Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  *

  ‘It started off hide-and-seek, then it was sardines, wasn’t it?’ Adam said. ‘I’d never heard of that before.’

  ‘Try these. They’re good.’ Luke edged the prawns towards me with his napkin. The flesh of my wrist seared briefly on the bowl.

  ‘So it was,’ I replied. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  *

  It had begun to rain, and we dived for indoors. I remembered looking down stupidly at the trail of sloppy footprints I left on the tiles of her floor.

  ‘Do you need a towel?’ she asked kindly, so I dirtied that as well.

  I told them how sardines worked and we scattered. We ransacked the house. We whooped and hollered. We made the children crazy. I went into her bedroom; I didn’t see the affront in it. The curtains were thin and cheap and the smell, when I moved them, was of deepest sleep – warm bodies and old breath. When I heard the door, I peeped around the flimsy drop of fabric, and there was Adam.

  ‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Come here. There’s room.’

  He looked at me strangely.

  ‘Hurry up. Before somebody else arrives.’

  I’d barely noticed him all day, but in the cool dark of the bedroom, I found I liked his looseness, the easy way he carried his height, the droop of his hair, the uneven roll of his sleeves. His face already showed experience. Mostly, though, I was aware of myself. The ten years between us, the distance into adulthood he had travelled, time he must – surely – want back. I had my cut-offs on, a month-old tan, it all still ahead of me. The booze rioted in my head.

  I took a step towards him. There was a sludge of compost on my thigh.

  ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘With me.’

  He held up both palms and took a big step back.

  ‘I’m looking for my jacket, OK?’

  He pointed. I saw a pile on the bed; my own, in smoke-wrecked denim, amongst them.

  ‘It’s over there.’

  He leaned across for his coat, carefully, one eye on me, still, as though I might bite.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘do what you like.’

  Back behind the curtain, I heard the door catch as he left and my throat was suddenly tight. By the time I went downstairs, he was gone.

  *

  ‘Nancy,’ Ann called down the table, ‘aren’t you eating? You’ve got all the best bits up there, you know. Can you pass some of it along, please?’

  He laughed at me from across the table, and I thought again of a wolf.

  ‘How did you get home anyway? I’ve always wondered. What with that knackered flip-flop.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘Christ.’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You’d better grab some of that food before she takes it all away.’

  I let him fill my glass. I felt hollow with the shame of it.

  ‘There’s the last of the prawns,’ Ann called out. ‘Going, going, gone.’

  But I couldn’t eat. Instead I wished for home. My mortgaged terrace in its neat South London street, full of my things, gained steadily across two decades’ worth of effort and sound sense. The known and the hard-earned. The warm rise of my children’s chests beneath my palm, and my husband, Stef.

  Two years, then, since Adam and I began.

  2

  There is a moment, sometimes, at my own front door, or just before, at the rough touch of the gate, when my children flood me. Part need, part panic – there’s guilt in there, too – and I simply want to get in, feel their heat beneath my hand, wipe the smudges of the day from their faces and reassure myself that there is no problem in their competing lives that I can’t make better.

  Mid-week, then, late home from work, two litres of corner-shop milk moistening my leg through its plastic as I chased my key round and round my bag, and it was beginning to feel like the universe was against me. In, at last, and—Nothing.

  I waited in the hall. I called a name. Just a heart-freezing silence. But they were not dead, of course, just plugged into their relevant screens. A couple of seconds and the littler ones were at me, mid-dispute over some slight they’d held in waiting until I got home. I subdued Jakey with a hug. ‘Get off me, Mum, you weirdo,’ he said, though it’s all pretend. The middle child, twelve now, he receives my love more easily than the rest. He’s a forgiver and a forgetter. There are no terms with Jake. Louisa peeled away.

  ‘Where’s Frieda?’ I said. Fourteen; a sensible girl, but still fourteen.

  ‘Where d’you think?’ Jake replied.

  ‘Free?’ I called up the stairs. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum,’ she said and her voice was light and non-committal and the purest relief.

  There are names for it all, in my profession. I catastrophise and suffer a generalised anxiety, albeit low-level. Maybe sixty per cent of my clients do, and a similar cut of the country, I’d estimate, though they may not name it as such, merely view it as a condition of living, as we all did, before the business of happiness began. The rest are angry; used to be men, but I find women are making gains. Something of the narcissist in there, too – that bit about the universe – but only a touch. Nothing I can’t out-rationalise. I’d ask a client to note the trigger. Are there any physical sensations? The key is to breathe. Then breathe again. Are you dealing with fact or opinion? Is there another way of viewing the scene? Map an alternative thought. Have a read of the handout. And this was not new, any of it; I have always been this way.

  Our house smelt of Stefan’s lunch, Jake’s trainers, Comfort, but mainly itself. They laugh at me for my nose but the smell is there, as it was when we first looked round. There was a time after we did the extension and the side return when it seemed to have cleared and the place felt new, though not necessarily ours, but the smell returned stealthily, an essence that wouldn’t be extinguished. It is not unpleasant: a sourish mud and something more human; the past of the house floating round in molecular form.

  Stef, whose religion is good taste, has a vision for our home, our family life, and is pained by the house’s refusal to conform. Now there is a chip knocked out of the countertop where I dropped a pan and the surface is blighted by spilled coffee and wine and though we knew it would mark, agreed that we could live with the blemishes, he sighs each time he spots them. The back – all glass – is a nightmare to keep clean and the view, which we didn’t consider before we started ripping out bricks, is forlorn; just two blunt tiers of hard-worked grass and at the end, Stef’s shed. When I look out, I find my eye drawn to a window, halfway up the block of flats on the left side of our stretch, and the huge telly beyond that fills a wall and is always on. I can read the Sky Sports news feed along the bottom from where I stand, though I’ve never seen the person who watches it.

  I went out and found Stefan in his office, designing something for a chain of dim sum bars on a large white screen.

  ‘I thought you were finished,’ I said.

  ‘Hey,’ he replied. He pushed his headphones off. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Have the kids had tea?’

  ‘As you’re early I said we could all eat together tonight.’

  He leaned his head into his knuckle and scraped back and forth; a little ritual that brought him out of his work. His hair is short and pelt-like, the skull showing faintly white beneath.

  ‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back through.’

  He reached for me as I moved off, caught my shoulder and rubbed at the kink he knew just where to find.

  There was a time, after Adam and I began, when my husband’s touch felt wrong, an infidelity, in fact, but things resettle. You cannot sustain a state of constant internal conflict and survive.

  ‘We need to do diaries,’ said Stef. ‘I’m getting busy again.’

  ‘Ouch,’ I said, as he pressed the nub of muscle harder.

  Adam and I were to go to Cambridge next month. I had booked it on my usual travel site, an aspirational collection of boutique joints. The room I chose had clotted-cream walls, real furniture and rugs as
threadbare as you might find at home. The inevitable roll-top bath. Once, I’d thought a decent room might soften it, pull the act into the orbit of my life, as if morality or risk could be moderated by a backdrop of acceptable soft-furnishings, as though it would have been the Travelodge that degraded us, had I chosen to sleep with him there. This too, has passed; it is simply nicer to wake up in a decent room.

  Frieda leaned out of the bathroom window. ‘Hey, you guys,’ she called, her long ironed hair almost reachable.

  ‘You want to come down now, honey?’ Stefan said, and when we got into the kitchen she was there. ‘I look like Daddy,’ she used to cry, when she was younger, ‘but I’m a girl.’ Now she tried to paint it out with stick-on lashes and thick lines round her eyes and lips. All her friends look the same. I long for an indie chick, a girl who doesn’t care, her guitar slung over her back – but that is another one of my secrets. I wonder, too, sometimes, if it would have been different had we sent her private. Would we have made that decision, swallowed up our principles, had we had the chance? But this is a thinking error – assuming life would be better if only it were different. I would have a client observe this feeling and rate it for intensity. And they’re just as bad, those other girls. A bunch of them get on my bus. Just a different brand of sameness. Frieda is fine. We let her be.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said. She touched his arm lightly and circled away on her toes to see if he would follow her with his look. She practised her appeal on him, her happy face, her sad face and he submitted to it graciously with a lack of awkwardness I couldn’t imagine in any other man. She came to me next. Her smell was vanilla, cherry and ink. I took one last long breath of her.

  ‘Hey,’ called Jake, suddenly, from the sitting room, ‘Hi!’

  I heard him scrabble to his feet, the clatter of a discarded remote. We three listened. The front door went. ‘Uncle David!’ cried Jake.

  Frieda’s face changed at the edges at my brother’s name. I saw a hint of play. The reach of David’s charm is wide. She turned from me, tucked into whatever scene she was now rehearsing, a finger tweaked in a caricature of poise or some early version of seduction. Too old now to run to him, she waited. Stefan looked at me.

  ‘Seriously?’ he said.

  ‘I had no idea,’ I replied, truthfully this time.

  ‘I’ll go get some wine,’ he said.

  I heard David speak, with some authority, about whatever Jake was playing on his screen. Then: ‘Hello hello, anybody home?’ and there he was, in the doorway, in old jeans, a shirt that hung off his shoulders, lace-up boots in the style he’d worn since college. A skinny lad, still. A boy of dips and hollows.

  ‘Thought I’d pop in as I was passing,’ he said. He is beautiful, always has been, if you can say this of your brother. We are nothing alike.

  He hugged me, smelling warm and waxy and of my childhood. My first love, David, and the most enduring.

  ‘How are you, Free?’ he said, ‘Come here!’ and she did. ‘Hello, lovely.’ He rubbed her cheek with his knuckle and I watched her colour rise. ‘What’s new?’

  ‘Drink?’ I asked him and poured myself the last of the wine from a bottle pushed deep into the back of the fridge. It was astringent and so cold I thought I felt the density of frost. ‘Stef’s gone down for some red,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have a beer, if you’ve got one,’ David replied, and knelt down to the cooler, glass-fronted, back-lit, and helped himself.

  ‘How come you’re passing?’ I asked.

  ‘Job round the corner. Did I not say? Have you got a fag?’

  I found a pack in a drawer amongst birthday candles, playing cards and shoelaces. He stood at the back to smoke, the door open just enough. ‘It’s pissing down,’ he said. The dog looped in and out, bringing the rain back inside with him in slashes, and when he stopped long enough, silty puddles collected around his paws.

  ‘What’s the job?’ I asked. David drank from the bottle in long smooth swallows.

  ‘Cabinets,’ he said. ‘Big house around the corner. Very nice.’

  I spooned some olives into a bowl. The dog settled happily on my bag.

  *

  I have a sheet, somewhere, of David’s sketches. Perfect 3D drawings, good enough to frame. He had described the different timbers that he used, their textures and grain. The problems of warp, twist and swell. The pros and cons of the dovetail joint versus the mortise and tenon. I remember the relief we all felt when he finally found his thing. He loved it, he told me; there is a special gratification in working with your hands. Not that I’d understand, he went on, living, as I do, in my head. I had agreed and felt a small dissatisfaction and wondered if this would be the year I finally started growing veg.

  *

  Stef returned and put a bottle on the counter.

  ‘Hey, David,’ he said and then, ‘do you mind?’ He raised the face of his mobile to us and pointed out into the wet. ‘I’ve got to finish something.’ He pressed a key on his phone and the light came on in his office at the garden’s end.

  ‘Wow,’ said David. ‘Cool.’ Then: ‘I’m not staying long.’

  Lou next, skipping in in her outsized uniform. ‘Mum, I’m starving. Hi, Uncle David. It’s your birthday next week,’ she said. Then: ‘I saw it on the calendar.’ She turned away to hide her flush.

  ‘It is indeed. Forty years old,’ he pulled her towards him, onto his lap. ‘What do you make of that?’ He tickled her. ‘Nearly as old as your Mum.’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t—I was just saying,’ she cried in panic and scrambled away.

  ‘Will you want to stay for dinner, David?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a problem. I can always ring out.’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he said, looking down at his phone. ‘In fact I need to be going. I only popped in to say hi. And I wanted to check what’s left of mine in your cellar.’

  ‘I thought it was all at Skyler’s now,’ I said.

  ‘Not everything.’

  He took a child down there with him and the dog, who loves the smells, and came back with a bag of old stuff.

  ‘Taking more,’ I said. ‘Must be getting serious.’

  ‘I’m off,’ he replied. ‘Thanks for the beer.’

  ‘And we’ll see you soon, will we?’ I asked. ‘Get together for your birthday? The three of us, perhaps?’

  I was almost thirteen and David eleven when our sister was born. We would never truly be three.

  David lowered his eyebrows. ‘Call Madeline if you like,’ he said. ‘No fuss, though, please.’

  He left with Frieda, who he was walking to a friend’s to rehearse something for school.

  ‘Bye, guys. Be safe,’ I called after them. David raised his hand but didn’t turn.

  Louisa raced back through to me, squealing. ‘Do you think he guessed? Oh, Mum, I didn’t mean to make it weird.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Lou. He won’t have noticed a thing,’ I said.

  ‘What about a cake?’ she cried. ‘Who’s getting a cake?’

  ‘Granny’s doing it. Now go and get Dad. I need to order food.’

  When she brought Stef through, she was still talking about the party.

  ‘But would you like a surprise, Daddy, for your next birthday?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’d be grateful, though; I know that much,’ he said.

  ‘Will we get to jump out?’ she asked.

  ‘You’d better ask your mum,’ he replied. Stef turned to me. ‘You’ve done a good job with this, Nance, you know.’

  ‘We’ll see. My parents in the same room. Skyler’s friends, whoever they may be. It could be a nightmare.’

  *

  ‘Oh, Nancy,’ Madeline had said, when I suggested the party a month back. We’d gone to hers for a change and she knelt behind Louisa, doing something off YouTube to her hair. ‘Do you really think?’ ‘Yes I really do,’ I said. ‘If we don’t do something, no one will.’ However old we get, the age-gap between my sister and me never seems to shrink.<
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  *

  ‘Is this the final list?’ asked Stef, walking around the island. The concrete had been his idea but when it was in, I found I loved it; the way it flowed in one long unbroken sweep. The drop into my sink is round and smooth as velvet.

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘The ones in red are coming. The blue said no.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘Alice? Just an old girlfriend,’ I replied.

  ‘Not just,’ said Louisa, in a lascivious tone, ‘Uncle David’s first love.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

  ‘I heard Aunty Mads say,’ and Lou had stayed of course, as Madeline and I talked. Flitting about. Pretending to read.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Stef.

  ‘Mads doesn’t know what she’s taking about, she was barely at school at the time,’ I said, but she was right. There had been a poetry to David and Alice, which started with their difference but became about their assimilation. He had borrowed some of her brightness when they were together, though she’d needed his edge just as much. They split when she left for university and she married young, a man I met once; handsome, bored and rich, who she had since divorced. I was curious to see what she had become.

  ‘As long as it won’t cause a problem with Skyler,’ Stefan said.

  ‘It shouldn’t,’ I replied. ‘David keeps telling me she’s a grown-up; I guess we’ll find out.’ I thought of her spiteful little face. ‘I’m just trying to mix it up a bit. That’s how good parties work. As long as everyone gets pissed at the start, we’ll be fine.’

  Stef gave a pinched look to indicate the ongoing presence of Louisa.

  ‘Shall we do a cocktail, do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he replied, pulling out a bottle of something new. ‘Top-up?’

  ‘If you’re opening it,’ I said and we went through to the kids.

  *

  Jake lay on the sofa, fighting a friend on his screen.

  ‘Just you two, right?’ I said. He snorted at me without lifting his eyes. ‘Shove up,’ I told him, and sank into my slot.