After You'd Gone (20 page)

'What do you need to wear glasses for?' she asks suddenly. He takes his eyes away from the road for a moment to look over at her. 'You make it sound like a crime. I need them for driving, going to the cinema and theatre - that sort of thing. Long-distance stuff. Working at a computer eight or nine hours a day has done it.'

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'So you' re going to go blind as well as bald.' 'Blind, maybe, but not bald.'

He moves his left hand from the wheel on to her leg. She smooths the hollow of her palm over the back of his hand, listening to the changes in sound as it moves over his knuckles, tendons and fingers.

'When was it your mother died?' she asks.

'It was the end of my first year at uni. I was nineteen. You would have been a sexy seventeen-year-old.'

'A stroppy seventeen-year-old, more like.' She curls her fingers around his. 'How did it happen?'

'She had breast cancer. Initially, anyway. She found the first lump the day after my A levels finished and she was dead by the following summer. It had spread everywhere -pancreas, lungs, bowels, ovaries, liver. At Easter they opened her up, intending to operate on her liver, and when they saw all the tumours, they just sewed her back up again and sent her home. They told us she wouldn't last the month out, but she did, and two more as well.'

'John, that's terrible.'

'It was, yes. '

'How did your father take it?'

'Pretty badly, as you'd expect after twenty-six years of marriage.'

'And how is he now?'

'Well, you see, now he's turned religious. Really religious. I suppose it's not that surprising, when you think about it. But he's worried a lot of people.'

'Why?'

'Because his new-found faith has such a . . . desperate . . . obsessive quality about it. My mother was very religious and he was always cynical about it. Used to tease her a lot. I mean, he'd have been the first to describe himself as a Jew, but he would

have been claiming it as his race, rather than his religion. He referred to my barmitzvah as "life insurance". She tried to make us all keep kosher but he wasn't having any of it. Anyway, since she died, he's become a real religious monomaniac. He won't even eat at my house - even if I buy the right food - because I don't keep a kosher kitchen. He has separate plates for milk and meat, he's even got two dishwashers. He observes all these obscure laws and I keep forgetting. He gets really annoyed if I do something like phone him on a Saturday. It's pretty . . . difficult at times. He seems to have this twisted logic that unless he perpetuates my mother's belief - the belief he himself used to mock - he's somehow being untrue to her memory. He's always been very pro the idea of me marrying a Jew but now he's obsessed. It's been hard. I wish sometimes he would meet someone else, just so there'd be someone else for him to focus on.'

'Apart from you, you mean?'

'Yes. I don't think he will, though. I can't imagine it.'

John takes back his hand abruptly and puts it on the wheel again. His face looks shuttered up and gloomy. Alice is silent and the warmth his hand has left in hers fades rapidly. She clasps her hands together over her knees, drawing them up to her chest.

As they are driving through Crouch End, he says, 'Alice, I've had the most brilliant weekend.'

'So have I. I loved that place.' She stretches out her legs. 'Am I going to see you again?'

His shoulders jerk in surprise and the car swerves dan gerously. 'What do you mean? Don't say things like that. Are you going to see me again? Well, of course. I mean . . . don't you want to see me again? I thought . . . What are you talking about? Was this just some little fling for you?'

I _p

'No, of course it wasn't. You know that. There's no need to get angry.'

'Yes, there is a need to get angry when you say things like that. Tell me what you mean, Alice.'

'What I mean is, the Jewish thing.'

He doesn't say anything. When she plucks up courage to look over at him he is gripping the wheel, his shoulders hunched. She sighs. 'John, I'm not angry with you. I don't want to give you a hard time. I couldn't give a shit what religion or race you are, you know that. But it does matter to you, you can't deny it. I just want to be realistic.'

'Realistic?'

'Yes. I don't want to get hurt by you. You have to decide what you want.'

'This is what I want, ' he thumps the wheel, 'I told you that.'

She says nothing, unconvinced. 'You don't believe me, do you?'

'It's not that. I believe that you believe what you are saying here and now, but I also believe that you could change your mind.'

'I won't.'

'You might.' She spreads her hands over her eyes and temples. 'Look, this is all getting a bit heavy. We have only just met. Why don't we agree to just take it easy and see what happens?'

He grunts non-committally. 'I don't see why you just can't believe me. '

'John, let's not spoil the weekend by arguing over some thing that hasn't and might never happen. This is all so speculative.' She sees a signpost for Holloway flash past. They are heading towards the outskirts of Finsbury Park. 'Could you drop me off at my flat, please?'

He looks instantly panicked. 'I thought . . . I mean, would you like to come back to my house? You haven't seen it yet.' 'I'd love to come and see it another night, but I need to unpack and get ready for work tomorrow.'

'Oh. I feel . . . I'd really like you to come back. I feel like we'd be parting on a bad note. '

She shakes her head. 'We're not. I promise.'

'Come round for dinner, then. Tomorrow night - no, shit, I can't make tomorrow. How about Tuesday?'

'Tuesday's fine. What time?' 'Eight o'clock? At my house.'

The car has drawn up at the end of the terrace outside Alice's flat. John jumps out of the car and comes round the other side j st as she is getting out. He puts his arms around her and they kiss for a long time.

'I'm so sorry for being arsy earlier. I'm an idiot.' 'No, you're not, and it's fine.'

He traces her cheekbone with his thumb. 'I wouldn't ever hurt you, Alice.'

She turns her head and bites his thumb. 'You'd better not.'

He laughs, lifts her off her feet and spins her round. 'I'll see you Tuesday, then. '

'Yes. There's just one small problem with that.' 'What?'

'I don't have your phone number or address. '

He puts her down. 'For God's sake. I'd better give it to you. ' He scribbles furiously on a piece of paper, then they kiss again. 'Are you sure you don't want to come back?' John says, after a while.

'Yes. You'd better go now before I change my mind. Be off with you.'

Alice waves after his receding tail-lights. It's only after his car has disappeared round the bend that she looks at the piece

of paper he's given her. On it is written his phone number, his address and then the words 'love John xxx'. She bounds up the steps to her flat door.

She lets herself in, awkwardly clutching her bag in one hand and struggling with the lock and handle with the other. Dropping the bag to the floor, she stands with her back against the door for a while, still holding her keys. Then she moves through the flat, putting on a CD, drawing the curtains, filling the kettle. Her room is full of evidence of her hurried packing on Friday afternoon - clothes strewn all over the bed, books in sliding heaps on the floor. She feels strange looking at all this. Was it really only two days ago that she'd thrown those things there? It feels like another age, that the whole flat belongs to a different person. She flops on to the bed. She can unpack in the morning. In the flat below, rhythmic music starts up and muffled voices are raised above it. She lies on her stomach, propping her chin up on her hands. John's note is curled in her palm. She smooths it flat on the duvet. A train rattles through the night, making the house shudder. Somewhere across the city he is swinging his car into his street.

'I've seen your type before,' the man said, as he approached Ann.

Ann brought her cigarette to her lips and inhaled. The man was vaguely familiar to her, and it wasn't impossible that she could have seen him in and around the town, but it was probably only because there were hundreds of men in this town who looked like him - thinning ginger hair, the beginnings of a paunch straining at his shirt buttons, a suede-panelled cardigan, fawn slacks. Ann breathed out the smoke, watching as the man's eyes began to water. He had a rim of beer froth stuck to the ends of his thick, ginger moustache.

'Have you?' she said.

'You're Englis.h, aren't you? Oh, yes.' He answered him self, so Ann didn't bother to make any response. 'I know your type.'

'Really? And what's that?'

Ann had been standing alone in .the front room of a large brick house on the eastern edge of North Berwick. All around her youngish married couples like her and Ben talked and ate and drank and flirted with each other. It was the party of someone Ben had been at school with. He was now a dentist, Ben told her, as they walked up the driveway. Ann had been standing by the fireplace, having slipped away from Ben ages

ago when an earnest-looking man with a Labrador-dog tie started asking him what car he was thinking of buying this year. And now this man had appeared from the kitchen, bearing - ominously - two glasses of beer.

'Petite,' the man said, 'blue eyes. Blonde.' He gave the word a revving up like a motorbike.

'Married,' Ann added, holding up her hand to show him the gold band encircling her finger.

'Aha!' he said, focusing on it with difficulty. 'A challenge! I like that! Lemme see.' He slammed his beers down on the mantelpiece and got hold of her hand, stroking it flat on his own. 'Now, you might not think it, but I am a very respected palm -reader.'

'Is that so?' Ann drew on her cigarette once more.

'Oh, yes, oh, yes. You're very passionate, very responsive. But there's something that life isn't quite giving you, something that leaves you with a deep but hidden dissatisfaction.'

Ann pulled at her hand, but the man had her wrist in a tight, sweaty-fingered grip.

'What's this?' he asked, running the tip of his finger along

a jagged, colourless scar that bisected her palm, making her fingers jitter compulsively. 'Nasty cut that must have been. How did that happen, then? Husband did it, did he?'

Ann removed her. cigarette from her lips. 'Let go of my hand,' she spat the words out one by one, very clearly, 'you ugly little troll.'

The man let her wrist slither from his grip, astonished.

Ann flicked the butt into the fire grate and walked away through people whom she knew were looking at her, but she didn't care.

She wanted Ben. Where was he? It felt like hours since

she'd left him with the boring man .. In the hallway, she saw the woman whose house it was, standing next to an arrangement

of hideous blue dried flowers whispering with another woman Ann didn't know. 'Have you seen my husband?' Ann asked.

'Ben? He was in the dining room, I think, last time I saw him. Bit worse for wear, I'd say. But, then, as I'm always telling my Peter, if you can't let your hair down once in a while, what can you do?'

'Yes. ' Ann plucked at the hem of her blouse. 'In here, did you say?'

'Right through there, on your left. Can't miss it.' 'Thanks.'

Ann pushed her way down the corridor, through vanous people lining the walls with drinks and cigarettes in their hands. Women's bodies were softer; they moved to let her pass. Men's didn't yield but inquisitively held their ground, remaining rigid to her as she tried to slide past them. I am thirty-one years old, Ann thought, my three little girls are asleep in their beds, what am I doing here?

In the dining room, a woman in too-tight trousers was sitting on the smoked-glass-topped table fondling a tabby cat. Two men were standing in front of her.

'The thing about the Edinburgh schools,' one of them was saying, 'is, of course, that you are guaranteed that your child will be mixing with others of alpha-type intelligence. '

'You just don't get that guarantee with the High School,' the woman said.

'You just don't,' the second man agreed.

'Excuse me, ' Ann said, stepping towards them, 'you haven't seen Ben, have you?'

'Ben who?' asked the woman. The cat circled her hips, tail in the air, displaying the neat circle of its anus.

'Ben Raikes.'

'Ooooooh,' the woman exclaimed, and held out her hand. 'You 're Ann, aren't you? I can't believe we haven't met before.