by Amanda Coe
‘Holly, apologise to Patrick.’
‘I didn’t do nothing!’
‘Say you’re sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Holly.’
Mia spoke from the stairs. Her low voice was hypnotically calm.
‘Patrick—sorry—I think we were ready to take a break anyway, weren’t we? Sorry. Can I make everyone some lunch?’
At Mia’s suggestion, Patrick meekly agreed to a lie-down until the food was ready. As the rest of them went downstairs, Mia apologised to Louise with insincere diplomacy: it was probably all her fault, Patrick was probably tired out from all the morning’s talking. Louise started to make tuna sandwiches, insisting that Mia sit down when she started faffing round her, offering to help. Holly was back on her phone, texting, probably to tell her friends about Patrick’s meltdown.
‘It’s such a lovely house,’ said Mia. Like everything she said, it sounded as though she was repeating something she had been asked to learn. Or it might just have been good manners. Through the recent filter of Jenny’s tactful good taste, Louise felt an ancient embarrassment in her association with the house, its rundown state and the abnormalities of its household.
‘It needs looking after.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s sort of exactly like you imagine a writer’s house to be, all nooks and crannies and books and stuff . . . atmosphere.’
‘Rank,’ Holly remarked, bent over her phone.
Mia accepted her plate with the sandwich on with the same air of faint, gracious surprise with which she’d taken her coffee. She offered to go and fetch Patrick, but Louise told her to leave him; he could have his sandwich whenever he was ready and he might well be asleep now. She wondered if he’d finished the bottle she’d found in his room when she was clearing it. ‘Basics’ again.
‘Hasn’t he been sleeping at night?’ asked Mia, all synthetic concern. Louise told her that she had no idea. The three of them ate on. Mia, Louise noticed, left her crusts.
‘I couldn’t turn it off,’ said Holly, finally finishing with her phone and assuming the conversation was where her attention had last left it. She was talking about the radio. ‘I turned the knob thing when he started going into one and it wouldn’t turn off.’
‘Maybe you’d got the volume by mistake,’ said Louise. ‘They’re funny, those old radios.’
‘It’s right spooky,’ Holly insisted. ‘You can feel it upstairs, near where me grandma died. It’s freaking me out.’
Mia tucked her hair behind her ears, two sleek commas. ‘The radio must be like broken or something?’
Louise recognised the set of Holly’s face. Mia had no idea how stubborn she could be. ‘It’s not, I told you. It’s weird. Summat’s going on up there.’
Mia smiled. ‘You must know there’s no such thing as ghosts.’
Holly gazed back. ‘Course there is. Everyone knows there is. It’s like proved by scientists?’
Mia stood, gathering the plates and tipping her crusts into the bin.
‘Haven’t you seen Most Haunted?’
Mia said she hadn’t. Holly sighed at Louise.
That night, from the way Holly cuddled up to her in the spongy bed they’d been forced to share, Louise could tell she was still fretting about the business with the radio.
‘You know, your grandma . . . If someone passes, that’s natural—in an old house like this lots of people must have died, if you think about it.’
‘Oh, Jesus!’
The mattress lurched as Holly hitched back closer to her. Louise kissed the back of her neck, where the hair had slid away on to the pillow. It smelled of her, the same smell she’d had as a baby.
‘Two more nights, that’s all.’
Holly squirmed free. They settled, their breathing countered in a sequence that evaded rhythm, their pulses their own. It had been years since they’d shared a bed, except for the odd bad dream, and even those had stopped some time ago.
‘Why didn’t you ever see Grandma?’
Louise shifted, the disparity in their weights making Holly collapse against her in the lee of her body.
‘I don’t know, really. It was difficult living so far away.’
‘We could have come for holidays,’ Holly offered, after a pause to think about this.
‘We hadn’t fallen out. It was just . . . I suppose I had my life and she had her life, you know.’
‘Are you sad she died?’
At this, Louise heaved around to face Holly with such force that Holly had to put out her arm to stop herself rolling on to the floor.
‘What a stupid bloody question, of course I’m sad. She was my mother!’
She could see the frightened glitter of Holly’s eyes in the dark. It wasn’t her fault.
‘When you’re older, you might understand. Us not seeing each other . . . it was just one of those things. She loved Patrick very much. It was a—big love story.’
A few breaths, in in, out out, in out. ‘But what about your dad?’
Frozen on the stairs, the awful sound of Dad crying in the lounge.
‘What about him?’
‘They were married, her and your dad.’
‘These things happen, don’t they?’
They turned away from each other to sleep, but it was Holly whose breathing stretched out first. Soon, she was so deeply asleep that even the buzz of an incoming text from beneath her pillow didn’t wake her. What was she like? They never stopped. The noise, so close to her own ear, had nearly given Louise a heart attack. After that she stayed awake for what felt like hours, with the phone giving the occasional rasp, like a wasp dying on a windowpane. She was tempted to text Scarlett back and put the fear of God into her, but she wasn’t confident of her way around Holly’s phone and she’d never hear the end of it if she deleted something by mistake. Instead, Louise listened to the cracks and settlings of the house around her. You never knew. Concentration had never been her strong point, but she needed to start paying proper heed. Only two more days left. Maybe there was another message, somewhere, if she knew how to look. Hadn’t Jenny said Mum would have wanted to speak to her?
Cobham Gardens
August 3rd, 1978
Dearest, Dearingest –
I bloody hate it. Please believe me when I say the last thing I want is another day like that, utter misery all round. I don’t mean to hector—it’s just knowing, as I said, how happy we could be, how happy you could make me, and seeing it squandered—your loveliness and lightness squandered. If not to me—and I believe you when you tell me you love me, remembering your delicious shyness breaks—you surely owe it to yourself to make an attempt at happiness, instead of settling for chicken in a bloody basket. Oh, and the promise of a ‘fitted kitchen’!!
You say I don’t understand about the children but I do. It’s not as though they’re babies. If you love me Love demands sacrifice: it’s as old as Abraham and Isaac. I’m not asking you to cut their throats. And I could afford to send your boy to school, think of that.
If I am to say anything to the world I need you with me to help me say it.
My Sara. My only Sara. Only my Sara. How I hate this stinking country. Tell me that’s all you want, truly, and I’ll leave you alone. Miserable. Miserable.
P xx
NOT LONG AFTER he’d turned out his reading light, Sophie’s backside brushed luxuriantly against Nigel’s leg. The deliberation of the contact stirred him from sleep’s early drift. Now he was alert. Her buttocks made another pass, unmistakably. He put a hand on her hip and slithered her nightdress up to reach skin. Ten minutes before, she had given him a tongueless, terminating kiss goodnight and rolled gratefully into her pillow. Sleep was all she wanted. Something, he had no idea what, had happened to change this. Blindly reaching for his wife’s breasts, Nigel pressed his thickened cock into the small of her back. He wondered if he could reach to switch the lamp on. Better not. She was more enthusiastic in the dark.
They moved in escalating, f
amiliar ways, made stranger by the lack of light. Skin; hair; smells, natural and synthetic, some unique to Sophie, some shared between them. After their twelve years together, sex was like a flow chart with limited possible outcomes. If yes, then proceed to step four, if no, continue with step three . . .
‘Condoms?’
‘Drawer.’
As Sophie reached out to the bedside table, Nigel struggled to remove his pyjama top. Maybe she’d put the lamp on now? But no, she preferred to scrabble around in the dark. As maintenance foreplay, he kissed his way down the back of her neck while she ripped open the foil sachet. Suddenly, a brutal arc of light sliced them across. Oliver’s small silhouette stood at the open door. He sobbed, gathering momentum, as Nigel and Sophie froze in position like escaping PoWs in a war film.
‘Sweetheart—’
Sophie hurried out of bed, her nightdress belling back down to unflattering mid-calf, and scooped him up.
‘Was it a bad dream?’
The little boy clamped her gratefully, shins and ankles dangling from his outgrown pyjamas as she staggered him back across the hall to his bedroom. Nigel subsided. Ah, well. He moved back into his warmer patch of mattress, away from the hall light. Hopefully Sophie would turn it off when she was done with Olly. Both boys had nightlights, shaped like benign cartoon ghosts.
Ghosts. Nigel thought of his mother, dying in that dusty house. Her last nights. Had there been a light on for her? Had she been frightened? She had known, after all, that there was nothing to be done: it was Patrick the truth had been kept from in that last week. Nigel had had a phone conversation with the GP, following the results of the post-mortem necessary after any death at home. The doctor had reassured him that Sara had been medicated beyond any sort of pain. Easy enough for him to say that: who now could tell any differently? Apparently Mum had been ‘most insistent’ that Patrick not be told how ill she was. It was hard to say if this had been a kindness, in the end. Perhaps she had just wanted to be left in peace, without his imminent bereavement hijacking the arduous days of her dying.
Roaming around the house, and Patrick, and his mother, Nigel arrived at the thought of the student, Mia. He hadn’t had time to check out her credentials; he must put that on his list for the following day. His dying hard-on quickened. There was something about her. So glossy. So young.
The hall light was still on. It was impossible to tell how long was Sophie going to be, comforting Olly back to sleep. Discreetly, Nigel began to bring himself off. Sometimes she got into bed with the boys until they were safely asleep, and fell asleep herself. But no, just as he was moving more urgently against his hand, Mia bent over the old table in the Cornwall kitchen, the hall light went out and Sophie scuttled back to their bed. Nigel rearranged himself as she put her newly freezing feet his way.
‘Thought we were out of the woods with him waking up,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s not starting again.’
Nigel moved Sophie’s icy hand downwards, just to let her know. It stayed for a second, gave his crotch a neutering pat and returned to the heat of his chest. All she wanted from him now was warmth. She wriggled against him.
‘Maybe it’s all, you know, with your mum.’
‘It can’t mean much to him.’
They had taken Oliver down to see Nigel’s mother when he was a baby: this had been, come to think of it, their last face-to-face meeting with her. There had been similar plans to take Albie for a viewing when he was born, but the visit had been postponed for some reason to do with either Sophie or Mum, he couldn’t remember which, and hadn’t, finally, happened. His mother had never travelled to Surrey to see them. This was just understood. Sophie kept a sparse gallery of the cards Mum sent up on the fridge as a meagre corrective to those from her own mother, Ganny T, the overlaid strata of which regularly defeated the tenacity of the fridge magnets, but surely the boys were too small to take in, at any level, their other distant grandmother’s death? It wasn’t as though they’d seen Nigel emoting about it all over the place, because he hadn’t been. He felt fine. He felt so fine he felt slightly irritable at the thought that it might not be normal to be so unaffected by the death of your mother. Or maybe the irritation was because he was horny. He really was. Although he also desperately needed to pee, which was confusing matters. Surely he was too young to be starting with prostate problems?
When he tried again with Sophie’s hand, she pulled it away and turned firmly on to her side. This decided him. He swung out of bed.
‘I’ll need to go down there again, I’m afraid,’ Nigel said, heading for the en suite. ‘Lay the will out for Patrick. Maybe you can come with the boys.’
Sophie moaned, already on her way to sleep. He knew this would be an unadopted suggestion. But at least he’d got it in there, as he’d remind her tomorrow when he firmed up her refusal. It suited everyone for him to go to Cornwall alone. Nigel wondered if Mia would be gone by the weekend. Probably.
When he’d finished in the bathroom (everything seemed normal, but maybe he’d book in for a prostate check), he made his way downstairs to the computer. There were things to do, as always. He had been deliberating about whether to let his father know about Mum. Well, Dawn, his second wife. Dad had been holed up in a home in Stockport for nearly ten years, deterioratingly vacant with Alzheimer’s. Digging out Dawn’s address—she had no email—Nigel recognised the self-serving tidiness of the gesture. If his father had been alert to the world, he wouldn’t have welcomed news about Mum. He’d tried hard to keep her, but once she’d gone, he never mentioned her again. And he had passed the two of them, his first children (there were two more sons, with Dawn), on like parcels. Louise to Auntie B, Nigel to the school Patrick had paid for. They were no more orphans now than they’d been thirty years ago, and nothing would change when Dad’s body died as well as the rest of him.
Still, it would be better all round to let Dawn know. One of the duties and advantages Nigel had derived from being sent to public school was the civilising art of correspondence. Thank-you letters, notes of introduction, job applications, and now this. By the time the boys were grown up, making marks on paper would be an obsolete skill, along with whistling. But for now, it was poignantly appropriate, all the more so for calling on a formalising decency he was seldom asked to exercise. With a thought for his mother, who had made all this possible, Nigel opened the drawer that contained writing paper, took out the heavy sheets, and found his pen. She, of course, never wrote.
Headland Heights Hotel
Newquay
Cornwall
November 2nd 1978
Darling girl –
Forgive scrawl, wine at dinner trying to make grim surroundings less grim. The only other guests are businessmen in suits, here for some kind of conference. As house rules demand dressing for dinner (piss elegance), they assume I’m one of them. Some of the b’men dine with their ‘secretaries’, all of whom wear flimsy tops with no bra. Effect in freezing dining room like sitting among a convention of peanut smugglers. One though, scandalously, has brought his wife! (Nipples firmly covered, thank God.)
Pounding seas. Very cold here, and empty, and beautiful. I am cold and empty, but as you know, only beautiful in your eyes. Although there is a little chambermaid with big brown eyes and bigger tits who seems to have taken a fancy to me . . . her hospital corners when she makes my bed speak volumes. I might take a crack at her, since you’re no longer interested.
I hope you don’t mind me writing. Hope the kitchen is all Writing proper is torture, but am grinding out a scene or two on a good day (not every day is). The main character is a man possessed by a daemon—good or bad, I haven’t decided, but she’s certainly you. She’s also Albion, the spirit of old England—you wouldn’t believe some of the things that have come out of your mouth . . .
I do understand the phone is impossible, but if you cared to drop me a line, it I would be very grateful.
I’m the loneliest man in the world.
P xx
THE GARDEN HAD probably been lovely once. Louise thought she might remember it from a photo Mum had sent when she and Patrick first moved in: the two of them shaded under a patio umbrella, toasting their good fortune with a gaudy array of bedding plants saturating the background. Even now, with the grass patchy and high and the beds barely woken into spring, you could see how nice it would be with a bit of work, stretching out towards the sea. Talking to Jamie on her mobile, Louise used her free hand to pluck at the weeds clogging a row of paving stones. The stones wound down to a birdbath, its contours blurred with moss.
‘Have you done any washing?’ she asked him. He told her he didn’t need any.
‘What about pants? And socks and that?’
He didn’t need any. Stooped over the path, Louise had a good view of the back of the house. The windows were in a shocking state. She could ask Jenny about a window cleaner.
‘I hope you’ve been getting up.’
‘Course I’ve been getting up.’
The school would let her know, if they could be bothered. Jamie was so close to leaving they’d more or less washed their hands of him, even with GCSEs still to come. No one was expecting him to cover himself with glory there.
‘What’s the place like?’ she attempted. ‘Work experience?’
Jamie had actually shown a bit of enthusiasm for that, the prospect of going into a joiner’s and carpenter’s for a week. He was good with his hands.
‘Dunno. All right. Bit crap.’
He managed to communicate that the place at the joiner’s had fallen through—he had no idea why—and in its place, the school had been sending him to an industrial dairy for the week.
‘Oh well,’ Louise said, unable to contribute any more on that subject. ‘Only another couple of days, eh?’
At the end of the house, shadows behind the long window arch lurched, bouncing light from the glass. It was Patrick’s study. He was in there having his last morning with Mia. She’d already booked the taxi to take her to the station, around five.
Louise couldn’t manufacture any more questions once Jamie confirmed that he had enough money, and enough food in the house. She really wasn’t needed. She promised to ring him at the same time tomorrow. He hung up first. Louise felt the lack of him, but then she felt that even when they were in the house together: his gangling remoteness, his silence that she wanted to break into in case it contained sadness. When he’d been a baby she used to kiss him and kiss him, all over, until he bubbled over with laughter. She loved to see him laugh now, cracking up at something stupid on the computer or on TV. It was never her who made him laugh any more, not on purpose, but maybe that was normal.