The Love She Left Behind (2 page)

‘You'll have to put the window up, for Patrick,' he told them both, getting out.

Phase two: Patrick. If Louise demanded patience, Patrick demanded a whole armoury of seldom called-upon resources. It would be like playing squash with a county champion after a ten-year layoff.

Walking up to the door, Nigel recognised a nest of broken, empty plant pots that had seemed temporary on his last visit, lichened into permanence. Although not as alienated as Louise from the Patrick/Mum axis, it was in fact at least ten years since Nigel had been to the house. It had scarcely been a show home then, but now the façade spoke of long-term neglect, its windowsills scabbed with grey, flaking paint and the grizzled creeper hanging over the front porch in an unpruned, brittle mat. Despite this, Nigel still enjoyed an atavistic buzz at the fairy-tale existence of such a large family asset. Patrick wouldn't be able to live here on his own, not without being able to drive. And even so unfashionably close to Newquay, it couldn't be worth less than half a million.

‘You said half past.'

Patrick had opened the door before Nigel could knock. Unchanged in the dark hallway, when he stepped outside, daylight revealed him to be shockingly old and shabby. He was wearing that disgraceful raincoat he'd always had, the colour of something on a butcher's tray. Unbuttoned, it revealed a bobbled fleece mapped with food stains, worn over a shirt and tie. Both fleece and tie, at least, were black. And like the house, the quality of Patrick's architecture defied neglect. The nose still arched, the lip, if a little thinner, still curled. As they walked to the car, the
wind blew Patrick's coat open and revealed a Norwich Union logo on the breast of the fleece. Presumably he had got it free.

‘I've been waiting.'

‘We had to pick up Louise.'

Patrick balked as though confronting a tripwire. Even he must have known that Louise was certain to come to Mum's funeral; she was her daughter. You couldn't even call her estranged, exactly. And there was certainly nothing Patrick could do about it now. Nigel strode round to the passenger door and held it open, like an employee. An explosive sneeze compromised his chauffeur's stance as Patrick made his shambling approach. He pulled up again.

‘Who's this?'

The girl, Holly, was now sitting in the front seat, her hands pressed prayerfully between her thighs. Nigel saw Patrick's momentary confusion at a collapse of time where this child could be Louise, before Louise herself, fully and massively contemporary, clambered out of the back to explain.

‘Holly. Patrick, it's me, Louise—this is Holly. My daughter. I'm so sorry.'

After a moment of paralysis, Louise lurched in to embrace Patrick. She curtailed her gesture into a brief clutch at his neck as he failed to respond, still unwilling to share anything of their mother with her, even her loss. He got in the car. Louise's eyes magnified with tears.

‘She felt sick on the way; she hasn't been well. The driver said she'd be better off in the front.'

Phase three: the funeral. It was fifteen miles to the crematorium. With Holly in the front, the three of them were forced to sit together in the back. It was, as far as Nigel remembered, an unprecedented configuration. Despite the roominess of the estate
car, he leaned defensively against his window. It was Louise who broke the silence, a few minutes on to the motorway.

‘Have you had any breakfast, Patrick?'

Although Patrick was clearly stunned by the audacity of any question at all, its sheer simplicity compelled an answer.

‘Um, no.'

‘It's going to be a long day,' she said over his head, to Nigel. ‘Maybe we should get something on the way—we've got time.'

‘I don't want anything,' Patrick said.

‘You'll be dropping,' Louise persisted. ‘Even a cup of tea—have you had a cup of tea?'

Patrick shrugged an apathetic negative.

‘We could stop at a garage,' said Louise. ‘They'll have a machine.'

Nigel decided to knock this one on the head. Their slot at the crematorium started in less than half an hour. He had persuaded the bookings clerk to rearrange another family in order to get the uniquely convenient late-morning time, which would permit him to get home to Surrey that night. If they missed it, it would be like trying to find runway space at Heathrow.

‘I don't think we've got time—'

‘I need to get some fags,' said Patrick, exploring his coat pockets. So that was that. The driver pulled into a station pennanted with some unfamiliar local logo and Louise took Patrick's order for twenty Silk Cut Light.

‘Can't smoke in the car, sir.' The driver instinctively addressed Nigel. He was, after all, the only one in a suit. Nigel checked his watch, resisting the temptation to rub his gritty eyes. At the funeral, he supposed, everyone would take their redness as a sign of grief.

‘How long will it take us now?'

‘ 'Bout twenty minutes, give or take.'

They really didn't have time to wait for Patrick to smoke a cigarette. Louise took an age getting the bloody things as well, as they all waited in a silence broken only by a few harrowed sighs from Patrick. Finally she reappeared, her lengthy absence explained by the lidded disposable cup of tea she carried, along with a grab bag of crisps and a plastic bottle of Coke that she dangled over to Holly in the front.

‘I thought she was ill,' Nigel objected.

‘She hasn't had any breakfast.'

The girl waved away her mother's offerings.

‘Can't eat in here, if you don't mind,' said the driver, gently.

‘Oh well.' Louise stuffed the refreshments into her bag and asked Patrick what combination of the milk pots and sugar sachets pincered between her fingers he wanted in his tea.

Five minutes back along the road, Patrick crumpled the cellophane from the Silk Cut packet into the footwell of the car and took out a cigarette. Nigel made a move as he saw the driver clock this in the mirror.

‘Patrick, you can't smoke in here.'

Arrested in trawling a disposable lighter up from a far corner of his raincoat's lining—the pocket must have been lost to a hole—Patrick halted and jabbed at the window button.

‘It's all right—'

‘No smoking if you don't mind, sir.'

‘I can't open the bloody window!'

‘He has to work it from the front—' Louise told him.

‘You can't smoke in here—'

‘What?'

Nigel pointed ahead to the neat sticker on the dashboard, with its universal symbol. ‘You can't smoke in here, Patrick. It's a no-smoking car.'

Patrick's convulsion of contempt was vast, familiar, and still frightening. Louise just managed to save the tea.

‘Christ alive—can you not open the window?'

‘Sorry sir, it's company policy.'

‘My wife's cold in the ground, man.' Patrick sparked up, inhaled. ‘
Company policy
. How about human fucking decency?'

The window rolled down to its limit.

‘I'm a smoker myself, as it happens,' the driver said, nervously tracking the direction of the smoke. He was an older man, small, with yellowed whites to his eyes.

‘Muuum.'

Louise shifted.

‘I'm sorry, Patrick, cigarette smoke makes Holly feel sick.'

Patrick continued to smoke.

‘She's been feeling sick.'

‘I think I'm gonna
be
sick.'

‘Oh you're not, are you, love?'

‘I feel really sick.'

The girl's voice had risen an octave again, back into childishness. She did look very pale. The wind was whipping away most of Patrick's smoke.

‘Patrick, please!'

‘Tell her to try putting her head between her legs.'

Louise changed position. For a wild second Nigel thought she was going to attempt to grab the cigarette from Patrick and throw it away, but she was only stretching forward to get a better look at Holly.

‘Are you going to be sick?'

The girl nodded violently.

‘I'm sorry,' said Louise to the driver, ‘we'll have to stop.'

‘We're going to be late!' Nigel objected.

‘It can't be helped, can it?' Louise rolled a look past Patrick to Nigel. Surprised, he caught it, just as an annihilating sneeze tore out of him. Why hadn't he listened to Sophie about getting her mum to babysit and let her come with him?

The driver pulled on to the hard shoulder. Louise massaged Holly's back as she bent over the rusted barrier at the verge, hair hanging in strings. Patrick finished his cigarette.

‘Suppose they can hardly start without us,' Nigel reassured himself. Careless of the consequences, he raked his palate frantically against his tongue. Holly produced a couple of dry retches.

‘Oh
Christ
.'

The spent butt pitched out of the window, Patrick swigged the last of his petrol-station tea. As his jaw stretched, Nigel saw that he'd missed a patch when he'd shaved, close to his ear. The stubble was silvery, both unspeakably louche and terribly vulnerable. Outside, Holly was holding her stomach, Louise still bent to her. Nothing happened.

Why did it always have to be like this? Why would it be any different? Mum was dead. It was the only thing that had changed. Sophie should have come with him, definitely, but it was better that she hadn't. Tenderly, Nigel placed a cool forefinger on each closed, raging eyelid. This worked, sometimes.

‘Women,' said Patrick.

 

March 10, 1978

Cobham Gardens

Early hours.

Darling Dear Girl,

I'm sitting here drinking whisky and unable to write a word and thinking how very much I love you and want you and can't live without you.

I want to fuck you three times in a row.

This will never do, will it?

Patrick xx

 

H
ER MOTHER HAD
had a way with clothes. Even in the chaos of the wardrobe and its overflow into the bedroom, Louise could see this hadn't deserted her. So far, she had come across no garments that she recognised, yet they were all familiar in expressing the singularity of her mother's style. Part of it, she could see now, was money; old clothes that didn't date or wear out. A good coat—that was something she could remember Mum harping on about. You need a good coat. It must have helped that she had stayed the same size for years, by the look of it, although she would have been emaciated by the end. Stomach cancer: how could it have been otherwise? Surely she must have known, long before that solitary collapse in the Tesco car park and the hurtling deterioration of her final week? Other, more secret parts of your body might harbour a tumour unknown to you, but surely not your stomach.

Louise hadn't asked for a look at Mum in the casket before they burned it. There was no point in seeing how much she had changed, except to upset herself. All the funeral rituals demanded you recognise death as real when it was the last thing you wanted, each impersonal stage stripping away what you held on to, finally trundling her away up a conveyor belt like a supermarket item to be scanned and bagged. And without them saying goodbye.

At least now there was all the sorting out to bring her closer.

Louise had volunteered at the reception. Jenny, the neighbour, was expecting her to, she could see. One look at Nigel would tell you that he never got his hands dirty. His hands were something she was shocked to recognise each time she saw him. They were still like a teenage boy's: bizarrely knuckleless and smooth. They made him look unprepared for life, despite his suit. Anyway, sorting out was a daughter's job.

‘Oh, bless you,' Jenny had said, too relieved for even a token
objection. ‘Patrick's been saying just to put it all in bin bags, but really . . .'

There was everything to be done. At least the bed next door where her mother had died had been stripped, thankfully. It must have been Jenny, or the nurse. The bed in this room, the one Patrick slept in, needed changing. The pungent, old-man smell of the sheets permeated the room, although without, Louise was relieved to notice, anything urinal. It didn't help that there was something wrong with the radiator, which belted out unstoppable heat. The low-ceilinged bedroom was sweltering, even with the window sashes pushed as far up as they would go. Louise sweated as she worked; it was surprising how heavy clothes could be on their hangers. She was starving, but that was good. Work a bit off her. Burger and chips: the chewy fat of the burger and its salty blood mixing with the salty chips, sweet blob of ketchup. Maybe they could go to the pub for lunch. There was nothing in the house.

Louise hauled out a little run of formal clothes in yellowed dry-cleaning shrouds. Her mother must have stopped going to do's long ago—Louise knew Patrick had never been keen. Only once, after Mum had run off with Patrick (as Auntie B liked to call it, as though they were still running, cartoon-like), she had sent a photo of the two of them at some London party, a reception or ceremony, montaged with the famous. Patrick might have been getting an award, Louise couldn't remember. What she remembered was how glamorous the two of them had looked in the picture, Patrick and Mum, like old-fashioned film stars among the real film stars, both laughing. Patrick must have won something, or been expecting to, to be laughing for the cameras like that. Her mother had probably been wearing one of these dead dresses shoved beyond the coats. Louise remembered sparkles, flaring against the flash.

Hefting the heavy clothes on to the bed, she sneezed at the
resulting explosion of dust. Jenny's hints at the funeral about the state the house was in had been, like the woman herself, conservative. Other peoples' houses were always filthy—Louise was prepared for that—but as well as the enamel in the bathrooms (as yellowed and disastrous as Patrick's teeth), the ravaged paintwork (smeared with track lines of fingerprints, as if tracing the unsteady routes of a gigantic toddler), the dulled carpets (darker at the edges, where years of scamped hoovering had deposited tidal rings of dirt), there was the mess.