The Love She Left Behind

by Amanda Coe

  Louise got going on the path. She always liked to finish a job, and it was satisfying seeing the margins of the rounded stones appear from beneath the weeds. Patrick had made it clear that he didn’t want her to do any more around the house. Which reminded her; she must return the hoover to Jenny.

  ‘Mmmmmn . . .’

  Mia stood on the back steps, taking in the air and stretching as though she wanted to be watched. Louise thought it might be yoga. On the upswing the stretches pulled the girl’s top from her jeans, revealing her concave stomach and the top of her hip bones.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ Mia asked. When she returned to standing, her hair fell back perfectly, as though freshly brushed.

  ‘Sorry—’

  Louise, still holding her most recent handful of weeds, headed for the patio. It had become a routine over the last couple of days, her bringing in the coffee for Mia and Patrick. Talking to Jamie, she’d forgotten.

  ‘No, I can make it,’ Mia objected. ‘Just wondered if you wanted one.’

  ‘I’ll do it. You’re busy.’

  ‘To be honest, I could do with a break.’

  Even as she said this, Mia sat on the top step, levering down from the hip without moving her planted feet. That looked like yoga as well, or the result of it. Louise chucked the weeds into a waste patch vivid with grape hyacinths and continued past her towards the kitchen. When she brought back the tray a few minutes later, the girl took the mug in that way of hers, as though it was unexpected.

  ‘Thanks so much!’

  Since Mia made no move to go back to Patrick, Louise took his coffee in for him. In the moment before she knocked on the open door, Louise felt sorry for the hopeless drop of Patrick’s shaggy head as it bent mechanically to the cigarette. (Mia had probably gone outside to escape the smoke.) As soon as she’d knocked, though, all her teenage nervousness returned. He barely looked round as she placed the mug at his elbow, and he didn’t speak.

  Turning away, Louise saw that a photo that sat on the desk, to the right of the kippered computer, was of her mother. The camera had come in close on her wearing a sort of crown of flowers and smiling with her eyes downcast. She didn’t look like herself. It was only the goofy vampire points of her incisors that identified the smile as hers.

  ‘It’s Mum.’

  Patrick turned, irritated by her exclamation. She wondered if he would allow her to take the picture so that she could look at it properly, but seeing him close his eyes against her, she decided not to ask. She could always come in when the room was empty. ‘I’ve never seen that one before.’

  Patrick lifted the frame from the desk, leaving the outlines of its lower edges stencilled in the surrounding dust. How many years since anyone had moved it? Bringing the photo briefly into range of his proper vision, he grunted, then cast it down, the sight unbearable to him. Unsupported by its angled brace, the picture lay prone on the desk’s worn leather. Louise knew better than to rescue it.

  Was it a wedding photo? That would explain the crown of flowers. It had only been Mum and Patrick at the wedding, as far as she knew. Dad had made the announcement, visiting her at Auntie B’s. It must have been a good year after he’d decided he couldn’t cope with her and Nigel, and Auntie B had stepped into the breach. Nigel had already been away at school for ages, so she had no one to share the news with. Not that Dad had produced it as news. Telling her that Mum was married was a weapon, designed to sever something. He had never mentioned her after that. Come to think of it, it must have been around then that he met Dawn and his visits began to peter out.

  In the kitchen, Mia loitered with her empty mug. ‘Thanks, Louise.’ The girl made a point of rinsing the mug at the sink and putting it on the draining board, while humming unconvincing appreciation at the green light that shone in through the window from outside. She seemed to be wanting a conversation.

  ‘Your mother must have loved the garden.’

  Anyone with eyes to see could tell no one had loved that garden for a very long time. But had Mum taken care of it, at the beginning? The back garden in their Leeds terrace had been a tiny concreted square, fissured by weeds and mainly occupied by Dad’s motorbike. Louise remembered now that Mum’s excited litany when she and Patrick bought the house had included quite a bit about the garden’s beauty and size. ‘Is that what Patrick said?’ she asked Mia.

  Mia looked around for a tea towel and started to dry her mug. ‘We’ve just been talking about his work, really. I imagine though, before she got ill . . .’

  ‘She wasn’t ill for very long. As far as any of us know.’ Louise couldn’t resist that bit. ‘That’s why it all came as a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .’

  Louise saw that the girl was embarrassed. Maybe this was all she was, landing in the middle of them like this, and her way of talking was just her attempt to conceal it. She made an effort to match Mia’s tone.

  ‘You’re right, though, she must have needed something to do while Patrick was in there writing all day!’

  They smiled at each other. What had Mum done with all those empty hours? Certainly not housework.

  ‘I don’t have much idea what Patrick’s been working on,’ said Mia, ‘do you? He hasn’t had anything produced in years, has he? I mean, you know, theatre stuff.’

  Louise didn’t know. The girl looked uncomfortable, but impelled to speak. ‘To be honest, I don’t think he’s actually written anything for ages.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Louise. It wasn’t for her to say.

  During their conversation Holly had dawdled in. She was definitely well enough now to be back at school, although she was still going about with a face like a smacked arse. No doubt about it, Louise was looking forward to being back at home, whatever state they found it in.

  ‘How many books has he written then?’ Holly asked Mia. Mia looked surprised. Louise was surprised herself.

  ‘Well, you know, they’re plays.’

  Holly looked indifferent. Anything written was a book to her. Mia smiled, a new expression, which made her much younger.

  ‘To be honest, I’m not sure myself: I’ll have to google it. I only really know the kind of famous one? The successful one, whatever. Not that many. Four? I think he wrote a few before.’

  Holly had already lost interest.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Mia, trailing into silence.

  Louise had tried to read Bloody Empire once, when the main library first got a copy. She had just left school, and was signing on. The fuss in the press was still quite recent. There was something magical about seeing Patrick’s book installed on a shelf in municipal respectability—proof of her own connection to a much larger world. Louise remembered exactly the unthumbed thickness of the individual pages, the assertive black text, the shiny blue of the cover and its urgent black-and-white photo of some crouched, howling figure. She also remembered how impossible it had been to understand, despite how very much she’d wanted to, the collection of oddly named people talking. She’d never read a play, before or since. It had endorsed all her awe of Patrick’s alien brilliance, the impossible air her mother breathed. Just for that time, there in the library, before she was defeated in her struggle to make sense of those baffling speeches and actions, Louise had felt that her life was going to be quite different.

  ‘It’s weird your mum not being an actress,’ said Mia. Louise must have shown her surprise. ‘Sorry, I don’t know if it’s horrible talking about her, or upsetting for you, I—’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Louise. Who else was left to talk about her?

  ‘I mean, she was very beautiful, from the pictures.’

  Well, Mum had been very beautiful. Louise didn’t even take after her dad, who hadn’t been bad-looking himself—in his twenties, anyway.

  ‘So I suppose I just thought that’s how she and Patrick must have met, through her being in something of his . . .’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I don’t think she’d have been able
to act her way out of a paper bag. She worked in a chemist after she got married. To my dad, I mean.’

  ‘How did she and Patrick meet?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Patrick,’ Louise told her. ‘I don’t really know.’

  Saying this, Louise’s ignorance peeled away so that she could see it, spread out for her like one of those old maps that stopped where they thought you dropped off the edge of the world. She’d never really wondered, let alone asked. It was what came after that that had meant so much. Patrick and Mum had met. That was the beginning, and everything else had followed. It was an old story, and now only Patrick was left to tell it. Head over heels. That was all she knew, from Auntie B. They’d fallen head over heels. Like Jack and Jill. Except Jack and Jill had been brother and sister.

  ‘It’s probably a good story!’ she said.

  Mia, as usual, was looking at Louise as though she spoke in another language, one she was determined, without aptitude, to learn.

  ‘I bet it’s amazing,’ she agreed.

  Cobham Gardens

  Tuesday night. December. (14??)

  Oh God,

  You’re right, there’s no point tormenting ourselves. Although torment with you is preferable to ordinary ecstasy with any of the others. Yes others, my love. A full and frank declaration, since you insist:

  The chambermaid, as you know. No more to say.

  A girl who works in my agent’s office. Blackheads on her breasts and an appalling laugh. I was pissed. For her sake, I hope she was too.

  Not quite Mrs Langley’s Swiss or possibly Austrian au pair. Long pre-Raphaelite (look it up) hair, and legs all the way up. Interrupted only by her fear of discovery. We were in the Langleys’ bathroom (a party), there isn’t a proper lock.

  But I only think of you. You you you. I went to another literary shitterary party last night and was preyed upon by a 40-year-old lady writer you won’t have heard of who beds tyros like me as trophies. Not my type at all, although a celebrated beeyootay, so don’t worry. I don’t fancy her any more than I fancy ending up in her memoirs.

  You will be the sole subject of mine, with or without you. No cheap cracks about the kitchen, please note.

  Patrick x

  The doctor says the reason I can’t shift the cough is smoking, so trying to cut down. Hell.

  NIGEL HADN’T INTENDED to arrive unannounced on Saturday afternoon, but no one picked up the landline despite three attempts, and although he left a message on Louise’s mobile, she didn’t get back to him. The house was shut-off and dim as he paid the cab, its pall of unwelcome enhanced by the mizzle that filled the air like a teenage mood. If they were going to put the place on the market, and that ‘if’ was highly moot, and a very compelling reason to talk to Patrick, the whole lot would need much more than a lick of paint.

  By now, he knew better than to present himself at the front. He went round to the kitchen, knocked for form’s sake, and let himself in through the door that skewed down from its frame at the top.

  The kitchen looked better for Louise’s efforts, no doubt about it. With the bottle installation removed and surfaces scoured, you could appreciate the depth of the window frames and the solidity of the walls. For the first time, Nigel’s imagination reached beyond estate agent’s details to him and Sophie and the boys settled here, under mellow beams. A second home, why not? Plenty of the partners had them. For Sophie it would be a whole invigorating project—she loved that sort of thing. She’d never been happier than when tearing out the perfectly good bathroom in the house they’d bought when she was pregnant with Olly, replacing it to specifications uncompromised even by having to relieve her increasingly strained bladder in a bucket. It would be interesting to see what Patrick might say.

  ‘Hello?’ he tried. The house was silent. Nigel walked up the dark corridor that led from the kitchen, glancing into each low, cold room that led off it. The smell in the dining room declared a damp problem that got worse in the library, absorbed, no doubt, into the pages of all those books, which remained. The vast TV was dark in the den. No one ever went into what he supposed was called the drawing room, with its handsome chimney breast and rigidly opposed sofas. At the end of the corridor was Patrick’s study. Approaching it, Nigel couldn’t deny a tickle of fear. The uneven flags had resounded against his shoes with each step; if Patrick was in there, surely he must have heard him by now? His feet landed softly outside the shut door, where a cheap, newish rug marked the threshold. Nigel knocked, just in case.

  The chair was pushed snugly into the desk, the computer off. The ashtray was empty. It was all a bit Marie Celeste. Nigel took out his phone and called Louise again. This time she answered, patchily.

  ‘We’re on the train!’

  They’d left that morning, heading back to Leeds. Mia had gone the night before, disappointingly. But Louise was worried to hear that Patrick wasn’t around: had Nigel checked upstairs? He couldn’t have had a fall, could he? Maybe Nigel should—The line died. Nigel went upstairs, without ringing her back.

  Nigel was relieved to find the bathroom clear of Patrick, as well as the bedroom. He briskly glanced into the other rooms, the one where his mother had died included, although he left it to last, and was perfunctory. Empty. There was no one in the house except him.

  He rang Louise back.

  ‘He isn’t here. The back door was open.’

  They wondered together what to do, although Nigel immediately regretted the collaboration. His sister told him to check the garden, as though he wouldn’t have thought of it. After he had promised to do this, and to call her if Patrick turned up, she interrupted his sign-off to ask, ‘Have you seen the curtains?’

  ‘What curtains?’

  ‘The ones in the room, you know, where Mum . . . not their bedroom, the other one.’

  Since Nigel was standing just outside, he once again opened the door to the room where their mother had died. The curtains, drawn shut, were fudgy beige and unexceptional. Curtains were the kind of thing Sophie could spend hours on. From her beleaguered anecdotes, Nigel had picked up that they tended to be both problematic and expensive. It remained hard to see why.

  ‘Yeah. What’s the thing with the curtains?’

  ‘They’re new.’

  Louise cut out again, but keenly rang him back to explain. If their mother had only become ill in the week or so before her death, as Patrick claimed, why had she been sleeping in the spare room long enough to warrant and allow the ordering of a new set of curtains? Nigel was baffled. He suggested, simply, that the curtains had been worn out and she had at some point replaced them. No mystery there.

  ‘In that house?’ said Louise. Nigel took the point. Their mother’s deficiencies as a housekeeper apart, when did they ever have guests to warrant such an uncharacteristic effort?

  ‘Anyway, her clothes. All her everyday clothes were in that room, Nidge. I realised when I was doing the sort-out. It was only the ones she didn’t wear any more she kept in their ward—’

  This time Louise seemed to have gone for good. Oh, she was an annoying cow. He had heard the excitement in her voice. Always latching on to something, milking it for emotion. If you could be passive aggressive, maybe it was possible to be a passive drama queen. What was it she was cranking up here? That Mum had been sleeping in the spare room for months because she was ill and Patrick had kept it from them? Even if he had, so what? It wasn’t like he’d held a pillow over her face. And why had Louise chosen to delay sharing this speculation until she was well away from any possibility of confronting Patrick about it? If she felt so thwarted from a late-stage Florence Nightingale bid to care for Mum, she could take him on herself. Nigel certainly wasn’t going to say anything.

  A sound intruded: the tidal crunchings of a car labouring cautiously into the pocked drive. From the landing window, Nigel saw the livery of the local taxi firm. Patrick got out, fishing in his raincoat pocket for cash. He looked different. Smarter somehow, despite the raincoat. The cab drove off. Nigel
headed downstairs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Patrick’s tone was amiable, despite his surprise. Nigel saw that he’d had a haircut. The flop of his forelock as he tossed the house keys into a dish on the hall table was newly boyish.

  ‘I tried to ring.’

  ‘They’ve all gone, thank Christ.’ Patrick’s ears, revealed by the trim, were enormous. Once Nigel had noticed this, it was difficult not to stare. Surely they hadn’t always been that large? ‘I suppose it’s me you want?’

  Nigel said that it was. Which was true, given everything there was to dot and cross. Certainly better to do it without the irritant of Louise, and perhaps even lacking the stimulant of Mia. He pointed out to Patrick that he’d left the back door unlocked.

  ‘Nothing worth stealing,’ he shrugged, leading the way in to the kitchen. He’d brought a pasty in from town, which he ate messily straight from the paper bag, while Nigel made them both an instant coffee and ferreted out a hardened stripe of cheese left in the anachronistically tiny fridge. No caffeine, no dairy. He completed the diabolical trinity with the heel of supermarket white sliced Louise had abandoned in the bread bin, making himself a sandwich.

  ‘Do you think you’ll stay here, Patrick?’

  In the moment of delay before he answered, Nigel feared an outburst, but Patrick’s shrug was amiable. A trip to the pub had possibly followed the barber’s.

  ‘I don’t see why not. Managed here long enough.’