The Love She Left Behind (20 page)

After breakfast (the boys, but not Nigel, were allowed Coco Pops), they set off to the house. Nigel had called Louise to warn her of their arrival, but not that he wanted to speak to her in particular. Sophie briefly rehearsed the pitch with him in the car.

Mia, answering the door, was as pristine as ever, the jeans as snug. As she led them through the markedly tidier hall, Sophie pulled a face of pantomime prurience behind her back and Nigel felt a twinge of irritation at this claim on his marital loyalty. He had, of course, told her about the wedding plans, with an admonition not to let them slip to Louise.

‘Patrick's asleep,' Mia told them. This was surprising, given the full-blooded hammerings and drillings from the direction of the kitchen. ‘Your sister's in the dining room.'

Louise was perched on one of the frail chairs, drinking coffee, her hands slack around the mug. Nigel registered his wife's assimilation of all the facts of Louise's appearance: size, clothes, damaged pallor. They had never met before, although Louise had been dutifully invited to their wedding, and had tactfully declined to attend, as Nigel had secretly hoped. Seamlessly Sophie stepped in, and air-kissed.

‘You must be Louise—how lovely to meet you.'

Louise, laughing in nervous surprise at Sophie's metropolitan second pass, botched the greeting. She moved on to Nigel, relieved to fuss the boys.

‘Bless them. Look at his hair! Haven't you got lovely hair?' Albie, blankly accustomed to this response to his crown of ringlets, said nothing. Nigel was privately waiting for the day it was all cut off. He could have had hair like that once, if it had been allowed.

‘Mum's hair,' said Louise.

‘Wasted on a boy!' laughed Sophie, as always.

‘And you're a big boy,' Louise said to Olly. ‘How old are you now?'

Olly retreated behind his mother.

‘Oliver,' Nigel warned.

‘Six,' said Sophie.

‘Six!' Louise exclaimed. A silence followed.

‘How's Holly doing?' Sophie asked. At this, Louise buckled and began to sob, apologising at the same time. Albie and Olly stared. They had never seen an adult cry before. Sophie, saying something about a glass of water, shot a look to Nigel that commanded him to get the boys out of the room. Relieved by this division of labour, he brightly suggested they have an explore. He hadn't realised Holly was still such a source of distress, although Louise had always been prone to what their mother called piping her eye.

‘Look at all those books!' he enthused, out in the corridor. It was too wet to go into the garden, and he knew better than to take them upstairs if Patrick was sleeping.

‘Dis library?' asked Albie, optimistically. He associated the library with juice and a biscuit. Olly wanted to know when they could go swimming at the hotel. Soon, Nigel promised. Struggling, he suggested they try counting all the books on the shelf. While he was doing this, alone, because Olly refused and Albie was too small to get beyond ten, his nephew appeared. He was there at the foot of the stairs when Nigel turned round, tall and alarming. Nigel jumped slightly.

‘All right?' said the boy. Young man. Jamie, wasn't it? Although he was fully dressed, his huge, hairy feet were bare. A large hollow black disc distended the lobe of one ear, and his forearms were dense with hostile-looking tattoos.

The boys stared as Nigel introduced them to their ‘cousin Jamie'. Jamie smiled and passed them, and Nigel saw Olly trying to make some connection with this alien creature and the adored den-building, cello-playing Big Cousins on Sophie's side.

‘Was the other one a cousin?' he asked.

He meant Mia. Nigel told him that she wasn't. The boys, alerted by the sound of the TV from the room Jamie had entered, trailed up the corridor after him. Nigel allowed them to follow. Olly wanted to know if they could get Cartoon Network.

‘You can get anything.'

Jamie showed Olly the remote, bending to indicate the menu button with a bitten-nailed index finger. Nigel was surprised by the attentiveness of the gesture. Perhaps he was a nice enough kid. The three of them—small, medium and large—gathered on the sofa as Jamie found
Scooby-Doo
.

‘All right?'

Olly nodded, settling in the cushions as Albie slotted his fingers in his mouth and trustingly cuddled up to his new relative. In the middle, Jamie gave a loose sigh, his head the only part of him angled above the horizontal.

Nigel left the three of them to it and went upstairs to see if he could happen on Mia. There was no doubt that the house was looking much better. He doubted Sophie would be giving Mia much credit for that.

‘Patrick.'

There he stood on the landing, dressed, his atmosphere wholly unstirred by Nigel's appearance. Like the house, Patrick looked sprucer. It was hard to say why; perhaps a matter of food stains?

‘Haven't seen my specs, have you?'

‘No,' said Nigel.

As usual, Nigel experienced the force of Patrick's personality as a tide swirling over a castle that only in that moment of catastro
phe realised it was made of sand. Presumably Patrick had struck his mother like that, with added sex. And now Mia.

‘They're in the bathroom!'

That was her, calling from the bedroom. Patrick's bedroom. His mother's bedroom, unless you listened to Louise's theory. That it had been separate bedrooms, possibly for years, as Mum endured her illness and Patrick refused to let her tell him and Louise about it. Mia's sleek head appeared from behind the door.

‘You left them in the bathroom,' she said. ‘But Dodie's in there, Patrick.'

‘Why in Christ's name would I have left them in there?'

‘Dodie, gosh,' Nigel said. This explained the extra car in the drive. Then, ingratiatingly, ‘You appear to be running a guest-house.'

‘Over my dead fucking body!'

Nigel recognised the symptoms of a pernicious hangover. Perhaps there would be a scene. Nigel knew Sophie wouldn't approve of this. Their argument last night had taken place behind the door of the hotel bathroom, so strongly did they both feel about exposing the boys to any of the less enjoyable emotions. There was also the swearing to consider. He followed Patrick downstairs, prepared to overtake. Patrick, though, seemed in no particular hurry.

‘You see her son's fetched up on the fucking doorstep now?'

Sophie would definitely have views. Socially, she got a kick out of purveying his family, in contrast to her own, as outrageous; at a party he had once heard her allude to ‘Nigel's secret chav origins', a word she had forbidden Olly to use when he brought it home from school. But Nigel suspected she might be finding this exoticism less adorable upon contact, which brought, after all, the possibility of contagion. Jamie's ear loop had alerted in Nigel a frisson of the forbidden, one of the myriad corrupters he had been
programmed by Sophie to prevent the boys from encountering. In truth, he knew she would have balked at Cartoon Network, since most facets of English life after 1980 were out of bounds to their children. At least it was only Scooby effing Doo.

‘He's only staying for a few days, Patrick.' This was Mia, swinging out from the bedroom, carrying a large tray. Nigel assimilated the dismaying lack of deference in her tone and all the intimacy it implied.

Patrick snorted, and continued downstairs. Nigel went back to help. Mia didn't fight him for the tray. He was relieved to see a single mug, a single toast-crumbed plate. Breakfast in bed for one. As if they weren't sharing a bed. They were getting married, for God's sake. He summoned several things he wanted to say, but none of them formed appropriately.

‘We could all go out for lunch,' he proffered.

Mia looked taken aback by this suggestion, emanating nothing-to-do-with-her, although Nigel had been attempting to show consideration. Did he seem strange to her? He was the normal one, after all. Descending below them, Patrick's mane mocked him. If only he had more bloody hair.

‘Lucas!'

The histrionic bellow from the bathroom stopped them all short. Above them, Dodie—a name invoked by his mother to which Nigel was now able to put an unexpected face—emerged. She braced herself against the doorframe, panting.

‘I knew that wretched chicken was off. Darling, I'm really not sure I can face Padstow!'

‘Oh God,' Mia said, from his shoulder. ‘Chicken, my arse.' Which surprised, then pleased him. Before Nigel had a chance to respond, she had skipped back upstairs, asking Dodie, in the most solicitous tones, whether she could get her anything.

Downstairs, Patrick headed for his study. Sophie was still in the dining room, attentively inclined to Louise's monologue about Holly and her recovery, but as soon as she saw Nigel she pushed her chair back and said she should check the boys weren't up to mischief. The brief panic in Louise's eyes as Sophie abandoned the room acknowledged the strangeness of the two of them being alone together. Nigel knew he needed to launch in; Louise was already shuffling back her own chair.

‘Louise—'

He sat down. Obediently, she followed suit. Feeling his chest tightening against the damp, he took out his inhaler, sprayed and inhaled deeply. Sophie was right. It was high time all this was sorted out.

Nigel first set out the terms of the will concerning the house. He had anticipated having to repeat himself to clarify Louise's muddy understanding, but she seemed to grasp what he was saying unusually well.

‘So we own it between us?'

‘Effectively. I think Patrick's accountant when they bought the place—it was the era of supertax and all that—must have been terrifically paranoid about them paying over the odds, so he encouraged them to put the house in Mum's name, along with all the rights.'

‘Rights?'

‘To his plays. Patrick must have been earning money hand over fist at that point.'

Louise slumped, hands inadequately guarding the spread of her belly. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, or if she was thinking at all.

‘It doesn't mean we have to do anything,' Nigel pointed out. ‘In fact, I think the last thing we should do is anything hasty.'

‘God knows what it's worth,' she said.

Although Nigel had already considered arranging a valuation, the same curiosity from Louise's mouth sounded distastefully venal.

‘Well, that will be something to consider in the, er, fullness of time.'

Chair pushed back from the table, Louise contemplated her surprisingly small, shoeless feet, clad in sheer black tights or pop socks (she was wearing her usual leggings) with opaque caps obliterating the toes. She wriggled herself into a more erect position, as though chided to sit up straight.

‘We could chuck Patrick out then. Out on the street.'

Once again, although the thought had formed readily enough, Nigel was repulsed by the prospect of sharing even that with her. Even worse was the oddly childish gurgle of laughter that accompanied Louise's suggestion, leading back somewhere he fastidiously refused to go.

‘Not exactly,' he counselled. ‘Not in his lifetime. Which is only as it should be.'

‘What if he got married again?' she asked, skewering him. Had Mia told her, then?

‘Well, that would be a different matter entirely. It would be hard for him to make a case, I suppose . . .'

Louise examined her feet again.

‘Listen to me. Why would he get married again? Not that it matters . . .'

So Mia had said nothing. Good. Better not to muddy the water. In he went.

‘I have a proposition—a suggestion.'

It unfolded just as he and Sophie had rehearsed. That they couldn't know how long Patrick had left to live, and that it was right and decent that they should allow him to live in the house as long as he wished. That, however, the house represented a substantial asset, and that Louise, Nigel imagined, could do with
the money from the house right now. That Nigel was willing to advance her her share of the equity in return for the other half of the house, so that it was entirely his. That he and Sophie would start to do some work on the house with a view to using it as a second home, subject to suitable arrangements with Patrick. The money, for Louise, would be a life-transforming amount—enough for a new, bigger house in Leeds, as well as to set up Jamie and Holly properly when they needed it. This was something he really hoped she would think about.

As he spoke, the colour in Louise's face rose beneath her make-up. Her breathing always had a catch at the end of it, a remote cellophane crackle. Asthma like his, perhaps, or simply the effect of her weight. It had become more pronounced as his proposition developed.

‘Nidge, I've got to tell you, this is—this just proves it. She wants me to stay.'

‘Holly?'

This seemed unlikely. And she couldn't mean Mia, surely.

‘
Mum
. She's here. She's looking after us.'

Nigel quelled his urge to look round and complete Louise's sightline into the corner of the musty room. She was offering her hand across the table. He took it, in a reflex quasi-handshake. He felt, even more than confused, profoundly embarrassed.

‘It's like she arranged it all.'

‘I think you'll find it was the accountant—'

‘All I want is to keep Holly safe. If I can stay here, if I can tell Patrick that's my right, I can keep her safe, can't I? Away from everything back home. That's all I want.'

She was squeezing hard on his hand. When Nigel looked up from the worn Turkish rug, his sister's tear-brimmed eyes were bright with unusual self-conviction.

‘But what about the money?'

‘Money isn't everything—Mum'd say the same, wouldn't she? Sometimes you have to trust in the universe. I've always believed that,' Louise said. ‘Us getting the house, it's a sign. That's what Kamila said—
She wants you to stay
. This proves it.'