The English Heart by Helena Halme

Author:Helena Halme
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-9998929-0-6
Publisher: Helena Halme

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Peter and Kaisa spent the week playing happy families. They stayed in every night, cooked together, and smiled into each other’s eyes. In the mornings Kaisa went to work at the bank, and Peter went shopping for food. He told Kaisa how the women at the meat counter in the supermarket in Tapiola laughed at him when he tried to use the Finnish phrases she’d written down for him.

When Kaisa came home from work he poured her a gin and tonic. They sat outside on the small patio at the back of Kaisa’s father’s house and had ‘sundowners’. Peter said that’s what the officers called the first drink of the evening on a naval visit to somewhere hot. They’d sip their drinks while watching the sun set against the horizon before disappearing into the sea.

‘It goes, psshht,’ he made the noise of a lit match dropped into water.

Kaisa watched the children who lived in the surrounding houses playing on the swings in the middle of the communal gardens. There was a small area of neglected grass in front, patchy and yellow in the scorching dry summer. The sun was still high up in the sky. This far north it didn’t set until much later in the evening. Still, in her mind, sitting next to Peter, Kaisa was in Gibraltar or the Caribbean, smoking a cigarette and drinking a smart cocktail.

After that first night Peter and Kaisa didn’t talk much about serious things. Or not enough. At the end of the week when they said goodbye at Helsinki airport, Kaisa nearly pulled Peter back, wanting to start the week all over again. Later in bed, alone, her mind turned to what they hadn’t talked about, and a chill spread over her. She wrapped the thin summer duvet tighter around her body. She tried not to think about the girl he’d slept with. Peter said it was a ‘stupid accident’ that just ‘happened’. When Kaisa asked if it was someone she knew, he vigorously shook his head and didn’t look at her. Kaisa ransacked her brain for anyone, any girl, who’d shown signs of being smitten with her Englishman. But she hadn’t met many of his friends; she’d only been to Britain twice.

Peter had blamed the drink. But how drunk did you have to be to accidentally sleep with someone? Kaisa had been drunk too; too drunk to realise that she shouldn’t have a one-night stand with a stranger, but she didn’t call it an accident. She’d been fully intending to do what she did before she even set out that night. Did that make it better or worse? Had Peter, like Kaisa, decided that they were finished before he had his accident? If so, what had changed his mind?

The other thing that disturbed Kaisa was that Peter had asked very few questions about the tennis player. As if he pretended it hadn’t happened. But surely he must have been curious?

Jealous?

None of it made any sense and now he was gone Kaisa couldn’t ask him.

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