After You'd Gone (28 page)

'No, it wouldn't,' she says indignantly. 'Don't treat me like I'm made of glass. I want to know. Come on. Tell me the worst. ' She almost squares her shoulders. 'I can take it, you know, John.'

He bites his lip. 'You want to know the worst?' 'Yes. '

'Sure?'

'Yes! How many times do I have to tell you?'

'OK. My father said that if I were to marry you it would be like letting Hitler win,' he says, in a rush.

There is a pause while Alice attempts mentally to process this statement. 'Letting Hitler-?' She shakes her head. 'Idon't understand. What on earth have we got to do with Hitler?'

'Because if Iwere to marry you, our children wouldn't be Jewish, and he sees that as the extermination of Jews.'

'But . . . ' she begins, then is silent. She turns back to the window. Letting Hitler win? Letting Hitler . . . ? It's such an outrageous assertion that part of her wants to laugh. She's not quite sure what the other part of her wants to do.

'Al,' he says, laying a hand on her back, 'it's a dreadful thing to say. I didn't want to tell you. He didn't mean it, Ijust--'

'What did you say?' 'To him?'

'Yes.'

'I said . . . er . . I said lots of unrepeatable things, among

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which I said that I didn't believe in letting the Third Reich dictate my love life.'

'Right,' Alice whispers. 'Shit.' She feels she might cry. Hitler? Not for the first time she tries to imagine John's father. What kind of a person would say that? She reruns the sentence in her head, trying it out in different ways, with a variety of different emphases.

He grabs hold of her round the middle and pulls her towards him. 'Alice, this is stupid. I can't believe we're arguing about this. I don't believe in letting my father dictate my love life either. He's bluffing, that's all. He'll come round. You've got to understand: he's coming from a very different perspective. I knew it wouldn't be easy telling him. I knew he'd take it badly, but I know him. He isn't one to bear grudges. His bark has always been worse than his bite. Once he's had a think about the whole thing, he'll be fine.'

'But how do you know? What if it really does mean being cut off from your family and your background and

. everything? I can't let you do that.' 'It won't come to that, I promise.' 'How do you know?' she persists.

'I just know. I know my father - this won't last, I guarantee you. Let's not argue any more.' He tips her face back so she is forced to look him in the eye. 'Now when,' he says, with mock fierceness, 'are you going to move in?'

'I'm not sure,' she says reluctantly, 'when's good for you?' 'As soon as possible.'

'Well, I've told my crook of a landlord that I'll be leaving the flat at the end of December.'

'Bollocks to the end of December. How about tomor row?'

'I had no idea you had this many clothes, Alice. When do you

have time to wear them all?' John is lying on Alice's bed, watching her trying to force the lid of her trunk shut. She bounces up and down on the lid and attempts to squeeze the lock together, panting with the effort.

'I know, I know. I should really throw some out, but I can't bring myself to do it. I love clothes.'

'Evidently.'

'I've been collecting them for years. In that cupboard, you know-' She breaks off, exasperated. 'John, come here a sec, will you, and sit on this so I can shut it?'

He rolls off the bed, crawls through the debris littering the room and adds his weight to the trunk. The lock snaps shut.

'There!' She flicks her pony-tail over her shoulder and sits back on her heels. 'Now, what next?'

He picks up a fragile, colourful paper Chinese dragon from a box. 'Where did you get all this stuff, Alice?'

'All over the place. That's from Bangkok, I think, or somewhere.' She lifts a box down from the top of the wardrobe, opens it and peers inside. 'God, this is all stuff from uni. When I moved out of Jason's house I didn't sort through anything, I just shoved it all into boxes and got out of there as quickly as I could.'

'Quite right too. The little shit, ' John mutters, wandering. into the bathroom.

She smiles at his retrospective loyalty and pulls out a

handful of old postcards, hairgrips, a bicycle bell, ribbol}s and photographs. She shuffles hastily through the photos, grimacing at images of herself at nineteen and twenty in a variety of poses with a variety of friends.

'Hey, John, look at this. I've got to show this to Rachel.'

She follows him into the bathroom where he is piling all her toiletries into a cardboard box and hands him the stack of photos. On top is one of her and Rachel beside a tent in

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a field. It is summertime and they have their arms around each other's waists, smiling happily. Alice is wearing a flowing golden-brown kaftan. Her hair is in plaits and she has stars drawn all over her face. Rachel is wearing flared, patched jeans and a flowery halterneck top.

'My God ,' says John, peering at the picture. 'What on

earth were you doing?'

'We were at Glastonbury, hence the outfits. It must have been second year. After the exams.'

He starts looking through the other photos, sniggering. She has turned to go back to her packing when she hears him say: 'Alice - look at this.'

He is staring at a photo. 'What is it?'

He says nothing but just lowers the photo for her to see. It's a younger Alice at a party. She is smiling, her face turned to one side, her mouth open slightly and her hand raised as if in the middle of saying something to the photographer. 'What?' Alice asks, perplexed. 'It's just me at a party.'

'No, look. ' He says, and taps his fingertip on the corner of the frame. 'Who does that look like to you?'

She takes the photo from him and holds it closer to her face. In the background, just behind and to the left of her, is someone who looks suspiciously like the man standing next to her right now.

'No. It can't be. ' She shakes her head, moves through to the bedroom and holds the picture up to the window. John follows her and looks over her shoulder. 'It is me.

It's definitely me.'

His face is in half-profile and he is looking sideways at the camera. He appears to be leaning on a desk or table of some sort and has a beer-can in his hand. She recognises unequivocally the curve of that brow, the line of the jaw, the way the hair stands

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up in tufts. Even though the man in the photo is a lot younger, it is unmistakably john. 'Shit,' she whispers, 'it
is
you.' She turns to look at him. 'How can that be?'

'What party was that? Do you remember?'

She looks at the photo again, hardly able to believe what she sees. She scrutinises what she's wearing, what she can see of their surroundings in the dim background light. She stares at the smudged replica of John's features in a photo she must have seen a hundred times since it was taken.

'It must have been your first year, if we were both there,' he is saying. 'I don't think I ever went to any parties there after I'd left.'

'It was a party in some house beside the river. It was the summer term, I think. Can't remember the name of the person whose party it was, or why I was even there.'

'Richard somebody,' john says.

'Richard?' Alice screws up her face. 'Yes, that's right. He was awful. He did history. He was a friend of a friend, or something.'

'I remember that party now.' He nods. 'Someone was sick on a bed.'

'Well, it wasn't me.'

'And you were there? That is just so weird. I don't remember seeing you there at all. I do have a feeling I used to see you in the English library - all legs and hair.'

'You should have been concentrating on your finals, not eyeing up first-years.'

'Mmm. I had to do something to keep my motivation up.'

'Motivation? Is that what you call it?'

He is staring at the photo again. 'Imagine if we'd met then. Imagine if, at that point in time, you'd turned to your left and said to me, "John Friedmann, in six years' time we will fall in love.'"

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'You'd have thought I was bonkers.'

'I'd probably have thought, Game on! But why, oh sexy and mysterious woman, must we wait six years?'

'I was too young. I wasn't ready for you then. I still had to go through Mario and Jason. Without them I wouldn't have got to you.'

'What, so I should be grateful to those dickheads?'

'No, what I mean is that it's like an equation, an emotional equation: Mario divided by Jason equals John. '

He laughs. 'Well, thanks for getting around to me eventu ally.' He tucks the photo into his jacket pocket. When she puts her arms around him later she hears it crackle against the pressure of her touch.

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A taxi deposited them on the pavement outside Alice's house, and when they stumbled from its high step, with bags and coats, Ann looked up to see the unbelievable
_:
a light burning in Alice's bedroom window. Her heart jumped in her chest, and while the rational half of her mind knew that her daughter was unconscious in a hospital bed, the other half was shouting, 'she's here! It was all a mistake, she's been here at home all along!' Ben saw it too. His face was upturned, the whites of his eyes glistening in the glow.

Ann groped in her bag for the keys, held together by that fish key-ring of Alice's that Ann had never liked very much. Fish had always given her the creeps - slimy, scaled things with serrated jaws. Resting one hand against the wood of the door, she pushed the key into the lock, turned it, and the door gave.

Then they were jostling in the hallway together, Ben fussing with the bags, Ann fighting a stupid reluctance to look upstairs towards the light. What was she afraid of seeing? The light filtering down delineated the walls and objects in the dark room downstairs. Ann moved into the sitting room on brittle ankles, still in her coat, still holding the keys, and turned on the light. On the coffee table was a book, resting face down, its pages splayed, a glass of half-drunk water and a clump of

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tissues, crisp with dried-up moisture. Ann took off her coat, laid it over the back of a chair and folded her arms across her chest. Ben lumbered across the room and sat on the sofa, tipping his head to rest on the sofa back. Water leaked from the corner of his eye. Whether it was a tear or not, Ann didn't know, and she was irritated to see that he didn't wipe it away, just kept staring at the ceiling.

Ann walked about, eyeing the room. She pulled open a drawer at random, not really knowing why, and found library cards, a sprig of lavender, old and scratched sunglasses, crumpled bank statements and a fountain pen, choked with dried ink.

In the kitchen a tall, narrow cardboard box of cat biscuits stood on the table. The kettle lid was off, resting beside the kettle on the counter. On the chair in the corner was a half-knitted sweater in bright green wool. Ann frowned. She didn't know Alice knitted. Walking to the window, Ann peered out into the gloom trying to make out the garden. She had just pressed her forehead to the cold of the pane when she saw, on the other side of the glass, just inches from her face, a pair of eyes swivel and flicker. A scream stretched from her mouth as if on elastic and she reeled back into the room, stumbling over the kitchen chair. Ben appeared behind her, his face edgy and strained. 'Ann? What's wrong?'

'There was . . . there . . .'

Inarticulate with fear, she pointed at the window, and as she did so saw black fur brush against the pane as a large rodent-like creature turned and resettled on the window-sill. The cat. Of course. She'd forgotten about the bloody cat.

At once furious and relieved, she marched to the back door, unlocked it and wrenched it open. The cat, hunched on the narrow ledge, regarded her with vertically slitted green eyes.

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'Come on,' she gestured towards the kitchen, 'hurry up, if you want to come in.'

It didn't move. Gnats zoomed around it in the pool of light cast from the kitchen window. Ann stood in the doorway. 'Are you coming in or not?'

It remained motionless. Sighing, Ann stepped back and started closing the door. But just before it closed fully, the cat darted, quick as a minnow, through the hand-span gap.

It stood in the kitchen, the very tip of its tail twitching, one of its front feet raised above the lino. Ben held out his hand to it, murmuring nonsensical sounds. It touched his fingers once with its nose, its whiskers prinking the air, cooler now the door had been open. Ann could see its claws, sheathed up inside its paws. She watched as Ben moved his fingers up to its head, touching its ears - strange alert triangles of soft papyrus.