After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

What she couldn’t fathom - and wouldn’t ever be able to, as she would find out - was the fickleness of people: how people can like you one day, but the next, because of something as random as telling the teacher how you were growing cress on a wet tissue on your window-sill, you were no longer in favour.

I loved him more than anything else I’d ever known. How was I to know he was a gift I couldn’t keep?

‘You know,’ he continued, ‘there is nothing anyone can say that will make you feel better, but do you know this?’ He frowned with concentration. ‘“Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.” ’ ‘Who said that?’ ‘Julian of Norwich. Someone sent it to me when my mother died.’

Alice catches sight of herself in a mirror and thinks, how did I get here? How did I get to be this old?

Before this, I used to try to work out how long I might live. Maybe I’d contract a terrible disease in my thirties and die. Or I could be struck down by lightning before I reached my forty-fifth birthday, or be in an air crash, or a car crash, or perish as the random victim of a madman.