The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom Read online

  The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

  Beth Miller

  Books by Beth Miller

  The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

  The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright

  The Good Neighbour

  When We Were Sisters

  AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

  The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Films

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Alex’s list of food for Eliza

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Eliza’s list of food for Alex

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Eliza’s Family

  Chapter 16

  Alex’s Exes

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Things Alex Didn’t Know About My Life Before I Met Him

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  New Experiences

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Sexy Things to Try

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Things I love about Eliza

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright

  Books by Beth Miller

  Hear More From Beth

  A Letter from Beth

  Acknowledgements

  For Rachel, who left too soon.

  And for my Zaida, who walked along the cherry blossom street with me.

  One

  March 2016

  As a child Leah would often say, ‘tell me about your wedding day.’ So I’d get down the photo, and recount the story again.

  ‘Well, you know I was meant to marry a man called Nathan. It was all set. Everything was ready: the dress, the ring, the food. But I fell in love with your daddy instead.’

  ‘Alex!’ (Or, when she was really young, ‘Awix!’)

  ‘That’s right. We met when I gave a talk at his work. And so the day of my big wedding to Nathan, me and your daddy ran away together.’

  ‘Running, like in a race?’

  ‘It’s an expression. Though actually, we did have to properly run a bit. Anyway, then we got engaged that same day, and soon after, we were married.’ I tended to gloss over the gap between us running away and getting married. ‘It was a very small wedding. The only people who came were Uncle Kim and Aunty Vicky.’

  When Leah was older, nine or ten, she loved the crazy chronology of the thing. ‘So you got engaged to Dad on the same day you were meant to marry someone else?’

  ‘Yes, I know! Funny, isn’t it?’

  Not that anyone at the time had felt like laughing.

  But younger Leah just liked looking at the photo: Alex and me, standing beneath a bare-branched beech tree. Me in a long silky red dress and white furry jacket, the only decoration my grandmother’s brooch. Standing firm in sensible black lace-up shoes, incongruous with the dress. Him in a dark suit and green tie, his arms round my waist. Our faces close together, our eyes on each other and no one else.

  ‘Your hair is funny.’

  ‘I had long hair back then, and it was pinned up.’

  ‘Wedding dresses are supposed to be white.’ A chubby finger pointed accusingly at the photo.

  ‘Not always. Red is a lovely colour. And look, I am wearing something white.’ I smoothed my finger over the image of the jacket that I’d borrowed from Vicky. I could almost feel its unfamiliar softness. I had never worn anything furry before that day.

  ‘What happened next?’

  For little Leah, I’d say, ‘We all lived happily ever after.’ That pleased her. And for older Leah, I’d bring her own birth into the story, and describe how her arrival made me and Daddy – the happiest King and Queen that ever lived – even happier.

  But now she’s a stroppy teen, and she isn’t interested in that photo any more; she’s overheard something I didn’t want her to know, found something I didn’t want her to find, put two and two together, and correctly made four.

  What happened next, Leah used to ask.

  It’s a good question.

  It was adorable, how fascinated she was by our love story when she was little. She still is fascinated in a sense, if last night was anything to go by. Maybe horrified is a more accurate description. Anyway, I don’t want to think about last night. I don’t want to think about Leah’s face as she stood in the doorway, the black eyeliner she favours making her seem even less childlike, looking at me with that cool, clear way she has. I prefer to think about Leah when she was little, and I could do no wrong as far as she was concerned. Not now, when she is fourteen, and angry, and has been missing for five hours.

  I was sound asleep when she went out this morning. She was gone even before Alex got up. He says he heard a noise at the front door at about seven, but assumed it was the paper being delivered. Yes, Alex, because that makes a sound exactly like someone opening and closing the door.

  We’ve agreed to wait until one o’clock before calling the police. Leah might have just gone out with friends and forgotten to tell us. She’s done that a couple of times before. Though never so early. I hope I’m not clutching at straws. But anyway, she’s always been back by lunchtime. So we’re filling in the wait with an interrogation of me by Alex Symons, Amateur Detective. He’s insisting on going over what happened last night when Leah and I were at my brother’s. He’s hoping to find out something we did or said that might have precipitated her disappearance.

  ‘She didn’t eat much at Dov’s,’ I say, laboriously giving all the boring details, ‘so I made her another supper when we got home. She didn’t eat that, either.’

  Alex dismisses this with a wave of his hand. We both know that her not eating supper is hardly breaking news. He puts the kettle on and stands in front of it as it boils, almost immediately, steam curling around him, because we have not long had tea.

  ‘Steam causes burns, same as boiling water,’ I say.

  ‘Worse, in fact,’ he says, not moving. ‘So what did she do after not eating supper?’

  ‘Made some toast and Marmite.’

  ‘She was all right at your brother’s, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. Unsaid words bubble up into my mouth, bang against my teeth. I swallow them down.

  Alex didn’t come with us to Dov’s last night. For various historical reasons, he isn’t very involved with my family. He and Dov actually get on really well. But he knew my mum and some of my other siblings would be there who, let’s just say, are less simpatico with him.

  His phone pings and we both rush for it. But it’s only another of Leah’s mates who we group-texted this morning, saying she hasn’t seen Leah since the end of school yesterday.

  ‘So did anything happen when you got home?’ Alex Poirot persists. ‘After I went to bed? She was completely normal with me. She was watching YouTube.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I lie. I’m too embarrassed to tell him about my conversation with Leah. If she does turn out to have done something crazy, I don’t want Alex to blame me for it for the rest of our lives.

  His phone rings and he snatches it up. But it turns out to be the mother o
f another of Leah’s friends, who we also group-texted this morning, to say she hasn’t seen Leah. Is there anything she can do to help? ‘Not really,’ Alex says politely, then hangs up, and adds, ‘Other than get off the fucking phone.’

  Alex never gets in a state. He is the world’s most patient father of a teenager. I’ve only ever once seen him lose his temper.

  When we got back from Dov’s last night, Leah disappeared upstairs. I now realise she’d gone to look for evidence. She’s smart as a tack. I’d be proud, under other circumstances, and so would Alex in his new An Inspector Calls mode, except I obviously can’t tell him.

  So it was Friday night, it was late, and Alex, who is a lark to my owl, went to bed. I was emptying the dishwasher when Leah came back down and sprawled on the kitchen sofa, legs improbably long and spindly, like a baby giraffe in tiny denim shorts. She plugged herself into the iPad and I continued with my usual dishwasher reverie. I was vaguely aware that she was sending me dirty looks, but I’m used to that; in her mind, I’m always doing something wrong. I was miles away, I don’t know what I was thinking about, perhaps why the dry cycle on the dishwasher never dries the glasses properly, when I realised she’d taken off her headphones and was saying something rather crossly.

  ‘What was that, sorry?’ I said.

  She muttered a swear word under her breath. She has the mouth of a sailor on shore leave. ‘I said, what is this, exactly?’

  ‘What is what?’

  She held something up. A photo. My heart jumped. I knew what it was straight away, because I’d looked at it earlier this week. I didn’t put it back in its safe place; in a hurry, I shoved it into my bottom drawer, making me the biggest idiot in the history of idiots.

  ‘Have you been going through my stuff, Leah?’

  She shrugged. She guessed, correctly, that in the hierarchy of bad things, the photo ranked higher than rummaging through my dresser drawers.

  ‘Move up.’ I pushed her legs along the sofa and sat next to her. She kept her body held rigidly away from me. I looked at the picture in her hand. A wedding photo. Not the one of me and Alex that Leah used to love examining so much, me in the red dress and white furry jacket, but a different photo.

  In this one, the bride is in a white dress, the groom in a suit. They are standing underneath a cherry tree. The bride is me. The groom is not Alex.

  The sound of the key in the door is the greatest sound I have ever heard. Alex and I stare at each other, then rush into the hall. As I jump up I knock my tea over, hear the mug crash to the floor behind me. Leah stands just inside the front door, wearing her defiant face and no coat.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Alex says, more gently than I would have done.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Come on, Leah,’ I say impatiently, ‘we’ve been going crazy here. You didn’t answer your phone…’

  ‘Wasn’t allowed to have it on, was I?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She knows.’ Leah flips a thumb at me. ‘I’m starving.’ She pushes past us and goes into the kitchen. A second later we hear her wail, ‘There’s broken stuff and tea all over the floor. Gross.’

  ‘What does she mean?’ Alex whispers. ‘What do you know?’

  I look at him, not knowing where to start. A horrible idea about where Leah might have been is taking shape in my mind.

  I say, ‘I have absolutely no idea what she is talking about.’

  Two

  Summer 1999

  ‘He’s turned down even more people than you,’ my mother said. Her smile had a slight edge to it. She opened a battered hardback notebook with a blue marbled cover – a book which contained all the possible lives I had been offered, and had rejected. Less poetically, it was where my mother kept details of the potential matches that had been suggested to us by friends and family. She turned to a page quite near the end; the book was nearly full.

  ‘His name’s Nathan,’ she said, ‘and his grandfather and yours were great friends.’

  I nodded. My expectations were low. She pushed the book over to me, and I looked at the photo she’d stuck into it, of a pleasant-looking sandy-haired man with a neat beard. Then I glanced at her notes, which gave his age (twenty-eight), his goals in life, his wishes for children, his beliefs about marriage, his level of education, his financial status. I felt like I had read something similar on numerous occasions, probably because I had. The only interesting thing about him so far – that like me, he had turned down lots of introductions – wasn’t in the notebook, of course; it would have been unofficial gossip passed on along the mothers’ grapevine.

  ‘Your grandfather and Nathan’s grandfather were children together, back in the forties in Edgware,’ my mother said, and launched into a detailed explanation of the connections between our two families: who knew who, when they knew them, where they lived. I drifted off, started doodling on her notebook. She finally noticed as I was about to colour in Nathan’s beard in black biro, and irritably moved the book out of my reach.

  ‘I’d have thought, given everything, that you would be more attentive, Aliza,’ my mother said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’ I sat up straight and focused on her. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting Nathan. He looks nice.’

  I knew I was on borrowed time. While I didn’t feel that my mother was particularly in a rush for me to marry, my father was a different story, and Mum always followed Dad’s line. He told me regularly that I was too old to be picky; that at twenty-three I was running the risk of ending up a spinster. In the last three years I’d met and turned down six possible matches, an unacceptably large number, apparently. That was before you factored in all the ones I’d not agreed to have an initial meeting with. Only Ha-Shem (and my mother’s notebook) knew how many there were of those.

  I only had to flick through the pages of the notebook to recall the six I’d formally refused. She’d obviously written their real names and details, but in my head they were:

  Bad-Breath-and-Dandruff (I hoped someone kind would tell him, but it wasn’t going to be me).

  ‘My Wife Doesn’t Need to Work.’

  The World’s Shyest Man, who addressed his entire, brief conversation, to my feet.

  Mr Swagger: ‘You’re a knockout, I’m a knockout – our kids will be gorgeous.’ In fairness, he was quite handsome.

  The Pioneer: A man who wanted us to live in Israel and had already paid a deposit for a house in Hebron.

  The Heels: A man who was slightly shorter than me. His opening sentence was, ‘Are you wearing heels?’ and his second was, ‘When we get married, I don’t want you to wear heels.’

  Nathan came to visit us that afternoon. He and I sat and talked together in the living room, my mother sitting in the corner. It wouldn’t do for us to be secluded. There were no surprises – he looked exactly like his photo – and no horrible discoveries of halitosis or obvious personality defects. He spoke quietly, and asked a few questions, but didn’t volunteer much about himself. I wanted to ask him about the women he had turned down – how many? Why did he refuse them? Did he give them nicknames like ‘Bad-breath-and-dandruff’? – but something about his gentle manner damped down my usual boldness. He didn’t ask me about the ones I’d turned down. I looked into his pale-grey eyes but I couldn’t read him.

  He didn’t seem the least bit interested in me, so I presumed I’d be the next ‘no’ on his list. Like the others, this one will come to nothing, I thought, and this time it won’t be my fault. I didn’t do anything to make myself particularly charming. I simply nodded, agreed with everything he said, kept my eyes cast down, and didn’t give anything of myself away. Being certain Nathan was going to say no, I realised I could safely say yes, and my father wouldn’t be able to blame me this time.

  When we stood to say goodbye, I saw that we were exactly the same height. He didn’t mention anything about heels. Up close, I noticed that his sandy hair, which was rather long, curled on to his collar in a cute way. He said goodbye politely to me and m
y mother, but he didn’t look back as he left the room, and I didn’t expect to hear from him again. Once he’d gone, my brother Dov stuck his head round the door and winked. He knew all about Bad Breath and Pioneer and the others, and waggled his hand at me, like a Roman emperor waiting to judge a gladiator – up or down? For the first time, I didn’t put my hand down.

  My mother was delighted when I said yes, that I was willing to get to know Nathan better, and my father gave me a very rare smile. I basked in the unusual feeling of having done the right thing by them, for once. I was pretty confident that it would go nowhere.

  But Nathan said yes.

  My stomach lurched when Mum told me this, but I managed to say, ‘Great!’ rather than, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’ Us both saying yes meant we were now courting, officially testing out if we felt right for each other. He came round a few days later to take me for a walk, and we smiled in surprise at each other. I guess that he, like me, had wondered if he would ever get to this stage. Walking together was nice. There were a few silences, but a lot of gentle conversation too, and he laughed a lot at things I said. He said I was funny. We started seeing each other every week, then moved to twice a week. We went to cafés, or for walks in the park, always with a relative nearby – in line with modesty laws, we could not be alone on dates. We discussed our families, our interests, our hopes for the future. I sensed that, in his quiet way, Nathan liked me and was ready to settle down. I supposed it was time for me to settle down too. Deborah kept saying I could do a lot worse than Nathan, which was true. Nathan was kind, and attentive, and our grandfathers had been great friends. There was no one better on the horizon, and as my mother said, I would surely learn to love him. His hair curled sweetly on his collar, he smelled of sandalwood soap, and I thought, yes, I can work with this.