by Amanda Coe
As he nodded at Sophie’s detailed account of her interactions with various unhelpful courier agencies, Nigel checked this thought. Actually, it would be nothing short of astonishing to find Louise in breach of her stolid honesty: Nigel might have liked her so much more if she had ever in her life summoned enough gumption to steal, or even lie. Still, he’d confer with Sophie about the rings. As for the matter of Mum’s title to the house, there was obviously no point in filling Louise in with the larger picture until it was entirely clear. Larger pictures overwhelmed her, they always had. She was vexed enough by a life lived in details.
‘So they said of course we’ll send a credit note and I said, you know what? You can send me a voucher for twenty-five per cent off and free delivery and maybe I won’t post a moan on your website—course, I’ve already put it up.’
‘Well done that woman.’ Nigel patted Sophie’s hand and accepted seconds on the coq au vin. Already, his guts were twisting.
The next day was predictably draining. On the train, Nigel made calls and formulated emails to compensate for his absence, both actual and prospective. Still, a refreshment-trolley cappuccino’s length of staring out at the meaningless countryside was enough to drive him back to his laptop and its demands. Relaxation never helped; for one thing, it made him oversensitive to the alerts of his treacherous digestive system. The cappuccino had been a mistake, if you were to believe the nutritionist Sophie had arranged for him to see: no caffeine, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol. Sod that. All the consultation had done was make him feel anxious about ignoring the prim, clear-skinned young woman’s impossible advice, which probably made the symptoms worse. She had told Nigel the problem was that human evolution was much slower than the changes human beings had wrought on themselves with post-industrial nutrition.
Nigel didn’t share his own theory: that his digestive system was the victim of a more personal failure to evolve. His belly had started to ache the moment he was removed from the carelessly processed diet of his childhood and forced to consume the grains and pulses and alien vegetables of his unusually progressive boarding school. By the time he had finished A-levels, the general middle-class diet had caught up with the headmaster’s pioneering, yogurt-manufacturing wife and he was condemned to a lifetime of discomfort. Only in his student years had he found respite, confirming that existing on a diet of white-bread golden syrup sandwiches, Pot Noodles and bags of crisps eased the cramps and torrential shittings that otherwise tormented him. Sophie wasn’t having it; she said it was all in his mind and forced him to eat courgettes as an example to the boys.
At the station Nigel took a cab, resenting the expense. When he arrived the house looked deserted, with no lights on, but it turned out that this was because everyone was in the kitchen at the back, eating. Everyone being Patrick, Louise, Holly (he had forgotten about her again) and the journalist, who introduced herself as Mia.
‘Hi!’ the girl exclaimed, as though welcoming him. As though his arrival had made her day. Having prepared to be defensive, Nigel was stirred to be winning. She was very attractive. She had glossy black hair and tight jeans and boots and looked a touch, a pleasing touch, oriental.
‘I’m so sorry about your mother.’
Nigel made the noise and pulled the face suitable to acknowledging bereavement. He stopped Louise from fetching him a plate, explaining he’d had a sandwich on the train (actually, a palliative bag of salt and vinegar crisps). Patrick, whom he’d been expecting to look besieged, was convivial. Perhaps it was the right time of day, with the wine on the table. And the tight jeans.
‘This charming young lady is here to pick what passes for my brains these days,’ Patrick announced. As Louise rolled Nigel a look about this, she noticed Holly’s plate, still full of glutinously overcooked pasta.
‘Holly, you’ve got to eat something.’
‘I told you—I’m not hungry. Can I get down now?’
She scarcely looked to be wasting away. Louise sighed and told her there were yogurts. The girl, ignoring this, got up without looking back and slouched out of the room, already texting. Her departure allowed Nigel to sit next to Mia.
‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘Which paper are you from?’
Mia laughed. ‘If only. I’m a student. I’m writing my thesis on—on Patrick.’
A little bow of the head to Patrick acknowledged the recent privilege of using his first name. Patrick dipped his head back, receiving the tribute. Nigel remembered that he could be charming.
‘It’s not an interview, then.’
Bloody Louise.
‘I thought you said—’ Louise objected.
‘Well, it’s a little bit two birds with one stone. Is that really awful? I was thinking—horse’s mouth, for the thesis—sorry, that sounds terrible’—the girl flashed an even-toothed smile of contrition at Patrick—‘but then maybe something for the student paper, if that’s okay. I feel awful about the timing and everything.’
But not so awful that she hadn’t got her feet under the table.
‘Life of a sort goes on,’ Patrick reassured her.
Nigel moved himself to be suspicious. ‘Which university?’ he asked.
‘Newcastle.’
‘You’re doing a BA . . .’
‘MA.’
‘In—’
‘Media and communications.’
Patrick snorted into his wine glass. This was all very awkward. Nigel thought the girl looked like she almost certainly was a student, although she seemed very groomed and self-confident. Young people were now though, weren’t they? She could be any age from twenty to thirty. She could be a journalist, and lying through her teeth.
‘I’m really so sorry about your mother; she was so nice to me when I emailed. I was really looking forward to meeting her. I should’ve double-checked or rung—it was just—I didn’t think. Stupid of me.’
‘It was all very sudden,’ said Louise emphatically.
If only she hadn’t come from so far away.
‘Listen,’ said Nigel, ‘this isn’t ideal, obviously. Why don’t we reimburse you for your fare or petrol, or whatever, and you can arrange with Patrick to come down in a month or two?’
Patrick reared at this. ‘Why the hell should she? The poor girl’s here now.’
‘Well—’
‘Course, totally, I’m really sorry about all this—’
‘It’s not your fault, God—’
‘Don’t listen to this lot—’
‘About inconveniencing you—’
‘You aren’t.’ Patrick was definitive. ‘I’m not inconvenienced. It’s a delight to have you here. What did you arrange with Sara?’
Mia’s eyes flicked around the three of them, assessing hierarchies.
‘That I’d come and talk to you. She offered for me to stay . . . she said it wouldn’t be a good idea to talk for more than a couple of hours at a time, because of your work. I mean, it started when I emailed—I just wanted to email you the questions, but she said you don’t do email?’
‘I prefer the old ways.’
‘Yeah. So . . . it wouldn’t be like, days.’
He could check the computer, thought Nigel. The emails would give him some sense of the girl’s credibility, along with ringing the university. For now, he may as well keep Patrick sweet.
‘Holly has to get back to school,’ Louise said suddenly. No one could see the point of this. ‘If you’re wanting me.’ No one wanted her. ‘Maybe you should book yourself into the B and B up the road,’ she said to Mia. ‘I mean, tonight’s okay, but after that. With the house. Patrick’s not . . . there’s no one to cook or anything.’
‘Oh, I could do that,’ said Mia. ‘I love to cook. Don’t get much chance at uni!’
She really was hot to trot, wasn’t she?
Louise’s face set. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t matter to keep Holly off until the end of the week. She’s still a bit off-colour. Then I can see to you all.’
‘You heard the girl,’ said Patri
ck. ‘She’ll see to me.’
The innuendo eddied, unintended.
‘I feel awful,’ Mia repeated, her poise unassailed. ‘Look, you’re right, Mr Conway—’
‘Nigel, please. It’s not Conway, I’m his stepson—it’s Dean, actually. But Nigel.’
‘Oh God, sorry, duh, Mia. Listen, I’ll go back in the morning, don’t worry about the fare—’
‘Stay!’
Patrick slammed the tabletop so hard that the plates jumped. They all stilled. Nigel felt he should be taking command of the situation, but he could never thump anything like that. In the ensuing silence, his stomach bubbled appeasingly. It was a small mercy, he realised, that his hay fever hadn’t made a reappearance.
‘We’ll stay until Friday, then,’ said Louise. ‘It’s not a problem.’ She smiled, forcing her mouth. ‘Does anyone fancy a yogurt?’
There were no takers.
May 19, 1978
Cobham Gdns
Dearest –
You’re still on my lips, salt and sour and sweet all at once. I hope you missed your train and he knows what you’ve been doing and the whole world knows. I live for the taste of your cunt.
Leave him—and the children—and live with me. It’s the only way, you know it is.
I love you.
P x
PS. If he tells you that, he’s a liar.
THE VACUUM CLEANER was broken. With all Mum’s clothes and bits sorted, Louise had decided to make a start on the house. It was nearly overwhelming, the amount there was to do if she was going to make a proper job of it. She assembled her materials: bucket, bleach, polish, dusters, rolls of paper towels. But the broken vacuum cleaner was a problem. There was no point discussing it with Patrick, or suggesting he fork out for a new one, although he’d have to eventually. She decided to call on the neighbour, Jenny, to see if she minded lending hers for the day. Holly could have done with the fresh air as well, but she refused to come with her. She still looked peaky, so maybe she was better off in the warm, thumbs busy on her phone.
‘I’m just popping out.’
Patrick was in his study, answering Mia’s questions. Louise had made them both a coffee. There should have been biscuits, but she had eaten them all herself watching TV the night before with Holly. By the look of her, Mia didn’t go in much for biscuits. She even took the mug of coffee gingerly, as though its proffered handle was a mild, surprising insult she was graciously prepared to overlook.
‘Honest toil,’ said Patrick. Louise wasn’t sure if this was getting at her or talking about him and the girl, who sat with her laptop angled on her crossed legs, tapping in notes. She closed the door on them, quickly.
It was a strange time, she thought, walking up the black unpavemented road to the other house. The countryside, that was strange in itself. Louise couldn’t remember being in the country ever, really, apart from the odd school trip, although there was plenty of countryside around Leeds. Different from this: less something, or more something else—green? Up and down? There was the sea, as well, making it even stranger. She wondered if her mother, a Leeds girl all her life, had loved it. She must have, to have lived here nearly thirty years. Although she had loved Patrick enough to have been happy in a cardboard box. Those had been her exact words, Louise remembered that: her frozen to the stairs, her mum and dad rowing in the lounge, Dad shouting, ‘Where are you going to live?’ and Mum shouting back, ‘What does it matter where we’re living—I’d be happy in a cardboard box!’ Luckily, it had never come to that.
The neighbour’s house was chasteningly smart, with a gravelled drive and twin bay trees, pruned into lollipops, on either side of the matt, sage-painted front door. Jenny answered the bell, harried and pleasant and less forbidding than her paintwork.
‘Oh, Sara’s daughter—of course, come in!’
Sara. With the long ‘a’, like ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. Louise never called Mum that, to herself. Sara was Patrick’s invention; he had hated Sally and changed it. Since Louise had been here, she’d had to get used to attaching the other name to her mother, and to hearing herself say it, just to be understood. Auntie B had always stuck to calling Mum Sally, to make a point.
Louise, apologising for the intrusion, explained about the hoover. Jenny insisted she come in. Louise felt a right lump in that lovely house. Even by her standards, it was well looked after, and the furniture was gorgeous. Exactly the sort of thing she might have had herself if she’d been able to afford it, although she would have gone for a bit more colour than the chilly whites and beiges and greys that toned in so well with Jenny’s thick ash hair and layered jumpers. Even the dog, an amiably overweight golden retriever, matched. Except for the house’s size, it all couldn’t have been more different from Patrick’s and her mother’s place.
‘How is Patrick?’
Jenny led Louise into a pristine kitchen-diner with a granite-topped island in the middle. Radio 4 muttered to itself in the background.
‘Not too bad. Well, taking it quite hard, really.’
Louise could hear her accent landing flatly on the granite in a way she never did at home. ‘I’m not sure how he’s going to manage, to be honest.’
Jenny sighed. ‘No. It must be a worry.’
She wasn’t going to join in, or help. Louise couldn’t blame her.
‘I thought I might—I don’t think they had a cleaner—’
‘No, I think there was a lady who retired—or maybe Patrick let her go.’
Jenny used the slender edge of her hip to nudge open a glossy white façade, revealing an immaculately ordered utility cupboard. ‘I could pass on the number for ours—she’s marvellous, but I don’t know if she has a gap—she’s rather in demand.’
She wheeled out the vacuum cleaner, which she insisted on emptying. Quickly establishing that it resembled nothing she’d ever pushed around a floor, Louise thanked the other woman for the trouble.
‘I was very fond of your mum.’ Jenny ran the tap to chase dust down the sink. ‘I wish there had been more we could do.’ The definitive sparseness of this statement clearly held so much more than its words that Louise immediately itched with questions. When? What was wrong? What were you hoping to do? Do you mean her being ill, or something with Patrick, before then? Why do you think the house was in that state? But it wasn’t easy to talk to Jenny, through the barrier of cashmere and granite and Radio 4.
Carefully, the woman clicked shut the casing on the waste compartment. ‘She told me all about you and your brother.’
Louise looked down to mask her welling eyes as Jenny tactfully concentrated on the vacuum cleaner.
‘Let me give you a lift back. It’s a heavy old beast.’
Throughout the short drive to the house, they both talked at slightly desperate length about the idiosyncrasies of the hoover. Louise promised to return it as soon as she’d finished, and when she’d turned off the car engine, Jenny asked her to read out the cleaner’s number from her mobile, as she didn’t have her reading glasses. Louise had to hold the mobile at arm’s length to see the digits while Jenny wrote them down for her. She probably needed glasses herself: another thing that needed sorting.
‘She did—’ Jenny hesitated. ‘I do think your mother would have wanted to speak to you, if things had been different. She got worse so quickly . . .’
‘You didn’t know, then?’ Louise asked. ‘That she was ill?’
‘No,’ said Jenny. ‘I don’t think anyone did, did they?’
Louise wished she could confide in her about her suspicions regarding Patrick and the separate bedrooms, but she was dumb with everything else she wanted to ask Jenny, who had known Mum so much better than her. She declined her offer of help to wrestle the hoover out of the back seat. Blurting a final thank you, she carried the contraption inside. She was desperate for a cup of tea and something to eat. But as soon as she got in, she could hear shouting—Patrick and Holly, coming from the upstairs landing. The girl, Mia, stood at the foot of the stairs; re
treating or advancing, it was impossible to tell. She smiled at Louise, absolving herself, as Louise rushed up to see what was going on. Holly’s appeal to her was immediate.
‘I didn’t do nothing!’
‘Get out!’
Patrick was purple, beside himself. Louise stepped in before he could hit Holly, although for all his rages she’d never seen him do violence.
‘He chucked the radio—he’s broke it! I didn’t do nothing, promise, Mum!’
Through the open door of the bathroom, Louise saw Patrick’s elderly radio on the floor, its roar of untuned static adding to the chaos. The approach of her body as she went to retrieve it provoked a flare of deafening interference. She twisted the dial, greasy with antique filth, until it clicked off.
‘You’re mental, you!’
‘Holly, that’s enough.’ Quickly, Louise moved back on to the landing. ‘What’s been going on?’
Holly had been running a bath, and, as she explained, since she couldn’t listen to music on her phone in case it dropped in, had decided to use the radio instead. Patrick had apparently gone berserk at the noise. He’d said that it was impossible to work with that deafening crap playing at top volume, he couldn’t hear himself think in his own house, he’d had enough of both of them, they should fuck off and leave him alone and he wanted no more to do with them. And more along those lines, as Holly sobbed.
‘Patrick, she didn’t think. She’s not fourteen till next month.’
‘I can see that thinking doesn’t come easily—’
