After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  So she stopped going out after a while. Or would go out

  in the winter dusk when she could keep her head down against the driving wind, which always funnelled through narrow gaps in the red sandstone buildings on the High Street, and no one would recognise her. During the day, she would be left alone in the house that was supposed to be her home but felt more alien than anywhere else she had known. She would wander from room to room, up and down the stairs, memorising where certain objects were; she wanted to know where everything was, how it all fitted together.

  Then she had a baby and everything was better for a while, and she even started venturing out more. She liked herself with the pram, which was dark navy with squeaking silver wheels. The people would look into it and not at her. After all, Kirsty was blonde and pink and smiling. ‘Like a wee angel,’ they all said, and Ann thought that because they liked Kirsty perhaps they liked her better too. She felt in control for the first time in her life: she had a baby, a husband and a house, which admittedly wasn’t hers but felt more like hers now she had had a baby, and Elspeth had been nice and encouraged her to paint the baby’s room and plant as many flowers as she liked in the garden soil. She would catch sight of herself in shop windows — with coat, shopping-bag and pram — and would think to herself: there is a smart young mother on her way to buy something for her husband’s tea. Her voice still sounded out of kilter, foreign, alien when she asked for things in shops, but somehow it mattered less now.

  It was on one of these outings, when she was exploring more and more, that she went into an antiques shop. In there was a man with dark eyes and long lashes. Ann looked around the shop and when she turned round, he had lifted Kirsty right out of her pram without asking, and was holding her to his chest. ‘I have a boy almost her age,’ he said. He had an accent like Ann’s. Kirsty looked tiny against the breadth of his shoulder. Then came Alice, who had black eyes and black hair from the moment she was born. Ann felt like a photo negative next to her, and she couldn’t wheel her about with confidence. She couldn’t bear people’s questions - however innocent - about this new baby. When she caught her reflection with Alice’s pram in shop windows, it wasn’t a young mother she saw, but an adulteress.

  In the taxi back to Alice’s house, Ben and Beth sit in the back, talking. Ann leans her head against the passenger window. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier now. It will soon be a year since John died. Ann’s breath appears in tiny beads of moisture on the glass propping up her head, vanishing as quickly as she inhales. On Saturday at eleven-twenty, or thereabouts, Alice wras in the Waverley Station Superloo.

  If Alice wakes up, Ann tells herself, the secret you thought was burnt and scattered on the Law with Elspeth’s ashes could come out. She might not wake up. But then again, she might. As the taxi speeds through the night, and in the back seat Beth relates to Ben some story involving a dog and a frisbee, Ann imagines the scene: her and Ben standing around the bed. Alice stirring, stretching, opening her eyes. She looks at her, looks at Ben, her lips open and she says—

  Maybe she wouldn’t say anything. Maybe she didn’t see anything at all. Maybe she was upset about something else entirely and it’s just a coincidence that Ann happened to be there with—

  And even if she did see, why would she automatically assume that the man has anything to do with her life, other than the fact that he’s having an affair with her mother?

  But Ann knows in her heart that Alice has that knack of instantly recognising the germ of any situation. Like someone else she knows. And Ann knows that if Alice wakes up, she is not the sort of person to let something like that lie. Alice would want to have it out with her. Probablv straight away.

  But what if she doesn’t wake up. What then?

  Alice dashes through the tube doors just as they are closing. It’s about noon on a Saturday and the Northern line is relatively empty. As the train starts to rattle out of Camden Town Station, she makes her way down to the end of the carriage and sits opposite a middle-aged woman with a headscarf and a plastic bag full of children’s toys. Alice will stay on the train until Kennington, where she will cross over to the northbound platform and catch another train which will take her back to Camden, where she will most probably go to the southbound platform and repeat the ritual.

  Her tube-train riding has become a habit, something she would never admit to anyone. It’s the only thing that makes her feel better — there is something about the anonymity of it, the lulling rattle of the train’s movement, the aimlessness of it, that soothes her.

  Today, the recollection of their last morning together is replaying over and over in her head, as if she’s peering at it through the narrow slits of a zoetrope. When she’d woken up that morning, he had already got up and was in the shower.

  She’d turned over into the warmth his body had left and cocooned herself under the duvet. I’ll get up in five minutes, she’d told herself. She heard John thud downstairs and clatter about in the kitchen. Then he climbed the stairs again, pushed open the bedroom door and started crawling over the bed to her curled-up body. ‘Time to get up, time to get up,’ he’d crooned, and had kissed the back of her neck.

  She’d shrieked when his wet hair met her bed-warmed skin. ‘You’re all wet, John.’

  ‘I’ve made you some tea,’ and he placed the mug on the bedside table before sliding in next to her under the covers. She’d turned over and they had lain in each other’s arms for a while, looking into each other’s faces.

  ‘Do you know what I’m going to say now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘You’re going to say, “Alice, it’s eight o’clock.”’

  ‘No. Wrong. I’m going to say, Alice, it’s eight-thirty.’

  She gripped his arm. ‘You’re lying.’

  He started laughing and shaking his head.

  ‘It’s just a ploy,’ Alice continued, ‘an evil ruse to get me out of bed.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ He dangled his watch in front of her face.

  She pulled away from him and got out of bed. ‘Oh, Jesus, I’m going to be so late. I blame you for this. You should have got me up earlier.’

  He laughed and jumped off the bed, pulling on his trousers as she rushed into the bathroom.

  When she had come downstairs ten minutes later, toast and cereal were laid out on the table for her. ‘You’re a wee angel,’ she’d said to the top of his head, just visible over the newspaper he was reading. She ate rapidly, shovelling the hot toast into her mouth. John folded up the newspaper and laid it on the table next to him. ‘What’s your day going to be like?’

  She’d pulled a face. ‘Not great. We’ve got yet another training day, for the new database they keep promising us, which never actually materialises. How about you?’

  ‘Not too bad. I’ve got an interview this afternoon in Islington, but apart from that, not much else.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Let’s go away this weekend,’ he said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Don’t know. I just feel like getting out of London. How about St Ives?’

  ‘St Ives? Isn’t it a bit far for a weekend?’

  ‘Nah, you lightweight, it’ll be fine. We can go to a little B-and-B, go for walks by the sea, see the new Tate Gallery, stay in bed all morning.’ He got up and dumped his plate on the draining-board. When Alice had got back from her parents after his death it was still there, as he’d left it. It had taken her days to bring herself to wash it up. The knife had still held his fingerprints in smeary margarine.

  ‘You’re on.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Alice stood and walked with him to the front door. He put his arms around her waist and kissed her. ‘See you tonight,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘goodbye, my love,’ and then went out of the door, waving to her from the gate. She closed the door behind him and as she passed through the living room, she’d seen him through the front window, his head bent against the cold wind, caug
ht in the act of zipping up his jacket. Then, like an actor exiting a movie screen, he was gone.

  Tears are spilling down Alice’s face, dripping off her chin on to her T-shirt. There’s hardly anyone in the carriage, but she wouldn’t care anyway. She attempts to wipe her face on her sleeves but they are already sodden. ‘Would you like a tissue?’

  It is the middle-aged woman opposite, leaning across the aisle, her face creased with sympathy, offering an opened packet of Handy Andies. Alice hesitates. ‘Go on, love, you look like you need one.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Alice takes one, hoping that she will not try to say any more to her. After blowing her nose and wiping her face, she tucks the tissue into her jeans pocket and glances surreptitiously over at the woman again. Damn, she’s still looking at her.

  The woman clears her throat and leans forward again. ‘You’re crying about a man, aren’t you?’

  Alice looks at her in astonishment, then nods.

  ‘I thought as much.’ The woman tuts. ‘Well, I can tell you this for free — he’s not worth it.’

  Alice lurches to her feet, pulling her bag up off the floor. She wants to shout, he’s dead, he’s dead and he was worth it, but she waits in silence by the door until the train jolts to a halt. As soon as the doors slam open, she steps off the train and loses herself in the crowd.

  Alice goes shopping with Elspeth. She is allowed to hold the parcels. Some stuff goes in shopping-bags, which knock Alice on the legs when she carries them. Food and cleaning products shouldn’t be in the same bag, Elspeth says. Tins and cleaning products together is all right. Fruit shouldn’t go in the string bag. It gets bruised. Alice knows that with a box of eggs she has to carry it in front of her in both hands. They come in grey, damp-feeling trays of half-dozens, which means six. Before buying eggs, Elspeth opens the box lid and pivots all the eggs around in their snug holders to check none have hairline cracks that are seeping liquids into the cardboard. When Alice is carrying them, she eases open the lid and turns them over again so that they all have their blunter ends facing down. Once, when she was doing this, they slid from her hands and broke on the pavement in a shock of yellow, shattered shell and viscous watery blur. Nevermindnevermind, Elspeth said, over and over again.

  Today, they haven’t bought much. A brown loaf swells the black netting of the string bag Alice is holding. Alice used to put this bag over her head and pull it down over her body with the plaited handles, folding her arm under the webbing. When she wore it like that she was Net Man. But that was a long time ago. Today Elspeth has met a friend of hers and they’ve been talking for ages outside the antiques shop. Alice doesn’t like this friend very much: she has a powdery face, and when she kisses Alice, the stale, chalky smell makes her sneeze. Alice starts to jiggle ever so slightly on Elspeth’s hand, and bends back the sole of her sandal under her foot. Without breaking off her conversation or even looking down, Elspeth twitches Alice’s arm, which Alice knows means she is expected to behave. She extricates her fingers from Elspeth’s, walks over to the window of the antiques shop, and presses her nose to it.

  First of all, she is only looking at how tiny beads of moisture leave a ghostly negative of her nose and lips on the glass. Then she adjusts her eyes to peer into the shop. She has to make a tunnel with her hands to shut out the glare of the street. She’s never been in here: it’s dark, things hang from the ceiling, and there’s a curved glass cabinet not far from where she is standing, heaped with beads, earrings, rings.

  ‘Shall we go in and have a look?’

  Alice brings her eyes back to the street and its reflection in the glass, and sees that Elspeth has come to stand next to her.

  ‘Yes.’

  The shop seems cold after the street. Alice stands next to a table that has a surface so polished she thinks that if she touched it, ripples would circle out from under her fingers to lap at its edges. She looks up and around the dark red walls: feathered fans, gold-edged paintings of East Lothian, a stuffed monkey with glassy eyes holding a platter, a slender-necked vase, blue-patterned plates gripped to the wall with little iron legs, a lampshade dangling strings of purple beads. Elspeth is talking to the shop lady in the back room, so Alice walks over to a chrome carousel of clothes. She knows these things from shopping with her mother, and she likes them. She gives it a shove to the left: the clothes swish on their hangers and there is the murmur of silk rubbing up against silk, a rustling, gushing, secret sound. Alice dives down to her knees and resurfaces in the middle of the carousel, surrounded by antique dresses and blouses and skirts and scarves. Alice runs her hand reverently down the insides of the clothes, the material giving her palm a cool frisson. She turns round and round, staring at each of them in turn, until dizziness starts to smudge her vision.

  ‘You must be Alice.’

  Alice looks up from under her fringe. She insists that it is cut straight across her forehead so it touches her eyebrows. She won’t have it any shorter. If her mother, who cuts their hair by sitting all three of her daughters in turn on a stool in the kitchen, tries to cut it shorter, Alice screams until her lips turn blue. She once raged so much during a hair-cutting session that Ann stood her up and smacked her on the legs with the back of the hairbrush.

  It is a man, looming above the top of the carousel, leaning with his elbows on the hangers. Alice can’t quite make him out, but doesn’t think she recognises him.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice says, from her crouched position, ‘I am.’

  He reaches in and Alice feels the hands of the stranger grip her underneath her arms before the floor falls away, and she is rising, rising towards the ceiling and a low red lantern covered with the writhing blue-green bodies of dragons. Then the floor is coming up to meet her again and she is set down in front of the man. ‘I thought you must be,’ he is murmuring, surveying her face so closely that Alice glances towards the back of the shop to reassure herself that Elspeth is still there. Is she in trouble? The man is tall, with thick, powerful arms and hair that’s longer than her father’s. It reaches below the collar of his faded blue shirt. He’s got canvas shoes on and no socks. One of the shoes is held together with a very short, knotted piece of red string.

  ‘Is this your shop?’ Alice asks.

  ‘Yes.’ He nods.

  ‘Are all these things yours, then?’

  The man laughs. Alice doesn’t know why.

  ‘Well, I suppose they are.’ He crouches down at her level and puts his fingers around her upper arm. ‘Tell me, what do you like best in here?’

  Alice doesn’t even hesitate, but points to the red dragon lantern. She loves their lithe, scaled bodies, their powerful tails and their fierce yellow eyes. ‘What are those?’ she asks, pointing at the strange, trailing, hair-like things that protrude from their jaws.

  The man looks. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It could be fire,’ Alice steps closer, ‘but I don’t think so.’

  ‘No. I’d agree with you there. I think they might be gills. I think these are sea-dragons.’

  ‘Sea-dragons?’ Alice repeats, turning to look at him. She’s never heard of them.

  He shrugs. ‘Maybe you only get them in China.’

  He sits down on a chair covered in deep red velvet. ‘Do you know what I was doing when I saw you come in?’

  Alice shakes her head.

  ‘I was testing these,’ he holds up a string of pearls, ‘to see if they were real.’ The man gets hold of Alice’s wrist, opens up her fingers with his and coils the pearls into her palm. ‘The best way to do this is to put them in contact with human skin. When real pearls are next to your skin they get warm and start to glow.’ Alice and the man stare at the pile of white orbs in her hand. At the centre of the string, the pearls are at their biggest; at the ends they are impossibly tiny, seed-sized. Some of the man’s hair falls over his face as they wait and they are so close together that some of it falls on to Alice’s. She takes a small, shuffling step back, still watching the pearls for any signs of opalescent glo
wing. Suddenly, he has whipped them out of her hand again. ‘Maybe that method’s a bit time-consuming. The other way is to rub them against your teeth. Real pearls feel like sand. Open your mouth,’ he commands.

  Alice does so. She has a row of perfect, white baby teeth. The man rests his hand on her chin, looking her straight in the eye. With his other hand he rubs the largest pearl at the centre of the string against the enamel of her two front teeth.

  Alice concentrates. There is a roughened, grainy feeling, a kind of scratchy rasp. ‘They’re real!’ she says. ‘They’re real!’ The man laughs and nods. ‘Good girl.’

  Then he has placed her on a chair in front of a mirror, and is fastening the pearls around her neck. ‘There. What do you think?’

  They are too long for Alice, disappearing below the neckline of her T-shirt. The man stands staring at her in the mirror, one hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You’ve got an English accent, haven’t you?’ Alice says. ‘My mum’s English.’

  He nods very slowly, and looks as if he’s about to say something when they both see Elspeth appear behind them in the mirror. ‘Alice,’ she says, ‘come along now, we must be going.’

  Alice gets down from the chair.

  ‘Give the man back his necklace.’ Elspeth turns her round and starts undoing the clasp at the back of her neck. The man is reaching in his shirt pocket for a narrow silver tin, from which he draws a thin cigarette. He presses down on a lighter from his trouser pocket, it sparks and he lights the cigarette. The air is filled with the faint scent of vanilla. Alice puts her hand up to the pearls to feel them for the last time.

  ‘No, no,’ he says, waving his hand and exhaling a spiral of blue smoke, ‘I’d like her to keep them.’

  ‘We couldn’t possibly . . .’ Elspeth is saying, and Alice feels the pearls flowing through her fingers as her grandmother pulls them off. Elspeth holds them out.

  ‘No. Really. I want her to have them.’