Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert Read Free Book Online Page B

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, fromGran 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’dbeen 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