Free Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

open door, and, although she had known he was there, she hadn’t spoken to him.
    ‘Mummy,’ he said, coming to the side of her chair.
    ‘I’ve got a poorly head,’ she told him, the best explanation she could come up with that he might accept.
    Gently, her son had put his hands on her temples.
    Now he turned back and looked at her.
    He was so like Nick.
    Please don’t let me hate my son, she thought.
    This is Joshua, not Nick.
    It’s not Nick.
    And that was when the first acute sensation of pain caught her. In a rush, she remembered the first weeks in the house, and the time before that, a holiday in Greece, making love behind closed shutters in the vast, blanketing heat of the afternoon; Nick’s soft American voice, which had attracted her the first time he had talked to her, that same voice whispering. She remembered how astonished she had been the first time they had slept together: he was so unlike other men she had known. He talked – about them, about the future, about what he felt. And he said wonderful things. Things so romantic that she might have been tempted to think he was joking, but a glimpse of his face confirmed that he was not.
    One morning, as she had come back into the bedroom from the bathroom – they had been living together for maybe a month – he had opened his eyes and said, ‘You are so stunningly beautiful.’
    She knew that she wasn’t beautiful, or anywhere near it, but she could see that he believed what he had said, and it wasn’t a line, or an attempt to get her back into bed. He loved her, and found her beautiful. That memory made her gasp, as if she had sustained a physical blow.
    Her little boy was pointing at something between the trees. She put her hand to her mouth, fisted it against her lips, as if to hold the sound inside her. She mustn’t cry. It would upset Joshua. She would not cry. All those things were past, gone.
    She began to walk faster, and, as she got closer, she saw that Joshua was bewildered.
    ‘What is it?’ she asked.
    He looked over his shoulder.
    She wondered if he had seen a dead bird. The first time he had seen one, killed by a neighbour’s cat, he had been fascinated, prodding it and turning it over, watching intently while it was buried. But then he had become fixated by death, watching herself and Nick. The next time they had crossed the park on the way to playschool, there had been feathers on the path and he had cried so hysterically that she had had to take him home.
    ‘What is it?’ she repeated, dreading another bird and the scenes that would follow.
    She looked to where Joshua was pointing.
    The dog – Cora’s dog – was lying on his side in the undergrowth. He looked as if he was asleep, the black flank showing between the bushes, the curve of his shoulder.
    ‘Denny,’ she said. ‘Denny?’

La Rosa
    You remember there is a road that runs south from Syracusa, along the side of the sea? My father has bought a second house there on the coast. It is a little way from where we stayed, a little way from the first house, but it looks east. My father is building it bigger; it is for tourists to stay .
    The local people think that no one will want to come to where there is no beach, that they will only want to stay at Taormina or Cefalu, and that south of Syracusa there is nothing for them. But he says that people will want the quiet; they will want the view of the sea. And he says all this without knowing what the place gave to us .
    I have been to the second house and it is not the same as the first. For one thing, it is much bigger, and he is making it bigger still. I have spent the last month there with the builders, with the carpenter my father brought from Enna, and the men who have made the new foundations and the new walling to the land. You told me that Richard had made a new house on land that no one wanted, and I think of him as I do the same job. And what else I think I dare not say to you, dare not repeat. I have told you too