Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  ‘Matthias. Are you hurt?’ I called, on my hands and knees now. I remember David, standing off somewhere behind me, saying nothing.

  Then Matthias let go of the root and took a long step back into a slice of brittle sunlight.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I called.

  The water rose up, nearly to his chest, and a slow deepening red bloomed around him. He took another step, though I was calling his name, and laid his head on the surface of the pond as though it might take his weight. I had the thought that he would lift up his legs and simply float off down the river, like Ophelia, but then the window went, and I wondered why we hadn’t called for them before and there were the mothers’ voices, climbing as they came across the lawn. We stood aside and they both jumped in, unhesitating, as though it had all been arranged.

  They dragged him out easily; in his wet things he was tiny and collapsed. They laid him on the grass, his mother by his head, slapping his face in time to some internal beat. ‘I need your shirts,’ Mum cried. David and I undressed. The cut was on his calf, deep and neat and already dead-looking around the seams. Our mother placed his foot up on her leg and wrapped my T-shirt around it and I watched the cotton fill steadily with his blood.

  ‘I was looking for Dad’s medal,’ Matthias began.

  ‘What on earth were you doing with that?’ his mother said.

  ‘I dropped it. David saw it in the water.’

  Mum gave David a sharp look and began to unlace the wet boy’s shoes.

  I turned to my brother. A triangle of ribbon rose out of his shorts pocket, natty as a folded handkerchief. He covered it with his hand and I felt the danger of his situation.

  Matthias started back to the house, feeble in his pants. Mum ran ahead for towels. And David threw the medal towards the pond, high and looping. It made a terrible plink as it hit the water and then the whole thing was gone in a sudden heavy drop.

  He gave me that wink that he’d just perfected, vaguely suggestive. Raised a finger to his lips and mouthed shush, long and low. He squeezed my hand. We never spoke of it again.

  *

  I went downstairs to my laptop and emailed him.

  Dear David,

  It’s a month this weekend since you left and I’ve got to thinking about the old days. Matthias Coombes, do you remember? I’d almost forgotten him, which can happen when it’s easier that way, but then this morning, all of a sudden, he was back. I kept my word, you know. I didn’t tell.

  Which led me to another weekend, years on, when Mum left us at home and we had that party and the dog ate your gear. You were tripping, so I had to drive her to the vet, miles over the limit. I’ve been meaning to ask, were you praying on the way? I recall you mumbling in the passenger seat beside me but I said nothing – I was concentrating on the road. They gave her an injection that made her sick and we cried and laughed all the way back and the party carried on. I used the money I’d saved to go away to pay the bill, do you remember? I was stuck in London all that summer, so it must have been the year I carried half your pills into clubs in my sock every weekend, to stop you from getting done.

  Not that it was all one-way. In fact, I’d like to thank you for taking me to the clinic when I found myself pregnant, the guy already forgotten. That was a weird one for a brother, I know, but I didn’t have anyone else and it’s that I circle back to, as much as anything else. I’ve never made the kind of friends I’d hoped for, I don’t know why, but no one seems to have stuck. All of them, pretty much, wanted to shag you and you often obliged and I have to say, that didn’t help. Years ago, of course, but habits set, don’t they? Although my work claims they can be broken.

  And you’re not so different. It wasn’t easy, pulling your fortieth together, tracking down all those people you’ve tried to lose. Most of them said yes, though, out of curiosity perhaps, but you were always popular and your beauty helps. I imagine they wanted to know what had become of you; you were, you remain, the very definition of unfulfilled potential.

  Does it still feel like something might happen in your life? Or not, any more. Is that why you ran? On the night of the party, there was no coherence in the room. When I looked around at all those faces, I couldn’t find a pattern. It didn’t combine to anything. Did you feel the same? Do you even care?

  I wonder if this email is making you cross, but you don’t really do cross, do you? I see it starting, behind your eyes – you’re not so unreadable as all that – but when I look back it’s gone. I’d want to explore that, if you were a client. You rolled your eyes when I was training and I asked if I could practise on you. ‘You know everything about me, sis,’ you said, ‘everything worth knowing,’ which pleased me at the time, and so I chose to believe it.

  I feel I miss our conversations, though we didn’t really talk lately. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined it and ours is just some twisted fictional romance, or each of us a foil, simply reinforcing the other’s stereotype. I talk with my clients about relativism. The difficulties of absolute truth and how other people’s versions have their own logic and demand respect, but sometimes a lie is just a lie. So, we’ll need to talk about your job. I hear you’re going away, so do you travel now? Oh, and why did you give Skyler my dolphin ring? And I want to know: how do you turn your face away from the damage you cause? How do you put yourself always so definitively first?

  You’ll recognise my tone. It’s that last blast before I give up – start to cry, or make some demand that you’ll agree to but never meet. We exist, we have always existed, in tandem. You leave, then you return. So come back now, David. I need you. Always and forever. N X.

  24

  I was ten minutes late and had to race to school. Inside, a bell had gone and I moved against the traffic. The corridors were wide and high-ceilinged and the calls of the children cannoned off the walls. I dipped my head against the smell of them; deodorant sprays, sweets, the alliums in last night’s dinner. The doors to the main hall were shut when I got there and the glass panels papered over for privacy. When I pushed them open, Stefan turned. He had saved me a place, and bought instant coffee from the machine. I took my seat; aware, suddenly, of my pulse. The headmistress spoke a few words, and the smaller children began.

  ‘Did she tell you what she’s doing?’ I whispered. Frieda had been practising for weeks behind the closed door of her bedroom but I heard only her intonation, which was strong, and carried.

  ‘She wouldn’t say,’ he replied.

  We watched a boy perform a two-hander, taking a huge step and turning to face the space he’d emptied every time he switched role, and then Stef nudged me and it was Frieda’s turn.

  In the rafters, someone switched off the lights and there was a moment of darkness. Then a beam hit the stage with a sound like a popped bulb and a bright circle appeared, dim-edged at first and then sharpened until the edges were crisp and cruel and perfect. There was nowhere to look but at the harsh white ring, each nick and splinter in the floorboards revealed. Nothing happened for long enough that I started to think something was wrong and I held my own hands for comfort.

  Then Frieda came, stealthily and in utter silence. The first I knew of her was her foot breaking open that circle. A naked foot, bleached bloodless by the light. She stepped inside, blacked out by clothes, just hands and feet and her fierce little face and the yellow of her hair. She squinted at the lamp’s full glare and then something above her changed, the light was softened or a shift made to its angle and her features emerged, the bones of her face. I watched a slow swallow travel down her neck, then she drew her feet together and loosened her arms. She looked poised and empty. She began:

  ‘“Love after Love” by Derek Walcott.’

  ‘What?’ I said, in a reflex and the woman in front of us half-turned. Stef gave me a mild look of reproach. On stage, Frieda spoke, lightly and with certainty:

  ‘The time will come

  when, with elation,

  you will greet yourself arriving

  at you
r own door, in your own mirror,

  and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

  and say sit here. Eat.’

  I was in bed when Adam had first read me those lines, from a volume pulled down off a hotel bookshelf. ‘Oh God, not a poem,’ I said and hid my face in the pillow. ‘Just listen,’ he replied. ‘It’s one of my favourites. It’s beautiful.’ He sat on the end of the bed, squashing my feet, and carried on.

  ‘You will love again the stranger who was your self,

  Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

  all your life, whom you ignored

  for another, who knows you by heart.’

  On stage Frieda, spoke out into the blackness of the audience. I was transfixed by her, acute to every nuance of her performance, and it was subtle. An adjustment to her stance, a finger’s flex became so freighted. The far reach of each pause was almost unbearable. The meaning of this, her up there, speaking these words, was remote and sealed for now. All I could do was exist from beat to beat. Her voice narrowed as she spoke again:

  ‘Take down the love-letters from the bookshelf

  the photographs, the desperate notes,

  peel your own image from the mirror.’

  She took a huge breath and swept her arm out to the side in invitation. She spoke the last words in a brutal staccato, each syllable biting and distinct.

  ‘Sit. Feast on your life.’

  Adam had dropped the book to the bed and lay by my side.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a poem about being dumped, isn’t it?’ I had replied, hiding behind my fatuousness.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But that’s not how I read it. I see us in this.’

  ‘How do you mean?

  ‘You’ve brought me back to myself,’ he said. ‘Now I can feast on my life,’ and his face was naked and exultant and when I looked up at Frieda, so bold up there, her face was the same and I felt the point of impact, the certainty of collision, and the lights went out.

  *

  We all clapped hard and there was that little surge of noise that an audience makes to expel whatever it has been feeling. In the darkness I scrabbled for my bearings and then the lights were back and so was Frieda, with a huge teary smile, and her little bird’s chest pumping. As she moved to the front of the stage to bow, I saw that she left wet footprints on the stage; two-parted, the splodge of her heel and then the mound of flesh beneath her toes.

  ‘That was awesome. Wasn’t that awesome, Nance?’ Stef said.

  I saw her find him in the crowd and he lay his palm over his heart. Her smile got bigger and he blew her a kiss. The drama teacher came to us as we waited outside the hall.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed Frieda’s performance, Mr and Mrs Jansen,’ she said, flushed herself.

  ‘We did. Very much,’ Stef replied, and shook the woman’s hand without pre-emption.

  ‘She really is talented, and that was the perfect reading,’ she said to him. ‘I’m so glad you approved it.’

  ‘Did we approve it?’ I said, vaguely. ‘Did you approve it, Stef?’ I was struggling to order my thoughts. The teacher’s face closed.

  ‘All pieces are approved. There was a form you will have signed,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry. Of course,’ and then Frieda was coming, brilliant and terrible at the head of a great swell of children, jostling and crying out, and I ducked my head at the sight of her.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘That was amazing, my darling,’ said Stef. ‘So wonderful. We are very proud of you.’ He took her face in his hands and she shone up at him.

  ‘Mum?’ she said. I dared a look at her. She was tucked compactly beneath Stef’s arm, their faces so similar side by side. She was damp around the hairline, expectant, a little bashful. Her frank gaze made me cower.

  ‘It was fantastic. Yes. As your dad said,’ I replied.

  ‘Mum, what’s the matter with you?’ she said, and there it was, her voice sharpened into a point. It struck me that this might be a test. She could never confront me with her knowledge outright. We would be locked into this exchange of signs and signals for ever.

  ‘I’m just—I’m feeling. I’m not particularly well,’ I said. Then the buckle of her face made my previous idea seem insane.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. She stepped forward and hugged me and I was like a child in her arms. I could feel her heart thumping hard, still processing the last chemical traces of adrenalin in her blood. I slowed my breath and hers steadied in response. I felt her love, her succour, and I knew with a certainty that our contract still held.

  ‘If you’re feeling weird, we can go home now, if you like,’ she said.

  I raised my face, frail and light-headed.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘You do look a bit pale.’

  ‘No, it’s fine Free. Go say hello to your friends.’

  ‘OK. Dad, look after my bag,’ she replied and nudged it across the floor to him. Sticking out of the top was her envelope, ragged and dog-eared now, in which she carried the scripts she had been working on, these past weeks, with Tara.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Where did you find that poem?’

  I pictured Tara in that room of hers that Frieda had described, a temple to her mediocre achievement, offering up these words to my daughter like a gift, with its oblique message to me hidden inside.

  ‘Ah,’ she replied, stretching the word out long. ‘So you get it at last.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Just tell me, please,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ she replied. ‘No need to be like that.’

  A darker vision rose then, of Adam and Tara sharing these words, many years before and her passing them on to my daughter in innocence, in love.

  ‘Please tell me, Frieda,’ I said, again. ‘It’s not so very hard.’

  ‘Mum, what is with you right now?’ she said, coming closer, snapping the end off every word.

  ‘Did she give it you?’ I said. ‘Was it Tara?’ My own voice rose up towards shrill.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said.

  ‘Nancy,’ said Stefan, ‘take it easy. I mean it,’ and for the first time I had a sense of him as a threat.

  ‘It was for you, you idiot,’ Frieda told me, thrumming with anger. ‘It’s your stupid poem. Don’t you even remember?’

  *

  I had gone back to the book while Adam was in the bathroom. I looked at the bindings, thinking of pulling out the page. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I know it by heart.’ A slick of hair at his temple, heat coming off him from the shower. But I am not like Adam. I like to see things before me, hold them in my hands and so I bought the book the following week, a newer edition, and kept it at the bottom of a stack by my bed.

  *

  ‘Oh of course,’ I said to Frieda. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m just—I’m not myself.’

  ‘Let’s go, Free,’ Stefan said. He picked up her bag and took her hand and they moved off, pushing through the crowd of ecstatic children. She turned her head back once and cast me a savage glare. I followed them from a distance.

  *

  I had read the poem to the girls one late afternoon when we were in my room wrapping Jake’s birthday gifts. Lou had picked up the book and wondered at it. ‘Bring it here,’ I said. ‘I’ll read you something. See what you think.’ When I began, the moment seemed to have become important. My voice trembled and I felt exposed under their evaluating gaze, but when I was done, Lou simply turned back into the room though Free gave a little ‘hmm’ of consideration. I’d been glad to let it pass unremarked.

  *

  ‘You’re nuts, Mum, do you know that?’ Frieda said, in the car. Stef had offered her the front seat and she took it. I sat in the back without comment, my feet deep in old water bottles and empty packets of snacks.

  ‘Just don’t worry, honey,’ said Stefan, his hand on
her knee.

  She turned the radio up and looked hard out of the passenger window.

  ‘I don’t even know how to be around her any more,’ she said.

  25

  I met Adam the next morning at his mother’s, who was abroad, though he said she wouldn’t have minded anyway. It was a wide Victorian semi a long way down a treeless street in South Ealing. Four storeys of red-brick, all right-angles and huge sash windows, with just a square of paving and a short dense hedge keeping it back from the road.

  The house was well-kept but unadorned. She hadn’t tried to domesticate it with name plates or little pots of greenery; it was simply itself – a solid pile of sand and lime – enduring and uncompromisingly London. I found the number on a council bin in thick green paint and paused a moment, but Adam, in the front room, raised his head. We met at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said and pushed his hand through his hair. ‘It’s weird. I feel a little shy, bringing you here,’ and I felt it too, the difference that context made.

  The house smelt of stove-top coffee and ancient radiators burning old dust. I followed him into a narrow hall, a round paper shade swinging easily above us. He took me to the kitchen at the back, a high-ceilinged room with white laminate cupboards and a chequerboard floor. In one corner stood a round table under a plastic floral cloth with four nondescript chairs pushed beneath it. She had pinned photos and cards in no sort of order between two large windows on the far wall, and I wanted to go across and look but felt I needed an invitation for that.

  ‘So you grew up in this house?’ I asked.

  ‘From aged about five,’ he replied. ‘It was pretty much exactly as you see it now.’

  I saw the top of his head, bent to homework in one of those chairs. Damp hair, still, at his temples from where she’d only just called him in, his feet still twitching for the ball. But he’d told me he wasn’t a sporty boy; it was my own son I was thinking of, or my brother, perhaps.