After You'd Gone (18 page)

'Alice,' he says, more audibly, 'do you want to sit down here for a bit?'

She turns and, ' with one hand resting on her hip, looks back down the path at him. 'All right. '

But when they sit he is silent, swigging water out of a bottle. What can be this serious? Alice wonders. He is sitting with his elbows hooked round his knees, facing the lake. He looks desperate, as if he's about to tell her something awful.

'So,' she says decisively.

'So,' he replies, turning to her, half smiling. Their faces are very close. She is looking at his mouth and finds herself imagining what it would be like to kiss him. Really kiss him. She is remembering the feel of his mouth on hers and beginning a private fantasy of them together on this damp turf beside the lake when she realises that her spine is beginning to bend involuntarily towards him. Her brain slams on some emergency brake and she sits bolt upright again. She incants Rachel 's advice, given last night via a British Rail phone on the train: do not sleep with him until he tells you whatever it is. Do not do it, Alice, you're not allowed. She feels a little

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frightened all of a sudden: what can be this bad? He rests his hand on her wrist. 'Alice, how do you feel . . . about me?'

She shakes her head. 'I'm not telling you that when you're about to tell me you've got a wife and twelve children, or that you're about to emigrate to Australia, or that you're a convicted criminal who's starting a life sentence next week, or that you've recently decided you might be gay. '

He laughs.

'Am I close?' she asks.

'Not even remotely.' He lapses into silence again, his fingers stroking the branch of veins at her inner wrist. She looks up into the sky and sees a bird wheeling about in wide, sweeping circles. She looks down and, at that second, its reflection hits the lake surface on one of its downward curves. That's it, she thinks, I've had enough of this. She reaches down and starts unlacing her boots.

John realises in alarm that Alice is unbuttoning her jeans and peeling them off. 'What are you doing?' he says, looking around to check that no one else can see them. What on earth is going on? He was in the middle of telling her and suddenly she starts stripping off.

'I'm going in,' she says, as if he's asked her a really dense and unreasonable question. 'In . . .
?'

'In there,' she replies, pointing at the lake.

'But . . . it'll be freezing. Alice, don't. Come back. '

She ignores him, her feet making small plopping sounds as she steps gingerly into the dark water, her arms held out for balance. She lifts one foot out of the water, her toes splayed. 'It's so cold!' she exclaims, and then wades in much more quickly, leaving a trail of bubbles in her wake.

Utterly nonplussed, he stands and comes down to the

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water's edge. She is now quite far out, up to her knees. 'Alice, please come back,' he bleats foolishly, 'you might slip and fall in. You'll get hypothermia.'

'It's fine, once you get used to it. '

'Stop pretending you're in an Arthurian legend and come out, please.'

Her laughter bounces towards him across the water's surface. He sees a middle-aged couple sitting farther along the bank, the wife pointing at Alice and the husband, John suspects, having a look at her - clad only in a skin-tight T-shirt and a pair of lacy knickers - through his binoculars. Alice shrieks and John sees her lurch to one side, struggle to regain her balance and then turn round to face him. The water reaches her thighs.

'Right, John Friedmann,' she calls across the water, cupping her hands around her mouth, 'this is your last chance.'

The middle-aged couple and several others who have stopped on the path look back at him expectantly.

'What do you mean?'

'If you don't tell me what the problem was the other night, I'm going to swim to that bank, ' she points to the bank opposite them, 'and you'll never see me again.'

John looks over at it. He estimates that she could probably swim it faster than he could walk all the way round to it. Is this some kind of test, a dare? Does she expect him to go in after her?

'You want me to tell you right now?' he asks, playing for time.

'Right now,' she says, then adding maliciously, 'now or never. '

'Alice,' he attempts to reason, 'can't we talk about this . . . ' he gestures towards the people watching '. . . a little more privately?'

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She shakes her head. 'You've had all morning to talk to me privately. I can't wait any longer. Tell me now.'

He looks at her across the water, her head on one side, her hands clasped behind her back, shivering in the icy water. Would she swim away if he didn't tell her? He couldn't risk it.

'I'm Jewish,' he shouts back at her.

There is a pause. She looks as if she's waiting for him to elaborate. He shrugs helplessly. The collective gaze of the people on the bank is fixed on Alice, waiting for her reaction.

'That's it?' she says. 'Yes. '

'So why's that a problem?' 'Because . . . you're not.'

She seems to be considering this, looking up at the sky, then back at him. There is a pause for a good few minutes, Alice standing in the lake, John in an agony of suspense on the bank, flanked by spectators. He is just considering removing his own boots and trousers and going in after her, when she speaks again: 'So you don't think you can get it together with me because I'm not Jewish? Is that it? That's why you . . . ' she pauses, selecting her words, presumably in view of the audience they have '. . . stalled the other night in the kitchen?'

'I didn't think I could,' John corrects. 'I thought I'd decided that non-Jewish girls were out of bounds.'

'And na"w?'

'Now . . . I think I don't care about that any more.'

She doesn't reply. He waits, agitated, shifting from foot to foot.

'Alice, please come in now.' 'I'm thinking.'

'OK. Sorry.'

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He turns round to glare at the people, who dissemble and make a pretence of walking on. When he turns round again she is wading back to him, a very serious look on her face. He stretches out his hand for hers, and when he manages to grasp it, it's blood-stoppingly cold. He pulls her in and hugs her to him. 'God, you're freezing,' he exclaims and, touching them with his fingertips, says, 'Your lips are turning blue. '

She pulls away and gives him a very level stare. 'We need to talk about this,' she says.

'I know.'

Alice takes the sugar cubes out of their bowl one by one and builds them into a tiny wall, cantilevering out the edges so that it wobbles precariously on the Formica surface of the table. John watches her. 'It must sound ridiculous to you,' he says after a while.

She is in the process of adding a fifth layer to her wall. While she reaches for another cube, she curls her hand around it as if protecting it from the danger of strong draughts. 'No,' she muses, 'not ridiculous.' She wedges it into a small gap, but the structural tension is blown by one cube too many and the whole thing collapses with a loud clatter on to the table.

'Damn, ' she says, and sweeps them all back into the bowl. She brushes the loose granules from her fingertips, glancing at the waitress's disapproving stare from behind the safety of the cappuccino machine, then rests her elbows on the table edge and looks at John, concentrating properly on him again. 'Not ridiculous,' she repeats, 'more strange, I suppose. Outdated. I mean, I've heard of it happening before to people but I think I thought it only really happened in extremist religious sects. I'd kind of worked out you were Jewish, what with your name and the fact that you don't exactly look Aryan, but it never even occurred to me that it could be a problem.'

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'The thing is,' he says, 'it's not so much about religion. It's hard to explain. It's more to do with . . . with . . . social identity than God. It's more race than belief. I mean . . . I went to Jewish classes three times a week and . . . well . . . all this has been drummed into me from a very early age. '

'I see,' she mumbles, a little out of her depth now. She looks out of the window. Tourists wander up and down Grasmere's main street. A woman wearing a long red mac over shorts and wellingtons stops right beside her on the other side of the glass to read the menu displayed just above Alice's head. Alice stares at her, feeling how odd it is that a stranger thinks they can stand that close to you just because there's a pane of glass between you. The woman looks down and sees Alice looking at her and steps back. Her face is annoyed, embarrassed, and she tries to read the menu at her new distance, screwing up her eyes with effort.

'So Sophie was . ?'

John laughs and bites his lip. 'Sophie was a bit of a disaster area. She's a family friend. A nice Jewish girl, as my father would say. I think I thought . . . I think both of us thought it would be really good if things magically worked out between us, but they didn't, of course. I was going to finish it last weekend, but I didn't get a chance to see her and then I met you and that kind of took everything over. My father is so desperate for me to meet a Jewish girl . . .' He lapses into silence, his chin cupped in his hand.

Alice watches him, waiting for him to elaborate.

'He's not going to be too happy about this, but . . . ' he gives a dismissive shrug '. . . that's his problem. It's all been made worse, you see, because my mother died and my father came over all religious,' he finishes abruptly.

'Oh,' says Alice, jarred, 'I'm sorry. About your mother, I mean.'

At that moment, the waitress appears, giving them what Alice feels to be a rather sinister smile. Alice's next sentence is halted in her throat and they both lean back into their seats as the waitress places more coffee in front of them. She seems to spend an age piling their used plates and cups on to her tray, and while she is scraping the crockery over the table surface, Alice takes a cautious look at John. He is looking at her and she is so discomfited - by what he's just told her, the question over what will happen now, whether he's changed his mind, whether she's changed her mind - she feels a maddening heat diffuse over her face. She looks away, starts blowing on the surface of the scalding coffee in front of her, fiddles with the spoon in her saucer.

'Alice, when I say that my father won't be too happy about it,' John says hastily, once the waitress has gone, 'I'm not automatically assuming anything . . . I mean, I'm not taking it as read that we're going to . . . get . . . involved or anything. I mean, it depends on what you think . . . I don't want to jump the gun . . .' He grinds to a halt.

Alice lifts the spoon and looks into it. On one side is her face, distorted, all mouth and nose, and on the other is the room behind her, the waitress stretched like an inverted comma, walking on the ceiling. Alice drops it back into the saucer. She allows her eyes to focus on the man in front of her

• on his hands, inches from hers on the table's red Formica, on his shoulders, on his eyes, his mouth. How could she ever think she might have changed her mind? She feels shy suddenly
  
• not a feeling she is used to. It seems harder to touch him now, sitting in this cafe, than when they'd been beside the lake. She feels unable to reach out for him but almost scared to move in case any movement is interpreted by him as a move of rejection.
  

He stretches his arms over the table and presses her head

between his hands. Moments later, they are kissing and kissing as if there is no one else in the room with them; people at neighbouring tables look for a moment, then look away; the waitress tuts and rolls her eyes heavenwards; others on the pavement outside nudge their companions, pointing.

On Sunday, at about nine o'clock in the morning, John comes out of the bathroom in one of the hotel's robes.

'Do you know what?' says Alice from the bed.

'What?' He sees that she is wearing one of his jumpers and gets a little lift of pleasure from this. She's lying on her stomach reading a book with her feet waving in the air. She looks about fourteen.

'We might as well have stayed in London. I mean, it's not as if we've seen much of Easedale or the Lake District.'

'How can you say that, when we've got this spectacular view?' He throws open the curtains with a dramatic flourish. 'You urban philistine.' He sits down at the table in the window, where he's set up his computer, and begins towelling his hair violently.

He hears her bare feet thudding over the floor then feels her hands on his. 'John, if you carry on doing that, you'll be bald by the time you're thirty.'