The Love She Left Behind

by Amanda Coe

  Louise went to the study, knocked and barged the door with the tray.

  ‘Breakfast!’ She heard herself but didn’t mind. Her nerves had vanished now; she was on a mission. There was the usual smoke to cough against until you got used to it. Mum smiled up at her from that lovely photo, which Louise now dusted regularly when she got a chance at the empty study. She put the tray down on the desk.

  ‘Thought you might fancy it.’

  Patrick glanced sidelong at the plate as he swiped the product of a rich, tearing cough into the handkerchief he pulled from his trouser pocket. She couldn’t tell if he was still giving her the silent treatment or just exercising his usual morning mood.

  ‘Up to you,’ Louise said. ‘Anyway, I wanted a word.’

  He finished with a sniff. Her pulse frantic, she launched in. She didn’t say anything about Kamila, but stuck to her need to keep Holly away from Leeds, and how the house being left to her and Nigel would enable her to do this, without, Louise stressed, affecting Patrick.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ he said, when she’d finished. ‘I want you out of my house.’

  He reached for his packet of cigarettes, his face blank to everything she’d just said.

  ‘It’s our house now,’ Louise maintained. Beyond them, in the kitchen, a mallet reverberated.

  ‘I’ll call the fucking police if I have to.’

  Despite the effect of her nerves, Louise realised she wasn’t actually frightened of him any more.

  ‘Mum wants me to stay.’

  Steadily, she told him about Kamila, about what Mum had passed on to her. If Patrick wouldn’t listen properly it was his own lookout; the facts were the facts. On the desk, Mum, in her crown of flowers, averted her eyes, smiling that smile that kept a secret with the side of the picture frame, encouraging her. The top of Louise’s head felt light, open, as though all the words she’d kept in there were finally free to spill out. By the time she got to what Mum had told her about the cancer, how Patrick should never have kept it from them and prevented her saying a proper goodbye, Patrick was gasping, hard breaths that made her worry he was having some kind of attack.

  ‘This is complete fucking nonsense!’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ She felt so calm. There was a far-away crumbling as a wall submitted to the pounding of the mallet.

  ‘You’ve always been a second-rate person, Louise . . .’

  He had to stop. As he gulped a fat tear on to the scarred leather of the desk, Louise was tempted to tell him not to pipe his eye.

  ‘I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but I knew nothing about her being ill. The first I knew was when the doctor came, out in the night, after she’d passed out at the supermarket—she was in terrible pain from her stomach. It was the first I knew. They took her into the hospital for tests. Nothing they could do. It was everywhere.’

  ‘But she says—’

  ‘She says nothing!’ Patrick spat the words through the fingers caging his face. ‘She’s dead and gone! There’s nothing, you stupid bitch! It all ends in nothing!’

  He was looking at her, finally. She was better than him. She’d always been better than him, even when he was somebody. And he was old now.

  ‘Well, you’re entitled to your opinion,’ she said. ‘But I’m telling you, Mum knew she was ill, even if you didn’t.’

  He barked, half-animal, half-laughter. ‘That’s more believable,’ he said. She was turned to leave. And then, ‘You know, she wished you’d never been born.’

  It was pathetic. He was pathetic.

  ‘You’re a bloody liar, you,’ she said. Not said, but shouted at him. For the first time in her life. Leaving, she dared to slam the door.

  An hour later, Louise scraped the dead breakfast into the bin and made Jamie a fresh one. He’d just come down. The study was empty; Patrick had gone out, using the front door so he didn’t have to brave the chaos of the kitchen, then tramping past on the gravel, taking a route through the back garden. Good riddance, she thought, and got on with feeding Jamie. The sound of that door still made her jump a little after what had happened with Holly. That wouldn’t leave her for a long time.

  After Jamie had finished eating, she drove them both to the hospital. Holly was dressed, ready to go and excited. Louise should have been ecstatic, but even as she saw Holly’s soft beam to Jamie, followed by her complaint to Louise that the jeans she’d brought for her the previous day weren’t the right ones, she felt flat. They were forced to wait for the final sign-off from the registrar on duty, whose whereabouts were uncertainly rumoured. Fortunately, Jamie compensated for Louise’s slump with his own high spirits, provoking Holly into ever more uncontrolled runs of their excluding laughter.

  She wished you’d never been born.

  Leaving them to it, Louise went to get herself a cappuccino from the machine outside the ward. As she watched the dismal froth spew erratically against the sides of the thin plastic cup, she recognised the shape of the bleakness that had come with her from the house. It wasn’t just the row with Patrick. It was Mum. It was as though a hand holding hers, tight in a deep pocket, the way Louise used to hold Jamie and Hol’s hands in her overcoat on the coldest days, big over small, had been withdrawn. She was on her own again. Just like that.

  The wait for the registrar stretched on for almost another hour. Then there was a trip to the dispensary for Holly’s painkillers and an unnecessary goodbye to her physio, who would be seeing her again in a few days as an outpatient. During all of these duties Louise was itching to get on the phone to Kamila. Surely Kamila could establish contact? It occurred to her that Kamila’s untimely trip to the concert was what had disrupted the delicacy of the connection, and that, like faulty broadband, it might be restored.

  When they got back from the hospital it was almost five and the builders were already outside, loading up their van. Mia was still nowhere to be seen. Louise, heading straight for the phone in the hall, felt a trill of gut panic as she realised Patrick wasn’t back either. He never went for walks, usually. Anything could have happened to him, particularly if he’d taken a whisky bottle out with him, which was more than likely. Louise abandoned her call to Kamila.

  ‘We’d better go and look for him,’ she told Jamie. ‘I’d never forgive myself if something’s happened.’

  The fact that Patrick had taken the garden path suggested the cliffs. Louise wondered if Patrick would ever hurt himself. It seemed unlikely, since he’d always been so protective of his health and comfort, but if he’d drunk enough the result may well be the same. He’d enjoy laying it at her door, anyway.

  Holly didn’t object when Louise settled her in the den with a mug of tea and some snacks. During the journey from the hospital her own ebullience had dwindled, as though the unfamiliar exertion of the drive had worn her out. Louise promised they wouldn’t be long, but Holly didn’t seem to hear her over the TV. Still, Louise made sure her mobile was safe in her own cardigan pocket. It would be beyond Holly to haul herself as far as the landline in the hall.

  It had been raining again, more or less since they’d started out for the hospital, and the ground was in an appalling state. She and Jamie looked for wellies that fitted from the collection in the back porch, but Jamie’s feet were too big for any of them, so he had to manage with his trainers. Louise pulled on a muddied green pair that might have belonged to Mum. Stamping her heels down into the chilly rubber, she ached again with the loss of her. She had hoped that her return to the house might reunite them, but there was no change. She had gone, definitely.

  Mum had loved Patrick more than anything in the world. Louise should have thought of that, shouldn’t she, before she started upsetting him? It was a punishment.

  ‘Come on then, woman.’ Jamie held the sagging back door open for her, his exposed sleeve already needled with rain.

  It wasn’t a day you’d have chosen for a walk. Louise’s knees were already protesting on the gradual incline that marked the end of the garden and th
e overgrown start of the sunken cliff path. As they got to this first summit, Louise could see there were much steeper parts ahead of them, the white line of the path twisting thinly through the high grass like an old scar. There was no sign of Patrick in the view ahead, but there were enough vagaries for blind spots in the lee of the hills where he might be hidden, collapsed or worse. Louise kept looking over the cliff edge, down to the brutal grey rocks below and the frothing mustard sea, fearing to see a liverish scrap of his raincoat, hair fronding in the water. Oh, please God, no, none of them deserved that. She hadn’t meant that.

  Soon, the steady rain made it hard to see much further ahead than they were walking. The walking itself exhausted Louise, and her slowness made Jamie impatient.

  ‘What about there?’ She had toiled to join him at a high point. To their right, the path forked on to a stumpy promontory surmounted by a white, domed building—a lookout, unlikely and municipal in the emptiness, squiggled with graffiti. Louise, who had got a stitch, struggled for the breath to reply. She had never come this far along the clifftops.

  ‘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

  THEY 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.’