The Love She Left Behind (24 page)

‘Do you remember when I left—before I left, I mean? When I met Paddy?'

‘Of course.'

‘Yes, you weren't that little.'

She continued to watch the deserted building. Her tone was remote, but relaxed.

‘But you remember, when we talked about it, and I asked you for advice. You were always so sensible.'

Her gaze shifted to him; acute, unchangingly blue. No one had eyes like hers.

‘You remember. I asked you what I should do.'

He did. He remembered too much. With the nostalgia of walking into a smell, Nigel reinhabited his childhood desire to protect her.

‘I let you decide,' she said.

‘Yes.'

It was all he could bring himself to say. As ever, he was a disappointment to her. Her sigh extended into draining the last of the tea and slamming the mug on the table surface. She managed to make the gesture look dashing, a little dangerous. A buccaneer, unlike her son.

‘Well. You make your own bed, and you lie in it.'

Already, Mum was getting to her feet. Nigel scrabbled his fingers against each other for a convulsive few seconds. It was clear that he'd have to do the asking.

‘Do you need somewhere—do you want to stay the night?'

Oh no, she said, and explained that she was staying with her friends the Shads, who lived in Kew.

‘Just a pair of knickers and a toothbrush,' she told him, indicating the shopper.

He wasn't sure he believed that, when he thought about it that night, a sour bottle of Bulgarian corner-shop red to the bad. He wished he'd pushed her about the exhibition as well. What exactly were you going to see, Mum? What did you think about it? What did it, in fact, make you feel?

Downstairs, she paused with one foot on the front step.

Have you heard anything from Louise lately?'

Of course not. They had pared down their communication even beyond Mum's, purely to Christmas, and even those cards unreliably on his part.

‘She's having a baby.'

‘Oh.' What else was there to say?

‘Poor bitch.'

Apart from that. When he kissed his mother goodbye, one kiss on each cheek, the way he did now automatically, she started at the contact of the second, her face already withdrawn. But he could see the gesture had made her smile at his affectation. He waved her off, all the way out of sight, even when it was clear she wasn't going to turn back to see him. A straight figure with her bizarre cloud of hair, the bag she was carrying almost weightless. Once she had gone, Nigel turned back to the empty stairs, raking the raw joints of his fingers. Thank God for hydrocortisone.

 

Now

 

W
AKING TO
the sound of the electrician's van, Mia's spirit lifted: he had really turned up, and in a few hours there would be nothing left to thwart her leaving. Of course it hadn't mattered to anyone except her that without her supervision, Andy and his men wouldn't be paid and the kitchen would languish unfinished, but her sense of order had imposed its own timetable. Mia had resolved not to leave until the kitchen was done, and Mary Poppins-like, she had prevailed. During what Andy had almost promised would be his crew's last week, she still hoped that one of the email applications she had scattered into the ether might seed itself into a job opportunity. As that week had run fruitlessly into the following, with electric wires still hanging bare from the holes drilled for spots, and her inbox barren, Mia rang her mother to tell her that she'd be coming home for a while, for a break. She packed, then repacked. There wasn't much to take. The electrician was elusive, working on other jobs.

In the meantime, Patrick pressed harder each day for them to get married. To placate him, Mia made the call to the registrar. The date they agreed on was securely weeks ahead; its prospect
calmed Patrick down. Mia knew that by the time it came she'd be long gone.

Patrick thought he was giving her something, and for months she'd believed it was all she was ever likely to get. What he had actually given her was a ring that had belonged to his own mother, apparently never worn by Sara (Mia had enquired, suspiciously). It was pretty, art nouveau diamond chips and garnet, too uncontemporary for her to choose herself but clearly quite valuable, and it was easy enough to wear it on her engagement finger, if only to make a statement to Louise.

Showing Louise that note of her mother's had seemed like such a good idea, a subtle detonation to create a fault line along the aggravating supremacy of Sara and Patrick, clearing a space for their marriage. Admittedly, she too, misdirected by Dodie, had failed to understand the hatred expressed in that desperate fragment. She had accommodated it as evidence that Patrick's first marriage hadn't been such a fairy tale that it wouldn't permit a second. Well, she had been right about that, just not about anything else. And now there were consequences.

‘Don't be in any doubt, I kept my side of the bargain. Did everything she asked me to, this house,
Bloody Empire
, everything . . . Jesus. Every day. Bloody fool I was. Madness.'

Louise, though, still refused to believe that her mother had felt anything for Patrick except devotion. She was supported in this by the woman at the end of the phone, her sensitive, as she called her. And now, whipped into a sort of frantic affront by their engagement, not only was she refusing to leave, but she had told Mia that if she married Patrick, she would make sure they were both chucked out of the house. Nigel kept tempering this, but Mia had really had enough. Of all of them, Sara most definitely included. Even if they stayed, the house would never properly be theirs. With property no longer clouding her thoughts, Mia wondered
if she could have been having some very specific, low-key kind of breakdown, possibly connected to Jonathon and the MA. If she had believed in that kind of thing, she might even have said that something had possessed her.

Patrick's cough was worse and since Mia couldn't be bothered to rouse him, he spent almost the entire day in bed, coming downstairs only when called for supper. After so many days of apocalyptic rain, another bout of freakishly hot weather had descended. The unnaturally close feel inside the house was enhanced by the presence of Jamie and Holly, who drooped around, indolent and bored, sleeping almost as late as Patrick and, like him, nocturnally active. The school-holiday vibe enhanced Mia's own inert mixture of longing and apprehension over her postponed future. While Patrick slept, she sunbathed in the garden like a teenager. Only the rare chill that sliced into you as soon as the sun went behind a cloud reminded you it was April.

Now that the builders had dwindled to the sole, erratically appearing electrician, Holly's excursion to physiotherapy was the spine of the day. As usual, Nigel and Sophie chose this time that Louise was out with Holly to come round from their hotel. The children were keen to wake Jamie, who was affably prepared to kick a ball around with them once he was up. While Nigel fielded their enthusiasm, Sophie disappeared to tackle the unprocessed rooms upstairs. When she first declared this project, Mia had deployed the ring that Patrick had given her to ensure that nothing was thrown away without her agreement. But then Sophie unearthed a signed rehearsal copy of a Pinter play that Mia herself would have stuffed straight into a bin liner, and she had relaxed her unauthorised vigilance.

Nigel let the little boys run round the garden, with an eye to the cliffs, as Mia applied facial sunscreen, just to be on the safe side. Nigel, pacing, watched her. It was probably her last opportu
nity, she realised, to interrogate him about the note and its aftermath. The box was well and truly open. Better to tidy that up, too, before she left.

‘Dodie definitely said Sara stopped Patrick writing. She said Lucas couldn't forgive her for it,' she said. He didn't seem at all surprised by her raising the subject. Pleased, rather.

‘From what I know, he never seems to stop,' Nigel said. ‘Being successful at it—that's another matter. You can hardly blame Mum for that.'

Mia squinted up at him, framed against the sun.

‘Patrick says they all stopped putting his stuff on because they didn't like his politics. You know, after
Bloody Empire
. That's what he said when I first came here to ask him about his writing.'

‘Ah yes, the establishment conspiracy.'

Nigel planted his feet, arms crossed, savouring what he was about to say.

‘It is possible, you know, his plays just weren't any good,' he said. ‘Have you read them? The people Patrick badmouths weren't exactly shying away from lefties in the eighties, were they? I mean, Thatcher wasn't running the National Theatre, as far as I know. Maybe he was writing rubbish, or maybe he just pissed too many people off. I couldn't tell you. It's all nonsense to me, to be frank.' He lifted his shoulders, exhorting himself further than she had ever seen him dare. ‘I mean, the theatre. Come on. All that bloody
shouting
.'

Immediately worried by his own vehemence, he shuffled his feet closer and looked down. Mia quite liked him, really. There was a lot they agreed on.

‘What did your mum think of them, though?' she asked. ‘His plays?'

‘I'm not sure she saw any of them, apart from
Bloody Empire
.
You know, the famous one. I don't have a clue what she thought of it. Anyway—it bought her this.' Nigel waved back at the house.

That was weird, wasn't it, that something you made up out of your head, and not even something useful, like an iPad, could turn into a building? Mia considered saying this to Nigel. He would have got it.

‘Weird, though. It was her name in the play, wasn't it?' She felt quite proud of herself for remembering; she'd only read it the once.

‘And there any similarity ends.'

‘So it wasn't, like, based on her?'

Nigel stared. ‘You mean, was my mother raped by a gang of squaddies? Certainly not! Surely you haven't mistaken Patrick for a
realist
?'

There was a squawk from the boys. They had spotted Jamie, rubbing his densely decorated forearms across his pale, bare chest as he slouched into the garden from the back door. Olly punted the football powerlessly towards him.

‘Give us a minute!'

Booting the ball back to Olly, Jamie dropped to the grass, rooting for his cigarette packet in the jeans he wore slung below his pubic bone. Nigel immediately started after the boys and tried to divert them from the sight of their idol smoking. Jamie lit and inhaled, staring down at the grass and knuckling the back of his bedhead as he blew out the first deep catch of smoke. His hair, like Albie's, was curly, a shared link back to Sara, according to Nigel. He actually wasn't bad-looking underneath all the dodgy decisions. Although Mia had become familiar with his fidgety unease, today it seemed to have cranked up a notch. While he smoked he piked his knees up and stretched them back out, rested back on his elbows and then quickly changed his mind, sitting up again
before resuming his previous position. Mia kept her face to the sun, waiting.

‘There's summat . . .'

It would probably be about the army again. She didn't blame him for not breaking the news to Louise. If he was smart he'd just do a bunk, like she was planning to. Mia had decided she would go at night, a proper vanishing.
Never complain, never explain, babe.

Next to her, Jamie, pained, pulled his phone from the front pocket of his jeans, thumbed across the screen.

‘What d'you reckon?'

Mia reared away from the image he held out to her: flesh, nipples, thong.

‘I can't believe it, me.'

His own face was averted. It wasn't a joke, then, or a come-on. He wanted a reaction, but not that. Mia looked again, properly. It was amateur, not porn, a phone shot with flare at the top, no face, hairs and imperfections.

‘She must have nicked it out of me pocket when I was asleep.'

Holly. Mia took the phone from him, forced a proper look. Despite her still limited capacity to move, Holly had apparently trekked to filch Jamie's phone during the night, posed somewhere—possibly the bathroom, since it was the only room with a lock—and sent the shots (there was more than one, but Mia declined further revelation) to an unidentified number.

‘It must be this bloke,' said Jamie. ‘Fucking pervert. Jesus. She's not been fourteen five minutes.'

Apparently Louise had warned him to keep Holly away from phones. It was unlikely she thought this might be what Holly was up to. Mia wondered why the girl hadn't had the wit to delete the messages from the sent folder. Perhaps she had been interrupted?

‘She's mad on him,' said Jamie. ‘I mean, proper. I can't tell Mum, she'll go mental.'

Then he glanced at her. ‘Even more mental.'

Leaving the phone on the grass between them, he unfolded himself to his feet and mooched after the ball Albie had toddled into a ragged flowerbed nearby. The boys rampaged as he looped the ball effortlessly, high in the air above them. Mia looked down at the phone's dark sheen. For the first time she thought that Louise's attempts to protect Holly might not be completely deranged. But if someone wanted something so badly, how could you stop them?

Earlier that morning, as Holly and Louise were about to set off for physio, Louise had disappeared back into the house for her keys while Mia was struggling to wheel the emptied dustbin back from the end of the drive. As Mia passed, she had acknowledged Holly, sitting in the front seat of the rusted Nissan with the door open to circulate some air. She was perched with her legs stretched out on to the gravel—bending them still presented her with problems, and even with the seat cranked back as far as it would go, getting into the car made her grimace. Seeing Mia's glance at the car's beaten-out fender, Holly had launched into a meandering account of how many times Louise's car had been broken into, because the thinness of the doors made it possible to bend them back easily and jack the lock.