Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  ‘They were the purples,’ I said. ‘Lower tar. I don’t suppose you can get them any more.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m in. It’s perfect,’ Adam said. ‘But it’s your choice, of course. Are you walking to the tube?’

  4

  My first appointment arrived early, waiting there as I shouldered my way in. Late February bitter with sharp sideways rain and my glasses all steamed up.

  ‘Morning, Nancy,’ said Lynn, our receptionist, a nice woman in her fifties, studying for an online degree in between answering our phone. She moved her eyes across significantly. Marie sat behind the door in her usual place; each client has one. Her arms were crossed but she released a hand to wave with her fingertips.

  ‘Oh hi, Marie. Sorry. I didn’t see you there. Won’t be a moment,’ I said.

  ‘Can I help you with any of that?’ Lynn asked.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  I straightened my arm which sent my handbag sliding. It landed in the crook of my elbow and bounced the coffee cup in my hand.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Lynn and passed me a handful of napkins.

  ‘I just need to get myself sorted, Marie. Be five minutes, OK?’

  The air in my office was dense and sour, the milk in last Friday’s tea a top note. I shoved up the sash but outside was worse; wet rubbish and mildew. She could wait another moment or two. I sat in the client’s chair to focus; a habit of mine.

  I had tried hypnotherapy once, as a favour to a friend who was training and he had me lie on a water bed, my eyes masked, his voice, through earphones, very close. He asked me to imagine a safe place; a place where I felt secure and then to anchor it in my mind so I could return to it any time. I thought of a desert island, beach and waves, but it was just a holiday. My bed, as a child, and the moment when you lose your grip on the edges of the day, but that can feel like a tumble. The fork of a tree where David and I used to hide. I held up my hand for more time and heard my friend laugh and that brought him to mind; sitting apart, observing from his seat, looking for the meeting point of theory and my own peculiarities. I envied him in that moment. This is my safe space, other people’s problems. The expanse that is my work.

  The morning’s client was in her twenties. Recently married. High-functioning. A sudden onset of anxiety centred around travel. No longer able to fly, though a recent promotion demanded it. I buzzed Lynn to send her through and stepped round from behind my desk. I like to shake hands.

  ‘Hi, Marie,’ I said.

  She moved straight to her seat which was broad and upholstered with arms wide enough to rest a mug on, and sat, tugging her bag in close beside her. I took my place in its pair, as much space between us as the dimensions of the room would allow. She pulled out her book, black, hard-backed and identical to mine, though they are common enough. She likes to rest it on her lap and tilts it upwards when she writes, pressing the edge into the flesh of her stomach. ‘I can push a table closer, if you like,’ I’d offered, first time, but she told me she was fine. She wrote at oblique moments. I couldn’t guess what, which I imagine was her intention.

  ‘So how have things been?’ I asked.

  She was small in her seat, neatly set.

  ‘OK, thanks. Fine,’ she said, in an everyday voice.

  ‘Great,’ I replied, taking her lead, biding my time.

  She gave a couple of quick nods which I mirrored; a tic that I’ve bent to use.

  ‘Anything you’ve noticed, or thought about, particularly, this week?’ I said.

  ‘Not really.’

  We play this game each time, committed to our polite exchange until I reference, always obliquely, the attacks which had left her kneeling on various platforms thinking she might die. She kept a hand on her bag, legs crossed. The slightest bounce in that raised toe.

  ‘How has your sleeping been?’

  ‘Not too bad. A little better, perhaps.’

  ‘And getting to work?’

  ‘I took the tube three times,’ she said, shyly.

  ‘That’s brilliant. How was it?’

  ‘It was OK, actually. Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘Can you take me through what happened?’

  ‘I was fine going down, but when I got on it was a squash. My heart began to race, but I did what you said. Observed my symptoms, went through the coping thoughts, and I got to my stop.’

  ‘Well done. And the next day?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Any easier?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘That’s good, Marie. Do you see how much progress you’ve made?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, though her face didn’t show it.

  ‘And have you been able to practise the breathing that we talked about?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been a bit busy this week,’ she replied, her eyes on me lightly. She wrung her hands, just once, but thoroughly, pulling hard along the top of each, right down to the tips of her fingers. She hadn’t lied. I would have lied. A truth-teller, then. A scrupulous girl.

  ‘I understand. But it’s worth keeping going with it, if you can,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  Behind me, my phone began to thrum.

  ‘You can get that if you want,’ Marie said, with an abrupt laugh. Her eyes, very blue, held mine.

  ‘Sorry. I usually put it on silent. They’ll go. You were saying.’

  ‘I don’t think I was. Was I?’

  My mobile buzzed again. I heard it nudging along the desk.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Let me just turn it off.’

  I stood and laid my book on the arm of the chair, knocking off my glass. It fell, the sound of impact absorbed by carpet. Across the room, Marie plucked some tissues from the box.

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ I called but she had started across the room.

  ‘It’s only water. It won’t stain,’ I said, but still she came. She knelt, her legs pressed together in an office skirt, the soles of her courts upturned, gashed and oddly indecent. She set to work, pressing thick wads deep into the pile.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I’ve used them all up.’ She put the sodden pile inside the empty box and handed them to me. This close, I saw she wore a thin gold chain tucked into her shirt. I dropped the lot into the bin and went back to my chair.

  ‘So, I think it’s time, soon, to start to think about next steps,’ I said. ‘As your symptoms are so much better, we could talk a little more about cause. Why this might be happening. Why now.’

  She watched me, dead still.

  ‘Anxiety doesn’t simply appear. There’s always something behind it,’ I said. ‘Your symptoms are sending us a message. We need to work out what that is.’

  I saw her chest jump as though she’d taken a sudden unplanned inhale.

  ‘As hard as it’s been, these events can actually be an opportunity. To get at things that have been hidden up until now. Things that might have been holding us back.’

  She gave a weak smile. This moment will excite some clients. For others, it can take more time.

  ‘I hope that doesn’t feel too daunting. We’ll work together. I’m here every step,’ I said.

  I handed her a page. We were to start with something easy.

  ‘This is a life events survey. It’s a list of things that can happen that might cause stress, or trigger an emotional change of some sort. Some will be obvious. Others less so. Do you want to have a look and we can go through whatever seems interesting next session?’

  ‘For me to keep?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘That’s time, I think.’ I have a large clock on the wall behind the client’s head. ‘We’ll talk again in a week.’

  *

  There was a text when I turned to my phone, from Stef. Free says she’s ill? No temp. I’ve kept her off.

  Why does a mother feel so differently for each child? To talk of preference is to miss the point. Take fear, for example. Against this measure, Frieda tops the charts.

  I wrote back: OK. Slightly odd.
Do you think something’s up? then scrolled through my phone to find the number of her school. I called it, and arranged a time to pop in for a chat.

  In a while, I heard Adam arrive and went next door to him. We made love silently, by the bookcase, as we had before.

  5

  We moved into the office, Adam and I, a month after we had looked round, on a warm grey autumn Saturday of fat low clouds and incipient rain. My husband drove me with the back seat flat and the car full of boxes. I wore old jeans and Converse and an ancient plaid shirt and as we passed through town easily in the weekend traffic, no kids, he switched to Radio 2 and when Oasis came on, looked across and said I looked like the nineties. When we stopped for petrol, he bought me service station flowers, long and limp in dripping plastic.

  We got everything upstairs in three trips and I offered him a cup of tea but he told me he had things to do. I thought I heard melancholy in the way he said goodbye and listened to his footsteps shrink as he passed down through the centre of the house. Quiet ballooned, and then I heard his voice, risen in welcome, the stress on the ‘a’ of his ‘hallo’ – never more Scandinavian than in greeting – and underneath it, Adam’s low note.

  I wondered how Adam’s hand felt in my husband’s. It is not beautiful, like Stef’s. Veins rise along its top in a prominent Y. His nails are fitted too snugly to the flesh; curved, almost clubbed. The skin is dry, a little ashy. I thought, I would like to sit by Adam’s bath and wash those hands, scrub them with the gritty perfumed wax I use all over, once a week, to slough off my own dead cells. Dip my fingers in the pot and draw out a handful, working it into the knuckles, at the roots, and the darkened patch between the first two fingers where the nicotine has stained. There are tiny beads suspended in the mix and in the heat, at the pressure of touch, they dissolve to release an oil and a deep clean ocean scent. When that happened, I would turn his wrist and work on the palm, the softer part. I would replenish him. Put life back into those hands.

  I moved through to the hall, kicking a box into the doorway so I wouldn’t get locked out, and leant over the bannister to better hear. Their introductions stretched into something else, but I couldn’t make out a word. I leant a little further and the handrail creaked. Toast caught in the downstairs flat and the smoke alarm began and when it stopped, a few seconds on, I heard Adam’s tread, rather close, and felt something like panic. I went inside and hid in the far corner of my office. My shirt smelled of too long in the back of a cupboard.

  ‘Knock-knock,’ he called, and I waited.

  ‘Knock-knock,’ he said again and I crossed the room and pushed open my door. There was his face, the smile that I have described. The same clothes as always. He stood on the threshold of the room, oddly framed. He looked like a portrait, with the raucous wallpaper of the hall behind him, the run of chestnut balustrade and his own general dishevelment set against the perfect blank of the walls. I saw he waited to be invited.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘come in. You don’t have to ask. It’s yours as well. Ours.’ He stepped inside. I think I blushed.

  ‘Where’s your stuff?’ I said. ‘Is that it?’

  He held a plastic bag.

  ‘Coming in a van later on. But I bought us this.’

  He reached inside and removed a large boxed coffee machine.

  ‘Wow. You didn’t have to.’

  I acknowledged my disappointment. For a moment, I had hoped for chilled champagne.

  ‘I didn’t. We got two for our wedding. Shall I make us some?’ he said and that feeling bent into an adolescent kind of hurt.

  I heard him setting up the machine in the kitchen and an old-fashioned whistling as I emptied the contents of my boxes onto the floor.

  ‘How do you like it?’ he called.

  ‘Long, please. Not too much milk.’

  I sorted my books, mainly textbooks and a handful of novels I’d pulled out on a trawl around the house. Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, some Brontë and Hardy, thick grown-up books about life, love and mistakes; I had stuck to the classics in an effort to demonstrate learning rather than taste. I laid my painting against the wall under the spot I planned to hang it and opened my laptop to the end of the Pick of the Pops we’d been listening to in the car.

  He brought me through a mug. ‘Can I help with any of that?’

  ‘Not really. Not till the delivery’s been.’

  He sat on the window ledge, back-lit, suddenly, by a burst of bright wet light that singed the edges of his hair. His wedding ring was a loose rounded gold of the traditional type. Stef wore a platinum band, wider and flattened, with a planed square edge. Adam crossed his legs at the ankle, his feet reaching out into the room. His face was deeply furrowed, clefts running out from the sides of his nose. I knelt at a stack of case-notes.

  ‘Rather gloomy choice, Nancy.’

  ‘What? Why?’ I said.

  ‘This one’s ending is grim, and she kills herself in that, if I remember.’

  ‘Oh dear. I’ve got a load of Shakespeare somewhere. Perhaps I’ll bring that in.’

  ‘I’m going to go out for a cigarette,’ he said, patting himself down.

  ‘It’s fine here, for now, I think. If you open the window,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want one?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  He pulled out a Zippo in old bronze. There was the clunk as he flipped the lid and the grate of the little flint wheel.

  ‘That takes me back,’ I said. Interchangeable nights of everyone over to someone’s, the evening getting deeper and the boy next to you turning his lighter through his fingers in some weird demonstration of masculinity.

  The flame was strong and white and arched towards me in a rush of breeze. The first pull crackled, a dry leafy compost cut with lighter fuel and I felt a chemical expansion behind my eyes, not altogether pleasant. I held my hand out to Adam and he placed the object in my palm, heavy and warm still from his pocket. I enjoyed the feeling of it there. It was worn and smooth and even the pits and dents were rounded and edgeless.

  ‘Is it very old?’ I said, turning it over in my hand.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked. There was a faint engraving on the lighter’s spine.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘what do you think?’

  There were only traces, fine lines so shallow that I felt nothing of them under my thumb. A shape had been etched, rounded and bulb-like at the bottom, twisting and narrowing to a point above.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Did he do it himself?’

  ‘No. My mother bought it for him. It’s hand-done, though, to her design.’

  ‘Is it a whirlwind?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘That’s perfect.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a new one, that’s all. I’ve never heard that before.’ He took it from me. ‘But I see what you mean.’

  ‘So what is it then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s a thought. Or a wish or a dream, she used to say sometimes. He was away a lot and she gave it to him as a way of keeping her close, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘That sounds like something out of a film,’ I said.

  He laughed again.

  ‘It does, a bit.’

  ‘Is that how they were together?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes. Not always. But they were a good pair.’

  The sentiment of it hung between us.

  ‘Anyway. He died, and she gave it to me. The best bit’s refilling them though,’ he said. ‘Do you know how?’

  ‘I remember,’ I replied. ‘You pull the bottom off, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Do it.’

  He gave it back to me. I pulled the casing away, revealing a slim tab of sponge underneath.

  ‘Don’t you pour the fluid into this hole?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re actually supposed to lift that part out,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’

  He reached into a box and took a biro. ‘Hold still
,’ he said and brought the pen close. He eased the nib into the hole, his hand umbrella’d over mine. As he bent, I saw the place in his scalp where his hair began, like the aerial shot of a hurricane. In the lobe of one ear there was a nub of regrown flesh where he once would have worn an earring.

  ‘Is my cigarette all right?’ he asked.

  I looked back to where it balanced on the window ledge.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, as a ridged column of ash tipped onto the floor.

  He lifted the rectangle of wadded felt out on the tip of my pen.

  ‘Once this is off, you pour the liquid in,’ he said, close enough that I could hear the texture of his breath. It’s hard to know for certain, but I think, had he tried to kiss me then, I would have let him. ‘But I haven’t got any, I’m afraid.’

  There was the beep of reverse lights.

  ‘That must be the van,’ he said.

  I’d paid for assembly and my office was arranged inside an hour; they even hung my art.

  *

  Tim arrived, later, an old colleague of mine who was taking the third office. He introduced himself to Adam heartily, and then asked did we mind if he put the radio on and listened to the game? It was the start of the rugby season, he told us. He wore the shirt to reflect his team. He kept the volume low and the mood was suddenly brisk and chatty as we worked out a layout for reception, dragging furniture back and forth, laughing about democracy and wondering how, long-term, this collaboration might play. Tim’s mind was on the game though, and every now and then he gave a huge unexpected shout in response to it and Adam and I shared the briefest look that tightened the bolt of our connection. When his team won, Tim suggested a celebratory trip to the pub, but I had four missed calls from home by then, and left.

  *

  And so our weekday lives began. Adam brewed a strange floral coffee every morning – Tim couldn’t stomach it and Lynn preferred tea – so he would make me a cup and bring it through, sitting a while in my client’s chair as I drank. When I found myself moving my nine-thirties to ten, I felt a first weak acknowledgement of distance travelled. As I tell my clients, intimacy is a process.