The Love She Left Behind (11 page)

Tipping onion skins into the kitchen bin—she was making shepherd's pie, since the stir-fry she had produced the previous night had ‘nearly taken the roof of my fucking mouth off,' according to Patrick—the youthful fragments of him and Sara enticed her. She retrieved the brittle magazine page. Sara was visible only as a section of waving gold-brown hair and a slender hand brushing Patrick's denim-shirted shoulder. He occupied most of the shot, his own hair black, as it still was only in the photos around the house. His expression though, was untouched by time.
Uncompromising
.

The pinging of her email startled Mia away from the bin. Expecting the quote promised by Atkinson Home Décor, she leaned over to her open laptop, resting on the stack of discardable recipe books, to retrieve the new mail. Sure enough, and pleasingly, the quote Atkinson's had come in with was the lowest of the three she had sought. Jotting it down, Mia scrolled past several junk messages that were part of the most recent haul and halted at the last message. It was from Jonathon, using his sober university email address.

Subject: Dissertation

Hi Mia,

Hope you've had a good summer. Can you confirm a tutorial meeting to discuss the progress of your dissertation on Monday October 8
^th
at 9.30 in my office? As you may know, the restructuring of the undergraduate degree course has meant my workload has increased dramatically over the last academic year in terms of the modules I'm both teaching and marking. Consequently, I've spoken to Harbinder Singh, lecturer in communications, who has agreed to take over supervision for you and some of my other MA students. As you know, Harbinder's an excellent tutor and very excited at the prospect of being on board with your work, which is in her field. I've copied her into this email, as she'll also be at the meeting on the 8
^th
.

Please let me know you can attend as soon as possible, in case we need to rearrange an alternative time for that week.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Jonathon

Mia clammed the lid of her laptop.
Some other of my MA students. Harbinder Singh.
It wasn't as though she'd had feelings for Jonathon, but his lack of flair was painful. She should never have ignored the warning of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On' poster the first time she went to his flat, instead of deluding herself because of his Missoni scarf, which turned out to have been a present from a tasteful ex-girlfriend.
As you know.
Jonathon had a nervous habit of folding things—napkins, receipts, seminar notes, takeaway menus—as he spoke to you, drawing attention to the tapering deftness of his fingers as he drew them along the edge of the crease as precisely as origami. She'd noticed this at the beginning; along with the scarf, it had seemed to promise delicacy, a discern
ing capacity for attention. In fact, it was just a random nervous habit.

Keep Calm and Carry On.
What the fuck was she going to do?

It was so unfair, the way some people were just given things. Jessica lived in Thailand now, a remote if aggravating Facebook friend. Her parents had sold the house and opened a resort hotel outside Phuket. Mia had never yet received an invitation solid enough to convert into a visit.

With unnecessary concentration, Mia spooned a perfect, crusted mound of shepherd's pie on to the exact centre of Patrick's warmed plate and carried the tray into his study, which was where he preferred to eat. Handing him his cutlery as she balanced the tray on one spread palm, she announced her progress in nailing down the best quote for repainting the kitchen.

‘I'll make sure I've got paper quotes, though,' Mia reassured him. ‘I don't think any of them will be able to start before the week after next and I'll be gone by then, but as long as you've got it in writing, they'll have to stick to it.'

Patrick grunted assent as Mia leant to slide the tray down in front of him. As she always did at this moment, Mia ignored his canine alertness to her breasts and glanced past him through the window into the garden. It was a beautiful evening, full of opaque, eliding Cornish greys and greens and creams, the scrap of sea as lively as an eye. She had Instagrammed this very view shortly after arriving. Talking to Patrick about the painting work made the thought of not being there in the house to see what only she cared about even more desperate: 8 October loomed. Harbinder Singh loved an argument and, despite being a lesbian, had had no time at all for Mia when she had taken, and got that bare pass in, her undergraduate Feminism and Film module.

Below her eyeline, Patrick mouthed his shepherd's pie. Silence from him always meant enjoyment.
Keep Calm.
Still intent on the
garden, Mia tussled with the miniature button below the collar of her blouse, which was rather stiff (usually, she pulled the teasingly prim garment on and off over her head without troubling herself with its fastenings). The buttons were heart-shaped, a little retro. Releasing the next button exposed the bruise-coloured lace of her excellent bra. Rigby & Peller. They rarely had sales, but it was worth waiting. And they fitted you properly: she had surprisingly full breasts for her narrow back.

Without looking down, Mia could feel Patrick relax; less aroused, apparently, than relieved.

‘Might I?'

His tone was unusually humble, less optimistic of her gratifying his request than of her fetching ketchup for his shepherd's pie.

‘No,' Mia told him, still relishing the view. In her experience, knowing what you wanted was half the battle. As her dad said, it sorted the men from the boys.
Plan A, and plan B.
Leaving the button as it was, she went to get the ketchup.

 

From the
Daily Telegraph

Letter to the Editor

April 12, 1982

Sir,

While I pride myself on a certain acumen, and certainly subscribe to a view of history as the account of mankind's doom to ignorant repetition, I would have to be nothing short of psychic to have written ‘a clumsily abstract and frequently obscene leftist attack on the Falklands conflict'. My play had its first performance at the National Theatre on April 9
^th
, a week after the first shots were exchanged in the South Atlantic. Does your critic have any idea of how a play is written, rehearsed and produced?

Yours,
Patrick Conway
Author, ‘Bloody Empire'
Cobham Gardens
London N8

 

From
The Times

Letter to the Editor

May 2, 1982

Sir,

Your correspondent E. Jarrett (Letters, April 30
^th
) may be interested to know that I have never been a member of the Communist Party, nor of the Socialist Workers Party, Labour Party, Conservatives, Liberals or any other political party. I do not join parties. As my wife will corroborate, I seldom even attend them.

Respectfully,
P. Conway
Author, ‘Bloody Empire'
London N8

 

O
BVIOUSLY, MIA KNEW
Nigel wanted to have sex with her; men did. Men in shops, boys at uni, Jonathon, blokes in clubs, friends' dads. But she could tell that he wasn't the kind of man to make it a problem, so when Patrick grumbled about Nigel wanting to pay another visit, she realised he must have some reason more compelling than her. He was a kind of lawyer—trademarks, apparently, although she only knew that from googling. Patrick had no idea what he really did, because he had no interest in Nigel. The firm's website, as much as Nigel's demeanour and the clothes he wore, confirmed to Mia that he was worth keeping on side. She suspected that this visit might have something to do with the legal documents she had found in Patrick's desk, still folded and unexamined—documents to do with the house, from what she understood, as well as others concerning his play.

‘Does he want to stay here? I can get a room ready.'

Patrick snorted and said they weren't a bloody hotel. In any case, Nigel was going to bring his family down with him, and he wouldn't take the bloody liberty. Mia was a little deflated to hear this; she would have enjoyed the preparations. One of her current reveries was in fact the conversion of the house into a boutique hotel. They could offer seven large bedrooms, perhaps centred around a theatrical theme, given Patrick's background. Shakespeare was obviously naff, and geographically wrong. Maybe themes were naff in themselves, as at weddings? In any case, there would have to be bathrooms installed. She had had to park the idea for now, but it was definitely one for the future.

In the weeks since the deadline for Mia's return to Newcastle had passed, Jonathon had sent an escalating run of emails, wondering what had happened to her. Mia hadn't replied to any of them. Responding to the one missed call from him on her mobile (no message, typically craven), Mia had simply texted: ‘Not return
ing. Will msg. Mia.' She hadn't messaged. There had been another missed call, then a bewildered but still official email in which Jonathon had included the email address of the university counselling service and cc'd both the chief counsellor and the head of humanities. Since then, Mia had severed her ties with the university by way of actual, printed-out letters, none of them addressed to Jonathon.

Throughout this time Patrick looked, but he neither touched nor asked to.

‘My cock doesn't work,' he had told her, a few days into the blouse-button routine. ‘Shut up shop years ago.'

It had made everything more possible. Even at its most enjoyable, sex always made Mia feel she was missing the point of something others deployed to enhance their status by claiming to find it transformational—much like those who trumpeted their love of the theatre. Well, she was different, as usual. Her pleasure was mild enough when she fancied someone, like Jonathon; it would be downright impossible with Patrick. But if she didn't want to and he was unable to, couldn't that work, for both of them? As far as Mia had observed, relationships were problematic if there were inequalities in what each party wanted: money, sex, conversation, three proper holidays a year including skiing. As hadn't been the case with her parents, she and Patrick balanced each other out. It wasn't a relationship, exactly, but given her lack of options, she was beginning to think it had nearly as much potential as the house.

Patrick's only request, when she had brought in a tray one day with her hair in a ponytail because she had been frying steak and hated the spit of fat in her hair, was for her to let her hair down. It was that day Patrick had told her about his cock not working. Otherwise they had conducted themselves as they had through the summer, talking to each other normally and watching TV
together in the evenings. Mia had never watched TV like that before, as though it was a hobby. She found it quaint. Patrick conscientiously underlined likely programmes in the TV guide you got with the Sunday paper (reading newspapers was another new pastime), teeing up the week's viewing. Far from the searing documentaries and subtitled films she would have imagined, he based his schedule entirely around crime dramas and sport. He shouted at both, and ads often tipped him into overdrive. Mia had quickly learned to field the remote, particularly if the National Lottery was involved.

A couple of weeks after the beginning of the university term, while she was flicking channels one night to find something less inflammatory than the Thunderball show announcing the numbers, Patrick put his large dry hand over hers. They were sitting next to each other, knees high and bums low in the shot sofa cushions. As Mia looked at him, one hand trapped, the other aiming the remote, Patrick brought up a trembling sigh.

‘Do stay, won't you?'

She said nothing, but nor did she withdraw. After a second or two, his own hand had retracted. She found the end of a
DCI Banks
and they watched it in silence, save for Patrick's outburst about an unconvincing pathologist. There was no need to speak of Patrick's offer, or the tentative pass that accompanied it; it changed nothing of their routine. Mia stayed. Still, she found herself unusually nervous at the sound of Nigel's four-by-four crunching into the drive late on the Friday afternoon he and his family were due.

Nigel immediately ran to use the bathroom, leaving Mia to greet his wife and children. There was no sign of Patrick, who had taken to his study. The small boys, introduced as Oliver and Albie, were asleep in the back of the car, heads lolled against the wings of their child seats, soft mouths agape.

‘It's too bloody far!' complained Sophie. ‘We tried to keep them awake. I told Nigel, we're the ones who'll suffer! They won't sleep tonight!'

Little about Nigel's wife surprised Mia, except for the fact that she was about ten years younger than Nigel, and a notch better-looking. Either Nigel was better off than she had thought, or Sophie had self-esteem issues. From the open way Sophie eyed Mia up and down before she swung into the house, wondering where Patrick was in a voice modulated to command, Mia decided it was more likely to be a money thing. Nigel himself looked uneasy as he came downstairs and saw Sophie making a beeline for Patrick's study.

‘Maybe Patrick's working, Sophe?'

But it was all fine. Sophie had taken the precaution of bringing a bottle of thirty-year-old single malt as a gift for Patrick, and she was all fawning flirtatiousness, which Mia was amazed to see actually worked, a little. Mia had learned that often the worst thing you could do was try to please Patrick but, as with everything, it depended on his mood, and if you were a woman, what you looked like. Sophie was quite pretty in a bog-standard Boden way—good legs that excused a soft middle that was probably due to the kids, decent skin. That wiggy middle-aged hair, blonde of course. With people, as with houses, Mia enjoyed imaginative renovation. No woman should ever wear a rugby shirt, even with the collar up, let alone in mint green and pink, let alone with diamond stud earrings. On the other hand, Sophie already had her family, and perhaps she dressed like that to close the age gap with Nigel. Maybe Nigel even liked it?