The Love She Left Behind (23 page)

After Warren left for work next morning, Louise used her so-called housekeeping to buy a ticket on a coach to Cornwall, a journey that was no joke with a pregnant bladder. She didn't leave Warren a note, or call him on the mobile he'd recently acquired. Louise didn't care. It was like she was in a dream and the only way she could wake up was by talking to her mum. Which was strange, because Mum had never been much of a talker.

She arrived in Newquay in the glare and traffic of teatime in the summer season, and used the last of her money getting a taxi out to the house. Why had she never thought of this before? It was well over ten years since the last disastrous trip Mum and Patrick had taken up to see her, when Patrick had ranted about her teenage foray into meditation. There had never been another meeting, let alone the promised family Christmas. Various plans had been postponed, one by one, then lapsed into cancellations, until the lack of contact established itself as a habit. Still, Louise's intense teenage familiarity with the few pictures Mum had sent of the house when she and Patrick first moved in were enough to produce a lurch of recognition as they approached the drive, followed by the lurch of difference in seeing the house as it was, unframed and real. Heart speeding, she paid the taxi and pressed the ivory teat of the doorbell in its tarnished brass dome. She didn't hear the bell ring inside, and endured an uncertain interlude wondering if it was broken, and if not, whether it would be rude persistence to ring again. Finally, by a combination of vain ringing and timid knocking, she brought Patrick to the door.

Patrick himself was unchanged, except for a new wildness to his eyebrows that added to his ferocity. He didn't recognise her, of course. Even when she said ‘Louise', it didn't register immediately.
When she said she'd come to see her mother, his face altered to a more pointed unfriendliness.

‘It's you, is it?' He took her in differently, noting her mounded belly. ‘Christ.' Although Louise had been nothing but excited about the baby from its first moment, one sweep of Patrick's eyes found the scabby Artex and Warren's indifference.

‘She's not here. She's gone out.'

Louise's suspicion that Patrick was lying didn't form immediately. It took the minutes she waited on the doorstep, lowering herself on to the worn grey stone to relieve her swollen ankles and pulsing feet while Patrick called a cab to take her back to the bus station, until his failure to invite her inside suggested a motive other than his traditional hostility. What if her mum was a couple of walls away, ignorant of her arrival? What could Louise do to announce her presence without provoking Patrick? Sluggishly, she rallied herself.

‘Could I just see her for a minute, do you think? I'll go straight back.'

Patrick put down the phone. ‘She isn't here, I told you. She's gone up to London.'

It wasn't as though he was scared of offending her. The call finished, he told her the cab would arrive in about fifteen minutes and left her, the open front door his only gesture towards hospitality. Sitting on the step, Louise imagined her mother at the upstairs window, forlornly watching her departure, like an advert that had intrigued her as a child when it appeared in Auntie B's magazines—‘Things happen after a Badedas bath'. You saw the bare back of a woman, a draped silken sheet just short of revealing the crack of her gently rounded arse, while she looked out of a window at a handsome knight on horseback in the courtyard below her. Louise had been too young to understand the caption's
implication about what was really supposed to happen after the bath; to her, the scene always appeared to be one of mournful farewell, not anticipation, the woman held captive and unable to be with her departing knight.

Mum had made a promise to Patrick. She could never, ever break it. It was an enchantment.

There was no sound from the corridor where Patrick had disappeared (the one that in fact led to his study). The rest of the house was quiet. Moving as softly as she could, Louise edged into the hall, the smell of damp rebuffing her. She had to try. Excruciated, she placed her foot on the bottom stair, releasing a steady creak from the warped wood. After a second or two, with no reaction from Patrick, she braved the next step. By the fifth, it became clear that he could hear nothing from wherever he was and she picked up the pace, still muffling her steps by keeping her heels suspended. Reaching the top landing, a desperate relief overtook her and she ran through the first door she saw, which led to the empty bathroom. The room opposite was their bedroom. That was empty too. The silence told her that Patrick hadn't been lying. Mum wasn't hiding anywhere, but nor was she waiting.

When the cab arrived, Louise poked her head back into the echoing hall and called, ‘That's me off, then.' Patrick bellowed a dismissive goodbye from the direction of his study. Louise had to wait hours at the station for the coach to take her back to Leeds, but it wasn't until she was safely in her seat that she sobbed her disappointment into the bristled fag-stink of her moquette headrest.

NIGEL HAD TAKEN
a day from his holiday allowance to help Cally move out of their flat. In fact, she had already arranged for her father to help, so his gesture was redundant, as well as, according
to her, both pathetic and typical. The final word she produced was
abject
, her satisfaction in alighting on it obscuring even her irritation. Since their mutual affection had evaporated, Cally's predominant emotion towards him was exposed, jaggedly and angrily, as contempt. Time was, Cally had said things like ‘You're so
abject
'
and Nigel had nodded, hangdog and obliging, and she had gathered him in and kissed the top of his head, perhaps fingering his ten-pence-sized bald spot fondly as she did so. No more. In the terrible weeks since she had confessed to sleeping with her pupil master, the end of that not-quite affair, and her determination to break up with Nigel despite his immediate willingness to forgive her for it, Cally had become increasingly furious. Nigel knew that he wasn't the bad guy, but he couldn't return her fury, even as she escalated into behaving like a soap opera bitch. He didn't want her to leave, but he longed for it all to be over. An eczematous rash had crept from the crooks of his elbows down his forearms, reaching the interstices of his fingers, where it itched ragingly, despite the assiduous film of hydrocortisone cream he applied morning and night. Seeing him screw the midget cap carefully back on the tube of cream one recent evening had been enough to send Cally roaring from the bathroom.

Having put in formally for a day off, Nigel was loath to withdraw in case explanations for the withdrawal were required. It was bad enough that the news of his girlfriend leaving him was being metabolised through the firm. He had been sleeping on the sofa for some time, to Cally's further annoyance (although she didn't want to share a bed with him and hadn't offered to take the sofa herself), which meant that he slept badly, assailed by traffic noise, the street light that shone through the slats of the living-room blind, and the goblin light of the VCR if he forgot, as he usually did, to lean a cushion against it at bedtime. Even
so, as dawn broke on the morning Cally was due to go, it was the noise from the bedroom that brought Nigel to consciousness, as she opened and shut drawers for the last time. It was really going to happen. She was leaving him.

Thank God they hadn't bought a place together. It had been during the discussions Nigel had persistently initiated about them entering the housing market that Cally had announced her infidelity. Since there was no way he could cover the rent on his own and it was a one-bedroom flat, he would soon be moving himself. Nigel didn't feel sentimental about this, leaving these expanses of MDF in the charmless end of Hammersmith. All his sentimentality was reserved, still, for Cally. Thinking about her going made his fingers itch. He doubted he would ever manage to find anyone else of her calibre to be his girlfriend.

While Cally tracked between bedroom and bathroom, swerving past boxes and adding to others, Nigel dressed and ate a meek bowl of cereal, trying to keep his spoon quiet. It would be best, and most dignified, if he got out before Cally's father arrived. There was a library a few streets away, and a cybercafé even closer, if he wanted to check his work email. Carefully, he fitted the heavy laptop that was his pride and joy into its dedicated backpack. It was time.

The bedroom looked stripped and utilitarian without the ropes of beads and mismatched earrings and medley of tubes and pots on the dresser, Cally's stacks of paperbacks by the bed. She had removed the duvet cover, but not the duvet. The walls were bare; he didn't own anything in a frame. Nigel noted that Cally was zipping an engorged cylindrical sports bag that technically belonged to him. He decided to let it go.

‘So . . .'

She glared at him.

‘I'm off. Leave you to it,' he said.

Just as he leaned in, muttering, ‘All the best,' her expression softened and she gave him a fierce, proper hug. She even patted the top of his head.

‘Let me know about the phone bill. You've got the address.'

He said he had. She was going to stay with her parents in Blackheath for a while. She said she would be gone by lunchtime, all being well. And that was that. Just for a moment, Nigel could have wept, but didn't. He struck out for the cybercafé, which was more congenial than he had feared. Sitting among the foreign students, he drank serial weak cappuccinos and got a surprising amount of work done. At lunchtime, he went to another café and lingered over his chicken baguette. Even so, when Nigel loitered back into the top of their road just after two, the small hire van was still parked outside the flat, its back open to reveal its trove of boxes and bags. As Nigel hesitated, the main door to the block opened and Cally's dad backed out, balancing a box stacked with pans against his modest paunch. Cally followed, arm splayed to stop the door swinging back on her, talking back at someone inside the hallway. She kept her arm spread to hold the door for them, her posture helpful, either patronising or polite; it was impossible to read without seeing the other person.

It was his mother.

She walked from the building, a little tentative, chatting to Cally. The two of them had never met. Since Sara never visited, Nigel had never invited her. The last time he had seen her was just after he'd qualified almost six years before, when he and Cally were supposed to be travelling to St Ives, but Cally had had to cry off with what turned out to be glandular fever. Since then there had been only the usual cards: birthday and Christmas. Nigel advanced, bewildered.

‘There you are.' His mother said this with such immediate, low-key exasperation that he wondered if a letter or phone message had gone astray.

It must have been obvious to her that Cally was moving out, if they hadn't actually had a conversation about it inside, but Sara said goodbye to Cally in the same unembellished way as she had addressed him. He and Cally reiterated their own embarrassed goodbye, punctuated by an even more embarrassed handshake with Cally's dad, Adam, and redundant introductions between the two parents. Cally handed Nigel the keys they had arranged for her to post through the letterbox. Distracted by Sara, there was no opportunity to watch the van depart elegiacally out of their road. When he suggested they go out, Mum said it would be too much bother and couldn't they have a cup of tea upstairs?

Nigel had kept the kettle, although when he opened the cupboard door above it, the row of mugs was gapped like a badly kept mouth. Aware of Mum's gaze, he patted his hair down over his bald spot as she watched him make the tea. She herself looked the same: sharp-eyed, idiosyncratically glamorous, her hair more grey than gold now, but still a statement. A statement along the lines of
I'm not like other people, so don't assume anything about me
.

One of them would have to speak.

‘How's Patrick?'

‘Fine. The same. Fine.'

He put the tea down in front of her. It was always a bit of a surprise that she didn't smoke. It would have suited her.

‘Lucky you were in.'

She was always more northern than he remembered as well. When she got hold of the handle of her mug, Nigel was shocked to see her hands tremble, so much that a drop of tea slopped on to the tabletop. He ignored the lapse, seeing that she wouldn't acknowledge it herself. Was she nervous, then?

‘So. To what do I owe . . .'

‘There's an exhibition I wanted to see. Patrick wasn't keen.'

He was about to ask her about the exhibition—he had never known her to be interested in art—but she interrupted him.

‘Cally. What's that short for then?'

‘Calliope.'

Mum snorted a laugh and gulped at her tea. Typical, it meant. Typical Nigel. Just the sort of girlfriend you would have. Ex-girlfriend. She saw him watching her fingers, to see if their tremor had stopped. She put the mug down on the table and placed her hand out of sight on her lap.

‘Ah well. Plenty more fish in the sea.'

Nigel disallowed the blood rush that followed this dead offering, the urge to toss hot tea in his mother's face. What the fuck do you know? What the fuck do you care? But something of his rage must have conveyed itself to her—a shift in facial colour, the aversion of his eyes. She hitched her chair back from the table, and seemed to think better of whatever she was about to say next.

The creases between his fingers itched horribly. What in the name of God did she want, he wondered. She was definitely here for a reason. That was the thing about Mum: she didn't do anything without a reason. Or rather, if there wasn't a reason—an advantage, let's face it—you wouldn't catch her doing it. When he met her eye, Mum looked away, feigning interest in the view over the asphalt forecourt of the Territorial Army building next door. In her lap, her forefinger worried at some loose skin around her thumbnail. Her bag was at her feet, a waxed Liberty shopper with tape round the handle that betrayed nothing about the nature of her errand.