Afterwards

by Rachel Seiffert

  Alice didn’t have many friends who still went on holiday with their parents. It used to embarrass her a little when she was younger, after she’d left school, and while she was at college: summer weeks spent walking the Pennine Way with her mother while everyone she knew seemed to be hitching around Italy or clubbing in Barcelona. Took Alice years before she admitted, even to herself, that she enjoyed walking more than dancing all weekend and the come-down after.

  Alice was six the first time they went away, just the two of them. Her mother had just qualified, had her first teaching job lined up for the autumn, and they spent three July weeks in Dorset: a graduation present from Gran and Grandad. The money had been intended for a week in a cottage, but Alice’s mum decided on staying away longer, cancelled the reservation her parents had made and booked a caravan instead. Alice loved the instant mash and tinned spaghetti meals her mother cooked those weeks, the biscuits eaten straight from the packet. They stayed up late together playing memory instead of washing up, and kept their pyjamas on until lunchtime, both knowing Gran and Grandad would have dressed hours before them. The nearest beach was shingle, and rough on cold toes after swimming, but Alice asked to go there nearly every day because she liked the pebbles. Local legend had it that they were larger at one end of the beach than the other, something to do with waves and current, and fishermen sent adrift could always tell where on the wide bay they had landed by the size. Alice and her mum tested the theory, working their way along the beach, filling their pockets. She couldn’t remember if they’d drawn any conclusions, just that she’d spent hours laying the stones out in size and colour sequences on the windowsills of their caravan. Milky blue-grey, deep red-brown, some green and some almost orange: all of them were prettier when they were wet, and she dribbled water onto them from the teapot, until her mother started frowning about the puddles on the lino. So Alice waited until she wasn’t looking and spat on the stones instead, rubbing them against her palms.

  The caravan site was small, but had space for tents, and in their last week three students pitched next to them. Postgraduate, geology, two men and a woman, on a summer field trip. They admired Alice’s pebble collection, and told her the names of the stones: quartz, flint and chert, and one she could never remember, but they said it was harder than steel. The students seemed ancient to Alice at the time, but they would have been early twenties, like her mum. Her mother never spoke much to the parents in the other caravans, but she took to drinking her morning cup of tea out on the steps around the same time the students were eating breakfast outside their tents.

  The caravan didn’t have a bedroom, but the dining table folded down and there were spare foam cushions under the benches, so in the evenings, after dinner and card games were over, Alice and her mother would rebuild the narrow double bed, which they shared. They hung a blanket across the caravan so her mum could read at the far end by the door after Alice had gone to bed. Once the students arrived, her mum started spending her evenings with them, sitting and talking outside their tents. Not far away, not much more than thirty feet, and if she wasn’t asleep yet, Alice would listen to the murmur through the metal walls.

  One night, towards the end of their stay, Alice woke up and panicked. No light leaking around the edges of the suspended blanket. Miles from a street lamp and she couldn’t hear anything. She needed the loo, and she’d been in the night before, knew the layout of the caravan, but this time her mum wasn’t there.

  Alice fell asleep again, despite the worry and the seeping wet, before her mother came in and moved her over gently to get into bed. And she cried when her mum peeled off her sleeping bag, sodden pyjamas. Doesn’t matter love, doesn’t matter. Her mum’s voice was quiet, not angry, but Alice could see her neck, flushing red above her T-shirt.

  The foam cushions and the sleeping bag were laid out on the sunny grass beside the caravan in the morning, and Alice stayed inside, thinking everyone on the site would surely guess what had happened. But she never heard her mum say anything to the students, not even the tall one who got a bucket from the site manager and helped her wash everything.

  – Oh God, yes. Rory.

  Her mum laughed when Alice asked about him, years later.

  – You still remember his name?

  – I was in his tent when you wet yourself, I think. Guilty conscience.

  Her mum shrugged, smiling. They were on holiday again, one spring when Alice was studying. At the old farm: now part of their annual routine. Gran was with them that year, and Alan too, but Grandad had stayed at home. He’d rarely left London since retiring, and Gran going away for a few days without him was normal enough to them all by then. Alice, her mum and Gran spent the days wrapped in conversation, and Alan had come prepared: a car boot full of contracts and timetables to keep him occupied at the desk in the upstairs bedroom, while they filled the kitchen with talking.

  – Did you like him, though, Mum? Rory.

  Alice poured more tea, reaching the cup across the table to her mum, who was smiling again, perhaps a little embarrassed because her own mother was there and listening.

  – Enough to take up the offer of his tent, anyway.

  – But did you see him again after?

  – No, no. Nothing like that.

  – Why not?

  Her mum shrugged again. Alice didn’t really need an answer: there had been nothing like that in her mother’s life until Alice was a teenager. She’d had evenings out, of course, but Alice remembered them being very occasional, and usually with female friends. Her mum would cook dinner for people at the flat sometimes too, and Alice was allowed to stay up for a while then with the grown-ups, but the first regular male face she could recall from those evenings was Alan’s. Alice used to press her mother about her love life. Started when she was seventeen, eighteen: the same age her mum was when she’d had her. Got more insistent as she got older. That spring break in Yorkshire became dominated by such conversations.

  – But you must have been asked out.

  – Sometimes. I did the asking sometimes too. Easier that way, because I’d pick evenings I knew you’d be free to babysit.

  Her mum nodded across the table at Gran and they both laughed. Alice smiled with them, but persisted:

  – Didn’t it ever bother you?

  – Of course. Of course it did.

  It exasperated her mum on occasion, this line of questioning, especially during that holiday because it came up so often, but she never got annoyed enough for Alice. The subtext was clear to all of them: Alice’s father. But Alice’s mum refused to let slip any resentment of him, even though Alice did her best to provoke. Teasing, needling:

  – He never interrupted his sex life to change my sheets, did he?

  – I think Rory and I had finished whatever it was we got up to before I discovered your predicament.

  – You know what I mean.

  – Might have been better if you had stopped us. The fact that you’d gone to sleep again used to bother me the most. I must have been away hours. Thoughtless.

  Her mother shook her head, smiling, but still shuddering at the memory. She hadn’t known Alice’s father long before she got pregnant, just a few weeks in her first term at university, and they split up a good while before she took the test. Alice knew all that already, and it was a perfect walking day outside, blue and mild, but she kept her mum at the table with questions. Couldn’t understand it, why she wouldn’t get angry.

  – It was just as much my fault for going to bed with your Dad. We were both naïve, love. Just didn’t think it would happen to us.

  Alice didn’t remember her gran saying much while she and her mum were talking, but she stayed with them there in the kitchen, clearing away the breakfast plates, or just sitting. Watching Alice’s mum, checking. Ready, it seemed to Alice, to step in if she got the signal that help was wanted. It annoyed Alice at the time: she didn’t think her mum was the one who needed support. She always seemed so certain. Said it was her choice to have Ali
ce. Not to get pregnant, but to keep her, and she never talked to Alice’s father about it, just told him it was happening: part-way through the spring term, almost three months since the last time they’d spoken. Alice’s mum said he turned up at the house she’d been staying in a few days later, with his parents, but she’d already packed her things and gone home.

  – It wasn’t as though I wanted him to marry me or anything. And I know he didn’t want that either.

  – He’s never thought about us. Me or you.

  Alice remembered being surprised at herself, her tone of voice, the anger that shot across the table at her mother. Her mum held up her hands, briefly, and then put them down next to her cup again, as though surprised too, but trying not to show it.

  – You don’t know that, Alice.

  Her gran took the final word: soft, but spoken clearly enough to end the conversation, and Alice was glad of it later. She was twenty then, and frightening: could sound so sure of her own opinions. Gran had been good at timing her interventions.

  They’d had plenty of those conversations before, Alice and her mother, but never with her gran there. It wasn’t until that week away together that Alice saw how hard it was for her mother, to hear how angry Alice was about her dad. Just as much my fault. It must have been tempting: her mum could have joined in with the character assassination, agreed with Alice about her father, shifted the blame for Alice’s hurt away from herself at least a little, but she’d held back. Not just because Gran was there, this was the way her mum always dealt with Alice’s questions: shrugs and smiles, and calm acceptance of the way things turn out. Alice had been fooled by that. Too easily, she thought: too self-absorbed. It took her gran’s concerned glances across the kitchen table to show Alice the effect her probing had.

  She knew her gran was right about her father too: how can you be sure what he thinks or feels or doesn’t? Unfair to make such a presumption. Her gran never said as much, and neither did her mum, but the implication was plain: Alice could be the one to make contact, if she wanted to find out.

  They’d all been quiet after that, but they’d stayed at the table together. Long enough for Alan to think it was safe to come downstairs and put on the kettle. He’d started when he opened the door and found the three of them still in the kitchen.

  – Oh! I thought you’d all gone out.

  Four

  Joseph didn’t see Alice for well over a week. Didn’t plan it that way, just days went by and he was working late or tired. She left a message and he called her back but made an excuse when she suggested meeting up. Bit of flu coming on or something. He didn’t think about it before he said it, it just came out, and he felt bad after: lying to her like that for no good reason, just because he wanted to sleep in his own bed. Monday night knackered, he’d been working over the weekend, and he said he’d see her Wednesday maybe, she could come round then. Only he must have made it sound vague enough for Alice to say she’d call him first, make sure he was better: still friendly enough, but she knew he wasn’t ill. It was a relief, though, waking up alone in his empty flat, and he didn’t start work until nearly lunchtime on Wednesday. Still sleepy, he keyed in the wrong code when he got there, set the alarm off in the house he was plastering. He was working with Tony, who didn’t want to wait for the police: his parents were West Indian, and the last time this happened they didn’t believe he was a carpenter and took him in to get his fingerprints. Tony jogged down to the pub on the corner and Joseph went to find him after the police had been and the alarm was reset. Stan arrived a bit later and Joseph ended up staying in the pub with them until after closing. Didn’t have his mobile on him, but from where he was sitting, Joseph could see the payphone at the end of the bar. Thought about calling Alice to let her know where he was, but he never made it up there. He went to see Eve and Arthur on the Thursday, and was glad when his sister didn’t ask about her: she was good like that.

  Joseph went home early that evening. Passed the end of Alice’s road and thought how he didn’t really understand what was going on, because he’d been into it, right from the beginning. Hadn’t felt like that in ages, but he liked her. The sandy red hair growing back in under her arms, that she apologised for, laughing, but that sent him searching, unbuttoning, with her lifting and shifting and helping him find the same shade curling over the top of her knickers. He remembered her wandering halfnaked around his flat one morning before work, looking for her socks. Not thinking he might be watching, still half asleep maybe, her face all squashed from the pillows, she looked great. But it took getting used to, being with someone again. All the time spent and all that talking. Tired him out, made him want to shut his mouth and keep it shut for a while.

  – I’ve never told anyone that before.

  That’s what she’d said. The second time they talked about her dad. After she told him it had been hard sometimes, not knowing him, or what he was like.

  – Not when I was little. I never missed having a dad then, not really. I knew my family set-up was a bit odd and everything, when I was at school. But I remember another girl in my class whose parents had split up and one boy who lived at his gran’s too. Mum says kids have such complicated families now. She has to draw little trees to keep track of them for parents’ evenings.

  It was a few days after that dinner with her flatmates. Alice had got a puncture on the way over to his place after work. They cooked together, and while it was in the oven, she carried her bike up the stairs and turned it upside down to mend it in the hallway, so she wouldn’t have to get up early for the bus in the morning. Alice was kneeling on the floorboards, working the bolts loose when she started talking, and it took Joseph a few seconds to catch up somehow: thinking backwards through what they’d been saying since she arrived that evening. He’d asked Alice before, about her dad, but not today, and it hadn’t seemed like she’d wanted to say much about him, either. Joseph filled the washing-up bowl for her and found an adjustable spanner, and then he waited.

  – I started to lie sometimes, when I was at college. If friends asked about my parents, I’d say they were divorced and I didn’t see my Dad. Seemed like an easier explanation. Plenty of other people in the same situation.

  Alice looked up at Joseph, standing in the kitchen doorway, and then down again. She stopped after that, talking and working, and so Joseph crouched down. Thought that might make it easier for her: make her feel more listened to than watched, because he did want to hear about it.

  Alice stayed quiet for a while, working the tyre irons around her front wheel, her palms turning grey with dirt. Joseph liked the way she always had oil smears on her legs, from her bicycle chain, and that she mended things herself: punctures and brake cables, and the dodgy light switch that gave Martha shocks. She never made a fuss or waited for someone else to sort it, just turned off the mains and got a screwdriver out. Started on things she didn’t know how to finish sometimes, but Joseph liked that too. The way she’d stood looking at the wires coming out of the wall that time, with the switch in her hand. She’d been stuck, but she found her own way out: unscrewed the switch in the living room too, and worked out the wiring from there.

  – Mum met him through a girl she knew from school, went to uni the year before her.

  The tyre came away, and Alice said they lived in the same squat, this girl and Alice’s dad, and Alice’s mum was living with a family then, friends of her parents, in a different part of town.

  – She was only seventeen, young to be studying. The idea was that my grandparents’ friends would look out for her. Didn’t do a very good job.

  Alice laughed and stood up to get her bike pump out of her bag.

  – I think the squat was just that bit more exciting, and the area. They’d done the house up really well, she said. It was a big place, and it wasn’t only students who lived there, but older people too, locals. One was a stonemason, I remember Mum telling me he did these Celtic knots all around the front door. Everything was put together out of bits th
ey’d found or been given, but everything worked. I think my Dad spent more time on the house than in lectures. They turned the back room into a big kitchen, for everyone to sit in, and he helped the stonemason lay all the floorboards in there.

  She smiled about that and then she said they weren’t together long, her mum and dad. Stopped seeing each other even before her mum found out about Alice, and her dad panicked when she told him. Her mum never thought about staying with him, just wanted to go home.

  – She says he didn’t want to be with her either. She’s probably right. After I was born she sent him a letter. To say I was a girl and what I was called, and he never wrote back.

  Alice shrugged and Joseph waited for her to go on, watching her while she held the inner tube under the water, looking for the leak. Her fingers were dripping when she pulled the tube out, so he grabbed a tea towel from the back of the kitchen door for her.

  – It’ll get filthy.

  – Doesn’t matter.

  He didn’t want to go off looking for a rag and hold up the conversation. Looked like it was hard enough for her to say all this without interruptions. Alice dried her hands and then the tube and chose a patch from the kit. Still nothing.

  – He never got in touch? Your Dad.

  She shook her head. She didn’t look at him, just at what she was doing.

  – He never got curious enough. That’s how it seemed to me anyway. I spent years going on about it with my Mum. She wanted to keep me, and she said it was her decision, pretty much. Took it out of his hands. But then, he let that happen, didn’t he? Never made contact. So I thought he didn’t want anything to do with me.

  Alice spread glue onto the patch, frowning concentration, then she put it to one side and looked up at him.

  – It was probably just a relief. For my Dad, I mean. He was nineteen and he wasn’t in love. No one was pushing him or asking him to take responsibility. I don’t know.

  – You can’t blame him for turning his back?