After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I just don’t want ... I don’t want you to get hurt.’

  ‘I’m not going to get hurt. John’s not like that.’

  ‘You don’t know that. Men don’t have the decisiveness of women. And Judaism is notorious for putting pressure on men not to marry out.’ Ann wanted to impress this on Alice but didn’t know how to do it without angering her further. ‘Notorious,’ she repeated lamely. ‘Ask anyone.’

  ‘What would you know about that?’ Alice scoffed. ‘And, anyway, I’ve only been with him for two months. We’re not planning to get married or anything.’

  Beth came through the door. ‘Who’s getting married? Not you, Alice?’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Alice clutched her head dramatically, ‘no, I’m not getting married.’

  ‘John is Jewish,’ Ann told Beth with emphasis.

  ‘So?’ Beth was nonplussed.

  ‘There!’ said Alice. ‘You see? Not everyone reacts like you.’

  Beth looked from her sister to her mother and linked her arms through theirs. ‘Come on. This isn’t the time to argue about this.’

  They went out through the doors. John was standing with Ben, Kirsty and Neil.

  ‘John, I’ve been trying to convince Alice to come back to the house and she’s being very stubborn. You will come, won’t you?’ Ann pressed John’s arm.

  ‘It’s called the Law,’ Alice said.

  ‘The Law? That’s a funny name.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s known as Berwick Law. It’s a volcanic plug, one of three, the other two are Arthur’s Seat and the Bass Rock. They’re all made of the same volcanic rock.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve heard of the Bass Rock.’

  ‘It’s very famous. There’s a large gannet colony there.’ ‘Can vou see it from here?’

  ‘Usually you can see it easily, but today it’s a bit misty.’ They strained their eyes and she pointed out to John the outline of a craggy column of rock that reared up out of the sea. ‘Is the white stuff rock or bird shit?’

  She gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know. Probably shit, I think. In the summer you can get a boat out there from the harbour.’ She swivelled round forty-five degrees. ‘That’s my school.’ John looked down at the grey and brown buildings clustered at the bottom of the Law, the large white Hs of rugby posts staked into the neighbouring field. ‘It’s tiny!’

  She laughed. ‘Do you think so? Well, it’s hardly a North London comp. There are about six hundred pupils, I think, not all from North Berwick. The people from other towns and villages near here send their kids here too. That smaller building is the primary and the larger is the secondary.’

  ‘Did you go to the primary school as well?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and Beth and Kirsty.’

  They carried on slowly up the grassy slope, Alice clutching the urn containing Elspeth’s ashes. Seagulls swung on invisible trapezes in the foggy, salty air. Ben had agreed quite readily to Alice’s proposal of scattering them on the Law. Ann had been less inclined to believe that Elspeth had told Alice that was her wish and was more in favour of fertilising a rosebush with them. But, for once, Ben had asserted that if that was what his mother had wanted then that is what she should have. The sisters had been surprised. John had chosen that moment to converse with an elderly and, as he rapidly found out, deaf friend of Elspeth’s in another corner of the room.

  ‘OK. Here’s a good place,’ she said and stopped. She handed him the lid and peered for the first time into the urn. John watched her face.

  ‘It looks just like sand,’ she said flatly, not really knowing what she expected. She pushed in her hand.

  He felt in his pockets for the small trowel that the undertaker had given them. ‘Here. You can use this.’

  ‘No,’ Alice said fiercely, steeling herself.

  The wind was strong so she didn’t have to throw it, as she had feared. She just loosened her fingers and the breeze snatched it away.

  ‘The wind’s heading north!’ she cried. ‘Towards North Berwick! That’s where she was born!’

  She released fistful after fistful of ashes to the wind. John watched her from a distance, surrounded by a veil of ash and dust. Her solemnity had gone; she was excited, almost dancing, as she sent Elspeth back to where she had come from.

  Mario stumbles from the bed and starts scrabbling around in his trouser pockets.

  ‘1 have one here somewhere,’ he mutters. ‘Christ. Where the fuck is it?’

  Alice lifts her head a fraction from the pillow and looks down at her body, almost as if she’d never seen it before. When she lies on her back like this her hipbones jut out like bookends and her breasts splay outwards, nipples pointing to the ceiling. Mario storms about the room, tearing his hair, throwing items of their scattered clothing about, his erection fading. He can’t possibly have forgotten it, can he? He’s been carrying one for weeks. Alice puts one hand behind her head and one on her stomach, feeling the murmurings of her digestion. When they were little, Beth used to beg to be allowed to press her ear to Alice’s stomach and listen to her ‘plumbing’. Alice wonders vaguely how Beth is and then stops wondering because Mario is climbing into bed beside her. ‘God, these beds weren’t made for this, were they?’ he complains.

  ‘Well, this is a women’s hall of residence. Fifty years ago, if you had a male visitor the janitor used to come round, take the bed out of the room and put it in the corridor.’

  Mario laughs. ‘That’s not true, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. And women weren’t allowed to have degrees either.’

  He decides that this is neither the time nor the place for one of Alice’s diatribes on feminism and puts his arms around her. She realises with a jolt that he’s completely naked. ‘Did you find a condom?’ she asks, a little nervous. She doesn’t entirely trust Mario.

  ‘That’s all taken care of.’

  ‘I didn’t see you put it on,’ she says, lifts the sheets and looks down. ‘You’re not wearing it.’

  They both survey Mario’s flaccid penis.

  ‘You have a lot to learn, haven’t you?’ He sighs. ‘If a guy has to stop and look around the room for a condom, it’s not unusual for him to lose his erection. You can’t put a condom on without an erection.’ He grasps her wrist and guides her hand towards his groin. ‘So what we have to do is make it come back.’

  They start kissing again. She feels his penis swelling in her hand. She pulls away and laughs. ‘That’s amazing.’ She pulls back the sheets to examine it and laughs again.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘It’s like one of those speeded-up nature films, you know, when you see flowers growing in about five seconds.’

  Mario stares at her. ‘What were those boys in North Berwick thinking of? How come you missed out on this when everyone else was doing it?’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t think people were. Doing it, I mean. North Berwick’s not like that. It’s not exactly New York. Everyone would have known and probably told my mother if they’d seen me holding hands with a boy. There was no one worth the trouble, to be honest.’

  She grips his penis and turns it this way and that, as if inspecting it for defects.

  At her touch, Mario feels his abdomen contract with desire. Alice is wearing only a pair of black pants and is bending over his groin, her hair tickling his thighs, her breasts hovering over his body. He hurriedly splits open the condom packet with fumbling hands and rolls it down over his penis. She leans back on her haunches and watches with that same expression of scientific interest. Mario grabs her by the arm and pulls her down. ‘OK, Alice.’ He is lying on top of her now, his hands gripping her buttocks. ‘Just relax.’

  She is finding it hard to breathe. Mario suddenly seems incredibly heavy. He is grappling with her knickers, pulling them down. His hands seem to be everywhere, while hers are pinned to her sides. She wriggles to try to free herself a little. He groans. ‘Oh, Alice.’

  His breathing is fast
and rasping and she suddenly feels his latex-covered penis pushing at her. She flinches in shock. He is gripping her shoulders as if pulling himself up on to a high wall. His penis, slippery and hard, jabs and thrusts at her groin.

  ‘Mario.’ She tries to speak but her mouth is muffled by his chest. She twists her head to the side with difficulty. ‘Mario!’

  Immediately his face is there and his mouth is covering hers, hot and panting. She manages to free one of her arms and pushes at his shoulder. He pulls her even closer, then seizes her pelvis in both of his hands and angles it up off the bed. She grabs a fistful of his hair and pulls it. ‘Mario, stop it, please.’

  Suddenly she feels him thrust right inside her and a second later a sharp bolt of pain shoots through her lower body. She thrashes and hits out at him. ‘Mario! Don’t! Please can we stop? You’re really hurting me!’

  ‘Don’t worry. It always hurts first time round. Just relax, honey. You’re doing fine.’

  With every dry and rasping thrust, his shoulder rams into her chin. Her groin is throbbing with pain and her legs ache from being forced apart. Alice’s mind goes a blank white. She begins counting the punching thrusts to try to block out the consciousness of this heaving, panting body thrashing about on top of hers. At number seventy-eight, she feels his back arch and at seventy-nine, he does a kind of prolonged rigid shudder and collapses on to her, breathing hard.

  For a good five minutes, they remain like that, then Mario raises himself on his elbow, smiling beatifically. He notices that Alice looks a little white and wide-eyed but reassures himself that this is normal for a girl’s first time. He begins to wonder why she isn’t looking at him, then he thinks of something. ‘Did you come?’

  Alice reached for John’s hand on the way down. It felt cold and she chafed it between her palms. The sky was turning a darker, inkier blue and the lights of North Berwick were coming on below them.

  ‘You never cried again after that time, did you?’ John said.

  ‘She didn’t like me to cry.’

  Dr Brimble peered at the student over her desk. She really should go and have her eyes tested. The girl didn’t look too bad, a little tired, perhaps. ‘What seems to be the trouble . . . er . . .’ she consulted the notes before her ‘. . . Alice?’

  The girl looked dead ahead, avoiding her eye. ‘Last Friday I had sex for the first time and I’ve been bleeding ever since.’

  ‘I see. Do you have a burning sensation when you pee?’ The girl nodded.

  ‘Have you had a temperature?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It sounds like honeymoon cystitis. It’s very common but unpleasant, and unfortunately, if you’ve had it once you’re very prone to have it again. I’d better have a little look. Could you go behind that screen, take off your skirt and pants and give me a little shout when you’re ready?’

  Dr Brimble was satisfied that there was no serious internal damage but she was rather disconcerted by the amount of bruising on the girl’s hips and thighs. She glanced again at her rather tense, mute face and stole a surreptitious look at her watch. She was running ten minutes late as it was. Once the girl was dressed again and sitting at her desk, she decided to frame her question delicately. ‘The person you had intercourse with,’ she began, ‘he was . . . ?’ and waited for the girl to finish. Alice looked at her, blankly.

  ‘Was he a boyfriend?’

  The girl seemed to consider this for a moment and then said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ Relieved, the doctor handed her a prescription. ‘This course of antibiotics should clear it up. Any problems, come back.’

  When Alice got back to her room later that afternoon, there was a note from Mario pinned to the door saying where the hell was she and he’d be back in two hours. She sat for a few moments on her bed, then got up and dragged her rucksack down from the wardrobe. Within an hour she was on a train to Scotland.

  Elspeth took a deep breath. ‘Ben, that’s wonderful, but when am I going to meet her?’ She hoped her voice sounded more sincere than she felt. Wasn’t this a bit sudden?

  ‘Soon, I’ll bring her out to North Berwick some time for tea.’

  ‘Good.’ She felt calmer now, her voice under control. ‘I’m looking forward to it already. What’s her name?’

  ‘Ann. She’s English.’

  ‘Right. Well, I’m so pleased, my dear. Very many congratulations. How are you fixed for Thursday?’

  ‘I’ll ask Ann and call you again tomorrow.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll speak to you then. Bye-bye now.’

  Elspeth replaced the receiver in its black Bakelite cradle and smoothed her hair with a quick hand. This was very unlike Ben, who was the younger and more cautious of her two sons. But Elspeth could recognise that resonance in his voice that meant he was happy. If they are coming on Thursday she should begin baking a cake today, which would give her time to strain the fruit in muslin first. She went down the flagstone steps into the kitchen, checking her appearance in the drawing-room glass on the way.

  Elspeth was born in North Berwick, a small seaside town east' of Edinburgh, in 1912; the year the Titanic sank. Her father was a Church of Scotland minister and they lived in a small, dank manse on Kirkports, one of the narrow, winding streets near the beach. It was North Berwick’s heyday as a fashionable holiday resort for the rich, and large new houses were springing up on the town’s fringes. Her mother took her for walks along the seafront on warm days and on Sundays they went to the church in the middle of the High Street to hear her father lift his voice into the rafters. She went to the primary school down by the sea and every day her mother would be waiting for her at the gates to take her home. They would often walk back along the East Beach and Elspeth would beg her mother to tell her about the time when the vast whale had been washed up on the sand. Her father had taken her on a trip to the Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh to see the skeleton of the whale, which hung suspended like a huge grey kite from the museum ceiling. He had held her over the balcony edge to touch it; it felt warm and crumbly and she couldn’t equate those dusty bones with the immense beast that had been thrown up by the sea and covered the whole beach.

  When she was seven her parents were sent as missionaries to India. Whether it was their idea or whether they were acting on the advice of another Elspeth never knew, but they decided that it would be best for the child if they didn’t tell her they were leaving. They dressed Elspeth in her best clothes and took her out for a walk on the beach, each holding one of her hands. While she was playing with the pebbles and seaweed on the blustery seashore, they slipped away and when she turned round they were gone and in their place was the upright figure of a housemistress for St Cuthbert’s School for Girls, who took her by the elbow and led her up the beach and on to a train for Edinburgh and boarding-school. She didn’t see them or North Berwick again for seven years.

  ‘It’s such a shame that Kenneth, Ben’s brother, couldn’t make it. He did so want to be here to meet you, Ann.’

  Ann nodded and helped herself to another slice of Elspeth’s cake.

  ‘His job seems to keep him so busy.’ There was a pause in which Elspeth hoped Ann would speak. She had barely heard her voice. ‘He’s a doctor,’ Elspeth volunteered.

  Elspeth felt puzzled by this woman and hoped that her face didn’t show it. Ann was pretty in a fragile, English way with slender wrists and nice manners. Her hair was a smooth, flaxen white-blonde and her skin pellucidly pale. She had light, light blue eyes fringed with delicate lashes. Everything about her was fragile and small. When Elspeth had shaken her by the hand, she had felt as though she could crush the younger woman’s finger bones with one slight squeeze. Next to Ben’s sandy-haired, healthy ruddiness, she looked of a different race. She was obviously a bright girl but Elspeth couldn’t work out whether her silence stemmed from shyness, which didn’t seem likely. Ann was self-assured, sitting upright in the chair, giving Ben clear instructions on how she took her tea, looking about her with ba
rely veiled curiosity.

  ‘Where is it that you stay, Ann?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Ben interjected, ‘She means, where do you live.’ He patted her small pale hand and laughed. ‘You’ll have to get used to Scottish idioms. We say “stay” when we mean “live”.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Well, I live near the Meadows, Mrs Raikes.’ ‘Please call me Elspeth. Everybody does.’

  Ann gravely inclined her sleek blonde head.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Elspeth, appealing to them both, ‘about the wedding plans. When is it to be? What do your parents think, Ann?’

  She saw an uneasy look pass between the two of them. Ben

  cleared his throat. ‘Ann hasn’t told her parents yet.’

  Elspeth was aware of her face registering surprise and tried, unsuccessfully, to alter her expression to one of mild interest. ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘We don’t really want a long engagement, do we?’ Ben turned to Ann, who had brought her hand up to her face and was pressing it to her mouth in an odd gesture. That this woman did not love her son became suddenly apparent to Elspeth. She felt a sharp stab of pity for Ben, who so obviously adored Ann. ‘So we thought we’d get married in the autumn,’ Ben was saying, ‘October maybe.’ He laughed with evident excitement. ‘I start at the university in September and there’s no point in waiting, is there?’

  ‘Have you thought about where you’ll live?’

  Ben’s face clouded. ‘No, not really. Somewhere small. A university wage isn’t much.’

  ‘I’ve been giving it a bit of thought,’ Elspeth began, ‘and, you see, this house is far too big for just me. I don’t know how you’d feel about living out in North Berwick but the train only takes about an hour. I’d love you both to come and live here, I really would, but only if it’s what you want.’

  Ben hesitated, looking at Ann. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘This is a beautiful house, Mrs ... I mean, Elspeth. How long have you lived here?’ Ann said.

  ‘Most of Ben’s life. It belonged to my parents-in-law. When my husband died, the boys were still very small, Ben was only a year old, and they asked me to come and live with them.’ ‘How did your husband die?’