The Love She Left Behind (22 page)

‘I'll go on ahead,' Jamie said. ‘No point you coming, I won't be a sec.'

Louise watched him go, eating up the distance with his loping legs. Before he could reach the lookout point, a figure appeared from the open archway of the dome. Patrick. He descended to meet Jamie as Jamie continued to climb to him, shouting something Louise couldn't hear. Patrick's gait was careful on the muddy, steep decline back to the path, his head bowed by the rain. He was so old now, Louise saw. The weather had whipped his hair so that you could see its underlying sparseness, and even when he reached the flatter ground, and he and Jamie spoke together, there was hesitation in his walk, a failure of vitality. As she watched, Jamie took something from his pocket, followed by something else: a cigarette and a lighter. Patrick bowed to both, eagerly. Jamie didn't follow suit, perhaps because he knew Louise was watching them, but returned both pack and lighter to his pocket. She couldn't have said what she liked less: seeing Jamie
with the cigarettes, or that democratic little act of fellowship. None of it was right.

Louise didn't want to share the walk back. She knew that Jamie could have caught her up easily, but he'd have to accommodate Patrick's faltering pace, even slower than hers. She started off without them. The stitch still pinched her side, and she was very wet now, with rain soaking down her neck. She should have been relieved that Patrick was okay, but she felt like shaking him, shaking understanding into him that he couldn't take off like that, all that time when she could have been talking to Kamila in the dry. If Kamila was even able to make contact now. Warm tears mixed with the cold rain on her face as Louise rounded the last cliff to see the back of the house, the surprise of the electric lights inside exposing the unnoticed decline into evening. Probably, it was the same as it had ever been: forced to choose, Mum had chosen him.

‘The back door was open,' admonished Mia. She stood in the hall, dry and neat, her damp-shouldered mac draped over the radiator and her shucked boots paired beneath, already stuffed with balled newspaper to keep their shape as they dried, another newspaper sheet spread beneath them to protect the floor. She had made herself one of those teas she liked, with the bag on a string. Louise waited for her to ask where Patrick was, but Mia busied herself with her sludgy teabag, wringing it against the side of the mug with the spoon before fishing it out and cradling it, dripping, to the wastepaper basket under the hall table.

‘Patrick decided to go for a walk. Jamie's bringing him back now,' Louise told her. Mia rattled the teaspoon on to a coaster.

‘I need to talk to you about something.'

‘They'll be back any minute. He's not too steady on his legs these days. Did you go into Newquay?'

Mia turned to Louise. She ignored the yellow tea that steamed by her elbow and tucked her hair back behind each ear, one,
two, her eyes on her stockinged feet. Without looking up, she offered Louise a piece of paper.

The lined sheet was torn from a cheap notebook, wrinkled as though it had been smoothed from a ball, its paper yellowed against the young skin of Mia's hand. Mia rotated the page so that the writing was the right way round for Louise to read.

‘It was in the boot. I was getting the spare tyre for Lucas, from the old car. I don't know how long it's been in there. Could be years.'

Erratically slanted, the writing was distorted, but its naïve loops were still as familiar as a face: Mum's handwriting. Contact. Thank God. You should always trust in the universe. Louise stared, her relief engulfing understanding. An irritable little hieroglyph in the top left corner of the page refreshed the pen, but even so, the flow of the strokes in bog-standard blue biro broke up on the porous weave of the paper, as though the pen had been running out or the pad had been held upright on a lap to write, so that Mum had had to go back and re-outline some of the letters.

Blind to the words, Louise turned the scrap over, just to be sure. The paper was so thin the pressure from the writing on the other side had indented through, discouraging double usage. That was all there was. She didn't need more.
She wants you to know she loves you.

Mia shrugged a laugh, but she wasn't amused. ‘It's kind of—weird.'

Louise smiled. Was it?

‘Don't you think?'

Still smiling, Louise pushed past the marvellous fact of the letters and forced herself to read them.

 

face any of it. Oh God let it be over. Lies. Every day the same. You get what you deserve. Every day. The way he looks at me, always. Touches even. Hate. Please no more hurting. Hate hate hate hate. The only thing I can do is try to live and

 

T
HEY WERE ALL
asleep, Nigel most lightly, when his mobile glared and trilled from the chest of drawers in the dim, alien room. The boys didn't wake as he stumbled from bed to retrieve the phone, barking his ankle against an unanticipated coffee table. Sophie muttered and turned.

‘You've got to come—'

Patrick had never called him in his life. The precedent brought its own urgency, although Nigel quickly established that it wasn't any kind of medical crisis. He woke Sophie—it was actually only just after midnight—and told her where he was going. She was at the stage of submission to sleep where his departure for the moon would have received the same barely stirring acquiescence. Driving up to the house, Nigel sat for a moment in the car, unwilling to leave its protection, the robust metal and leather mantle of the life he had bought and paid for. God knows what was going on. The car was the only barrier between him and the formless futility that raged around Louise and Patrick, and even Mia now.

Except, incredibly, Mum had left something more. There it was, spalled bricks and biscuit-crumb mortar. A second home. His. Nigel grabbed the car-door handle and stepped back into the world. It had stopped raining, at least.

Sophie had two sisters, one a haematologist and one who called herself a publishing consultant, which meant that she had been an editor before having children and now professed to work part-time. The three women shared holiday villas and took turns to cater vast meals on family anniversaries, visibly the same tetchy, vocal triumvirate chronicled in photographs around their parents' house, posing on ponies or holding trophies, squinting into foreign sunlight in a height order gradually reversed by the passage of time. Although Sophie moaned freely about Olivia's control issues and Ginny's self-entitlement, and holidays inevitably led to
tight-lipped conflicts over their children, Nigel never saw either of them without wishing in his heart and soul that these artlessly competent, securely judgemental women were his sisters, too. Instead of which, there was Louise opening the door to him now, all Mystic Meg jewellery and smeared-mascara distress.

‘He won't listen to reason.'

Tears, again. It would never be better. If she was determined to stay, then Patrick would have to go, whatever Sophie thought.

Nigel was expecting the study or drawing room, but Louise led him to the den. The air inside was trapped and close. Patrick stood in front of the blank TV screen, smoking, a sheen of sweat on his nose. Mia sat tidily at the edge of the sofa. From the doorway, Nigel felt a paranoid surge of adrenaline, as though they were lying in wait to attack him. Then he saw that Mia was actually relieved by his arrival; Patrick too. He relished the novelty of their absolute attention. He couldn't remember his presence ever affecting Patrick, let alone positively.

‘What's all this in aid of?'

This was a phrase that had never left Nigel's mouth before, borrowed from Auntie B and apparently lying in wait for forty years for the occasion.

‘You have to tell her to go,' said Patrick.

‘I'm not going, I've told him.'

This was Louise. From the sofa, Mia's expression appealed to Nigel.

‘This is fucking madness,' said Patrick, madly. Nigel turned. Of the two of them, surely Louise was going to be the more biddable. While irrational, at least she lacked Patrick's volatility. And crucially, she trusted him, her big brother. She believed, after all, in the magic powers of his legal knowledge, as well as all other kinds of magic. He could conjure something out of Mum's will to placate her.

‘Read it.' She was holding out a torn piece of notepaper.

The only thing that was obvious was who had written it, although in what extremis Nigel couldn't imagine.
Hate, hate, hate, hate. The way he looks at me always.

He sat down, close to Mia. ‘You've read this?' he asked Patrick.

Patrick shook his head, an infant refusing a detested spoonful. His eyes were closed.

‘Why did you hate her?'

Louise's tone was genuinely, wonderingly curious.

‘I don't understand,' she said. ‘Patrick.'

Patrick's breathing pulled in his chest, painfully. He was overcome by a run of coughs.

‘She stopped him writing,' said Mia, unperturbed. ‘That's what the Shads said. Maybe that's why she
thought
he hated her, if they'd had a row about it or something.'

‘Why would she stop him writing?'

‘Maybe she felt jealous about his work,' Mia said. ‘She wanted him all to herself.'

‘But he was always the jealous one,' said Nigel.

There was not a shred of doubt about that. Say, just as a thought experiment, Nigel himself were to fall uncontrollably in love with someone other than Sophie, in the impossible way of films and novels and memoirs salaciously extracted in newspapers. Mia for example, just to make it as inconvenient as possible. If she were to insist: to be with me you must have no contact with Albie and Olly . . .

Patrick jolted, his voice thinned by coughing, but still vehement. ‘You're all talking shit. Bonkers as fucking conkers, the lot of you.'

He faced the three of them.

‘I
adored
the woman. Fool for love, fucking idiot. My feelings never changed, never, from the moment I clapped eyes on her.
Jesus—you can't imagine. The world at my feet, well, fuck the world when all you want . . . I tried, Christ, bought the house—thought that would make her happy. Took the thirty pieces of silver. Sold myself down the fucking
river
.'

Patrick rubbed his trembling jaw and looked at Louise. It was a glance of abject directness. Whatever he was about to say, Nigel felt bound to believe him. He had never looked at either of them so democratically, unveiled by hostility or irritation or his magnetic preoccupation with Mum, who was the only person he ever truly wanted to look at. Who could doubt that?

Mia reached to touch Patrick's leg, coaxing him to sit. ‘I just thought, with that note, maybe you'd had a row. It makes sense you were pissed off with her if she'd put a stop on your work in some way. I mean, for whatever reason.'

Ignoring her, Patrick stilled the hand rubbing his face on to his opposite shoulder, half cradling himself.

‘She didn't stop me doing anything. The thing about Sara . . .' Hopelessly, he hoisted his crooked arm and dropped it, a flightless wing. ‘She didn't care enough to stop me doing anything.'

Mia hovered, not touching, still trying to get him to sit. Louise turned away from them and looked to Nigel, an appeal immediately at the ready.

‘You know they're getting married,' Nigel told her, with some satisfaction.
Enough.

At this Patrick growled, craning back to him. Nigel flinched, but all he was aiming for was the note, which he swiped from his hand. Louise, Nigel could see, was too shocked by what she had just heard to register the capitulation. For seconds Patrick parsed the scrap of paper, head craned back and arm fully stretched.

—face any of it. Oh God let it be over. Lies. Every day the same. You get what you deserve. Every day.
The way he looks at me, always. Touches even. Hate. Please no more hurting. Hate hate hate hate. The only thing I can do is try to live and—

‘You can't be.' Louise faced Mia. ‘She would have told me. Mum—Kamila would have known.' This, to Patrick, who paid no attention.

When he spoke, his voice was robustly irritable: old, of course, but entirely unbroken.

‘“
The way he looks at me, always.
”
How do you think I fucking looked at her? It didn't change from the moment I saw her, out in the arse end of nowhere. Love. I looked at her with love. That was the way I looked at her. And she loathed it.'

Patrick shook the flimsy sheet, offering it to whoever wanted to claim it. ‘Not at the beginning. But hate—fuck me.'

He smiled down, at a reality that still amazed him.

‘Hate hate hate. That was your mother's department.'

 

Then

1997

L
OUISE WANTED
her mum. She was over six months pregnant, beginning to get huge, and for the first time in the three years they'd been together, Warren had completely forgotten her birthday. When he didn't turn up for his tea she had a surge of hope that he was out doing last-minute shopping, but he had just gone straight to the pub from work. He came in late, his eyes pink from smoking dope in the van with the lads, grumbling there was nothing in the fridge as he ate an indiscriminate assortment of the food that was actually in there. Then, stoned and beery, he took her into the bedroom and shagged her. As Louise rocked against the weight of him (they had to do it from the side, she'd got so big already), she stared at the Artex on the top half of the wall in front of her, which was coming off in patches like a disease, and was overwhelmed by the shittiness of their flat, of Warren's unromantic demands, of their life to come with the baby and no money. She wanted her mum. She wanted her so badly it was like the worst sort of craving, like no way she'd ever wanted her before, as though she had that thing that supposedly made you eat coal but in her case it was wanting to see her mum. As Warren came, Louise reached out to replace a triangle of wallpaper
beneath the Artex that drooped from its seam. She hadn't chosen it. She hadn't chosen bloody anything.