After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

was holding on to her hand so tightly that her knucklebones were beginning to hurt. She floundered with her other hand for her bag under the table, but encountered only

It was as if a large bowl of warm liquid I had been carrying around inside me had sprung a leak. All that warmth was draining away. I was furious with myself for being so gullible and with my mother for planting such ideas in the first place only to dash them by idle chat with some tedious neighbour.

‘People who send their children away to boarding-school should never have had them in the first place,’

I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you, ‘Don’t worry. This may be your life but you’re not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you - it’s already organised.’ It’s all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.

The strangest thing about this is that a thought can go on and on circling your mind, that you can’t stop obsessing over it, that there are no brakes to apply to things you no longer want to think about. In normal life, you distract yourself - pick up a newspaper, go out for a walk, turn on the television, phone somebody up. You can throw your mind a sop, trick yourself into thinking you’re all right, that the thing that’s been haunting you is resolved. It won’t work for long, of course - an hour, two hours if you’re lucky - because nobody’s that stupid and because these things always come back to you when you’re once more idle and distractionless. In the small, dark hours of the night, when you’re being rocked into blank-mindedness on a bus.

‘Oh. But why--’ Ann broke off. ‘Ben, not like that. This way. Over here, towards me more.’ Elspeth pushed back her chair and walked away, as if to go and see the griffin dribble water over the Victorian grotto. Alice saw this. Alice saw her father sit down again and reach to the ground for Ann’s fallen cardigan. She saw him place it over her shoulders. She saw, as if for the first time, her father performing all these small tasks for his wife. And she saw him, at the end of it, place his hand on Ann’s knee, smiling round at his three daughters on his forty-fifth birthday. And Alice saw, a few moments later, her mother move her chair ever so slightly, but just enough for Ben’s hand to fall into the space between them.

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

But diseases, lightning and madmen aside, I could realistically live until I was seventy or eighty. Longer, perhaps. I couldn’t believe I was going to live for all that time. I would find them incomprehensible - those fifty or so years stretching out before me that I would have to live without you. What was I going to do to fill them? It seemed cruel to me that I was so healthy, so alive, so seemingly indestructible when your life had been so easily and so randomly severed. I was puzzled by those women in previous centuries dying of broken hearts, taking to their beds and just fading away. That’s what I wanted: I desired nothing more than to lie down and let life ebb from me. I couldn’t believe it when, every morning, I opened my eyes and felt it surging through me like sap through a tree - that aliveness, that undeniable force of existence. The beat of my heart, the swell of my lungs, the stiffness in my muscles that was telling me, despite everything, to get up, use my legs, stretch my arms.

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.