The Love She Left Behind (5 page)

‘Not too bad. Well, taking it quite hard, really.'

Louise could hear her accent landing flatly on the granite in a way she never did at home. ‘I'm not sure how he's going to manage, to be honest.'

Jenny sighed. ‘No. It must be a worry.'

She wasn't going to join in, or help. Louise couldn't blame her.

‘I thought I might—I don't think they had a cleaner—'

‘No, I think there was a lady who retired—or maybe Patrick let her go.'

Jenny used the slender edge of her hip to nudge open a glossy white façade, revealing an immaculately ordered utility cupboard. ‘I could pass on the number for ours—she's marvellous, but I don't know if she has a gap—she's rather in demand.'

She wheeled out the vacuum cleaner, which she insisted on emptying. Quickly establishing that it resembled nothing she'd ever pushed around a floor, Louise thanked the other woman for the trouble.

‘I was very fond of your mum.' Jenny ran the tap to chase dust down the sink. ‘I wish there had been more we could do.' The definitive sparseness of this statement clearly held so much more than its words that Louise immediately itched with questions. When? What was wrong? What were you hoping to do? Do you mean her being ill, or something with Patrick, before then? Why do you think the house was in that state? But it wasn't easy to talk to Jenny, through the barrier of cashmere and granite and Radio 4.

Carefully, the woman clicked shut the casing on the waste compartment. ‘She told me all about you and your brother.'

Louise looked down to mask her welling eyes as Jenny tactfully concentrated on the vacuum cleaner.

‘Let me give you a lift back. It's a heavy old beast.'

Throughout the short drive to the house, they both talked at slightly desperate length about the idiosyncrasies of the hoover. Louise promised to return it as soon as she'd finished, and when she'd turned off the car engine, Jenny asked her to read out the cleaner's number from her mobile, as she didn't have her reading glasses. Louise had to hold the mobile at arm's length to see the digits while Jenny wrote them down for her. She probably needed glasses herself: another thing that needed sorting.

‘She did—' Jenny hesitated. ‘I do think your mother would have wanted to speak to you, if things had been different. She got worse so quickly . . .'

‘You didn't know, then?' Louise asked. ‘That she was ill?'

‘No,' said Jenny. ‘I don't think anyone did, did they?'

Louise wished she could confide in her about her suspicions regarding Patrick and the separate bedrooms, but she was dumb with everything else she wanted to ask Jenny, who had known Mum so much better than her. She declined her offer of help to wrestle the hoover out of the back seat. Blurting a final thank you, she carried the contraption inside. She was desperate for a cup of tea and something to eat. But as soon as she got in, she could hear shouting—Patrick and Holly, coming from the upstairs landing. The girl, Mia, stood at the foot of the stairs; retreating or advancing, it was impossible to tell. She smiled at Louise, absolving herself, as Louise rushed up to see what was going on. Holly's appeal to her was immediate.

‘I didn't do nothing!'

‘Get out!'

Patrick was purple, beside himself. Louise stepped in before he
could hit Holly, although for all his rages she'd never seen him do violence.

‘He chucked the radio—he's broke it! I didn't do nothing, promise, Mum!'

Through the open door of the bathroom, Louise saw Patrick's elderly radio on the floor, its roar of untuned static adding to the chaos. The approach of her body as she went to retrieve it provoked a flare of deafening interference. She twisted the dial, greasy with antique filth, until it clicked off.

‘You're mental, you!'

‘Holly, that's enough.' Quickly, Louise moved back on to the landing. ‘What's been going on?'

Holly had been running a bath, and, as she explained, since she couldn't listen to music on her phone in case it dropped in, had decided to use the radio instead. Patrick had apparently gone berserk at the noise. He'd said that it was impossible to work with that deafening crap playing at top volume, he couldn't hear himself think in his own house, he'd had enough of both of them, they should fuck off and leave him alone and he wanted no more to do with them. And more along those lines, as Holly sobbed.

‘Patrick, she didn't think. She's not fourteen till next month.'

‘I can see that thinking doesn't come easily—'

‘Holly, apologise to Patrick.'

‘I didn't do nothing!'

‘Say you're sorry.'

‘What for?'

‘Holly.'

Mia spoke from the stairs. Her low voice was hypnotically calm.

‘Patrick—sorry—I think we were ready to take a break anyway, weren't we? Sorry. Can I make everyone some lunch?'

At Mia's suggestion, Patrick meekly agreed to a lie-down until the food was ready. As the rest of them went downstairs, Mia
apologised to Louise with insincere diplomacy: it was probably all her fault, Patrick was probably tired out from all the morning's talking. Louise started to make tuna sandwiches, insisting that Mia sit down when she started faffing round her, offering to help. Holly was back on her phone, texting, probably to tell her friends about Patrick's meltdown.

‘It's such a lovely house,' said Mia. Like everything she said, it sounded as though she was repeating something she had been asked to learn. Or it might just have been good manners. Through the recent filter of Jenny's tactful good taste, Louise felt an ancient embarrassment in her association with the house, its rundown state and the abnormalities of its household.

‘It needs looking after.'

‘Oh, I don't know. It's sort of exactly like you imagine a writer's house to be, all nooks and crannies and books and stuff . . . atmosphere.'

‘Rank,' Holly remarked, bent over her phone.

Mia accepted her plate with the sandwich on with the same air of faint, gracious surprise with which she'd taken her coffee. She offered to go and fetch Patrick, but Louise told her to leave him; he could have his sandwich whenever he was ready and he might well be asleep now. She wondered if he'd finished the bottle she'd found in his room when she was clearing it. ‘Basics' again.

‘Hasn't he been sleeping at night?' asked Mia, all synthetic concern. Louise told her that she had no idea. The three of them ate on. Mia, Louise noticed, left her crusts.

‘I couldn't turn it off,' said Holly, finally finishing with her phone and assuming the conversation was where her attention had last left it. She was talking about the radio. ‘I turned the knob thing when he started going into one and it wouldn't turn off.'

‘Maybe you'd got the volume by mistake,' said Louise. ‘They're funny, those old radios.'

‘It's right spooky,' Holly insisted. ‘You can feel it upstairs, near where me grandma died. It's freaking me out.'

Mia tucked her hair behind her ears, two sleek commas. ‘The radio must be like broken or something?'

Louise recognised the set of Holly's face. Mia had no idea how stubborn she could be. ‘It's not, I told you. It's weird. Summat's going on up there.'

Mia smiled. ‘You must know there's no such thing as ghosts.'

Holly gazed back. ‘Course there is. Everyone knows there is. It's like proved by scientists?'

Mia stood, gathering the plates and tipping her crusts into the bin.

‘Haven't you seen
Most Haunted
?'

Mia said she hadn't. Holly sighed at Louise.

That night, from the way Holly cuddled up to her in the spongy bed they'd been forced to share, Louise could tell she was still fretting about the business with the radio.

‘You know, your grandma . . . If someone passes, that's natural—in an old house like this lots of people must have died, if you think about it.'

‘Oh, Jesus!'

The mattress lurched as Holly hitched back closer to her. Louise kissed the back of her neck, where the hair had slid away on to the pillow. It smelled of her, the same smell she'd had as a baby.

‘Two more nights, that's all.'

Holly squirmed free. They settled, their breathing countered in a sequence that evaded rhythm, their pulses their own. It had been years since they'd shared a bed, except for the odd bad dream, and even those had stopped some time ago.

‘Why didn't you ever see Grandma?'

Louise shifted, the disparity in their weights making Holly collapse against her in the lee of her body.

‘I don't know, really. It was difficult living so far away.'

‘We could have come for holidays,' Holly offered, after a pause to think about this.

‘We hadn't fallen out. It was just . . . I suppose I had my life and she had her life, you know.'

‘Are you sad she died?'

At this, Louise heaved around to face Holly with such force that Holly had to put out her arm to stop herself rolling on to the floor.

‘What a stupid bloody question, of course I'm sad. She was my mother!'

She could see the frightened glitter of Holly's eyes in the dark. It wasn't her fault.

‘When you're older, you might understand. Us not seeing each other . . . it was just one of those things. She loved Patrick very much. It was a—big love story.'

A few breaths, in in, out out, in out. ‘But what about your dad?'

Frozen on the stairs, the awful sound of Dad crying in the lounge.

‘What about him?'

‘They were married, her and your dad.'

‘These things happen, don't they?'

They turned away from each other to sleep, but it was Holly whose breathing stretched out first. Soon, she was so deeply asleep that even the buzz of an incoming text from beneath her pillow didn't wake her. What was she like? They never stopped. The noise, so close to her own ear, had nearly given Louise a heart attack. After that she stayed awake for what felt like hours, with the phone giving the occasional rasp, like a wasp dying on a windowpane. She was tempted to text Scarlett back and put the fear of God into her, but she wasn't confident of her way around Holly's phone and she'd never hear the end of it if she deleted
something by mistake. Instead, Louise listened to the cracks and settlings of the house around her. You never knew. Concentration had never been her strong point, but she needed to start paying proper heed. Only two more days left. Maybe there was another message, somewhere, if she knew how to look. Hadn't Jenny said Mum would have wanted to speak to her?

 

Cobham Gardens

August 3
^rd
, 1978

Dearest, Dearingest –

I bloody hate it. Please believe me when I say the last thing I want is another day like that, utter misery all round. I don't mean to hector—it's just knowing, as I said, how happy we could be, how happy you could make me, and seeing it squandered—your loveliness and lightness squandered. If not to me—and I believe you when you tell me you love me,
remembering your delicious shyness breaks
—you surely owe it to yourself to make an attempt at happiness, instead of settling for chicken in a bloody basket. Oh, and the promise of a ‘fitted kitchen'!!

You say I don't understand about the children but I do. It's not as though they're babies.
If you love me
Love demands sacrifice: it's as old as Abraham and Isaac. I'm not asking you to cut their throats. And I could afford to send your boy to school, think of that.

If I am to say anything to the world I need you with me to help me say it.

My Sara. My only Sara. Only my Sara. How I hate this stinking country. Tell me that's all you want, truly, and I'll leave you alone. Miserable.
Miserable
.

P xx

 

N
OT LONG AFTER
he'd turned out his reading light, Sophie's backside brushed luxuriantly against Nigel's leg. The deliberation of the contact stirred him from sleep's early drift. Now he was alert. Her buttocks made another pass, unmistakably. He put a hand on her hip and slithered her nightdress up to reach skin. Ten minutes before, she had given him a tongueless, terminating kiss goodnight and rolled gratefully into her pillow. Sleep was all she wanted. Something, he had no idea what, had happened to change this. Blindly reaching for his wife's breasts, Nigel pressed his thickened cock into the small of her back. He wondered if he could reach to switch the lamp on. Better not. She was more enthusiastic in the dark.

They moved in escalating, familiar ways, made stranger by the lack of light. Skin; hair; smells, natural and synthetic, some unique to Sophie, some shared between them. After their twelve years together, sex was like a flow chart with limited possible outcomes. If yes, then proceed to step four, if no, continue with step three . . .

‘Condoms?'

‘Drawer.'

As Sophie reached out to the bedside table, Nigel struggled to remove his pyjama top. Maybe she'd put the lamp on now? But no, she preferred to scrabble around in the dark. As maintenance foreplay, he kissed his way down the back of her neck while she ripped open the foil sachet. Suddenly, a brutal arc of light sliced them across. Oliver's small silhouette stood at the open door. He sobbed, gathering momentum, as Nigel and Sophie froze in position like escaping PoWs in a war film.

‘Sweetheart—'

Sophie hurried out of bed, her nightdress belling back down to unflattering mid-calf, and scooped him up.

‘Was it a bad dream?'

The little boy clamped her gratefully, shins and ankles dangling from his outgrown pyjamas as she staggered him back across the hall to his bedroom. Nigel subsided. Ah, well. He moved back into his warmer patch of mattress, away from the hall light. Hopefully Sophie would turn it off when she was done with Olly. Both boys had nightlights, shaped like benign cartoon ghosts.