Laying the Ghost Read Free Page B

what he’s left?’ – wasn’t that what Mimi had said? There was too much here of what had been left – not just receipts and the paracetamol packet, the lipsticks, pens and spare glasses that were scattered like sad garbage all over the tarmac, but
herself
. Thanks so very much, Alex, you bastard, she thought, finding it easy enough to add this mugging to the list of grievances against him. Just as she turned the key in the ignition, up came that question that had never been quite far enough from her mind – according to Alex’s bitter parting words – during the entire twenty years of their marriage. Would it have been like this if, so many years ago, she’d hadn’t, after all, left Patrick?

2
    Changes
    (David Bowie)
    ‘I KNOW HOW she bloody feels,’ Alex had muttered on that long-ago day when he and Nell had watched Princess Diana confiding to the biggest TV audience in history that there were three people in her marriage. Nell had laughed, told him to leave it alone, for heaven’s sake; it was years ago and he was the one she’d married, wasn’t he?
    Alex had given her the usual look and she’d gone into the kitchen to pour more wine and have a private moment of wondering what Patrick was doing now. That time she’d pictured him living on a remote island, possibly in the Outer Hebrides, painting lonely landscapes and communing with otters and deer. No women were in this scene, though she’d allowed him an amicable parting of the ways from maybe two or three over the years. No children, though – he’d always been a hundred per cent sure on that one.
    When Nell first met Patrick, they were both eighteen, starting their first day as art students. His look had been somewhere between early Sting and the prettiest one from Duran Duran – all floppy blond hair and too much black eyeliner and casually flamboyant clothes that gave him an attractively piratical look. There were so many boys like him at the time. Nell liked the type. It was a softer look than punk, but not yet the trainee-accountant-on-a-weekend image that would define the New Romantics; vain, certainly, but having spent five school years boarding with girls of varying levels of hygiene awareness she knew what she
didn’t
want in a potential life partner. Never again, she’d vowed the day she left school, would she share premises with anyone who let their hair become filthy enough to smell of stale cheese, or whose sweaty-hockey-match-to-shower ratio was less than one-to-one.
    Nell fancied Patrick the moment she walked into the Oxford Poly (as it then was) Graphics department and saw him slumped on the old sofa in the corner, apparently asleep. It wasn’t what you’d expect from a first-year – as all the group assembled in this room were. Everyone else was alert, upright, prowling, eyeing each other for cool-rating and the possibility of friendship. To Nell, who was mildly frightened of just about everything and everyone on that first day, Patrick’s don’t-care detachment gave him a thrilling aura of confidence and superiority. If he was so casually at home on day one in a new college, he could presumably be enviably comfortable anywhere; she wanted to hang out next to him, to see if that blissful self-assurance was catching.
    Patrick’s long, stretched-out body was wrapped in a multicoloured coat of velvet patchwork and he wore lime green snakeskin boots. Beside him on the sofa was a very battered old black leather cowboy hat. You’d need supreme confidence to wear that too, she’d thought, guessing it would look so wonderful on this slim and elegant boy that by the end of term at least three doting acolytes would have bought cheap and less stylish versions of it.
    She was immediately certain she had never seen anyone quite as desirable as him before and wished she’d had more practice at sex so that when she eventually got him into her bed (and she was very, very determined here) she would be skilled enough to ensure he’d want