After You'd Gone (39 page)

His father. I twist round in my seat. I want to see him.

I scan the rows and rows of faces. I know all these people. Some of them give me a little smile and some of them nod. One person waves. I don't wave back - and I feel bad about ignoring them - but I just want to get a look at him. I just want to see who he is and I want him to look at me and think, that's Alice.

My mother is plucking at my sleeve and muttering 'Alice' in that way so I know she wants me to turn around and sit nicely, but I won't. Over the other side of the room, across the narrow aisle through all the seats is a group of people I've never seen before. John's family. I know it. Six or seven of them. There are four middle-aged men in dark overcoats. I realise that I'm looking for someone who looks like John, I'm searching for an older face that echoes his, but none of them do.

A woman from John's work is reading a poem. I can hear people sobbing in the room and beside me my father is supporting his forehead in his hand. It's funny because I used to tease John about how I thought that this woman fancied him. I am just about to turn round again to look at his family when there is a strange electronic whirring sound. Little wheels under his coffin are rotating and the coffin is moving slowly towards an opening in the wall that was hidden behind some curtains. Nobody told me this would happen.

I spring upright, my legs barely holding out, but immedi ately my parents seize hold of me and pull me back down.

'No!' I struggle. 'No, please, I just want . . .'

Both my hands are being crushed by my parents' and watch in horror as his coffin trundles slowly into the hole and disappears. Then I wrest my hands free because I want to cover my face. I clamp both my hands over my eyes and won't take them away because I never want to look on anything ever again.

Rachel has her arm through Alice's and they are standing near the door. Lots of people are coming up to Alice - kissing her lightly on the cheek, shaking her hand, saying things which, once they are out of their throats and into the air, she can't recall at all. She looks at their mouths moving, nods a lot but doesn't speak. Rachel speaks and so does Alice's mother who is standing somewhere nearby but Alice can't see her. Someone puts into her hands a yellow plastic pot.

She stares at it blankly, her hands curled round its sides. Rachel's hand supports it from underneath. Rachel thinks she'll drop it. It has a tiny silver plaque on the front with the words 'John Daniel Friedmann' in a nasty italicised script. She is looking at this plaque, wondering if she can remove it when someone to her left says in a quiet voice, 'You must be Alice.'

She turns. It is one of the men in dark overcoats, offering his outstretched hand. She has to shift the pot into the crook of her left elbow to take it. His hand is warm and he holds on to hers for longer than she expected.

'I'm Nicholas,' he says, then adds, 'John's uncle.'

'Yes.' Alice tries out her voice cautiously. It sounds unnaturally high and cracked. She passes her tongue over her lips and draws in a deep breath. 'John's told me about you.'

'Alice,' he begins, 'we . . . that is, the rest of the family . . . want you to know how very sorry we are about everything.'

Rachel is holding on to her very tightly. Alice nods.

'Also,' he glances involuntarily behind him at a man standing a few feet away, 'Daniel would like to know . . . if you don't mind telling us . . . where you're going to scatter those.' He points at the yellow urn.

Alice looks over his shoulder at John's father. He is shorter, stockier than she imagined, with grey hair cut very short. He

is standing alone, gazing out of the doors at the crowds of people on the pavement outside and as she watches he draws the side of his finger across his eyelid in a slow movement full of weariness and grief. At precisely that moment, and just for a moment, she loves him. She actually loves him. It feels like the unfamiliar, cramping stretch of rarely used muscles. She even looks at her watch. At 3.04 p.m. I loved your father.

She unscrews the lid of the urn and looks inside. It is filled with a finely sifted, whitish powder. She dips her fingertips into it and rubs the grains between finger and thumb. They dissolve and flake under her touch. She screws the lid back on and pushes it into Nicholas Friedmann's hands. He is astounded. 'Are you sure?' he asks.

Ann, who has materialised at her side, is saying, 'Alice, you don't have to do -that, you know. You might regret it. You don't have to do that.'

He is touching her sleeve hesitantly. Alice nods at him, twice. He walks back across the room and, saying something in a low voice, hands the urn to John's father. He cradles it in his hands and, just as Alice did, tilts it back to read the plaque. Then he looks over at her. Their eyes meet, briefly. She stands there thinking that he is going to come over and she is pushing down all the words that are crowding into her throat, but then he turns and, clutching the urn to him, goes out of the door and down the steps into the bright winter sun.

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Ann hated North Berwick at first. Hated it. Hated that everywhere she went - into shops, on to the beach, into the park, into the library - everyone knew exactly who she was: 'You must be Ben Raikes's wife,' or 'You're the new Mrs Raikes,' or 'This must be Elspeth's daughter-in-law.' She would draw her coat around her, run her hand around the edges of the coins in her pocket, not knowing how to respond to these greetings. She was, she knew, at a disadvantage straight away, because she had no idea who anyone was, let alone have all sorts of inside information on them and their families going back four generations. People she'cl not only never met before but would never want to meet would just stop her in the street and ask her questions as if they knew her: 'How do you like it here?' 'Do you play golf at all?' 'Why don't you call round for some coffee?' 'Where is it you're from anyway?' She couldn't be invisible. It was as if she was walking around with a big sign on her back. To her, the town, trapped as it was between the sea and the flat monotony of the agricultural fields, was a pit that seethed with gossip, circles of knowledge and people who clawed information from you. And they didn't like her, thought her a stuck-up Englishwoman - she knew that and she didn't care.

So she stopped going out after a while. Or would go out

in the winter dusk when she could keep her head down against the driving wind, which always funnelled through narrow gaps in the red sandstone buildings on the High Street, and no one would recognise her. During the day, she would be left alone in the house that was supposed to be her home but felt more alien than anywhere else she had known. She would wander from room to room, up and down the stairs, memorising where certain objects were; she wanted to know where everything was, how it all fitted together.

Then she had a baby and everything was better for a while, and she even started venturing out more. She liked herself with the pram, which was dark navy with squeaking silver wheels. The people would look into it and not at her. After all, Kirsty was blonde and pink and smiling. 'Like a wee angel,' they all said, and Ann thought that because they liked Kirsty perhaps they liked her better too. She felt in control for the first time in her life: she had a baby, a husband and a house, which admittedly wasn't hers but felt more like hers now she had had a baby, and Elspeth had been nice and encouraged her to paint the baby's room and plant as many flowers as she liked in the garden soil. She would catch sight of herself in shop windows - with coat, shopping-bag and pram - and would think to herself: there is a smart young mother on her way to buy something for her husband's tea. Her voice still sounded out of kilter, foreign, alien when she asked for things in shops, but somehow it mattered less now.

It was on one of these outings, when she was exploring more and more, that she went into an antiques shop. In there was a man with dark eyes and long lashes. Ann looked around the shop and when she turned round, he had lifted Kirsty right out of her pram without asking, and was holding her to his chest. 'I have a boy almost her age,' he said. He had an accent like Ann's. Kirsty looked tiny against the breadth

of his shoulder. Then came Alice, who had black eyes and black hair from the moment she was born. Ann felt like a photo negative next to her, and she couldn't wheel her about with confidence. She couldn't bear people's questions

- however innocent - about this new baby. When she caught her reflection with Alice's pram in shop windows, it wasn't a young mother she saw, but an adulteress.

In the taxi back to Alice's house, Ben and Beth sit in the back, talking. Ann leans her head against the passenger window. It's getting dark earlier and earlier now. It will soon be a year since John died. Ann's breath appears in tiny beads of moisture on the glass propping up her head, vanishing as quickly as she inhales. On Saturday at eleven-twenty, or thereabouts, Alice was in the Waverley Station Superloo.

If Alice wakes up, Ann tells herself, the secret you thought

was burnt and scattered on the Law with Elspeth's ashes could come out. She might not wake up. But then again, she might. As the taxi speeds through the night, and in the back seat Beth relates to Ben some story involving a dog and a frisbee, Ann imagines the scene: her and Ben standing around the bed. Alice stirring, stretching, opening her eyes. She looks at her, looks at Ben, her lips open and she says—

Maybe she wouldn't say anything. Maybe she didn't see anything at all. Maybe she was upset about something else entirely and it's just a coincidence that Ann happened to be there with—

And even if she did see, why would she automatically assume that the man has anything to do with her life, other than the fact that he's having an affair with her mother?

But Ann knows in her heart that Alice has that knack of instantly recognising the germ of any situation. Like someone else she knows. And Ann knows that if Alice wakes up,

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she is not the sort of person to lie. Alice would want to have it straight away.

let something like that out with her. Probablv

.J

But what if she doesn't wake up. What then?

Alice dashes through the tube doors just as they are closing. It's about noon on a Saturday and the Northern line is relatively empty. As the train starts to rattle out of Camden Town Station, she makes her way down to the end of the carriage and sits opposite a middle-aged woman with a headscarf and a plastic bag full of children's toys. Alice will stay on the train until Kennington, where she will cross over to the northbound platform and catch another train which will take her back to Camden, where she will most probably go to the southbound platform and repeat the ritual.

Her tube-train riding has become a habit, something she would never admit to anyone. It's the only thing that makes her feel better - there is something about the anonymity of it, the lulling rattle of the train's movement, the aimlessness of it, that soothes her.

Today, the recollection of their last morning together is replaying over and over in her head, as if she's peering at it through the narrow slits of a zoetrope. When she'd woken up that morning, he had already got up and was in the shower.

She'd turned over into the warmth his body had left and cocooned herself under the duvet. I'll get up in five minutes, she'd told herself. She heard John thud downstairs and clatter about in the kitchen. Then he climbed the stairs again, pushed

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open the bedroom door and started crawling over the bed to her curled-up body. 'Time to get up, time to get up,' he'd crooned, and had kissed the back of her neck.

She'd shrieked when his wet hair met her bed-warmed skin. 'You're all wet, John.'

'I've made you some tea,' and he placed the mug on the bedside table before sliding in next to her under the covers. She'd turned over and they had lain in each other's arms for a while, looking into each other's faces.

'Do you know what I'm going to say now?' he asked. 'Yes.'

'What is it, then?'

'You're going to say, "Alice, it's eight o'clock."'

'No. Wrong. I'm going to say, Alice, it's eight-thirty.' She gripped his arm. 'You're lying.'

He started laughing and shaking his head.

'It's just a ploy,' Alice continued, 'an evil ruse to get me out of bed.'

'I'm afraid not.' He dangled his watch in front of her face.

She pulled away from him and got out of bed. 'Oh, Jesus, I'm going to be so late. I blame you for this. You should have got me up earlier. '

He laughed and jumped off the bed, pulling on his trousers as she rushed into the bathroom.

When she had come downstairs ten minutes later, toast and cereal were laid out on the table for her. 'You're a wee angel,' she'd said to the top of his head, just visible over the newspaper he was reading. She ate rapidly, shovelling the hot toast into her mouth. John folded up the newspaper and laid it on the table next to him. 'What's your day going to be like?'