After Before

by Jemma Wayne

  “Please,” he says, without looking at her, his voice wobbling as it comes. “I’m trying to help her. To do the right thing. At least for the time she has left. You’re my fiancée, you should see her.”

  From her bag, Vera’s phone buzzes. Again. “Work,” she lies quickly, turning it off. But Luke doesn’t even lift his head. Has he grown used to it? Used to her being only half there? Only half true? Her stomach tightens. The thought of losing him hits her hard in her gut like a punch. Crouched over the steering wheel, he seems both weak and still so strong. Vera has an urge to touch him and tentatively she reaches for his arm. Through his thick winter coat she can feel his beating pulse. It is the most intimate they’ve been in weeks. And the thump of it is like an electric shock to Vera, a sudden propulsion.

  “I should have visited,” she says abruptly. “You’re right.”

  He breathes in heavily. Vera keeps her hand on his arm and feels for the rhythm beneath.

  “I’ll come Luke,” she says while the beat is strong. “I will. But before I do, I have to tell you something.”

  And she tells him.

  That she was pregnant by Charlie.

  That she almost had an abortion, and told his mother that she had it.

  That she had a baby.

  That she gave it away.

  She stops. Waiting. Hovering. Deciding.

  Luke looks up at her. His normally two-tone eyes seem almost black.

  The pastries are almost a week later. Short, dark days have crept by and Vera has marked them with a succession of doodles that have now completely obscured the message on Charlie’s card. At the time, after a long and uncomfortable silence, Luke thanked her for telling him, for allowing him the knowledge of the truth. Vera looked down when he said this but he didn’t seem to notice her unease, or presumed probably that what she did confess was enough reason for it. He said he was grateful to her for enabling him to speak into her life with what he hopes will be help and illumination. And for a fleeting, uncertain moment, he squeezed her hand. But seven days have passed and he is yet to ‘speak’. They have not been speaking. He has texted her a few times with wedding necessities - a sign she has taken as positive; but he has not answered her calls, they have not dissected what she told him, he has not unloaded her of her remaining secrets. She presents the sweets to Luke on Lynn’s doorstep feeling a little silly in her grand gesture, but she has nothing else. “I brought pastries,” she declares, stupidly.

  He looks good. Tired, anxious, slightly more dishevelled than usual; but with grey-green eyes full of soul, and arms that if wrapped around her would solve everything. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected it,” Luke says quietly after a long pause.

  “Expected what?”

  “Expected more than, well, pastries. It was too much for you.”

  Vera feels the sting.

  “It was too soon for me to ask it,” he carries on, attempting to clarify, to temper. Then slowly he bends forwards and reaches for the box.

  Accepting it. Accepting her? Accepting what she has done? What he knows of what she has done. Vera shakes her head. She wants to tell him the rest. The truth. She has come so far. But his breath draws close to hers flexing warmth through the cold air and Vera smells his familiar aftershave. The desire to collapse into his forgiveness is too much. Breathing in deeply she wonders how she could ever have placed him in her periphery.

  Then, of course, her phone buzzes. Always buzzing. Buzzing. Startling her like a police car or an ambulance siren. A flashing light reminding her of danger ahead.

  “Come in,” Luke whispers. And she does, but without telling him anything more, without answering her phone that is blinking at her from the top of her bag, and without quite noticing his hand on her back, or the pain behind his eyes, or the way that he is watching her not watching him.

  At first, Vera and Lynn greet each other with great fanfare. A fuss is made over the pastries, which Lynn insists be served on a particular plate that Luke has to root around for in the display cabinet in the dining room, and has to be eaten from matching dishes which Luke says he can’t even recall, but finds eventually. The elaborate display of china seems to please Lynn and she insists on making a pot of tea with another delicate piece, despite their entreaties for her to sit and let them take care of it. Finally they all settle and endeavour to keep up the high spirits.

  The older woman sits opposite Vera, loudly saying nothing. Her white hair is pulled back into its usual bun, her blouse freshly ironed, her cheeks lightly rouged, but the creases around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth seem to have hardened into the skin. Her lips are chapped and the first signs of undernourishment are appearing around the jaw. She seems far older than her 58 years. Occasionally, when she thinks nobody is watching, she winces. It is a peculiar feeling for Vera, to mix pity with trepidation. She tries to behave normally but hears herself talking several tones higher than usual and making jokes that nobody laughs at. Luke’s face seems unprepared for laughter. He is absorbed in studying his mother and every now and then his jaw clenches or his eyelids blink in quickened succession. The sight of his bitten nails makes Vera swallow hard. She tries to catch his hand across the couch, but he folds it into his lap, then leaves the room. There is an urgent phone call, he apologises.

  From the next room, Luke’s voice rises and falls. Rises and falls. Rises and falls. Vera tries to steady her own breath with his and, alone again with Lynn, tries desperately to think of a topic for conversation, but she cannot come up with anything. Ever since her phone rang on the doorstep she has been thinking about Charlie, and even with Luke and Lynn and the agony of it all directly in front of her, her mind is almost wholly occupied by this, by him: the father, the ex, the victim, the aggressor. And by apprehension and anticipation of what sooner or later she will have to hear him spew - blame, and deserved reproach. She knows that the phone in her bag will ring again, will keep ringing, and she should have turned it off, but now in front of Lynn it would seem rude to fish around for the mobile. Vera endeavours not to stare at her bag too noticeably. The silence persists and she makes a mental note to prepare conversation in advance of her next visit. What does one discuss with future mother-in-laws with no future of their own? For her part, Lynn says nothing, and doesn’t appear to be trying to. Perhaps, Vera supposes, there is simply little for them to say. They are too different. Lynn too pure and Vera too imperfect, still.

  Yet they cannot say nothing forever.

  “I’ve told him,” Vera announces to Lynn suddenly, out of nowhere.

  There is no time for the older woman to reply before Luke re-enters the room.

  He looks purposeful. The remains of a smile cling to his face and he seems refreshed almost. Vera watches him gladly, relieved that he is coping after all, that he has been coping without her attention. As he replaces his phone in his pocket however and sinks into his place on the sofa, his steady breath seems to leave him. He coughs slightly and asks his mother if she would like a blanket. She does not. He asks if she would like the window closed. She does not. He asks if she would like another pot of tea, but the one on the table is still half full and Lynn tells him so. Luke nods, and picks up his bible. He offers to read them passages from it, and finally at this Lynn assents. Luke grips the spine tightly. He recites verses that speak of tests of faith, and hard times, and healing. His voice is strong as ever, affirming, sure, but he rarely glances up at Lynn who sits still in her cream-coloured chair with perfect posture and respectfully listens, despite the faint frown that occasionally creeps across her brow, just fleetingly, before she remembers Luke and hurries it away. With the bible in his hand, Luke is no longer looking at her so does not see this. But Vera sees. And watches. Mother and son locked in tragic theatre. Mother sacrifice. Mother devotion. She cannot take her eyes off them.

  After what seems like a very long time, John arrives. He flounces onto the sofa in his flamboyant way, and wraps his scarf around his mouth to indicate he’ll be quiet, an
d although he rolls his eyes and slumps into himself as Luke reads on, he dutifully says nothing. And Lynn says nothing. And as they sit there, separately, bound only by teachings that she knows John does not believe, and promises from God that perhaps they don’t all feel, and messages that she is beginning to learn come not from the book alone but reside in one’s heart, none of them ask: why us? Or confess to each other what is all over Luke’s face: fear and panic and vulnerability. They simply carry on, clinging on, letting Luke cling on for them, his voice growing ever more insistent and desperate and distressed until finally Vera’s phone rings, again, as she knew it would, and at last she has a way to step in to save him.

  “That’s probably the minister telling us it’s time to wrap up this service!” she declares jokingly. Then more softly: “Luke, you don’t want to bore your mother to death.” She smiles at him gently as she says this, a smile he’d once told her was sunrise-speckled.

  “That’s not funny,” he pronounces solemnly.

  Vera’s phone buzzes again.

  John smiles in sympathy at her accidental choice of words but the others stare at her expectantly.

  The phone continues to buzz.

  “I mean - I meant… ” She trails off. What did she mean? Only for him to stop, to look up. Luke is looking up now but does not attempt to rescue her. Vera can think of nothing else to say. She had not meant to be brazen or flippant.

  The phone buzzes.

  “Well then, it’s interrupted us,” Lynn declares suddenly with a cantankerous flap of her hand. “Don’t you think you should answer it?”

  Now everybody is waiting. Watching. The buzzing persists.

  “Come on,” hurries Lynn.

  Luke nods.

  John nods.

  Lynn nods vociferously.

  Slowly, Vera retrieves the phone from her bag and puts it to her ear.

  “Don’t hang up,” says Charlie.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  Lynn sat straight in a hard-backed chair at the dining table and rested her hand on the stack of paper in front of her. The monogrammed pen that Philip had once given her and she’d employed mainly for writing thank you cards, hovered, the tip ready and spouting a tiny bubble of blue ink. One of the lawyers at Philip’s firm had already prepared the legal jargon of her will, updated to account for Philip not being there, John and Luke being grown-ups now, and Luke preparing to be married. Really, she should have restructured it years ago. Her lawyer had prompted her regularly, but she’d been barely 40 when Philip had died. Now she was not yet 60… And she supposed she hadn’t wanted to move on anyway, officially. Or couldn’t. Just like Emily. Now she was forced to, and contemplated the great list of items she would soon no longer have a need for, the inventory of possessions by which it was possible to catalogue one’s life.

  The house would have to go to John. Lynn placed her hand on her chest. Since her Rummy-fuelled conversation with Emily weeks earlier, she had found it difficult to think of her youngest son without feeling a deep pang inside her. But there were practicalities to consider before sensibilities. John lived still in a one-bedroom flat that he rented, and was without a steady income. He was the one who needed a house. She lifted the pen. But Luke would undoubtedly feel snubbed, think she was favouring his brother, and remember this about her. She should tell him about it in advance perhaps. Or make him the executor of the will, the responsible one, the one she could always rely upon, and make sure he knew that, knew how well he’d held them up. She would be gone but these things mattered. They would frame the boys’ memories, and be her last testament.

  Luke would want Philip’s watch. Lynn liked to take it out of its box each morning, shine it and lay it on her wrist. Listen to it ticking like a heartbeat. But Luke had always admired it. She moved her pen and made a note of this, carefully, in her best script. When she’d raced through her History exams at Cambridge her penmanship had drastically deteriorated, the style in which she wrote much less important than the content. But here, now, she was precise and spent time on the flourishes.

  John must have the gramophone. They hadn’t used it properly for years having long ago abandoned it for cassettes and CDs and in recent months an iPod Luke had bought her. But she kept the ancient instrument in the sitting room next to a stack of old vinyl records and every now and then, amidst one of his spells of exuberance, John dusted it off and set it working. Then they would put on Frankie Laine or Dickie Valentine and – before her side had grown too painful – dance together around the sofa as if they were at an old-fashioned dance. John had always been able to sense that Lynn missed this, this taste of what it was like to have a man on whose arm one could swing. Did John have a man to swing on? Was there somebody he loved? Somebody who…

  What else? There had to be other things of value in her life, things her sons would want. The china. Lynn lifted her pen again and began to detail the collection. This should go to Luke of course. He was the one who would have a wife. She would appreciate it, and add to it perhaps, over time. Should she specify Vera’s name? She had begun to come round again lately. It still irked Lynn to see her; she was young and rude and awkward, and in love, and young, and young. But she was persistent in her effort, Lynn had to give her that. She was amusingly forthright. And they seemed to have made a tacit agreement not to mention the mortifying exchanges that had passed before the arrival of Emily. But what if they divorced? It happened these days and considering Vera’s background... Would Vera then pack her bags and in them place Lynn’s wedding china? Maybe she wouldn’t want it. Maybe she’d replace the floral pattern with something modern and classless. Maybe it would languish at the back of a cupboard or in a box in the attic and never be used year after year, nor be displayed, or even remembered.

  Lynn wrote only Luke’s name down as a beneficiary. Then suddenly she remembered the shares. And the offshore bank account Philip had created from which she still earned a salary. And the art. And her jewellery. She capped the pen and placed it on the table. Her side was playing up again and she felt nauseous and tired. There was too much to think about. She wanted to rest. But the documents would have to be cleared off the table somehow before Luke arrived, and the bed still hadn’t been made, and there was a dirty, floral cup in the kitchen sink. And she hadn’t finished her painting. And the agency hadn’t called back about Emily coming on weekends.

  Painfully, Lynn pulled herself up to standing and dusted the sheets of paper into a loose pile which she placed in the drawer of the side table she had always meant to fill with after dinner mints, or fresh sprigs of lavender, or spare greetings cards. It remained empty, save for a collection of elastic bands that Philip used to bind his post and she sometimes still found, inexplicably, on the dining room floor. And couldn’t bear to get rid of. Steadying herself for a moment at the doorframe she made her way into the sitting room where she sank into her chair and closed her eyes, the sore rims thanking her with ready teardrops.

  The night before she had been unable to sleep again. There were twin terrors. First her body: nausea and headaches, and pain shooting through her arm. Then her mind: the future, the future, the future; that she wouldn’t see and couldn’t affect and was unable to control. It was filled with things like Luke and his need to fix the world. John and his life that she knew too little of, and had blackened with pretence, and the dwindling moments left in which to put that right. And, Emily. Most insistently, Emily. The girl shouldn’t have mattered to Lynn as much as she did – she was barely more than a stranger – but Lynn found herself thinking of her constantly.

  It was impossible to sleep when one of these thoughts struck her. Or, as was more frequent, when they all struck at once. Lynn opened her eyes and a tear slipped out of them. There was so much to do. So much she still wanted to do.

  When she woke, Luke was there. He’d let himself in and was sitting in his usual place, opposite hers, watching her silently.

  “How long have you been there?” she murmured.
<
br />   “Just a few minutes.”

  Luke’s brow was furrowed, again. He was beginning to age.

  “I only closed my eyes for a second. I’ve been busy all morning,” she told him, quickly checking her hair and sitting up.

  “Are you feeling tired Mother? Would you rather not go to lunch?”

  “Don’t be so silly. I got sleepy sitting here waiting for you, that’s all. It’s hot in here.”

  “I told John to check the thermostat.”

  “I like it hot.”

  “I’ll check it now.”

  Luke fetched Lynn’s purse from her bedroom and didn’t mention the unmade bed. “You look beautiful Mother,” he said as she buttoned her sensible, knee-length black coat and made for the door.

  John and Vera were both already at the table. John was dressed in a white shirt underneath a cream linen jacket with a silk scarf around his neck. For years, Lynn had bought him lumberjack shirts and woollen blazers, but that week, she had got Emily to pick up a fitted velvet waistcoat which she had wrapped for Christmas already, in case later there wasn’t time. In case this gesture would have to say everything. When they entered, he was waving his arms around dramatically and Vera was slowly folding into her chair, holding her stomach in hysterics. She looked illuminated.

  “Are we interrupting?” Luke queried, pulling a chair out for Lynn then kissing Vera – perfunctorily, Lynn noticed – and sitting himself next to her.

  “John was just telling me about the cast in his new play,” Vera offered. “They’re very funny.”

  “You didn’t check the thermostat,” Luke told him.