After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  At about four she hears John’s key in the lock. She leaps on to the sofa and affects a relaxed position, as if she’s been lying there reading all afternoon.

  ‘Hello?’ he calls.

  ‘Hi.’

  He comes in through the sitting-room door and gives her a weak smile. He looks exhausted and drained. She gets up, goes over to him and hugs him. He rests his forehead on her shoulder.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ she says, peeling his jacket off his back and pushing him towards the sofa. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  He knits his brows. ‘Um. I’d rather have a whisky.’

  She pours him a double, spilling a few drops on the table, and hands it to him, standing in front of him. He takes a swig and, putting his arms around her middle, buries his head in her exposed midriff. ‘I like your jumper,’ he says, his voice muffled.

  She strokes his hair. ‘I bought it today. I was so worried about you I had to go shopping. How was it? Do you want to tell me now or later?’

  ‘We-ell,’ he says slowly, and she gets the feeling he is keeping his face buried in her stomach so that he doesn’t have to look at her, ‘it was no worse than I thought it would be.’ ‘That bad, eh?’

  He nods, ‘Yes. Just about.’

  ‘John, I’m sorry.’

  His arms around her tighten. She lets her fingers stray through his hair.

  ‘Alice,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to learn that none of this is your fault. You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I can’t help feeling responsible, can I? I mean, if it weren’t for me—’

  ‘He’ll come round,’ he interrupts, ‘once he’s had a few days to think about it.’

  They’re both silent for a moment. Alice cannot bear to see him crushed and hurt like this, and feels incensed. ‘But what did he say? Does he hate me?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t hate you. He’s going to love you.’ ‘We’re going to meet?’ she says to the top of his head, alarmed.

  ‘Well, yes, one day. Not yet, maybe. But when he’s got more used to the idea, I’ll take you to meet him. He’ll love you when he knows you.’ He sounds grim, determined to convince himself.

  ‘But what did he say?’ she persisted.

  ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She pulls away from him, walks to the back window and looks out into the garden, twining and twisting her fingers. It is beginning to get dark and the trees are being tossed by the wind. The reflection in the window has projected the room into the cold, dark garden. Everything is reversed and in it John is looking at her over the back of the sofa.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yes?’ She doesn’t turn round, watching him instead in the reflection.

  ‘Talk to me, please. Don’t go silent on me. Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  She shrugs, as if to free herself of a stiffness in her neck. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘I don’t know ... I don’t know if I like not knowing what he said.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Alice wonders what she does mean. She feels unbelievably confused, her thoughts all whirled in a tangle. ‘I suppose I mean ... I find it astonishing that it matters to him so much, but how can I ever hope to understand it if you won’t tell me?’

  He doesn’t reply straight away. She sees from the reflection that he sits on the sofa for a few seconds then he stands and comes across the room, slipping slightly in his socks on the bare boards. He takes her firmly by the shoulders and turns her round to face him. ‘Alice, I . . .’ Then he stops. He smooths his palm over her forehead, then rests it in the curve of her neck. ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ he says, in a lower tone of voice. ‘To tell you what he said might be . . .’He stops again and takes a deep breath. ‘You see, I can kind of understand, after my lifetime of conditioning, where he’s coming from. Do you see what I mean?’ he asks her.

  She nods impatiently. ‘Yes. But, John, why don’t you just tell me what he said?’

  ‘Because . . . because I’m afraid it would sound ridiculous and divisive . . . and . . . and extreme to you.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ she says indignantly. ‘Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass. I want to know. Come on. Tell me the worst.’ She almost squares her shoulders. ‘I can take it, you know, John.’

  He bites his lip. ‘You want to know the worst?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes! How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘OK. My father said that if I were to marry you it would be like letting Hitler win,’ he says, in a rush.

  There is a pause while Alice attempts mentally to process this statement. ‘Letting Hitler—?’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t understand. What on earth have we got to do with Hitler?’ ‘Because if I were to marry you, our children wouldn’t be Jewish, and he sees that as the extermination of Jews.’

  ‘But . . .’ she begins, then is silent. She turns back to the window. Letting Hitler win? Letting Hitler . . . ? It’s such an outrageous assertion that part of her wants to laugh. She’s not quite sure what the other part of her wants to do.

  ‘Al,’ he says, laying a hand on her back, ‘it’s a dreadful thing to say. I didn’t want to tell you. He didn’t mean it, I just—’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘To him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I said ... er ... I said lots of unrepeatable things, among which I said that I didn’t believe in letting the Third Reich dictate my love life.’

  ‘Right,’ Alice whispers. ‘Shit.’ She feels she might cry. Hitler? Not for the first time she tries to imagine John’s father. What kind of a person would say that? She reruns the sentence in her head, trying it out in different ways, with a variety of different emphases.

  He grabs hold of her round the middle and pulls her towards him. ‘Alice, this is stupid. I can’t believe we’re arguing about this. I don’t believe in letting my father dictate my love life either. He’s bluffing, that’s all. He’ll come round. You’ve got to understand: he’s coming from a very different perspective. I knew it wouldn’t be easy telling him. I knew he’d take it badly, but I know him. He isn’t one to bear grudges. His bark has always been worse than his bite. Once he’s had a think about the whole thing, he’ll be fine.’

  ‘But how do you know? What if it really does mean being cut off from your family and your background and . . . everything? I can’t let you do that.’

  ‘It won’t come to that, I promise.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she persists.

  ‘I just know. I know my father — this won’t last, I guarantee you. Let’s not argue any more.’ He tips her face back so she is forced to look him in the eye. ‘Now when,’ he says, with mock fierceness, ‘are you going to move in?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says reluctantly, ‘when’s good for you?’ ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Well, I’ve told my crook of a landlord that I’ll be leaving the flat at the end of December. ’

  ‘Bollocks to the end of December. How about tomorrow?’

  ‘I had no idea you had this many clothes, Alice. When do you have time to wear them all?’ John is lying on Alice’s bed, watching her trying to force the lid of her trunk shut. She bounces up and down on the lid and attempts to squeeze the lock together, panting with the effort.

  ‘I know, I know. I should really throw some out, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I love clothes.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘I’ve been collecting them for years. In that cupboard, you know—’ She breaks off, exasperated. ‘John, come here a sec, will you, and sit on this so I can shut it?’

  He rolls off the bed, crawls through the debris littering the room and adds his weight to the trunk. The lock snaps shut.

  ‘There!’ She flicks her pony-tail over her shoulder and sits back on her heels. �
��Now, what next?’

  He picks up a fragile, colourful paper Chinese dragon from a box. ‘Where did you get all this stuff, Alice?’

  ‘All over the place. That’s from Bangkok, I think, or somewhere.’ She lifts a box down from the top of the wardrobe, opens it and peers inside. ‘God, this is all stuff from uni. When I moved out of Jason’s house I didn’t sort through anything, I just shoved it all into boxes and got out of there as quickly as I could.’

  ‘Quite right too. The little shit,’ John mutters, wandering, into the bathroom.

  She smiles at his retrospective loyalty and pulls out a handful of old postcards, hairgrips, a bicycle bell, ribbons and photographs. She shuffles hastily through the photos, grimacing at images of herself at nineteen and twenty in a variety of poses with a variety of friends.

  ‘Hey, John, look at this. I’ve got to show this to Rachel.’ She follows him into the bathroom where he is piling all her toiletries into a cardboard box and hands him the stack of photos. On top is one of her and Rachel beside a tent in a field. It is summertime and they have their arms around each other’s waists, smiling happily. Alice is wearing a flowing golden-brown kaftan. Her hair is in plaits and she has stars drawn all over her face. Rachel is wearing flared, patched jeans and a flowery halterneck top.

  ‘My God,’ says John, peering at the picture. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

  ‘We were at Glastonbury, hence the outfits. It must have been second year. After the exams.’

  He starts looking through the other photos, sniggering. She has turned to go back to her packing wrhen she hears him say: ‘Alice — look at this.’

  He is staring at a photo.

  ‘What is it?’

  He says nothing but just lowers the photo for her to see. It’s a younger Alice at a party. She is smiling, her face turned to one side, her mouth open slightly and her hand raised as if in the middle of saying something to the photographer. ‘What?’ Alice asks, perplexed. ‘It’s just me at a party.’

  ‘No, look.’ He says, and taps his fingertip on the corner of the frame. ‘Who does that look like to you?’

  She takes the photo from him and holds it closer to her face. In the background, just behind and to the left of her, is someone who looks suspiciously like the man standing next to her right now.

  ‘No. It can’t be.’ She shakes her head, moves through to the bedroom and holds the picture up to the window.

  John follows her and looks over her shoulder. ‘It is me. It’s definitely me.’

  His face is in half-profile and he is looking sideways at the camera. He appears to be leaning on a desk or table of some sort and has a beer-can in his hand. She recognises unequivocally the curve of that brow, the line of the jaw, the way the hair stands up in tufts. Even though the man in the photo is a lot younger, it is unmistakably John. ‘Shit,’ she whispers, ‘it is you.’ She turns to look at him. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘What party was that? Do you remember?’

  She looks at the photo again, hardly able to believe what she sees. She scrutinises what she’s wearing, what she can see of their surroundings in the dim background light. She stares at the smudged replica of John’s features in a photo she must have seen a hundred times since it was taken.

  ‘It must have been your first year, if we were both there,’ he is saying. ‘I don’t think I ever went to any parties there after I’d left.’

  ‘It was a party in some house beside the river. It was the summer term, I think. Can’t remember the name of the person whose party it was, or why I was even there.’

  ‘Richard somebody,’ John says.

  ‘Richard?’ Alice screws up her face. ‘Yes, that’s right. He was awful. He did history. He was a friend of a friend, or something.’

  ‘I remember that party now.’ He nods. ‘Someone was sick on a bed.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘And you were there? That is just so weird. I don’t remember seeing you there at all. I do have a feeling I used to see you in the English library — all legs and hair.’

  ‘You should have been concentrating on your finals, not eyeing up first-years.’

  ‘Mmm. I had to do something to keep my motivation up.’ ‘Motivation? Is that what you call it?’

  He is staring at the photo again. ‘Imagine if we’d met then. Imagine if, at that point in time, you’d turned to your left and said to me, “John Friedmann, in six years’ time we will fall in love.’”

  ‘You’d have thought I was bonkers.’

  ‘I’d probably have thought, Game on! But why, oh sexy and mysterious woman, must we wait six years?’

  ‘I was too young. I wasn’t ready for you then. I still had to go through Mario and Jason. Without them I wouldn’t have got to you.’

  ‘What, so I should be grateful to those dickheads?’

  ‘No, what I mean is that it’s like an equation, an emotional equation: Mario divided by Jason equals John.’

  He laughs. ‘Well, thanks for getting around to me eventually.’ He tucks the photo into his jacket pocket. When she puts her arms around him later she hears it crackle against the pressure of her touch.

  A taxi deposited them on the pavement outside Alice’s house, and when they stumbled from its high step, with bags and coats, Ann looked up to see the unbelievable —' a light burning in Alice’s bedroom window. Her heart jumped in her chest, and while the rational half of her mind knew that her daughter was unconscious in a hospital bed, the other half was shouting, ‘she’s here! It was all a mistake, she’s been here at home all along!’ Ben saw it too. His face was upturned, the whites of his eyes glistening in the glow.

  Ann groped in her bag for the keys, held together by that fish key-ring of Alice’s that Ann had never liked very much. Fish had always given her the creeps — slimy, scaled things with serrated jaws. Resting one hand against the wood of the door, she pushed the key into the lock, turned it, and the door gave.

  Then they were jostling in the hallway together, Ben fussing with the bags, Ann fighting a stupid reluctance to look upstairs towards the light. What was she afraid of seeing? The light filtering down delineated the walls and objects in the dark room downstairs. Ann moved into the sitting room on brittle ankles, still in her coat, still holding the keys, and turned on the light. On the coffee table was a book, resting face down, its pages splayed, a glass of half-drunk water and a clump of tissues, crisp with dried-up moisture. Ann took off her coat, laid it over the back of a chair and folded her arms across her chest. Ben lumbered across the room and sat on the sofa, tipping his head to rest on the sofa back. Water leaked from the corner of his eye. Whether it was a tear or not, Ann didn’t know, and she was irritated to see that he didn’t wipe it away, just kept staring at the ceiling.

  Ann walked about, eyeing the room. She pulled open a drawer at random, not really knowing why, and found library cards, a sprig of lavender, old and scratched sunglasses, crumpled bank statements and a fountain pen, choked with dried ink.

  In the kitchen a tall, narrow cardboard box of cat biscuits stood on the table. The kettle lid was off, resting beside the kettle on the counter. On the chair in the corner was a half-knitted sweater in bright green wool. Ann frowned. She didn’t know Alice knitted. Walking to the window, Ann peered out into the gloom trying to make out the garden. She had just pressed her forehead to the cold of the pane when she saw, on the other side of the glass, just inches from her face, a pair of eyes swivel and flicker. A scream stretched from her mouth as if on elastic and she reeled back into the room, stumbling over the kitchen chair. Ben appeared behind her, his face edgy and strained. ‘Ann? What’s wrong?’

  ‘There was . . . there . . .’

  Inarticulate with fear, she pointed at the window, and as she did so saw black fur brush against the pane as a large rodent-like creature turned and resettled on the window-sill. The cat. Of course. She’d forgotten about the bloody cat.

  At once furious and relieved, she marched t
o the back door, unlocked it and wrenched it open. The cat, hunched on the narrow ledge, regarded her with vertically slitted green eyes.

  ‘Come on,’ she gestured towards the kitchen, ‘hurry up, if you want to come in.’

  It didn’t move. Gnats zoomed around it in the pool of light cast from the kitchen window. Ann stood in the doorway. ‘Are you coming in or not?’

  It remained motionless. Sighing, Ann stepped back and started closing the door. But just before it closed fully, the cat darted, quick as a minnow, through the hand-span gap.

  It stood in the kitchen, the very tip of its tail twitching, one of its front feet raised above the lino. Ben held out his hand to it, murmuring nonsensical sounds. It touched his fingers once with its nose, its whiskers prinking the air, cooler now the door had been open. Ann could see its claws, sheathed up inside its paws. She watched as Ben moved his fingers up to its head, touching its ears — strange alert triangles of soft papyrus.

  But then the creature seemed to shrug inside its skin, its back bristling up into dinosaur spines, and it started to edge around the room, low to the ground. It looked at them again, opened its red maw of a mouth and began to emit a horrible,

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Ben asked anxiously, ducking down to peer at it, under the table. ‘Is it in pain?’

  Ann put her hands over her ears. The noise seemed to enter the sides of her head like knives. ‘How should I know?’ She caught sight of the cat-biscuit box on the table again, and said, ‘Maybe it’s hungry.’ She shuddered. The noise was a hideous cross between miaowing and weeping. She’d never heard anything like it, didn’t knowT cats were capable of a noise like that. ‘Ben, it’s horrible, horrible. Can’t you get it to stop?’

  Ben tried to get hold of it, or tried to stroke it, addressing it in low, soothing tones, but it wouldn’t let him get anywhere near it. The ululating howl went on and on. Ann couldn’t stand it any longer. She pushed her way through the kitchen door to go back into the sitting room and, as she did so, the cat shot out with her, grazing her legs with the fur of its flank, sprinting across the floorboards of the sitting room and disappearing up the stairs.