The Love She Left Behind

AMANDA COE

The Love She Left Behind

A NOVEL

For Gus and Julia

The Love She Left Behind

What happens in the heart simply happens.

—
TED HUGHES
,
Birthday Letters

I think the rage to understand comes from the fact that you do not ask the right question. You will never find the right answer if you do not ask the proper question. It's like trying to open a door with the wrong key.

—
LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Part One

 

Now

SPRING

T
HERE WAS
no one left to call him Nidge. This had been his first clear thought when Patrick's neighbour rang to tell him their mother was dead. Seeing Louise step off the train the morning of the funeral, Nigel realised it was also possible for her to call him Nidge, although she didn't tend to call him anything. The ability to use his childhood name was a small power Louise didn't know she could exercise, and the fact that she didn't added to his irritation at the sight of his sister's pilled coat and misjudged cleavage. Immediately worse than any of this, though, was the teenage girl that unexpectedly followed her out of the carriage door, helping to bump a wheeled bag down on to the platform. Swaddled in a puffa coat that enhanced her matronly bulk—a miniature version of her mother's—she was much changed since Nigel had last seen her, when she must have been around seven.

‘I had to bring her,' said Louise. ‘She's been poorly and I couldn't get anyone to look after her. I can't rely on our Jamie, can I, Hol?'

Nigel allowed the cough he'd been suppressing in his throat all morning full rein; the pollen count must be off the scale. Holly. Sophie would have remembered straight away; she took care of birthdays and Christmas. Not for the first time since he'd
arrived in Cornwall, Nigel regretted his ready agreement that his wife would stay home with the boys while he navigated Mum's funeral solo.
Holly
. He nodded a hello and instructed himself to stop coughing; it was an itch always there to scratch, and once the membranes were inflamed, restraining himself became a torment. His niece sniffed back her own lacklustre greeting, fortunately too apathetic to share her germs. She was unappealingly pale and pink-eyed: presumably the result of her illness. Nigel supposed it would be fine for her to attend the ceremony. He couldn't imagine they'd exactly be oversubscribed at the crematorium. Still, it was aggravatingly like Louise to spring a surprise on him.

‘It's a good job you let us know when everything's happening,' said Louise, as he led them out of the ticket hall to the parked funeral car. ‘Have you seen him?'

‘I've spoken to him on the phone. About the arrangements for today.'

This had been Nigel's plan, to pick Louise up from the station first so that they would face their stepfather together. Patrick had, of course, been too distraught following their mother's death to make any of the phone calls himself, even the first one. This had been left to a neighbour, Jenny, the kind of competent middle-aged woman presumed on as a brick. Patrick was all too ready to presume, but Nigel's legal training was an obvious qualification for him taking over all that was to follow, if being a son hadn't been sufficient in itself. It qualified him over Louise, anyway, unquestioningly. He had made the necessary calls following Jenny's initial contact, and all the subsequent arrangements. This landed on top of a busy time at work, but he made lists and forged through them, as always, despite an electric cable of sciatica that shot down his leg whenever he sat down. In the days following his mother's death, Nigel had made quite a few calls with acupuncture needles sticking out of him like the miniaturised afflictions
of a medieval saint. Despite the osteopath's admonitions, it hadn't stopped them working, if it was in fact the needles that had erased the pain rather than the large doses of anti-inflammatories Nigel had been taking in secret defiance of the alternative remedies Sophie had arrayed on his bedside table. In any case, today only the hay fever was laying him low.

‘So, we're picking Patrick up, the service is at eleven thirty, nothing fancy—then it's sandwiches and so on at a hotel back near theirs.'

‘Lovely.'

Watching Louise fuss her daughter into her seatbelt, fumbling the prong blindly at the catch with an exclamation at each failure until Holly herself took the strap and housed it with one click, Nigel remembered acutely why he had no time for his sister. In the roughly three-year intervals at which they saw each other, nothing changed. Or rather, her circumstances changed—usually worsened—but Louise didn't. Soon she would start talking up a plan born of a low-level but persistent crisis: training, relocating, paying off a loan, finishing with her boyfriend, finding a different house, laying down the law with her kids, losing the weight. None of it ever happened.

‘How long do you think they knew she was ill?' Louise asked, once their car had pulled away from the station. Of course, there were other things to talk about today: Mum. Deliciously, Nigel rolled his tongue up against his palate, which itched furiously.

‘No idea.'

With Patrick out of bounds with grief, there had been no one to talk to except Jenny the neighbour. Nigel had scarcely felt he could assail her with questions about their mother's final months and days. The bare bones of it was undiagnosed stomach cancer—diagnosed so late that Mum had had scarcely a week before she died at home, hospital being pointless at the stage it
had been discovered. Perhaps during the reception (the hotel had been recommended by the funeral home), Jenny might be able to tell them more. After a drink, which Nigel was already greatly looking forward to. With the amount of Sudafed he'd taken, it would hit him like a train.

‘So, this is Cornwall!' Louise's tone was brightly officious, attempting to engage Holly, who was staring glumly through the view from the window. ‘Fab, isn't it?'

Neither Louise nor her daughter had ever been to the house they were travelling to. Having Louise here, large and human behind him in the formal black car, Nigel felt to his marrow the strangeness of this accepted fact.

‘They didn't even admit her to hospital, you know—it must have been very far gone,' he said.

‘Did
she
know, though?' Louise shifted forward, filling the space. ‘She must have, surely. You'd think Patrick would have let us know—let you know. So we could say goodbye.'

That was the way Louise liked to do things. A bedside goodbye, as in the soaps she watched. Tearful reconciliations. Not that reconciliation was necessary, as far as he knew.

‘Mum, I feel sick.'

Surely the girl's voice, with its strong Yorkshire accent, was too small and childish for her age? Louise leaned across her daughter to work the window switch. It didn't respond. She bent forward to the driver.

‘Do you mind if we have a bit of fresh air?'

The window retracted, blasting icy wind at the back of Nigel's neck and increasing his irritation. Louise insisted the window stay open for the entire route—along a winding B road—to counteract Holly's possible nausea. By the time they pulled into the potholed drive, Nigel could see in the rear-view mirror that Louise's thin hair had been whipped into a demented mop. She looked
older than the last time he'd seen her, despite highlights and too much makeup. Worn, with cross-hatching beneath her eyes. His own eyes were streaming.