The Love She Left Behind (13 page)

‘Have I said something funny?'

He asked her to look in the glove compartment for a packet of Nurofen and swallowed a couple dry. His small, involuntary bleat
of panic as the capsules stuck in his throat almost set her off again. Neither of them spoke again until they were on the outskirts of Newquay.

‘I suppose you could say it's history repeating itself,' said Nigel. ‘First my mother . . .'

Mia stared. ‘Did she work for Patrick? I didn't know . . .'

‘Holly,' he said. ‘I meant Holly. You know, Mum was a bit of a bolter.'

‘What's that?'

‘Running away.' His tone had dried up. ‘Never mind.'

They were just coming off the second roundabout. As the car straightened, Mia saw a girl, picked out by a streetlight at the exit beyond the one they'd just taken.

‘Holly!'

Holly reared round, then, seeing them brake, started to run off, heavily. She held the mobile—Louise's—in her hand. Swearing, Nigel reversed back up to the roundabout and manoeuvred to follow—there were no other cars to stop him. The filter road was dark and at first Mia thought they'd lost her again, that she'd pitched into a hedge and taken off across the fields. Bolted. Approaching a bend, twin lights arced towards them as a car swooped from the opposite direction and there Holly stood, solid in the middle of the road, blinking at the sudden flash-bright swathe of hedgerow as Mia screamed uselessly and the speeding car struck her, catapulting the handset from her fingers to shatter on the tarmac a moment before she bounced off the bonnet and rolled down next to it, broken.

 

June 5
^th
1982

Dear Tony,

Let there be no mistake, I was appalled by last night's perf. In the month since I
saw
last saw it, the play has changed out of recognition. The flags make the stage look like a fucking street party. Putting Wilson in a skirt and giving him a handbag and headscarf, although greeted with wild laughter by the audience, totally skews his speech. It can only be a matter of time before it's a full-blown Thatcher impression. Christopher ad libbed ‘Goose Green' in the Act 1 litany and got the laugh of the night—that middle-class roar of self-congratulation that chills my blood. I don't care about box office, I don't care about the audience, I do care very much that my play has been hijacked as some sort of topical panto.

A hit's a hit, I hear you say. Obviously, the fact that all these embellishments have taken place without my consent speaks volumes. I would have
come in today, but Sara and I are off to bloody Leeds. I'll be back by tonight. Phone me once you get this.

Patrick

PS Carbon sent to the Board.

 

T
HE FIRST TIME
Mia caught Louise on the landline, she assumed she was checking in with the hospital about Holly, but the face Louise pulled as Mia passed, acknowledgement mixed with embarrassment, implied a less businesslike transaction. When the calls continued, Mia's next thought was that she was ringing her son in Leeds. It was understandable, if a bit cheeky. Louise must have decided it was worth the money saved by not using her mobile, because there was no privacy in the hallway. The phone in Patrick's study shared the same line, but Louise was never going to venture in there, so she had to mutter her conversation where anyone moving through the lower part of the house—i.e., Mia—could hear. Even then, Mia's attention wasn't crucially drawn until one morning when she was coming downstairs and Louise turned into the receiver and lowered her speech so incriminatingly that Mia could only assume she was saying something about her. She strained to catch it.

‘Those sort of vanilla wafers.'

Perhaps not, then. ‘Not tea, no.' Another pause, then excitedly, ‘Yes, yes that's right!'

Reaching the kitchen door, Mia glanced back up the corridor. Louise arched into the black handset, its ancient cord stretched tight, nodding at whatever was being said with transformative, eager engagement. She looked like she was being fed something.

It was possible that Louise had friends. She didn't have a boyfriend, Mia knew that, although her ex had turned up when she'd contacted him about Holly in the first few days after the accident. Warren, he was called. He was shaven-headed, mainly silent and about the same size as Louise; standing side by side, they had looked like a giant cruet set, him the salt and Louise the pepper. Louise's deferential tone during the calls didn't suggest a chat with him, or any other friend or lover. Who, then?

Over the next days Mia monitored Louise's phone activities with irresistible interest. She didn't say anything to Patrick; it wasn't worth the rage. Even immediately following the accident, he had been unsympathetic to Louise's need to use the house as a base close to the hospital where Holly was in intensive care. Louise remained mild, but she remained, coming back at odd hours for a bath and change of clothes, occasionally staying the night after Holly was out of danger, or catching up on sleep during the day, driving the forty-mile round trip to the hospital in Launceston in the ancient car Warren had brought down from Yorkshire for her. However foul Patrick was, swearing at her, kicking doors shut she had just opened, telling her continually that she was a cuckoo in the nest, she responded with depressed but persistent unamenability. At least now that Holly had started physical rehab and her recovery was cause for frail optimism, there was the possibility of transferring her care up north.

With all this deranged family stuff in full flow, Patrick wasn't quite as grateful to Mia as he had been. In fact, he could be intensely irritable and therefore irritating, riding her about everything from the colour of his toast to the accents of TV newsreaders. There was also the whole thing he'd started about her going out. Whenever she left the house, even just to wheel the rubbish out to the end of the drive on collection day, he always demanded to know where she was going. It wasn't as if Patrick's anxiety conferred even the implicit compliment of need for her company, since he still spent most of his day in his study. He just seemed to need the reassurance of her body around the place, like a dog. Or so she had thought, until the next time she had to ask him for unmentionables money.

‘Distasteful . . .' Sliding notes across the kitchen table, Patrick's fingers stayed, trapping the cash. His expression was agelessly rea
sonable, as though discussing a third party. ‘But you're old and educated enough to know the meaning of quid pro quo, my love.'

Well, not the Latin exactly, but it meant someone wanting to shag you, didn't it?

‘I mean company, not molestation. A bit of human warmth.'

Apparently he wanted her to share his bed, ‘no more'. Mia took the money and continued to sleep on the sofa in the den. She knew she would be able to fend him off. But the next day, she updated her CV and began to send off exploratory emails (language schools, a cooks' agency, one hopeful application for a magazine subeditor's job). While she waited for replies, she doggedly continued to put the house in order, entirely for her own satisfaction. The time had been passing, and she needed a plan. Particularly now it seemed that Patrick had had one all along.

One night, in sleepless panic about her future, Mia got up to make herself a herbal tea and was startled to discover Louise, crouched like a teenager with her back against the wall by the hall table, the elderly phone cradled down on her lap. As before, she appeared to be listening more than she was talking. As soon as she saw Mia, she lumbered to her feet, and in that moment, as Louise replaced the phone on the table and told her communicant that she would have to go, Mia's skin goose-pimpled. She hurried by, fully expecting Louise to follow her into the kitchen with an explanation, but in the time it took her to boil the kettle, shivering, Louise had disappeared back to bed.

Frustratingly, the hall phone was so old it lacked a redial function. Carrying her tea, Mia crept into the nicotine chill of Patrick's study, where the technology was marginally less antique. Safe within the searing little cone of light cast by Patrick's Anglepoise, she lifted the receiver. Around her, the house made its noises. She looked away from Sara's smile, its mystery held in the photo frame
beside the lamp. Her teeth were chattering. Just who might answer if she revisited Louise's call? She replaced the receiver, conscious of an attempt to be as quiet as possible.

In the morning, bathed and rational, Mia marched into the study and punched redial. The number was for a premium-rate line to a psychic, although it took some pound-squandering minutes for her to manoeuvre through enough option buttons for this to become intelligible. She saw no reason not to raise the matter with Louise. Since Holly's accident, Louise had contributed nothing to the household, either financially or in terms of her labour. Mia didn't miss the sloppy pasta bakes, but she felt there was a principle being abused, and Louise's secrecy suggested she knew she was taking the piss. Really, Mia was protecting Patrick. He was an old man, after all.

She found Louise in the disused pantry that housed the washing machine, off the kitchen. Either too large or too inflexible to bend in the confined space, Louise sat on the floor, legs splayed ahead of her, posting clothes into the open drum like a scaled-up toddler with an educational toy.

‘Did you want some washing doing?'

Mia didn't beat around the bush, as her own mother would say. She'd taken note of the premium-rate charges and recited them to Louise. Confronted with the evidence, Louise froze, holding a limp bundle of leggings in mid-air. Mia had noticed that she could only do one thing at a time.

‘I'll reckon up with Patrick,' Louise said. ‘It'll all be on the bill. Of course I will.'

‘Well, that's okay, if it happens.' Mia found herself reluctant to forgo an argument.

‘All the bills,' said Louise, ‘the heating and that. I want to pay my way.' She kneaded the leggings, now in her lap.

‘Those phone lines,' said Mia. ‘You know they're just a rip-off.'

‘Oh some of them are, of course,' Louise agreed.

‘Why would you waste your money?'

‘I've found someone really good,' Louise maintained. ‘Really proper. Not like some of them. Kamila's definitely got the gift. She could even tell me stuff about Holly and that.'

‘But Holly's alive.'

‘A good psychic, they'll tell you all sorts. About the future. Stuff about you, even, she's told me.' Louise's gaze slid up from the leggings to Mia. ‘She thinks you're alike, you see.'

‘Sorry?'

‘
Mum.
She's been communicating a lot about you. Nothing bad!'

From the floor, Louise stretched to pat Mia on the shin. Her eyes danced. Mia took an instinctive step back.

‘She's given you her blessing. Because she was worried about Patrick being looked after, but now she knows he's got you, so she can be at peace, like. She says, “She's like me.”'

So that's what it was. For a few months during her first year of university, Mia had worked for a sex chatline. A psychic's punter might demand more freewheeling invention than the sad wankers Mia had been instructed to string along, but she felt sure the underlying ethos was identical.

‘These people will say anything to keep you talking. Trust me.'

‘Well, we're all entitled to our beliefs.'

Louise resumed loading her washing, with the same unreachable aplomb she deployed when Patrick started shouting at her.

Sara speaking.

Instead of making soup for lunch, Mia picked up her bag and left the house without stopping to knock on Patrick's study door and let him know. He'd live. Getting out was pure relief, into the bracing November cold. As Mia walked up to the main road, she half-expected a toot behind her from Louise's rusty Nissan,
making the daily trip to the hospital. Mia was prepared to reject the offer of a lift, but the car hadn't appeared by the time she turned on to the verge of the dual carriageway. She headed off in the opposite direction.

There was an attenuated bus service to Newquay, but Mia walked the full seven miles, flayed increasingly by the wind. It was crazy, living somewhere so remote without a car. Patrick had never learned to drive, of course, and although, according to Nigel, Sara had always acted as chauffeur, she had stopped driving for the last years of her life, despite the viable-looking Peugeot still standing in the garage. Mia, having given it a cursory inspection, thought its trade-in value was probably nil.

With her circulation speeding and a massive appetite, Mia felt herself again. The walk had taken over two hours, making Holly's feat on the night of her accident even more remarkable. Passing the second roundabout, Mia stared determinedly ahead, refusing to notice the patch of road where, during their terrible wait for help, Nigel had got down and cradled Holly's still head, using his folded jumper as a cushion. Mia had kept talking to her, shocked words of meaningless consolation, unable to touch or look as she looped up to the junction and back on the pretext of checking for the ambulance. The one horror-film glimpse of Holly's illogically splayed legs, the gloss of blood across her white face, had been unbearable. The paramedics had assumed that Mia would want to go with Holly in the ambulance, called her ‘your sister', although Mia had quickly put them right. Given that unwelcome flashback to the moment of damage, it was incredible the doctors had been able to pin Holly back together so confidently. She was healing. No doubt Louise thought that this process had been abetted by Sara, who was apparently watching over them all.

She thinks you're alike, you see.

Mia marched into the first Costa she saw. Waiting for her mol
ten panini to cool, she brushed aside inherited muffin crumbs to make a suitable space on the table and took out her leather-bound notebook. Also a good pen. A rollerball, which she preferred to a ballpoint. The trick with lists was to start with a couple of things already accomplished.
Course
, Mia wrote, then immediately ticked it off. Strictly speaking, although her dealings with Newcastle were squared away, there was the matter of her graduate loan, but she was hardly about to sully the immediate simplicity of her list.
Mum
, she proceeded. This also warranted an immediate tick, since she had sent her mother a card on her recent birthday, making an unspecified promise to visit.