Afterwards (27 page)

– I’ll try and remember to use it too.

He’d brought two boxes down from the attic when Alice arrived the second morning. Mostly personal letters, and nothing he wanted to throw away: he’d been through them already, but he showed them to Alice anyway. In small piles, ordered by date, and neatly tied with string. Alice recognised her grandfather’s handiwork: she knew the birthday cake parcels her gran had sent were always tied by him. Beautiful, and it felt like sabotage to use scissors, but the knots were impossible. He left Alice with the letters and went to put on the kettle.

The postmarks ran across the decades. Most were from the fifties, with Kenyan as well as British stamps: her grandparents’ love letters. Fewer of them later, but they continued well into the nineties, and Alice wondered that they’d been apart long enough during those years to warrant sending letters. While Gran was up in York maybe, or visiting Aunt Celie, and Grandad stayed in London: a week away at most, but they’d still found things to write. Her grandfather had sorted them into pairs, wherever he could, and for almost every letter, there was a reply.

– I wanted you to know where they are.

Her grandfather was back in the room. He smiled at her, hesitant:

– You can read them, but you might have to wait until I’m gone, I’m afraid.

He set a cup down beside her, and went to drink his by the window. He knew she was disappointed, Alice could see that: to have to defer the untying and opening, the reading. They stayed like that for long minutes, the width of the room between them, and then Alice slotted the letters back into their box. Reluctant but careful, in order of date, just as her grandfather had done. Conscious he was unlikely to be with her the next time she saw them.

They’d started a list the day before, subscriptions to cancel, charities to contact, standing orders to stop or transfer, and they went through this together, dividing the tasks between them. Many were already months overdue: Alice was ashamed not to have offered her grandfather help earlier, and that she hadn’t thought he might need her to. It was lunchtime before they’d finished. Alice had cycled past the deli on her way over, and she went into the kitchen to put everything onto plates for them. Her grandfather had cleared a space on the table when she returned with the tray, and he’d also laid two envelopes in front of her chair.

– These are for now. If you’d like them.

They were addressed to her grandparents, both of the letters, but the handwriting was unfamiliar. Dated a few weeks apart, in 1972, a couple of months before she was born.

– I don’t have the letters we sent them, of course, but they may have kept them.

Alice turned the first envelope over and recognised the return address: her father’s parents. She’d written to him there, the first letter, and he’d told her they had sent it on. Her grandfather left his plate untouched while she read the handwritten pages. Both full of concern for her mother and what life with a child but no husband would hold for her. In both they also expressed their regret that their son did not want to stay in contact.
We still hope he will change his mind.
The second letter referred to a meeting, and confirmed the date, with directions from the A-road that passed their village.

– You went to see them?

– Yes.

– You and Gran?

– Yes.

– Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?

Her grandfather looked at her, shocked. She hadn’t shouted, but she had raised her voice. It was the first time Alice had felt angry with him in months. Not since Joseph had smashed the window. She’d only felt protective. But then he said:

– I presumed Isobel. I thought. I’m not sure now.

He looked at the letters, frowning. Old eyes flickering.

– You should have known. Of course you should. I’m sorry.

He was squinting a little. Alice said:

– What did you talk about?

– Practicalities. The different options.

He looked at her, almost embarrassed.

– I mean marriage, adoption. Financial considerations.

Then he smiled a little.

– Not that we had much influence, of course. Our children were both stubborn. A good thing Sarah was.

Gran had known that she’d started writing to her father. Alice thought about all her grandparents’ letters and was certain Gran would have told him.

– He stopped writing to me. Almost two years ago now.

– Yes. We did think. We assumed something must have happened.

Alice thought her grandad was reddening.

– I liked them, your other grandparents. I’ve often wondered. That they never knew you. I’m sure they would have liked to.

Alice remembered the letter she’d sent her father, the first one, and that his reply had come so quickly. They must have forwarded it immediately, the same day perhaps. Did they think it was from her? Addressed by hand. They can’t have got many letters for their son, not thirty-odd years since he left home.

The first Alice heard of Joseph again was when she went round to see Clare. It was sometime early in March, not long after Stan’s birthday, and Alice brought round a bottle for Clare to pass on to him. Their extension still wasn’t finished, but the kitchen cabinets had finally arrived and the walls were plastered too. Clare saw her looking at them and then apologised.

– Joseph. He insisted.

Alice nodded. Thought about how Joseph had insisted on doing her grandad’s house too.
I wouldn’t want paying
. Maybe he’d seen it as a way to make up, for disappearing on her, the first time. She said:

– You don’t have to be sorry.

– No. I know. Stan wants to give him another go.

Clare still sounded apologetic, but Alice surprised herself by feeling pleased. The regret came after she left, slowed her limbs and her breath, and was much more familiar. Later, she described how those autumn weeks had felt, on the phone to her mother:

– As though he wanted me to split up with him. Be the one to give up. I thought he was willing me to do it. Even before that business at Grandad’s.

Alice sometimes thought she’d complied too easily: remembered how cowardly it had felt, not to include a message in the letter her grandfather had written him. But her mother said it wasn’t her fault it had ended. The way she saw it, the break would have come anyway.

– I mean, I don’t really know Joseph. I liked him when he came up here, and Dad seems determined to defend him. But he was shutting you out, even before the autumn. You can’t expect to be with someone and do that to them, not in my book. Not if you want them to be happy with you, anyway.

It made Alice feel better, talking to her mother, but after she’d hung up, she wasn’t sure she agreed.

There was an old conversation with Clare, one they’d had often over the years. About Stan, and how he’d so wanted to get away from Poland.
All the things that never happened, and the things that were done wrong.
That’s how he put it, and it was all he would say. It used to frustrate Clare, that he wouldn’t tell her more, and yet when friends or family came over from Wroslaw, and the wine came out, that’s all they talked about. Hours and hours, whole nights, in a broken-up mixture of Polish and English, so it was difficult to follow.

– I make the most of those evenings, get what I can. It’s still frustrating. But Stan has to talk about it with them, you know? He has to, and I think he hates it. He’s always jumpy for days after they’ve gone. Has a really short fuse. He can forget about it with me and the kids. I might not like it, but he does.

It wasn’t the same: Stan was running from an economic situation that had become unbearable, parents who were too bitter about the past, and the changes that hadn’t made enough of a difference to their lives. It didn’t compare, but Alice thought she was still trying to imagine a way she could let Joseph have his silence.

She went to Stan and Clare’s party: a late birthday do, and a sort of warming for their new rooms. The place was crowded with people she hadn’t seen in ages, and there was so much to catch up on, it took her the best part of an hour to make her way across the party to where Clare was standing. For months now, Alice had been avoiding places she thought Joseph might be, and she was relieved when Clare said he’d been and gone already, much earlier in the evening. But it also made her wonder when it was going to stop. They had friends and places in common. She didn’t want to pretend she’d never known him.

Her grandparents’ letters were back in the attic. She saw the box again when she went to sort through the things she’d left at her grandfather’s, ready for moving. Her grandad had cleared the attic over the winter, and said her books and camping stuff were getting dusty in their uncovered crate. He’d left an old suitcase under the eaves for her to put them in, if she wanted. Years since the last time she was up here, only two trunks and four or five small boxes left, grouped together by the trap door, and the letters were second from bottom. Alice had heard some of what must be in them already: the things her mother had told her, the explosions, the crew member lost. But since she’d seen the letters, she thought there
must have been more. All those years and pages he’d written, the conversations he’d had with Joseph. Alice tried again to imagine them talking, and couldn’t: thought she was still afraid of what she might end up hearing. She’d preferred Ireland at a safer distance. Perhaps Gran had felt the same way about Kenya. Sitting there, Alice didn’t feel impatient for her grandfather’s letters any longer: more curious now to read her grandmother’s responses.

She must have wanted to leave it behind: her first marriage, expat Nairobi, the unhappy years there, but she couldn’t. She’d have had to leave Grandad too, and Alice knew Gran would never have done that. Alice had been so critical of their relationship. The way her grandmother allowed him to retreat behind her conversation, tolerated his rudeness as though she were blind to it. She didn’t believe her gran was so thick-skinned: it must have upset her too. Alice had loved them, but never wanted a marriage like theirs: a partner whose behaviour you’d have to cover for. Still didn’t. But she was aware now that something more had been passing between them, in all that time.

Something gentle, undeclared, about how they were with each other, but you could never intrude. Alice remembered the hush in their house on summer afternoons. No radios or water fights on the back lawn, or loud celebrations at the end of the working week, the way it was when she visited her friends after school. She used to put it down to them being old, easily tired, but now she thought their weekends were for being a couple. Their time, in the garden and kitchen: they would sit together, hands held, eyes closed, hot Saturdays after lunch in the shade on the patio. Alice was never
told or reprimanded: there was no need, she just didn’t get in the way. Lifted her bicycle out of the shed as quietly as possible, and carried it round the side of the house.

She thought about it often, that day they’d driven down from York: her mother’s anger, standing in the hallway, trying to understand what had happened, and her grandfather’s quiet refusal to blame Joseph or venture an explanation. They’d stood together, she and her grandad, even after her mother had given up asking and appealing, and went outside instead to dig in the plants she’d brought for his garden. He seemed so calm. Alice thought maybe he was relieved to have got it all over with: the repairs and the inevitable scene when she and her mother saw them. She’d stopped crying and could remember feeling glad of him, his quiet company and his small, clumsy gestures. And how sad he’d looked later, when she said she didn’t think Joseph wanted to see her any more.

It was much easier than Joseph thought it would be.

Summer again, but no hot days yet. He’d been down in Brighton, finishing Clive’s house, and he came home to a message from Alice, the first in months. She left a number, a new one, said she’d moved. He phoned her back the same evening and she asked if she could come round one day after work. Familiar and unfamiliar, that voice, and no edges to it. She said she’d left some things behind. A jacket and a hairbrush, a bike pump and the spare key to her lock. He knew where they all were: he’d left them where she had. Went round his flat collecting them into a box, chose a small one he reckoned would fit on the back of her bike. Put the map in there too, at the bottom, with the small beach and the wood above it marked.

They sat on the chairs in the big room the day she came, something they’d never done when they were together. Always sat in the kitchen then, because it was the only room he’d got anywhere near finished. Alice gave him the news about Martha’s baby, due in a few weeks, and then she shifted a bit in her chair before telling him she was going to see her grandparents at the weekend.

– My Dad’s parents. I asked them up to London last time, and they’ve returned the invitation. My Dad knows
about it. He won’t be there, but we’ve started writing again. I think so anyway, a couple of letters.

Joseph thought: one way got blocked so she found another. Alice was smiling, and it was hard not to smile with her. She lifted her hands to her face. He knew those fingers, that skirt and T-shirt, old trainers and bare legs.

She never said anything about the colour on his walls, or the furniture, although he saw her looking, and she didn’t bat an eye when he asked after her grandad either, just said he was up north at the moment, visiting her mum and step-dad.

– A long weekend. They’ve lined up a garden to visit every day. All over Yorkshire. Poor Alan.

She laughed. And then:

– My mum’s got this idea of us going to Africa. To Kenya. See the places Gran lived, I think the hospital she worked in might still be there. Mum’s talked about it on and off over the winter. I don’t know how far she’s really got with planning it or anything.

Alice rubbed at a smear of oil on her shin.

– She’d love my Grandad to come with us, basically. Show us the places they got to know each other. He says he’s too old now, but she reckons she’ll wait a year, let him come round to the idea. I’m not sure he will, though.