The Love She Left Behind (26 page)

‘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
of
f
! 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

 

N
IGEL 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 them 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
moneti
sation, 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?'

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.