After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Suddenly she’s there, under the table between his knees, pushing the robe apart. He jumps in surprise and ‘akdjneuskjnlkfhakew’ appears on the computer screen. He pulls out his earplugs just as she takes his penis in her mouth. The effect is immediate: it’s as if all his blood abandons the other parts of his body and rushes to stiffen it. His head swims with the shock. ‘Oh, Christ.’

  Her mouth is soft, pliable and incredibly hot. He can feel the ridges of her palate pushing against him and, every now and then, the slightest graze of her teeth. He releases her hair from the clip she’d put in it for the shower and it spills over his thighs and her shoulders. The only time in his life when he thought he was going to ejaculate prematurely was last night when she bent over him in the dark and wound its length tightly around his penis. He takes hold of her arms and pulls her towards him.

  Table seven in the window is still empty and it’s almost the end of breakfast time. Who’s missing? Molly casts her eyes swiftly round the dining room. The young couple from London, of course. The rest, older and more used to staying in hotels, have come down on time and are solemnly eating their fruit salad and maple-syrup pancakes, barely talking. Molly peers at her watch. She wants to get off early today, if possible. Her boyfriend, who is working in the Wordsworth museum down in the village, is coming up to see her this afternoon. They are going rowing on Grasmere.

  Her feet ring as she walks across the polished (by her) floorboards to clear a vacated table. The family, leaving by the door, smile at her.

  ‘I think autumn is coming,’ the father says.

  Molly remembers feeling an imperceptible edge in the air when she put the rubbish out earlier this morning. ‘I think you’re right.’

  Tt must be beautiful around here, with all the trees.’

  ‘It is, I’m told, but I won’t be around to see it. I’ll be leaving here in a fewr weeks.’

  John grips her, lifts her up and staggers towards the bed.

  Giggling, they crash on to it rather more precipitately than he’d planned.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he says, concerned.

  ‘I think so. It’s not often I get eleven stone of male flesh landing on top of me at such a speed . . . Oh, shit.’ Her voice becomes strangled and she bites his shoulder. ‘What are you doing to me?’

  He eases himself up on to his elbows to look at her. She is frowning concentratedly, her eyes focused somewhere past his head. He touches her face. ‘Hello. Are you all right in there?’

  She laughs and stretches her neck to kiss him.

  Molly and Sarah, the other girl, have cleared the whole of the dining room apart from the one unused table.

  ‘What shall we do with this?’ Sarah asks, gesturing towards

  it.

  ‘Don’t know. They may come down at any minute.’ ‘Then again,’ Sarah says, ‘they may spend all day in bed like yesterday.’

  Molly laughs. ‘Shush, they might hear you. Anyway, that’s w'hat I’d do if I came here.’

  Sarah snorts and throws her a duster, which cracks in the air like a whip. ‘That would depend on who you were with.’ They work on, wiping the table surface first, then smearing it with beeswax polish. Molly rubs in fast, circular motions until her face rises up before her in the burnished wood.

  He knows she’s close: her breathing is shallow and urgent and she’s gripping him tighter all the time. Their bodies are slippery with sweat. John runs his tongue up Alice’s neck to her ear, tasting salt. Her body jolts and arches. ‘Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, fucking, fucking hell!’ she shouts. He has to turn his head away to prevent being deafened, at the same time laughing incredulously at her string of expletives. She is clutching the back of his neck, sobbing or laughing, he can’t tell which. After a few minutes, he starts to withdraw, but she tightens her arms around him. ‘Don’t go just yet.’

  ‘Well, believe me, I’d love to stay, but I’ve got the population of China down here.’

  Alice tiptoes down the stairs. The hotel seems deserted. She rings the bell at reception, guilty at how loud it sounds, but no one answers. She pokes her head tentatively around the swing door into the kitchen. There’s no one there either. The cooker is off, cooling with its door open. Tin foil covers various pots and trays. Lentils soak in a big glass bowl, releasing slow bubbles to the water’s surface. The clock above the dishwasher, showing the time to be a quarter to one, ticks loudly.

  Alice can hear voices coming from somewhere. She walks towards the front door, the bright sunlight making her eyes smart. On the steps in front of the hotel sits the curly-haired girl with a boy. They are eating sandwiches from white plates balanced on their knees. The boy has his arm around the girl’s shoulders. They are laughing about something, and with his other arm, the boy is wiping his eyes on the edge of his T-shirt. ‘I don’t believe it, I just don’t believe it,’ he is saying. At the sound of Alice’s footsteps on the gravel, the girl turns her head then gets to her feet.

  ‘Hello,’ Alice says.

  ‘Hi.’

  Now she’s standing, Alice sees that she’s wearing shorts, heavy-duty boots and a big woollen cardigan.

  ‘I’m sorry — you’re off-duty, aren’t you? I didn’t realise.’ ‘That’s OK. Did you want something?’

  The boy is half turning to look at her. Alice remembers

  having seen him earlier, walking across the lawn, his head tipped back towards the sky.

  ‘No, don’t worry. I was wondering if we could get something to eat before we drive back to London. We missed out on breakfast, you see.’

  ‘Yes, I know. We don’t usually serve lunch here, but I’m sure I could find something for you.’

  Alice shakes her head. ‘No, no. I wouldn’t dream of it. We can go into the village. You enjoy your lunch. I used to work in a hotel so I know how annoying it is when people like us don’t eat at the proper times.’

  Molly looks relieved. ‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’

  ‘I am.’ Alice turns to go. ‘Have a nice afternoon.’

  Alice prowled round the edges of the walled garden at Tyningham, a large country house open to the public on Sundays. It was hot. She was wearing her black Victorian frock coat. ‘It’s your father’s birthday, put on something nice for God’s sake,’ her mother had hissed, when she’d come downstairs. Elspeth had told Ann to ‘leave her be’. So she couldn’t take it off now.

  In pi aces, the red-brick wall was covered with a grey-green lichen. Borders ran along the walls, planted with roses, herbs and bright orange flowers that Alice didn’t know the name for. At one end was a small, murky pool with a stone griffin spouting a weak trickle of water from its mouth. There was a lawn, hemmed in with low, myrtle hedges. In the middle, on white wrought-iron garden furniture and under a parasol, sat Alice’s family.

  The waitress, carrying a large tray, was advancing over the lawn. Alice walked back over and took her seat between Elspeth and Kirsty. Elspeth and Ben were having a conversation about Kenneth, Ben’s brother, and his new medical practice. Alice half listened, watching the waitress unload the teacups from the tray. Beth was pestering their mother to go and visit the horses after this. ‘Can we, can we, can we?’ Beth said, bouncing up and down in her seat. ‘Please?’

  Ann extracted each saucer one by one from the pile the waitress left them in, balanced a cup on each and filled it with a stream of hot brown tea. Then she handed them to Kirsty, Elspeth, Ben and herself. ‘I ordered juice for you,’ she said to Alice. ‘We’ll see,’ she said to Beth, and handed them both a tumbler of orange liquid.

  ‘Happy birthday, Ben,’ Elspeth said, toasting her son with her teacup.

  The night before, Alice had wrapped up a compass, the dial of which was suspended in a globe of water. On one end it had a big, transparent sucker. Ben had moistened it with his tongue and stuck it to the windscreen of the car. ‘It’s a wonderful present, Alice,’ he’d said, turning round to smile at her. All the way from their house to Tyningham, it had swivelled, readjusted and shifte
d, marking the slightest increments in their changes of direction.

  ‘I need a glass of water,’ Ann announced, apparently to no one. Ben stood and ran after the disappearing waitress. ‘It’s hot,’ Ann said, fanning herself with her hand. ‘Don’t you want to take your coat off, Alice?’

  Alice didn’t answer, but sucked the lurid-coloured juice up through a straw. Saccharine-tasting liquid passed through her mouth, coating her teeth. She fished from her coat pocket a pair of sunglasses and put them on, plunging into shade her family, seated around her, and her father coming towards them over the lawn carrying a glass of water that was glinting in the sunshine. Her mother pursed her lips. Ben placed the glass in front of her. Barely turning to him, she said, ‘Ben, can you fix the parasol? I’m too much in the sun.’

  ‘Like Hamlet,’ Alice muttered.

  Ben twizzled the white plastic stick that speared through a hole in their table. The parasol shade spun round above them.

  ‘What did you say?’ Ann peered at her daughter as if she was very far away.

  ‘I said, like Hamlet. He said to Claudius and his mother that he was “too much i’ the sun”. Like you did. Just then.’

  ‘Oh. But why—’ Ann broke off. ‘Ben, not like that. This way. Over here, towards me more.’

  Elspeth pushed back her chair and walked away, as if to go and see the griffin dribble water over the Victorian grotto. Alice saw this. Alice saw her father sit down again and reach to the ground for Ann’s fallen cardigan. She saw him place it over her shoulders. She saw, as if for the first time, her father performing all these small tasks for his wife. And she saw him, at the end of it, place his hand on Ann’s knee, smiling round at his three daughters on his forty-fifth birthday. And Alice saw, a few moments later, her mother move her chair ever so slightly, but just enough for Ben’s hand to fall into the space between them.

  As they near London, they stop talking. The tape playing finishes and John doesn’t put on another. Alice leans her head against the car window, counting the infinity of orange lights and occasionally watching them reflected in the lenses of John’s glasses.

  ‘What do you need to wear glasses for?’ she asks suddenly.

  He takes his eyes away from the road for a moment to look over at her. ‘You make it sound like a crime. I need them for driving, going to the cinema and theatre - that sort of thing. Long-distance stuff. Working at a computer eight or nine hours a day has done it.’

  ‘So you’re going to go blind as well as bald.’

  ‘Blind, maybe, but not bald.’

  He moves his left hand from the wheel on to her leg. She smooths the hollow of her palm over the back of his hand, listening to the changes in sound as it moves over his knuckles, tendons and fingers.

  ‘When was it your mother died?’ she asks.

  ‘It was the end of my first year at uni. I was nineteen. You would have been a sexy seventeen-year-old.’

  ‘A stroppy seventeen-year-old, more like.’ She curls her fingers around his. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘She had breast cancer. Initially, anyway. She found the first lump the day after my A levels finished and she was dead by the following summer. It had spread everywhere — pancreas, lungs, bowels, ovaries, liver. At Easter they opened her up, intending to operate on her liver, and when they saw all the tumours, they just sewed her back up again and sent her home. They told us she wouldn’t last the month out, but she did, and two more as well.’

  ‘John, that’s terrible.’

  ‘It was, yes.’

  ‘How did your father take it?’

  ‘Pretty badly, as you’d expect after twenty-six years of marriage.’

  ‘And how is he now?’

  ‘Well, you see, now he’s turned religious. Really religious. I suppose it’s not that surprising, when you think about it. But he’s worried a lot of people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because his new-found faith has such a . . . desperate . . . obsessive quality about it. My mother was very religious and he was always cynical about it. Used to tease her a lot. I mean, he’d have been the first to describe himself as a Jew, but he would have been claiming it as his race, rather than his religion. He referred to my barmitzvah as “life insurance”. She tried to make us all keep kosher but he wasn’t having any of it. Anyway, since she died, he’s become a real religious monomaniac. He won’t even eat at my house — even if I buy the right food — because I don’t keep a kosher kitchen. He has separate plates for milk and meat, he’s even got two dishwashers. He observes all these obscure laws and I keep forgetting. He gets really annoyed if 1 do something like phone him on a Saturday. It’s pretty . . . difficult at times. He seems to have this twisted logic that unless he perpetuates my mother’s belief — the belief he himself used to mock — he’s somehow being untrue to her memory. He’s always been very pro the idea of me marrying a Jew but now he’s obsessed. It’s been hard. I wish sometimes he would meet someone else, just so there’d be someone else for him to focus on.’

  ‘Apart from you, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think he will, though. I can’t imagine it.’ John takes back his hand abruptly and puts it on the wheel again. His face looks shuttered up and gloomy. Alice is silent and the warmth his hand has left in hers fades rapidly. She clasps her hands together over her knees, drawing them up to her chest.

  As they are driving through Crouch End, he says, ‘Alice, I’ve had the most brilliant weekend.’

  ‘So have I. I loved that place.’ She stretches out her legs. ‘Am I going to see you again?’

  His shoulders jerk in surprise and the car swerves dangerously. ‘What do you mean? Don’t say things like that. Are you going to see me again? Well, of course. I mean . . . don’t you want to see me again? I thought . . . What are you talking about? Was this just some little fling for you?’

  ‘No, of course it wasn’t. You know that. There’s no need to get angry.’

  ‘Yes, there is a need to get angry when you say things like that. Tell me what you mean, Alice.’

  ‘What I mean is, the Jewish thing.’

  He doesn’t say anything. When she plucks up courage to look over at him he is gripping the wheel, his shoulders hunched. She sighs. ‘John, I’m not angry with you. I don’t want to give you a hard time. I couldn’t give a shit what religion or race you are, you know that. But it does matter to you, you can’t deny it. I just want to be realistic.’

  ‘Realistic?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t want to get hurt by you. You have to decide what you want.’

  ‘This is what I want,’ he thumps the wheel, ‘I told you that.’

  She says nothing, unconvinced.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘It’s not that. I believe that you believe what you are saying here and now, but I also believe that you could change your mind.’

  It 5 , 5

  1 won t.

  ‘You might.’ She spreads her hands over her eyes and temples. ‘Look, this is all getting a bit heavy. We have only just met. Why don’t we agree to just take it easy and see what happens?’

  He grunts non-committally. ‘I don’t see why you just can’t believe me.’

  ‘John, let’s not spoil the weekend by arguing over something that hasn’t and might never happen. This is all so speculative.’ She sees a signpost for Holloway flash past. They are heading towards the outskirts of Finsbury Park. ‘Could you drop me off at my flat, please?’

  He looks instantly panicked. T thought ... I mean, would you like to come back to my house? You haven’t seen it yet.’ ‘I’d love to come and see it another night, but I need to unpack and get ready for work tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh. I feel ... I’d really like you to come back. I feel like we’d be parting on a bad note.’

  She shakes her head. ‘We’re not. I promise.’

  ‘Come round for dinner, then. Tomorrow night — no, shit, I can’t make tomorrow. How about Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesd
ay’s fine. What time?’

  ‘Eight o’clock? At my house.’

  The car has drawn up at the end of the terrace outside Alice’s flat. John jumps out of the car and comes round the other side just as she is getting out. He puts his arms around her and they kiss for a long time.

  ‘I’m so sorry for being arsy earlier. I’m an idiot.’

  ‘No, you’re not, and it’s fine.’

  He traces her cheekbone with his thumb. ‘I wouldn’t ever hurt you, Alice.’

  She turns her head and bites his thumb. ‘You’d better not.’ He laughs, lifts her off her feet and spins her round. ‘I’ll see you Tuesday, then.’

  ‘Yes. There’s just one small problem with that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t have your phone number or address.’

  He puts her down. ‘For God’s sake. I’d better give it to you.’ He scribbles furiously on a piece of paper, then they kiss again. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back?’ John says, after a while.

  ‘Yes. You’d better go now before I change my mind. Be off with you.’

  Alice waves after his receding tail-lights. It’s only after his car has disappeared round the bend that she looks at the piece of paper he’s given her. On it is written his phone number, his address and then the words ‘love John xxx’. She bounds up the steps to her flat door.