After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Your . . . ? Which one?’

  ‘Alice.’

  There is a pause. She hears him tut, his tongue hitting the back of his teeth.

  ‘You mean my daughter, then.’

  Ann stands, still grasping the phone, and begins to walk in tight, controlled steps around the room. ‘Now, look, I don’t want to go into all that again.’

  ‘Why don’t you just admit she’s mine? Do you know that sometimes I leave the shop early and watch her walking home from school? I pass her in the street almost every week, sometimes close enough for me to touch her. She looks more like me than my own sons. She’s mine and you know it. Why can’t you just admit it?’

  ‘What difference would it make?’ Ann retorts. ‘She’s Ben’s to all intents and purposes. And for your information, it is also,’ she adds haughtily, ‘more than likely that she is his altogether. ’

  ‘That’s rubbish, Ann, and you know it. Of course she’s mine. There’s no doubt about it. The older she gets, the more obvious it is. Don’t you think she has a right to know the truth?’

  ‘I’m never going to tell her about you. Never.’

  ‘You can’t cope with it, can you, Ann? You can’t cope with this constant, living reminder of what we had — and what we still have.’

  ‘We have nothing.’ Ann thinks out these words, sees them as if written on an autocue inside her head, and reads them aloud to him. ‘There is nothing between us. It’s over. I’ve told you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ And he drops to a whisper, ‘Ann,’ he murmurs, his voice curling out from the telephone, sliding down the secret spiral staircase of her ear, ‘come and see me.’

  ‘No.’ She is panicked now. She can cope with anything but this. She stops walking about. She feels giddy, as though if she took a step she might tip forward into a terrible hole. If she stays rooted to this spot of her bedroom carpet, keeps her feet neatly together like this, everything will be all right.

  ‘Please,’ he urges.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ann, don’t say that. I love you. And I know you love me. You can’t waste that. You just can’t. Nobody will find out. Ben will never know, I promise you. Liza will never know. We’ll be careful.’

  ‘We were careful last time.’

  ‘Not careful enough. Ann, please.’

  ‘No.’ Is this her speaking? Is this her voice saying these things? ‘I mean it.’

  He doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask her again. And part of Ann is glad, so glad, because if he asked her one more time, she knows she wouldn’t say no, if he asked her again, she couldn’t say no, she’d be out of this house and down at his shop in minutes. She is so close. Why doesn’t he know that, damn him, why doesn’t he ask again, just one more time, that’s all it would take, my darling.’

  After a while, she hears herself speak: ‘I need you to promise me you’ll keep your son away from her.’

  Ask me again.

  ‘Andrew can see who he likes.’ His voice is distant this time, offhand and impersonal.

  ‘Please. I need your cooperation on this. You and only you know how . . . wrong it could be.’

  ‘What am I supposed to tell Andrew — sorry, son, she’s your sister?’

  ‘I don’t care. Tell him what you have to. Make something up. You have to do this for me. Please.’

  Please ask me again.

  ‘You do realise that your asking me to do this is tantamount to admitting that Alice is my daughter.’

  ‘I know that,’ says Ann softly, ‘but what are you going to do about it? Sue for custody?’

  I still feel afraid, unsettled. Earlier — some time earlier, I don’t know when — I was suddenly aware of this presence. Someone I didn’t know was close to me, bending over me maybe. The scent my nostrils relayed to me was unfamiliar, male, tinged with nicotine.

  I once watched a buzzard circling its prey from the air. It cruised the sky, searching, and when it found something, it would drop like a plumbline and hang suspended four or five feet above it, wings oscillating rapidly, waiting maybe a full minute before diving down.

  This person, whoever it was — it was as if I could hear the crack of beating wings, feel a shadow hovering above me. My mind whirred and clicked: I wanted to scream, reach out and push him away. Is there a worse thing — knowing that someone is there and being powerless to move, speak or even see them?

  Alice had been asleep since Newcastle, curled against him, her legs tucked under her, her funeral-black clothes rumpled and creased. She looked pale, with dark crescents under her eyes. John read her copy of Daniel Deronda and watched houses, factories, fields and the blank gazes of cattle reel past. Across the aisle a toddler grizzled and jumped up and down on the seats. ‘Stop that, Kimberley,’ the mother kept saying, without looking up from her magazine. Opposite them, two nuns peeled and ate a red string bag of oranges in silence, piling up the bits of peel on the table in pungent-smelling ziggurats. One of them gave him an oddly beatific smile when he caught her eye. The other looked away sourly. At Peterborough, Alice stretched and opened her eyes.

  ‘Hello, how are you feeling?’ John said.

  ‘Um, all right.’ She yawned and pushed her tangled hair out of her eyes. ‘Where are we? Have I been asleep long?’ ‘About two hours. We’ve just left Peterborough.’ He closed the book and shoved it in the gap between their seats. ‘Your family are great, you know.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She stared out of the window. ‘I wish you Could have met my grandmother.’

  He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I wish I could have done too.’ He leant forward slightly to see if she was crying, but her face was dry, her eyes unfocused as the dusky scenery slid past them. ‘You know,’ he continued, ‘there is nothing anyone can say that will make you feel better, but do you know this?’ He frowned with concentration. ‘“Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.”’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Julian of Norwich. Someone sent it to me when my mother died.’

  ‘Julian of Norwich? The mad medieval mystic?’

  ‘The very same, but she wasn’t mad, I’ll have you know.’ Alice repeated it under her breath, looking at him intently. ‘I like it. “Love is not changed by death ...” I think Elspeth would have liked it too. Her husband died when she was about my age.’

  ‘Really? What of?’

  ‘Malaria. They were missionaries in Africa.’ She picked up

  the book he had been reading and absently flicked through the pages with her thumb, over and over. T’m glad we scattered her ashes on the Law,’ she said suddenly. ‘Did you scatter your mother’s ashes somewhere?’

  ‘No. She’s buried in Golders Green.’

  ‘Oh. Burial.’ She shuddered. ‘I’ve never liked the thought of that very much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Putting the body of someone you love into the cold, damp earth, and then knowing that under the mound that you visit and tend is still them, slowly decaying bit by bit.’

  ‘It’s not really them. Only their body.’

  ‘Yeah, but bodies are important too. In your sense of them, anyway.’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s never bothered me. I’ve never really thought of what lies beneath that headstone as my mother.’ She knelt up on the seat to see if the toilet’s engaged sign was on.

  ‘I need the loo. Back in a sec.’

  She edged between him and the seat in front; he felt the warmth from her body on his face briefly before she walked down the aisle, steadying herself against the movement of the train by grasping the tops of the seats.

  When she got back he saw she’d washed her face and brushed her hair. ‘You look better,’ he said, stroking the damp tendrils around her face.

  ‘I feel better.’ She smiled and swung her legs across his lap.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Do you fancy an afternoon film at the NFT?’

  She screwed up her face. ‘I have a feeling I’m
doing something, but I can’t remember . . . Oh, yes! Of course! I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I’m looking for a flat. I’ve decided. I just can’t bear that place any more. I’m going to get up really early, buy Loot and scour London to find my ideal home. Well, that’s the plan anyway. I doubt I’ll find one that quickly, but you never know. My dream home is out there somewhere — and I’ve just got to find it.’

  As she talked the idea that had been gradually forming in his mind crystallised into a definite and articulate desire — that she should live nowhere but with him. He watched her fiddling with a plastic cup from the buffet car, and her words reached him in snatches — '. . .a one-bedroom flat in north London somewhere, Kilburn maybe . . . about eighty pounds a week or something . . . Willesden is supposed to be nice ... a quieter road . . .’

  ‘Move in with me,’ he blurted out.

  She was immediately silent. His words hung in the air between them.

  ‘I mean, if you want to.’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  He laughed and cupped her face in his hands. ‘I really, really want you to.’

  She circled his wrists with her fingers. Her pupils were very wide, her mouth serious. She’s going to say no, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Damn. Serves you right for hurrying things too much.

  ‘Do you want to move in with me?’ he said shakily, and then began to burble: ‘I mean, you can think about it. You don’t have to decide right now. We could leave things as they are, if you like. Whatever. And if you need your own space you can keep your own flat or if you move in — not that I think you’re definitely going to or anything, it’s entirely up to you— but we could clear out the spare room so that—’

  ‘John!’ Alice put her fingers over his mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d love to move in with you.’

  His heart lifted with relief and happiness, and he leant forward to kiss her. Just as his mouth reached hers, she said, ‘But . . .’

  He pulled back to look at her again. ‘But what?’

  ‘I think you know what I’m going to say.’

  For the next few seconds he ran through everything he could think of. ‘What? I’ve already got rid of the futon. What is it? The decoration? The furniture? The axolotl? Tell me and I’ll change it.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not the house. If I’m going to move in, we have to tell your father about us.’

  John leant back into his seat. Since that drive back from the Lake District almost three months ago, his father hadn’t been mentioned at all. He’d been coasting along under a ridiculous illusion that things could stay like this — him perfectly happy and in love and his father suspicious about how he was spending his evenings and weekends, but nothing more. He suddenly saw how difficult it had been for Alice, harbouring the knowledge of this problem but saying nothing to him. He was angry with himself for the level of his self-deception, causing her all this pain and uncertainty while he hid his head in the sand.

  She laid her hand on his arm. ‘John, the last thing I want to do is to upset things between you and your father.’ He saw that her eyes were filling with bright tears and that she was struggling fiercely with herself not to cry. It broke his heart but he was unable to speak. ‘But don’t you see?’ she continued, the tears spilling down her cheeks now. ‘How can I move in if he doesn’t know? What if he calls round? What if he rings and I answer the phone? He’s your father. We can’t live together without him knowing, and I can’t move in with you if you are denying my existence to him.’

  He pulled her towards him and kissed her face repeatedly, licking the salt from his lips. ‘Don’t cry, Alice. Please don’t cry. I’m so sorry I’ve been so crap about this. I’ll tell him tomorrow. I promise. He’ll be fine about it, really he will. Everything’s going to be all right.’

  When Elspeth returns to the house at four, she can hear the noise from the end of the drive: Alice is screaming at the top of her voice. Elspeth hurries down the path around the side of the house and opens the back door. Ann is near hysteria — clutching the edge of the kitchen table — and Alice, her hair all disarrayed and looking oddly conventional in a white shirt and school skirt, is shrieking. ‘Don’t you ever, ever tell me what to do!’

  Elspeth shuts the door firmly and the noise stops as they both turn to look at her. ‘What,’ she says, ‘is going on? Do you realise that people on the road can hear you, Alice?’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Alice weeps and storms from the room. She crashes into the sitting room and a few seconds later they hear the piano lid being slammed open and the opening chords of a Chopin waltz banged out violently and very fast.

  Elspeth turns to Ann and raises her eyebrows.

  ‘Elspeth,’ Ann begins, ‘something awful has happened.’ The seriousness of her tone, the whiteness of her face makes Elspeth’s heart stall. ‘To ... to Alice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’ Already Elspeth’s mind is running along possibilities — drugs? police? expelled from school? pregnancy? ‘Not really to her ... It hasn’t happened yet, at least I

  don’t think so . . . but the fact is it might . . . and it could be serious . . . serious trouble if it does . . . and I don’t know how to tell her without her knowing why ... I don’t know how to stop it.’

  ‘Ann,’ says Elspeth sharply, ‘what is it that’s happened?’ ‘Alice is . . . his son has fallen for Alice.’

  Elspeth is about to ask whose son for God’s sake, but the realisation hits her as soon as she opens her mouth. ‘I see,’ she says instead and sits down at the table.

  Ann darts to her side, fidgeting with nerves. ‘Elspeth, you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me stop . . . this happening.’

  Elspeth turns and surveys her daughter-in-law. ‘Don’t you realise,’ she says, ‘that if you tell Alice not to do something it will more than likely make her go ahead and do it? Don’t you see that? Do you understand your own daughter so ill, woman?’

  Elspeth goes into the sitting room where Alice is bashing on the piano and takes a firm hold of Alice’s hands. ‘That’s enough of that, missy.’

  ‘Don’t you start ordering me about as well,’ Alice cries, raising her red, streaked face to Elspeth’s.

  Elspeth sits next to Alice on the piano stool, and continues to hold both of Alice’s trembling hands in her own. ‘If you don’t learn to curb this temper of yours, Alice Raikes, you’ll one day hurt someone you really love,’ she says, beginning to stroke her right palm soothingly up and down Alice’s taut back. ‘What a lot of fireworks over nothing. I’m not ordering you about. That is no way to treat a musical instrument, as you well know.’ The ends of Alice’s hair brush the keys as she wipes the tears from her face. Elspeth holds up her left hand — spanned out — palm to palm against Alice’s, lifelines crossing, finger to finger. ‘Look at that,’ she says. Alice looks. Her fingers extend above Elspeth’s by the length of a whole metacarpal. ‘What big hands you have.’

  ‘All the better to play my scales with,’ Alice mutters. ‘Tell me,’ says Elspeth after a while, ‘do you like this Andrew boy? Do you really like him?’

  Alice shrugs non-committally. ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘But that’s not the point,’ says Alice, flaring up again indignantly.

  ‘I would say it’s very much the point. Whether he’s worth all this anger and energy. Whether you really want him or not.’

  Alice says nothing, sullenly jiggling her leg.

  ‘Well?’ Elspeth persists.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Alice repeats.

  ‘And nothing more?’

  ‘No,’ she admits finally, ‘nothing more.’

  ‘Good.’ Elspeth releases Alice’s hands from her grasp and says, ‘Now play me something nice.’

  Alice’s hands hover over the keyboard for a few seconds. There is a slight click as her clipped nails hit the ivory keys and then she begins to play.

  He leaves
at ten in the morning. Alice waves him off from the front door, ‘Good luck!’ she calls after him. John pulls a face.

  Since getting up, they have had a forced jollity about them, both of them joking and chatting as normal, pretending that what John has to do today is not that serious at all, just another visit to his father. After his car has pulled away, Alice clears away the breakfast things, has a bath, takes a long time drying her hair and goes across the road to buy a newspaper. She can’t settle at anything: she tries to read a book for a while but the words on the page jump about, and no matter how many times she rereads the opening paragraphs, she cannot muster enough interest in the characters to carry on concentrating. She keeps wondering what’s happening with John. He’ll have arrived by now. Has he told him yet? Will he tell him straight away or wait until they’ve been to the synagogue? What will he say? Will he be OK about it? Will he be angry? She flicks through the paper and reads the film reviews. At one o’clock she phones Rachel and leaves a distracted message on her answering-machine. What will he do if his father forbids him to carry on seeing her?

  She decides to go out. Leaving John a note on the kitchen table in case he should come back while she’s not there, she wanders into Camden Market. The streets are packed with tourists, teenagers with lurid hair and ethnic clothes, and dealers whispering, ‘Grass? E? Acid? Anything?’ The air is thick with joss-sticks and patchouli oil and the canal banks are full of people sitting in the sunshine, dangling their legs over the water. She watches a young woman with cropped blonde hair have her belly button pierced. She buys a jumper with bright yellow and blue stripes that barely covers her midriff: she wears it home, stuffing the one she came out in into the carrier-bag the stall-holder gives her.

  John still isn’t back when she finally returns. There is a message on the answerphone from Rachel: ‘Alice? It’s me. Are you there? Pick up the phone . . . You’re not there? OK. Just wondering how the big confession went. Call me soon. Bye.’

  She feeds the axolotl, the way John has shown her: dangling a scrap of prawn from plastic tweezers in front of its snubbed nose. ‘Come on,’ she murmurs to it, ‘aren’t you hungry today?’ It looks straight ahead, mournfully, and just when her arm is beginning to ache seriously, it flashes forward and seizes the prawn scrap from the tweezers in one gu!p.