Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  ‘You don’t look very well, Mummy,’ Lou said.

  ‘Louisa, please,’ I replied and she started back to April at last, watching the ice creams as she went, the weight of its flake threatening to tip the most top-heavy cone. I binned mine and left, with a view to finding Adam and a promise to get home as soon as I humanly could.

  *

  Back in the office, though, and he wasn’t there. Lynn couldn’t help and so I sat at his desk, feeling for his things, trying to divine where he was and what he might be thinking. The door went and I rose but it was not Adam but Tim, who gave a wry little laugh when he saw me, and said: ‘Well, this makes things a whole lot easier, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I replied.

  His top lip twitched as if tugged by a line. ‘Well, I was actually hoping to speak to Adam,’ he said, ‘which is why I came into his office, not yours.’

  ‘But he isn’t here, as you can see, so you might as well speak to me.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Tim replied. ‘He might have tried to dissuade me, being the softer of you pair.’

  ‘Can you come inside?’ I asked.

  Another short laugh which broke open into a snarl that showed his gums. He made a throaty sound of repression. ‘You’re worried about privacy, are you? Or professionalism?’ he said. I’d known Tim for a decade, a person of uneven temperament outside his work to whom I’d chosen to give a second chance. I wondered if he should even be practising.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  He crossed reception with a bounce in his walk. Lynn, spellbound, turned her head to follow. He reached his office and she woke up, spun her face to me, a study in frozen panic, but then he was out again and her look was drawn back to him. He entered Adam’s office fast and kicked the door shut with the back of his heel. He tossed an envelope across the desk and I read the letter in seconds, a template, brief and formal.

  ‘Can I ask you why?’ I said, fighting the urge to throw it back at him.

  ‘Personal reasons,’ he replied.

  He’d given notice on his room, we had agreed at the outset on a month.

  ‘If you’ve got something to get off your chest, now’s the moment,’ I said but he turned instead to leave.

  ‘Did you have some message for Adam by the way?’ I asked. ‘Before you go?’

  ‘Tell him I wish him the very best of luck,’ he said, his fist on the handle. He slammed the door behind him, definitively this time, which gave me some small gratification. If he’d allowed himself full rein, I think he might have hit me. I heard him to speak to Lynn through the wall, spitting contempt, and when he’d gone, at last, she came in with a timid knock and a tea trembling in its saucer.

  ‘Are you OK, Nancy?’ she asked. ‘Oh my goodness. Wasn’t he cross.’

  She went back to work and when the phone rang outside, answered it quietly, so as not to disturb me, convalescing at the desk.

  21

  Next day I stayed at home. Stefan was out, presenting visual identities to a luxury riverside brand aboard a boat – his idea – and so I was alone. The house drooped without the kids. It seemed unfamiliar, settled into some earlier shape, our updates just surface and temporary. The paint job looked drab and the dialogue between our modish furniture and the house’s old shell – intended to be witty – just fell flat. I felt a kind of tenderness towards our own best efforts and then did what I always do and set about trying to re-establish us.

  I shook out a grey wool blanket with tapered stripes like a backgammon board and laid it on the back of a chair, then lit the chain of fluorescent letters we have strung up along a wall. There had been Fun and Love and Dancing on the website but we bought Ciao in the end, because we liked the way it meant one thing as well as its opposite and the cursive was looped and elegant. It looked good, in the winter months, when you switched it to blink – it stretched out Christmas – but it was springtime now and the light outside was brutal and outshone the fairground bulbs. I made a drink and watched the dog claw the blanket back down. He pulled it to the floor with his teeth, he circled and stamped. He kneaded with his pointed toes then flattened it out behind him with quick rabbity kicks, pulling tiny snags in the wool as he did it, but I love to watch him demonstrate his true nature and didn’t have the heart to spoil his fun. At last he settled and was sleeping, instantly. I drained the ancient mug, which bore a rude joke – a gift from my son – and went back to the house and its inevitable demands.

  I filled a bag with warped trainers and outgrown clothes. I threw out a load of old jars. I stood at the hob, the window in front of me fogged thickly, dripping steady tears, and I was thinking that outside could be anything: alien invasion or the end of the world and neither one of them a disaster, when the landline went, and it was Frieda, asking for her dad. I said he wasn’t there and heard panic break in her voice and then her efforts to smooth it away.

  ‘But where is he?’ she said. ‘Why isn’t he there? I’ve been trying his phone.’

  She needed an essay from her laptop which she’d left in her room.

  ‘Don’t worry. I can do it,’ I said. ‘Thank goodness I was in.’ My tone was bright. She knew I’d heard her preference for Stef and I wanted her to think I didn’t mind. I wiped an oval clear of condensation and his shed came into view. I could see him, usually, through his window, with his headphones on, listening to the music that Frieda recommends, but today the lights were off.

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Still, her instinct was good, for Stefan would never have done what I went on to do, but he is hamstrung by his morality. Do we not, above all, bear responsibility to keep our children safe? He’d drag them from a burning car, but it is me who would have to raise the bat to an intruder if it came to it. Stefan is squeamish and he always thinks first.

  ‘Mum, you will—Respect my privacy. Won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Sweetheart. Just tell me what you need.’

  My slippered tread felt sneaky on the stair.

  The essay was on her hard drive and I was to load my email account on her screen and send it from there. I opened the laptop, bringing the keyboard upwards too; Stef’s old Mac, creaky and overused.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I need to put the phone down for a sec.’

  I eased the stiff joints apart and her screensaver appeared, a picture of her and her two best girlfriends dropped on to a beach they’d never visited, cheeks pressed together, fish faces and their arms and legs out star-shaped. Her password was an obscure mix of letters I didn’t recognise but felt artful; I sensed method in there somewhere. In between, the date of her birth, reversed.

  ‘Say it again,’ I said, ‘I got it wrong.’ She did, and I wrote it down on one of her oversized post-it notes with a pen that had a pom-pom set on its end.

  ‘Shut it now, please,’ she said after I’d sent across her work, and then, in a tiny voice: ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Done,’ I told her, and I even pulled the screen down, imagining she might hear a tiny whoosh of displaced air or some resistance in the hinge, a metallic twang.

  ‘Right, I need to get on, now, Free,’ I said and she believed me. She was away, leaving me there amongst her things.

  It was odd to be in her bedroom without her. There was the faint animal scent of her sleeping self and the sweet clay of the lidless make-up arranged along the windowsill, all gouged and claggy. She had been burning her candles, something unusual, a smoky tea or burning pine, but I smelt mostly dead air, warm and slow, the room returning to its uninhabited state. Dust had settled gently; enough already, on her desk, that I could draw the outline of a heart, visible in a block of sudden sun. When she was small, she drew hearts everywhere, and moons and stars in glitter-pens and I gathered the pages to put aside for nostalgia’s sake, but it made her cross – my efforts to give her drawings weight. Her infant self was still so present to me, in the b
rief flare of her upset, the knock beneath her eye that had left a mark, that I hadn’t had to turn to those old things yet.

  So I began. I stuck my fingers in the pen jar but there was nothing but old memory sticks, an ink-mulched rubber and a half-wrapped chew. There was a drift of discarded paper which I moved with my foot, disturbing a long string of bobbled fluff. Copy after copy of her essay on Lord of the Flies with minute amendments marked in red. ‘Ralph and Simon are both good, what are the differences in their goodness?’ The bed was loosely made, her water glass half-drunk and starting to bubble. Every plug socket was on, and most trailed chargers. There were clothes all over, of course, and a self-conscious display of photos around her mirror, of girls who I may or may not have known. I checked her drawers – nothing of note but a worshipful arrangement of sanitary products and a slightly racy paperback. I looked under the mattress, at the back of her high shelves, behind a poster. I opened her computer and there was her face again, but it didn’t pull me up. I spent an hour pawing through. That she didn’t use her email much was clear, seven thousand lay unread, broken up with the odd one she had starred (bless her heart) from me or Stef. Her documents were neatly arranged and contained what their titles implied. I clicked on her history but it had been cleared, which I assumed was just good sense; Jake had brought home a story of a boy who left his laptop unguarded at school, and when he whispered to the others what was found, it was enough to make Louisa blush and Frieda slap his arm.

  At the bottom of her wardrobe was a box. I knew this box; it had once contained a gift from me, but now she used it to store her special things. There was no secret about it. She would leave it unattended, though she no longer took me through the contents as she used to, an inventory of every item, a justification for each choice. I flipped a corner of the lid, bent away as though braced for a bang and it was then, as I leaned back in, that I asked myself what I was doing here, what I was hoping to achieve, and the answer was simple and sad, that I just wanted to know her again.

  On top, I found a tiny gift, beautifully wrapped in a thick red paper. A ribbon had been wrapped twice around the package and tied in an extravagant bow, wider than the box. The ends were snipped into clean points and a card was tucked underneath. I worked it free. Happy Birthday and good luck on the night!! it read, in an even inked hand, effortfully adult.

  The knot of the ribbon gave with a fibrous creak that I felt at the back of my teeth. The wrapping was so glossy that the tape eased away with the merest application of a nail and sprung apart entirely creaseless.

  The box inside was nondescript, a rough recycled cardboard and I felt both dread and anticipation as I opened it. Inside, I found one tiny earring, a delicate gold cuff made of wire as fine as a paperclip and bent into the shape of a triangle. Sweet, adolescent and blameless.

  So I straightened the room. I hid my presence. I bent for the dressing gown I’d knocked from her door, full of a fear that one of them would come home and catch me at it. I was in the wrong now; finding nothing had made me culpable. Then I laid down my head on her pillow, blotched with milky shadings of her spit, and slept a long deep sleep.

  Louisa woke me. ‘Mum, what are you doing in there?’ she cried, from the doorway, her voice high with disapproval. She leaned across the threshold but seemed reluctant to step into her sister’s room. Free’s rules held in her absence, for Louisa at least.

  ‘Get up, Mum,’ she said. ‘Why are you being so weird? The house is all dark.’

  I scrambled through my apologies and led her back down, my eyes thick and my hair mussed up one side. I twisted dimmers as I went and the house shook out its skirts and raised its best face up to us. A bank of happy photos woke under their lights, the cushions on the sofa picked out a colour in the rug, and on the radio Big Ben chimed the news. The dog leapt from his bed and trotted a couple of perimeters of the room.

  ‘Pasta,’ I said, ‘don’t you think? Fetch me down the big pot,’ and when Lou brought it across, her face was smoothed once more by certainty, repetition and habit. Then Jake arrived, delighted by a huge new bruise he had earned in a rough game of rugby. He dropped his trousers to show us, a perfect studded print on the teardrop-shaped muscle above his knee, and he laughed when he saw it again, even darker now, he claimed, and pressed it all around until he found the sorest part. He took a photo on his phone which he sent to friends. I made a bolognese with pancetta added to the onions and a handful of fresh oregano ripped from the pot, which brought the kids across to the pan, and then again later when I added the wine.

  I gave it an hour, but still no Free.

  I called her number but the phone rang out. I fed the others and asked them did they know where she might be? Could they remember any arrangement? But neither did. I texted Stef, but he was still in his meeting and would be for at least another hour. I looked in the diary and at the board we had long since stopped using and there was an itch at the edge of my memory but I couldn’t pull it into view. I poured myself a glass, which fuzzed my worry at first, then sharpened it. I moved around the kitchen and Louisa eyed me subtly, looking away when I caught her.

  ‘I’m popping out,’ I said, already wearing my boots.

  ‘Why?’ she replied. ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll be half an hour, OK? We can all watch some telly when I get back.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Louisa. ‘I want to come.’

  ‘Lou, it’s much easier if you stay. Your brother’s staying.’

  ‘But he’s on his screen,’ she said.

  ‘So get ready, then. You need to be quick.’

  ‘I’m not getting out,’ she said, settling herself into the front seat in bedsocks and old leggings, grimed and loose at the knees. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’ She flicked through the radio stations looking for a song. She’d brought a soft drink and a snack.

  ‘Off to get Frieda,’ I told her.

  ‘Have you remembered, then?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘I have,’ I replied and pulled out into the road.

  I’d driven to Adam’s in the early days, those times of sleepless yearning when I couldn’t rest or eat or hear any other voice but his. I’d never met him at his home, but I knew where he lived and liked to drive by, my foot easing up and down on the brake as I passed, or simply park up and watch, just for ten minutes or so, yoga my alibi, a bag of untouched kit in the boot. Most often I saw no one but still it hadn’t felt like a wasted trip. To be in his environment gave me comfort.

  I never saw Tara, though three times I spotted Adam. The first, he was walking down his road, his long feet flapping, his face raised skywards with a sanguine look and a twist to his smile and I just knew that he was thinking about me. It took everything, then, not to run across the road and embrace him.

  Next time, I saw him in his window as he pulled the curtains to at the turning point of dusk; heavy old things, I could see that in their drag across the runners, and he looked so carefully left and right that I wondered if he sensed me out there. I imagined ringing, seeing him raise his phone to his ear and then leaving that warm yellow room behind and coming to me, in the chill, where we would make love in my car, not giving a damn who saw.

  Then there was a Saturday. All three children at home, a TV talent show on, gin and tonics and the dog unchallenged on the chair. We shushed for our favourites, texting in to cast our votes and then some young girl hit her note, the crowd roared, and my throat was full of a rising sob; I felt a true desperation. I claimed an allergy, hid the Piriton and left.

  I arrived at Adam’s at the same time as his early guests, a couple who looked like no one I had ever known. Established yet bohemian. Right-thinking and inherited and certain. When Adam opened the door, I heard the strange and gorgeous music that he preferred, some melancholy aria which moved me, but I couldn’t understand. The next pair hopped off the bus with two bottles of champagne that she took out of the shopper on the doorstep and finally two women, who laughed as they pushed aside his gate as though the
y’d never felt doubt. I watched them all for a while, the party unfolding in the window, and then went home. Lou and Stef stood up when I came in. They asked how I was. I said the medicine made me sick and went to bed. On Monday, Adam had looked tired. I asked him about his weekend but he took my face in his hands and said: ‘You weren’t there,’ and I forgot what I had seen. I never told him, nor went back, though I felt how easily it could become compulsion.

  This time, though, I didn’t wait outside. I pulled in right before his house in a space that felt like it had been left for me and walked straight up the path. I rapped the knocker, something Regency, in brass. Behind me, Louisa rolled her window down. A light went on in the pane above the door.

  ‘Nancy,’ said Adam, and took the top of my arms. He wore old cotton pyjama bottoms of the sort that I had imagined him in.

  ‘Louisa’s in the car,’ I said.

  He looked over my shoulder and dropped his hands. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Why weren’t you at work? Come inside. Bring Louisa.’ I saw him attempt a smile at her. The reflex lift of a hand that he cut short.

  ‘Is she here?’ I said.

  I tried to form an impression of his home. The hall was large and square and painted a current shade of aubergine. I saw an old grandfather clock next to the stairs with a moon dial above its face, a semi-circle of sapphire sky dotted with tiny incandescent stars. I found it beautiful and that surprised me. I supposed it had been passed down the line.

  To my right, a rack of hooks held their coats and outdoor things. There was an old cardigan she would have worn around the house, a tissue worked halfway out of the pocket. She had the same high street parka as me, or similar; a bit too young for both of us. I was aware, for the first time, of my incursion. It struck me like a tiny wonder.

  ‘No, she’s still at work,’ he said. He looked away and gave an incredulous little burble. ‘I can’t believe you’re here, Nancy,’ and lifted his hands towards me once more, briefly, weakly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get Lou in. She must be cold. Tell me what’s happened,’ and I saw his excitement then, in his fidget and the curl of his mouth. His readiness for what he thought must be this next phase. There was something almost obscene in it.