Afterwards (12 page)

September came and Alice was allowed to take some time off again: she’d used up most of her last year’s holiday looking after her gran and hadn’t been away in ages. Joseph planned a week in Scotland with her for the end of the month, and Alice booked a train up to Yorkshire first, to see her mum, spend a bit of time with her out on the Dales, at her step-dad’s place. Joseph was due to finish off a job for Stan, so he wouldn’t be able to join them this time. He had some free days, but they were in the middle of the week, and he thought he’d spend them working at David’s.

He took Alice to the station. The idea was to drop her off at King’s Cross and drive on to work, but when they got there he decided to look for a meter, said he wanted to come in with her.

– Won’t you be late, Joe?

– Doesn’t matter. We might get a space by the arches if we’re lucky.

They had to park a couple of streets away from the station in the end, and they were cutting it fine for her train by then, so Joseph took Alice’s rucksack because it meant they could go a bit faster. He’d wanted to make it a proper goodbye, but the half-jog up the platform made it all a bit hectic. And then the train was packed, and it was hard to say anything to each other with all
the people trying to shove onto the carriage past them, both out of breath and sweating. Alice smiled down at him from inside the door.

– I’ll give you a ring later, yeah?

– Yeah. Take care of yourself.

– You too.

She pushed the window open further, so she could reach an arm out and touch his face.

– Don’t spend all your days off at my Grandad’s, will you?

Joseph walked along the platform, watching her through the windows, as she found her seat and lifted her bag onto the rack above. This time next week, he’d be getting on the same train and she would be meeting him off it at York: the plan was to have some lunch with her mum and step-dad before getting another train further north. He stayed on the platform, by her window, but Alice had a paper with her, and started leafing through it after she’d sat down, so Joseph thought she might not look out again. He felt a bit stupid then, waiting for someone who didn’t know he was there. But when the train started moving, Alice raised her head. Saw him, and then lifted a hand to wave to him, surprised. Looked almost shy, pleased to see him still there, and then Joseph was glad he’d stayed.

There was no answer when he rang the bell, so Joseph went to the garage and got changed before he let himself into the house. It was cool and quiet in the front room and strange to be alone in there, so he put the radio on and set to work quickly, rolling up the rug and standing it in the porch, ready to take out to the garage for safekeeping later. Laying out the dustsheets, he noticed for the first time the dark, worn wood on the arms of the old man’s chair, and the red and green light falling on the carpet through the coloured glass panels in the tops of the windows.

– Joseph? Is that you, Joseph?

The voice was upstairs, muffled by distance, and it took him a couple of seconds to adjust: not alone. He turned down the radio.

– Yeah. Only me. I rang the bell earlier. I thought you weren’t in.

No reply. Joseph wasn’t sure what to do, and why the old man hadn’t answered the door. He went out into the hallway, listened a moment and then called:

– I’ll be making a start down here then.

But he stayed where he was, looking up the stairs to the empty landing.

– No. Come up, Joseph. Would you come up, please?

The old man’s voice sounded further away than upstairs, and it didn’t seem right to Joseph somehow. Halfway up to the landing, he saw the trapdoor to the attic was open, the old wooden ladder pulled down and sagging on its hinges. He thought,
Jesus
. And then:
fucking stupid
. Took the rest of the stairs two at a time, thinking David must have climbed into the loft and fallen, but when Joseph started up the ladder, the old man was above him, stooping over the hole in the gloom.

– I haven’t been up here for years.

He was smiling.

– Found a few things to show you.

One of the bulbs had gone, but the other still cast its forty-watt glow at the far end by the water tank. Joseph moved slowly away from the square light of the trapdoor, careful where he put his feet, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Lagged pipes and loft insulation, trunks and crates and cardboard boxes. In the middle was David, watching him, nodding.

– We can see well enough, can’t we?

He pointed at the dead bulb.

– Didn’t want to risk another journey down and up that
ladder again to get a spare from the kitchen. Isobel’s knitting patterns.

He gestured to a box next to Joseph’s leg, stuffed with magazines, their pages swollen with damp.

A trunk was open next to them, clothes, summer dresses, pastels and florals for a middle-aged woman. David lifted one of them out, held it up.

– I’d forgotten all of this.

The dress hung from his fingers but he was still smiling, and Joseph had to look away, down at the square of daylight next to him in the floor, and the landing below.

– Sorry. I didn’t call you up for this. Thought you might be interested in my old service things.

The old man was making his way over to the water tank, head ducking the roof beams, one arm out to steady himself. He sat down on a trunk and pulled a small box up onto his knees. Joseph followed, hunched and careful, squatting down next to him under the dim bulb.

– I was looking for pictures of Isobel to show Alice. Found these. Our squadron.

Men in uniform on wet tarmac. Maybe a hundred or so: five or six rows of them in front of an aeroplane, the propellers on either side marking the edges of the frame. The men were arranged behind one another in tiers, the heads of the top row level with the wing.

– See if you can find me.

He passed the picture over and Joseph tried but they all looked the same. Front row on chairs, hands on knees, the men behind them standing, arms by their sides. All stiff backs and cheerful faces.

– Fourth row down. Third from left.

David prompted, but he didn’t seem offended. And then Joseph thought the face did look like him: long with a thin mouth smiling, but then so did the man next to him. All with their caps on.

– That was Norfolk. This was Kenya.

The old man had a pile of small, white-framed snapshots in his hand. Passed them over to Joseph one by one, explaining the views of forest and cloud taken from his cockpit, mountains rising at the end of a wingtip.

– Those are the Aberdares. I have one of Mount Kenya too.

Snow-capped, with another plane flying ahead: sun glare on the metal, propellers blurred. And the last one was of the forest canopy, far below, taken through the bomb bay doors, Joseph could just see the edges of them, hanging open. He handed the small pile back to David, who looked through them again, quickly, nodding as he slipped them one behind the other.

– I was a cadet, while the war was still going on. It was what I looked forward to, all through the school day. Morse code and aircraft recognition in the church hall
weekday evenings. I could recite names and wing spans, used to cycle over to the airfield at Northolt, halfway across London, to name them as they came in. Hurricanes and Spitfires. I’d check the wind direction, try to guess which way the pilot would land. They had a Polish squadron there, as I remember, with the highest Allied scores in the Battle of Britain. Wished it hadn’t ended, the war. What a terrible thing to wish for.

He laughed and then glanced at Joseph, as if to make sure he was still there, still listening. The old man put the photos back in the box on his knees, told Joseph he’d been looking through his service papers when he heard the radio downstairs. David held a couple of letters out, which Joseph took from him, but he didn’t read the typed pages because the old man was still talking. Telling him that he’d been called up, everyone was then, but he’d never have got an interesting job as a national serviceman, so he enlisted immediately.

– I’d have been out in under two years otherwise, and I already knew that wasn’t long enough to learn anything. I was suggested for air crew, which pleased my father no end, I remember. Plus the fact that my training took me out to Rhodesia. It was something to be proud of then, a son in the Empire Training Scheme.

The old man took the letters back, didn’t seem to mind or notice that Joseph hadn’t read them, and he flicked through the remaining papers in the box while he was talking, but didn’t take anything else out to show him.

– I remember looking it up before I left. I knew where Rhodesia was, of course, we were taught things like that at school back then. It was a habit I’d picked up as a
boy, I listened to the radio in the evenings with my parents, followed the fighting on my father’s atlas. The war made everything seem closer. I thought I had a picture in here, a postcard I bought in Salisbury.

David frowned and shut the box, glanced around the floor at his feet.

– I learned to fly Tiger Moths and Harvards out there. I’d only just finished my training. And then came Kenya and Isobel.

He looked at Joseph, blinking, and Joseph wasn’t sure if he was meant to say something. The old man was jumping around in time, getting hard to follow. They sat quiet a minute or so and Joseph could feel the air moving in from under the eaves. There was a slit of sunlight and garden away to his left, and he could hear a passing car, birds in the garden. His ankles and knees were stiff from squatting.

– I’ve been going on, haven’t I?

– No.

– I have.

– I don’t mind.

David smiled, like he didn’t believe him. Started searching in another box resting on the beam between them.

– I found a picture of Alice to show you.

Somewhere. It hadn’t felt like a lie when Joseph said he didn’t mind, but it was strange, squatting up here, between a bin liner of tablecloths and some empty suitcases, listening to another man’s life. The old man sat up again:

– Here. Six, I think. Or seven. With her first glasses.

Joseph was glad to see Alice’s face, and smiled at the small eyes, looking tired through the lenses, her uneven parting. He knew she wore contacts now, but he’d never thought she’d been a speccy girl.

– Her school reports are here too, old exercise books. Funny. Tent and things she put here last time she moved.

David pointed over towards the trapdoor, at two fruit crates, packed with books and papers. Joseph was tempted, but knew he couldn’t really ask to look through them. Underneath the picture in his hand was another girl, but the photo was older.

– That’s her mother, Sarah Margaret. Around the same age, perhaps a little younger.

David nodded at his daughter’s picture.

– Peggy, little Peg, they called her. Her grandparents, up in Scotland. Not Isobel. I remember she told me: I don’t call her that. Meaning, please don’t call her that either.

Joseph went down first and then held the ladder steady. David came down slowly, switching the light off once he had his feet firmly planted on one of the upper rungs. When he was back on the landing, Joseph asked if he shouldn’t close over the trapdoor for him.

– No, no. Leave it, leave it. Plenty up there to keep an old man occupied.

Pork pie, salad, boiled potatoes. David had made lunch when Joseph arrived the next day: jar of pickle and a pot of tea waiting at one end of the table with its cosy on.

– I tend to make the things that she did. This is a Tuesday meal.

The old man smiled, and Joseph sat down where the plate had been laid for him. He’d been at Stan’s in the morning, sorting out an order for their next job, and bought a sandwich from the garage on his way over, still in his bag.

– Much better than what I’d have got myself. Thanks.

They ate together, talking about Joseph and Alice’s trip to Scotland, and where they planned to go. They’d be spending most of their time on the Fife coast, around the East Neuk villages, where Alice’s gran grew up, and David knew the area well, from visits to his in-laws, taking Sarah up to see her grandparents in the summer holidays. He said there was plenty of good walking and driving they could do, and he rummaged some maps out of a drawer in the sideboard to show Joseph.

– Take them with you. I should have given them to

Alice last week, don’t know why I didn’t think of it.

They were OS, but very old, and worn at the folds. Joseph had already bought a new one, at the station after he saw Alice off, but he didn’t refuse. Followed the coastal paths that David pointed out with his little finger, the roads might have changed a bit, but he could remember the routes to tell Alice about later.

The dining table was at the far end of the room that Joseph had been working on, pushed closer to the French windows than usual, and a bit crowded by the armchairs and the piano, which Joseph had moved down there, out of his way. The other half was covered in sheets, walls exposed up to the dado rail, strips of paper scraped off above it too. Joseph had thought he’d get it all done yesterday, but the time spent talking in the attic had taken a chunk out of the morning. Hadn’t planned to come today originally. He was meant to see Arthur, have a game of snooker, only Ben was sick and Eve was working all day, so they said they’d have a drink later in the week instead. Joseph thought he could make use of the afternoon, catch up on the work here, and when he’d called David to say he was on his way over, the old man had told him he was going out after lunch so he’d have the place to himself. David didn’t look in any hurry to get moving, though: folding up the maps for Joseph, saying he envied him a week up there, and that he had wonderful memories of that stretch of coast.

– Going through all those old photos yesterday. Made me remember how much I enjoyed being in Africa. Rhodesia especially, but Kenya too. Isobel didn’t. It was all soured by her first marriage, I think. Or had been by the time I met her.

His lunch finished, knife and fork tidy, the old man was
looking out through the windows at his back garden, both hands resting in front of him on the table.