Love After Love

by Alex Hourston

  ‘Does Daddy know?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t talked to him about it.’

  She nodded and I waited. She watched her feet, her fingernail working at a scrap of varnish left on one toe. The doorbell went downstairs and we both cringed in terror.

  ‘I’ll keep your secret, Mummy,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t worry any more,’ and she fell into my arms and though she didn’t cry, her breastbone pounded as though her heart was trying to break out from behind it.

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Lou. I would never ask that of you,’ I said.

  We took the stairs together carefully and when I saw Stefan waiting at the bottom I thought he must have heard it all.

  ‘Louisa,’ he said, ‘I need you to join the others in the sitting room, please. Nothing to worry about, though,’ and at that, her face flared into horror. ‘I just need to speak to your mum.’

  He followed me into kitchen and pushed the door shut behind us. In the weak light, he took my hands and I thought of the moment he had proposed.

  ‘Nancy. I’ve just had a visit. It’s about your client, Marie. I have to tell you. She has committed suicide.’

  30

  I found a night two weeks later. Jake’s easy, he is biddable and will go where he is asked. Frieda’s willing but over-scheduled. Louisa, though, needs persuading. She has these three lanky cats that she likes to rest on a pillow by her face and feels inhibited in this at any other place than home. Still I found a date, a Saturday, and crammed each child’s arrangements onto the diary page.

  Stef noticed the next day.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Am I reading this right?’

  I poached salmon to make fishcakes for the kids. Pearls of orange fat collected on the surface of the milk which I broke up with a fork, though each time I turned back to it they had come together again. I lifted the fish out with a slotted spoon, peeled off the skin and the dark V of grey flesh underneath which makes the children gag, and dropped it, calling for the dog.

  ‘What?’ I said, although I knew full well.

  ‘A child-free evening weekend after next,’ he replied.

  Louisa, stretched up at a cupboard for sanctioned biscuits, paused in her groping.

  ‘Is there a plan?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you booked anything?’ he said.

  He had just come back from a run and bent a leg behind him to catch the top of his foot. He eased it towards his flank, his thigh muscle coming into definition. I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Ugh Dad,’ Frieda cried. ‘That’s so gross. You’re sweating all over the floor.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘I can do it, if you like?’ Stef replied, dropping his leg and bending low.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, in a tone loose enough to bring Louisa off her toes. ‘Leave it with me.’

  He went upstairs for his shower, towelling his head roughly as he passed.

  I was at home for an indefinite time; my choice. Only the lawyer disagreed, seems the family sometimes sue in these cases and he felt it sent the wrong signal, but there had been no word and so I stayed inside, waiting. They managed me now, the children and Stef. They handled me carefully. They tried to lubricate my days. Time slid by.

  I thought of Marie and wondered if anything she had told me had been true. I wished that I had touched her and been kinder. I wished that I’d never seen her face.

  I thought of Adam. I hid behind my book and called to mind the rough feel of the calluses at the roots of his fingers, the way they snagged on my hair. I drank my wine, locked into my spot on the sofa, and dreamt of the whiskery ridge where his chin gave way to throat, the prickle of it, back and forward on my cheek. I took his laugh to bed with me.

  Meantime I planned how I would tell Stef. I plotted it out in the hours when I used to see clients. I tried to find the words, I settled upon tone. I let myself imagine the whole thing done. I floated adrift in the family and they let me, all of us loosening, little islands now, eyeing each other across the space.

  Then the mother rang. I had a strange premonition when the unfamiliar number came up; not that it would be her, but a sense of something imminent. I answered anyway, grateful for change.

  ‘It’s Mrs Bingham,’ she said, sounding irritated and officious. ‘Irene Bingham. Mother of Marie,’ but I already knew; their voices were the same, thin with a sandpaper edge.

  ‘I’ve got some questions,’ she said. ‘I wondered if we could meet.’

  I heard her effort to elocute each word and saw her at home in a hard-backed chair in the sitting room that Marie had once described. She named an all-day café on the high street and I agreed to see her there.

  I arrived early. The place was a disaster, crammed with tiny tables and disco on the radio. I went back outside, took a seat, and watched a decorative ball of plastic greenery swing gently on a tripod of chains in front of the dry-cleaner’s next door.

  She arrived with Mark; a small woman, an earlier iteration of Marie, a prototype, a rough first draft wearing too many layers and the thick woollen tights of a child. When she reached me, she stopped; her arms packed before her, just like Marie, and looked straight over my shoulder as she told me her name. Mark shook hands and went inside to buy tea. I’d pulled two square tables together and Irene took the seat diagonally opposite me and watched the café door steadily, in silence, until he came back out.

  ‘I’m so sorry—’ I began, but she stopped me with two efficient little nods.

  ‘Was it a surprise?’ she asked, suddenly, as soon as Mark was sitting.

  ‘Irene has been wondering—’ he said.

  ‘She can answer,’ Irene replied sharply. ‘It’s simple enough.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘A complete shock. I had no idea at all.’

  Those choked little nods again. She had plucked her eyebrows to nothing and drawn them back on in two thin identical lines.

  ‘Sealed tight as a nut, that one,’ Irene said, ‘Always was.’

  ‘She was certainly very private,’ I replied. ‘I was hoping that, over time—’

  ‘And did she tell you about Luke?’ Irene asked.

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘My oldest child. We lost him, just as he came up to ten.’ She watched me, now, very closely, but I did not react. Across the years, in my work, I have heard many dreadful things.

  ‘Two years apart, the kids, give or take. A long illness,’ she said, her face clenched like a fist.

  ‘She was never able to talk about that with me,’ I said.

  ‘I see,’ Irene replied. ‘I wondered.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how that must have been,’ I said.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she replied, in simple agreement.

  ‘Did she speak with anyone at the time?’ I asked. ‘Did your family get some help?’

  ‘Help?’ she called, with a splintered ill-used laugh. She made the sound again, looking at Mark, trying to enlist him, but his face was locked. ‘Help with what exactly?’

  ‘With your grief,’ I said.

  ‘My grief?’ she repeated, and struck her chest, hard, with her palm. ‘Oh I don’t need any help with that,’ she said and I saw that without her pain she would simply collapse, an old sack of bones.

  She got up then. She was still wearing her coat and held her bag pressed under her armpit. ‘I was curious about that,’ she said. ‘I wanted to know.’

  ‘Is there anything else—?’ I asked.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ she replied formally. She walked away and came to stop a little way down the pavement, waiting there, stick straight, as Mark worked his thick legs free from beneath the small zinc table.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Mark said. ‘Marie liked you, you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  He shook my hand once more.

  ‘But she struggled with hope,’ he said and was off, after Mrs Bingham, stri
ding out to catch her in those same smart dress shoes he’d worn to my house. I walked home myself, as fast as I could, mere survival feeling like a miracle.

  *

  We had dinner for my brother that night, though Dad cried off. April and the girls placed him at the centre of the table as he spun a tale about a love that had endured, waving his hands around, slopping his wine. Stefan allowed it. He had made no comment about David’s return and I wondered at that. He seemed watchful and apart, but we were all on pause. Waiting out the hiatus.

  ‘Going well, then?’ I said, when David came to find me at the stove. His face showed the blind shine of a zealot.

  ‘Really well, Nance,’ he said. ‘I want you and Alice to be friends again, like the old days.’ He took the top of my shoulder, and rubbed the heel of his hand into the sinew at my neck with a touch meant for her. He smelt expensive, dry grass, vetiver and citrus. I saw it would survive. The daylight had made them strong.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘If I get the time.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, Nancy,’ David said.

  ‘Since when?’ I replied. I felt corrupted and mean.

  ‘You can’t keep going like this,’ he said. ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘Look, I just want you to be happy,’ he told me and I laughed at that, at the reversal, and the gap between intention and effect. I’d said the same to him, and meant it, many times across the years, a pang of righteous sorrow in my chest, and yet the sentiment reached me now as facile and limited and self-serving. I thought, what a pain in the arse I must have been, which made me laugh again.

  ‘Well I guess I’m David-proof,’ I said, and was pleased with it. He went back to the table and opened another bottle of wine. In the end Stefan offered to drive him home.

  I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.

  I walked, I slept, I tended to the kids and then one afternoon Adam emailed, saying that he had heard about Marie and could we talk? I laid down my glass and left. I walked to the middle of the park, the wind a shriek every time I turned into it. When I found a sheltered place, I called him.

  ‘God, Nancy I am so very sorry,’ he said. His voice sounded close.

  ‘Who told you?’ I asked.

  ‘Lynn,’ he replied. ‘She called me.’

  ‘Has it ever happened to you?’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ he said. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m terrified,’ I replied, just realising it. ‘I feel lethal.’

  I watched a child running face first into the weather, ecstatic, her arms off behind her and her mouth stretched wide.

  ‘You didn’t have a chance, Nancy,’ he said, ‘Marie wasn’t honest.’

  ‘But she wanted to be. She came, didn’t she? Week after week.’

  ‘But she couldn’t,’ he said. ‘Some people can’t. It’s just too difficult.’

  ‘I should have found a way,’ I said. ‘Adam, I don’t know if I’ll ever practise again.’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘Use it, Nancy. Assimilate it. Allow it to make you better,’ and I wanted to grab hold of that logic, pull myself, fist over fist, to where Adam stood, on firm dry land.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re welcome. I need to go now,’ he said. ‘Take care.’

  ‘You too.’

  *

  Then the weekend arrived and saying goodbye to the children felt weighted, but I refused to give in to the melodrama of it. They fought for favourite sleeping-bags, packed chargers, slipped in sweets. They bounced their stuff down the stairs and the dog woke, moving fretfully between them. Into each wash-bag I slipped my usual note, Sleep well. Love you, Mum XXX. Jake keeps them all, I once found a great scrunched bundle in the corner of his shelf. I kissed them and wondered what they would come home to. Then the last of them had left, and Stef closed the front door and walked back down the hall towards me.

  ‘So,’ he said, the way he does when he is about to tell me a story that he knows I’ll like. He drew out a chair at the end of the table. I stood behind the sink, dropped flush into the island, my hands in scalding water. I cleaned the last part of his juicer with its special brush, working the bristles hard into the tight links of mesh.

  ‘So,’ I said, which is how it often goes.

  Stef’s eyes are conker brown, complete, with no gradation. It struck me, then, that he was hard to read and that I’d never before acknowledged this because I’d never before thought he might be hiding. He wore a new shirt, slim-cut in a faded Oxford stripe, though the difference between all of them was slight, even on the rail.

  ‘You first,’ he said, and at that, I should have simply begun, but this was not the way I had imagined it and I faltered. I pulled the plug from the sink. The first suck was thirsty and then the flow of water slowed and I made a production of plunging the hole with the heel of my hand.

  ‘Oh come on, Nancy,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’ve got something to say. Just say it. I’m not an idiot, you know,’ and I realised my mistake, for his voice was changed. It cracked and wavered.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. My hands dripped and I groped for a towel. I had considered the phrasing. I wanted to be straightforward. To name it for what it was. Behind me the dishwasher drained and then settled into its low, even chug.

  ‘I had an affair,’ I said. The other options had seemed either too cosy or too bald.

  ‘I see,’ he replied, very still. ‘I’m going to guess—’ He crossed one leg high over the other and the shade of his sock made me think of that instant at which yellow and red combine at the mid-line of a Tequila Sunrise. The skin above it, by contrast, was white. ‘I am going to guess Adam.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked, which was immediately wrong.

  ‘Is it Adam?’ Stefan said, again.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. I wanted to ask him how he knew. Whether he had seen it, that time in the office or at the party. I felt sorry, and also shame, but a kind of gratification too, as though Stefan’s recognition gave our love materiality, form.

  The dog sensed the mood and circled the island at a trot. He found the tea towel that I’d dropped and took it over to the door, whining. I didn’t dare respond, but when he started to scratch at the glass, Stef went across and let him out. It felt better with Stefan moving. I drank water straight from the tap while he was still behind me, then he was back and pushed up onto the island, where Louisa sits, though she’s too big for it now, chatting to me sideways as I chop. This close, I saw a popped blood vessel in the white of one eye.

  ‘In your office, then. All this time,’ he said, nodding down at his feet which dangled just short of the floor. ‘Or beforehand too?’

  ‘Not before,’ I replied.

  ‘A year, then. More,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked. He cocked his head, squinting as though the sight of me hurt his eyes, listening completely.

  ‘Stef, you know there’s no single answer to that—’

  ‘Well, give me one of them then,’ he said, ‘just to start me off.’ So here was bitterness, a brief phase of attack. It felt like headway.

  ‘There was the fact that I knew him from before,’ I said. ‘I think that’s relevant. We got close in a way I wouldn’t have let happen, otherwise.’

  ‘So you were unhappy, then? With me? With us?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I felt angry a lot of the time. And compromised, somehow. I’d lost myself.’

  In the silence, I became aware of a low electrical hum. The lighting, the extractor, the speakers came together and as I listened, the sound seemed to narrow and accelerate into one symphonic drone.

  ‘We could have talked,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t allow it.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘So you fell in love with him and out of love with me,’ he asked. ‘Was it like that?’


  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Nothing like as binary.’

  ‘Do you still love me then?’ he asked. He leant forwards over the lip of the counter, his weight in his hands, the toes of his trainers tipped up.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but being with Adam feels—More truthful. I don’t know how else to put it.’

  ‘Truthful,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘The kind of word you use with your clients, I imagine, to explain away all their shit decisions, too. I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘I can’t explain it any better.’

  ‘More truthful than your life here with your children?’

  ‘That is something completely different,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Stef replied emphatically. ‘It’s not. That’s where you’re wrong. You don’t get to pull things apart like that. You know who you sound like, Nancy? Your brother,’ and he landed that last word hard, as though it were the worst kind of profanity.

  ‘David’s got nothing to do with this,’ I said.

  ‘Ah. Well,’ he replied and pushed up off the island, landing with a pitter-patter, a kind of skippity two-step.

  ‘What you’ve just described to me,’ he said. ‘It’s just so fucking selfish. Seriously. Do you even hear yourself?’

  He moved around the kitchen with a strange sudden energy. The dog, wanting in, gave a rough two-note bark.

  ‘Look, you’re in the grip of this. I get that. And then there was Marie. But you’re honestly here to tell me that you’re giving up – no, destroying – all of this? This effort. This time. Everything?’

  ‘Stefan, please. Just let me tell you what I need to—’

  ‘You’ve told me, Nancy, OK? It’s done.’

  At the far end of the kitchen, he paused. He eased his shoulders out in a couple of subtle rolls, loosened his head on the stem of his neck. He turned and took a full breath – I observed the procedures of it – the lift of his chest and then the reciprocal swell of his belly. I watched him wilfully collect himself and start back towards me.

  ‘The deceit is over, all right? And carrying that weight must have been hard. It must have felt impossible. But it’s gone now,’ he said and at his words I felt a sudden dizzy relief.