After Alice Read Online Free PDF

or rebuilding as an estate. (But that is a daydream, and none of this new grandnephew Alex’s business. )
    â€œIt’s what, a fifteen-minute drive from your house,” Justin says. “I can’t believe you don’t go to see it! The place where you grew up!”
    She shakes her head, frowns at Justin. The young don’t understand about the past. To them, it’s a foreign country, clearly demarcated, walled off. You have to be middle-aged before time begins its collapsing trick and you realize that the past, even the distant past, is just next door, a short walk down a grassy slope. That all of your mistakes, your regrets, your wounds and grievances have collected there, piled up. That all of the people and places you have lost are camped out there, displaced, out of reach, but just in view.
    Alex says again, “I’d like to see it. Would you go with me? Would you show it to me, the house and the orchard?”
    â€œI’m very busy,” she says, discouragingly. She ought not to have engaged in this discussion to begin with. She has no interest in taking Alex to Beauvoir. Alice’s children have had their share. She has been dutiful there. What is left is Sidonie’s only.
    Cynthia finally looks into the kitchen, says “Ready?” and Justin (who has taken off his tie and sweater; he must have been too warm) gets off his stool so hastily that it rocks and he has to catch it to prevent it from falling over. The girl laughs, not kindly.
    Sidonie catches sight of herself in the simple maple-framed mirror in the hall. In her black trousers and sweater, her still-dark hair in its precise bob, she is too angular; a dark slash, a discontinuity, in the room. Nobody else is wearing black; the men are in jeans or khakis, checked shirts; the women in little coloured dresses; they look like young middle-aged party-goers in any North American city. She looks frightening, witchy. But that is not her fault. She does not belong here.
    Why have Stephen and Cynthia insisted? She has nothing to offer, no connection to recover, with these middle-aged offspring of her sister’s, or with their children. This would have been Alice’s world, this world of houses and domestic arts. It is not hers. She is not good at it; she has repudiated it. She is not Alice. She cannot be Alice for them. And Alice is gone.
    A memory, then, of the apparition on the highway this evening. Certainly not a good sign after the many years of therapy expended after Alice’s death.
    Who even remembers Alice now? Alice’s children. Hugh would, and Walter Rilke, her old neighbour, who manages Beauvoir. Masao, if he is still alive; perhaps a smattering of other former classmates or old friends. (Alice’s old friends! She could look them up. That would be a project. But why? What would be the use?)
    Better to let go: to accept the loss. To sever, to amputate, to prune away. For after all, in this country of her past, the dead outnumber the living. Alice, Mother, Father, Graham, Mrs. Inglis. No doubt also most of her teachers, her parents’ friends, her neighbours, who would otherwise be very elderly. If she begins to visit, she will be pulled in; the weight of losses will pull her under.
    She should never have come. (She should never have come back.)
    She has nothing in common with this nephew and his family; they belong to different worlds. Cynthia can visit if she wants; Sidonie need not. She does not need this sort of social contact, this forced familial interaction. There is no bond, here. She barely remembers Stephen; saw him two or three times as a child, attended his wedding twenty years ago. She would not know him, if not for the accident of birth.
    She has not avoided family entanglements these four decades to be trapped by them now. More reasonable to create one’s own family out of congenial company, as she had been thinking earlier.
    They say protracted goodbyes at the door, only