The Love She Left Behind (18 page)

The dishwasher was a boon, and when the building foreman, Andy, came to talk to Mia about the work, he reassured her that they could leave it where it was for most of the duration. ‘No problem' seemed to be his motto, dismissively tapping the surfaces and cabinets soon to be ripped out and replaced, breezily consigning them to history. It was nice to have a burst of energy in the
house. Patrick had been ill; not seriously, but his mornings were starting towards lunchtime and he had a new cough in his repertoire that came in harsh volleys he had to suspend speaking or moving to withstand. Since the cough also troubled him at night, Mia had moved out again, not back to the den, but to one of the disused bedrooms at the end of the top corridor. Andy had said it would be no problem to install a new radiator in there, and that his crew could do it before they got going on the kitchen. He was as good as his word. Mia cleaned the room comprehensively, painted it in a week's worth of evenings, and had a new bed delivered, charged to one of the new cards. If Patrick had bothered to ask about the scheme, she would have offered her justification that he needed a guest room for all the visitors they seemed to be having, now that Louise occupied the spare room proper. He didn't ask.

Even after one night, Mia thought of the room as her own. Its deep casement looked over the back of the house, to the sea. Although she rarely looked out of the window, she cherished the idea of it. She Instagrammed a phone shot of the view. After all that rain, the weather had turned freakishly warm, with steady sun gilding unseasonably decorous waves.

Just before eight on the builders' first day, Mia was at the door to welcome them, hopeful that Patrick wouldn't be disturbed, given his habitual deep sleep and the fact that his bedroom sat over the opposite side of the house. At the sight of the van she felt nervously excited, as though complicit in a small crime. She offered cups of tea, but Andy and his assembly of silent, fleece-wearing men were already sipping from lidded paper cups of their own. She left them to it. Less than five minutes later, Louise barged her bedroom door so hard that the knob dented the new paintwork.

‘What's going on?'

Mia looked up from her laptop, where she was trying to source
a cheap version of shelving she had admired on the walls of a converted Belgian orphanage in
ELLE Decoration
.

‘They're working on the kitchen.'

Louise's breath came deeply, wheezing. ‘Working?'

Not for the first time, Mia was tempted to announce her engagement.

‘It should have been ripped out twenty years ago. It's totally had it.' From downstairs, a woody wrenching underlined Mia's point. Louise took a step back, hanging on to the door, banjaxed. Mia's presence on the night of Holly's accident had led her to believe that Mia was an ally, an article of good faith she still clung to in spite of the deterioration of Mia's tone.

‘Does Nigel know?'

‘Why would he?'

Mia decided to ring him first. She didn't think there was much chance of Nigel backing Louise against her. But his mobile and his work number both went straight to voicemail. Louise was probably down the corridor, blocking the lines. Mia hovered in her doorway and listened. Louise was talking, all right, but she was talking to Jamie; Mia could hear his responses, measured and brief against his mother's flow of agitation. He wasn't a talker; that seemed to run in the family. Patrick talked for all of them. Had that been true for Sara as well? Mia dismissed the question. Louise's ridiculous communion with the spirit world was a Pandora's box left temptingly open. She refused to succumb to curiosity: it would mean Louise had won something. If she could just hang on for a few more days, Louise would be gone and Mia could have everything she wanted.

Self-consciously casual, Mia left her room. Patrick's bedroom door was still closed, its scuffed wood incommunicative. Increasingly, when she'd left him for any length of time, the thought came to her: what if he were dead? Her pulse tripped as she opened
the door. Patrick, on the side of the bed, paused in putting on his socks. His feet dangled a bathetic few centimetres from the floor, one socked, the other naked and veined. Unusually, Mia went to him and dropped a kiss on his head. He held her to him, warm and animal with his recent sleep. Alive, then.

‘You're the world to me, darling girl.'

This meant it was going to be one of his good days; the builders couldn't have woken him. He looked at her, up and down. Mia had come to understand what the phrase ‘drinking in' meant as a way of looking—the thirsty progress of Patrick's eyes, relieving a basic need.

‘You're man's answer to God,' he said. ‘You're all there is.' The hairs that poked from his unbuttoned pyjama top were grey and wiry. She settled them with her palm as a fusillade of coughing overtook him. If he died and they weren't married, she'd be left with nothing. She didn't want much, she really didn't.

‘I'll bring your tea.'

Mia had moved the kettle, toaster and relevant supplies into Patrick's study. While she was jiggling toast free from the ejecting mechanism, Jamie sidled round the door. Talking to her didn't come easily, Mia saw; even the rims of his ears were a hot red. For the first time, she saw a resemblance to Nigel. He was Jamie's uncle, after all.

‘Mum's a bit upset.'

Mia waited for Jamie to say more, but that seemed to be as much as he could muster. She put the slices on to the plate and cymballed her palms free of crumbs.

‘When isn't she upset?'

Eyes widening with surprise, Jamie grinned. Mia smiled back.

‘It's just—anything to do with her mum, you know. It upsets her.'

‘What does the kitchen have to do with her mum?'

He shrugged, on the spot.

‘Would you like some toast? Sorry, I should have thought . . .'

He considered the offer as though it gave him pain.

‘Go on, then.'

Mia knew from her years in Newcastle that northern people always met hospitable gestures as though they were doing you a favour. She proffered Jamie the plate and put in another couple of slices for Patrick as Jamie mortared cold chippings of butter on to his toast. Despite the sunshine outside, the study remained inhospitably cool.

‘I know it's a bit inconvenient, but it'll only be a couple of weeks. It's not like they're tearing the place down—it's a few units, for God's sake.'

Jamie stood, and munched.

‘Nothing to do with me, is it.'

Thank God for that. She made him a coffee along with Patrick's. He blushed again when he took it. It wasn't a particular blush, she could see; he was just shy.

‘I'm off soon.'

Like a tap with a slow drip, Jamie's speech seemed to take a while to gather in him before it could be expressed.

‘Into t'army. Basic training, like.'

‘Your mum hadn't said,' said Mia, as though she and Louise chatted about these things.

‘She dun't know.'

Mia was surprised by his confiding in her. But who else did he have to tell, apart from Patrick? Maybe he had told him already. A couple of times she had been surprised to find the two of them in apparently easy conversation about football. They had that in common, as well as cricket, racing, snooker and Formula One. Since Jamie's arrival, Patrick had been enticed to watch more of these than ever on the TV in the den, at all hours.

Jamie slurped coffee. ‘I'll tell her, like. Working up to it. She'll feel better about stuff once she's got Holly from the hospital.'

Mia picked up the breakfast things for Patrick, leaving Jamie to it. She half-expected to see Louise in the hall as she passed through, receiving confidences from the Other Side, but there was no sign of her. As Mia reached the stairs, the phone rang baldly. Backtracking, she picked it up and answered. There was a small, charged hesitation before an elderly woman's voice said, ‘Oh, hello, I was hoping to speak with Patrick.' The voice was lush, burred with nicotine. Mia suppressed a small surge of fright.

‘Who shall I say is calling?'

‘Dodie Shad.'

Not Sara then, of course not. Mia asked the woman to hold the line. Phone calls for Patrick were rare enough for her to feel curious and slightly excited on his behalf. When he heard who it was, he gave a quavering, matter-of-fact sigh and stumped downstairs, as though people were beleaguering him by phone every minute of the day. Mia lingered on the landing.

‘Dodie.'

Patrick's hand stole to his forelock, and he instantly became more robust, even dashing. She couldn't infer much of the conversation, as Dodie appeared to be doing most of the talking. ‘Cradle-snatching,' Patrick agreed at one point, which Mia assumed alluded to her. The conversation lasted for less than five minutes. Replacing the receiver, Patrick headed for his study without turning back. She had to scuttle after him with the cooling coffee and cold toast. He received them neutrally and took them to his desk. Jamie had cleared out, leaving his mug neatly on his empty plate, by the kettle.

‘So?'

Patrick glared. ‘Is there any marmalade?'

She brought it for him. Through the crunching, Patrick told Mia that Dodie and her husband, Lucas, would be staying the following night, on their way to a literary event in Padstow. This was something they had done occasionally when Sara was alive, although not for a number of years. Mia stared at him as he dropped a crust to his plate. At some point she had imagined entertaining in the house, drifting from one streamlined surface to the other as she assembled an effortless meal, sharing a bottle of champagne with her guests. But now was definitely not that point.

‘We don't have a kitchen!'

‘We'll go out. They'll pay, since we're putting them up. Although Lucas can be tight as fucking
arseholes
.'

Mia made a booking for a bistro in Newquay. She found it online when the restaurant Patrick mentioned as the place he and Sara always went to with Dodie and Lucas turned out to have gone bust in 2003. On the assumption the Shads shared Patrick's conservatism, she chose somewhere she hoped would be similar in atmosphere and menu to their extinct regular, and booked a table for four. She bought gin and lemons and minibar cans of tonic, and proper whisky instead of Patrick's own-brand stuff, hiding it among the cereal packets so that he wouldn't start the bottle before the visitors arrived. She stowed a bag of ice cubes in the stranded freezer. As a final gesture, she picked the tulips and grape hyacinths that bloomed randomly in the garden and arranged them in vases. Opening the windows of the damp drawing room to the welcome spring heat, Mia felt her keenest pleasure: life as magazine shoot.
Mia likes to brighten the eighteenth-century drawing room with flowers from the garden.
She Instagrammed a shot of the flowers, her face a blur behind them.

The next day, the Shads arrived nearly two hours before they were expected, while Patrick was having his study-based nap.
Louise and Jamie had left for the hospital, and in any case were neither expected nor asked to play any part in the socialising. Mia answered the door.

‘Wonderful journey, we just cruised straight through, didn't even stop for a pee!' announced Dodie, foursquare on the doorstep. She was a tall woman, extravagantly layered against any defining assessment of her large body. Clumped mascara framed her sentimental blue eyes, which blinked through a girlish ash-blonde fringe, so that the top of her face in no way corresponded to the swags and puckerings of age further down. She offered a warm hand, armoured with rings.

‘You must be Mia.'

Mia smiled and withstood the frank scrutiny of both Shads. Lucas, smaller than his wife, stepped out from behind her, armed with a bottle that he forced into Mia's hands as he lunged in for a double kiss. He was dapper, smoothly bald. Mia hadn't been prepared for a friend of Patrick's to be black. (His Wiki entry said a lot about a small magazine, and jazz; she had skimmed it without looking up any images.)

‘Where is the old bugger?'

Mia told them that Patrick was working, and apologised about the kitchen, where drilling whined through the walls. While Lucas went to find Patrick, she led Dodie upstairs with their bags: Mia had decamped back to Patrick's bedroom to make way for their guests.

‘Absolutely desperate for a pee, we were so determined not to stop,' said Dodie, disappearing into the bathroom on the way. Mia carried the bags on into the bedroom for her. They were of unremarkable quality, she assessed, neither the cheapest nor shabby with age. Going by these as well as their car, the Shads weren't rich, but they didn't look to be strapped, either. Dodie took so long
in the bathroom that Mia went back downstairs, where Patrick was already shuffling around in search of a drink.

‘House is in a bloody uproar,' he complained to Lucas, who sat in the spare chair, legs urbanely crossed to reveal burgundy socks and skinny, hairless shins. Mia intercepted the Basics whisky bottle and asked Lucas what he would really like.

By the time of their dinner reservation, everyone except Mia had been drinking for hours. Although Lucas showed no signs of being affected by the gin and tonics that kept pace with Patrick's scotches, Dodie was slurring her words and repeating herself, with an increasingly irritating habit of buttonholing Mia every time the conversation between the two men became interesting. Fortunately, the older woman seemed to be seeking an outlet for monologue rather than an actual conversation, so after a couple of frustrating interchanges, Mia was able to tune her out and listen to the men. She relished the opportunity to eavesdrop on Patrick, performing the way he had on the phone to Dodie, all frailty banished. He was exactly the way she had imagined he might be before she met him.

It took some chivvying to get the uproarious trio of them moving in time for dinner. The Shads, supported by Patrick, were adamant that there was no point paying for a taxi when their perfectly good car was parked outside. When Mia protested that Lucas was over the limit, he flourished his car keys and suggested that she drive. She decided to take Dodie's breezy assurances about the scope of their insurance coverage at face value.