The Love She Left Behind

by Amanda Coe

  ‘Yes, but. It’ll be different, won’t it, without Mum, I mean?’

  Patrick snorted, spraying crumbs. They both ate on. Now was the time to mention the house, the ownership of the house. Finishing his last mouthful, Patrick crumpled the empty paper bag and said, ‘A pair of brown eyes.’

  Nigel made a vague noise of agreement at this unprovoked reminiscence. Patrick hooked a finger in a back molar to retrieve a piece of gristle, which he wiped on the balled-up paper bag.

  ‘Stupendous knockers.’

  Nigel couldn’t really continue the agreement. You couldn’t think of your own mother’s breasts as knockers. Had they, in any case, been all that stupendous? She had been rather a slight woman.

  ‘Your mother was jealous.’

  Oh. Although relieved, Nigel wasn’t sure he wanted to be Patrick’s confidant.

  ‘I was staying at this awful hotel, jacked in my teaching, trying to be a writer. Trying to be! She’d definitely given me the heave-ho, all too much, think of the kids, et cetera, et cetera. I knew I’d win in the end, mind.’

  Nigel sipped, concentrating on his mug. With the children, they told you not to reward negative behaviour with attention. It might work.

  ‘There was this maid, with the—Why not, I thought? And of course the sheer mention . . . She was green. Absolutely couldn’t take it, the thought of me and other women. So it was all back on from then. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’ Patrick grinned wolfishly. His large teeth were an appalling sepia. ‘Most enjoyable, mind.’

  Yes. It was obvious cause for celebration that his mother, a married woman with two children, had been crucially provoked into abandoning them all by the fact of Patrick, a childless bachelor, fucking around. And why not revisit those carnal delights that had reunited them while he was at it?

  Nigel intervened with the offer of another coffee. But from the way Patrick settled back with a cigarette as Nigel filled the kettle, he feared that they were in for the long haul. Exhaling, Patrick squared the cigarette packet, crossed his legs and cosied the chair next to his with an outstretched arm. The pose was very much Man of the Theatre. The haircut really had taken years off him.

  ‘Of course you’re right. I’ll need some help.’

  That was something.

  ‘The girl’s offered. Mia.’ Although his inflection on the name was sarcastic, it prodded Nigel electrically. ‘Putting my house in order.’

  ‘The house . . . but surely that’s not her—area of expertise . . .’

  ‘My work. She’ll help me with my work.’

  Nigel spooned coffee into their recycled mugs.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea? I was thinking more—a housekeeper sort of thing. Not to live in or anything, just to sort you out until you’ve had time to think of the future.’

  ‘She’ll sort me out, for the time being. She has the summer vacation.’

  This was very bad indeed. On the other hand, Patrick was past seventy and a girl like that . . . And she’d be here, and Nigel had ongoing reasons to visit.

  ‘What about paying her?’

  ‘She’s offered herself for free.’

  There was no doubt that Patrick was enjoying playing up the unsavoury roué implications. Nigel stirred the coffees overthoroughly, intent on dissolving the last granules that whirlpooled creamily in the centre of each mug.

  ‘Well, if you think it’s best . . .’

  Nigel put Patrick’s mug in front of him. Patrick flicked ash. His hand trembled and, when he spoke, his voice.

  ‘I’ll never forgive her, you know. Leaving me like this.’

  He meant Mum. Well, rampaging end-stage cancer was hardly running off with the milkman. Nigel pushed the sugar bowl his way appeasingly.

  ‘Ashes,’ said Patrick. ‘Oh God.’ And to Nigel’s dismay, he wept. Nigel hated this, always had, the way Patrick detonated instantly into high emotion, winding you in the backdraft. Still, he made an awkward clutch at Patrick’s shoulder as it jerked with the incontinent rigour of his grief. Haircut or no, with the first awful sob he had become an old man. Agonising seconds passed without abatement. Nigel patted and withdrew. There was nothing to be done. How could he possibly say anything about the house now? He, at least, would conduct himself with delicacy. All that was left to him was to stand guard by the chair as Patrick, drooling a rope of wet-crumbed spittle all the way down to the table, howled on and on, alone.

  C’ham Gdns

  New Year’s Day, 1979

  Darling –

  I’ve written pages tonight and torn them up, they’re not even fit for you. Love an appalling annihilator of prose styles.

  Jesus, Sara. All you need to know is that your letter has made me happier than the happiest man alive. Which is only fitting, because before this you have also made me the most abject.

  Cheque enclosed, cash it at any bank, it will cover tickets and necessaries. It’s direct to King’s Cross as far as I can tell. Trains are regular, no point writing times, as you don’t know exactly when you’ll manage to get away. Drop me a line or phone once you know, and of course I’ll be there to meet you. If you can’t, phone from the station and hang on and I’ll be no more than half an hour. Don’t talk to strangers.

  I live every moment for your arrival.

  I had a letter from the bursar at St Christopher’s confirming the place will be free for the boy after the half-term holiday in February. I’ve accepted, presuming it’s all ok with your sister till then.

  Don’t be sad, my darling. You know this is the only way and the break you make is necessary in order for us to have a life together that isn’t half measures and acrimony. That’s the thing. Clarity will prevail, as the best for the children as much as us. No one thrives on the piecemeal and second-rate. As my love is absolute, so must yours be. I hope you can understand this. I think you do, because your instinctive capacity to understand—to understand me, at least—is one of the things I love most about you.

  Longing for you every night. I kiss the left nipple, then the right, then the left again. The Green Cross Code.

  For thine is the kingdom, forever and ever,

  Patrick

  xxx

  Then

  1979

  LOUISE HAD starred the entry in her Letts Wombles diary as soon as Mum had written to tell her that she and Patrick and would be coming to take her out. The pencil that came with the diary wasn’t very good; its lead was too hard for the shiny pages, although the snug way it tucked into the spine, with the flat brim of its white plastic top perfectly flush with the edge of the cover, hectic with Wombles, gladdened Louise’s heart every time she replaced it. She considered her diary a present from Mum, since she had used some of the Christmas money Mum had sent to buy it, and Louise felt slightly guilty about how quickly she had stopped keeping it up to date. So it was good to be using the diary as it was intended, instead of manufacturing bogus reminders such as writing ‘bring baking stuff for school’ three days after the claggily underbaked scones had come home in their ice-cream tub and gone straight into the bin. Feeling that the pallid grey lead didn’t give the visit its due importance, let alone permanence, she went over the date—March 10—in felt-tip. It would be harder, surely, to cancel an event in actual felt-tip. There had already been a couple of cancellations: one before Christmas, when the weather was too bad for Mum and Patrick to travel all the way from London, and another after, when Patrick got the flu. Third time lucky, as Auntie B said. Since she only believed in the bad kind, Auntie B invoked luck purely as a dampener. Louise could tell she was expecting another cancellation, right up to the moment when the taxi pulled up outside. It was always disappointing to be proved wrong.

  Mum spilled out first, and by the time she was busy with the fiddly catch on the low iron gate, Louise was already out of the front door and halfway down the garden path. But before she could reach her, Mum had pulled back and returned to the taxi, where Patrick appeared to be having difficulties over payment. So it was Louise wh
o released the gate’s metal spring and welcomed them in, first enveloped by the smell of Mum she hadn’t smelled for months and the shape she’d left behind like a cut-out, and then, suddenly, confronted by the startling new shape and smell of Patrick.

  It was the very first time they’d met. Louise felt nervous, suddenly. He wasn’t smiling; he was talking to Mum about the taxi.

  ‘—tipped the bugger, he didn’t know where he was going!’

  Mum waved her purse with the same hand that held the strap of her smart green handbag.

  ‘This is Louise.’

  Patrick nodded. He was an immediate, complicated fact, like weather. Louise understood at once that he’d prefer to speak to her through Mum. His own voice was as posh as anyone on television, and seemed to taint Auntie B’s, so that when she offered him a cup of tea inside, she braced herself before each aitch as though facing a slightly challenging stair. They were already using cups and saucers instead of mugs; Louise had helped set the table. Patrick asked for coffee to begin with, but Louise saw Mum pull a face at him and he settled for tea. While the kettle boiled she climbed into Mum’s lap. Mum pulled her hair.

  ‘What’s she been feeding you, bricks?’

  Eleven was too old to be sitting on your mum’s knee, but it was a special occasion, after all.

  ‘This looks nice,’ Mum said, tipping her off to hover at the table. Louise had forgotten that already, the way she’d never sit in a chair. Auntie B said she had a round bum, which in fact she hadn’t, but it meant she couldn’t be still. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered, B.’

  B planted the teapot.

  ‘It’s only a few biscuits. You’re lucky I was off. Matron’s gone sick and they’ve had me working all hours. Doing her job as well as everyone else’s, as usual.’

  ‘B’s the brains of the family.’

  Louise had grown up with the flaunting of Auntie B’s brains. Nigel was assumed to take after her, although obviously boys couldn’t become nurses. Patrick didn’t seem particularly interested, although Mum always talked about B’s brains as the end of a conversation instead of a beginning. It wasn’t until they’d finished their tea and biscuits—Louise was the only one who had a biscuit, because they didn’t want to spoil their lunch—and were walking to the Berni Inn that Patrick became even slightly animated. Unfortunately, it was about the Berni Inn.

  ‘Not this prefab Merrie Englande bollocks. Can’t we go somewhere where you can get a decent pint? Or even wine?’

  B looked flummoxed. The Berni was the only place they ever went as a treat.

  ‘You can get wine at a Berni,’ Mum said.

  ‘It used to be the Red Lion,’ B offered.

  ‘I’m sure it did.’

  At the table, Louise watched Patrick remember to offer B a cigarette before he put the packet away (Mum didn’t smoke). He wasn’t her dad, but he put his penis in Mum’s vagina. Every night, if Nigel’s information was to be believed. Of course Nigel didn’t say penis and vagina—that was from school, where they had recently been shown a film about periods (‘menstruation’, pronounced with eccentric emphasis on the ‘u’). The boys had been removed to the gym while the screening took place, and afterwards, Louise and her friends had tantalised them with wild elaborations and exaggerations and downright lies about the censored material. But Louise knew, unlike her friends, that any or all of the improbable facts imparted about adult sexual behaviour had to be true. This weirdness must all take place, because why else would Mum leave Dad, and them? Since nothing made sense, you had to believe in a compulsion you couldn’t understand. It was all because Mum wanted Patrick’s penis in her vagina. Dad’s penis wasn’t good enough, for some reason. There were sizes, apparently. Louise had started to ask Nidge about this before he’d gone away to school, but he’d told her that she was too young to be asking those sorts of questions.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  It was the first thing Patrick had said directly to her. Mum told her to stop staring at him, and stroked his hair back from his face, smiling. She had never done this with Dad, not least because Dad’s hair was much shorter. Patrick’s was really quite long for his age. Not as long as a hippy, but not as short as a proper dad’s.

  According to the film at school, it was all to do with sperm and eggs.

  ‘Are you going to have a baby?’

  Louise wasn’t saying this to Patrick in particular, but because Mum had turned back to B, who was deep in telling her something to do with Nanna and Grandpa, their mum and dad, he was the only one who caught it. He pulled back, as though the question had hit him in the face.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ He bared his teeth. ‘Revolting things, aren’t they, babies?’

  It was meant to be a joke, a joke against her. He’d decided, because she was a girl, that she must love babies, and it was more a way of teasing her for that than anything else. But Louise didn’t like babies. Still, she shook her head, because that was what Patrick wanted. She could tell he wasn’t interested in what she really thought, and she had decided that it was best to give him what he wanted.

  Patrick’s face lit into a proper smile as the waiter arrived with his round tray crammed with drinks. Once they were distributed, Mum hoisted her glass of wine for a toast, although Patrick had already taken a gulp of his. She shook back her hair and stretched her neck, as though she was waiting for a photo to be taken.

  ‘Cheers. And to Nidge, eh?’

  Louise could tell Mum was wishing it was Nidge who was there instead of her. Patrick finished his drink so quickly that it was like a party trick. He reached for the bottle. He hadn’t joined in the toast.

  OF ALL THE new things Nigel had feared and imagined he might have to do at boarding school—Latin, rugby, fox hunting, wanking off an older boy, watching foreign films—sewing had never occurred to him. Sewing. But here he was, and Patrick was paying for it—Nigel knew exactly how much, £550 a term, because he’d secretly read the letter—sitting in the art room, expected to cross-stitch a pencil case. Even at primary this hadn’t been required of him.

  ‘It can be practical or decorative,’ said the art master, Mr Hinton. ‘Just do what you like, incorporating your name.’

  There was an immediate bundle into the heap of felt on each table as the boys made their selection, a few tussles, good-naturedly resolved. They were thirteen, for God’s sake. Nigel sat and watched, empty-handed. If only he could stop farting.

  ‘All right Nidge, need a bit of help to get going?’

  Mr Hinton, rusty-bearded, tank-topped, touched his shoulder. He showed no reaction to the fart, although the stench was unignorable. Miserably, Nigel shook his head and picked up a needle.

  ‘Best thing is to outline the design so that you’ve got something to follow. Unless you’re like Toby—pretty confident there, Tobe!’

  Toby, who was hugely tall and had the pinkest cheeks Nigel had ever seen, beamed, pulling on a length of banana-yellow embroidery thread. Like all the boys except Nigel, his hair hung shaggily over his face and ears. Mum had ensured that Nigel had been smartly barbered before his departure, mistakenly assuming, like him, that quasi-military standards of grooming would be the norm at a school you had to pay for.

  Mr Hinton patted Nigel’s shoulder and moved on. ‘Good chap.’

  There was no choice. Cautiously letting another one go, Nigel reached for the depleted pile of felt. He chose the darkest colour, a bottle green that was the same colour as his old school blazer. There weren’t even uniforms here; Patrick had thought this was a good thing.

  ‘Soz.’

  At the end of his stitch, Toby had caught the side of Nigel’s head with his needle-bearing hand, which required a lot of space for its full extension. Nigel edged his chair away. Glancing at the boys around him, he folded the square of green felt into a rectangle, took up a pen and printed N I G E L. The letters sloped down to one corner, erratically spaced and pathetically small. He didn’t think he could bear another forty minutes of this.


  He put up his hand. ‘Toilet sir.’

  Mr Hinton nodded and smiled. Nigel escaped. On recent experience he could take up a good fifteen minutes in the bogs without having to eke it out. And after art there would be Latin, which he was already looking forward to. Any respite from expressing himself was already very welcome. They were big on expressing themselves at St Kit’s, as they called it. In words, through the medium of embroidery thread, or even, accompanied by piano music on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and despite the fact of puberty, in movement to music. Even from the little he knew about Patrick, his choice of school astounded Nigel. His dad, without knowing any details, had been very cowed by the opportunity. That’s what he’d called it, ‘A big opportunity for you, son.’ Mum had agreed, seizing on the same word. To her, it was a ‘wonderful opportunity’. And so it had all been agreed. If his dad had known about the sewing, he would have laughed himself silly. Nigel wasn’t about to write and tell him. It felt wrong to write anything at all from a place like this, like the worst sort of boasting, even if he was miserable.

  The toilets were wonderfully empty. No one to ask how he was; even though all he ever said was ‘fine’, they kept on asking him. Nigel dropped on to the sturdy wooden seat and let it all go. He felt as though he could never get rid of all the shit there was in him. Might he have some kind of disease? Matron was supposed to deal with ‘aches and pains’, as she’d told him when he arrived, along with inviting him to call her Linda. She was the Head’s wife’s younger sister, bosomy and red-haired, and although she wasn’t pretty, all of the boys made appallingly crude jokes about her that longed for her in every kind of way. It would be impossible to have a conversation with Linda about his bowels, and it wasn’t as though he could write to Mum about it. He was completely on his own.

  Nearly spent, Nigel rode the final cramps. They had become familiar enough over the past days that he knew they would pass. It was the porridge that had done it. He would try to avoid it from now on. Bracing his hand on the cubicle wall, he waited it out. At a concluding spasm, his nails twitched over the whitewashed brick and produced a frisson, like scratching a blackboard, that shivered him all the way up to his ears. It was repulsive. Divine. It overcame the turmoil in his arse. Taking a breath, he reached up and scored his hand down the satiny wall, in ecstasy and horror.