After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  At that moment a grim-faced woman walked into the lift. ‘I was wondering if . . . whether you would like to . . .’ he faltered, as the woman fidgeted pointedly with her watch. ‘. . . Er . . . I wondered if I could borrow that book.’

  She was taken aback. ‘Well, yes. Do you really want to?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  She reached into her bag and handed it to him. He took it and stepped back. ‘I’ll give it back to you.’

  Alice was about to say that there was no need but the doors closed.

  Rachel had just returned from an early lecture and was knocking on Alice’s door. ‘Alice? Are you awake? Are you dressed?’

  Alice was sitting in bed with a book propped up on her knees. The curtains were open and the mid-morning sunlight

  formed triangles of light on the carpet. ‘Yes, come in. How was the lecture?’

  Rachel appeared in the doorway still in her coat and scarf, clutching a parcel. ‘Boring, actually. Guess what came for you in the post.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s from New York.’

  Alice put her hands over her eyes. ‘I don’t want it! Take it away!’

  Rachel sat down on the bed and tossed the parcel into Alice’s lap. ‘Open it, go on. It could be something nice, something expensive.’

  Alice turned it over in her hands. There was no return address but the handwriting was unmistakably Mario’s. It was an ordinary brown padded envelope and what was in it was light, bulky and squashable, giving easily to the pressure of her fingers. What was it? Clothes?

  ‘You open it,’ she said, pushing it into Rachel’s hands.

  ‘No. It’s addressed to you. You open it.’

  Alice peeled back the Sellotape on one end of the envelope and held it upside down, shaking whatever it was into her hand. What came out was so shocking that things registered in reverse order in her mind. Hair. A lot of hair. Black hair. Curly, tangled hair. Familiar hair. Hair cut in one hack from someone’s head. Hair she’d felt between her fingers before. Mario’s hair.

  Both girls shrieked loudly and leapt from the bed. From the other side of the room they clutched each other, Alice frantically shaking loose strands from her fingers, and looked at it, nestling in a black clump on the bedclothes, like some overgrown rodent.

  ‘Jesus Christ, the man’s a psycho,’ Rachel muttered.

  Alice jumped up and down, rubbing her hands on her pyjamas, ‘Uuuuurrrgggh! Yuk, yuk, yuk! It’s horrible. God, what a thing to do.’ Having it in her hands, feeling again its ravelled spirals and curves, brought back with a slamming force the time she had slept with him. It was as if he was there in the room with them, not thousands of miles away across an icy Atlantic. She looked about despairingly. ‘What do we do with it?’

  ‘We throw it away.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m not touching it again.’

  Rachel picked up Alice’s waste-paper basket and marched over to the bed, brandishing it before her. She swept the hair into it and carried it downstairs. Alice heard her emptying it into the wheelie-bin at the front of the house.

  ‘Thank you, Rachel,’ she called.

  ‘Any time.’

  But for weeks, Alice would find stray strands hooked into a teacup, coiled around the soap or clinging to her tongue, making her spit and hiss.

  John prowled around the lobby, banging himself on the head with the book.

  ‘You fucking coward, you fucking, fucking coward.’

  This was the last thing he needed.

  When Alice got back to the office later on that afternoon, Susannah was beaming at her across the room.

  ‘What’s up with you, Cheshire Cat?’ Alice said, as she sat down at her desk.

  ‘You’ve had a call,’ Susannah said, and was then distracted by something on her computer.

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘That man,’ Susannah said absently, peering closely at her screen.

  John Friedmann, Alice thought irrationally, and was immediately cross with herself. She started flicking through her card indexes. ‘Which man?’ she said, as if she didn’t really care. ‘That man. Whatshisname. You know.’

  Alice stopped flicking. ‘Suze, do you think you could be a little more specific?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Susannah turned to face her, concentrating on her now. ‘That man from the organisation in Paris.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alice fought a feeling of intense disappointment. ‘That man.’ This was ridiculous. She couldn’t be getting all hung up over that journalist. Could she?

  ‘Isn’t he the one you’ve been trying to get through to all week?’ Susannah was looking at her, puzzled by her unenthusiastic response.

  ‘Yes. Yes, he is.’

  Alice, for something to do, opened her diary.

  ‘But he’s called you back. This is good news, isn’t it?’ Susannah persisted, ‘I mean, it probably means he wants to do the project with you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I hope so. I’ll call him back in a minute.’

  There was a pause. Alice, feeling that Susannah was still looking at her, kept her head bent over her diary, filling in needless appointments.

  ‘How was the interview, by the way?’

  ‘Oh . . . fine ... all right . . . yeah, great. Well ... it was . . . fine, actually.’

  At the sound of the bell jangling on its wire, Elspeth comes out of the back room of the Oxfam shop to see her afternoon replacement already taking off her coat at the till: a largish, florid-faced woman in a turquoise plastic mac.

  'You’re early today,’ Elspeth remarks.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman tells her, ‘it’s good to get out the house early on a day like today.’

  Elspeth feels uneasy about this woman. Always has. She wears those glasses that react to the light. In today’s bright sunshine, you can’t see her eyes at all. Can’t trust someone who won’t show you their eyes. And she always brings her dog into the shop. It’s a nice enough dog, but it smells. Puts folk off.

  Outside the shop, Elspeth hesitates. She needs to go to the supermarket to buy something for the girls’ tea when they come home from school, but she does have this extra half-hour to spare that she hadn’t bargained for. On an impulse, she turns away from the direction of home and walks towards the end of the High Street, saying hello to various people on the way. She turns right at the chip shop down Quality Street and crosses over to the Lodge Grounds.

  She doesn’t come here often, but it’s one of her favourite places in the town. She likes the way its cultivated prettiness is caught midway between the wide, flat sweep of the beaches and the gorse-covered cragginess of the Law. Even though it’s a weekday, people with buggies and prams are wandering up and down the uneven, winding concrete paths, looking at the plants or just enjoying the sun. Passing the aviary, she shudders. Elspeth has never seen the attraction of caged birds.

  At the brow of the hill, she sees a small gaggle of teenagers in the red and black uniform of the High School. A quick scan of the group assures her that neither Kirsty nor Alice is among them. It was last year that she came face to face with a shame-faced Kirsty and two of her friends down by the harbour at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Elspeth had promised to say nothing if Kirsty gave her her word that it wouldn’t happen again.

  Elspeth, still feeling a little like a child let out of school early herself, sits down on a green bench with the crazy golf course behind her and the town and the sea in front of her. It was at about this spot that she and her then fiance Robert had been walking when they met a man to whom Robert introduced her as Gordon Raikes. Elspeth knew of the Raikes family, their large house on Marmion Road and their golf-club factory on the outskirts of the town, but she had never met their youngest son, Gordon. He’d been away at school and then at St Andrews University, Robert told her, as she and Gordon looked dumbly at each other. As she always told him later, she might as well have taken off Robert’s engagement ring there and then. She and Robert had walked away together and as they went round
a corner to go down the slope, Elspeth had turned and seen him, still standing there beside the privet hedge, looking after them. It must have been here. There were no concrete paths then, of course, only dust-soil ones that turned to churned mud in the rain.

  She’d met him again a week later on the blustery High Street, both with their mothers, both weighed down with parcels of food. He’d winked at her while their mothers chatted and she’d surprised herself — and him too, no doubt - by winking back. It was only a few days after that that she’d been standing by the harbour, watching the fishing boats coming in, and he’d appeared from round a corner. ‘Hello, Elspeth,’ he’d said, and stopped to look down into the boats with her. Caught fish slipped and slithered about on the decks, their tails flicking, their parched mouths opening and closing. The fishermen threw creels and baskets up on to the harbour with a regular thud, thud, thud.

  ‘Do you always get called Elspeth?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Not always. Some people shorten it to Ellie.’

  ‘I bet you don’t like that,’ he’d said, leaning his elbows on the railing next to her.

  She’d shaken her head. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I thought so. You don’t suit a shortened name.’

  He’d taken her out on to the point beyond the swimming-pool and she’d sat with her arms around her knees, slightly nervous of the swell and fall of the waves that slapped the rocks so close below them and the stiff breeze that whipped her hair around her face, listening to him tell her how he wanted to go into the church and be a missionary.

  ‘My father wants me to go into the family business, but I just don’t think it’s for me. I don’t see how I could be happy doing that. That’s what should be your priority, shouldn’t it, Elspeth?’ He’d stopped tossing pebbles into the greenish sea at that point and looked at her. She’d said nothing, her mouth dry, thinking only, what on earth will my parents say?

  ‘Don’t you think, Elspeth, that you should always be as happy as you possibly can be?’ he’d asked again.

  She’d raised her chin to meet his insistent gaze. ‘Yes. Yes, I think you should.’

  He’d squatted down on his haunches, so that he was on a level with her. ‘Are you really going to marry Robert?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t marry him. Marry me,’ he’d said. Then he’d crawled over the rocks and did something that Robert had never done — kissed her full on the lips.

  Elspeth shades her eyes from the sun and turns her head to look east out to the Bass Rock. Farther off down the path, where the trees and undergrowth were thicker, she sees an unmistakable flash of blonde hair and a familiar, petite figure. Ann. Elspeth feels a slight stab of confusion. Didn’t Ann say she was going into Edinburgh today? But Elspeth sits forward on the bench, raises her hand to wave and draws breath to call her name — but the shout never comes.

  With her arm still raised, she watches as a dark-haired man she’d assumed to be just a passer-by pulls Ann towards him. Sunlight is eclipsed between their bodies and they kiss. Elspeth lets her hand fall to her lap and looks down at the ground. Was it here that she first met Gordon? Or was it farther towards that oak tree? She looks back down the path again. Their bodies are parting now. There is sunlight between them again. They are talking. Ann cups her hand around his jaw. It is a gesture so familiar to Elspeth: she has seen her do it to the children, to Ben.

  The man walks off quickly, away from Elspeth. Ann sets off in the other direction. Elspeth watches her daughter-in-law walk more slowly down the winding path within a hundred yards of her, then disappear out of the Lodge gates. Elspeth looks again at the receding back of the man, then she stoops as if she’s experiencing physical pain, pressing the ball of her fist into her closed eyes. An even worse thought has suddenly occurred to her.

  Two days later Alice answered the office intercom in the middle of the morning.

  ‘I’m here to see Alice Raikes.’

  The line crackled and the sound of traffic in the street came booming down the line. She couldn’t place the voice. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘My name’s John Friedmann.’

  She slammed down the handset at once. ‘Oh, shit.’

  Everyone in the office looked up. Then she pressed the button to let him in. ‘Oh, shit, shit.’ She tore open her bag and seized her hairbrush and began sweeping it through her hair in long, urgent strokes.

  ‘Who on earth is it?’ Susannah shouted across the office. Anthony, the new director, appeared out of his room.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked mildly. ‘Why is Alice running around?’

  ‘Oh, God. Don’t ask . . . bugger . . . What am I going to do? How do I look?’ Alice appealed to Susannah.

  ‘Completely mad.’

  She galloped down the first flight of stairs then slowed her pace so as not to appear red in the face and panting when she saw him. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, reading one of the literacy posters stuck on the wall.

  ‘Hello.’

  He turned and smiled as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. She tried to ignore her stomach, which was trying to cram itself up into her throat. ‘Hi,’ she said, leaning in what she hoped was a casual manner on the banister. ‘What are you doing here? Did you forget to ask me something for the interview?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Did you read the book?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  There was an agonising pause. She fiddled with her hair and put a strand of it into her mouth.

  ‘I was just passing through Covent Garden and . . .’ He stopped, sighed and cast his eyes up at the ceiling. Then he slung his bag to the floor, looked at her and said, ‘I think we both know that’s a lie.’

  A curious thing happened to Alice’s face. The muscles around her mouth, the ones that controlled her smile, seemed to go into spasm and she had to bite her lips so as not to appear to be grinning in a rather brainless way. She looked at the floor. A taxi rumbled past outside. He rubbed his hand against the weft of his stubble. ‘You have to come and see a film with me tonight.’

  Her smile disappeared immediately. ‘What do you mean, I “have to”? Aren’t you supposed to say things like “please” and “would you like to”?’

  ‘No. Why should I when it’s perfectly obvious to me that you are a witch and that you’ve put some evil spell on me?’ He came towards her. Oh, my God, was he going to kiss her? Right here? She panicked and backed into the stand holding poetry competition leaflets. He came so close that she could feel the sweep of his breath on her neck: she was sure that he would be able to hear her heart pounding. She forced herself to hold his gaze without smiling. ‘I love it when you’re angry,’ he whispered.

  Her laughter burst out of her like water from a dam and she thumped him hard on the chest. ‘You are the most infuriating man I have ever met. I would never go to the cinema with you! Never! Not even if . . . if . . .’ she floundered for the most outrageously hurtful situation ‘. . . not even if it was my favourite film playing for the last time ever and you had the last spare ticket. Not even then!’

  John rubbed his chest where she’d hit him. ‘Every time I see you I get injured in some way. But I’m optimistic. Not even a witch can do much damage in a cinema.’

  ‘I’m not coming!’ she shouted.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he shouted back.

  ‘I’m not! I’d never go anywhere with you.’

  She sees him first, outside the cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue, his head bent over a newspaper, frowning slightly. He glances up the street in the opposite direction to the one she’s coming in. She sees that he’s resting one foot on the bridge of the other, that he’s quite tall, and the anxiety in the curve of his neck as he cranes to see up the crowded pavement.

  ‘Hey,’ she says, tapping the newspaper, ‘you’re off-duty, you know. You can put that away now.’

  Relief floods his face as he turns towards her. They don’t touch, but stand apart. ‘You’re late, A
lice Raikes. I thought—’

  ‘I’m always late.’

  ‘I’ll remember that . . .’

  She sees that he was about to say ‘next time’ but stopped himself.

  ‘Do you want to go in, or shall we just stand and smile at each other all evening?’

  He laughs. ‘We could, but I’m afraid you’d get bored. Let’s go in.’

  Alice walks beside him, her hands in her jacket pockets, talking about the film. When she is emphasising a point she turns her body towards him and says, ‘Don’t you think?’ She is wearing close-fitting, dark navy jeans and heavy-soled boots with metal heels that flash in the neon signs of Soho. Outside a Japanese noodle bar she stops and inhales, closing her eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘I love that smell.’

  John sniffs but can only smell the bitter-sweet stench of rotting vegetables and the acrid, burnt smell of stir-fry.

  ‘It really reminds me of Japan,’ she says.

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘Yeah. I spent about a month in Tokyo.’

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘During one of my university holidays. I did lots of travelling then — those long holidays were the best thing about being a student. ’

  ‘Did you like Japan?’

  ‘I loved it. It was very exciting. I was ready to leave when I did, though. Tokyo’s such a frenetic city. We went straight from there to Thailand, and spent a few weeks recovering on a beach.’

  We? John thinks.

  ‘Who were you with?’ he says casually.

  ‘An ex-boyfriend of mine.’

  He has to swallow hard to stop himself from shouting, who was he? did you love him? how long did you go out with him for? when did you split up? do you still see him?

  ‘What would you like to do now?’ he asks instead.

  ‘Don’t know. Got any ideas?’

  ‘I’ve got a problem, rather than ideas.’

  ‘What?’ She looks at him sideways through her hair which she must have loosened sometime during the film. When she arrived earlier, it was knotted at the nape of her neck. Sometimes he finds her gaze a bit unsettling.

  ‘Well, because I spent quite a lot of my day running around Covent Garden in a state of teenage angst about some woman . . .’he looks at her carefully; she has bowed her head and the curtain of hair has slid further over her face ‘. . . I got no work done. I have to have a two-thousand-wrord article about independent American cinema in by nine tomorrow.’