Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

‘Not selfish, Nancy, no.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You have the tendency to put yourself at the centre of things, dear,’ she said.

  ‘I find myself there,’ I replied.

  ‘No, you assign yourself that position. There’s a difference. I’m merely asking, can you not let him be? This family’s not so easy.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ I said.

  ‘I was talking about David.’

  She had always tipped us out of sync, into competition, though he claimed he couldn’t see it. I searched her face now for tone or emotion; I, who can find offence in the set of her mouth, the hook of a brow, but she was perfectly still. I used to love that poise in the old photos. She had been a tiny blonde with a face like architecture when she first met Dad; beautiful, though something closed in the cast of it. There was no display about Kath, April told me once; it was hard to find a place to park your eyes on her. And Dad by her side, stiff suit and bearing. One hand resting lightly on his lapel. The story of their courtship was pure fiction; Mum’s sixties swinging in the usual way when Dad walked into her bar. She moved in with him in a matter of months. A cultural tourist who stayed for twenty years then packed up and left, going back to her middle-class beginnings.

  ‘What family are you referring to anyway, Mum?’ I said and at last, there was something. A long tired sigh, a feint of exhaustion.

  ‘Oh this,’ she said. ‘I was with your father until you were thirteen, Nancy. And it was he who upped and left as I remember.’

  Dad had come to me to try to explain: ‘I know it’s hard to hear, Nance, but there it is. We all deserve to be—’ and I knew he wanted to say loved, but he couldn’t, kneeling by the side of his eldest child. ‘We all deserve a bit of respect,’ he said in the end, and I understood, his needs were simple and she could be cold.

  She broke an oatcake into smaller pieces, and ate them dry, one by one.

  ‘And I know it hurt you when I moved back home but you were grown by then. A mother, yourself,’ she said. She put our house on the market the week after Mads got her college place and was gone before the summer was out, to a village outside Market Harborough, ten miles from where she was born.

  ‘I don’t begrudge you that at all,’ I said and it was true. Her leaving had been a sheer relief. She had thinned, by then, to the point that we could almost see through her; the cost of her sacrifice to us everywhere. When I visited her in her cottage with its garden and a studio, she had taken flesh again. This new Mum, with mud on her boots, a bicycle and a cat, was in fact the old one. I saw that her time with us – the city, motherhood, my entire growing up – had been the anomaly. She had slipped back into an earlier skin and found a perfect fit. She was blissful and that look on her face cast me out.

  ‘You seem rather cross, dear,’ she said.

  She’d always borne the brunt of my moodiness, and taken it. Guilt, I put it down to. A clever kind of masochism. She submitted to my punishment yet retained the high ground, sitting quietly as I stamped about, a futile domestic tyrant, diminished by my own meanness.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t owe you an apology, Nancy, you know. We each have a responsibility to live the best life we can.’

  She pressed her handbag, patted the table twice in quiet little acts of displacement.

  ‘And you survived, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘In fact, I think you’ve turned out rather well.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is.’ She gave a brief parched chuckle. ‘You’ve always struck me as rather fearless. Don’t let growing older diminish that.’

  Unaccountably, I felt that I might cry.

  ‘You might be a little kinder to yourself though, perhaps,’ she said.

  ‘If you mean do exactly what I like, like David, well that’s hardly possible, is it? Or right.’

  ‘I’d rather assumed you were already doing what you liked,’ she said, with an acute look. She felt for her long wooden beads and I saw something different then, in her steadiness; a kind of tenacity. I thought, I could take this moment. I could simply tell her. I realised she would be difficult to shock; that she could take my disgrace, if it came. She might even call it by a different name.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘OK,’ she replied and tapped the back of my hand. ‘Anyway.’ She gave a light smile. ‘What else is news?’

  ‘Well, we’re having a party for Frieda in a couple of weeks’ time,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. Fifteen. My goodness me.’

  ‘It’ll be at home. The whole family,’ I said.

  ‘That’ll be nice. Just tell me when.’ She stood. ‘Don’t worry about this. My treat,’ she said, though it wouldn’t run to much more than twenty pounds. She wandered off towards the till but was distracted on the way by a rack of expressionist postcards. She gave me one, in a paper bag, as we walked towards the exit.

  ‘For you,’ she said. ‘Just a little something.’

  We left the museum together.

  ‘Bye-bye, Nancy,’ she said, in the street, squinting up into the daylight. ‘You know I love you, dear.’

  We held hands as though we were about to dance and the V of skin between her thumb and first finger was loose and webbed and softer than seemed human, like a trimming of silk. Then off she set, keen to miss the rush hour, her satchel tucked high into her armpit. ‘Send my love to the children, won’t you?’ she called and bent into the weather like someone in disguise, a witch in a fairy tale dispensing her blessing or curse. I felt the old familiar ache of separation and it took me back.

  We were at the airport, David and I, Mum’s goodbye still hot in my throat as we crossed the terminal like some weird kind of hostage exchange, the space between her and Dad empty and risky. I turned for one last wave and the long brave kiss she threw at me, and the way she moved towards the escalator, focused and resolute, was about the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

  We were to spend a week in Albufeira, with Dad, Ape and their brother Charlie and his kids. There had been a falling out, but Charlie’s wife had died of cancer just that year and so Dad and he were trying again. I spotted our uncle easily enough; he was big, like Dad, and ridiculous in khaki cargo shorts above huge hams of calf, but I couldn’t see anyone who might be our cousins. They were twins, a few months younger than me, and it had been years since we’d all last met. Then David gave this chuckle and I followed his gaze and found that it ended on a girl. He had been leaking trouble all that summer and the sound, a burble of glee as though he’d just been proved right about pretty much everything, should have told me how it would be, but I missed it, because I was stupid and I loved him and had spent my whole life defending him.

  I chose to see that he was laughing at the way she chewed – the Hubba Bubba he was addicted to by the holiday’s end – and the magazine she held, that he had previously judged naff. ‘Give her a break, sis,’ he said, when I pointed this out later. ‘Don’t be so quick to judge,’ ruffling my hair as he said it, though I was sixteen to his fourteen, but he was taller by a foot, and already had many secrets whereas I mainly worried and hadn’t yet kissed a boy and somehow he seemed to know all this.

  Dad’s brother called it right, though, when his daughter blinked David into focus under electrified blue lashes and gave off an answering heat. He dropped a hand onto her shoulder and she shot her face around as though his touch had burnt. I felt sorry for him; his love looked painful and misdirected. Then everybody watched as David approached. A lanky streak of piss, Dad used to say, which wasn’t kind, but David was so beautiful, and knew it, that the insult became something else; an attempt to moor him to the rest of us, so earthbound and ordinary. And space and time did that thing they talk about in love stories and we all felt a whisper of their first touch, the steadying fingertip on the top of her smooth pink arm as he bent to kiss her on each cheek, a ridiculous affectation back then, and for a boy of his age.

  ‘Layla, r
emember?’ she said, and he replied, ‘I do. Like the song,’ though he remembered no such thing.

  I think Dad spoke his name then, hissed between his teeth like an insult and the adults tried to defuse it with chatter and pointless laughs and David’s smile was brilliant, all teeth and pleasure. When Dad introduced him again to his brother, David held out his hand. Could he have called him ‘Sir’? That’s how I remember it. The little shit.

  Where was I? Off to one side. Stranded again, in the wake of his latest disruption. I caught the other child’s gaze, the boy, Luca, but he curled his lip to tell me that he and I were not the same at all. Aunty April smirked, her hands quick and aimless. She worked her fingers before her as though she was mixing breadcrumbs; she loved chaos, Ape, and also sex, and was realising, now, that it might be a decent holiday, after all, that which had previously seemed nothing but difficult; the attempted rapprochement of her brothers when it suited her so much better for them to be apart.

  I see all that from here, but at the time, there was just my isolation. Even now, the first feel of sun on unaccustomed flesh, and the smell of coconut in cheap foreign sun cream prompts a slippery unease.

  We were staying at our uncle’s time-share, ‘a new build,’ he told us, proudly, which explained, perhaps, the unfinished concrete around the pool which skinned my toes and the odd trimmings of plastic we kept finding in the joints of things; slivers of packaging that nobody had bothered to remove.

  The sun was blinding, thrown back at us from the surface of the pool and the plate glass that was everywhere. Ape walked straight into the patio door one afternoon, despite the sticker, a big red exclamation mark in a triangle above something Portuguese and the impact slammed the door in its casings, making a sound like gunshot. When we opened our eyes, each of us had rolled up on our sun loungers like woodlice. A tray of drinks had exploded on the stone and for a minute, I thought the sangria racing across the tiles was blood, but Ape was fine, apart from a cut on her nose and one black eye. From then on, there was only plastic outdoors. I walked down the baked, rutted lane to buy my first pair of sunglasses.

  The shop had once been a house. Lilos, donuts and dinghies swung from a scaffolding pole at the front, tied with brown string in loose bows. On the terrace were racks of shoes, balls and beach sets. A boy about my age worked through an A4 maths book in English at the till, next to a counter dressed with fridge magnets, comedy pens and a cardboard sheet of Lypsyls. I passed into the room beyond and stopped at a great tray of silver jewellery arranged against black sponge, the rings tucked into slits and necklaces suspended on circles of pins. And right at the back, in amongst the sweary T-shirts, I found David, with his hand wedged down Layla’s shorts and her head resting sleepily on his shoulder. He jumped when he saw me and said: ‘Nance, it’s only you!’ in amusement and relief. And when I think of my first time, which was later that year with a ghastly boy, the events are somehow conflated and it is the terrible pulsing of cicadas I hear and the pasty throat ache of too much Lemon Fanta that I taste and a sicky little twist of shock in my stomach.

  Needless to say, I kept quiet. There were the grownups to think about, the ebb and flow of Dad and Charlie’s dislike, which peaked at about three each afternoon, bringing lunch to a close, and then surged again, late at night, as I listened from my bed. April watched them like the tennis, back and forth, with evident interest and no apology. She stepped in occasionally, to adjudicate, when their antagonism tipped into explicit disagreement, or she felt she had a relevant point: ‘Now now, Bill. You shouldn’t say that. That’s not fair,’ or ‘Don’t forget, love, your brother’s been through a lot.’ It always seemed to be Dad she pulled up, though it was he and she who were close.

  Still, on the final afternoon, as we walked amongst the dunes, there was the feeling that ground had been made. I walked behind with Layla – she was actually OK; kind, and occasionally funny, despite being so obvious – and April had her arm through Dad’s (she couldn’t stand to walk alone) when Charlie, on her other side, pulled close enough that she could thread her hand through the bend at his elbow, too, and for a moment they travelled as a three, in an unbroken line.

  Then: ‘Isn’t that your David?’ Charlie asked. There was a boy climbing out of the sea, edged in silver. I raised a hand to shield my eyes. He started to run and then, from inside the next wave, launched a girl, arms outstretched as she broke through its surface, sleek as a seal. She caught her footing and sprung after him in a low sprint, shaking off splinters of water and light. She caught up easily and from a stride away, jumped high onto David’s back. He tripped and they both rolled, laughing and tumbling in sand and grass, and though Layla was beautiful, this girl was something else again, with her lack of care, her hair clumped round her face and her musculature, her shorts that might have been a boy’s, and the light dusting of salt that made her look frost-tipped.

  Layla tensed, calling to mind the time between hurting yourself and the arrival of the pain. It came, I assume, for next she staggered, one long weak step, and began to wail with such conviction that it must have been more about her dead mother than David and the girl. Her father bent to her and I saw his tenderness and anguish but also his reticence and how much that would gall, pre-empting her furious bat of his hand. Charlie stepped away and looked around him dumbly but then his pain contorted into rage – I saw it, that distance travelled on his face – and he moved to Dad and roared and Dad threw back his shoulders and roared back. Ape laid a hand on each man’s chest and I watched her buffeted, like a woman facing into the wind on the prow of a ship, though they observed the distance that she marked out between them. Next to me, the brother, Luca, cried silently, and David looked on, while the other girl turned cartwheels on the scorched sand behind him.

  This is not one of our golden tales. The breach between Dad and Charlie proved final and we never of spoke of it again, not even Ape, who loves to press a bruise. Still, what does it reveal? Little that I don’t already know. David in the middle of it all. Incandescent, selfish and cruel. Dad, fists clenched, made impotent by rage. And me, the spectator, standing on the side line, itching for a role. Each of us fixed, forever, into our spots.

  19

  ‘Come in, Marie, sit down.’

  She walked soft-footed across the carpet. I held the jug and her glass; bent to them at my desk.

  ‘I haven’t been telling the truth,’ she said.

  I have had this moment only once before.

  ‘Please. Carry on. I’ll just grab my stuff.’

  I scrambled for my book, a pen, and sat across from her. Her hair was two weeks old, now; a difficult age. Where it had grown, it flicked out at the ends, following the curve of her neck. She turned it back between two fingers but it wouldn’t submit. She was silent. She looked around the room as if it were new.

  ‘Take your time,’ I said.

  ‘I hated it as a child.’ She gave a loud, aggravated sigh and moved her eyes past my face to the painting behind me.

  I felt something close to triumph. I had thought she had the mark of the bullied, the stillness of a rabbit, those racing eyes.

  ‘What did you hate, Marie?’

  ‘All of it. All of the time.’

  I heard contempt; I saw a childhood of restriction and control. Maybe worse.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said, sitting back, creating space. She kept her eyes on the picture.

  ‘Home. My parents.’

  ‘What was it like? At home?’ I asked. I took my voice upwards and tried to hide my appetite.

  ‘I just—You know. This is hard.’ She watched me closely.

  ‘I do. But you can say whatever you like in here.’

  My stomach hopped and I felt my responsibility.

  ‘I don’t want you to think badly of me,’ she said and leant towards me, closing the gap, and in that moment I felt that it would come, some confession, and that perhaps I could deliver her from it.

  ‘Marie, I won’t. You need to believe that.
And you must not blame yourself for anything that happened to you.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. ‘Nothing happened to me. It wasn’t like that.’

  Her book twitched on her lap and she rolled the barrel of her pen between her fingers.

  ‘It wasn’t them at all,’ she said, in a tight voice. ‘It was me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I just wanted to get away,’ she said. ‘Always. Even when I was small. I couldn’t wait to leave.’

  ‘And why was that, do you think?’

  ‘Because it was tiny there,’ she said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘There was no air,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t breathe.’

  ‘And yet you lived at home until you were twenty.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘That must have been hard.’ She dropped her eyes and shrugged.

  ‘The way I feel is not the same as what I do,’ she said. Then: ‘I think that’s why all this is happening to me.’

  ‘It might very well be,’ I said. ‘That’s hard to live with, that kind of fracture. And you’re recently married, which can prompt a re-evaluation of the past. There can be a concern about repeating mistakes.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ she said and her look was wretched now. ‘I think I’m being punished.’

  ‘No,’ I replied, though I told myself to go carefully. ‘No, Marie. You’ve done nothing wrong. What I’m hearing here is shame. Shame at your difference which meant you didn’t always feel you fitted in. And as for leaving, every child has to leave. It’s harder, perhaps, if you’re an only child, but it’s natural. And your relationship with your parents is good. You see each other. You play your part.’

  ‘Shame,’ she said, in a kind of wonder. ‘I am ashamed.’

  ‘And shame is a defence, a first-base emotion that shields us from feeling something deeper and more difficult.’

  ‘But I don’t feel anything,’ she said in a dreamy tone.

  ‘Not yet,’ I replied and in one of those odd moments of exchange, I felt it, suddenly, for her; my ribs scarcely containing an anguish, vacuum light and ravenous, threatening to lift me off my feet.