Ann shoves everything back into the rucksack and stands up. Without registering to herself what she is about to do, Ann opens Alice’s wardrobe. Clothes are racked along the rail evenly — Alice’s on one side, John’s on the other. Ann touches them with her hand. Metal coat-hangers clack together. John’s shirts are lined up, two or three to a hanger, his trousers and jeans folded over each other on the spar beneath. Alice’s side — which takes up over two-thirds of the rail — is more elaborate, a mix of velvets, silk, embroidery, sparkly cardigans, lace dresses. At the bottom, shoes are mixed up — a trainer nestles between a pair of black sandals; a ridiculously high strappy shoe rests on top of a heavy, mud-rubbed boot. At the point where Alice’s clothes meet John’s, a red slip dress hangs next to a blue cotton shirt, slightly crumpled. It makes Ann cry, their clothes hanging together like this, it makes her cry a lot. And she’s not sure who she’s crying for: for her daughter, yes, the thought of whose death makes her feel like a glove pulled inside out on itself; for John who should never ever have died when Alice loved him so; and a part of her cries for herself, whose clothes would never hang like this with anyone’s.
The sitting-room door opened slowly and Alice crept in, clutching a pillow to her chest. It was late morning, but she hadn’t yet opened the curtains so the room was in half-light. The ringing of the phone stopped abruptly as the answering-machine clicked on: ‘Alice? It’s Rachel. I know you’re there so pick up the phone.’
Alice didn’t move but stared, unfocused, at the ceiling. ‘Come on, Alice, pick up . . . OK. So, this is the . . . what? . . . sixteenth or seventeeth message I’ve left for you. Is your machine working? Have we fallen out without me noticing? Are you still alive?’
Alice heard her friend pause and sigh. The tape hissed gently. ‘Right. Have it your way. I’ll call again later.’
It was only after she had hung up and the tape had finished its little ritual of winding and rewinding that Alice backed out of the room and closed the door behind her.
Rachel bangs on the door again with the hardest bones of her knuckles.
‘Who is it?’ Alice’s voice comes from behind the door. ‘It’s me. Open the door, for fuck’s sake.’
There is a pause then she hears the flicking, clicking slide of a lock being drawn back. The door swings open. The two women stare at each other, Rachel with her hand on her hip, her mouth pursed. Rachel is puzzled, but can’t quite say why. Alice looks different - well, even. Her eyes look brighter and she has more colour in her cheeks.
‘So?’ Rachel enquires.
‘So what?’
‘So, what’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’ Alice looks at her defiantly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t call me, you ignore my messages. Alice, it’s been almost three weeks since I last saw you.’
‘Has it?’ she says vaguely, her eyes following a car going down the road.
Rachel sighs, seeing this is going to get them nowhere. ‘Can I come in, then?’
‘Um.’ A shadow of panic passes over Alice’s face, then she relaxes her grip on the door jamb. ‘I suppose so, yes.’ ‘Thanks,’ Rachel mutters, as she steps into the hall.
Alice drums her fingernails on the side of the kettle as she waits for it to boil. Rachel sits at the table, looking about her for something to say.
‘Is that a new cardigan?’
‘What?’
‘That.’ Rachel points at a red woollen cardigan draped over the back of a chair. ‘Is it new?’
Alice picks it up quickly, refolds it and puts it down in exactly the same place. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s really nice. Where did you get it?’
Alice, with her back to her, mumbles something unintelligible.
‘What?’
‘I said, I made it.’
‘You made it? Really? Seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘What . . . ?’ Rachel is amazed. ‘You knitted it?’
‘Yes. Why is that so surprising?’
‘Well, I didn’t know you could knit for starters.’
Alice places a mug of tea in front of Rachel and sits down. ‘I’ve been teaching myself.’
‘That’s a bit weird. What for?’
‘What for? What do you mean “what for”? Why does anyone knit?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Old people like my grandmother knit to give themselves something to do. But you hardly need to fill your time.’
‘I like it.’
‘What? Knitting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alice, do you know how sad that sounds? Is this what you’ve been doing instead of calling me — spending your evenings in, knitting?’
‘Maybe. What’s wrong with that?’
‘What’s wrong with that? Alice! For God’s sake . . .’ Rachel breaks off her tirade and gazes at her friend across the table. In the bright sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window, she’s just seen that Alice’s new, healthy complexion is due to a layer of carefully applied make-up.
Knowing she needs to say something and not yet sure what it is, Rachel gets up and, from the seat by the door, she lifts up a work-in-progress by the needles. It’s a large, bottle-green sweater, or will be, when Alice has finished the ribbing round the bottom. Holding it up to the light, Rachel stares at its intricate web of stitches. This one slightly disturbs her but she’s not quite sure why. She turns back to Alice, still sitting at the table. ‘This one’s a bit big for you, isn’t it? Who’s it for?’ Alice looks up and the expression of horrified anger that distorts her face astonishes Rachel. ‘Don’t touch that. Put it down.’ Alice darts across the kitchen and tears it from Rachel’s hands.
Rachel watches as Alice winds the knitting protectively into itself. There is something about the colour of that sweater, the feel of it, the V-neck that unfailingly brings John to mind. She is knitting that sweater for John, Rachel thinks, she is knitting her dead lover a sweater.
‘ Al,’ Rachel begins, chewing the inside of her lip, ‘are you all right, I mean, how are things?’
Alice nods before speaking. ‘I’m fine.’
Alice dials the number, checking it in the open book beside her, waits, hears the click of connection, then the ring. She imagines the telephone, it’ll be a black, old-fashioned one with a cradle, maybe by the front door or on a window-sill, vibrating with her ringing. She imagines him hearing it — he’s reading perhaps, or washing up, or watching TV — looking up, putting down whatever he’s doing and crossing the room or coming downstairs — slowly because he had a slightly laboured gait, didn’t he — reaching for the receiver.
Alice hangs up. She waits for a while. She gets up and walks around the room twice. She rearranges her plants by the window, turning their outward sides towards the light, pulling off any etiolated leaves and crushing them in her palms. Then she sits next to the phone again. Redials. This time she waits longer, listening to the faraway ring. The telephone dings as he picks it up, but before he can speak, Alice puts down the receiver. She has no air in her lungs. There’s a needling, numb sensation all down her spine and up into her scalp.
Alice gets out of the taxi. The street is narrow and curves in an S-shape. Tall privet hedges obscure the gardens and houses from the pavement. House numbers are twisted into the wrought iron of the gates, which are dwarfed by the green mass of the hedges. As she walks along, she meets no one, no cars pass her. The sound of traffic from the busier three-lane main road behind her fades away. The houses are different, more suburban, set back from the road, detached with garages separating them from their neighbours. As the number nears, something like excitement flutters in Alice’s chest.
There is a straight, flagstone path, bisecting the lawn, from where Alice is standing to the front door. A sprinkler jets arcs of water over a flower-bed: part of the path is darkened by the spray. This is where John grew up, Alice thinks, where he returned to every day from school, where he came that last time to tell his father about me. The windo
ws are dark, giving out only reflections of the garden. Curtains are drawn over a room downstairs. It is big, Alice decides, she cannot imagine what it would be like to live in it on your own. By the gate is a rosebush. Overblown red roses that would have been perfect a week ago have let their petals droop and fall. Alice looks down to see that the pavement beneath her feet is strewn with them. There is a faint, sweetish odour of crushed petals. It reminds her of ... of wreaths . . . and . . . Alice looks away, looks at the house, looks up at the sky, looks at the trees. The front door opens and the shape of the man that comes out and turns to lock the door behind him is blurred with Alice’s sudden tears.
She darts away from the gate and hides round the corner of the neighbouring driveway, her fist pressed into her teeth. Has he seen her? What would she say? She’s not prepared now, she’s not prepared at all. She can’t organise her thoughts, can’t think of what to say now. Peering round the rockery, she sees him come out of the gate and pull it closed. He is holding a striped shopping-bag with wire handles that he transfers to his other hand to shut the gate. Then he walks off.
Alice pulls up the hood on her sweatshirt, horrified to realise as she does so that it is one of John’s. How could she be so stupid? She spends a few seconds panicking, trying to work out how lpng John had had it, and was there any way that Daniel might recognise it. Then she steps out on to the pavement and follows, keeping a stretch of road between them, her eyes fixed on his back, the polished heels of his shoes.
He walks along the street and turns right, heading down the hill towards the shops and tube station she passed on her way in the taxi. He walks slowly and unevenly, his back a little bent, and Alice thinks how much older than her parents he seems. He pauses outside a delicatessen with barrels of apples outside. She ducks behind a phone box until he moves on again. At the crossroads he waits with two or three other people for the traffic to stop. She loiters in the doorway of the bank. Would he recognise her if he saw her? Would he know her if she was to approach him? How would she introduce herself? When he has crossed the road, the traffic-lights still bleeping, she dashes across at the last minute, just as he is climbing the steps to the
It is quiet and dark in the library. The hallway has a red stone floor and blackened wooden panelling. There is a smell of lots of books — that unmistakable, moistureless, throat-catching odour. Through glass swing doors, she sees him go up to the returns desk, taking from his striped bag three books. He places them one by one on top of each other on the desk and waits in line, shunting them along beside him as the queue moves.
Alice pushes through the doors and stands behind a book stack filled with children’s books. ‘Hello, Mr Friedmann,’ she hears the librarian say. He is fumbling in the inside pocket of his coat, pulling out a glasses case. Nodding, he mumbles something Alice cannot hear, then turns and walks across the room.
Alice shifts her position. She knew he was retired. Is this what he does all day? He takes off his coat and settles it over the back of a chair. Then he sits and adjusts a pair of half-moon spectacles on his nose. He opens one of the newspapers impaled on wooden sticks and starts to read.
Now would be a perfect time. She tugs at the drawstring running through the rim of her hood. If he looked up, straight ahead of him, he’d see her eyes watching him through the shelves. She walks around the edge of the room, nearly tripping over a mother reading to a toddler balanced on her lap. She gets so close to him, close enough that if she leant over and stretched out her arm she could tap him on the shoulder. Then what? He would turn, look up into the face of this woman wearing his dead son’s sweatshirt, and then what?
One of his hands is curled around the back of his neck, the other rests, limp, on the table. From where she is standing, Alice can see through the lenses of his glasses: the newsprint distorts and stretches beyond them. She just has to reach out, or say something, that’s all it would take. A surge of adrenalin pulses through her body, making her head ring. She’s going to do it. She’s going to do it right now. Right now.
At that moment, another librarian, a middle-aged woman, pale beneath a rash of freckles, appears on the other side of the table to Alice and Daniel. ‘How are you, Mr Friedmann?’ she trills.
He jumps. Looks up. His hand on the table tenses, his nails scratching against the newspaper. ‘I am well,’ he replies, ‘thank you.’
And Alice cannot bear this, she really cannot. It makes scalding tears brim without warning into her eyes. Surface tension holds them there for a second - making the librarian leaning over the table, his back, the paper, the book stacks beyond them all swim before her as if the scene is melting — then they spill down her face. His voice. His voice is so like John’s. It is John’s. It has a slight Polish edge to it, but the tone, the inflection, the pitch are identical. It could have been him speaking, it could have been his voice sounding out into this library. But it wasn’t and she cannot bear it.
Her feet move beneath her, carrying her around the edge of the table, past the librarian who is staring at her now, so she puts her hands up to cover her face and has to negotiate the rest of the building though the gaps between her fingers. Once outside, she runs and runs, bolting past people on pavements, dodging cars; she runs, and runs so far and without seeing anything, that when she stops she has no idea where she is.
Beth, wearing only a T-shirt, encounters her mother in the sitting room. She has woken late, her head feeling muzzy. Her mother has an apron on (Beth wonders where it came from and if her mother brought it with her - it couldn’t possibly belong to Alice), and rubber gloves, and is gripping a duster in one hand and the head of the vacuum cleaner in the other. Beth knows that this can only mean one thing: Ann is preparing for a germ genocide.
‘Morning,’ Beth says warily.
‘Hello.’
‘What are you up to?’
‘I’ve just got to do some cleaning.’ Ann marches over to the desk and starts sorting papers into vague piles, dusting the area cleared. ‘This place is, frankly, a health hazard. I don’t know what your sister was thinking of.’
‘Mum, I don’t think you should—’
‘I mean, really. ’ Ann yanks open a drawer and begins pulling out bits of scrumpled-up blue paper and dropping them into a rubbish bag.
‘Mum, don’t.’ Beth goes over and peers at the bits of paper in the bin. Some have unintelligible writing on them. ‘You shouldn’t do that. Alice wouldn’t like it. You can’t throw her stuff out like that.’
Ann moves off and starts pushing at the sofa. ‘Help me with this, Beth, will you? I wouldn’t like to think when this was last vacuumed under.’
Beth is considering trying to stop her doing this as well, but is deciding that her mother isn’t easy to deflect when in cleaning mode and that vacuuming is probably the least harmful thing she could be doing, when the phone begins to ring.
‘Phone,’ Beth says.
Ann stops unravelling the flex of Alice’s vacuum cleaner. This is the first time the phone has rung since they’ve been here. Beth isn’t wearing enough to be wandering around the house this late in the morning, so Ann moves through into the hall and picks up the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘Hello.’ It’s man’s voice. Oldish. Middle-aged sounding. Hesitant. ‘I’m not sure if I have the right number.’
‘No,’ Ann says, a bit thrown, ‘no, I mean, it’s not . . . Alice isn’t . . . here.’
‘I see.’ He sounds uncertain. Ann feels irritated. Don’t take all day, for heaven’s sake. ‘Maybe you could give her a message for me.’
Ann is silent. Who is this person who doesn’t know? She isn’t sure how to phrase it — is he a friend? A colleague? The gas man?
‘If you could tell her that . . . that I saw her last week, I saw her in the library. And I tried to ... I came out after her, but she ran away too fast. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find her. If you could tell her ... I meant to call ... a long time ago, but ... I never did. And now I’ve been mea
ning to call all week, but I still didn’t, so . . .’ He trails off, then inhales audibly, summoning courage, ‘I think what I really want to say is that ... I would very much like to . . . talk to her. I would like to see her.’
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Daniel. Daniel Friedmann. I am John’s father.’ Ann sees a man in bright-white sunlight, walking down the steps with John’s ashes, and Alice’s face watching him. Fury, unexpected and potent, surges upwards in her.
‘I see,’ Ann says. She looks up and sees her face thrown back at her by the large gold mirror hanging in the hall. ‘Well, Daniel Friedmann, this is Alice’s mother. I can’t give Alice your message, I’m afraid. Do you want to know why?’
‘Oh. I—’
‘Alice was hit by a car. She’s in a coma. You have a habit of leaving things too late, don’t you? Alice is in a bloody coma. And she’s probably going to die. What do you say to that?’ Ann slams down the receiver, cutting off the line, then drops it so that it dangles somewhere near the floor.
Ann slips through the heavy double doors into Intensive Care. There’s hardly anyone around and anyone she does pass doesn’t give her a second look.
In Alice’s room she pulls a chair up close to the side of the bed so that she’s close to her daughter’s face. Ann moves her handbag off her lap and pushes it under her chair. She lays her hand over Alice’s — surprisingly warm and tense — then removes it quickly. She wonders what happened to Alice’s hair when they cut it all off. Would it have been incinerated? Ann shifts her chair even closer to the bed and leans towards Alice’s ear. ‘Alice,’ she begins, ‘I want to tell you something.’
At at movement beyond the window, Ann stops. A nurse is passing, holding the arm of a man of indeterminate age. His skin is sallow, puckered, the texture of brown paper, and he walks with the laboured steps of an astronaut. His head lolls to one side. ‘Very good,’ the nurse is saying brightly, ‘that’s farther than yesterday already.’