The Love She Left Behind (6 page)

Ghosts. Nigel thought of his mother, dying in that dusty house. Her last nights. Had there been a light on for her? Had she been frightened? She had known, after all, that there was nothing to be done: it was Patrick the truth had been kept from in that last week. Nigel had had a phone conversation with the GP, following the results of the post-mortem necessary after any death at home. The doctor had reassured him that Sara had been medicated beyond any sort of pain. Easy enough for him to say that: who now could tell any differently? Apparently Mum had been ‘most insistent' that Patrick not be told how ill she was. It was hard to say if this had been a kindness, in the end. Perhaps she had just wanted to be left in peace, without his imminent bereavement hijacking the arduous days of her dying.

Roaming around the house, and Patrick, and his mother, Nigel arrived at the thought of the student, Mia. He hadn't had time to check out her credentials; he must put that on his list for the following day. His dying hard-on quickened. There was something about her. So glossy. So young.

The hall light was still on. It was impossible to tell how long was Sophie going to be, comforting Olly back to sleep. Discreetly, Nigel began to bring himself off. Sometimes she got into bed with the boys until they were safely asleep, and fell asleep herself. But no, just as he was moving more urgently against his hand, Mia bent over the old table in the Cornwall kitchen, the hall light went
out and Sophie scuttled back to their bed. Nigel rearranged himself as she put her newly freezing feet his way.

‘Thought we were out of the woods with him waking up,' she said. ‘I hope he's not starting again.'

Nigel moved Sophie's icy hand downwards, just to let her know. It stayed for a second, gave his crotch a neutering pat and returned to the heat of his chest. All she wanted from him now was warmth. She wriggled against him.

‘Maybe it's all, you know, with your mum.'

‘It can't mean much to him.'

They had taken Oliver down to see Nigel's mother when he was a baby: this had been, come to think of it, their last face-to-face meeting with her. There had been similar plans to take Albie for a viewing when he was born, but the visit had been postponed for some reason to do with either Sophie or Mum, he couldn't remember which, and hadn't, finally, happened. His mother had never travelled to Surrey to see them. This was just understood. Sophie kept a sparse gallery of the cards Mum sent up on the fridge as a meagre corrective to those from her own mother, Ganny T, the overlaid strata of which regularly defeated the tenacity of the fridge magnets, but surely the boys were too small to take in, at any level, their other distant grandmother's death? It wasn't as though they'd seen Nigel emoting about it all over the place, because he hadn't been. He felt fine. He felt so fine he felt slightly irritable at the thought that it might not be normal to be so unaffected by the death of your mother. Or maybe the irritation was because he was horny. He really was. Although he also desperately needed to pee, which was confusing matters. Surely he was too young to be starting with prostate problems?

When he tried again with Sophie's hand, she pulled it away
and turned firmly on to her side. This decided him. He swung out of bed.

‘I'll need to go down there again, I'm afraid,' Nigel said, heading for the en suite. ‘Lay the will out for Patrick. Maybe you can come with the boys.'

Sophie moaned, already on her way to sleep. He knew this would be an unadopted suggestion. But at least he'd got it in there, as he'd remind her tomorrow when he firmed up her refusal. It suited everyone for him to go to Cornwall alone. Nigel wondered if Mia would be gone by the weekend. Probably.

When he'd finished in the bathroom (everything seemed normal, but maybe he'd book in for a prostate check), he made his way downstairs to the computer. There were things to do, as always. He had been deliberating about whether to let his father know about Mum. Well, Dawn, his second wife. Dad had been holed up in a home in Stockport for nearly ten years, deterioratingly vacant with Alzheimer's. Digging out Dawn's address—she had no email—Nigel recognised the self-serving tidiness of the gesture. If his father had been alert to the world, he wouldn't have welcomed news about Mum. He'd tried hard to keep her, but once she'd gone, he never mentioned her again. And he had passed the two of them, his first children (there were two more sons, with Dawn), on like parcels. Louise to Auntie B, Nigel to the school Patrick had paid for. They were no more orphans now than they'd been thirty years ago, and nothing would change when Dad's body died as well as the rest of him.

Still, it would be better all round to let Dawn know. One of the duties and advantages Nigel had derived from being sent to public school was the civilising art of correspondence. Thank-you letters, notes of introduction, job applications, and now this. By the time the boys were grown up, making marks on paper would
be an obsolete skill, along with whistling. But for now, it was poignantly appropriate, all the more so for calling on a formalising decency he was seldom asked to exercise. With a thought for his mother, who had made all this possible, Nigel opened the drawer that contained writing paper, took out the heavy sheets, and found his pen. She, of course, never wrote.

 

Headland Heights Hotel

Newquay

Cornwall

November 2
^nd
1978

Darling girl –

Forgive scrawl, wine at dinner trying to make grim surroundings less grim. The only other guests are businessmen in suits, here for some kind of conference. As house rules demand dressing for dinner (piss elegance), they assume I'm one of them. Some of the b'men dine with their ‘secretaries', all of whom wear flimsy tops with no bra. Effect in freezing dining room like sitting among a convention of peanut smugglers. One though, scandalously, has brought his wife! (Nipples firmly covered, thank God.)

Pounding seas. Very cold here, and empty, and beautiful. I am cold and empty, but as you know, only beautiful in your eyes. Although there is a little chambermaid with big brown eyes and bigger tits who seems to have taken a fancy to me . . . her hospital corners when she makes my bed speak volumes. I might take a crack at her, since you're no longer interested.

I hope you don't mind me writing.
Hope the kitchen is all
Writing proper is torture, but am grinding out a scene or two on a good day (not every day is). The main character is a man possessed by a daemon—good or bad, I haven't decided, but she's certainly you. She's also Albion, the spirit of old England—you wouldn't believe some of the things that have come out of your mouth . . .

I do understand the phone is impossible, but if you cared to drop me a line,
it
I would be very grateful.

I'm the loneliest man in the world.

P xx

 

T
HE GARDEN HAD
probably been lovely once. Louise thought she might remember it from a photo Mum had sent when she and Patrick first moved in: the two of them shaded under a patio umbrella, toasting their good fortune with a gaudy array of bedding plants saturating the background. Even now, with the grass patchy and high and the beds barely woken into spring, you could see how nice it would be with a bit of work, stretching out towards the sea. Talking to Jamie on her mobile, Louise used her free hand to pluck at the weeds clogging a row of paving stones. The stones wound down to a birdbath, its contours blurred with moss.

‘Have you done any washing?' she asked him. He told her he didn't need any.

‘What about pants? And socks and that?'

He didn't need any. Stooped over the path, Louise had a good view of the back of the house. The windows were in a shocking state. She could ask Jenny about a window cleaner.

‘I hope you've been getting up.'

‘Course I've been getting up.'

The school would let her know, if they could be bothered. Jamie was so close to leaving they'd more or less washed their hands of him, even with GCSEs still to come. No one was expecting him to cover himself with glory there.

‘What's the place like?' she attempted. ‘Work experience?'

Jamie had actually shown a bit of enthusiasm for that, the prospect of going into a joiner's and carpenter's for a week. He was good with his hands.

‘Dunno. All right. Bit crap.'

He managed to communicate that the place at the joiner's had fallen through—he had no idea why—and in its place, the school had been sending him to an industrial dairy for the week.

‘Oh well,' Louise said, unable to contribute any more on that subject. ‘Only another couple of days, eh?'

At the end of the house, shadows behind the long window arch lurched, bouncing light from the glass. It was Patrick's study. He was in there having his last morning with Mia. She'd already booked the taxi to take her to the station, around five.

Louise couldn't manufacture any more questions once Jamie confirmed that he had enough money, and enough food in the house. She really wasn't needed. She promised to ring him at the same time tomorrow. He hung up first. Louise felt the lack of him, but then she felt that even when they were in the house together: his gangling remoteness, his silence that she wanted to break into in case it contained sadness. When he'd been a baby she used to kiss him and kiss him, all over, until he bubbled over with laughter. She loved to see him laugh now, cracking up at something stupid on the computer or on TV. It was never her who made him laugh any more, not on purpose, but maybe that was normal.

Louise got going on the path. She always liked to finish a job, and it was satisfying seeing the margins of the rounded stones appear from beneath the weeds. Patrick had made it clear that he didn't want her to do any more around the house. Which reminded her; she must return the hoover to Jenny.

‘Mmmmmn . . .'

Mia stood on the back steps, taking in the air and stretching as though she wanted to be watched. Louise thought it might be yoga. On the upswing the stretches pulled the girl's top from her jeans, revealing her concave stomach and the top of her hip bones.

‘Would you like a coffee?' Mia asked. When she returned to standing, her hair fell back perfectly, as though freshly brushed.

‘Sorry—'

Louise, still holding her most recent handful of weeds, headed
for the patio. It had become a routine over the last couple of days, her bringing in the coffee for Mia and Patrick. Talking to Jamie, she'd forgotten.

‘No, I can make it,' Mia objected. ‘Just wondered if you wanted one.'

‘I'll do it. You're busy.'

‘To be honest, I could do with a break.'

Even as she said this, Mia sat on the top step, levering down from the hip without moving her planted feet. That looked like yoga as well, or the result of it. Louise chucked the weeds into a waste patch vivid with grape hyacinths and continued past her towards the kitchen. When she brought back the tray a few minutes later, the girl took the mug in that way of hers, as though it was unexpected.

‘Thanks so much!'

Since Mia made no move to go back to Patrick, Louise took his coffee in for him. In the moment before she knocked on the open door, Louise felt sorry for the hopeless drop of Patrick's shaggy head as it bent mechanically to the cigarette. (Mia had probably gone outside to escape the smoke.) As soon as she'd knocked, though, all her teenage nervousness returned. He barely looked round as she placed the mug at his elbow, and he didn't speak.

Turning away, Louise saw that a photo that sat on the desk, to the right of the kippered computer, was of her mother. The camera had come in close on her wearing a sort of crown of flowers and smiling with her eyes downcast. She didn't look like herself. It was only the goofy vampire points of her incisors that identified the smile as hers.

‘It's Mum.'

Patrick turned, irritated by her exclamation. She wondered if he would allow her to take the picture so that she could look at it properly, but seeing him close his eyes against her, she decided not
to ask. She could always come in when the room was empty. ‘I've never seen that one before.'

Patrick lifted the frame from the desk, leaving the outlines of its lower edges stencilled in the surrounding dust. How many years since anyone had moved it? Bringing the photo briefly into range of his proper vision, he grunted, then cast it down, the sight unbearable to him. Unsupported by its angled brace, the picture lay prone on the desk's worn leather. Louise knew better than to rescue it.

Was it a wedding photo? That would explain the crown of flowers. It had only been Mum and Patrick at the wedding, as far as she knew. Dad had made the announcement, visiting her at Auntie B's. It must have been a good year after he'd decided he couldn't cope with her and Nigel, and Auntie B had stepped into the breach. Nigel had already been away at school for ages, so she had no one to share the news with. Not that Dad had produced it as news. Telling her that Mum was married was a weapon, designed to sever something. He had never mentioned her after that. Come to think of it, it must have been around then that he met Dawn and his visits began to peter out.

In the kitchen, Mia loitered with her empty mug. ‘Thanks, Louise.' The girl made a point of rinsing the mug at the sink and putting it on the draining board, while humming unconvincing appreciation at the green light that shone in through the window from outside. She seemed to be wanting a conversation.

‘Your mother must have loved the garden.'

Anyone with eyes to see could tell no one had loved that garden for a very long time. But had Mum taken care of it, at the beginning? The back garden in their Leeds terrace had been a tiny concreted square, fissured by weeds and mainly occupied by Dad's motorbike. Louise remembered now that Mum's excited litany when she and Patrick bought the house had included quite a
bit about the garden's beauty and size. ‘Is that what Patrick said?' she asked Mia.