The Girl You Left Behind (30 page)

He would put money on it that she has no
idea who the
painting is by. He hears her voice, shy and oddly
proprietorial: ‘She’s my favourite thing in this house. Actually,
she’s my favourite thing in the whole world.’

Paul lets his head drop into his hands. He
stays there until the office phone starts ringing.

The sun rises across the flatlands east of
London, flooding the bedroom a pale gold. The walls glow briefly, the almost
phosphorescent light bouncing off the white surfaces so that on another occasion Liv
might have groaned, screwed her eyes shut and buried her head under her duvet. But she
lies very still in the oversized bed, a large pillow behind her neck, and stares out at
the morning, her eyes fixed blankly on the sky.

She’d got it all wrong.

She keeps seeing his face, hearing his
scrupulously polite dismissal of her.
Do you mind if I head off
?

She has lain there for almost two hours, her
mobile phone in her hand, wondering whether to text him a small message.

Are we okay? You seemed suddenly …

Sorry if I talked too much about David. It’s hard for me to remember that not
everyone …

Really lovely to see you last night. Hope your work eases up soon. If you’re
free on Sunday I’d …

What did I do wrong?

She sends none of them. She traces and
retraces the stages of the conversation, going over each phrase, each sentence,
meticulously, like an archaeologist sifting through bones. Was it at this point that he
had changed his mind? Was there something she had done? Some sexual foible
she hadn’t been aware of? Was it just being in the Glass
House? A house that, while it had no longer held any of his belongings, was so palpably
David that it might as well have had his image shot through it like lettering through a
stick of rock? Had she misread Paul completely? Each time she considers these potential
blunders, her stomach clenches with anxiety.

I liked him, she thinks. I really liked
him.

Then, knowing sleep will not come, she
climbs out of bed and pads downstairs to the kitchen. Her eyes are gritty with
tiredness, the rest of her just hollowed out. She brews coffee and is sitting at the
kitchen table, blowing on it, when the front door opens.

‘Forgot my security card. Can’t
get into the care home without it at this time. Sorry – I was going to creep in so that
I wouldn’t disturb you.’ Mo stops and peers past her, as if looking for
someone. ‘So … What? Did you eat him?’

‘He went home.’

Mo reaches into the cupboard and starts
fishing around in her spare jacket pocket. She finds her security card and pockets
it.

‘You’re going to have to get
past this, you know. Four years is too long to not –’

‘I didn’t want him to
leave.’ Liv swallows. ‘He bolted.’

Mo laughs and stops abruptly as she realizes
that Liv is serious.

‘He actually ran out of the
bedroom.’ She doesn’t care that she’s making herself sound tragic: she
couldn’t feel any worse than she does already.

‘Before or after you jumped his
bones?’

Liv sips her coffee. ‘Guess.’

‘Oh, ouch. Was it that bad?’

‘No, it was great. Well, I thought it
was. Admittedly I haven’t had much to go by recently.’

Mo gazes around her, as if looking for
clues. ‘You put your pictures of David away, right?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘And you didn’t, like, say
David’s name at the crucial moment?’

‘No.’ She remembers the way Paul
had held her. ‘I told him he had changed the way I felt about myself.’

Mo shakes her head sadly. ‘Aw Liv. Bad
hand. You’ve just been dealt a Toxic Bachelor.’

‘What?’

‘He’s the perfect man.
He’s straightforward, caring, attentive. He comes on super-strong until he
realizes you like him too. And then he runs a mile. Kryptonite to a certain kind of
needy, vulnerable woman. That would be you.’ Mo frowns. ‘You do surprise me,
though. I honestly didn’t think he was the type.’

Liv glances down at her mug. Then she says,
with just a hint of defensiveness, ‘It’s possible I might have talked about
David a bit. When I was showing him the painting.’

Mo’s eyes widen, then lift to the
heavens.

‘Well, I thought I could just be
straightforward about everything. He knows where I’m coming from. I thought he was
okay with it.’

She can hear her voice: chippy. ‘He
said he was.’

Mo stands and goes to the breadbin. She
reaches in for a slice, folds it in half and takes a bite. ‘Liv – you can’t
be straightforward about other men. No man wants to hear
about how
fantastic the one before was, even if he is dead. You might as well just do a whole
spiel on Enormous Penises I Have Known.’

‘I can’t pretend David
isn’t part of my past.’

‘No, but he doesn’t have to be
your whole present too.’ As Liv glares at her, Mo says, ‘Honestly?
It’s like you’re on a loop. I feel like even when you’re not talking
about him you’re thinking about talking about him.’

That might have been true even a few weeks
ago. But not now. Liv wants to move on. She had wanted to move on with Paul.
‘Well. It doesn’t really matter, does it? I blew it. I don’t think
he’ll be coming back.’ She sips her coffee. It burns her tongue. ‘It
was stupid of me to get my hopes up.’

Mo puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Men
are weird. It’s not like it wasn’t obvious that you were a mess. Oh, shit –
the time. Look, you go out for one of your insane runs. I’ll be back at three
o’clock and I’ll call in sick to the restaurant and we can swear a lot and
think up medieval punishments for fuckwit men who blow hot and cold. I’ve got some
modelling clay upstairs that I use for voodoo dolls. Can you get some cocktail sticks
ready? Or some skewers? I’m all out.’

Mo grabs the spare key, salutes her with the
folded bread, and is gone before Liv can respond.

In the previous five years TARP has
returned more than two hundred and forty works of art to owners, or descendants of
owners, who had believed they might never see them again. Paul has heard stories of
wartime brutality more appalling than anything he encountered while working
in the NYPD; they are repeated with a clarity of recall that
suggests they might have happened yesterday, rather than sixty years ago. He has seen
pain, borne like a precious inheritance through the ages and writ large on the faces of
those left behind.

He has held the hands of old women who have
wept bittersweet tears at having been in the same room as a little portrait that was
stolen from their murdered parents, the silent awe of younger members of a family seeing
a long-missed painting for the first time. He has had stand-up arguments with the heads
of major national art galleries, and bitten his lip when long-fought-over sculptures
were returned to families, then immediately put up for sale. But for the most part this
job, in the five years he has done it, has allowed him to feel he is on the side of some
basic right. Hearing the stories of horror and betrayal, of families murdered and
displaced by the Second World War, as if those crimes were committed yesterday, and
knowing that those victims still lived with the injustices every day, he has relished
being part of some small degree of recompense.

He has never had to deal with anything like
this.

‘Shit,’ says Greg.
‘That’s tough.’

They are out walking Greg’s dogs, two
hyperactive terriers. The morning is unseasonably cold and Paul wishes he had worn an
extra jumper.

‘I couldn’t believe it. The
actual painting. Staring me in the face.’

‘What did you say?’

Paul pulls his scarf up around his neck.
‘I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think what to say. I
just … left.’

‘You ran?’

‘I needed time to think about
it.’

Pirate, the smaller of Greg’s dogs,
has shot across the heath like a guided missile. The two men stop to watch, waiting to
determine his eventual target.

‘Please don’t let it be a cat,
please don’t let it be a cat. Oh, it’s okay. It’s Ginger.’ In
the far distance Pirate hurls himself joyously at a springer spaniel and the two dogs
chase each other manically in ever-widening circles in the long grass. ‘And this
was when? Last night?’

‘Two nights ago. I know I should ring
her. I just can’t work out what I’m going to say.’

‘I guess “Give me your damn
painting” isn’t your best line.’ Greg calls his older dog to heel, and
lifts his hand to his brow, trying to track Pirate’s progress. ‘Bro, I think
you may have to accept that Fate has just blown this particular date out of the
water.’

Paul shoves his hands deep in his pockets.
‘I liked her.’

Greg glances sideways at him. ‘What?
As in really liked her?’

‘Yeah. She … she got under
my skin.’

His brother studies his face. ‘Okay.
Well, this has just gotten interesting … 
Pirate. Here!
Oh, man.
There’s the Vizsla. I hate that dog. Did you speak to your boss about
it?
’

‘Yeah. Because Janey would definitely
want to talk to me about some other woman. No. I just checked with our lawyer about the
strength of the case. He seems to think we would win.’

There’s no time bar on these
cases, Paul
,
Sean had said, barely looking up from his papers
. You
know that.

‘So what are you going to do?’
Greg clips his dog back on to the lead and stands there, waiting.

‘Not a lot I can do. The picture has
to go back to its rightful owners. I’m not sure how well she’s going to take
that.’

‘She might be okay. You never
know.’ Greg strides over the grass towards where Pirate is running around, yapping
dementedly at the sky, warning it to come no closer. ‘Hey, if she’s broke
and there’s proper money involved, you may actually be doing her a favour.’
He starts to run and his last words fly over his shoulder on the breeze. ‘And she
might feel the same way about you and just not give a shit about anything else.
You’ve got to keep in mind, bro, that ultimately, it’s just a
painting.’

Paul stares at his brother’s
back.
It’s never just a painting, he thinks.

Jake is at a friend’s house. Paul
arrives to pick him up at three thirty, as arranged, and Jake slopes out of the
friend’s front door, his hair mussed, his jacket hanging over his shoulders in
apparent preparation for his adolescent years. It never ceases to shock him, the
familiar jolt, the umbilical nature, of parental love. Some days he struggles not to
embarrass his son with the depth of his love for him. He wraps an elbow around the
boy’s neck, hooks him towards him and drops a casual kiss on his head as they set
off for the tube station. ‘Hey, fella.’

‘Hi, Dad.’

Jake is cheerful, pointing out the various
permutations of a new electronic game. Paul nods and smiles in the right places, but
even as he does so, he finds he’s conducting a
parallel
argument in his head. He keeps working it over silently. What should he say to her?
Should he tell her the truth? Will she understand if he explains it to her? Should he
just steer clear? The job is everything, after all. He learned that a long time ago.

But as he sits beside his son, watching his
thumbs flicking on the controls, his total absorption in the pixelated game, his mind
drifts. He feels Liv, soft and yielding against him afterwards, sees the drowsy way she
lifted her eyes to his, as if she were dazed by the depth of her feelings.

‘Did you get a new house
yet?’

‘Nope. Not yet.’

I can’t stop thinking about you.

‘Can we go for a pizza
tonight?’

‘Sure.’

‘Really?’

‘Mm.’ He nods. The hurt on her
face as he had turned to leave. She was so transparent, every emotion registering on her
face as if, like her house, she had never known what she should conceal.

‘And ice cream?’

‘Sure.’

I’m terrified. But in a good way.

And he had run. Without a word of
explanation.

‘Will you buy me Super Mario Smash
Bros for my Nintendo?’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ he
says.

The weekend stretches, is weighed down by
silence. Mo comes and goes. Her new verdict on Paul: ‘Divorced Toxic Bachelor.
Worst variety of species.’ She makes Liv a
little clay model of
him, and urges her to stick things in it.

Liv has to admit that Mini Paul’s hair
is alarmingly accurate. ‘You think this will give him stomach ache?’

‘I can’t guarantee it. But
it’ll make you feel better.’

Liv picks up a cocktail stick and
tentatively gives Mini Paul a belly button, then feels immediately guilty and smoothes
it over with her thumb. She can’t quite reconcile this version of Paul with what
she knows, but she is smart enough to grasp that some things are not worth dwelling on,
so she has taken Mo’s advice and run until she has given herself shin splints. She
has cleaned the Glass House from top to bottom. She has binned the shoes with
butterflies. She has checked her phone four times, then turned it off, hating herself
for caring.

‘That’s feeble. You
haven’t even broken his toes. You want me to have a go for you?’ says Mo,
inspecting the little model on Monday morning.

‘No. It’s fine.
Really.’

‘You’re too soft. Tell you what,
when I get home we’ll ball him up and turn him into an ashtray.’ When Liv
returns to the kitchen Mo has stuck fifteen matches into the top of his head.

Two pieces of work come in on Monday. One,
some catalogue copy for a direct-marketing company, is littered with grammatical and
spelling errors. By six o’clock Liv has altered so much of it that she has pretty
much written the whole thing. The word rate is terrible. She doesn’t care. She is
so relieved to be working instead of thinking that she might well write Forbex Solutions
a whole extra catalogue for free.