Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  Stef took our order for the takeaway, a tea towel over his shoulder to make us laugh. Lou’s legs were heavy across my lap. The dog sat on my feet.

  ‘How about a movie?’ he said after he’d phoned it through, and we agreed on one we’d seen ten times before. He called for Frieda, who’d just got back. The wine began to do its work.

  It is hard to see where Stefan has aged, he has the type of looks that hold: blunt bone-structure, thick cheekbones, his nose just slightly flat. Light blue eyes and short hair since forever, cropped close to his well-shaped skull.

  The movie began, so familiar that it bored me instantly.

  Plus he has taste, which I can recognise, despite having little of my own, in his brushed plaid shirt and his stiff dark jeans and authentic work-boots imported from the USA.

  ‘One minute,’ I said. There’s something I just need to check.’

  ‘Shall we pause?’ Jake asked.

  ‘No, go ahead,’ I said. ‘I can easily catch up.’

  I poured myself a drop more wine and went to the alcove that David had built, a knocked-out bookcase in what used to be the dining room; an awkward little adjunct that unbalanced the space. I felt a hope in my throat as I waited for my screen to wake, but we rarely email, and never text and there was nothing. It ruined me, briefly, nonetheless. Stef is a good man and a textbook father. A faithful partner. All of these things and more, but he is not Adam, at whose nearness all logic collapses.

  They brought me through some takeaway, cool and separating on the plate and later, came in, one by one, for a tentative goodnight.

  ‘Are you OK, Mummy?’ Louisa said. I pulled her close. Always so dry, Lou, the skin tight and scaled under her nose, beside her mouth. Bleached to bone, she looked; pale eyes, white hair.

  ‘I’m fine, sweet. Off you go.’

  My mood had reached them, infused the house, but I refuse to lay that at Adam’s door. I remember this – this restlessness, this inability to settle – from before. I am a working woman, my time with the kids is parcelled and discrete, and loaded because of it. It is impossible to wring satisfaction out of every occasion, on demand, and acknowledging this, making peace with it, saves a lot of unnecessary grief.

  When Adam and I first began, my children’s pleasure hurt me. It seemed too fragile, too tentative; I had the idea that it existed in reverse proportion to my own and in the darkest times, I thought we couldn’t all survive. And then I came to see that our love – Adam’s and mine – is beneficent. It shines its light on everything. It makes all of this easier. And yet, when, sometime after midnight, Free reappeared, owl-eyed at the edge of the room, I felt grateful for another chance.

  ‘Sweetheart. Are you having a dream? I’m here.’

  She came to me and leant her weight into my shoulder. Her closeness, and the wine I’d drunk, set off my heart. Her hair was rubbed to candy floss at the back and the trousers of her pyjamas pooled around her feet.

  ‘Are you ill?’ I said, reaching for her forehead and then mine.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I just woke up.’

  ‘Take this off. Cool down.’

  She let me slide off the thin dressing gown and I felt the skin on her arms pimple, and her exposure in her T-shirt. She sat on my lap then, and hunched her shoulders, her back a comma. I pulled her close and the heat left her body quickly, passing into mine.

  ‘Do you want anything, darling?’ I asked, into her neck. She had missed a smudge of foundation, which smelled of wet paint and powdered milk beneath the alcohol and cucumber of her wash. I rubbed it from her jaw. Her top gave off a delicious base-note of old sweat that had outlived a hundred washes to be baked deep into the cotton by the dryer.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ she said, with hope.

  ‘Not this time of night. How about warm milk?’

  Then Stef was there.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said.

  ‘Daddy,’ she called, and her bony bottom dug into my thigh as she pushed herself up. I watched their mirrored profiles, leant in close, and felt a strange intersection of jealousy and relief. I switched off the broadband, I let out the dog. Kicked the shoes into a heap near the front door and lifted the pile of clean clothes that needed taking up. I trawled the rooms for more discarded things and bent for the hem of Frieda’s robe which had slipped off the back of my chair. As I lifted it, her phone slid out of a pocket and hit the floor with a rubberised clunk.

  The knock woke it up, and I saw she had a text, 11.47 p.m. – too late, I thought, for a girl of fourteen. The drink turned a sour roll in my stomach and I felt a mother’s vulnerability, my absolute dependence on my child. To make the right decisions, to be happy, to survive.

  Stef stood in the doorway to the garden and whistled for the dog. It was Beatrice, her best friend.

  Sounds intense. Can’t W8 2 hEr mo xxx

  Some girlish intrigue, no doubt, though I didn’t like the tone, the ambiguity, the suggestion of risk. I heard the dog skid over the kitchen tiles in avoidance of his basket and felt sheer terror, a kind of slideshow in my mind, a Greatest Hits of chaos and disaster, but that moment always passes.

  3

  Two years, then, since I found Adam; since that first weighted meeting. But was it the start? To name it as such feels too fated, too certain. There was a time when it could have gone either way. I fell in love slowly, from a distance. In my imagination first. Old-fashioned, really; for a while it was all just dreams and deferral.

  I caught the first flight back the morning after the conference, battered by a couple of hours’ parched and restless sleep. There were a few people on the plane from the previous night, but we ignored each other comfortably. I ate everything that was offered, however it smelled, and tried to hide inside my book.

  The evening had been long. More food was ordered, and wine. Adam told a couple of warm stories from back in the day and I recovered; alcohol will do that. His wife was an actor, I heard him say, and I imagined stage make-up and jazz hands. The management sent across a tray of drinks and a second, and from then, the night was broken by others’ drunken mis-steps: the upended bottle, the inappropriate joke, Chloe’s extended trip to the loo, where I’m pretty sure she threw up, all of which we shared, he and I, across the table, in an effortless telepathy. His hotel room was in a different wing to mine, so we avoided that tell-tale moment of goodnight.

  On the plane, I thought of his face. There is something roguish in the set of it, long and bony, but the rest of him pokes fun at that. His hair is a collapse. He has a lolloping gait and is far too thin; he wears his trousers belted out of necessity. Colour and texture, angle and feel. The details began to assume a sort of meaning, as if he were complete and intended, like a painting or a book; beautiful and important.

  A week later, there was contact; a group email from the conference’s organiser asking for feedback. My address was the only one visible but I saw him at his desk, rating the experience 1 to 5. I answered the questions imagining myself him. On the final page I read, would we care to share our details with the group? I replied yes. Another week, and a message headed: Intros!! arrived.

  Dear ex-delegates,

  See the inbox for your fellow attendees’ addresses!

  Feel free to get in touch! Attached is a list of names and specialities also. I’ll duck out now.

  Enjoy. See you next year!

  His name was first and I wondered if he was quickest to respond and what that might mean. Emails came in across the day, vague and enthusiastic but Adam remained quiet; I watched for him from the fringes of the exchange, turning him over in my mind, and maybe that was harmless, a middle-aged woman’s distraction, or else it breathed life into something frail and barely viable, one of trillions of maybes that would fall away if they failed to take root, and my attention was soil.

  I found his wife online easily enough. His Facebook feed had looked unpromising, just birthday wishes and the odd professional approach but at the bottom of his timeline was one tagged photo,
taken from behind, of him and a woman hand in hand at the top of an ancient sloped street in some bleached-out holiday town. The shot didn’t tell me much, save placing them loosely in the urban middle classes with her rough straw hat and the corked backs of a pair of Birkenstocks. Adam’s shoulders were holstered with the straps of a long-lens camera and a beat-up leather satchel. I watched the image for a while and came to see that his head was just inclined towards her, though she looked straight ahead. The post read: Lazy Summer Days and was dated the previous year. When I held my cursor above her, a name appeared: Tara Cole. Her account was private, though I found her elsewhere in no time. I pulled up a CV and a ludicrous head-shot and no evidence of work in the last ten years.

  *

  Summer came, and regular contact from the group. A pattern emerged. Ann sent details of her speaking engagements. That guy I’d sat next to at the meal kept trying to sell things; a week in a Dorset cottage, an unused exercise bike, his old car in the end. A woman I didn’t remember pasted articles from The Guardian once a week and Chloe began each Monday morning with a joke related to the various therapeutic services.

  Jake tore a ligament falling down a muddy bank and was on crutches for a month. I took my Aunty April for her first pedicure, which she hated and let me know by talking loudly and self-consciously for the full hour as we sat side by side, feet tepid in gently pulsing water, and Adam receded under the weight of all this dailyness, though I pulled out the thought of him, now and again, sitting amongst the family in a rare moment of stupefied rest, or more often when I was alone. He became my treat. I wrote a paper which was to be published in a journal and sent it, flinchingly, to the group. Their replies were kind and considered and I acknowledged my affection for our scrappy band.

  Then one night Stef told me that he was ready to set up on his own; branding and design, still, but with an online twist. He had two clients ready to go, and how would I feel about giving him the shed and working from an office again? Delighted, I said and next evening, I emailed the group, subject: ‘on the off-chance,’ asking if anybody cared to share as I was looking for space. Adam answered by reply, subject: ‘Very weird’ and wrote:

  I do. I’ve just decided to get back into practice. Should we meet? Happy to help look for places, if you’ll have me. Just let me know. Hope you’re well etc.

  Adam.

  We met, the following week, on the last hot day of the year which smelt of traffic fumes and bitumen. He was late, and I leant into the warm brick of the building and waited, bouncing the estate agent’s keys on their coiled plastic chain. I’d left my sunglasses at home and closed my eyes to slits, watching a thin white line of day between them. I wondered, loosely, what I was doing here, but six months had passed since I’d seen him and the whole thing seemed benign. I couldn’t touch the danger of it. I almost dozed, and he surprised me when he pulled up in his cab, ten minutes on, full of apology. His fluster, the contortion of his limbs as he got out of the car, his fumble for change, all made me laugh. I guess the dregs of it were still there on my face, for when he turned to me, it was his smile in reply that was the hook. It was the most complete smile I’d ever seen, and I wondered how one man gained access, had the right, to so much pleasure. It pinned me to the wall, that smile.

  ‘Good spot,’ he said, in the end, and I felt myself come down. ‘Café next door. I think I passed a pub back there.’

  ‘Bit of a boozer,’ I said.

  ‘Best sort.’

  ‘So it used to be a flat,’ I said, when we got inside. ‘The others are still residential.’

  ‘Good for security though.’

  The entrance hall was hushed and domestic; empty, save for a frill-edged table with a glass top and tapered legs pushed against the wall. Someone had arranged the post into four neat piles.

  ‘Odd, do you think, for clients?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s go up and see.’

  I started up the stairs, but when I lifted my foot, the toe of my shoe had left a dark arrow point of dust on the carpet.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said and bent awkwardly to the mark, forcing him back down the hall. From my vantage point, under one arm, I saw that he wore loose cotton trousers and the same belt as last time and I gave a sort of snigger; it was the nerves. We climbed, and the staircase moaned somewhere underneath us.

  ‘Don’t you feel like we should be whispering?’ he said and his voice felt illicit at my neck.

  ‘They’re probably all at work,’ I replied, but as we passed along the second floor, I heard a television start, the call of a furious studio audience.

  It got hotter as we climbed and I wondered if he was watching the back of me.

  ‘OK, so this is us,’ I said.

  The locks were new and the keys slid in flush. The owner must have knocked down walls, for the room we stepped into was large and had no equivalent in a home. It had been repainted in a blistering white, the smell of it still sharp. The front door shut behind us heavily, launching old dust into the air and I watched it rise, substantial as ash, reach its highest point and then start to fall back down slowly through blocks of silver daylight. As he walked into the room beyond, I saw a light layer come to rest in the weft of his clothes and on the contours of his hair. I had the idea of brushing him clean, the feel of his jacket and the bones of his shoulder.

  ‘Let’s open some windows,’ he said. They had been painted shut and gave with a brief clean scream.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. I felt a breeze and heard traffic noise below and regretted the break in the seal of the place. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘It still feels like a house.’

  ‘I know what you mean but this room would be a great office. You could put your desk here, facing that way. And the client there. There’s plenty of space.’

  He padded round in circles, the way the dog does before he comes to lie. His hands, by his sides, were long and curved as though he held a ball in each.

  ‘Shall we look around the rest?’ he said.

  I passed through two more rooms which also failed to stick.

  ‘Oh and there’s a shower,’ he called, out of sight.

  I waited for him at the mouth of a brand-new galley kitchen.

  ‘That’s pretty handy. What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  He came towards me and I imagined us newlyweds, choosing our first place together. Discussing where to put baby. The best spot for our bed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

  The skin under his eyes was shaded rain-cloud grey.

  ‘I do,’ he replied. ‘I think it’s perfect, Nancy.’

  Downstairs, someone scraped a chair leg sharply.

  ‘Maybe the walls aren’t thick enough,’ I said desperately.

  ‘For clients. You know how distracting it is if you can hear next door.’

  ‘Let’s find out,’ he replied. He went into the far room and pulled the door shut; a floorboard beneath it hopped. I waited, but nothing happened. I moved a little closer.

  ‘Adam?’ I said, with a warble in my voice, but he didn’t reply.

  ‘Adam. Do you want me to call out? Should I be the one calling?’ I said but it came out feeble.

  In the room beyond, I could hear him speak, his tone low and even. The sound was like an incantation or the repeated note of some bass instrument.

  ‘Speak up,’ I said, ‘speak louder.’ I laid my hands against the door. The finish was horrible, slippery and synthetic. His voice rumbled on and there was a rhythm in it, like poetry, or a story read to a child. I heard a lift, the ee sound, the last syllable of my name and pressed my ear to the clean poreless paint. Then the door went and I took one long lunging step inside. My palms met his chest, and I grabbed two fistfuls of his rough wool lapels to stop myself falling. My thumbs pressed into his shirt and I felt the slight give of his skin beneath it and the fragile slant of ribs. I loosened my grip and there was the fain
t crackle of hair. He was real now – this man – the flesh of him under my hands. I straightened and found the shallow dip at his neck. His Adam’s apple bounced and his laugh, when it came, was huge and throaty. When he lowered his head, his teeth, at the back, were filled with wrinkled cushions of silver. His nose turned off to the left. I saw the shading of new whiskers at his chin and felt that I was watching the last seconds of his fine pale skin’s resistance before the new beard pushed through.

  ‘What on earth were you doing?’ he said.

  His eyes are hazel, like my son’s, but yellower, in a shade of old bruise.

  ‘What you told me to. Trying to hear.’

  ‘And did you?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Well, just faintly.’

  ‘But not what I said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’re good.’

  He frisked himself for his phone.

  ‘Do we know each other well enough?’ I asked and blushed at the connotation.

  He laughed again, fully, and I wanted to say: where do you hide your disappointment, your insecurity, your fear?

  ‘I sat behind you for a year. Does that count?’ he said. ‘One row back, a seat to the left. You came in with that girl you used to hang out with, who always wore dungarees. You were late. Every week. And you smoked what I am pretty sure were Silk Cut and used to have one just before class because I’d given up and the smell of it nearly killed me. I leant forward, once, and sniffed your hair, but you must have felt it because you lifted your hand and nearly hit me in the face.’ His eyes moved upwards. ‘It was redder back then, I think?’

  I remembered a Friday morning class. Dazed, most weeks; thick-headed from the night before.

  ‘And a little bit longer,’ he said. His gaze, like muddy pond, passed over me.

  ‘Cerys,’ I said. We had fallen out, late, drunk, over a boy she claimed she’d earmarked, in an awful tinted club with a revolving dance-floor, every surface sticky with booze and the bass a constant in your chest. She had pushed me, lightly, to emphasise her point, and my elbow knocked over an abandoned pint, which escalated things. I might have taken a step towards her but the boy moved between us, his palm at her shoulder. My win, and the closest I’ve been to a fight.