The Love She Left Behind

by Amanda Coe

  Taking sledgehammers to walls hadn’t helped, said the engineer. Good old Mia.

  ‘So I’m afraid . . .’ Nigel waved his hand at the house, aiming for dismissal.

  ‘Of course. I was just on my way to Crantock.’

  The woman wriggled something else from her pannier and offered it to him: a clear blue plastic file with some kind of thin document inside. What she said about it struggled to gain purchase in Nigel’s understanding. His mother and Jenny had taken a class together in a neighbouring village a few years ago: creative writing. They’d all produced a pamphlet to mark their achievement at the end of the course: ‘some pieces of life writing’, Jenny called it. She’d come across it when she was tidying her desk and thought that it was something that Patrick—‘or Sara’s family’, she amended—would want to have.

  ‘Did Patrick know?’

  Jenny shook her head, her grimace acknowledging what an incendiary pursuit it would have been for his mother to confess. Patrick had been approached to teach on sundry creative writing courses over the years. He’d always relished reporting his extravagant denunciations of these offers to collude in what he called ‘the travesty of writing as industrial process’.

  Just another of Sara’s secrets then. Nigel took the folder. Finally finding his manners, he apologised for not offering so much as a cup of tea in return.

  ‘Not to worry.’ Jenny pushed off with one toned leg and, with a brief clumsiness, mounted the pedals. He and Sophie watched her cycle fluidly out of the drive. ‘Take care!’

  ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ Sophie asked, as Nigel surmounted the casserole dish with the file.

  He shrugged. A fugitive thought. Less a memory than a leftover feeling attached to a memory. Bloody Empire, the famous visit, when he’d been ferried from school for the opening night of the West End transfer. Seventeen, the quinine bitterness of the interval gin and tonic, arousal from the very idea of those breasts bared on the stage minutes before, the involvement in his own randiness of Patrick and his mother and the familiar rutting heat between them. Standing at the bar, a sudden interruption to that, an unseen barrier. It came from his mother, dazzling in the kind of dress no one wore any more. The feeling she emanated was distinct from the mood of the Bloody Empire audience, although just as connected to what they’d all seen on stage.

  ‘How you can say that’s me, I don’t know.’

  Is that what she’d said? Something like it: ironic, throwaway, the teasing flatness she used for intimacy. But in that small moment as she’d handed Patrick her cigarette packet, just before Patrick had landed the cigarette and bowed to take the light she offered, he quailed in a way Nigel had never seen, before or since. He had looked lost, frightened even. Why?

  Nigel struggled after the memory. Surely she must have been proud, as well as a bit baffled, as everyone was. Shocked, perhaps, as well. There had been a current of indulgent pleasure among the interval audience in exercising their outrage. He remembered stumped eye rolls and half-sentences (‘Well!’, ‘Strong stuff!’) and rueful puffings, none of them from Mum. That wouldn’t have been her style, which was always opaque. ‘Serene’ was the traditional interpretation, although considering it now, that mask-like attendance on other people’s emotions, Nigel wondered. Had she been thinking, let alone feeling, anything at all?

  ‘They meant the world to each other.’ That’s what Louise always said. For-thine-is-the-kingdom-the-power-and-the-glory-for-ever-and-ever-amen.

  He took the dish and file from the top of the car.

  ‘I’m just popping inside.’

  Plaster dust obscured the details of every surface, with Louise’s and Jamie’s footprints stark on the stairs. Sneezing, he followed their trail. They were on the landing, hauling a bin liner stuffed with bedding between them. Nigel saw the blurred tattoo rose on Louise’s forearm, its stem and petals faded with age, all its colours reverting to blue. He always forgot about it, surprised each time by the sight. Imagine, his little sister with that on her arm.

  ‘It’s all right, we can manage,’ she told him, the catch in her breath worse from the effort. But she looked pleased to see him.

  Nigel conjured his mother. A warm, scented shape; the lively metallic curls of her hair that he loved to wind around his fingers; a silent figure, careful with her spoon at breakfast; her back, dressed for work or dressing-gowned, going out of the door of whichever room he and Louise were noisily inhabiting, playing one of their favourite games. Warm, warmer, boiling hot, colder . . . How you can say that’s me, I don’t know.

  Nigel hoisted the casserole, the file balanced on its lid.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said.

  The young woman wears a short blue mac that barely covers the top of her long slim legs. Her knees and ankles show every bone. Even with tights on they look polished. It’s hard for her to find tights to fit, her legs are so long, but stockings are impossible with short skirts. At the weekends she wears jeans but during the week she has to look smart for work.

  The young woman works at a chemist’s called Wilkinsons. The couple who run it aren’t called Wilkinson, they bought the business off them. The couple are called Mr and Mrs Monette. They came from down south somewhere, although Mr Monette is Scottish. They seem old to the girl but they are probably in their fifties. They are both quiet people and good to work for. Mr Monette is the pharmacist and Mrs Monette works behind the till. Although he doesn’t talk much, Mr Monette has a noise he makes when he’s working in the back room where he makes up the prescriptions. It sounds like he’s trying to spit something out of his mouth using the tip of his tongue, something fiddly like the pith of an orange, although there isn’t anything there. He was shell-shocked during the war when he was a teenager. The other thing about Mr Monette is that he has one very long fingernail. It is on the little finger of his left hand. It is much longer than any of his other nails and always very clean and filed into a point. The girl doesn’t know if it has some use in Mr Monette’s work as a pharmacist, but every time she sees the nail it surprises her. Mrs Monette has nothing unusual about her. She eats two Ryvita for her dinner every day that she takes out of a pale blue Tupperware box with a lid coloured like an old toenail. She also has a tomato in the box that she dips into a twist of salt along with a hardboiled egg. After her food she smokes one Embassy Regal. It’s the only cigarette she has all day. She keeps herself smart and has her hair set every week. Her hair is dyed jet black. The Monettes don’t have any children.

  The young woman has two children. She has worked at the chemists since they started at school and the boy was old enough to have a key to let them both in after. They watch TV until she gets back to make them their tea. Their dad usually gets in from work as she’s putting it on the plates. She had the boy when she was seventeen and the girl when she was twenty, so she is still young. Sometimes she feels young and sometimes she thinks thirty is ancient and her life is over. There are a lot of old people who come to the chemists and they all tell her that she’s young. They call her a lovely young lass, ‘a lovely young lass like you’, they say. They all take tablets or have trusses or some of the old ladies have feet and legs that swell out of normal shoes so that they have to wear slippers and can barely walk. They take tablets for it, it’s called elephantiasis but the tablets don’t make much difference. She feels sorry for them, but she doesn’t want to be that old. Sometimes, the way she gets whistled at or talked to she hates it, but usually it’s nice, like her legs and all the rest are a present she’s been given. If you were given a watch, a really expensive one, no one would expect you to keep it in the box. They’d say it was meant to tell the time.

  It’s not all old people who come to the chemist’s. There are mothers with babies and children, especially in the mornings. There’s a big scale for weighing babies in the front of the shop and it’s something for the mothers to do. She helps, because Mrs Monette is nervous of babies, who wriggle around in the slippy enamel bowl of the scale lik
e fish and often cry. There is a box of deep red glucose lollies with vitamin C kept near the till and mothers buy these for their older children for behaving while their little brothers and sisters get weighed. Her own daughter always begs for a lolly when she comes into the shop and the girl gives her one. She puts the money in the till for it as well, a couple of coppers, and Mrs Monette never stops her, never says it’s on the house. That’s what she’s like.

  Lads come in for johnnies, teenage lads on a bet, some with their mates, and Mrs Monette serves them so that sometimes they end up buying one of the lollies or a packet of Victory Vs instead and scarpering. Older men don’t come in for johnnies. They must get them somewhere else. Mr Monette fills prescriptions for the pill, and the girl gets her own prescription filled there. The pill makes her feel heavy and headachy, although it’s worth it not to have another baby. The pills come in a pale pink dial, turned for each day of the week. The chemist is so old-fashioned, full of polished wood, and pink plastic seems odd in it, but the pills arrive in boxes and they must dispense going on for a hundred a month to married women like her, or women who say they’re married. It’s the modern world.

  If she thinks about it now, the chemist is more a place for women than men. Old men come in, but only if their wives are dead and can’t collect their medicine for them. Then there are the babies, the ways of avoiding having babies, the pads and belts and tampons, the teats and gripe water and teething pegs and rusks, the jars of Cow & Gate, the pile cream and the rose water and the pots of Nivea and Atrixo, the boxes of fudge and biscuits you are meant to eat instead of food to help you slim, the Complan and Lucozade to build you up when you’re too ill to eat. He doesn’t want any of this when he comes into the shop. If you were making him up you’d think he wanted johnnies, and he wouldn’t take Victory Vs instead. But he’s lost.

  There’s a taxi outside and it doesn’t know where to take him. She doesn’t know anyone who takes taxis, unless they’re coming back from the airport on holiday.

  ‘I’m looking for the college,’ he says. ‘I’m giving a talk.’

  His voice is deep, with a stranger’s accent. He’s left the door open and brought the frosty draught in with him. He probably swears. He’s wearing a jacket that doesn’t matter and his hair is greasy black and beautiful. His eyes aren’t as dark as his hair, but they are beautiful too, like an animal’s eyes, so alive, so outside her and everything about her. Him. She can’t believe the sight of him, but there he is.

  Falling in love is like a song on the radio.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  WARMEST THANKS GO to Jill Bialosky and all at Norton for supportive editing, and to my US agent Zoe Pagnamenta. A huge thank-you to Anna Webber, who engaged with the book at an early stage and provided invaluable comments and encouragement. And to Ursula Doyle at Virago, without whom it would be a very different book—and not in a good way. To Clara Glynn and John Archer for first-draft Drymen dinners and company; Clare and Brian Linden for generous use of the Retreat, which made all the difference; and Deborah Dooley and Bob (www.retreatsforyou.co.uk), for Sheepwash hospitality at another crucial point. Meike Ziervogel, for Louise Bourgeois. Kate Lock, the most constant and generous friend any woman could have. Gus and Julia, for being such good company: no offence taken. And to my husband, Andrew Clifford, who makes everything possible in all ways.

  ALSO BY AMANDA COE

  What They Do in the Dark

  A Whore in the Kitchen

  The Love She Left Behind is a work of fiction. All of the characters are products of the author’s imagination, and all of the settings, locales, and events have been invented by the author or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Amanda Coe

  First American Edition 2015

  First published in Great Britain under the title Getting Colder

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

  Book design by Brooke Koven

  Production managers: Devon Zahn and Ruth Toda

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Coe, Amanda, 1965–

  The love she left behind : a novel / Amanda Coe. — First American edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-393-24549-3 (hardcover)

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Dysfunctional families—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6053.O25L68 2015

  823'.914—dc23

  2015004620

  ISBN 978-0-393-24550-9 (e-book)

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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