Free The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French

she heard her phone ring. She stopped. Her Oxford friends worked all day and knew she did too. They wouldn’t expect her to be home at ten in the morning. She fought a little skirmish with herself, but continued to descend, hearing the rings, expecting each to be the last, and sinking a little at that thought. The phone stopped ringing. In the lower hall, she wheeled her bike out the door, and got on it, and headed downtown.
    She loved the ride down to the Bodleian, past little old houses with wonderful gardens, still blooming in September, past St. John’s and Balliol. But she had gotten only as far as the Randolph when she realized: he couldn’t call her, he hadn’t asked for her phone number and she wasn’t listed in the Oxford directory. If he had had any intention of calling, he would have asked.
    My God.
    So he didn’t mean it, not a thing he said, not a thing he did.
    She had slowed down as she considered this, directly in front of the Randolph. Averting her head, she speeded up again and turned down Broad Street, The Broad, as they said here, towards the library.
    Who could understand it?
    Just forget it. Wipe it out, she ordered herself.
    She set her bicycle in the rack and locked it
    Try to concentrate on something else. Look around you, isn’t it wonderful?
    But it didn’t look wonderful today. Some days Oxford just looked like an elitist mausoleum. She mounted the old wooden steps to Duke Humfrey’s Library with her head down, feeling tired, very tired. And her legs ached.
    But once she entered the ancient library, her spirits lifted. She loved this room, loved working in it. It had been reconstructed with scrupulous fidelity to its fifteenth-century origins: it had old wooden floors that creaked when people walked down the center aisle, old wooden carrels filled with ancient flaking leather-bound volumes, huge things with dry heavy pages. There was a wonderful ceiling held up by carved wooden arches, and painted with ancient seals. The windows were arched, and decorated with roundels of pale stained glass. She always sat by the windows that looked down into Exeter Garden, not the best garden in Oxford, of course, but lovely enough for her, sun on the chrysanthemums and asters, on all the burning flowers of the fall.
    She wished Victor could see it, this room.
    Not going to think about him. He’s not thinking about you.
    But she did: as she waited for her books to be delivered; when she walked downstairs to look something up in the old handwritten book catalogue; each time she looked up from her book to glance at the garden or at some passing creaker.
    She could not disbelieve the part of him that had loved her. But she could not either disbelieve the part of him that had blanked her out, had turned her into a piece of furniture, or a servant from whom leavetaking is business, can be brusque. And she did not know which of these sides was dominant in him, although she guessed it was the businessman. The other side would no doubt surface again, perhaps tonight, perhaps not for a few days, when he felt the need, when it was convenient.
    Convenient: Anthony’s favorite word. It’s more convenient if we go to my mother’s: she has more room. It’s more convenient if we stay home during my vacation. It’s more convenient if I drive.
    And the question was: did she want to be involved with a man who could turn her off when it was convenient for him, and who gave no thought to how she felt? Did she want to be even in the slightest degree involved with such a man?
    The answer was clear: No.

6
    S O THAT WAS THAT . And even if she did see him again, there was no point in going into all of this with him, because he simply wouldn’t understand. Men tended not to understand because, of course, it was more convenient not to. She’d have to work at it, explain, maybe even argue, to make him see. She might have to get angry. And she didn’t want to get angry, to try to convert him. She was tired of that, sick of