Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke

and I shall put a third letter inside a larger envelope, and I shall return it to you. You will have three letters. And if there is anything bad, if you are ill, if you have changed houses, gone away, if you have a new address, you must tell me it all, Cora. For I have a right to know. You are mine in every way that truly matters .
    I shall be more careful about the third. I will prove to you that I am patient and that I can wait, even if this would be shameful to any Sicilian man, to be made to feel like a child waiting for his mother’s approval .
    What is wrong? Is there trouble with Richard? I can’t write that name. I can’t write it again. I wonder if he touches you. That is what I wonder all the time, if he is touching you as I am sitting here alone in the house, writing these lines. He is touching you, and you allow it. That is what I think. Right now, as the ink drains from my pen and stains the page, he is drawing you out like thread through fabric, a needle sewing up the divisions between you .
    That is his work, to make the seam tight, to bind the two of you together. That is his right, and your duty. I would not deny a man his duty or right, and what I ask for myself is sinful. I know that I have sinned and that I continue to sin. I go to church but it is all for nothing. It has no more meaning. It is terrible to lose the centre of your life like that. The pity of Christ I feel will pass over me: even He will exclude me because He knows that I think of what is denied me; He will know that I thought of the needle and the thread. And that needle passes through me, too, tying my heart to my spine. That is what it feels like. I have shrunk inside until my heart touches my backbone and ribs. I am so full of shame .
    But I will still write the letter .
    I cannot bear this separation any longer. And something keeps you from me and from the promises you made to me, I must understand what it is .
    Write to me. Write to me .
    For you made me promises, and I gave an oath to you .

Six
    Cora was in Border Wood when she saw Nick. She had gone back to Denny’s grave – they had buried him where he lay, at almost midnight, after Joshua had gone to sleep for the day, walking up through the trees and finding the dog with the aid of torchlight. It had been eerie, in the darkness, digging among the knotted undergrowth, branches brushing their shoulders, the wind pulling at the tops of the birches and sycamores. Cora had been worried that it was worse for her daughter, almost, than it was for her. She had brought Denny home as a puppy when Zeph was sixteen.
    It had been one of those teenage years when Zeph had felt nothing was going right. She had no boyfriend, she had fallen out with her closest girlfriend, and she had spent long hours in her room. Cora had hoped that Denny would bring Zeph out of herself, and it had worked. Denny had been Zeph’s slave until she had gone to university in Kent two years later. For weeks afterwards, Denny would go to the bottom of the lane and stand by the gate, where Zeph had got off the school bus. Once or twice Cora had noticed the vehicle slow as it rounded the corner. Denny’s tail would give a tentative half-wag as it went past.
    The dog had represented Cora’s own lost feeling: an empty house, with no one coming home at night. They had rattled around together, Denny following her as she moved from the kitchen to the sitting room, with her supper tray, to watch television. She had turned on the radio and TV constantly, so that she could hear voices, and it seemed like company. After a week or two, she allowed Denny to come upstairs and lie by her bed at night. He never had before, but she couldn’t bear the sound of him walking up and down the flagstone hall, stopping by the front door. She couldn’t look at his almost comically mournful face: she saw too much of her own self-pity in it.
    But last night Zeph had borne the task with resignation. When Cora couldn’t roll the dog’s