After Before

by Jemma Wayne

  The paint was a dark blue-black. Philip had been gone for three weeks. She said ‘gone’ and not ‘died’ around the boys and now even inside her own head. He had been gone frequently in the years they’d been together. When John was a baby, wrapped in her arms, refusing to be laid even for a moment in his cot, she would count sometimes the hours in which Philip was gone. Count them down, looking forward to the moment at which he would burst through the door filling her with support and company and friendship undimmed. Sharing with her the indescribable wonder of their sons that nobody else would ever quite understand. Creating with her four walls of sleepless, nappy-filled, unexpected… bliss.

  He always came back to her then.

  And told her when he was going. Gave her time to plan.

  She picked up the brush she’d tentatively purchased from the shop in the high street. She had set up the canvas in her garden room at the back of the house and locked the door. John was still at school and Luke wasn’t due home until the weekend, but she couldn’t risk their finding a crack in her exterior. It was necessary for her to seem undefeated.

  Luke had not cried, at least not in front of her.

  John had wept for days.

  She hadn’t painted since Cambridge, since those endless days on sunny riverbanks. Why did she crave the brush now? To see him again. To remember him. To depict without decision the sweep of his hair, the gaze of his eyes, those early picnic dinners on student floors. When she was finished she stared at the images for hours. Longingly.

  Lynn caught herself daydreaming and glanced around the room, inspecting the canvasses that she had begun that day. The paintings were like a diary of the last 15 years. Calmer times reflected in cityscapes, and beachfronts and forests from her youth. Other moments, regrets, frustrations, passions, in the sometimes-heady, sometimes-stricken faces of those she loved.

  She shook her head. She should cover them. What was the point in remembering a happiness that no longer existed? It had been a foolish path in the first place. Family. Love. A career would not so easily have vanished.

  Lynn closed her eyes.

  She should have gone to bed earlier. It was unlike her to have stayed awake so late into the night, but the previous evening it had seemed necessary. Panic had begun to sweep over her often now: a sickly, hot sensation that made her kick off the covers or open a window or move around the room despite the pain in her side, for fear of stopping. Or noticing how fast her heart was racing. Or how pitifully nervous she’d become. Poise, people used to call it. She had poise. She’d had poise. Over the years she’d been told this often, and it was something people admired about her, aspired to, something that suggested intelligence and good breeding. She was glad that Luke and John, or worst of all Vera, had not seen her the night before: sweating, fidgeting, turning on the television. The television. She’d watched it until three in the morning, by which time she could hear birds already singing from the tree-lined street. There’d been a programme about reptiles that she’d watched for a while, the intrepid presenter somehow taming a ten-foot python, wild and beautiful, understanding it, showing it off before releasing it once more. After that there’d been only quiz shows, or rolling news of which she’d seen all the stories within the first 10 minutes and drew little satisfaction from the minuscule developments that were occasionally added. Still, she’d been compelled to watch something.

  The result however, was this daytime haze that now enveloped her. She ought to shake herself out of it. She ought to clean out the palette and go upstairs. She ought to have done many things differently, and been different herself.

  *****************

  There is something about Lynn that makes Vera feel crumpled. Dishevelled, as though her clothes are in need of an iron. And condensed somehow, folded, like the piece of paper in her wallet. She sits on the tube, squashed between an old Chinese woman and a slightly pungent teenaged boy, and tries in vain to straighten herself.

  She knows that Lynn dislikes her. Lynn barely managed to hide her horror when she and Luke told her about their engagement, and sometimes when they are together, sipping tea and making small talk, Vera catches Lynn glaring. She doesn’t hold it against her. Vera suspects it is because Lynn has seen through her. Luke tells her all the time how good his mother is, how self-sacrificing, how astute, and Vera fears that for all her church-going and toeing of lines, Lynn has somehow spotted her wildness. Her evil.

  It is for this reason that leaving work to look after Lynn is so perfect. It will not be easy. It will not be fun. It will be Vera’s punishment, and redemption.

  Despite knowing this, Vera has spent the past week concocting improbable fantasies of how things might pass - cosy confidences, raucous moments of laughter, a passing down of womanly secrets. A sharing of son and fiancé. Luke was so thrilled by her offer, touched and effusively grateful. Squeezing her arms beneath his coat he volunteered a ‘something true’, and told her that thanking God for her presence in his life is the first thing he does each morning. Then he kissed her square on the lips in the middle of the park and for once didn’t seem to notice the people walking by. Vera can’t quite quell the spark of hope that has been rising inside of her ever since. If only she can truly befriend Lynn. If only she can be there for her, and for Luke too, be useful, needed, do something good, help him, help them, help ease the transition between now and eternity. Dear God, make me better, make me worthy, make me clean.

  Vera so wants to be clean. She wants to be good. When was she last good? She doesn’t mean church and charity and abstinence and all that. She means something else she can’t quite finger but knows she has lost. Purity? Innocence? Humanity? When was she last pure? Who last met that Vera? Not Luke. Though he has no idea.

  The train shrieks to a halt. Lynn’s house is the next stop.

  Of course it was Charlie.

  Charlie.

  It’s best to start with his name because so much about him seems to unfold from it. Charlie as in Prince Charles and aristocracy; Charlie as in Chaplin, the joker, the entertainer; Charlie as in cocaine. When they met during their first day at university, Charlie called her V and instantly, with one letter, dismembered her from her previous era, detaching her from the sensible, loving daughter she had once been, and setting her free. Or so she had thought for three blissful, electrifying, terrible years, the two of them filling the void of life, of growing up, of becoming, with chaos and noise and drug-fuelled decadence. Feeling youthful and brilliant, soaring high, until…

  Luke fills his void with Jesus. His goodness shines out of him.

  Lynn does not smile when she opens the door. Leaving it agape she moves to the lounge where she seats Vera in the comfy chair and insists on making their tea herself. She winces as she lifts the teapot but will not allow Vera to pour. She opens the window for Vera who is hot, then rubs her own arms from the cold. She is a wily old bat. Vera has a momentary vision of Lynn fanning her arms like bat wings. Luke would not find this funny but despite her nerves, or because of them, Vera laughs at the imagery. Lynn raises her eyebrows. Perhaps she thinks that Vera is laughing at her frailty with the teapot. Vera cannot explain. She avoids eye contact and scans the room, trying quickly to spot something to bond them, some nugget to offer up for friendship. It is important that they begin on the right note. Lynn sips her tea silently. Against the delicate china cup, Vera’s own lips feel large and clumsy, and she cannot quite stifle the slurp. On the mantelpiece, a brass-tipped clock ticks loudly. In Vera’s movie version of her life, tumbleweed is rolling by. She can see it moving across the rug and squeezing underneath the coffee table. Vera blinks. She can actually see it. Lynn is frozen, while dried, globular strands of plant creep over her, consuming her, progressing while she is paused. Or is it Vera who is paused? Slumping into the soft cushion, she feels herself folding. She is folded. She is about to fold. On the side table, there is a photo of Luke. Smiling. Smiling with certainty. The photo has pride of place. Lynn is looking at her looking at it. Vera�
��s mantra circles her head. The silence has become unbearable.

  “You must teach me how to make that soup Luke loves,” Vera ventures finally, plucking a thread of conversation from the air.

  “You mean before I drop dead and can’t cook it any more?”

  “No - I… ” Vera pauses, again, uncomfortably.

  Like her life, there is an uncomfortable pause.

  “Only the way he raves about it anyone would think you’ve got a Michelin star.”

  “I’ll make you a pot,” Lynn replies, leaving Vera to nod gratefully into yet another silence and reach for more tea, which she spills over the antique coffee table. At least it is a reason to escape to the kitchen for a cloth, away, briefly, from Lynn and her disdainful looks, which have a way of dismantling Vera. It is already harder than she had imagined. It is one thing to play a part to willing audiences, to people predisposed to think well of her, but Vera finds Lynn too much of a sceptic to keep up the charade. Especially when, when it comes to her own character, Vera is a sceptic too.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she mutters, returning with the cloth.

  Lynn stares at her silently for a while, then concedes a nod. “Well, I suppose you might as well get used to mess,” she says, pushing a strand of hair back into place with fingers that Vera now notices are stained red.

  Vera pauses from wiping the table. She is taken aback. “I won’t mind,” she offers eventually, tentatively, putting down the cloth and thinking how brave it is of Lynn to admit her fear of the untidy end. To share it with Vera. “And it might not be as bad as you think.” She steps closer, reaching slowly for the discoloured hand.

  But at once this enrages Lynn.

  “When you marry my son and have children, is what I mean. Children. There’ll be more mess then than someone like you will ever be ready for.”

  “I’m not ready,” she tells him.

  “Nor am I.”

  “I don’t want it,” she whispers.

  He says nothing.

  “I won’t keep it,” she sobs onto his shoulder. It smells rancid: wine and smoke and sex and sweat.

  Vera breathes in deeply.

  Someone like you, Lynn had said. Who is she like? Not herself. Not that girl she was for a while. Help me to be better.

  When you have children, Lynn had said.

  Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean.

  Lynn taps her foot against the chair leg.

  “Did you ever work, before children, before you had Luke and John?” Vera asks, exhaling hard. She passes Lynn a crumpet.

  Lynn butters it, adds jam, and then laughs, pityingly. “I had no interest in such things. My choice was to be a wife and a mother.”

  Vera flinches, too visibly. But perhaps because of it, to her surprise, Lynn softens: “You’ll understand dear, now that you’ve given up your job.”

  “Oh, I haven’t given up,” Vera replies quickly. Her mind is still whirring uneasily from their previous exchange but Lynn has offered an olive branch. Now is the time to capitalise, to clarify that she doesn’t plan to live off her son, that her feelings for Luke are authentic, that leaving work to care for her is a sacrifice not a desire. “I’ve just taken a sabbatical. I’ll be going back.”

  Lynn drops part of her crumpet into her lap. “A sabbatical?”

  “Yes.”

  Angrily Lynn snatches up the fallen crumbs and empties them onto her plate. “A sabbatical,” she repeats. “So how long is this ‘sabbatical’ to be? How many months have you allotted in which for me to die?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean - ” Vera begins, but Lynn has already taken her plate into the kitchen, and then too slowly to be really dramatic, but perhaps more potent because of the pain it is obviously inducing, storms upstairs, away from Vera.

  *****************

  Lynn lay alone in her bedroom, staring at the ceiling and noticing a chip in the paint that she wouldn’t bother, now, to repair. Downstairs she could hear Vera moving about, tidying up, trying to be quiet, but every sound shot through Lynn’s nerves and filled her with a seething anger. It was bad enough that Vera had arrived early and made her rush from her painting, leaving her dishevelled and imperfect for the rest of the day. But having her there, in the house, right in front of her was like being taunted by her worst demons. Slender limbs without age-spots. Hair still bright and voluminous. Naïvety and hope in abundance. A career. That had been the last straw, to learn that Vera had not been as stupid as she. That, after all, Vera would not cast herself into the periphery. Into dependence. She would marry and live. A whole life still unwritten.

  Lynn’s own money ran out a month after their eighth anniversary. She’d had a fund set up for her by her grandfather that she’d drawn from only slightly during university, but with their marital home to decorate and children to clothe, she’d pilfered from the top more and more regularly until there was no longer a top as such, but a fast-approaching bottom. She scraped the last of that to buy Philip a new briefcase made from the soft leather he’d been admiring with his initials embossed just above the buckle. There was a conversation soon after during which Lynn suggested half-heartedly that she apply for a secretarial position somewhere, or something part-time as a supplement. But they both knew that she was trained in Plutarch, Tacitus and Thucydides, and the thought of undertaking a career so far below the options that had once been open to her, filled her with dread. Philip – who by then was earning quite enough salary for both of them and had acquired a number of rising expectations along with his rising status – wouldn’t hear of it anyway. Not his wife. A legal aid perhaps, or something else professional and suitable to her intellect, but that would take further qualifications, and when she pointed out it would also mean the need for a housekeeper and a nanny and an end to his nightly three course suppers, he didn’t push the matter. Instead, he presented a simple solution: a new fund, topped up monthly by him.

  But it wasn’t so simple. All of a sudden every penny she spent was accountable to Philip. Not that he asked, but when he ran through the accounts each month she felt a need to explain why they’d required a new toaster, why she’d purchased a new set of curtains, who she’d been at Henry’s with three times for lunch, what was the occasion for which she’d bought her mother chocolates. It was as if all at once she needed his permission for everything she did, and the more often she requested it the faster she felt herself shrinking, submitting, forgetting almost the girl who’d once debated Engels and excelled at Cambridge, and been cleverer than her husband.

  The first time she used her new fund to buy anything extravagant for herself, she unveiled the Givenchy dress she’d pounced upon in delight at Harvey Nics as they were getting ready for bed one evening. “It’s the new style,” she informed her husband, holding it up excitedly. “Longer. What do you think?”

  Philip was in bed reading a law journal, as if to emphasise the disparity that now stretched between them, a gap across which it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to fly, but he put the heavy book down to consider his wife.

  “How much was it?”

  Some words are heavy. They can drag a person down.

  Although, in hindsight, it was possible that he’d never meant the question to be an indictment, Lynn could still feel the amalgamation of guilt and resentment, which in that singular moment clipped her wings. At once, she began to pack the dress back into its plastic. “It was quite expensive darling, but I did need a new dress. We have the party next week don’t forget.”

  “Of course,” Philip agreed. “I’m just curious, how much?”

  It had cost twenty pounds. In those days that was a lot of money. It still, to Lynn’s ears, sounded a lot and it shocked her when Luke didn’t blink an eye at paying that much for dinner somewhere, for each person, for each course.

  “Twenty pounds!” Philip sa
id no more than that. He’d always been mild-mannered, like John, but there was accusation in his eyes, or she imagined there was and concocted his thought process: I work hard all day, I provide for us, and what do you do? Spend my money like it’s nothing. His unspoken words stung her through the silence.

  “Put it on,” he said suddenly. Sitting up in bed now, Philip had taken off his glasses and tidied the journal onto his nightstand. Lynn was already in her nightdress, her hair set in curlers, her confidence dented.

  “Not now darling,” she said. “It’s late. You don’t really want to see it now.”

  “Put it on.”

  Lynn hung the garment onto the door of the wardrobe and turned to face him. She was unexpectedly exhausted and no longer felt like parading in front of him in the dress she now hated. But it had been bought with his money. This, she supposed was how she was to repay him. Philip nodded and so, slowly, she removed the protective material, sliding the dress off its hanger, stepping out of her nightdress and lifting the new outfit over her head while he gazed on. Silently she took out the curlers. Her hair tumbled free. She slipped her feet into a pair of heels. And then she stood, fully clothed now but feeling more naked and exposed by his eyes than ever before. With an abrupt, determined movement, Philip raised himself from the bed and walked rapidly over to her, his hands feeling for her waist and turning her in front of the mirror so they were both looking at her reflection. Her skin was pale and she was still thin after a bout of flu. The dress skimmed her breasts and hung loose.

  “It’s stunning,” Philip whispered.

  From behind her now, he hitched up the new long-length material, slid his hand underneath, then kissed her neck hard. Slowly she turned to face him again and just as slowly Philip lifted the twenty-pound dress over her head and threw it unceremoniously to the floor, so that she stood before him wearing nothing but a pair of heels. It was by no means the first time. The nights they had been naked together since their wedding were by then too numerous to recall and ordinarily, with both boys asleep, Lynn would have reached eagerly for Philip, for the buttons of his shirt, the string of his trousers, what lay beneath them. But this time the occasion felt contrived, an unequal exchange, her nakedness a gift and payment for him alone to enjoy. She let him trace her body with his hands and squeeze where they liked while she remained motionless. For the first and only time in their marriage, as he tenderly made love to her, Lynn felt tears stream down her face. Oblivious, Philip whispered his usual sweet nothings, my darling little one, but Lynn felt herself suffocating underneath his strong, capable frame, and as he moved on top of her she stared not at him but over his shoulder, fixing her eyes blankly on the then unblemished ceiling above their bed.