Laying the Ghost (4 page)

She wouldn’t have been completely surprised to find
him
sitting at the big old kitchen table with a mug of coffee, going through emails on his laptop, saying, ‘Oh you’re back,’ without looking up, the way he so often and so annoyingly would do. She wondered how she’d have felt if he had still been there, and decided she’d have been furious, actually (as of course, contrarily, she was also furious that he’d gone). That week away had been to avoid the worst of him going, a chance for him to slink out of the house with his possessions – spotted-hankie-tied-on-a-stick style – while she was bravely having fun somewhere else, getting herself ready, mentally, to face this house he’d abandoned. She would have felt completely cheated if, after all that, he’d been there large as life, having casually changed his mind. It
was
a good thing he’d gone. No question about it. She could almost believe the mean temperature of the house was up by a good few degrees. And that had nothing to do with thermostat settings.

‘Mum? I’m going to do some emails and then get some sleep. Cup of tea would be nice.’ Mimi yawned and slunk away towards the stairs, not – no surprise here – showing any sign of wanting to drag her bag up with her to unpack.

‘This lot won’t be lying in the hallway for the next six weeks, will it?’ Nell called up after her. There was no reply. And nothing was
that
different, so far. No Alex around, obviously, but the seagrass stair carpet still had the fluffedwire
effect
on the bottom two steps where Pablo the cat had clawed it. There was still a chunk of gouged-out paint on the wall halfway up where Seb had been carrying a chest of drawers with a mildly drunk friend and without enough care. An irrational corner of Nell’s brain had half-expected these domestic blemishes to have fixed themselves, for the entire place to have given itself a celebratory makeover.

The new start shouldn’t just apply to her. The house – all her own territory now, so long as she could cope with the bills – should be shaping up and joining in too. The paint she had been planning for the kitchen should have somehow got itself bought and applied, and every room should be full of flowers and Welcome to Your New Life cards. Monty Don should be wiring in a fountain as a finishing touch on the back terrace. Flags should be fluttering from every window, like a flamboyant cruise ship boasting its way into port, and sirens should blast all down the street. Instead, silence. Then out of this silence came a full-volume blast of Kaiser Chiefs from Mimi’s room.

‘That’ll be Mimi reclaiming
her
territory,’ Nell muttered to herself as she went to fill the kettle. She didn’t feel inclined to go and ask her to turn it down because the going-upstairs bit would be where the difference would really show, and where a twinge of pain might kick in. There would be no John Grishams heaped on Alex’s
bedside
table. His comfort stack of Nurofen packets (Regular, Plus, Caffeine-free and Gel) would be gone. He would no longer leave shoes in dangerous tripping-over positions in every doorway and at the top of the stairs, as he had each day since she’d met him (to the point where, lately, she’d wondered if he had murder on his mind. From his point of view it would have solved a lot). There would be empty drawers containing nothing but crinkled lining paper with drifts of dust, lost buttons and flecks of wool and cotton. Possibly a few shirts that he no longer wanted would be hanging in his wardrobe, waiting to be bagged up for the charity shop. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to take them there himself. A man who had never made himself familiar with the workings of the washing machine wouldn’t have given any thought to the disposal of old clothes.

She would, she decided, repaint the bedroom as well as the kitchen. Farrow & Ball’s Cooking Apple Green would be good – she’d had it in mind for a while for somewhere in the house. Alex hated green. When she’d run the idea past him a couple of years ago, he had said it would make the room feel cold, and besides, it reminded him of ponds and wasn’t magnolia a safer bet? Well, of course it was. And so bland. How typical of Alex, though, whose extramural sex life didn’t lack imagination, to have tried to go for the dull and predictable inside the house and expected her to live with it. An old memory whizzed back to Nell:
Patrick’s
room in the Oxford flat had been green – the wall behind the bed a vivid lime and the rest painted deepest velvety emerald – and it hadn’t been cold at all. Far from it.

The phone rang while she was shoving bread into the toaster.

‘Eleanor, daaarrrling!’ Only her mother could spin the word out to a five-syllable descending note. ‘So. Has Alex really gone?’

Nell heard the accusation ‘Oh you useless failure of a wife/daughter’ in the sentence. Not for the first time. Gillian Wilkinson had perfected a fine line in disappointment over her entire adult life. It had started, Nell was sure, with the arrival of three daughters but no sons. Nell, as the last of these girls, was by definition the biggest disappointment, for after that there were to be no more. ‘Boys stay so wonderfully
devoted
,’ Gillian always claimed, with much ill-concealed regret, whenever she was out with Eleanor and caught sight of some elderly dowager being helped into a restaurant chair by what she took to be a loving grown-up son. A generation on, she quite brazenly favoured Sebastian over Mimi, breezily claiming that was ‘natural’; that all indulgent grandmothers spoiled the first-born, whichever sex they were, but this didn’t fool anyone. It would have been just the same if Mimi had been the older one; it would still have been Sebastian who was treated to extra outings, to the
bigger
presents. Nell had had to come up with a lot of crafty gift additions around birthdays and Christmases when the children were little, to make sure Mimi didn’t feel slighted.

‘Yes, he’s really gone,’ Nell now confirmed. ‘And yes, Mimi and I had a lovely week away in the sun, escaping Alex’s escape, thanks for asking.’ She wasn’t going to mention the mugging. Somehow this would add to her mother’s tally of Nell’s failures. She could do without a lecture on how to hold on to a handbag.

‘And Alex was
such
a reliable sort.’ Nell’s mother sighed the deep, sad sigh of the reluctant betrayee. It had to be someone’s fault. Guess whose? Nell pulled a knife out of the drawer in preparation for spreading deep swirls of honey on her toast, and wished that phones still had curly cables. How satisfying it would be, right now, to saw right through one.

‘But Alex was
not
so reliable, as it turned out.’

‘Oh but he
was
, darling, for very nearly twenty years; dull of course, but …’

‘There is absolutely no “but”.’ Nell cut her mother off before she could get into full regret flow. ‘Alex has gone and I don’t want to talk about him. Let me tell you about the hotel … you’d love it there; it was quite a small place, right on the sea, perfect pool, fantastic seafood, spa …’

‘Yes, yes, but daaarliiing …’ There it was again … that
drawn-out
note, the ‘but’. ‘What on earth are you going to do
now
?’

‘I shall come down to Guildford, Mother dearest, and move in with you, of course.’ Nell crossed her fingers suddenly, in case what was spoken in jest was misinterpreted by the spiteful gods as something she’d truly wished for. You had to be careful with that. Losing a husband to a girl who was just a toddler when Pink Floyd played
The Wall
at Earls Court was bad enough, but being sent by the teasing immortals to live with your mother in the Surrey gin and Jag belt would be a humiliation too far.

‘What? Oh don’t be silly, Eleanor. I meant …’

‘I know what you meant. I’m going to have some toast, tea and then a couple of hours’ sleep. Catch up on emails, see if any work has come in. Order some paint supplies. I’ve got a whole series on vegetables with diseases to illustrate for
Home Grown
magazine, so I need the right colours for potato blight.’

‘But … if you tried, you know … even now, I’m sure … You see, men at a certain age, they do silly things. They don’t mean them. And you know, Eleanor, it isn’t entirely ungracious to
forgive
. And of course then you would
have the upper hand
.’ This was said in almost whispered intimacy that suggested a mutually understood code. Nell didn’t, quite, understand but guessed it might involve the acquisition of valuable guilt presents. That could explain why her mother had such a collection of sparkly jewellery.
She
really didn’t want to know about any wanderings of her late father, and hoped fervently that Gillian wasn’t planning an intimate lunch at which she would decide it was time to tell all in the interests of trying to spare her daughter a lonely old age. Five years after his death (car crash on the A3, alongside a woman in scarlet dungarees who, it turned out, delivered more than bouquets from the local florist), she really didn’t think such details would add anything helpful to her memories of her father.

‘Mum, are you trying to say that Alex really didn’t
intend
to move three thousand miles to live with another woman? That he didn’t
mean
to have had at least four full-on affairs before the great big catastrophically destructive final one? Which silly thing that “they don’t mean” would apply, in this particular case, to Alex?’

Gillian Wilkinson sighed again. ‘Well if you’re going to be like that, Eleanor … But one thing I will say: in spite of everything and the way it’s turned out, I still think you did the right thing, marrying
him
and not …’

‘Now don’t even
start
on that!’ Nell warned, feeling her voice rise and wishing she was a more controlled type. Press the right keys and her mother would still always play the same tune, so many years on. ‘Just don’t say
anything
more. Not a word!’

‘You know what I mean, Eleanor. After …’

‘OK that’s it. Goodbye Mum, I’m going to get some sleep now. I’ve got a party to go to tonight. I want to be
awake
enough to enjoy it.’ Nell clicked the phone off and wished she hadn’t said that last bit. It smacked of So There defiance, of Look at Me, I Do Have a Life, You Know. Gillian would sense desperation. She had a nose for it. Too late now and so what anyway; Nell opened the fridge. Oh, God bless Andréa – a big bottle of milk. And a massive, massive multipack of Cadbury’s Flakes. Nell’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away quickly with the nearest useful item (a damp J-cloth, smelling strongly of Astonish. Never mind, it was probably good exfoliation), took out one of the Flakes and snapped off half of it, sending shards of chocolate to the floor. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. No. Not at all. She would be positive and abide by Chapter Three in
After He’s Gone
: ‘Treat yourself daily to one item that always makes you feel good’. Just now, to kick things off, she reckoned it would take four to do the trick: toast, honey, chocolate and tea. The well-muscled boy who’d stacked the beach chairs at the hotel would have been a good addition to this list, but hey, you couldn’t have everything.

I am now the Responsible Adult in Charge in this house. Thanks for that, Dad. Mimi thought this as she wriggled her way down beneath her duvet and tried to blot out the shaft of weak sunlight that was searing in through the gap at the bottom of the wooden blind. Neither Adult nor Responsible were terms she was comfortable with. She
was
way too young. For one thing, if she had to be responsible for keeping her mother’s spirits up, where did that leave her own needs? How was she going to carry on doing Being Fifteen and all the glorious self-centredness that went with it, if she had to think about being careful not to add to her abandoned mother’s woes? She’d had a quick skim through the
After He’s Gone
divorce book over in Barbados, but the author had carelessly left out a chapter aimed at teenage daughters who were going to have to deal with the fallout from … well, the fallout. There were girls younger than her – she’d seen
The Jeremy Kyle Show
– who were looking after entire dysfunctional families almost single-handed. Kids with no money, having to juggle the lone mum’s benefits and drug habits and casual loser boyfriends. Obviously she hadn’t got it
that
hard. But that was the trouble with it not being
that
hard by regular standards. There just wasn’t any kind of manual for it. And what a number her dad had laid on her: ‘Take care of your mum. Keep an eye on her.’ Final fucking last words before the one-way to New York. Great, so helpful. Lay it all on me, why don’t you?

Mimi closed her eyes and thought of lying in the sea again, weightless and carefree. Her hair still had a slight sandy residue and smelled of sea life and she pulled a thick strand of it across her mouth, tasting salt. This time yesterday … the boy who strolled up the beach in the mornings selling shell necklaces, palm-frond hats and
ready-rolled
spliffs; the tiny silver-striped fish that nibbled her ankles as she paddled out to the waves. The sun blonding her hair, the heat making her body tender and lazy. All of it was stuff that made you feel good. Not like this huddly cold, not like this late-winter loneliness. What a long, long time it was going to be till summer.

3

No Surrender

(Bruce Springsteen)

‘NELL!
LOVELY
TO
see you!’ Evie Mitchell kissed the air alongside each of Nell’s ears as she let her into her pink-lit hallway. From further into the house Nell could hear distant-motorway waves of conversation and party laughter and suddenly wished she’d stayed home, in bed with the chocolate, the cat and some well-worn comedy repeats on the telly. Evie was an excited blonde flurry of cream lace and spray tan and looked like a cappuccino. ‘I’m so sorry about it being a school night,’ she giggled. ‘It’s just that … I know it seems odd but Don and I always think it’s
really
important to celebrate our wedding anniversary
on the actual day
, don’t you agree?’