Joseph didn’t see Alice for well over a week. Didn’t plan it that way, just days went by and he was working late or tired. She left a message and he called her back but made an excuse when she suggested meeting up. Bit of flu coming on or something. He didn’t think about it before he said it, it just came out, and he felt bad after: lying to her like that for no good reason, just because he wanted to sleep in his own bed. Monday night knackered, he’d been working over the weekend, and he said he’d see her Wednesday maybe, she could come round then. Only he must have made it sound vague enough for Alice to say she’d call him first, make sure he was better: still friendly enough, but she knew he wasn’t ill. It was a relief, though, waking up alone in his empty flat, and he didn’t start work until nearly lunchtime on Wednesday. Still sleepy, he keyed in the wrong code when he got there, set the alarm off in the house he was plastering. He was working with Tony, who didn’t want to wait for the police: his parents were West Indian, and the last time this happened they didn’t believe he was a carpenter and took him in to get his fingerprints. Tony jogged down to the pub on the corner and Joseph went to find him after the police had been and the alarm was reset. Stan arrived a bit later and Joseph ended up staying in the pub with them until after closing. Didn’t have his mobile on him, but from where he was sitting, Joseph could see the payphone at the end of the bar. Thought about calling Alice to let her know where he was, but he never made it up there. He went to see Eve and Arthur on the Thursday, and was glad when his sister didn’t ask about her: she was good like that.
Joseph went home early that evening. Passed the end of Alice’s road and thought how he didn’t really understand what was going on, because he’d been into it, right from the beginning. Hadn’t felt like that in ages, but he liked her. The sandy red hair growing back in under her arms, that she apologised for, laughing, but that sent him searching, unbuttoning, with her lifting and shifting and helping him find the same shade curling over the top of her knickers. He remembered her wandering halfnaked around his flat one morning before work, looking for her socks. Not thinking he might be watching, still half asleep maybe, her face all squashed from the pillows, she looked great. But it took getting used to, being with someone again. All the time spent and all that talking. Tired him out, made him want to shut his mouth and keep it shut for a while.
– I’ve never told anyone that before.
That’s what she’d said. The second time they talked about her dad. After she told him it had been hard sometimes, not knowing him, or what he was like.
– Not when I was little. I never missed having a dad then, not really. I knew my family set-up was a bit odd and everything, when I was at school. But I remember another girl in my class whose parents had split up and one boy who lived at his gran’s too. Mum says kids have such complicated families now. She has to draw little trees to keep track of them for parents’ evenings.
It was a few days after that dinner with her flatmates. Alice had got a puncture on the way over to his place after work. They cooked together, and while it was in the oven, she carried her bike up the stairs and turned it upside down to mend it in the hallway, so she wouldn’t have to get up early for the bus in the morning. Alice was kneeling on the floorboards, working the bolts loose when she started talking, and it took Joseph a few seconds to catch up somehow: thinking backwards through what they’d been saying since she arrived that evening. He’d asked Alice before, about her dad, but not today, and it hadn’t seemed like she’d wanted to say much about him, either. Joseph filled the washing-up bowl for her and found an adjustable spanner, and then he waited.
– I started to lie sometimes, when I was at college. If friends asked about my parents, I’d say they were divorced and I didn’t see my Dad. Seemed like an easier explanation. Plenty of other people in the same situation.
Alice looked up at Joseph, standing in the kitchen doorway, and then down again. She stopped after that, talking and working, and so Joseph crouched down. Thought that might make it easier for her: make her feel more listened to than watched, because he did want to hear about it.
Alice stayed quiet for a while, working the tyre irons around her front wheel, her palms turning grey with dirt. Joseph liked the way she always had oil smears on her legs, from her bicycle chain, and that she mended things herself: punctures and brake cables, and the dodgy light switch that gave Martha shocks. She never made a fuss or waited for someone else to sort it, just turned off the mains and got a screwdriver out. Started on things she didn’t know how to finish sometimes, but Joseph liked that too. The way she’d stood looking at the wires coming out of the wall that time, with the switch in her hand. She’d been stuck, but she found her own way out: unscrewed the switch in the living room too, and worked out the wiring from there.
– Mum met him through a girl she knew from school, went to uni the year before her.
The tyre came away, and Alice said they lived in the same squat, this girl and Alice’s dad, and Alice’s mum was living with a family then, friends of her parents, in a different part of town.
– She was only seventeen, young to be studying. The idea was that my grandparents’ friends would look out for her. Didn’t do a very good job.
Alice laughed and stood up to get her bike pump out of her bag.
– I think the squat was just that bit more exciting, and the area. They’d done the house up really well, she said. It was a big place, and it wasn’t only students who lived there, but older people too, locals. One was a stonemason, I remember Mum telling me he did these Celtic knots all around the front door. Everything was put together out of bits they’d found or been given, but everything worked. I think my Dad spent more time on the house than in lectures. They turned the back room into a big kitchen, for everyone to sit in, and he helped the stonemason lay all the floorboards in there.
She smiled about that and then she said they weren’t together long, her mum and dad. Stopped seeing each other even before her mum found out about Alice, and her dad panicked when she told him. Her mum never thought about staying with him, just wanted to go home.
– She says he didn’t want to be with her either. She’s probably right. After I was born she sent him a letter. To say I was a girl and what I was called, and he never wrote back.
Alice shrugged and Joseph waited for her to go on, watching her while she held the inner tube under the water, looking for the leak. Her fingers were dripping when she pulled the tube out, so he grabbed a tea towel from the back of the kitchen door for her.
– It’ll get filthy.
– Doesn’t matter.
He didn’t want to go off looking for a rag and hold up the conversation. Looked like it was hard enough for her to say all this without interruptions. Alice dried her hands and then the tube and chose a patch from the kit. Still nothing.
– He never got in touch? Your Dad.
She shook her head. She didn’t look at him, just at what she was doing.
– He never got curious enough. That’s how it seemed to me anyway. I spent years going on about it with my Mum. She wanted to keep me, and she said it was her decision, pretty much. Took it out of his hands. But then, he let that happen, didn’t he? Never made contact. So I thought he didn’t want anything to do with me.
Alice spread glue onto the patch, frowning concentration, then she put it to one side and looked up at him.
– It was probably just a relief. For my Dad, I mean. He was nineteen and he wasn’t in love. No one was pushing him or asking him to take responsibility. I don’t know.
– You can’t blame him for turning his back?
Alice looked up at him, like that was a harsh way to put it, but then she smiled. Self-conscious.
– Yeah well, maybe. If it wasn’t me he was turning his back on.
She picked up the tyre again and Joseph thought about his own mum and dad, both of them teenage parents. But they’d wanted to be: got engaged, saved up, so it didn’t compare. Still, listening to Alice, it was hard not to think of his dad and what he did for them. Years of night shifts, and he’d wanted to be a cabinet maker, like his grandad was, only the apprenticeship was a long one and you couldn’t keep kids on apprenticeship money. That’s what he’d said when Joseph asked him about it. Like it was something you didn’t have to think about, just obvious: no point moaning, just get on with it. Alice was still watching him, as if she was thinking, and then she said:
– I had a hard time understanding my Mum. Always so bloody fair when she talked about him. My Dad never helped her look after me, or supported us financially. But Mum said she had all the help she needed, from Gran and Grandad. I suppose she did. I think Mum always wanted me to get in touch with him, basically. She didn’t want me to be angry with him on her account. Didn’t want that to stop me.
Joseph had thought maybe Alice wrote her dad a letter: the first time they’d talked about this, he’d thought that was what she was going to tell him, but then she’d stopped. She was quiet again now, looking for the mark she’d made on the tube, so he said:
– He doesn’t still live in that squat, does he?
Alice looked over at him and laughed.
– No. He doesn’t.
Then she held out the patched tube for him to hold while she wiped the splashes off the floor and poured away the water. Joseph pressed his thumb down onto the sticky rubber and listened to Alice describing her dad while she worked, things he’d told her in his letters. He was a doctor, a GP. Had a surgery in Bristol, same place he went to university. He was an astronomer too, amateur, had a telescope in his garden.
– I don’t know. I just really liked the sound of him.
She didn’t always like reading his letters. He never said sorry or why he hadn’t got in touch, but he’d wanted to know about her: his first letter came three days after she’d sent hers, and it was a long one, nearly four pages. He asked lots of questions, and when she did the same, he wrote a lot about himself in return.
– I thought that was more important, you know? Finding out about each other. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that, not so soon in any case.
Alice sat down by her bike again, opposite Joseph. Said they wrote to each other about work, because they had that in common: debating the NHS cuts and squeezes, the good and the bad in policy changes. She was retraining at the time, for post-operative, and enjoying it.
– Much more interesting than where I was before, in antenatal. You see people more often and for longer too, over weeks. Get to talk to them about more than just what hurts and what doesn’t.
Her gran had been the one she usually talked to about work, but her dad was better, his knowledge was that much more up-to-date, so Alice wrote to him about hip replacements and her spinal patients.
– I told him I like walking, so he wrote to me about good places he knew. I drove out to the Mendips after I got that letter. Borrowed Martha’s car. Middle of the week, so he wasn’t likely to be out there. I wasn’t even sure he was a walker, but any middle-aged man I came across in hiking boots had me thinking about turning and running. We hadn’t talked about meeting up yet. I mean, I wanted to bump into him but I didn’t want to look like a stalker, did I?
Alice smiled a bit, and then she said the address he gave her was his surgery. They’d been writing for months by then, letters going back and forth every few weeks, but she still didn’t know where he lived. She found out she’d been writing to his work because he never gave a phone number, and she’d called directory inquiries.
– Makes me sound so desperate.
She shook her head.
– Maybe I was. I had to wait weeks between letters sometimes. I know it took me a while to reply too. Wasn’t always easy to write, but waiting was worse. I never knew for certain I’d get more.
It wasn’t residential anyway, the address, so Alice told the woman to check under business instead.
– I couldn’t not ask him, could I? Why he didn’t want me writing to him at home.
Alice picked bits of glue off the ends of her fingers. Joseph watched her pulling the words together.
– So that was all I wrote in the end. Just that question. He’s married. They don’t have kids. Maybe they couldn’t, I think that’s what he meant. His wife doesn’t know about me, anyway. He wrote back and said he wasn’t sure how to tell her yet. I thought that meant he was going to, but I don’t know now.
Joseph held the wheel steady while Alice fitted the tyre again. When that was done she said:
– I brought you a picture anyway.
– Of your Dad?
– Yeah, well. You were asking, so I thought you might like to see him.
She went over to her bag and dug it out for him. Joseph thought he was getting a doctor in a shirt and tie, but it was an old picture, in a little plastic pocket. There were a few of them on the photo, her mum’s friends at university. All of them with the same hair, long and in need of washing, the blokes too. Sat with their backs up against a wall, the steps of someone’s back door, Joseph thought it was the squat maybe. Bare feet in the long grass in front of them, a couple of wine bottles open, leant up against their knees. Alice pointed to him, one along from her mum.
– I’ve always wondered if I look like him. People say I’m like my Gran, but I’m not really. Same hair, same colour eyes, but that’s as far as it goes. And I don’t look a bit like my Mum.
Joseph looked at her mother’s face in the picture and thought Alice was right: her mum was all dark and round. He looked at her dad, and Alice laughed.
– No, you can’t tell from that.
He was a student, all scraggy beard and glasses, so much on his face you couldn’t get past it. He did look young, but Joseph didn’t want to say that, in case it sounded like he was making excuses for him. The same age his parents were when they had him. It wasn’t getting her mum pregnant that Alice was upset about anyway, as far as he could tell. The guy wasn’t too young to be her dad now: that was the problem.
– I sent him a photo of me. Should have waited before I did that, probably, but I wanted to push him, you know? I thought he might send me one back, but he never wrote again after that.
Alice put the picture away in her bag again.
– When did you send it?
– A year ago, a bit more than. It was after Gran got ill.
She was trying not to sound too sad, and Joseph couldn’t understand that. He thought she should have been angry, like she was before she started writing, and he kept waiting, couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to say any more about it. Wasn’t expecting her to shout or cry exactly, but something. Thought if she asked him, he would have to say her dad was a coward. The way Alice talked, made it sound like it was her fault the letters stopped coming, and it didn’t make sense to him. He didn’t want to upset his wife, Joseph could see that part: first you have to say you’ve got a daughter, then you have to explain why you’ve never told her. But her dad never even sent Alice a picture, he couldn’t even get it together to do that much for her.
Alice didn’t ask Joseph what he thought, she just said:
– I’ve never told anyone that before.
He could remember standing next to her in the hallway and how she spun the wheel of her bike a few times, like she was checking if it was on straight, even though she’d done that already. He’d been angry about her dad, but she just looked relieved. Glad to have said all that to someone, maybe. And Joseph thought it was better not to have said anything about her father, not then anyway, because that would have spoilt it for her.
Friday night, he went to his parents’, didn’t tell them he was coming. Drove there straight from work, bought a bottle of wine on the way, some cans for his father, and some flowers for his mum. From a garage, so they weren’t up to much, but it was the only place he found open. Eve had got their mum used to much better over the years, but she laughed when he apologised for them.
– I’m always happy to get flowers, Joey. Especially when my son comes with them.
His dad was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, and he grumbled about having to do a couple extra for Joseph, but he was smiling. Joseph took them out for a drink after dinner. There was a quiz night on in the bar at the snooker club, and they were talked into staying. Phil, one of his dad’s old workmates, was doing the questions, and half of them were about the cars they used to assemble and the union they belonged to. Most of the regulars at the snooker club worked at the plant or used to, but there was a younger crowd in too, and after a while they started whistling and heckling. Phil threw in a couple of telly questions to keep them happy, but then his mates started in on him, and there was more banter than quiz until he threatened to hold over the prize pot until next weekend. It made Joseph laugh, seeing how much his dad enjoyed it, all the kidding, and how much about his old job he still remembered. They came second, won a set of glasses, it got late and Joseph had had too many to be driving, so his mum made up the bed in his old room upstairs.
The mattress was narrow, and Joseph knew that Ben slept there now, if Eve and Arthur stayed over. He couldn’t get to sleep for a long time: had to be up early, but he’d had too much to drink, and so he spent too much time thinking about what it was like when he and Eve still lived here. The estate was out in one of those dog-end bits of London, always felt nearer the coast than the centre. Not great, but not so bad either. Rows of brick-and-tile semis built after the war, roads laid out in crescents with endless pavements, their kerb stones dipping for the countless driveways. Shops on one side, primary school on the other, and beyond that came the industrial units and the railway siding. Their house was in the middle, where the gardens backed onto each other. They were mostly kept neat these days, but Joseph remembered long grass and low fences when he was younger, all sagging and ignored by the kids, their games played across and through them.
Hadn’t thought about any of this in years. He’d maybe caught it off being with Alice so much, listening to her, and telling her about himself. Joseph wasn’t used to it. Lying in his old bed, he couldn’t stop it all coming, and there were plenty of good things to remember too. Kids’ things mostly, wouldn’t mean much to anyone else, probably, but he enjoyed thinking about it all again. Walking to school the long way by the canal, after his paper round, football and cigarettes at the rec, Sunday dinners with everyone at his nana’s house. Auntie Jean, who wasn’t really his auntie but lived next door, her kids grown up and gone. She looked out for him and Eve after school when his mum was working, took the fence down between their bits of back lawn. His mum and Jean used to sit together on the back step, smoking in the evenings after his dad left for work, and Joseph liked to listen, not to what they were saying so much as the sound of their talking. Lying on the rug in the front room with the gas fire on; cool air and warm cigarette smell from the open kitchen door; half-listening to his mum laughing, half-watching the telly.
None of that was what Joseph expected to be remembering. He knew something was on its way back to him: it was like he’d been waiting all week, getting ready, but then all this stuff from when he was a kid surprised him. He lay in his old bed and thought this wasn’t such a bad way to be feeling, they were happy enough memories and he should be glad of them. Usually it was different. Days ahead he could predict it, and he’d felt it happening this week too: going home, not answering the phone, avoiding Alice. He’d been crawling into himself, and that meant he had to be careful.
Saturday and early, but there were kids out already on the estate, playing, standing at the street corners when Joseph was driving away from his mum and dad’s place. It was quick, the memory, when it came, and he was ready for it.
Up in Portrush, two days on R and R, halfway through his tour, end of the summer. Four of them in a taxi, going back to the hotel: civilian vehicle, civilian clothes. Three small boys at the side of the road, couldn’t have been more than six years old: hard little faces, spitting, giving them the finger as they were passing.
Joseph drove off the estate. Been a while since he’d remembered anything like that too, but it was more the kind of memory he was used to. Stones thrown, people staring, mums shielding their babies from you, like you were infected or dirty. Didn’t matter if you weren’t in uniform, there was no getting away: even on leave, everyone knew who you were, even the kids. Was a time he’d have had to stop the van, hands useless, feet shaking on the pedals. Not today, though. It was just that feeling that stayed with him: years gone by and still no escaping.
Alice called Joseph again at the end of the week. Still just the machine doing the answering, so she hung up. Called her mum a few hours later, not intending to talk about Joseph, but she ended up doing so anyway.
– It’s too bloody stupid, this. I feel like an idiot. Adolescent. Waiting for some spotty boy to phone me.
It was a relief to laugh at herself with someone. Her mum said:
– Maybe he’s in bed. I don’t answer the phone when I’m ill.
– No, he’s fobbing me off. He doesn’t pick up if he doesn’t want to, I’ve seen him do it. Just lets it ring and gets on with whatever he’s doing.
– Are you a bit in love with this one, maybe?
– Not today I’m not.
– Sounds to me like you are, sweetheart.
– I think he’s a wanker.
– Well, in that case, so do I.
Alice had to laugh again, properly this time, and it helped that Martha agreed with her later too:
– If he’s being a berk, you just have to ignore him until he stops.
Alice thought of the days, weeks even, that Keith and Martha could be angry with each other and still stay together, and it was comforting. She took her mother’s advice and went out with Martha, to the pub first and then a late show. They queued too long for coffee and chocolate and sat down a few scenes in. Alice couldn’t get interested in the film and irritated herself again thinking about Joseph instead, how much she’d liked being with him. She wouldn’t be the first to confuse sex with something else, but it still made her flinch: to think that’s what it might amount to, just the familiarity that comes from knowing someone’s body. Should know better than to trust that. Patients would sometimes tell her the most intimate things, all about their childhoods, their divorces and bereavements. Because we touch them, that’s what Clare said: they put themselves in our hands. Alice thought of the past weeks with Joseph and all that she’d told him. Too much, probably. You can go too far with people.
Alice had told her mum that she was writing to her father, but they’d never really discussed the letters.
– I’m sorry, Mum.
– Don’t be, love. None of my business really.
She was patient like that, her mother: Alice thought maybe it had been enough for her to know they’d made contact, and that the letters were ongoing. Martha got to recognise the envelopes after a while, and she used to slip them under Alice’s door instead of leaving them on the kitchen table if she picked up the post downstairs. Alice had thought she would talk about it with all of them later: her mum and Gran, Martha and Clare too, once there was something to talk about properly. But then it was all over, when it had just got going, and telling anyone had seemed too difficult. Joseph had sat quietly for the most part and let her get on with it, but he’d wanted to hear, and there was no pretending with him either: you can’t blame him for turning his back? He was right: it had been daft to make out she wasn’t hurt by her father’s absence, or that she understood it. In theory, yes, but Joseph could see that’s all it was. He had been teasing her, but he’d been gentle about it, and she felt sad, remembering how it felt to speak to him: he’d been interested and she’d wanted him to know.
She didn’t have a lot to base that trust on, Alice was aware of that. Never met his family, and it had been weeks before she’d even stayed at his flat. He’d somehow never invited her back, and she’d thought he had some dodgy flatmates, perhaps, even started wondering if he lived at home with his parents. Alice had been absurdly nervous the first time she went round there, but it turned out to be fine. He lived on his own, in an ex-council place in Streatham. It was a small estate, three blocks, and he told her most of the flats were owner-occupied now. Alice thought it was a bit grim at first: the stairwells and walkways seemed unfriendly after dark. But in the morning she saw the window boxes and net curtains and changed her mind. The three blocks faced inward, and every front door was a different colour. Joseph’s neighbours nodded hello to him across the courtyard and she felt stupid and prissy for having been worried the night before.
– It was a state when I bought it. Pulled everything out.
Joseph told her about doing it up, with his brother-in-law, how they’d thrown the old carpets and cabinets over the side of the walkway, had two skip-loads of junk piled up in the courtyard. It was very plain inside now, new floorboards and plaster walls, and Joseph said it wasn’t finished, but Alice thought they’d done a nice job. She liked the sun in the bathroom in the mornings, the big kitchen table his dad had made for him, and the view from the bedroom too, over the allotments. The flat was on the fourth floor and the whole place was on a hill: from the living room window, Alice could see trains, gas towers, the trees on the common.
But that was his flat, not Joseph. What did she know about him? He drank Guinness, mostly. He grew up in London, like her, but a bit further south. His music collection was eclectic: Marvin Gaye, The Jam and Johnny Cash were the tapes he kept in the van. He had no vanity about him, which Alice found appealing. When he cut his hair it was short, a number three all over, and he did it himself, but not that often, and he didn’t shave every day, either. Only when his beard got long enough to be uncomfortable, and then only in the evenings, because he didn’t like getting up any earlier than he had to. He voted Labour but said his family had done well out of the Tories: he wasn’t mad about council sell-offs, but he knew how proud his dad was that they all owned their own houses. Socialism was one thing, security another. Joseph played snooker, wasn’t really interested in football. He’d been in the army for a while, after he left school. Spent a year or two in Spain and Portugal after that, plastering retirement villas for expats, and it was someone he’d worked for out there who introduced him to Stan after he came back.
It didn’t add up to much, but then she really hadn’t known him that long. Alice still felt surprised by Joseph, and how much she liked him. When she’d told him about the old farm and suggested going up there sometime, it hadn’t been the wildlife and ancient plumbing he’d picked up on, she didn’t think they’d bother him. He said he liked the sound of the house and the hills around it, but he’d never tried going to the same place over and again: I’ve never wanted to do that before. Familiar routes and views, knowing which tracks were best at what times of year: that was all part of being at the farm for Alice, but she hadn’t been disappointed by Joseph’s comments. He hadn’t been turning her down, and there was no criticism in them. He was his own person, that’s what Clare said, and Alice agreed. Self-contained, but not unfriendly with it, not until now at least. She liked that about him: self-possessed, something she’d always wanted to be herself.
Joseph rang early on Saturday morning and said he was sorry. Just after she’d picked up the phone:
– It’s me. It’s Joseph. I’m sorry.
No lead up, and then quiet afterwards. Alice couldn’t even hear his breath. Thrown, she said nothing, and then he asked if he could see her, and Alice said yes. Much too quickly she thought, and cursed him for it when he came round. Standing in the kitchen, relieved to see him, despite herself. Pouring him tea and calling him an arsehole at the same time, which made them both smile.
They spent the afternoon in bed, and then when it got dark, they wandered out together for a late drink. Stan was at the pub, with Clare and a few others, so they pushed the tables together and played cards. Stan persuaded the publican into a lock-in, but Alice and Joseph didn’t stay long. Just until Alice won, then Joseph took her home, and made her laugh again by waiting to be invited upstairs. He stayed over and it was lovely, but Alice kept expecting him to say something about what had happened the week before. She was very glad to have him back, but angry too, because he never explained. Wasn’t sure she wanted just to start up again like that, without reasons given or any discussion. Clare smiled when Alice talked to her about it.
– Looks to me like it has anyway, whether you like it or not. Or it did last night. I’d never have guessed you’d fallen out.
– We haven’t. Not really.
Late Sunday morning and Alice had taken a detour on her way to her grandad’s. Stan had taken the boys swimming, so she and Clare were alone, and they sat in the kitchen, talking.
– He’s apologised, Alice. Be happy.
– I am. Except I don’t know what he’s sorry for, do I? He might have been sleeping with someone else for all I know.
– Have you made any promises to each other?
– No.
– Do you want to stop seeing him?
– No, I don’t.
Alice had been through her options already. Either she talked to him about it or she left it. The former was too possessive, and the latter wouldn’t work for long: she was bound to start thinking about it again. But Alice didn’t want it to be over. She liked being with Joseph too much. He’d said sorry. Last week had thrown her: she hadn’t seen that coming. But then there was yesterday, last night, this morning. Clare walked her down as far as the corner, and smiled when Alice said she wanted to give him the benefit.
– Good. I don’t think a relationship’s got going till you’ve had a bit of bother. Not properly. Don’t make too much of it, will you?