After You'd Gone (26 page)

'Alice,' Ann clutches her daughter's wrist, 'who is that

boy?'

'What?' says Alice, appalled.

'That boy.' Ann jabs her finger at him.

'It's none of your business. Why are you doing this to me?

Go away. Please.'

'Just answer my question. Who is that boy? What's his name?'

Alice is looking at her in incredulous fury. 'You are so embarrassing,' she hisses. 'He'll hear you. Why can't you just go away?'

'If you tell me his name then I'll go. I promise.'

Alice stares at her, torn between her need for privacy and her desire for Ann to disappear. 'Andrew Innerdale,' she says.

Ann closes her eyes. She never in a million years expected this. Is this divine retribution? Alice starts to withdraw her arm from Ann's grip. Ann clutches at it with renewed terror. 'Alice, tell me, are you going out with that boy?'

Alice is really furious now. 'Let go of me,' she spits, 'you promised you'd go. You promised. '

'Just tell me. Are you?'

'Why should I tell you? It's none of your business. ' Angry tears are springing into Alice's eyes.

'I want to know.'

'No. No, I'm not. We're just friends. OK?'

Ann looks past Alice at the boy who is hanging back, staring at them uncertainly. 'And are you going to go out with him? Does he want to go out with you?'

'Mum , please! Please can I go?' Alice twists her arm in her mother's grip. 'Why are you doing this to me? I hate you, I hate you! You're hurting my wrist.'

'Answer me. Does he?'

'Yes,' Alice sobs, wiping her eyes with her free hand.

Ann lets go. Alice springs back from the car, rubbing her wrist, and runs across the yard into the school building,

1
97

leaving the boy calling after her, 'Alice! Alice! Where are you going?'

Ann does a U-turn in the road, causing a driver coming in the other direction to gesture at her, and drives at top speed back to the house. She shuts herself in her bedroom, in case Elspeth should come back unexpectedly, cradling the phone on her lap.

She still knows the number off by heart. Of course.

'Can I speak to Mr lnnerdale, please?' she says, to his assistant. Then his voice is next to her ear and she is speaking and he is answering and she has to press her nails into her palms several times because she realises that nothing has changed, that despite the silence between them since she ended it - again - almost a year ago and despite the fact that she daily congratulates herself that she has managed to tear out the love she had for him by the roots, nothing has changed. 'Ineed your help,' she hears herself saying.

'Of course, Ann. Anything.'

'You've got to keep your son away from my daughter.' 'Your . . . ? Which one?'

'Alice.'

There is a pause. She hears him tut, his tongue hitting the back of his teeth.

'You mean my daughter, then.'

Ann stands, still grasping the phone, and begins to walk in tight, controlled steps around the room. 'Now, look, I don't want to go into all that again.'

'Why don't you just admit she's mine? Do you know that sometimes I leave the shop early and watch her walking home from school? I pass her in the street almost every week, sometimes close enough for me to touch her. She looks more like me than my own sons. She's mine and you know it. Why can't you just admit it?'

'What difference would it make?' Ann retorts. 'She's Ben's to all intents and purposes. And for your information, it is also,' she adds haughtily, 'more than likely that she is his altogether.'

'That's rubbish, Ann, and you know it. Of course she's

mine. There's no doubt about it. The older she gets, the more obvious it is. Don't you think she has a right to know the truth?'

'I'm never going to tell her about you. Never.'

'You can't cope with it, can you, Ann? You can't cope with this constant, living reminder of what we had - and what we still have.'

'We have nothing.' Ann thinks out these words, sees them as if written on an autocue inside her head, and reads them aloud to him. 'There is nothing between us. It's over. I've told you.'

'I don't believe you.' And he drops to a whisper, 'Ann,' he murmurs, his voice curling out from the telephone, slid ing down the secret spiral staircase of her ear, 'come and see me. '

'No.' She is panicked now. She can cope with anything but this. She stops walking about. She feels giddy, as though if she took a step she might tip forward into a terrible hole. If she stays rooted to this spot of her bedroom carpet, keeps her feet neatly together like this, everything will be all right.

'Please,' he urges.

'No.'

'Ann, don't say that. I love you. And I know you love me. You can't waste that. You just can't. Nobody will find out. Ben will never know, I promise you. Liza will never know. We'll be careful.'

'We were careful last time.'

'Not careful enough. Ann, please.'

199

'No.' Is this her speaking? Is this her voice saying these things? 'I mean it.'

He doesn't speak, doesn't ask her again. And part of Ann is glad, so glad, because if he asked her one more time, she knows she wouldn't say no, if he asked her again, she couldn't say no, she'd be out of this house and down at his shop in minutes. She is so close. Why doesn't he know that, damn him, why doesn't he ask again, just one more time, that's all it would take, my darling.'

After a while, she hears herself speak: 'I need you to promise me you'll keep your son away from her.'

Ask me again.

'Andrew can see who he likes.' His voice is distant this time, offhand and impersonal.

'Please. I need your cooperation on this. You and only you know how . . . wrong it could be.'

'What am I supposed to tell Andrew - sorry, son, she's your sister?'

'I don't care. Tell him what you have to. Make something up. You have to do this for me. Please.'

Please ask me again.

'You do realise that your asking me to do this is tantamount to admitting that Alice is my daughter.'

'I know that,' says Ann softly, 'but what are you going to do about it? Sue for custody?'

200

I still feel afraid, unsettled. Earlier - some time earlier, I don't know when - I was suddenly awae of this presence. Someone I didn't know was close to me, bending over me maybe. The scent my nostrils relayed to me was unfamiliar, male, tinged with nicotine.

I once watched a buzzard circling its prey from the air. It cruised the sky, searching, and when it found something, it would drop like a plumbline and hang suspended four or five feet above it, wings oscillating rapidly, waiting maybe a full minute before diving down.

This person, whoever it was - it was as if I could hear the crack of beating wings, feel a shadow hovering above me. My mind whirred and clicked: I wanted to scream, reach out and push him away. Is there a worse thing - knowing that someone is there and being powerless to move, speak or even see them?

Alice had been asleep since Newcastle, curled against him, her legs tucked under her, her funeral-black clothes rumpled and creased. She looked pale, with dark crescents under her eyes. John read her copy of
Daniel Deronda
and watched houses, factories, fields and the blank gazes of cattle reel past. Across the aisle a toddler grizzled and jumped up and down on the

2 01

seats. 'Stop that, Kimberley, ' the mother kept saying, without looking up from her magazine. Opposite them, two nuns peeled and ate a red string bag of oranges in silence, piling up the bits of peel on the table in pungent-smelling ziggurats. One of them gave him an oddly beatific smile when he caught her eye. The other looked away sourly. At Peterborough, Alice stretched and opened her eyes.

'Hello, how are you feeling?' John said.

'Um, all right. ' She yawned and pushed her tangled hair out of her eyes. 'Where are we? Have I been asleep long?'

'About two hours. We've just left Peterborough.' He closed the book and shoved it in the gap between their seats. 'Your family are great, you know. '

'Hmm.' She stared out of the window. 'I wish you could have met my grandmother.'

He took her hand and squeezed it. 'I wish I could have done too. ' He leant forward slightly to see if she was crying, but her face was dry, her eyes unfocused as the dusky scenery slid past them. 'You know,' he continued, 'there is nothing anyone can say that will make you feel better, but do you know this?' He frowned with concentration. '"Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest."'

'Who said that?'

'Julian of Norwich. Someone sent it to me when my mother died.'

'Julian of Norwich? The mad medieval mystic?'

'The very same, but she wasn't mad, I'll have you know.' Alice repeated it under her breath, looking at him intently.

'I like it. "Love is not changed by death . . ." I think Elspeth would have liked it too. Her husband died when she was about my age.'

'Really? What of?'

'Malaria. They were missionaries in Africa.' She picked up

202

the book he had been reading and absently flicked through the pages with her thumb, over and over. 'I'm glad we scattered her ashes on the Law,' she said suddenly. 'Did you scatter your mother's ashes somewhere?'

'No. She's buried in Golders Green.'

'Oh. Burial.' She shuddered. 'I've never liked the thought of that very much.'

'Why?'

'Putting the body of someone you love into the cold, damp earth, and then knowing that under the mound that you visit and tend is still them, slowly decaying bit by bit.'

'It's not really them. Only their body.'

'Yeah, but bodies are important too. In your sense of them, anyway.'

'I suppose so. It's never bothered me. I've never really thought of what lies beneath that headstone as my mother.'

She knelt up on the seat to see if the toilet's engaged sign was on.

'I need the loo. Back in a sec.'

She edged between him and the seat in front; he felt the warmth from her body on his face briefly before she walked down the aisle, steadying herself against the movement of the train by grasping the tops of the seats.

When she got back he saw she'd washed her face and brushed her hair. 'You look better,' he said, stroking the damp tendrils around her face.

'I feel better.' She smiled and swung her legs across his lap.

'What are you doing tomorrow?' he asked. 'Do you fancy an afternoon film at the NFT?'

She screwed up her face. 'I have a feeling I 'm doing something, but I can't remember . . . Oh, yes! Of course! I've got a big day tomorrow. I'm looking for a flat. I've decided. I

2 03

just can't bear that place any more. I'm going to get up really early, buy
Loot
and scour London to find my ideal home. Well, that's the plan anyway. I doubt I'll find one that quickly, but you never know. My dream home is out there somewhere - and I 've just got to find it. '

As she talked the idea that had been gradually forming in his mind crystallised into a definite and articulate desire

- that she should live nowhere but with him. He watched her fiddling with a plastic cup from the buffet car, and her words reached him in snatches - ' . . . one-bedroom flat in north London somewhere, Kilburn maybe . . . about eighty pounds a week or something . . . Willesden is supposed to be nice . . . a quieter road . . .'

'Move in with me,' he blurted out.

She was immediately silent. His words hung in the air between them.

'I mean, if you want to.' 'Do you want me to?'

He laughed and cupped her face in his hands. 'I really, really want you to.'

She circled his wrists with her fingers. Her pupils were very wide, her mouth serious. She's going to say no, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Damn. Serves you right for hurrying things too much.

'Do you want to move in with me?' he said shakily, and then began to burble: 'I mean, you can think about it. You don't have to decide right now. We could leave things as they are, if you like. Whatever. And if you need your own space you can keep your own flat or if you move in - not that I think you're definitely going to or anything, it's entirely up to you - but we could clear out the spare room so that-' 'John!' Alice put her fingers over his mouth. 'What?'