The Love She Left Behind

by Amanda Coe

  ‘Very smart,’ he said, looking round. Louise had to concede that it was. Since Kamila had conveyed Mum’s approval of the changes, she felt much better about Mia’s presumption. Nigel sat in one of the old chairs they’d moved back in with the pine table, which now looked even shabbier amid the new fittings. He asked some formulaic questions about Holly’s recovery, but she could tell that his interest was elsewhere. He and the family were travelling home later that day. Louise braced herself to talk about money, as they had agreed.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she told him. ‘You might be right.’

  It was all different since she’d known about Patrick, about his true feelings. How could she think of continuing to live here with him and Mia? Even Mum’s own view had undergone a change in the last days. If anything, she thought Louise (and Nigel) should take the house outright and Patrick be damned, but Nigel had persuaded Louise that this would be legally difficult, if not impossible. Kamila had been a godsend, as ever. As she had pointed out, the main thing was that Holly was improving every day.

  Sitting across the table from Nigel, Louise set it out to him, making sure that they agreed. He would give her her half of the money the house was worth, and with that she’d buy a place for herself and the kids, far away from all the trouble that waited in Leeds. She could see that Nigel hadn’t been expecting this at all.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Great. I’ll . . . crack on, if you’re sure.’

  He told her that she should have a solicitor to handle her side of their agreement, which had to be drawn up formally. Surely that was money for old rope, she pointed out, with his qualifications. It wasn’t as though she didn’t trust him.

  Nigel ran his hand down his face. His skin was pink, dewed with raindrops, or perhaps sweat. It was still clammily warm, despite the wet.

  ‘Weezer.’

  He still remembered, then. Perhaps he even remembered it better than she did, the time before Patrick, although he never talked about it. That day, when Dad had called them in to tell them Mum had gone, Nigel standing next to her, the trapped summer air in the small, dark living room of their terrace, the garish pattern of the carpet. The unprecedented formality of being summoned by their dad in this way had inculcated them both with dread before he’d even opened his mouth. Louise’s memory didn’t include any of his actual words, just the import of them soaking into her as she stared down at the uneven way the inside legs of her bibbed tomato-red shorts rode up into her granular white thighs. She had cried. Nigel hadn’t, and had got credit for it. Nothing had been the same again.

  Much later, when everything had been rearranged because Dad couldn’t be expected to work and look after children, Auntie B had put up a picture of Nigel on the china cabinet, to replace the actual Nidge who had gone away to school. When Louise saw him again, it was impossible to imagine them playing trampolines on the bed. ‘Give your brother a cuddle, then,’ Auntie B had urged, and Louise had hugged this tall new boy with long hair and odd clothes who didn’t talk much like Nidge any more or even smell like him; that warm, stale, boy-smell of body and earth and chocolate biscuits. He hadn’t hugged her back. She could feel how embarrassed he was by her, and he had stayed embarrassed ever since.

  She put her hand out, across the table.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to trust in the universe. Things have a way of working out.’

  Nigel didn’t respond, but for once he kept his hand there, beneath hers. She could feel him gathering all his breath. ‘You know what she did,’ he said, finally. ‘Mum—’

  There was a wail from upstairs—an animal howl. Nigel was faster than her on the stairs, with her knees. When Louise reached the bedroom, Nigel was already sitting next to Patrick on the bed, patting his back, murmuring. No blood, no disaster.

  Mia had gone. At first Louise thought it was just Patrick panicking because Mia had got up early and gone out without telling him, which he never liked, but as he insisted, she saw that it was true: the room had been stripped back to what belonged there. There was nothing left in Mia’s side of the wardrobe, nothing in her allocated drawers. The zipped bags of toiletries were gone from the bathroom, and downstairs, her jackets and coat had been removed from their hooks, her aligned pairs of shoes taken from the mat. The dining room table was bare of the laptop she kept on it, always exactly parallel to the edge. She’d buggered off, all right. Like a thief in the night.

  Patrick was wild, demanding they call the police. Nigel assured him that there was nothing the police could do. Mia was free to go. She hadn’t taken anything that wasn’t hers, had she?

  ‘I’ll call them myself.’ Patrick struggled up. They let him go.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Nigel, still on the bed. ‘What’s she playing at?’

  He looked upset himself. Louise felt excited; more than that—relieved. Mia had seen sense, pure and simple. Mum was at work, somewhere.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been right, them getting married. A young girl like that.’

  Holly stood at the door. ‘What’s happened?’

  While bleared, she was already made up and dressed, quite carefully, even her hair straightened, so the noise couldn’t have woken her up. Louise thought of Holly’s Valium from the hospital, and wondered if they should give Patrick one to calm him down. She could hear him shouting on the phone.

  ‘She must have left a note or something,’ said Nigel. But Mia hadn’t. Not in the bedroom, not downstairs. There were no voicemail messages on either of their phones. When the police rang back to see if everything was okay, following Patrick’s garbled rant to 999, they were advised not to waste any more police time. Between them, she and Nigel realised that they didn’t know Mia’s surname, let alone any details of her family, although, as Nigel pointed out, there was enough paperwork around the place to repair this ignorance and allow pursuit of her if it was really needed. Was it, though?

  Louise went to retrieve the Valium packet from Holly’s room. She hadn’t seen Patrick so agitated since she was a teenager, and seldom so mobile. She’d expected him to take to the study with a whisky bottle, but instead he kept ranging around downstairs from room to room, talking, talking, talking. Most of it swearing, of course, tirades about faithlessness and futility and the folly of age. Nigel shadowed him tentatively all the while, like a netball marker without the confidence to try for the ball. At least Patrick didn’t seem likely to make a break out of the house this time. Amid all this, Holly started trying to persuade Louise that she should go out to do a food shop, as she’d planned, but Louise was determined to stick around until she could see Patrick felt a little calmer.

  He was coughing unstoppably, doubled over, and he wasn’t a good colour. All this might kill him. She knew he wouldn’t take a Valium if she suggested it, and possibly not even if Nigel did, and decided on grinding a tablet into a heavily sweetened cup of tea. As she went down to the kitchen, Holly planted herself at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Leave him, Mum, he’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’m sure he will, but I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘Just—go shopping. If you miss the shops you’ll be kicking yourself. There’s nothing in.’

  ‘There’s plenty in.’

  God knows why she had such a bee in her bonnet about the shopping, but she’d been like that since the accident; you could never tell what would set her off. Normally, Louise was indulgent, but there was too much going on. She snapped at Holly that they could go to Tesco on the way back from physio tomorrow: she would have to sit in the car park and lump it. It was a tone Louise hadn’t taken with her in a long time. Used to the protection of being an invalid, Holly recoiled. She was gathering herself to argue when the doorbell shrilled uncertainly, its circuit loose.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ Holly headed across the hall with reckless speed, careless of her crutches. Louise called after her to be careful. Patrick was already in the hall, at the midpoint of his pacing route, with Nigel close at hand. Nigel mov
ed to open the door. Glimpsing black hair, Louise expected Mia, and she could see by the tilt of Patrick’s head that he too was hopeful. But it was a young man the hair belonged to; as he spoke, she could see a sliver of him, black-haired and brown-skinned from the angle she had. There was a polite mumble, and Nigel swung the door open to let him in.

  The man hovered, reluctant. He was small, Louise could see, and his posture was wired as though in anticipation of a fight, his eyeline darting back to the showy car, now visible, parked behind him in the drive.

  ‘You’re all right. Is Holly about?’ The man still spoke quietly, with a strong Leeds accent. That’s when she knew. Him.

  Holly swung up to the doorway and clipped Nigel on the back of the calf with one of her crutches, so that he took an automatic step back. ‘Get out of the way!’

  ‘All right, mate—she wants to talk to me.’ The man’s tone remained soft, wheedlingly reasonable.

  Louise’s attempt to cry out was stifled by shock.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I suggest you go before I call the police.’ Thank God, Nigel had twigged. She was glad that he had a good few inches and about a stone over that piece of shit.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Patrick looked as paralysed as Louise.

  ‘You can’t stop me talking to him! He hasn’t done nothing!’

  ‘You her dad?’

  The tone was more challenging now, and Nigel’s rose to meet it. It wasn’t a voice Louise had ever heard him use before.

  ‘No. Please leave the premises.’

  ‘You a fucking racist?’

  ‘I’m calling the police.’

  As Nigel went to close the door, Holly jammed the rubber-tipped end of her crutch in the jamb. ‘He’s not done nothing!’

  Jigging with impatience, the man whipped his phone from the pocket of his jeans.

  ‘You want to see the kind of slag she is?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer. I’m sure the police would be delighted to see it and treat it as evidence.’

  ‘Fuck you, man!’

  ‘Nish—I haven’t got nothing to do with him!’

  Holly was squirming her way past Nigel, but he managed to grab her by the elbows and hang on in spite of her hysterical, twisting anguish. Louise forced herself forward.

  ‘What happened to the police?’

  This was Patrick, still uncomprehending as Nigel wrenched writhing Holly back. She was screaming—‘Fuck off! I fucking love him!’—trying to wriggle out of Nigel’s grasp, but then with a scream of pain she lost balance and fell, dropping the crutch. As Nigel lurched to help her, Holly’s so-called boyfriend started forward. Before he could come in through the unprotected entrance, Patrick stepped up and slammed the heavy door with a violence that shuddered the elderly frame. The man’s shouts, muted by the shut door, rose into a squawk of alarm, immediately echoed by Patrick on their side. Louise saw why: the vibration from the frame appeared, in an extraordinary accumulation, to be spreading, so that as she watched, the plaster above the door heaved and, with an uncanny groan from deep in the wall, a crack thunderbolted from the top of the door frame up into the ceiling. For a slow-motion moment, they all gaped as a much larger movement overtook the front of the house. The wall buckled.

  ‘Louise!’

  Nigel. To the monumental percussion of tumbling masonry, he had dragged hold of Holly and was staggering back with her towards the kitchen. Louise tried to bundle Patrick after them, but he thrashed her away, yelping. Blinding dust rose. She needed to get Jamie.

  ‘Just get into the garden, away from the house! Look after Holly!’ As Nigel shouted, pushing the whimpering girl at her, Louise realised she herself was screaming.

  She took Holly as Nigel headed back towards the stairs, squinting and coughing through a fog of plaster dust. Louise expected everything to collapse beneath him, but there was no further catastrophe as he made it to the top. She shifted herself.

  ‘Patrick, come on.’

  This time, he followed her, out through the kitchen. As she, sobbing Holly and Patrick made their way into the garden, Louise saw that the back of the building was still undamaged. Outside, the noise had already subsided from the first cacophony of the main disaster into the individual smashing of bricks from the front of the house as they fell. The wall had collapsed outwards. Taking no risks, she led the three of them to the sea end, as far away from the house as possible. The rain still poured down, a small shock with everything else that was going on. More bricks fell. She wondered if the man who had come for Holly was lying crushed beneath the sundered porch. It would serve the bastard right.

  She cried out in relief as Nigel shepherded Jamie into the garden to join them. Jamie only had his boxers on; he’d been in bed, slept through the whole thing. Suddenly, as she hung on to him, Louise wanted to laugh. She must be hysterical herself. Nigel sat down heavily on the soaked grass as he fished for his phone. When he attempted to ring 999 his hands were trembling so badly that his fingers kept botching the keypad. As he finally got through, a new noise exploded out at the front of the house. They all flinched, then relaxed as they recognised its normality: a car engine. Holly’s boyfriend had survived, then, and in a state fit to drive. At this, even Holly stopped screaming.

  ‘What’s the address again?’ Nigel asked Patrick, as the operator waited. Patrick looked past him at the house, too stunned to answer.

  As Jamie pulled the phone away from his uncle, Louise put a hand on Nigel’s shoulder. Beyond hysteria, a brimming excitement animated her as she took in the disaster they had all survived.

  ‘Nidge, love,’ she said, squeezing, ‘It’s all all right. She knows what she’s doing. Mum.’

  Nigel slumped his head on his knees. The sound that came out of him was the only dry thing around them.

  While they waited for the emergency services—all of them, they’d been promised—Nigel remained on the lawn. He’d rung Sophie to fetch him. Louise had Holly leaning into her, stroking her hair to comfort her, like she’d done ever since she was tiny, as Holly took long, shivering breaths. Patrick sat, a little way away, on the stone bench near the sundial. The rain ran down his flattened hair, dripping off his face. Jamie veered ever closer to the house, despite Louise’s warnings, trying to get a proper look.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ Louise asked Nigel, remembering. ‘About what Mum did?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before it all kicked off,’ she prompted. ‘You were saying, about something she did.’

  Nigel rubbed the bottom of his nose with a pointed forefinger, the way he’d always done when she put him on the spot. Nidge. Those unmarked, schoolboy hands.

  ‘She made me choose.’ Nigel faced up into the sky that spilled endlessly down on them. They might not need the fire brigade, Louise thought. Surely nothing could catch fire in this.

  ‘When she left Dad. She said there wasn’t enough money for Patrick to send both of us to school, so I could choose. You could go, or me, or neither of us. She said it was up to me. We could stick together if we wanted, but it was up to me.’

  Holly raised her head. ‘What a shitty thing to do. What she do that for?’

  Behind them, Patrick made a noise as the sirens came to rescue them.

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Louise.

  After

  NIGEL HAD probably been rude to the neighbour, but it was clear to him she’d only turned up to gawp. Sophie, God knows how, remembered her name was Jenny, and was far more polite, despite trying to wrangle the boys into the car at the same time as rationalising all the crap they were attempting to cram in the boot. The woman sat astride her bike, undeterred by his offhandedness.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, staring at the scaffolding that buttressed the wreckage of the house’s façade. Black and yellow danger tape was draped from it at intervals, fluttering against the weather, which had reverted to some sort of seasonal normality. The police, deranged with health and safety, had only agreed to let the
m back in the house the previous day. Louise was in there now with her son, foraging for clothes after a week of camping at their B and B.

  ‘Still, I suppose that’s why we have insurance . . .’

  Sophie and Nigel shared a look. In fact, because Patrick had bought the house for cash, with the heady profit of Bloody Empire’s monetisation, it seemed there had been no obligation on Patrick and Sara to take out buildings insurance. Patrick was predictably hazy when Nigel questioned him, and in any case, Nigel suspected that the failure to carry out any sort of maintenance would render any miraculously underwritten claim invalid. Patrick had already announced himself content to let the injured structure crumble. Whether it was the house or Mia’s departure that had enfeebled him, he was suddenly very old. There would have to be serious conversations about his future.

  Jenny, twisting to plunder the retro spotted panniers that balanced across her bike, produced a cling-filmed casserole dish, kept carefully horizontal.

  ‘I thought you might be able to use this. Don’t worry about the dish, it’s an old one.’

  Sophie accepted the contribution, slightly at a loss. They were, finally, about to drive back to Surrey. ‘How kind. I’m sure Nigel’s sister . . .’

  She placed the gift on the top of the car. ‘I’m sorry we can’t ask you in. We’re not allowed, actually, it isn’t safe—’

  ‘Diurnal shift.’ This was Olly, who greatly enjoyed the phrase pronounced by the structural engineer who had driven up from St Ives.

  ‘The weather,’ Nigel explained. ‘It was really wet, then really dry, then wet. Everything moved.’

  And, the engineer had added, the house should have been underpinned years ago; all those cracks and dodgy door and window frames were a sign.

  ‘Absolutely . . .’ Jenny shook her head, sympathetically incapacitated by negatives. ‘And you’d just had work done, hadn’t you?’