The Love She Left Behind (14 page)

Kitchen
came next. With an increasing sense of redundancy, Mia inked a dash and added a question mark. She knew that manoeuvring Patrick into agreeing to any kind of work, let alone the renovation she had extensively envisaged, would take serious and unavailing effort. He had even put a stop to her very basic decorating plans once he knew how much it would cost. It wasn't just that Patrick couldn't care less. She knew now that she had been bamboozled by the good furniture and the house around it, while failing to read the more accurate message of their neglect. She had simply assumed that Patrick was mean and his late wife chaotic, and that she'd be able to cajole him into spending in the same way that she'd finally got him to eat garlic. But his scrimping, own-brand ways weren't just habits. He was, it turned out, as broke as she was.

Well, this wasn't entirely true. Through the forensic ransacking of the paperwork she had cleared from every surface, Mia was stunned to discover that Patrick and Sara had never mitigated their hardships with even a normal level of debt.

‘Not even a credit card?'

‘Fetters of capitalism. Cut 'em up as soon as they sent 'em.'

It was beyond own-brand, or not taking holidays. Accordingly,
Mia had applied for a couple of credit cards in Patrick's name and was working up to getting him to sign them, for his own good.

Pen hovering over her list, she forbore to write Patrick's name, even as a sub-category of
kitchen
, although she did finally scribble
finance??
, from which was born
bank
. To accomplish anything there would have to be a chunky loan. Given that all she needed was the first sniff of a job offer to send her on her way, even research at the level of price-comparison websites was pointless. Mia scored the entire entry through.

Mia nibbled her panini.
Job
, she wrote finally. No dash, no question mark, and definitely, despite all those emails, no tick. Looking up, she saw that the Costa employee who had served her, a post-adolescent boy with dark circles under his darker eyes and a misguided directional haircut that angled to conceal one ear and was shaved above the other, was lingering under the pretext of clearing the next table to watch her write. It was the post-lunch lull.

‘Busy.'

The word was bottom-heavy with an accent, possibly Polish. Mia flashed him a dismissive smile.

‘You need?' He offered her the napkin dispenser he was lifting to wipe beneath. Politely, she hoisted the thin napkin on her panini plate. ‘No thank you.'

He mimicked writing. ‘Studying?'

Capping her pen, Mia shook her head, whisked the list into her bag and reached for her scarf. The boy hovered, possibly on the verge of telling her that he was a student himself, or wanted to be: psychology, perhaps, or business studies. Although if it was business, why was he working in a Costa?

With a smile full of aggravating irony, the boy tried to fix her gaze. ‘Something more interesting than studying, maybe.'

She had a vision of her own future, learning to flourish frothed milk into the calligraphic leaf on top of a flat white.
Chocolate on that?

Mia shouldered her bag. ‘Everything about me is more interesting than you can possibly fucking imagine.'

She didn't look back as she made for the door. She was so much better than all of it. She always had been.

After an undermotivated tour of the less tacky shops, the acquisition of some interiors magazines that would have earned her another tick on the kitchen portion of her list if she hadn't scrubbed it out, and a maintenance trip to Tesco, Mia took a cab back to the house. It was still quite early, and she was relieved not to see Louise's car parked outside. As she paid the cab driver, Patrick appeared from the back of the house. He was shouting.

‘Everything all right with the old boy?' asked the driver, a middle-aged man who had spent the journey telling her about his cholesterol levels.

‘I think he was just wondering where I'd gone.' Mia terminated their transaction with a couple of pound coins and straightened up from the car door to withstand Patrick. It would be the usual thing. Sure enough, he started before the minicab had even negotiated the turn in the drive.

‘Where the fuck have you been?'

She told him, briskly headed towards the back door, in no mood. Patrick hurried to keep astride with her, the slight swing of the Tesco bags batting him away as she manoeuvred them through the doorway. Backing round to accomplish this brought his face into proper view. Mia's first thought was that his eyes were watering from the wind, then she realised that he was weeping.

‘Patrick.'

She had looked into his study, she lied, but he had been asleep.
She should have left him a note. Or perhaps, to prevent this happening again, he might finally learn how to dial her mobile, which had been switched on all afternoon?

‘I don't want to learn how to use your bloody mobile, just don't do it again, you stupid little bitch!'

The margins of Mia's tenderness contracted. Silently, she triaged groceries from their bags on to the table, before putting them away in cupboards and fridge, showing him her back.

‘I will not live like this!' Patrick roared.

Continuing to ignore him, Mia stacked cans of tuna, taking the time to align them exactly. Behind her, she sensed movement as Patrick took a peevish swipe at a box of eggs. She wheeled into a stretch that caught them as they left the tabletop, surprising herself with her agility. Patrick scrabbled to pull the box from her, his massive hands crushing the cardboard as they tussled, her gasping and him grunting with animal effort until, at the sound of cracking shells Mia gave way, leaving Patrick to hoist the egg box one-handed above his head in a pose that was equal parts childish triumph and melodramatic threat. As he held this ridiculous position, a clear, spunky gout of egg white gathered from the lowest corner of the box and glopped down on to the shoulder of his jumper.

Mia laughed. Not as a weapon, but in rare true amusement, as happened to her sometimes, the way it had with Nigel when he gulped Nurofen on the night of Holly's accident. Patrick touched his shoulder, exclaimed, ‘
Shit!
' and momentarily panicked her by also bursting into laughter. Laughing, seeing him laugh, Mia felt something like joy. No future, no past, just this.

‘Oh Christ.' Patrick steadied himself against the table for a few breaths, knuckles down on the scarred wood. ‘Forgive me, darling girl. Jesus.'

And he gathered her into his stinking old jumper, but she liked
the smell, of whisky and fags and him, and even though the wool was full of holes it was actually cashmere. She avoided the egg white. He moved her back, looking for something in her face. Finding it, he kissed her, properly.

That night, having troubled to change the sheets, she followed him up to bed.

 

June 11
^th
1982

Dear Tony,

Good to see you and Penny yesterday, and thanks for the lunch. I hope your hangover isn't as wretched as mine. Your theory about the better vintages doesn't seem to obtain, but there was a glory in the experiment.

Forgive the arse-aching. It's not just stubbornness. I may not subscribe to the idea of an immortal soul, but I do have an artistic conscience. Indeed, it's the only conscience I do have. A small thing, but mine own . . .

To reiterate: Bloody Empire isn't, never has been, and never will be a play about the Falklands. Although I can accept an element of serendipity in the timing of the production, I am very much inclined to look the gift horse, as you put it, in the mouth. A transfer to the West End may be lucrative, but really what could it profit beyond our bank accounts? Dancing cats are one thing, gilding our reputations with the blood of the fallen, another.

And yet, and yet. There can be no doubt but, like everything in this fallen world, conscience has its price.
God help me, I may have discovered exactly what it is. Man the telephone, Mephistopheles.

Yours aye,

Patrick

PS. Apologies from Sara. She's been rather tired lately.

 

Then

1983

S
INCE OXFORD
in summer term—Trinity term—was so obviously close to heaven, with the green college gardens, and drinks parties, and Shakespeare productions and drinks parties in college gardens, and punting, and Pimm's, and rowing tournaments, and balls, and long, starlit nights out on the window ledges of rooms or in obscure meadows at parties, so many parties, Nigel's exclusion from all these forms of paradise was particularly tormenting. It was like one endless production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(which he had recently seen at Wadham, staged in the gloaming at the edge of the lake), in which he, an anti-Titania, had been forcibly unenchanted and left alone to see flaccid strings of mint in the warm, weak Pimm's, wheeze asthmatically in the gardens however much he deployed his inhaler, and everywhere hear the confident, opinionated braying of his snogging, rutting cohort, their wholehearted hedonism failing to conceal from him its underpinning of untransformed self-advancement.

In the first month there had at least been exams—Mods—running alongside all of this, but now they were over and enjoyment was unconfined. Nigel slightly regretted the lack of an excuse to stay in the library even a little of the time, but the library,
so crammed with territorial, hollow-eyed finalists for most of the year, was now deserted, the liberated finalists having preceded the first-years in abandonment to all this noisy pleasure
. Despite spending his mornings asleep (in common with most members of the college), the days were sadistically long. Work had distracted him from his failure to extract any value from Oxford apart from the pale appreciation of his law tutors for his uninspired reliability in producing his weekly essays. This apart, he may as well have been studying law anywhere else in the country, redbricked or concreted, although when he was feeling particularly desperate he reminded himself that value would be added once he came to the stage of applying to law firms, so long as he did himself justice in exams. He also reminded himself of how very proud he assumed he had made his mother, Auntie B and Louise.

He was, though, feeling particularly desperate, which was why he had accepted Toby's sister's invitation to the picnic at St Hilda's. Entering the porter's lodge after a doctor's appointment—he had been wondering if he had a virus and the brisk GP had told him that he was probably drinking too much and not eating properly—Nigel had almost missed the note in his pigeonhole, mixed in with photocopied fliers for garden plays and Undercroft bops, a scrawl on a torn half-sheet of pale green notepaper. The hurried writing, its comely, feminine flow, was enough to provoke fantasies of ending the evening in Toby's sister's narrow St Hilda's bed. Her name was Zoë, and she was in her second year. They had met just once, when Toby had visited Oxford the previous term (Hilary), on a break from the London crammer where his parents had sent him after he had tanked his A-levels at St Christopher's. Toby had brought her along with him when he had arranged to meet Nigel for a drink at the Eagle and Child.

Zoë was almost as tall as her brother, with the same hectic complexion but apparently none of his good nature. In common with
all the girls he had met at Oxford, her wrists and knuckles were occluded by her overstretched jumper sleeves, the excess of which she kept gathered into each palm, as if she was either perpetually cold or—less likely—shy. She had barely stayed to finish her half (which Nigel had paid for), annoyed about some unfathomable but clearly boyfriend-related arrangement that she accused Toby of fouling up by arriving late, and had left abruptly after making a call from the pub's payphone, borrowing the change to do so from Nigel, along with a further two pounds for the cigarette machine. So it was surprising to be invited to bring a bottle, ‘pref sparkling', to her picnic. There was a hand-drawn map at the bottom of the sheet, guiding him to a riverside spot behind the St Hilda's grounds.

‘Any difficulties with girls?' the GP had asked him, while grudgingly filling out the forms for a blood test. Nigel had said no. The briskness of her tone, her middle age and utilitarian haircut, didn't invite any kind of confidence, although there was an even more alarming glimmer of sympathy behind her manner.

Nigel took an antihistamine, bought an unchilled bottle of Asti Spumante and, as the sky's colour leached into night, headed up towards Iffley Road. Hilda's was all-girls, so his chances were good, even if Zoë herself had a boyfriend. He reminded himself not to get too drunk. He really felt like getting drunk.

By the riverbank, there were far more guests than he had been expecting. Although a few token picnic blankets scattered around the field bore trampled quiches, open packets of crisps and plundered punnets of strawberries, Nigel was undeceived. He recognised the same, rolling party he had been fruitlessly attending for the last three weeks. A boombox parked by the strawberries played
Off the Wall
, and he immediately spotted four members of his own college: two historians, a physicist and a prat wearing a trilby and earring whose subject he assumed to be English, trying
to chat up the Hilda's girls. Still, the ratio remained promising. Reassuring himself that the bulge of his inhaler was intact in his front right trouser pocket, he went to look for Zoë.

She was pissed and, therefore, cheerful. Oddly, her upbeat mood actually decreased her resemblance to her brother. This may have been because she was wearing eye make-up and looked disarmingly pretty when she smiled. Nigel realised that she was probably a full two years older than him, since he was one of the few people he had met who hadn't taken what he had learned to call a gap year.

‘I'm doing it,' Zoë announced, hooking her slender ankles and dropping to the grass cross-legged. ‘I said it was a picnic and as far as I'm concerned it means not having to stand up all fucking night.'