The Love She Left Behind (12 page)

The two of them only stayed for a cup of tea, pleading the hotel check-in, as well as the boys, still sleeping out in the car. As she presented a mug of Earl Grey to Sophie, Mia clocked the full value of the other woman's distraction, intent on the worm-drilled
roof beams above her. It was the house. She was there to scope out the house for herself, the cow, while Nigel sealed the deal with Patrick in some way, using his legal magic. Mia had stayed with enough school friends in Cornwall with mothers from the same gene pool as Sophie. She was probably already picking out muted paint colours and lining up friends for half term.

‘Let's hope TripAdvisor doesn't lie!' Sophie said, as Mia followed her back to the car. (Patrick hadn't been so charmed that he felt it necessary to see them out.) Nigel arranged that they would drop by after breakfast the following day. Every time he talked to Mia directly he blushed, and she could see Sophie noticing.
Awkward
. Although Sophie wasn't detained for long, her frosty-shadowed eyes intent on the porch, mentally replacing the vast corpse of creeper with wisteria.

Nigel overcame the blushing to speak to her before he got into the passenger seat. He wanted to know if Patrick had heard from Nigel's sister, Louise. Mia told him that as far as she knew, they'd heard nothing since Louise had been down for Sara's funeral. And she did know. Ringing phones—and they didn't ring very much—were one of her jobs.

‘She called me when we were loading the car,' said Nigel. ‘She was in a bit of a state, to be honest. But that's nothing new.'

‘I can't see why she'd ring Patrick anyway, can you?'

Nigel smiled, pinking again, and agreed.

‘Maybe it was a false alarm.'

But that night, while she and Patrick were watching
Scott & Bailey
, the doorbell rang. Sure enough, it was Louise, trailing her daughter behind her. Holly looked furious and Louise tremulous, verging on tears while brimming with some uncommunicated anger of her own.

‘We've got to stay,' she announced, pulling Holly closer to her. ‘It's an emergency.'

When Mia let them over the threshold, Louise's anger seemed to vanish, as though surrendering a weapon she'd armed herself with for an argument that hadn't materialised.

‘Thank God,' she wept, as Holly rolled her eyes. Holly was definitely still angry, Mia could see. Already, and it surprised her, she missed the peace of summer. It was true what Patrick had said that morning: the hordes were descending.

 

From the
Guardian

Letter to the Editor

May 10th 1982

Sir,

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me, I take strong exception to Michael Billington's review of my play, ‘Bloody Empire'. It does not ‘draw outraged attention to the slaughter of young working-class men in the symbolic defence of an impotent imperialism'. That may be his view of what's happening in Port Stanley—I can assure him it's not the case at the Cottesloe. Perhaps he left before the end of Act Two?

Yours etc,
Patrick Conway
London N8

 

I
N THE NIGHT,
a hand touched Mia's face. Warm and soft, it left her skin and returned to it, rhythmic and loving. She was a cat being stroked, moulded by the blissful comfort the hand dispensed. There were words, nonsense words in a language she couldn't speak, but she knew their translation:
Everything's going to be all right. Everything's going to be all right. Everything
—

She woke, the hand still on her cheek and a scream in her throat.

‘Sorry.' Louise hovered over her, her bulk blocking the unresolved light from the door. Mia was sleeping in the den, having sacrificed the spare room bed to Louise and Holly. ‘She's gone—I don't know what to do.'

It took seconds for the words to find their edge. Louise was already sobbing, which was no good to anyone.

‘Sure she's not just in the loo or something?'

But as she followed Louise out into the corridor, Mia saw that the lights leading down the hall blazed a trail to where the kitchen door stood open to the cold dark. Weaker than the electric glare inside, the penumbra of moon on sea still cast enough light to show the garden was empty. The drive, when Mia walked it, was also empty, and all the visible road beyond. Louise was right—Holly was gone.

She'd seemed docile enough when Louise had pitched up with her, despite her underlying mood. Once Mia had let them in, Louise had started gabbling about Holly's bad behaviour with a boyfriend and Louise's determination to get her away from him. Apparently the boyfriend was much older than Holly, although Mia suspected a racist element in Louise's disapproval—his name was Nish. Holly had been caught lying about staying out with him all night and beyond this Mia became hazy, since Louise's distress had escalated into incoherence, at which point Holly had started
shouting (among other things) that her mother didn't know what she was talking about. It seemed that Louise thought the boyfriend had attacked Holly, but this was possibly just Louise's way of accounting for the sexual contact, which Mia could see was borderline unsuitable, given the girl's age. What was she, barely fourteen? Certainly Holly wanted to be with this boy, whatever he was supposed to have done, but she also seemed twitchy and blenched to a degree unwarranted by just having a row with her mum, even if Louise did appear unhinged. Not least because, in her blind impulse to remove Holly from the boyfriend's sphere of influence, she'd thrown herself on Patrick's mercy.

‘You must be a fucking lunatic, coming here.' Behind Patrick's forceful delivery, his face betrayed an elderly faltering at the female distress invading his world.

Mia had sent him to bed, telling him she'd deal with it and it would all be sorted out in the morning. Once he'd gone, Louise calmed a little and Mia managed to hustle mother and daughter into the spare room, dissipating the turmoil with cups of tea and the search for clean sheets. It was pleasing to discover that she was good in someone else's crisis, even someone she found as annoying as Louise, and actually, now their peace had been breached, doing something after so many weeks of lassitude was oddly enjoyable.

Now, though, there was this—more crises to come. Louise shuddered in the kitchen, fighting for breath.

‘She's took my phone.'

Louise had confiscated Holly's own mobile back in Leeds. Obviously she needed a way to stay in contact with the boyfriend and had filched the phone from her mother's bag, along with some cash. After making Louise sit down, Mia headed for the hall phone to ring the police. It also occurred to her to ring Nigel.

Mia had never had cause to call out the police before; once they arrived, they made her feel unaccountably uneasy. Patrick,
roused by the comings and goings while on one of his customary nighttime forays for a pee, declared them a useless fucking waste of time. Louise gabbled her story indiscriminately at both the woman officer and Mia, although the WPC was the only one with a notebook. Not that she wrote much in it, Mia observed. The male officer stayed outside on the drive, nudging conversationally into the radio strapped up near his neck and keeping a redundant eye on their patrol car. There was no sense of urgency, except from Louise, who was hoping the police might intercept Holly at the train station, although the twenty pounds Holly had filched from her purse was hardly enough for the train fare all the way back to Leeds, even on a child ticket. Louise was convinced Leeds was where she was headed, to get back to her boyfriend, if boyfriend was the right word. ‘Older', from the account Louise had given the police, turned out to be closer to thirty than twenty. For the first time since she had arrived, Mia felt sympathetic to Louise's distress. When Mia first arrived at Patrick's after Sara's funeral, she had more than once seen Holly sucking her thumb as she watched TV, her eye-rolling pose of disaffection slackened into infancy once she stopped watching herself pretend to be an adult.

‘She can't bloody stay away from him,' Louise sobbed, as though she hadn't already been through all this with Mia and Patrick earlier in the evening. The WPC reassured her, for the fourth or fifth time, that there was no train for Holly to board until the earliest one left towards six. Her colleague was speaking to one of their cars near the station—they had seen no sign of her as yet. This didn't console Louise in any way. ‘Anything could happen to her,' she insisted, ‘it's pitch dark out there.'

Just as Patrick announced that he was going back to bed, Nigel arrived, incongruously spruce and alert and intrusive with aftershave. By comparison the police officers seemed blurred, as though they'd been asleep themselves when they got the call. Nigel took
charge, which appeared to be his thing. Mia felt a lurch of irritation; she'd been doing so well.

‘Does this man have a car?' he asked. The question, which apparently hadn't occurred to the police, diverted Louise's torrent of distress into an overflow about him hanging around giving Holly lifts, Louise not knowing a thing about it until the night Holly had gone missing back home, her thinking Holly was at a school disco, getting a text from her saying she was staying with her friend Scarlett, but when she'd checked up to see they'd got back to Scarlett's safely, it was Scarlett who had told her about the lifts and presents, the way the bastard wouldn't leave her alone—

Nigel shut her up. ‘Louise, if he has a car, and they haven't picked her up at the station, isn't it more likely she's arranged to meet her boyfriend out on the motorway somewhere?'

Louise clamped her hand over her mouth and did some rocking. The WPC said that they could put the word out to highway patrols, but beyond that . . . Mia allowed a yawn to swell behind her teeth until it was big enough to swallow. It was too late now to follow Patrick back to bed.

‘There's really not much more we can do, at this point,' said the WPC. ‘She might turn up, change her mind. You know what kids are like at that age. You say there was no argument at all?'

Louise wept. ‘If I saw him, I'd kill him,' she said. ‘I'd get a knife and stick it in the bastard. I would.'

‘I don't think the officer needs to hear that,' said Nigel.

The copper glued to the radio appeared with the emptied mug of tea Mia had made for him, and the WPC took this as their signal to leave, promising to ring with any developments. Once they had gone, Louise degenerated into gulps and shakings. Mia wondered whether she or Nigel should slap her. Nigel seemed equally uncertain; he stood by his sister, his fingers twiddling anxious octaves at the end of his rigid arms, unsure of which note to play.

‘Louise.'

She didn't respond. ‘Weezer.' Nigel said it as self-consciously as a word attempted in an unpractised foreign language. ‘Come on now. This isn't helping anyone.'

‘Sorry.' Louise's speech was thick, waterlogged. She calmed a little.

‘I'll go out in the car myself and look for her. If you think about it, he's not going to be able to get down from Leeds for hours. Unless they had an arrangement.'

‘I wouldn't put it past him. I just thought, if you can get her away, get her away, Louise . . .'

Mia offered to go with Nigel. She didn't want to stay and listen to more of Louise's distress. Sitting in Nigel's Audi, as he apologised for the child seats in the back even though she was sitting in the front, she realised how long it had been since she had left the house. It was actually good to be doing something different, however bizarre.

The lanes were still dark as they criss-crossed towards the Newquay road. Mia kept watch from her window for Holly's small, square figure trudging along the verges, but all she saw were rabbits, skittering out of the headlights' beam.

‘You must think we're a strange lot,' Nigel said.

Since this was unanswerable, Mia didn't. She was aware of Nigel flicking a look at her. They drove on through the empty countryside. Once they got on to the B road, there were other cars, although not many.

‘What's
your
family like?' He asked this as though he was making a joke.

‘Oh, well, you know . . . I've left home and everything.'

Three texts to her mum since June. There had been voice messages, asking her to call back. But she had to live her own life:
Mum was the first one to say that. Anyway, she had half been waiting until she could send some news. That's what Mum liked, that's what she always pressed her for, definite news. Progress. Well, there was news of a kind. Mia felt like testing it out on Nigel.

‘This is kind of random, but Patrick wants me to stay. As a more permanent . . . as his assistant, kind of thing.'

Although there was no deviation in his steering, Mia felt the instant entirety of Nigel's tension at the wheel.

‘Right,' he said after a second or two. And then, after a second or two more, ‘And what about your degree?'

‘It's . . . I mean, I'm happy to, for now. I've kind of put a pin in finishing my MA.'

By her side, Nigel performed a series of driverly mannerisms, checking his rear-view and side mirrors, running his hands along the top of the steering wheel and back to ten-to-two, adjusting the ventilation flap nearest to him.

‘Patrick, you know . . . I think he's lonely.' Saying it, Mia realised it might even be true. A mild, unfathomable noise came from Nigel. She couldn't tell if it was emotional or digestive.

‘I mean, it's kind of an amazing opportunity,' she said. ‘Helping him with his writing. I've never met anyone like him.'

‘No,' said Nigel. ‘He's a bit of a nightmare, in case you haven't noticed.'

He still gripped the wheel as though he was choking the steering out of it. Mia wanted to laugh. He just looked so correct and desperate, with his pastel jumper folded round his neck like a French exchange student, even though it was the middle of the night.