A Home for Broken Hearts by Rowan Coleman

Author:Rowan Coleman
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2010-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Occasionally, so occasionally that when it happens you find yourself pleasantly surprised, things work out the way you want them to, which was how Ellen felt when Charlie came home just before four, bounding up the stairs and even humming.

Released early from work by Allegra, who had said that she felt a little tired (which was Allegra for ‘tipsy’) and needed to rest her eyes (which was Allegra for ‘nap’), Ellen had decided on impulse to go through her wardrobe. Spread on her bed were a selection of dresses and skirts, vapid remnants of a past life when she used to think about what she looked like. She picked up one of Nick’s favourite dresses, a pale blue cotton affair printed with tiny chintzy flowers, with a square-cut neck, little cap sleeves and covered buttons down the front. She held it against her body as she looked in the mirror, smoothing it over her breasts and shaping it to her hips.

Odd how it didn’t look like her dress any more, or even like anything she would choose to wear herself. The colour clashed with her olive skin and green eyes and the length, which fell just below the knee, made her look a good deal shorter than she was. And if Ellen remembered rightly the little covered buttons used to pull uncomfortably over her bust, so that she had feared making any sudden movements with her arms in case they pinged off one by one. She had hated wearing this dress, and yet she had worn it because Nick had chosen it.

Hearing laughter drifting in through the crack in her bedroom window, Ellen went to investigate, pulling back the thick cream lace curtain that she habitually kept drawn. Standing on the street beneath her was her neighbour, wearing the red dress that she had seen on the line, and she was talking to someone else, perhaps another neighbour. As she hovered behind the curtain, Ellen peered at the man, but she didn’t recognise him. That didn’t mean anything, though, she realised – the whole street could have changed ownership in the last year and she wouldn’t have known a thing about it. She remembered that just after Nick’s funeral many of her neighbours had visited, most dropping cards through the letter box, wanting to show support but not intrude, but some knocking on the door asking if there was anything they could do (as if there could be). Ellen’s red-dressed neighbour, Laura something, if Ellen remembered correctly, had arrived with a casserole in a dish. It had been the first morning that Ellen had been on her own in the house and she wouldn’t have opened the door if she had remembered that she didn’t have to, but habit had moved her body before her brain could engage.

Laura had looked tired, drained, as she held out the dish.

‘It’s just chicken,’ she said by way of a greeting. ‘I remember that after my husband left me I didn’t have the energy to eat anything.

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