The Love She Left Behind Read online

  AMANDA COE

  The Love She Left Behind

  A NOVEL

  For Gus and Julia

  The Love She Left Behind

  What happens in the heart simply happens.

  —TED HUGHES, Birthday Letters

  I think the rage to understand comes from the fact that you do not ask the right question. You will never find the right answer if you do not ask the proper question. It’s like trying to open a door with the wrong key.

  —LOUISE BOURGEOIS

  Part One

  Now

  SPRING

  THERE WAS no one left to call him Nidge. This had been his first clear thought when Patrick’s neighbour rang to tell him their mother was dead. Seeing Louise step off the train the morning of the funeral, Nigel realised it was also possible for her to call him Nidge, although she didn’t tend to call him anything. The ability to use his childhood name was a small power Louise didn’t know she could exercise, and the fact that she didn’t added to his irritation at the sight of his sister’s pilled coat and misjudged cleavage. Immediately worse than any of this, though, was the teenage girl that unexpectedly followed her out of the carriage door, helping to bump a wheeled bag down on to the platform. Swaddled in a puffa coat that enhanced her matronly bulk—a miniature version of her mother’s—she was much changed since Nigel had last seen her, when she must have been around seven.

  ‘I had to bring her,’ said Louise. ‘She’s been poorly and I couldn’t get anyone to look after her. I can’t rely on our Jamie, can I, Hol?’

  Nigel allowed the cough he’d been suppressing in his throat all morning full rein; the pollen count must be off the scale. Holly. Sophie would have remembered straight away; she took care of birthdays and Christmas. Not for the first time since he’d arrived in Cornwall, Nigel regretted his ready agreement that his wife would stay home with the boys while he navigated Mum’s funeral solo. Holly. He nodded a hello and instructed himself to stop coughing; it was an itch always there to scratch, and once the membranes were inflamed, restraining himself became a torment. His niece sniffed back her own lacklustre greeting, fortunately too apathetic to share her germs. She was unappealingly pale and pink-eyed: presumably the result of her illness. Nigel supposed it would be fine for her to attend the ceremony. He couldn’t imagine they’d exactly be oversubscribed at the crematorium. Still, it was aggravatingly like Louise to spring a surprise on him.

  ‘It’s a good job you let us know when everything’s happening,’ said Louise, as he led them out of the ticket hall to the parked funeral car. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to him on the phone. About the arrangements for today.’

  This had been Nigel’s plan, to pick Louise up from the station first so that they would face their stepfather together. Patrick had, of course, been too distraught following their mother’s death to make any of the phone calls himself, even the first one. This had been left to a neighbour, Jenny, the kind of competent middle-aged woman presumed on as a brick. Patrick was all too ready to presume, but Nigel’s legal training was an obvious qualification for him taking over all that was to follow, if being a son hadn’t been sufficient in itself. It qualified him over Louise, anyway, unquestioningly. He had made the necessary calls following Jenny’s initial contact, and all the subsequent arrangements. This landed on top of a busy time at work, but he made lists and forged through them, as always, despite an electric cable of sciatica that shot down his leg whenever he sat down. In the days following his mother’s death, Nigel had made quite a few calls with acupuncture needles sticking out of him like the miniaturised afflictions of a medieval saint. Despite the osteopath’s admonitions, it hadn’t stopped them working, if it was in fact the needles that had erased the pain rather than the large doses of anti-inflammatories Nigel had been taking in secret defiance of the alternative remedies Sophie had arrayed on his bedside table. In any case, today only the hay fever was laying him low.

  ‘So, we’re picking Patrick up, the service is at eleven thirty, nothing fancy—then it’s sandwiches and so on at a hotel back near theirs.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  Watching Louise fuss her daughter into her seatbelt, fumbling the prong blindly at the catch with an exclamation at each failure until Holly herself took the strap and housed it with one click, Nigel remembered acutely why he had no time for his sister. In the roughly three-year intervals at which they saw each other, nothing changed. Or rather, her circumstances changed—usually worsened—but Louise didn’t. Soon she would start talking up a plan born of a low-level but persistent crisis: training, relocating, paying off a loan, finishing with her boyfriend, finding a different house, laying down the law with her kids, losing the weight. None of it ever happened.

  ‘How long do you think they knew she was ill?’ Louise asked, once their car had pulled away from the station. Of course, there were other things to talk about today: Mum. Deliciously, Nigel rolled his tongue up against his palate, which itched furiously.

  ‘No idea.’

  With Patrick out of bounds with grief, there had been no one to talk to except Jenny the neighbour. Nigel had scarcely felt he could assail her with questions about their mother’s final months and days. The bare bones of it was undiagnosed stomach cancer—diagnosed so late that Mum had had scarcely a week before she died at home, hospital being pointless at the stage it had been discovered. Perhaps during the reception (the hotel had been recommended by the funeral home), Jenny might be able to tell them more. After a drink, which Nigel was already greatly looking forward to. With the amount of Sudafed he’d taken, it would hit him like a train.

  ‘So, this is Cornwall!’ Louise’s tone was brightly officious, attempting to engage Holly, who was staring glumly through the view from the window. ‘Fab, isn’t it?’

  Neither Louise nor her daughter had ever been to the house they were travelling to. Having Louise here, large and human behind him in the formal black car, Nigel felt to his marrow the strangeness of this accepted fact.

  ‘They didn’t even admit her to hospital, you know—it must have been very far gone,’ he said.

  ‘Did she know, though?’ Louise shifted forward, filling the space. ‘She must have, surely. You’d think Patrick would have let us know—let you know. So we could say goodbye.’

  That was the way Louise liked to do things. A bedside goodbye, as in the soaps she watched. Tearful reconciliations. Not that reconciliation was necessary, as far as he knew.

  ‘Mum, I feel sick.’

  Surely the girl’s voice, with its strong Yorkshire accent, was too small and childish for her age? Louise leaned across her daughter to work the window switch. It didn’t respond. She bent forward to the driver.

  ‘Do you mind if we have a bit of fresh air?’

  The window retracted, blasting icy wind at the back of Nigel’s neck and increasing his irritation. Louise insisted the window stay open for the entire route—along a winding B road—to counteract Holly’s possible nausea. By the time they pulled into the potholed drive, Nigel could see in the rear-view mirror that Louise’s thin hair had been whipped into a demented mop. She looked older than the last time he’d seen her, despite highlights and too much makeup. Worn, with cross-hatching beneath her eyes. His own eyes were streaming.

  ‘You’ll have to put the window up, for Patrick,’ he told them both, getting out.

  Phase two: Patrick. If Louise demanded patience, Patrick demanded a whole armoury of seldom called-upon resources. It would be like playing squash with a county champion after a ten-year layoff.

  Walking up to the door, Nigel recognised a nest of broken, empty plant pots that had seemed temporary on his last visit, lichened into permanence. Although not a
s alienated as Louise from the Patrick/Mum axis, it was in fact at least ten years since Nigel had been to the house. It had scarcely been a show home then, but now the façade spoke of long-term neglect, its windowsills scabbed with grey, flaking paint and the grizzled creeper hanging over the front porch in an unpruned, brittle mat. Despite this, Nigel still enjoyed an atavistic buzz at the fairy-tale existence of such a large family asset. Patrick wouldn’t be able to live here on his own, not without being able to drive. And even so unfashionably close to Newquay, it couldn’t be worth less than half a million.

  ‘You said half past.’

  Patrick had opened the door before Nigel could knock. Unchanged in the dark hallway, when he stepped outside, daylight revealed him to be shockingly old and shabby. He was wearing that disgraceful raincoat he’d always had, the colour of something on a butcher’s tray. Unbuttoned, it revealed a bobbled fleece mapped with food stains, worn over a shirt and tie. Both fleece and tie, at least, were black. And like the house, the quality of Patrick’s architecture defied neglect. The nose still arched, the lip, if a little thinner, still curled. As they walked to the car, the wind blew Patrick’s coat open and revealed a Norwich Union logo on the breast of the fleece. Presumably he had got it free.

  ‘I’ve been waiting.’

  ‘We had to pick up Louise.’

  Patrick balked as though confronting a tripwire. Even he must have known that Louise was certain to come to Mum’s funeral; she was her daughter. You couldn’t even call her estranged, exactly. And there was certainly nothing Patrick could do about it now. Nigel strode round to the passenger door and held it open, like an employee. An explosive sneeze compromised his chauffeur’s stance as Patrick made his shambling approach. He pulled up again.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  The girl, Holly, was now sitting in the front seat, her hands pressed prayerfully between her thighs. Nigel saw Patrick’s momentary confusion at a collapse of time where this child could be Louise, before Louise herself, fully and massively contemporary, clambered out of the back to explain.

  ‘Holly. Patrick, it’s me, Louise—this is Holly. My daughter. I’m so sorry.’

  After a moment of paralysis, Louise lurched in to embrace Patrick. She curtailed her gesture into a brief clutch at his neck as he failed to respond, still unwilling to share anything of their mother with her, even her loss. He got in the car. Louise’s eyes magnified with tears.

  ‘She felt sick on the way; she hasn’t been well. The driver said she’d be better off in the front.’

  Phase three: the funeral. It was fifteen miles to the crematorium. With Holly in the front, the three of them were forced to sit together in the back. It was, as far as Nigel remembered, an unprecedented configuration. Despite the roominess of the estate car, he leaned defensively against his window. It was Louise who broke the silence, a few minutes on to the motorway.

  ‘Have you had any breakfast, Patrick?’

  Although Patrick was clearly stunned by the audacity of any question at all, its sheer simplicity compelled an answer.

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘It’s going to be a long day,’ she said over his head, to Nigel. ‘Maybe we should get something on the way—we’ve got time.’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ Patrick said.

  ‘You’ll be dropping,’ Louise persisted. ‘Even a cup of tea—have you had a cup of tea?’

  Patrick shrugged an apathetic negative.

  ‘We could stop at a garage,’ said Louise. ‘They’ll have a machine.’

  Nigel decided to knock this one on the head. Their slot at the crematorium started in less than half an hour. He had persuaded the bookings clerk to rearrange another family in order to get the uniquely convenient late-morning time, which would permit him to get home to Surrey that night. If they missed it, it would be like trying to find runway space at Heathrow.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got time—’

  ‘I need to get some fags,’ said Patrick, exploring his coat pockets. So that was that. The driver pulled into a station pennanted with some unfamiliar local logo and Louise took Patrick’s order for twenty Silk Cut Light.

  ‘Can’t smoke in the car, sir.’ The driver instinctively addressed Nigel. He was, after all, the only one in a suit. Nigel checked his watch, resisting the temptation to rub his gritty eyes. At the funeral, he supposed, everyone would take their redness as a sign of grief.

  ‘How long will it take us now?’

  ‘ ’Bout twenty minutes, give or take.’

  They really didn’t have time to wait for Patrick to smoke a cigarette. Louise took an age getting the bloody things as well, as they all waited in a silence broken only by a few harrowed sighs from Patrick. Finally she reappeared, her lengthy absence explained by the lidded disposable cup of tea she carried, along with a grab bag of crisps and a plastic bottle of Coke that she dangled over to Holly in the front.

  ‘I thought she was ill,’ Nigel objected.

  ‘She hasn’t had any breakfast.’

  The girl waved away her mother’s offerings.

  ‘Can’t eat in here, if you don’t mind,’ said the driver, gently.

  ‘Oh well.’ Louise stuffed the refreshments into her bag and asked Patrick what combination of the milk pots and sugar sachets pincered between her fingers he wanted in his tea.

  Five minutes back along the road, Patrick crumpled the cellophane from the Silk Cut packet into the footwell of the car and took out a cigarette. Nigel made a move as he saw the driver clock this in the mirror.

  ‘Patrick, you can’t smoke in here.’

  Arrested in trawling a disposable lighter up from a far corner of his raincoat’s lining—the pocket must have been lost to a hole—Patrick halted and jabbed at the window button.

  ‘It’s all right—’

  ‘No smoking if you don’t mind, sir.’

  ‘I can’t open the bloody window!’

  ‘He has to work it from the front—’ Louise told him.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here—’

  ‘What?’

  Nigel pointed ahead to the neat sticker on the dashboard, with its universal symbol. ‘You can’t smoke in here, Patrick. It’s a no-smoking car.’

  Patrick’s convulsion of contempt was vast, familiar, and still frightening. Louise just managed to save the tea.

  ‘Christ alive—can you not open the window?’

  ‘Sorry sir, it’s company policy.’

  ‘My wife’s cold in the ground, man.’ Patrick sparked up, inhaled. ‘Company policy. How about human fucking decency?’

  The window rolled down to its limit.

  ‘I’m a smoker myself, as it happens,’ the driver said, nervously tracking the direction of the smoke. He was an older man, small, with yellowed whites to his eyes.

  ‘Muuum.’

  Louise shifted.

  ‘I’m sorry, Patrick, cigarette smoke makes Holly feel sick.’

  Patrick continued to smoke.

  ‘She’s been feeling sick.’

  ‘I think I’m gonna be sick.’

  ‘Oh you’re not, are you, love?’

  ‘I feel really sick.’

  The girl’s voice had risen an octave again, back into childishness. She did look very pale. The wind was whipping away most of Patrick’s smoke.

  ‘Patrick, please!’

  ‘Tell her to try putting her head between her legs.’

  Louise changed position. For a wild second Nigel thought she was going to attempt to grab the cigarette from Patrick and throw it away, but she was only stretching forward to get a better look at Holly.

  ‘Are you going to be sick?’

  The girl nodded violently.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Louise to the driver, ‘we’ll have to stop.’

  ‘We’re going to be late!’ Nigel objected.

  ‘It can’t be helped, can it?’ Louise rolled a look past Patrick to Nigel. Surprised, he caught it, just as an annihilating sneeze tore out of him. Why hadn’t
he listened to Sophie about getting her mum to babysit and let her come with him?

  The driver pulled on to the hard shoulder. Louise massaged Holly’s back as she bent over the rusted barrier at the verge, hair hanging in strings. Patrick finished his cigarette.

  ‘Suppose they can hardly start without us,’ Nigel reassured himself. Careless of the consequences, he raked his palate frantically against his tongue. Holly produced a couple of dry retches.

  ‘Oh Christ.’

  The spent butt pitched out of the window, Patrick swigged the last of his petrol-station tea. As his jaw stretched, Nigel saw that he’d missed a patch when he’d shaved, close to his ear. The stubble was silvery, both unspeakably louche and terribly vulnerable. Outside, Holly was holding her stomach, Louise still bent to her. Nothing happened.

  Why did it always have to be like this? Why would it be any different? Mum was dead. It was the only thing that had changed. Sophie should have come with him, definitely, but it was better that she hadn’t. Tenderly, Nigel placed a cool forefinger on each closed, raging eyelid. This worked, sometimes.

  ‘Women,’ said Patrick.

  March 10, 1978

  Cobham Gardens

  Early hours.

  Darling Dear Girl,

  I’m sitting here drinking whisky and unable to write a word and thinking how very much I love you and want you and can’t live without you.

  I want to fuck you three times in a row.

  This will never do, will it?

  Patrick xx

  HER MOTHER HAD had a way with clothes. Even in the chaos of the wardrobe and its overflow into the bedroom, Louise could see this hadn’t deserted her. So far, she had come across no garments that she recognised, yet they were all familiar in expressing the singularity of her mother’s style. Part of it, she could see now, was money; old clothes that didn’t date or wear out. A good coat—that was something she could remember Mum harping on about. You need a good coat. It must have helped that she had stayed the same size for years, by the look of it, although she would have been emaciated by the end. Stomach cancer: how could it have been otherwise? Surely she must have known, long before that solitary collapse in the Tesco car park and the hurtling deterioration of her final week? Other, more secret parts of your body might harbour a tumour unknown to you, but surely not your stomach.