After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Elspeth smiled to show that she didn’t mind such a direct question. ‘It was malaria. He was a missionary, like my father, and we were living in Africa. Everybody got malaria out there and there weren’t the drugs then as there are now. I think he must have had a particularly bad strain. He died two weeks later. It was not a good position for me to be in. We’d only been married two years and I had two wee boys to bring up and nowhere to go. I was very lucky that Gordon’s parents offered to take me in.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘My father was a missionary, as I said. They didn’t earn a great deal, as you probably know, and my mother and father couldn’t have afforded to keep the three of us. Not that they would have turned us away, mind, but life would have been very difficult. Gordon’s parents were so good to us, even though to begin with they didn’t approve of our marriage.’ Elspeth laughed.

  ‘And you never married again?’

  Ben shifted in his seat, wondering whether his mother minded Ann’s frank questioning.

  Elspeth was just pleased that Ann was talking at last. ‘No, dear. Gordon was the only one for me.’

  ‘So Gordon’s parents left you the house?’

  ‘That’s right. They left it to me in the hope that I would pass it on to the boys, which I will do, one day.’

  ‘Well, I would love to live here.’ Ann smiled, and Elspeth felt relieved.

  ‘Well, that’s settled, then. Do you think you’ll like North Berwick?’

  Elspeth’s overriding recollection of boarding-school was of being hungry or cold, or often both. St Cuthbert’s comprised mainly the daughters of well-to-do Edinburgh families, who would all go back to their homes in Momingside or the Grange at the end of the day. The boarding-house was just behind the school where there were twenty boarders from the ages of eight to eighteen. Elspeth remembered always having a cold, her cardigan sleeves stuffed with damp hankies embroidered with ‘E. A. Laurie’. Her parents loved her, she was sure of that, and wrote to her once a week, sending her scraps of brightly coloured silk, carved ebony elephants or sepia picture postcards of dusty streets. She never asked when she would see them again or why they had never told her they were going.

  The most difficult part was the holidays. Even the other boarders, miserable, thin girls, had places to go during the breaks, but Elspeth’s parents could never have afforded to bring their daughter out to India. She spent her first few holidays hoping and expecting a kind letter from her grandmother or aunt in Glasgow, but it never came. They disapproved of Elspeth’s mother’s marriage and by default the daughter that came of it.

  She missed her parents and North Berwick desperately. The climate of Edinburgh was so different from that of North Berwick, although they couldn’t have been more than twenty-five miles apart. Edinburgh was steeped in a coagulating damp and mist; whenever Elspeth tried to conjure her childhood there she envisaged wet, slicked streets at dusk, veiled with sheets of feathery rain and grey buildings. Every winter she was plagued by asthma and lay awake, struggling for breath, imagining herself back in the crisp, dry sea air of her birthplace.

  Elspeth became a peculiarly independent and resourceful child, immune to the slights to which the other, richer girls subjected her. When, in her third year at St Cuthbert’s, a school outing to Kirkcaldy was organised, Elspeth wore her school uniform while the other girls were dressed in bright sweaters and matching hats. On the train, a girl called Catriona MacFarlane started a whisper that Elspeth Laurie had no other clothes apart from her school uniform. Catriona was queen bee in their year, so even girls who liked Elspeth were obliged to join in the giggling and nudging. Elspeth stared resolutely out of the window at the rain-smudged outskirts of Edinburgh. Catriona became incensed by Elspeth’s lack of response, began whispering more and more ostentatiously and eventually stood up in the aisle and roughly pulled the sleeve of Elspeth’s regulation red cardigan. ‘Elspeth, why are you wearing your school uniform? Don’t you have any other clothes, Elspeth?’ Elspeth turned to face her. ‘No, I don’t.’

  Catriona was thrown. She had expected denial or silence. The other girls watched, tense and silent.

  ‘Why don’t you have any other clothes, Elspeth?’

  Elspeth turned her gaze out of the window again. ‘My father is a missionary and he doesn’t have much money.’ ‘How come you can afford to go to this school, then?’ ‘The Church pays for me.’ Elspeth’s voice was quiet, and they had to strain to hear her.

  Then a teacher, Miss Scott, came bustling down the aisle. ‘Catriona MacFarlane, what are you doing out of your seat? Sit back down again please. We are nearly there.’

  Elspeth invites Ann to see the garden.

  ‘Ben tells me you are a biologist,’ Elspeth says, as they step outside the back door. ‘What part of biology is it that you specialise in?’ Elspeth is hoping that now they are alone, Ann might open out a little more. Elspeth likes women. She finds their minds and lives interesting, and enjoys their company, especially that of educated, bright young women. She is always saddened that she could not have had a daughter after her two boys.

  ‘Plant life, I suppose. My thesis was more to do with botany than biology.’

  ‘How marvellous. You must get stuck into this garden when you live here. It’s far too big for me to manage, as you can see.’

  The garden is indeed huge, with lush green grass sloping down to Westgate and a croquet lawn to the left of the house. The broad horizon of the sea glints through the gaps in the trees. Ann wanders away towards the bottom of the garden. The bright white of her dress hurts Elspeth’s eyes. She notices Ben hovering in the kitchen window and pretends not to see. ‘Where is it that you are from, Ann?’ she calls.

  Ann speaks without turning round. ‘My parents live in London now, but I grew up mostly in a boarding-school in the middle of Dartmoor.’

  i spent a large chunk of my childhood in a boarding-school for young ladies in Edinburgh. It’s surprising the number of people who did. Did your parents live abroad?’

  ‘My father was a musician and my mother used to travel the world with him.’

  ‘Ah. Are you musical yourself?’

  Ann shakes her head. ‘The school I went to didn’t teach you anything apart from social skills.’

  ‘I see. Boarding-schools are funny things. I refused to send the boys away, even though Gordon’s parents wanted me to. I wanted them to grow up here in North Berwick.’

  ‘People who send their children away to boarding-school should never have had them in the first place,’ Ann says bitterly, stripping the branch she is fingering of its leaves. Elspeth begins to understand a little more of her prospective daughter-in-law.

  Ben and Ann were married in what had once been Elspeth’s father’s church in the High Street in North Berwick. The whole town lined the pavement opposite to see Ben Raikes’s pale bride emerge from the red sandstone church in her scandalously short and tight wedding dress. It had been chosen by Ann’s mother in an attempt to inject some style into her daughter’s wedding. Ann had refused to get married in a register office in London and had insisted on having the ceremony in this godforsaken windswept village in the middle of nowhere. During the photographs, Ann’s mother clung to her collapsing beehive hairdo, eyeing Elspeth’s severe undyed hair and lace-up shoes. Ann’s father attempted to light a cigarette in the brisk October breeze and tried to ignore all the curious onlookers across the street.

  They had a week’s honeymoon in the French Alps, where Ann’s hair was bleached a dazzling white. Ben couldn’t quite believe his luck and while she slept he would sit above her and trace with his fingertips the network of violet rivers frozen just beneath her skin.

  Ann wanted children straight away and Ben didn’t argue with her, as he would never argue with her about anything. During the first couple of months of marriage when Ann failed to conceive, she didn’t worry particularly. But when six months of trying to get pregnant had gone by, she began to fret. ‘Don’t worry, da
rling,’ Ben said, when he saw her reach despondently into the cupboard for the sanitary towels that she clipped to a looped belt around her waist. ‘It takes time, you know.’

  Ben left the house at around eight and Elspeth would usually be out and about in North Berwick for most of the day doing her charity work or seeing her innumerable friends. Ann would wander from room to room of the house that was supposed to be her home but in which she never failed to feel like a guest who’d long outstayed her welcome, pressing her lower stomach with clenched fists, as if willing it to miraculously gestate. If she had a child, she told herself, she’d feel like she had a right to live in this echoey house with upright chairs, leather-backed books and watercolours of seabirds.

  Nine months into their marriage, Ann became passionate and cool by turns. Sometimes when Ben came home from the university she would be waiting for him upstairs on the bed, glowing with desire, wearing nothing but her slip. Downstairs, Elspeth would turn up the wireless while Ann would seize him with hot palms, pressing herself against him, and pull him towards the bed. When they had finished, Ann would hold on to Ben, wanting him to stay in her as long as possible, and lie completely motionless, imagining the sperm writhing up inside her. But every month without fail she would feel the aching cramps in her back and the slow, dropping heat between her legs. Then she would turn away from Ben in bed. Confused, he would tentatively caress her stiff back and kiss her impassive, taut face, murmuring to her, ‘Ann, my love. Please, Ann. Don’t be upset, my love.’

  This went on for a year. It was Elspeth who finally cracked. One morning at breakfast when Ben had left, she took one look at the pinched whiteness of Ann’s face and said, ‘Things can’t go on like this, can they?’

  Ann said nothing but Elspeth saw something she had never seen before: a single, silver tear, coursing down Ann’s porcelain cheek.

  ‘I think we should make an appointment to see the doctor.’

  A hoarse sob broke from Ann’s thin frame. ‘I can’t. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Can’t bear what?’

  ‘I can’t bear to be told that I can’t have children.’

  Elspeth took Ann in her arms for the first and last time of their lives together. Ann stiffened momentarily then pressed her face into Elspeth’s shoulder and sobbed.

  ‘There, there. You cry. Let it all out. Crying never did anyone any harm,’ Elspeth kept saying. ‘We’ll sort it out. Don’t worry.’

  The family doctor took Ann’s pulse and blood pressure, palpated her stomach through her skirt, asked discreet questions about her menstrual cycle and ‘marital relations’, making notes all the time in deft, neat handwriting. ‘There is nothing wrong with you or your husband, Mrs Raikes. I am quite certain that you will conceive in no time. Take exercise, get some fresh air.’ He also gave her a prescription.

  In the chemist’s on the High Street, Elspeth scrutinized the prescription, holding it close to her face. ‘What are these?’ she asked the pharmacist.

  ‘They’re just pills,’ he said cheerfully, but Elspeth was not to be put off.

  ‘I know that, sonny, but what are they for? What do they do?’

  The man consulted the piece of paper again, ‘They’re tranquillizers.’

  Elspeth’s mouth thinned. ‘In that case, we won’t be needing them. Come along, Ann. Good day to you.’

  Through Kenneth’s medical contacts and Elspeth’s determination, Ann and Ben got an appointment to see Scotland’s leading gynaecologist, Douglas Fraser. For five months, she travelled to Edinburgh once a week and was punctured for blood, probed with cold, slim metal instruments and interrogated on her diet, medical history, menstrual cycle and sexual habits. She and Ben had tussled and fumbled like teenagers behind impervious white screens to produce a sperm sample, while Elspeth sat a few metres away reading magazines. Then, almost two years after they had first married he called them for a final diagnosis. They sat on red leather chairs and watched while Dr Fraser shuffled papers on his desk. He was a large, kindly man with watery eyes. As he faced them, he was struck by how young they looked, and felt it almost indecent that he was discussing their having children.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with either of you. Both of you are normally functioning, fertile human beings.’

  Ann sighed tearfully and Ben asked, ‘Then why is it we’ve been unable to conceive?’

  ‘The problem lies in the combination of the two of you. The fact of the matter is that you, Mrs Raikes, are rejecting your husband’s spermatozoa.’

  Ann tossed her head. ‘What do you mean “rejecting”?’ ‘You are — if you like — allergic to Ben’s sperm. Your body has an allergic reaction and gathers all its immunity against it and — rejects it.’

  Ann looked at the doctor. ‘So you are saying if I had, say, married another man, there would be no problem?’

  ‘Well, you could put it like that. What’s happened to the two of you is a one in a million occurrence. And, yes, if you’d married a different man there probably wouldn’t have been a problem. It is just an incompatibility of yours and Ben’s individual antibodies. ’

  ‘But what can we do about it?’ asked Ben, reaching for Ann’s hand.

  ‘At the moment, there is no proven treatment,’ Dr Fraser said carefully, ‘but there is something that I would like to try on you both. I can’t see why it won’t work.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What I propose to do — and this is something that has been researched for some time now — is take a section of your skin from here,’ and he indicated Ben’s upper arm, ‘and graft it on to here,’ and he indicated Ann’s upper arm. ‘Ann’s antibodies will assimilate themselves to the new graft and stop rejecting your sperm. It’s as simple as that.’

  Their faces reflected, just as he’d expected, a mixture of astonishment and hope.

  ‘It will be a very straightforward operation. You won’t even have to stay in overnight.’

  ‘But it sounds so ... so . . .’ Ann groped for the right word.

  ‘Medieval? Yes, I know. But a basic physical problem requires a basic physical solution. Saying that, I’m not promising anything.’

  ‘Is this ... is this the only solution?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Fraser said gently, ‘it’s your only hope.’

  Elspeth picks them up in the car from Edinburgh General Infirmary. They are holding hands as they cross the car-park and have matching bandages on their left arms. Ben is left with a puckered, translucent scar and Ann, a two-by-two-inch square of slightly darker skin that soon grows and breathes as if it has always been a part of her. She also becomes pregnant within a month.

  Ann’s first was a long and difficult birth. She began to understand the true semantics of the word ‘labour’. For a day and a half the dome of her belly contracted and raged and she saw the heartbeat of her child echoed in an undulating red electronic line. When the line went flat and the machine cried out a monotonous bleep, they cut her with one slash and dragged the baby out by the head with cruel steel forceps. Seconds later they were staring into each other’s eyes in shock. She never strayed far from Ann. In time she would bear a daughter and give her Ann’s name.

  In the second hour of her second daughter’s life, Ann wrapped her baby tightly in a shawl. She thrashed her red, angry limbs until she was free, her tiny starfish hands clenched in defiance. They called her Alice — a short name that never seemed to contain her character. The word starts deep in the back of the mouth and ends with you expelling air from your lips. She had black hair and black eyes from the moment she was born. People bending over her pram would glance at Ann and at the cherubic older child and then back at the baby with olive-black eyes. ‘She’s like a wee changeling, isn’t she?’ said one woman. Ann’s fingers tightened around the pram handle. ‘Not at all.’ When Alice was still young enough to seem like a child to Ann, she left to travel the world. She waved goodbye from a train window, beads looped and plaited into her long black hair, rainbow skirts trailing
the ground. She returned crop-haired, in tight leather trousers, an Oriental dragon rampant on her shoulder-blade. ‘How was the world?’ Ann asked. ‘Full,’ she replied.

  Her third daughter was watchful and loved. She drank in the sights of her two older sisters and was like both of them at once, and so not like either of them at all. She saw, copied, emulated. She was cautious, made no mistakes because they’d made them all for her. When Ann visited her, she made her tea from the herbs that grew in her window-boxes.

  Jamie screams and batters the tray of his highchair with his plastic trainer cup. Annie joins in the wailing gleefully, letting her cornflakes get soggy and unappetising in the milk.

  ‘Quiet!’ Neil roars from behind the Scotsman.

  The children ignore him. Kirsty crams a spoonful of baby rice into Jamie’s mouth, hoping to thwart the noise. ‘Eat up your breakfast, Annie, or you’ll be late for playschool.’

  ‘I hate playschool.’

  ‘You do not. You liked it last week.’

  ‘I hate it today.’

  ‘You haven’t been yet so how do you know you hate it?’

  ‘I just do.’ Annie swishes her spoon around her bowl, making the milk skirl around the rim.

  ‘Don’t play with it, just eat it,’ Kirsty says. Jamie chooses that moment to spit out his rice which spatters Kirsty’s shirt. ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she exclaims, jumping up for a cloth.

  ‘You swore! You swore!’

  Neil appears from behind the paper. ‘Eat that up at once, young lady,’ he thunders at Annie.

  ‘No, I won’t, I don’t like it!’ she shouts.

  Neil smacks her hand. ‘Do as I say!’

  Annie begins to scream in earnest. Over the racket, Kirsty hears the telephone ringing. ‘I’ll get it.’

  She picks up the receiver with one hand, wiping down her shirt with the other.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Kirsty, it’s Dad.’