The Girl You Left Behind (21 page)

Liv listens to the one o’clock news
on the radio, distantly aware of the sounds from the guest bathroom, the vague prickle
of disquiet that she feels whenever someone else is in the house. She wipes the granite
work surfaces and buffs them with a soft cloth. She sweeps non-existent crumbs from the
floor. Finally she walks through the glass and wood hallway, then up the suspended wood
and Perspex stairs to her bedroom. The stretch of unmarked cupboard doors gleams, giving
no clue to the few clothes behind it. The bed sits vast and empty in the middle of the
room, two Final Reminders on the covers, where she left them this morning. She sits
down, folding them neatly back into their envelopes, and she stares straight ahead of
her at the portrait of
The Girl You Left Behind
, vivid in its gilded frame
among the muted eau de Nil and grey of the rest of the room, and allows herself to
drift.

She looks like you.

She looks nothing like me.

She had laughed at him giddily, still flush
with new love. Still prepared to believe in his vision of her.

You look just like that when you –

The Girl You Left Behind smiles.

Liv begins to undress, folding her clothes
before she places them, neatly, on the chair near the end of the bed. She closes her
eyes before she turns off the light so that she does not have to look at the painting
again.

Some lives work better with routines, and
Liv Halston’s is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty
a.m., pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she is
doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half-hour run
along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined
commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain
slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud
of her feet hitting the pavements. Most importantly, she has steered herself away again
from a time she still fears: those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that
loss can still strike her, unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black
fug. She had begun running after she had realized that she could use the world outside,
the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector. Now it has become
habit, an insurance policy.
I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not
have to think.

Especially today.

She slows to a brisk walk, buys a coffee,
and rides the lift back up to the Glass House, her eyes stinging with sweat, unsightly
damp patches on her T-shirt. She showers, dresses, drinks her coffee and eats two slices
of toast with
marmalade. She keeps almost no food in the house,
having concluded that the sight of a full fridge is oddly overwhelming; a reminder that
she should be cooking and eating, not living on crackers and cheese. A fridge full of
food is a silent rebuke to her solitary state.

Then she sits at her desk and checks her
email for whatever work has come in overnight from
copywritersperhour.com
. Or, as seems to
have been the case recently, not.

‘Mo? I’m leaving a coffee
outside your door.’ She stands, her head cocked, waiting for some sound suggesting
life within. It’s a quarter past eight: too early to wake a guest? It has been so
long since she had anyone to stay that she no longer knows the right things to do. She
waits awkwardly, half expecting some bleary response, an irritable grunt, even, then
decides that Mo is asleep. She had worked all evening, after all. Liv places the
polystyrene cup silently outside the door, just in case, and heads off to her
shower.

There are four messages in her inbox.

Dear Ms Halston

I got your email from
copywritersperhour.com
. I run a
personalized stationery business and have a brochure that needs rewriting. I notice
your rates are £100 per 1000 words. Would you consider dropping that price at all?
We are working on a very tight budget. The brochure copy currently stands at around
1250 words.

Yours sincerely

Mr Terence Blank

Livvy darling

This is your father. Caroline has left
me. I am bereft. I have decided to have nothing more to do with women. Call me if
you can spare the time.

Hi Liv

Everything okay for Thursday? The kids
are really looking forward to it. We’re looking at around 20 at the moment,
but as you know this figure is always fluid. Let me know if you need anything.

Best regards

Abiola

Dear Ms Halston

We’ve tried several times to
reach you by phone without success. Please could you contact us to arrange a time
whereby we can discuss your overdraft situation. If you fail to make contact we will
have to impose additional charges.

Please can you also ensure that we have
your up-to-date contact details.

Yours sincerely

Damian Watts,

Personal accounts manager, NatWest
Bank

She types a response to the first.

Dear Mr Blank. I would love to drop my
prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological make-up means I also have to
eat. Good luck with your brochure.

She knows there will be somebody out there
who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesn’t care too much about grammar or
punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains ‘their’ for
‘there’ twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meagre
rates pushed down further.

Dad, I will call round later. If
Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are
dressed. Mrs Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last
week and you know what the police said about that.

Liv x

The last time she had arrived to comfort her
father after one of Caroline’s disappearances, he had opened the door wearing a
woman’s Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive
hug before she could protest. ‘I’m your father, for goodness’
sake,’ he would mutter, when she scolded him afterwards. Although he hadn’t
had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his
childlike lack of inhibition, or his irritation with what he called
‘wrappings’. In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after
Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr Worthing walked around
‘with all his bits swinging’. (She had also told everyone at school that
Liv’s dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled
by that one.)

Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of
almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to
walk around semi-naked herself. Liv
sometimes thought she was more
familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her
own.

Caroline was his great passion, and would
walk out in a giant strop every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of
earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv
could never quite imagine.

‘Lust for life, my darling!’ he
would exclaim. ‘Passion! If you have none you’re a dead thing.’ Liv,
she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.

She swigs the last of her coffee, and pens
an email to Abiola.

Hi Abiola

I’ll meet you outside the Conaghy
building at 2 p.m. All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up
for it. Hope all good with you.

Regards

Liv

She sends it then stares at the one from her
bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses
delete
.

She knows, with some sensible part of her,
that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamour of the neatly
folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. At some
point she will no longer be able to contain them, to fob them off, to slide, unnoticed,
away from them. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still
it is
not enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit
themselves back at her from cashpoints. The council had arrived at her door last year,
part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass
House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As
if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could
barely blame her: since David’s death she has felt a fraud living here.
She’s like a curator, protecting David’s memory, keeping the place as he
would have wanted it.

Liv now pays the maximum council tax
chargeable, the same rate as the bankers with their million-pound wage packets, the
financiers with their swollen bonuses. It eats up more than half of what she earns in
some months.

She no longer opens bank statements. There
is no point. She knows exactly what they will say.

‘It’s my own fault.’ Her
father drops his head to his hands theatrically. From between his fingers, sparse grey
hair sticks up in tufts. Around him the kitchen is scattered with pots and pans that
tell of an evening meal interrupted: half a lump of Parmesan, a bowl of congealed pasta,
a
Mary Celeste
of domestic disharmony. ‘I knew I shouldn’t go
anywhere near her. But, oh! I was like a moth to a flame. And what a flame! The heat!
The
heat
!’ He sounds bewildered.

Liv nods understandingly. She is attempting,
privately, to reconcile this tale of epic sexual misadventure with Jean, the
fifty-something woman who runs the local flower shop, smokes forty a day and whose grey
ankles emerge from too-short trousers like slices of tripe.

‘We knew it was wrong. And I tried, oh,
God, I tried to be good. But I was in there one afternoon, looking for spring bulbs, and
she came up behind me smelling of freesias, and before I knew it there I was, as
tumescent as a new bud …’

‘Okay, Dad. Too much
information.’ Liv puts the kettle on. As she begins clearing up the work surfaces,
her father downs the rest of his glass. ‘It’s too early for wine.’

‘It’s never too early for wine.
Nectar of the gods. My one consolation.’

‘Your life is one long
consolation.’

‘How did I raise a woman of such will,
such fearsome boundaries?’

‘Because you didn’t raise me.
Mum did.’

He shakes his head with some melancholy,
apparently forgetting the times he had cursed her for leaving him when Liv was a child,
or called down the wrath of the gods upon her disloyal head. Liv thought sometimes that
the day her mother had died, six years ago, her parents’ short, fractured marriage
had somehow been redrawn in her father’s mind so that this intolerant woman, this
hussy, this harridan who had poisoned his only child against him now resembled a kind of
virgin Madonna. She didn’t mind. She did it herself. When you lost your mother,
she gradually recast herself in the imagination as perfect. A series of soft kisses,
loving words, a comforting embrace. A few years back she had listened to her
friends’ litany of irritation about their own interfering mothers with the same
lack of comprehension as if they had been speaking Korean.

‘Loss has hardened you.’

‘I just don’t fall in love with
every person of the
opposite sex who happens to sell me a pot of
tomato food.’

She had opened the drawers, searching for
coffee filters. Her father’s house was as cluttered and chaotic as hers was
tidy.

‘I saw Jasmine in the Pig’s Foot
the other night.’ He brightens. ‘What a gorgeous girl she is. She asked
after you.’

Liv finds the filter papers, deftly opens
one and scoops in coffee.

‘Really?’

‘She’s marrying a Spaniard. He
looks like Errol Flynn. Couldn’t take his eyes off her. Mind you, neither could I.
She has a sway to her walk that is positively hypnotic. He’s taking on her and the
baby. Some other chap’s, I believe. They’re going to live in
Madrid.’

Liv pours a mug of coffee, hands it to her
father.

‘Why don’t you see her any more?
You two were such good friends?’ he wonders.

She shrugs. ‘People grow apart.’
She cannot tell him this is only half of the reason. These are the things that they do
not tell you about losing your husband: that as well as the exhaustion you will sleep
and sleep, and some days even the act of waking up will force your eyelids back down and
that merely getting through each day will feel like a Herculean effort – you will hate
your friends, irrationally: each time someone arrives at your door or crosses the street
and hugs you and tells you they are so, so desperately sorry, you look at her, her
husband and their tiny children and are shocked at the ferocity of your envy. How did
they get to live and David to die? How did boring, lumpen Richard with his City friends
and his weekend golfing trips and his total lack of interest in anything
outside his tiny complacent world get to live, when David,
brilliant, loving, generous, passionate David, had to die? How did hangdog Tim get to
reproduce, to bring further generations of little unimaginative Tims into this world,
when David’s unexpected mind, his kindness, his kisses, had been extinguished for
ever?

Liv can remember screaming silently in
bathrooms, bolting without explanation from crowded rooms, conscious of her own apparent
rudeness but unable to stop herself. It had been years before she could view anybody
else’s happiness without mourning the loss of her own.

These days, the anger has gone, but she
prefers to view domestic satisfaction at a distance, and in people she doesn’t
know well, as if happiness were a scientific concept that she is merely pleased to see
proven.