that little bit prouder, even on the worst days.We bought a house.Russ and I bought a house. In an actual village, like real grown-ups. With a fireplace that needs actual wood. With a compost bin, and flower beds, and roads lined with more horse poo, than cars.

‘Just here,’ I say pointlessly, because Sycamore is a tiny little arc of three set-back cottages on a country lane, and he couldn’t really pull in anywhere except in front of them, or the deep, dark bloody forest. But I say it anyway, because not to is to disobey an unwritten taxi law.

We pull up in front of the house – our little number three. A warm, yellow light beams through the diamonds of the ever-so-slightly wonky lead window. Relief. Dread. All at once.

I pay the driver, and tip more than I usually would. Mostly for crying in his car, and for him not asking why, or if I’m okay.

‘Thanks, love,’ he sighs. ‘You take care.’ And he drives off as soon as I shut the car door behind me, tyres crackling on the wet tarmac until he disappears.

In a blink, it’s just me and the cold, pitch darkness. That’s something you don’t realise about the countryside – and I think we’d be allowed to call this little village away from the town and all its bustle, countryside – until you move into it. Just how bloody dark it is. So dark, your eyes play tricks, create figures, imagine movement where there isn’t any. It’s why I leave a light on at all times. That, and so if I ever feel weird about being in a car with a taxi driver who freaks me out a bit, I can tell them my husband is home, and the light already on makes my story all the more realistic. And sometimes I just like to hear the words come out of my mouth.My husband’s home.Present tense.

I reach into my bag for my door keys, my shoes squeaking on the tiled garden path – the ancient terracotta-coloured diamonds Russ had been quietly enamoured with when we viewed the cottage four years ago, photographing them discreetly on his phone like a paparazzo with one mission: to get a single perfect shot of original period features.

‘We can’t just buy a whole cottage based on the garden path,’ I’d whispered as the estate agent showed us around.

‘Yeah, but it’s not just thepath, is it, Nat? It’s the beams, and the windows and— Shit, look. Look at that little storybook old man out the window – the neighbour. He’s planting something.’

‘He’snot, is he?’

Russ had grinned. ‘That’s what they do in the country, Nat. Live off the land. Like that bloke your sister fancies. Hugh Fearnley-Thingybob. They make chutney and soupand pies and stuff, from their own carrots. That could be us. We could get our own greenhouse. I know suppliers from work, we could get a proper awesome one—’

‘Russ. I kill cactuses,’ I’d said, joining him at the window. ‘I buy soup, and then throw it away after a mouthful because I remember I hate soup and just wish I was a person who liked soup. I do not have it in me to grow a vegetable.’

Then, as our estate agent had left the room, Russ had whispered with a smile, ‘I mean, to be fair, how do we know it’s vegetables. How do we know he’s not just buried a body? All that money, and we get Patrick Bateman for a neighbour …’

And I knew then, from his smile, from the way he talked about greenhouses and chutney, the way he saidneighbour,like it was already ours,that we’d do it. That we’d buy this wonky, ramshackle little cottage with the tiles and beams and damp and crumbling plaster, next to the cute old man in the jumper. (Roy, his name is. And it was leeks, we later found out. Not a single corpse. Although he’s so embittered, I often think serving up a good, fresh corpse or two might cheer him up.)

The front door gives a sad, pained wail as it opens, as it always does when it rains and the wood swells in the frame, and it does it again when I close it, lock it behind me.

I pee, don’t bother removing my make-up, put on a pair of fleece pyjamas that I’ve worn for too many nights in a row, and thanks to too many margaritas and too many tears, I fall asleep quickly, as I always do, since Russ died, on his side of the bed.

Chapter Three

Shauna arrives through the door behind Goode’s shop counter like an actor from the wings for her turn on stage – shoulders back, hands on her round hips, lips parted ready to deliver the first line of the scene. But at the sight of Jason, her face scrunches up, like a walnut.

‘What are you doing just standing there? Waiting for her to do a bloody dance? At least get her coffee on. Sorry, Natalie.’

‘Can’t, Shauna,’ says Jason. ‘We’re mid guessing game.’

‘Oh, Christ, not this again.’

‘Yup.’ Jason shoves his hands into his barista’s apron, squaring his shoulders like he’s preparing for a scuffle in a pub. ‘Natalie has to guess which band I went to see this weekend, andIhave to guess which song she played downstairs just now. The last one.’

‘What, and then she gets served?’ asks Shauna.

I nod over at her. ‘Yep. Andhegets a brownie. That’s the deal.’

‘Give me strength.’ Shauna lifts her round eyes to the ceiling, but there’s a small tug of a smile at the corner of her pink mouth, like a mother who wants to throttle her misbehaving children and ruffle their hair all at once.‘Just so you know, he gets enough brownies, Natalie,’ she says. ‘Eats all the wonky ones for me. The ones I can’t sell to the customers. He doesn’t need any more. Do you? Bloody shirker.’

It’s Tuesday, four days since dinner and margaritas at Avocado Clash and, as often is the case, Shauna and Jason are the first people I’ve spoken to face to face since. I first came here, to Goode’s, a tiny little sliver of a coffee shop in St Pancras train station, a few months after I lost Russ. Like today, it was a bitterly cold London day, the station one big fridge, and I’d fled a painful lunch meet-up with Lucy and some old uni friends after about an hour. It was a gilet that set me off, of all things. A bloodysleevelessjacket on a man at the next table, and the beat of hesitancy that followed as I’d considered whether it was worth getting one for Russ for his birthday. He liked wearing them for work – gardening. Grounds maintenance mostly, for huge houses with even huger gardens – because the man was a walking, talking kiln. Always hot, never in a coat, but in the depths of winter, he’d wear a gilet until it fell apart. I don’t remember much about that day, just that I made my excuses, and cried on the tube next to a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin (complete with tiny drawn-on kohl moustache) who offered me a piece of kitchen towel from his pocket to blow my nose on. And it was when I was waiting for my train home, at St Pancras, my heart in my shoes, that I saw the piano.

I knew it was there. I’d passed it so many times when I worked in the city, with my friend Edie, when we taughtat a small music school, but that day, I saw it like it was the first time. Empty and still and comfortingly silent in the bustling chaos of the station and my own noisy, desperately wailing brain. I’d sat on the stool, edged it closer to the cold, shiny keys. I’d been scared to play, before that moment. Playing reminded me of hope and happiness and success. Playing reminded me of Russ, and the plans we had in a world in which he washere. And the idea of playing again always felt painful – like peeping behind a curtain to a world I could never, ever enter again, even if I desperately wanted to. But I’d pressed the first key, then the second – and I’d played. It didn’t feel painful – not at all. It was anonymous. Nobody knew me at the station, nobody was taking notice of me. It meant nothing. It was just me, and the music, and a lightness I’ve only ever found in playing.

I played for twenty minutes that day. It felt like healing. It felt like home. It was after that I’d grabbed a coffee, plus a slice of carrot cake from Goode’s, to eat on the train home. And, like all habits, I could have never seen it coming. Playing piano at the station, and grabbing coffee here, at Goode’s, just sort of happened on its own, taking root Tuesday and Thursday mornings, two of my days off work.

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