Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  *

  He had tidied our room while I’d been out. On my bedside table, the books were neat and a clutch of daffodils leant their weight against one point of the vase. I snipped the string with nail scissors and shook them out in a little burst of drips. The week’s un-homed clothes had been left, folded, on the end of our bed and I knew he would have moved them from the armchair where I drop them each night and wondered again, why I did that when he had asked me not to, because he felt it as my indifference and that had to hurt.

  The chair was his favourite piece, a gift to me: ‘An original, you know,’ he had said, when he brought me upstairs, hands over my eyes, the seat already settled in its spot. It was mid-century, of slim-lined oak with a thick burnt-orange cushion. ‘The frame, I mean. I got it re-upholstered. Do you like it?’ he asked. He crouched by its side and ran a finger up the shallow slope of its arm. ‘The lines are beautiful, don’t you think?’

  I hadn’t been sure, at first, and then began to notice similar, in magazines or in the background of the right type of television show. I got there, in the end, my own taste moving into line, though it felt a bit learned by then. The chair was never used – what adult spends their time up in their room? And so I buried it in discarded clothes and he mentioned this, for a while – asked me to stop, could I not find somewhere else? – but I didn’t, the habit calcified, and he let it go. So I sat there this evening, after my shower, and tried to enjoy its promise of a view. I watched a manic dog zigzag through a rhombus of scrubby park, though I had to lean forward to do it. The angles of the chair were set at an unnatural tilt, they tipped my gaze straight into the sky. I got up and changed into an age-old dress and the shoes that Louisa had chosen.

  ‘Mum, you look lovely,’ Lou said, when I came down. Then: ‘Why don’t you always wear stuff like that?’

  ‘You know the last time I saw you in that dress?’ Stef asked and although I did, I told him no, for this was one of the ways that he showed me his love.

  It had been a party, a splashy agency do before he set up alone. Lots of brief, aborted conversations and needy men sharing the same restless energy. ‘We got out of there, though, and went for food, do you remember?’ he said. Dim sum in Chinatown which Stefan loved but made me squeamish, more wine but mostly smugness as we took all the other guests apart from safe inside our functioning marriage.

  ‘Guys. Through to the kitchen, now, please. I’m going to make eggs,’ called Frieda, to her siblings, in a parody of Mum. She’d even found a pinny.

  ‘Bye, Mummy,’ said Lou, trailing her fingers through my skirt as she passed. ‘Don’t forget to have fun.’

  ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here while we can,’ Stef said and slipped his fingers between mine, that snug familiar fit.

  ‘Shall we go the long way?’ he asked; a line from our past. When we first met I was living with Mum, and Stef had a flat share with a group of boys he hardly knew. We got to know each other in public, in cafés, pubs and parks. He was outdoorsy and we left London for the weekends. I bought my first pair of walking boots and a proper coat.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Come on. It’s cold,’ he replied, and it was; a low abrupt wind and rain in the odd spiteful handful. The park was empty now.

  ‘You take my scarf,’ he said. He stopped and one end uncurled from his neck in a sudden gust. He caught it and threw the loop over my head and I saw him think of pulling me to him, but he turned instead and we walked on.

  I had married pregnant, like my mother before me. Our union had the blessing of serendipity. I met him on my birthday, queuing for a round when he came up and said, ‘Hi, I’d like to know you,’ with his straightforward look and his hand held out. I chose to read it as a sign. We married three years later to the day. ‘Only somebody very certain should marry on their birthday,’ Stef had said. ‘Nancy the Brave,’ I replied, my father’s words, but it hadn’t felt like a risk. I had believed completely in our chances of being happy. David, when I told him we were engaged, feeling shy and excited and malicious, said: ‘Fair enough, sis, you couldn’t hope for a better guy,’ which left me surprised and I realised, after, a little let down.

  ‘Let’s get a drink first,’ Stefan said. ‘How about here?’

  We turned into a new bar and crossed the dark empty floor. A young girl in a vest with an armful of tattoos laid down her phone and asked us what we’d like. We sat on stools.

  ‘Martini?’ he said.

  ‘On a week night?’

  ‘Live a little, Nance.’

  We observed the ceremony of the drink. She seasoned the shaker and assembled the elements competently. It tasted good; frosty, oiled and brined. Like petrol, briefly, at the back of my nose.

  ‘You guys local?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Stef replied.

  She turned the music down a fraction, and eased the lighting up. We laughed at that; at the truth that we were getting old. At the far end of the room, outside was just a rectangle of dun light, dimming fast. He misinterpreted my attention and took my hand.

  He began to talk about Free’s party, just a week away. His thoughts for the night, how we might marry the needs of our daughter and friends with that of the family. He observed that she was growing. Her need for independence. Did I think some of them might smoke? What was our policy on booze? He had the idea we could splash out on a marquee.

  ‘She’s growing up great, though, Nance. Don’t you think?’ he said, shiny-eyed, but he didn’t wait for my reply, borne away on the idea of our family’s perfection.

  We ordered a second. This one was smoother, easier. Another couple came in, tentative and possibly underage. When their request for beer was granted, they relaxed and began to kiss, aggressively, at a table a little way away.

  ‘This place is weird,’ I said. ‘Do you think we should try somewhere else?’

  The girl behind the bar was bored. She passed us olives and I speared one with a cocktail stick and raised it towards my mouth. Stef leant forward and closed his teeth over it.

  ‘Anchovy,’ he said. ‘Saved you.’

  The girl watched and I saw her respond to him. His appeal has sharpened across the years, perhaps because his aesthetic has become current but there is also his decency, which is only more valuable over time. Men could overlook him, but he doesn’t care, and that puts him further ahead again. Stef is a patient man. A man who carries his load without question. Our family gives him joy.

  We talked about Lou. Her curiosity and her kindness.

  ‘She’s shrewd, too,’ I said, but he made no comment and I didn’t expand. Didn’t mention her manipulations. The clever ways I’d seen her exert control. Why rain on his parade? Stef is, after all, an excellent mate; respectful, present, true.

  When he turned to Jake, he chuckled.

  ‘Such a boy, though, don’t you think? It’s so funny. Those conversations about gender and then you have a child—’

  ‘He’s wonderful, of course, but he can be mean, Stef. I’ve heard him. On the computer. With his friends.’

  ‘Sure, the banter and so on, but he’s a good kid. He’s got a good heart. That’s the thing.’

  ‘He can be cruel,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it. You must have too.’

  That pulled him up.

  ‘What are you saying—?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing. But none of them are faultless. That’s all I mean. Nobody is.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting they were. I was trying to enjoy, for tonight, our children’s—’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Forget it. He’s a great boy. He is,’ but Stef didn’t want to talk about them any more. He tipped his drink, setting the last dregs of liquid rolling round the steep banks of the glass. When he spoke again, his voice was even.

  ‘So, I’ve been thinking about David,’ he said.

  ‘Oh Stefan,’ I replied. I noticed his arms, my favourite part of him, muscled from all that time in the gym,
thick with light springy hair and freckled knuckle to elbow.

  ‘It’s just not right what he does,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t say,’ I replied.

  ‘Which is whatever he likes and then hey, screw the rest of us.’

  There is something mildly comical about Stef’s English when provoked. He can choose the wrong word, slightly retro or tonally askew. I fought the urge to laugh.

  ‘You do everything for your family, Nancy. Your parents,’ he said. ‘Us. The kids.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I replied and dropped my eyes, though he read it as modesty and went on.

  ‘And then there’s David.’ He shook his head at the thought of him. ‘I mean, what does it teach the girls? The way he behaves?’

  ‘Well, we can hardly protect them from every difficult thing in life,’ I said, on firmer ground now. ‘That’s not realistic. It’s not even desirable—’

  ‘Of course not,’ Stefan said, and it was rare for him to interrupt me and I felt, then, his conviction, and the possibility that this evening had some purpose. ‘What I’m really talking about is the way that you endorse him.’

  ‘That’s just not true,’ I replied.

  ‘It is. You know you do. And so it will continue when he comes back, this week, or next, and slots straight back in. Everything forgiven.’

  He shook his watch on his wrist in a little declaration of frustration. The other couple ran through ringtones on a phone. Behind the bar, the girl cut a lime into thick wedges with a short sharp knife.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ I said. ‘I love him.’

  ‘But that’s not enough,’ Stefan replied. ‘He doesn’t deserve it. He loses the right when he does this stuff. And I’m sorry, Nancy, but he doesn’t love you back. If he did, he wouldn’t act this way.’ He gave a little puff of distaste.

  ‘He’s—There’s a weakness. Or something. I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You say he isn’t depressed.’

  ‘Well, there was no formal diagnosis. Nothing we’ve been able to put a name to.’

  ‘So what are we left with then? That he’s selfish. A baby.’

  ‘Oh Stefan, you see things too simply.’

  ‘You know, you always say that about me,’ Stef replied. ‘And I do, sometimes. I realise that. But not in this. I don’t recognise you in the way you deal with David. The excuses. The denial. The way you obscure the truth of it. You’re better than that.’

  ‘Stefan,’ I said. ‘That’s just not fair.’

  ‘You lose your mind around him, with his charm and that handsome face.’

  My only resistance now was silence.

  ‘What I’m saying is that I don’t want that for the girls. That template,’ Stefan said. ‘It’s not healthy. You know it,’ and I remembered that though his judgement was rare, when it came, it was absolute.

  ‘So what are you suggesting? That I simply cast him aside?’

  ‘It’s got to change. For God’s sake, Nancy, acknowledge what I’m saying.’

  The barmaid watched us now, with little glances up through her eyelashes.

  ‘OK, I understand,’ I said. ‘Just let me think. This is sudden.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘That’s all I’m asking. ‘This—’ he groped around before him in search of the word. ‘This uncertainty. The tension all the time. I don’t want it in my life.’

  My phone went and we both jumped. The screen read Home. It was Louisa. She was OK, but Frieda had burnt herself on the hob. We were to come straight back.

  ‘What on earth’s that noise?’ I asked, in panic. ‘Have you called the police?’ but it was Jake, somewhere behind them, on Grand Theft Auto.

  I gave the phone to Stefan who asked for Free. ‘Nothing to worry about, sweetheart,’ he said, the middle T sounding as D, in a faint echo of my father’s London inflection. ‘We’ll be home soon.’

  The dog, at the door, showed his stress with his strange phlegmy pant, ack ack ack. They had done well with a tea towel and a bag of frozen peas. Frieda bore a sickle-shaped brand on the soft flesh of her inner arm, rather beautiful, and her eye make-up had resettled in gentle drifts on the bones of her cheeks. Nobody had eaten. It took ten minutes to sort, then, mouth metallic, my head tinny from booze, I settled with my family, crammed onto the sofa we’d long outgrown. Blankets, squabbles and repeats on the TV.

  23

  I woke straight into a memory. Matthias Coombes, a narrow child; thick white hair with a vintage wave and a lackadaisical bearing undercut by light nervy eyes. No bottom at all, his trousers at the back were limp and sorry. He was a little sod. Thanks to David, he very nearly drowned.

  We were visiting with Mum, as we did each July, a dutiful trawl of her old county friends and every year the space between us and them grew wider, more rock-strewn. We always met at Matthias’s home, which gave him an advantage and a slightly make-believe quality. He never felt quite real, as though he might not exist beyond the walls of his garden, or would vanish into a wisp of smoke if caught in the full glare of a day unfiltered by the leaves of an ancient tree or a slab of Georgian shutter.

  My primary emotion on those trips was shame. Ourselves as living evidence of our mother’s decline, with our London accents and modern clothes and minds full of chat and pop, yet when we got there, it seemed that we were the ones who were out of time. Where could that idea have hatched? It wasn’t Mum, resolutely cheerful, bandying round treats all the way up and full of snarky observations in the dark on the fast road home. Monica, maybe – Matty’s mother – with her dead smile; for a while I had admired her cut-throat charm. But there was something about the set-up that made David cross. He must have been around ten.

  They had a pond, deep and brown and fed by a fast snaky stream. It was a distance down the garden but we were allowed as we were all strong swimmers (were we, though? Ten sessions in the council pool) and if you looked back up, you could see one white corner of the house, composed like art behind a lawn of parakeet green, and sometimes the outlines of the mothers in a window, depending on how the sun fell on the old thin glass. We used to get the dog in – Pooter, a horrible animal, barrel-shaped and stinking – but it was fun to throw sticks and watch her wiggly swim and the way she scrambled out, three or four goes at the steep slippery bank until Matthias bent down and dragged her by the collar.

  He had a medal with him, this time, an oxidised bronze disc on a thick ribbed mustard ribbon that his father had won, though he wouldn’t tell us how. He swung it in huge circles, the ribbon turning around a finger, and then yanked it back into the flat of his palm. He patrolled the bank and the movement and the thwack were distracting. I saw it cutting into David’s focus as he tried to hit a rock with a volley of little stones. There were funny vibrations in the air and I felt anxious but also curious as to what would happen next.

  David turned from the water and grabbed a branch of the tree above him, swinging a couple of lazy arcs, a tense band of stomach revealed beneath his shirt. He pulled his legs up between his hands and turned a circle around the bough to come to sitting. Someone had hammered metal hoops deep into the bark and he set off up the tree as loose as a monkey. It was a large elm, stretching halfway across the pond and the very best thing about that place.

  Matthias watched, absorbing the challenge and flung up his arms. I saw straight away that he had dropped the medal, though he hadn’t seemed to notice. David did. We both watched as it fell into the thick soft grass at the base of the tree where the mower couldn’t reach. The disc vanished instantly, though the ribbon lay flat and light on a bed of fat blade tips. David jumped down, feigned a stumble and snatched it. I saw him shove his fist into the pocket of his shorts and the jumping of a tendon stretching up into his wrist as he felt it there. In a while, Matthias came down too, nothing left to prove. He landed with an inelegant thud and stood, breathing hard.

  David showed me a metallic flash and I probably smiled. I looked back to the boy and for a second his face was cl
ear but then his eyebrows dropped and his right hand began to open and close. He raised his palm up and looked at it, stupidly, and then felt in his pockets and began to walk, down-facing, in panicky little circles, kicking at the grass.

  ‘What are you doing?’ David said.

  ‘I’ve lost my medal.’

  ‘Oh dear. When did you have it last?’

  ‘I don’t know. Up the tree?’

  ‘Go back to where you’ve been,’ he said, and for a moment he was trying to help; that’s what Mum would say and it nearly always worked. Though, of course, he had the medal himself, hot in his pocket.

  ‘Perhaps it fell in the water?’ David said.

  ‘I didn’t hear a splash.’

  David walked across to the bank and peered. It is possible I sniggered.

  ‘I think I can see something,’ David said. ‘In the pond. There.’

  He tipped onto one knee.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘See that shiny bit?’

  Matthias took a step and as his full weight hit the heel of his shoe, it slid up in a surprising arc. His leg stretched into blank midair and he came down on his bottom, hard, on the edge of the bank. Down he bumped with a splash into the water and then turned at once, as we had all been taught, and grabbed a tree root that had grown out into the pond. He seemed obviously safe and it was funny and we laughed. But Matthias was already crying.

  ‘Please get Mummy, it’s freezing,’ he said. His chin was shaking from side to side in a way you couldn’t copy if you tried.

  ‘Is it deep?’ David asked.

  In the shade, the liquid around Matthias looked thick and black. He was very still and I had the idea that he was stuck in a smooth, well-mixed tar. But when he raised a hand, the river’s properties shifted, water racing off him in the sweetest of candy pinks.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Have you cut yourself?’

  He turned his arm before him in a kind of wonder. The tears had stopped and his face was stiff. There was no visible wound and he dropped his arm. The water took it.