The Love She Left Behind Read Free Page A

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 theresulting 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.
    â€˜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 froman 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