by Amanda Coe
Louise hadn’t asked for a look at Mum in the casket before they burned it. There was no point in seeing how much she had changed, except to upset herself. All the funeral rituals demanded you recognise death as real when it was the last thing you wanted, each impersonal stage stripping away what you held on to, finally trundling her away up a conveyor belt like a supermarket item to be scanned and bagged. And without them saying goodbye.
At least now there was all the sorting out to bring her closer.
Louise had volunteered at the reception. Jenny, the neighbour, was expecting her to, she could see. One look at Nigel would tell you that he never got his hands dirty. His hands were something she was shocked to recognise each time she saw him. They were still like a teenage boy’s: bizarrely knuckleless and smooth. They made him look unprepared for life, despite his suit. Anyway, sorting out was a daughter’s job.
‘Oh, bless you,’ Jenny had said, too relieved for even a token objection. ‘Patrick’s been saying just to put it all in bin bags, but really . . .’
There was everything to be done. At least the bed next door where her mother had died had been stripped, thankfully. It must have been Jenny, or the nurse. The bed in this room, the one Patrick slept in, needed changing. The pungent, old-man smell of the sheets permeated the room, although without, Louise was relieved to notice, anything urinal. It didn’t help that there was something wrong with the radiator, which belted out unstoppable heat. The low-ceilinged bedroom was sweltering, even with the window sashes pushed as far up as they would go. Louise sweated as she worked; it was surprising how heavy clothes could be on their hangers. She was starving, but that was good. Work a bit off her. Burger and chips: the chewy fat of the burger and its salty blood mixing with the salty chips, sweet blob of ketchup. Maybe they could go to the pub for lunch. There was nothing in the house.
Louise hauled out a little run of formal clothes in yellowed dry-cleaning shrouds. Her mother must have stopped going to do’s long ago—Louise knew Patrick had never been keen. Only once, after Mum had run off with Patrick (as Auntie B liked to call it, as though they were still running, cartoon-like), she had sent a photo of the two of them at some London party, a reception or ceremony, montaged with the famous. Patrick might have been getting an award, Louise couldn’t remember. What she remembered was how glamorous the two of them had looked in the picture, Patrick and Mum, like old-fashioned film stars among the real film stars, both laughing. Patrick must have won something, or been expecting to, to be laughing for the cameras like that. Her mother had probably been wearing one of these dead dresses shoved beyond the coats. Louise remembered sparkles, flaring against the flash.
Hefting the heavy clothes on to the bed, she sneezed at the resulting explosion of dust. Jenny’s hints at the funeral about the state the house was in had been, like the woman herself, conservative. Other peoples’ houses were always filthy—Louise was prepared for that—but as well as the enamel in the bathrooms (as yellowed and disastrous as Patrick’s teeth), the ravaged paintwork (smeared with track lines of fingerprints, as if tracing the unsteady routes of a gigantic toddler), the dulled carpets (darker at the edges, where years of scamped hoovering had deposited tidal rings of dirt), there was the mess.
‘Oh my days, Mum. It’s like one of them programmes,’ Holly had said when they arrived that morning.
With Patrick’s study as the unseen epicentre, books, papers and bottles strewed the house like the aftermath of a disaster. It didn’t look as though they’d thrown anything away in thirty years, not if you could read it. Next to the study, in the formal dining room, books and magazines were heaped so densely that they threatened the fragile-looking antique furniture with collapse. Moving out along the corridor, more printed matter was rammed horizontally into any space left in the packed bookshelves and bookcases, with more volumes stacked optimistically next to and in front of the housed editions, narrowing most thoroughfares to a precarious single file. Freestanding piles of books and papers teetered on stairs and landings, while others, typically near chairs in many rooms, had been adopted as permanent surfaces on which cairns of crumbed plates and unopened junk mail were balanced. Even the extra bedrooms, with the exception of the one where Louise’s mother had died, were colonised by reams of hoarded print.
The bottles followed a more haphazard pattern, with the exception of the dark kitchen. Here, empties of varying sizes and colours had been serried in rows around the bin and along the wall as far as the dresser, in a display of historic consumption as formally impressive as an art installation or a tomb offering from an ancient civilisation. Only the bedroom came close to containing as many, although Louise had yet to see the study, Patrick’s most private domain. He always kept the door closed.
So this was where Mum had lived, and how. Louise’s memories of their childhood, pre-Patrick home were of irritably enforced cleanliness and order: knick-knacks that were purged of dust every few days, coasters that protected table surfaces, Mum advancing on rooms spraying Mr. Sheen ahead of her like tear gas at a riot. It seemed that much had changed. Of course Mum had been ill, as it turned out. For how long, though?
Turning to the mounded clothes on the bed, Louise could hear the sound of the TV from downstairs: Holly and Patrick were watching Homes Under the Hammer together. There was a tiny room off the corridor from the kitchen, like a nest, with a sagging sofa and tired cushions and years of scattered Sunday supplements, all arranged around a huge, spanking new flat-screen. It felt like the most inhabited room in the house, and was certainly the most inviting. There was a dust-dimmed gallery of framed photos on the shelves that surrounded the TV, mostly of Patrick or Patrick and Mum together, none of them recent. Helping Holly to find the remote, Louise had scanned the shelves and quickly killed the small hope of discovering any pictures of herself. In one, the oldest photo and the only one without Patrick, her mum was a young woman, holding Nigel as a blurred baby on her miniskirted knee, before Louise existed. It must have been the only photo she’d taken with her when she left.
It was getting to be late for lunch, and Louise needed a break. They also needed to decide what they were doing: she and Holly had brought their bags from the B and B so that they could get straight to the train, but if they went at three there would be stacks left undone. Louise really couldn’t afford to stump up for another night away, and she wasn’t entirely secure about the status of her return on the train. But supposing they stayed here in the house—could she really trust Jamie to get himself up in the morning? Not that it was the end of the world if he overslept; he was only doing work experience.
Patrick would never agree to it, probably.
‘Where’s Patrick?’
Down in the den, Holly was alone in front of the flat-screen, cradling her phone. She shrugged.
‘How are you feeling, chick?’
She shrugged again. It wasn’t like her not to be hungry. Ordinarily she’d be shouting the house down about needing her lunch by now. Poor little thing. She still looked pale.
Louise went to the study door and knocked. When there was no answer, she opened it to find Patrick at his desk, smoking, a whisky bottle to hand.
‘Sorry to disturb you.’
No lights blinked in the housing of the ancient nicotine-beige computer that sat to his right. Its screen was equally lifeless. There was no other sign that he was writing, not so much as a piece of paper in front of him. Just the ashtray, the bottle and the glass.
‘I don’t want anything,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ It hadn’t occurred to her that he might want anything. She took up the cue. ‘I could make you a coffee. Or I was wondering about going out to get a bit of lunch.’
He didn’t respond to this.
‘Patrick . . .’
His hair stuck up at the back, in need of a cut as well as a wash. There was still a lot of it. Louise remembered her mother pushing it back off his face, where it always fell. Adoring him.
‘You don’t look anything li
ke her,’ he said. ‘You never have.’
‘No.’ Louise waited a second or two. ‘I’m making headway, but there’s quite a bit to do . . .’
‘Burn the fucking lot, as far as I’m concerned. Put me on the pyre and have done.’
What was she supposed to say to that?
‘Well. Even if it’s the charity shop, they’ll be grateful for it. It’ll take me a little while yet, though.’
He drank. The whisky bottle was from Sainsbury’s: ‘Basics,’ said the label.
‘Would it be all right for Holly and me to stay the night? I could make up one of the beds—I mean, we’d share. That way everything would be sorted for you—I can talk to Jenny, is it, make sure . . . I mean, if you want someone to come in and . . . maybe just once a week, sort things out. Maybe you’ve got someone . . . I’ll ask Jenny, shall I?’
‘Nigel said he’d take care of the legal stuff.’
‘I meant in the house.’
Patrick didn’t move, except to take the glass a small distance from his lips.
‘So we’ll stay then, just for tonight. I’ll bring something back for your lunch. You might fancy it later.’
The look Patrick wheeled to give her as she closed the door was violent and unfathomable. But it was as Louise remembered, from his visits to see her with Mum: the turning away, back to the glass and the bottle, did most of the damage.
She’d left her bag up in the bedroom. When Louise opened the door back into the unnatural heat, an impossible movement by the bed caught the edge of her eyeline, escaping with a weightless sigh. Even as she told herself not to be so stupid, her feet met an uncanny resistance. Starting back, she lost her balance.
Righting herself heavily against the side of the bed frame, Louise saw what it was that had moved against her; the draught from the opening door had agitated a wisp of dry-cleaning plastic that had come untethered from the neck of its hanger when she had heaped it with the others. It lay on the musty carpet, where it had drifted against her panicking feet. Stretching down, she squirmed to trap it, but it flounced limply away. She caught it on the second attempt. Her pulse returning to normal, Louise stood and hooked the plastic back over the hanger. Stupid.
It was as she shimmied the sheath down over the unprotected dress that she saw what the clothes had been trying to tell her all morning. Briskly, excited, she walked next door into the spare bedroom and opened the wardrobe there. Sure enough. A row of clothes, feminine, everyday, more recently worn than the spangled outfits abandoned in the room where Patrick slept. All the mess had stopped her thinking clearly; it would do the same to anyone. But the message was obvious, if you had eyes to see. Mum was telling her, loud and clear. Patrick said that they only knew about the cancer a week before she passed. Not enough time to get her and Nigel down to say goodbye. But Mum had been sleeping in the other room for months.
It was hard to be surprised he’d lie to them.
Cobham Gdns
April. 9? 10? ‘78
Sometime in the middle of the night
My darling—
I love you, I love you, I love you. You make me a better man than I ever thought possible, even the thought of you when I’m here in this desperate room marking desperate bloody essays about ‘English countryside’ for the Jap students. I can just about bear to work but it’s impossible to read the newspapers without wanting to step in front of traffic. You’re very sensible never to read them but then you seem wise about so many things. Beautiful and wise and irresistible. For all those reasons, your name can’t be Sally.
Have your excuse ready for Wednesday. I’ve wangled the money for the ticket.
P xx
TWO DAYS AFTER the funeral, Nigel was taken aback to ring Patrick and get Louise on the phone. At first he thought he’d dialled her number by mistake.
‘We’re back home tonight,’ she told him. ‘There’s been that much to do.’
This was annoying, after all he’d been doing himself.
‘You should have told me,’ he said. ‘I could have arranged to get someone in.’
‘It’s family,’ she maintained. ‘I’ve sorted a few things out you might like, or Sophie, you know, to have.’
Nigel couldn’t imagine Sophie wanting anything from that grotto of a house. Unless—had there been jewellery? He remembered rings, catching light.
‘How’s Patrick?’ he asked, more or less knowing the answer to that. He needed to speak to him, however fruitlessly. Assimilating the contents of the will, of which Nigel was co-executor along with Patrick’s solicitor, it had become apparent that ownership of Bloody Empire had been transferred to their mother, for long-defunct tax reasons. Although clear provision had been made for the rights to the play to be transferred back to Patrick in the event of his wife’s death, Nigel needed his consent. At the very least, it would make Patrick liable once again for any tax accruing. Then there was the matter of the house. That looked like it would be, as houses always were, rather more complicated.
Was Bloody Empire still put on anywhere? Nigel had been seventeen when he’d seen it, on the West End press night. He remembered best being allowed a gin and tonic in the bar at the interval. And the topless scene, naturally. He’d been permitted to come up from school specially, in the middle of the week in the middle of the term, and had greatly enjoyed the glamour on his return; underplaying it, but careful to mention the tits and exaggerating their, in truth, disappointing size and trajectory. They had been very political breasts, bracketed by underarm hair. That time was long gone, thank God. Nigel had been surprised to spot the actress in a Poirot a few years ago, much aged as a sadistic headmistress who became the murder victim, the breasts he had once ogled heavily covered in bloodstained tweed.
Patrick didn’t come to the phone when Nigel rang. Louise said he was sleeping, in his study. (A study, now that was something to have.) They arranged for Nigel to ring back later in the day, before she and Holly left for their train. When Nigel called again, towards four, the phone rang on for so long he thought it was a lost cause. No answer machine kicked in, although he knew there was one because it had been the main conduit of communication between him and his mother when she was alive. Just as he was about to hang up, Louise answered, out of breath from the stairs. She then toiled to get Patrick.
‘Do what you must,’ was his response to Nigel’s crisp summation of the rights situation. His voice sounded so thick with age and drink that Nigel faltered at the prospect of asking anything to do with the house. He wasn’t even confident Patrick had understood what had just been so concisely put to him about his play.
‘If you don’t take measures to retrieve the rights,’ he repeated, to be on the safe side, ‘they’ll pass to Louise and me.’
‘She’s still here,’ said Patrick, distractedly. ‘Turned the place out from top to bottom. I want her gone.’
‘They’re getting the train,’ Nigel reassured him.
But after the conversation had finished, Louise rang him back on her mobile.
‘I’m in the garden,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want him to hear. Nidge, I don’t think I should go.’
Nidge. It grabbed him. She didn’t even know she was doing it.
Someone had turned up. A young woman. She claimed to be a freelance journalist who had apparently some time ago arranged, via email, to interview Patrick. She seemed to be expecting to stay in the house, according to Louise.
‘You know what journalists are like,’ she said, groundlessly. As if she had ever had anything to do with journalists.
‘Well, doesn’t she know about Mum?’ Nigel asked.
Apparently the girl hadn’t, until she had arrived. And she had travelled down from Newcastle, or Sunderland, or possibly the Lake District—somewhere far north.
‘What kind of freelance journalist?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Or did she say she was studying journalism? Something like that. I couldn’t really make it out, to be honest.’
This was
impossible. Louise was hopeless on real-life details. That was the problem with never having to function in the real world, and God knows, Patrick was no better. But she had been right to warn him. Mum had always been the gatekeeper: now that responsibility had passed to him. The timing could have been better. Nigel had a big client presentation in the morning and the PowerPoint material wasn’t yet finished for him to check over, while Sophie’s annoyance over his absences from the house was cashing out in escalating acts of martyrdom he’d be stupid to ignore. That morning she’d even washed his gym kit for him and presented it to him at the door when he’d left at sparrow’s fart: he knew the danger signs. She needed some attention. No wonder his IBS was playing up.
‘Can you get her to ring me?’
Apparently the girl had wandered off, Louise didn’t know where. She said she’d do her best. Nigel agreed that in that case it would be a good idea for Louise to stay if she could, until he could travel down after his presentation the next day. With Mum gone, who knew what some opportunist hack might be hoping to dig up? Patrick hadn’t been newsworthy since 1982, but you never knew. A journalist could probably manipulate him into saying a story’s worth of anything, if they were really that desperate for material. And at least being down there would allow him to have a proper conversation with Patrick about the future.
When Nigel got home that evening, Sophie had not only made coq au vin, but insisted the boys wait so that they could all eat it together. They were peevish and argumentative with hunger and tiredness. Nigel felt the same way, but he made a great effort to be charming and interested, and to praise the food, which he knew his digestion would suffer for later. As Sophie told an extended anecdote about her tribulations in returning some catalogue purchases, Nigel used the time to think through tomorrow and its compartments, starting with the presentation and moving on to whatever he would face in Cornwall. Perhaps it had worked out for the best that he’d be down there before Louise went for good: for all he knew, she might have stripped the house bare. Had there been rings? Sophie would remember. According to the will, he and Louise were to split everything evenly, but it would hardly be surprising if Louise took the opportunity to line her pockets while she could.