Alice invited Joseph to have a proper dinner, or rather Martha did. It was Martha’s flat, and she rented out the spare room because her lecturer’s salary didn’t cover the mortgage. Alice moved in three years ago, not long after she’d started at the hospital. It was affordable, handy for work, and she thought it would just be until she got a place of her own. Whenever she talked about leaving now, Martha told her to stop.
– You can’t, no one else would put up with us.
Martha had been with her boyfriend for years, on and off, and Keith lived there too, while things were on between them. Alice kept clear when they argued, but they weren’t hard to live with. They were always good to her, even when they couldn’t be good to each other, had been especially so during her grandmother’s illness. She was pleased when Martha suggested inviting Joseph, because he’d been staying over quite a bit, and she had started to worry about it. He always brought something with him, a few cans or bottles, and he went out to the shop in the mornings sometimes too, got bread and milk so no one would be short for breakfast. But still, it was a small flat for four of them to be sharing, even on a part-time basis, and Alice didn’t want Martha getting annoyed. She liked living here, and having Joseph over. Didn’t want either of those things to end in a hurry.
They started cooking late, and were only halfway through when Joseph arrived. Keith had bumped into him at the off-licence and they’d come up the street together. Between them, they’d bought far too much to drink. The first few minutes in the kitchen together were mainly spent getting in each other’s way. Joseph stood by the door, smiling at Alice and rubbing his face after she gestured to him to sit down. He put a few beers in the freezer and then as many as he could in the fridge, and after that Martha said he could slice some tomatoes too, if he wanted to feel useful. He smiled, kissed Alice first and then picked up the chopping board.
The phone went just after they sat down, and Martha waved a hand, said the answerphone could get it. Alice was spooning rice onto plates when she heard her grandfather’s voice, the tinny speaker emphasising his proper vowels. He hated talking to machines, she knew that, so she felt embarrassed for him, stopping and starting again with everyone listening from the kitchen.
– This is David Bell. Would Alice Bell call me, please? It’s concerning tomorrow. I’d like to know if she’ll be coming as usual. I’ll need to go shopping for lunch in the morning.
If Alice picked up now, he’d be offended. She’d done it before and he’d been confused at first and then very curt. He finished his message with a pause and then a thank you.
– I’ll call him after we’ve finished.
– Is this your weekend to see him?
Martha was holding her plate out. Alice shook her head and carried on serving. It had bothered her too, that he’d got the weeks confused, but she didn’t want to think about that now. Two beers on an empty stomach, plus nerves: Alice thought the evening might be getting ahead of her before it had even begun. Joseph got another bottle out of the fridge and held it up like a question.
– I’ll wait a bit, thanks.
– I’ll have it.
Keith reached for the beer, and turned to Alice while he was opening it.
– You grew up with your grandparents, didn’t you?
– Partly. We lived with them until I finished primary school.
– Oh yeah, okay. I think Martha might have told me once.
Alice had talked about this with Keith before, she could remember it quite clearly, and thought Keith probably could as well. He was just moving the conversation on, or maybe he thought Joseph would be interested: she looked across the table and saw he was waiting for her to go on.
– Mum got pregnant when she was at university. A firstterm fling with someone in the year above, medical student. When she found out I was on the way, she went home to live with her parents.
When Alice started nursery, her mother went back to university and trained to be a teacher. She found them a flat on their own once she started earning enough. It only had one bedroom, but the kitchen was big, the best room in the place, so they put the sofa in there and her mum slept in what would otherwise have been the living room. It was only five minutes on her bike to her grandparents’ house.
– I still went there most days after school, until I was well into my teens.
Did her homework at the kitchen table while Gran supplied her with juice and toast. They used to play piano as well: her grandmother disapproved of how little music Alice had in her timetable. So they played duets, perched on the stool together, one pedal each, once Alice could reach, the other foot planted on the ground. Her mum would pick her up when she finished work, put her marking in the basket on Alice’s bike, and they would take turns wheeling it home along the evening streets, talking about what to cook for tea, what to watch on telly.
Martha said she envied Alice, never got to know her grandparents properly, not her grandfathers anyway, and Joseph agreed:
– My Nana lived round the corner when I was little, but both my Grandads died before I came along.
He’d been very quiet until now, and Alice was glad he felt like joining in the conversation. She smiled at him:
– David’s a bit like my Dad, really. Or the closest I’ve got.
Joseph had asked about her father once, when she was talking about her mum and Alan: what about your Dad dad then? Alice had been half expecting the question, and she’d started to tell him: that she never knew her father while she was growing up, just his name and what he’d been studying and where his parents lived. Her mum had always kept the address in case Alice ever wanted to look him up. She’d got that far talking to Joseph about it, but then she felt herself stop. Hadn’t known him long enough yet, maybe. She’d had friends for years and never told them: Martha was the only person outside her family who knew about the letters she’d sent him. Her dad had been the one who stopped writing, and that just wasn’t something she liked people knowing. Too recent, still too confusing. So Alice had stopped talking, shrugged and smiled at Joseph for hesitating, but she couldn’t continue, and she’d liked the fact that Joseph accepted it: hadn’t asked more questions, or changed the subject for her, just let her be quiet about it. He nodded at her now over the plates and bottles, and Martha picked slices of cucumber out of the salad bowl.
– What’s he like then, your Grandad? We met your Gran a few times, but I’ve only ever spoken to him on the phone.
Alice smiled. She wanted to say that she loved her grandfather, but she was too aware of Joseph, sitting across the table from her. She didn’t think she’d be like this if he weren’t there.
– You heard him on the phone. He can be funny like that sometimes. A bit formal. Mum says he’s not very good at being sociable. Gran always took care of that side of things. They were married forty-odd years, so I expect he’s forgotten how.
Joseph was smiling at her now, probably at the colour in her cheeks. Alice thought of how her mum planned to stay the whole week after the funeral, but Grandad had started getting impatient with her after only three days.
– I’m making him sound awful, aren’t I? Best not to crowd him, that’s all. He was crowded by the three of us for years. Me, Mum and Gran. ‘House full of blessed women!’
Alice laughed. A refrain from her childhood. Bellowed from the corridor in the weekday morning bathroom rush.
– I never knew if he was angry or happy when he said that. Both, I imagine. But I should go and call him anyway. Is there a bottle open?
Joseph and Martha were stacking the dishwasher when Alice came back from the phone with her empty glass. Keith was at the table, shuffling a pack of cards.
– Joseph’s going to teach us Brag.
The early awkwardness had gone, and Alice was happy to have them all together, filling the kitchen with their wandering about, nicely drunk. Her grandfather had been fine on the phone: she’d heard him smiling when he said he’d looked at the calendar already, realised his mistake.
– I can come this week anyway, I don’t mind at all.
– No, no. I’ve got plenty to be getting on with in the garden.
Joseph took them through a couple of hands, explaining the game as they went, patient and amused at Martha’s mock ill-humour about rules she didn’t understand. Keith ran out and bought more wine from the offlicence before it closed, and they all stayed up too late, playing cards until there was nothing left to drink and Keith got his pipe out. Alice groaned and pushed back her chair.
– Not for me.
– Ten more minutes. One more hand.
Martha passed the cards to Alice to deal and Keith told her it was unfair on them for her to leave while she was winning. Joseph laughed:
– She can be sly like that.
– We’ll leave the pack where it is, then. Pick up in the morning.
– It is morning.
When they got into bed, Joseph said he could hear the first train running. Alice listened for a while, lazy and drunk, with the warmth of his legs stretched out against hers. Drifting, her limbs wine-heavy, she closed her eyes and remembered her grandfather, quiet and removed, out in the garden. Did we have a reason for you coming?
Alice called her mum the next day, partly to tell her about her grandfather’s mistake, partly just because she missed her. Her mother lived three hours away by train. She’d come to London more often while Gran was ill, and in the weeks after, so seeing less of her again was another thing for Alice to adjust to. They’d had fierce rows while she was in her teens, and when Alice went to her gran for comfort, she used to say they were too close in age, and lived too close together. But their tempers were short-lived, and they stayed in that one-bedroom flat until Alice went to college. Her mum moved in with Alan a few months later, and a year or two after that he got a job back at his old school in York, so they moved out of London. Alan was headmaster there now, and Alice’s mum ran the biology department in another school, a little nearer their home. She used to joke about giving the sex education classes: ex-teenage single mother, not the best role model. Said she felt a fraud, warning them of the perils, because she’d never regretted having a daughter, even though Alice had come along a bit early.
Alice’s mum wasn’t worried about Grandad: told Alice she’d been waiting for something like this, ever since Gran died.
– He won’t show it like we would, but it’s bound to come out.
– I half feel like going out to see him today.
– I’d leave him be, love. I expect he does want to get some gardening done, he wouldn’t have said it to be polite.
– No, I suppose not.
Alice liked the way her mum was about Grandad: clear, pragmatic. She didn’t seem to get upset by his bluntness the way Alice did, so it was reassuring to talk to her. Alice often called her, in the evenings after she’d visited her grandfather, to get a bit of perspective down the phone. And she knew her mum liked to have a second opinion on how he was getting on.
– How’s he been the last couple of times? Apart from forgetful.
– Fine. A bit weary. But he’s keeping up with everything. The house, shopping.
– He can cope with more than you think.
They spent the rest of the call planning a week together for later in the year: Alice and her mum wanted to go up to the Dales, with Alan for a couple of days too, if his work allowed. His grandparents had farmed up on Swaledale and their house was still there, three miles from the nearest village. Alan and his brothers shared the upkeep, used it as a base for walking and holidays with their families. They’d got it hooked up to the grid for power a few years ago, but the water was still off the hill, so the supply was unreliable and had to be boiled for drinking, and the only good source of heat was from the kitchen stove. Alice remembered sleeping next to it her first time in the house: Easter was early that year and came with snow. The bedrooms were perishing, so they’d moved the mattresses downstairs. She was sixteen then and the three of them had spent the school holidays up at the farm. Her mum had been seeing Alan for a while and Alice knew the holiday was meant for her to get to know him properly. She hadn’t done it consciously, but spent most of the fortnight avoiding him. They got on fine in London, and she couldn’t explain it, but suddenly couldn’t bear to be at the table with him eating, hated seeing his piss in the toilet in the mornings. Flushed it away before sitting down, although she knew she wasn’t meant to because the water was low. She was amazed that Alan never lost his temper, despite her behaviour. Even after she had a bath without asking and the tank ran dry, and he had to get gallon cans from the outhouse and drive miles to the nearest standpipe.
Alan was always generous with the house: let Alice use it, would never take money for bills or maintenance. He’d long ago shown her all the best walks, how to keep the stove lit if you were out all day, and where the water tank was on the hillside, so she could keep an eye on the level. Alice usually went there with her mum now, but she’d taken friends up before, and boyfriends. The old farm was an acquired taste: the country was bare, the slopes around grey with scree, and the house was a steep walk from the only road out. Not always inviting, especially in winter, when you had to leave a warm car and scramble up the track with rucksacks and supplies. Alice tried to remind herself how awkward she’d been that first Easter visit, but it was hard not to be disappointed if friends ignored the sky and heather and complained about the draughts instead, the lack of mobile reception. She’d cut short a stay once, driven back south three days early, because she couldn’t take any more of her then-boyfriend’s moaning. Late summer and the house had been full of daddy-long-legs, dancing along the walls. For Alice, these were a familiar part of August at the farm, but they just drove her boyfriend mad. He couldn’t sleep with the rustle of their spindly limbs in the room, spent the evenings battering them with newspapers until Alice decided she’d had enough. She told Alan about it a year or so later, after they’d split up, and he laughed when she apologised, belatedly, on behalf of her sixteen-year-old self.
Alice didn’t have many friends who still went on holiday with their parents. It used to embarrass her a little when she was younger, after she’d left school, and while she was at college: summer weeks spent walking the Pennine Way with her mother while everyone she knew seemed to be hitching around Italy or clubbing in Barcelona. Took Alice years before she admitted, even to herself, that she enjoyed walking more than dancing all weekend and the come-down after.
Alice was six the first time they went away, just the two of them. Her mother had just qualified, had her first teaching job lined up for the autumn, and they spent three July weeks in Dorset: a graduation present from Gran and Grandad. The money had been intended for a week in a cottage, but Alice’s mum decided on staying away longer, cancelled the reservation her parents had made and booked a caravan instead. Alice loved the instant mash and tinned spaghetti meals her mother cooked those weeks, the biscuits eaten straight from the packet. They stayed up late together playing memory instead of washing up, and kept their pyjamas on until lunchtime, both knowing Gran and Grandad would have dressed hours before them. The nearest beach was shingle, and rough on cold toes after swimming, but Alice asked to go there nearly every day because she liked the pebbles. Local legend had it that they were larger at one end of the beach than the other, something to do with waves and current, and fishermen sent adrift could always tell where on the wide bay they had landed by the size. Alice and her mum tested the theory, working their way along the beach, filling their pockets. She couldn’t remember if they’d drawn any conclusions, just that she’d spent hours laying the stones out in size and colour sequences on the windowsills of their caravan. Milky blue-grey, deep red-brown, some green and some almost orange: all of them were prettier when they were wet, and she dribbled water onto them from the teapot, until her mother started frowning about the puddles on the lino. So Alice waited until she wasn’t looking and spat on the stones instead, rubbing them against her palms.
The caravan site was small, but had space for tents, and in their last week three students pitched next to them. Postgraduate, geology, two men and a woman, on a summer field trip. They admired Alice’s pebble collection, and told her the names of the stones: quartz, flint and chert, and one she could never remember, but they said it was harder than steel. The students seemed ancient to Alice at the time, but they would have been early twenties, like her mum. Her mother never spoke much to the parents in the other caravans, but she took to drinking her morning cup of tea out on the steps around the same time the students were eating breakfast outside their tents.
The caravan didn’t have a bedroom, but the dining table folded down and there were spare foam cushions under the benches, so in the evenings, after dinner and card games were over, Alice and her mother would rebuild the narrow double bed, which they shared. They hung a blanket across the caravan so her mum could read at the far end by the door after Alice had gone to bed. Once the students arrived, her mum started spending her evenings with them, sitting and talking outside their tents. Not far away, not much more than thirty feet, and if she wasn’t asleep yet, Alice would listen to the murmur through the metal walls.
One night, towards the end of their stay, Alice woke up and panicked. No light leaking around the edges of the suspended blanket. Miles from a street lamp and she couldn’t hear anything. She needed the loo, and she’d been in the night before, knew the layout of the caravan, but this time her mum wasn’t there.
Alice fell asleep again, despite the worry and the seeping wet, before her mother came in and moved her over gently to get into bed. And she cried when her mum peeled off her sleeping bag, sodden pyjamas. Doesn’t matter love, doesn’t matter. Her mum’s voice was quiet, not angry, but Alice could see her neck, flushing red above her T-shirt.
The foam cushions and the sleeping bag were laid out on the sunny grass beside the caravan in the morning, and Alice stayed inside, thinking everyone on the site would surely guess what had happened. But she never heard her mum say anything to the students, not even the tall one who got a bucket from the site manager and helped her wash everything.
– Oh God, yes. Rory.
Her mum laughed when Alice asked about him, years later.
– You still remember his name?
– I was in his tent when you wet yourself, I think. Guilty conscience.
Her mum shrugged, smiling. They were on holiday again, one spring when Alice was studying. At the old farm: now part of their annual routine. Gran was with them that year, and Alan too, but Grandad had stayed at home. He’d rarely left London since retiring, and Gran going away for a few days without him was normal enough to them all by then. Alice, her mum and Gran spent the days wrapped in conversation, and Alan had come prepared: a car boot full of contracts and timetables to keep him occupied at the desk in the upstairs bedroom, while they filled the kitchen with talking.
– Did you like him, though, Mum? Rory.
Alice poured more tea, reaching the cup across the table to her mum, who was smiling again, perhaps a little embarrassed because her own mother was there and listening.
– Enough to take up the offer of his tent, anyway.
– But did you see him again after?
– No, no. Nothing like that.
– Why not?
Her mum shrugged again. Alice didn’t really need an answer: there had been nothing like that in her mother’s life until Alice was a teenager. She’d had evenings out, of course, but Alice remembered them being very occasional, and usually with female friends. Her mum would cook dinner for people at the flat sometimes too, and Alice was allowed to stay up for a while then with the grown-ups, but the first regular male face she could recall from those evenings was Alan’s. Alice used to press her mother about her love life. Started when she was seventeen, eighteen: the same age her mum was when she’d had her. Got more insistent as she got older. That spring break in Yorkshire became dominated by such conversations.
– But you must have been asked out.
– Sometimes. I did the asking sometimes too. Easier that way, because I’d pick evenings I knew you’d be free to babysit.
Her mum nodded across the table at Gran and they both laughed. Alice smiled with them, but persisted:
– Didn’t it ever bother you?
– Of course. Of course it did.
It exasperated her mum on occasion, this line of questioning, especially during that holiday because it came up so often, but she never got annoyed enough for Alice. The subtext was clear to all of them: Alice’s father. But Alice’s mum refused to let slip any resentment of him, even though Alice did her best to provoke. Teasing, needling:
– He never interrupted his sex life to change my sheets, did he?
– I think Rory and I had finished whatever it was we got up to before I discovered your predicament.
– You know what I mean.
– Might have been better if you had stopped us. The fact that you’d gone to sleep again used to bother me the most. I must have been away hours. Thoughtless.
Her mother shook her head, smiling, but still shuddering at the memory. She hadn’t known Alice’s father long before she got pregnant, just a few weeks in her first term at university, and they split up a good while before she took the test. Alice knew all that already, and it was a perfect walking day outside, blue and mild, but she kept her mum at the table with questions. Couldn’t understand it, why she wouldn’t get angry.
– It was just as much my fault for going to bed with your Dad. We were both naïve, love. Just didn’t think it would happen to us.
Alice didn’t remember her gran saying much while she and her mum were talking, but she stayed with them there in the kitchen, clearing away the breakfast plates, or just sitting. Watching Alice’s mum, checking. Ready, it seemed to Alice, to step in if she got the signal that help was wanted. It annoyed Alice at the time: she didn’t think her mum was the one who needed support. She always seemed so certain. Said it was her choice to have Alice. Not to get pregnant, but to keep her, and she never talked to Alice’s father about it, just told him it was happening: part-way through the spring term, almost three months since the last time they’d spoken. Alice’s mum said he turned up at the house she’d been staying in a few days later, with his parents, but she’d already packed her things and gone home.
– It wasn’t as though I wanted him to marry me or anything. And I know he didn’t want that either.
– He’s never thought about us. Me or you.
Alice remembered being surprised at herself, her tone of voice, the anger that shot across the table at her mother. Her mum held up her hands, briefly, and then put them down next to her cup again, as though surprised too, but trying not to show it.
– You don’t know that, Alice.
Her gran took the final word: soft, but spoken clearly enough to end the conversation, and Alice was glad of it later. She was twenty then, and frightening: could sound so sure of her own opinions. Gran had been good at timing her interventions.
They’d had plenty of those conversations before, Alice and her mother, but never with her gran there. It wasn’t until that week away together that Alice saw how hard it was for her mother, to hear how angry Alice was about her dad. Just as much my fault. It must have been tempting: her mum could have joined in with the character assassination, agreed with Alice about her father, shifted the blame for Alice’s hurt away from herself at least a little, but she’d held back. Not just because Gran was there, this was the way her mum always dealt with Alice’s questions: shrugs and smiles, and calm acceptance of the way things turn out. Alice had been fooled by that. Too easily, she thought: too self-absorbed. It took her gran’s concerned glances across the kitchen table to show Alice the effect her probing had.
She knew her gran was right about her father too: how can you be sure what he thinks or feels or doesn’t? Unfair to make such a presumption. Her gran never said as much, and neither did her mum, but the implication was plain: Alice could be the one to make contact, if she wanted to find out.
They’d all been quiet after that, but they’d stayed at the table together. Long enough for Alan to think it was safe to come downstairs and put on the kettle. He’d started when he opened the door and found the three of them still in the kitchen.
– Oh! I thought you’d all gone out.