The Girl You Left Behind

  'Oh, just some freelance stuff. I work for myself. I don't have the personality for office work.' Liv smiles.

  Mo takes a long drag of her cigarette. 'I'm surprised,' she says. 'You were always one of the Golden Girls.'

  'Golden Girls?'

  'Oh, you and your tawny crew, all legs and hair and men around you, like satellites. Like something out of Scott Fitzgerald. I thought you'd be ... I don't know. On telly. Or in the media, or acting or something.'

  If Liv had read these words on a page, she might have detected an edge to them. But there is no rancour in Mo's voice. 'No,' she says, and looks at the hem of her shirt.

  Liv finishes her coffee. The remaining waiter has gone. And Mo's cup is empty. It is a quarter to twelve. 'Do you need to lock up? Which way are you walking?'

  'Nowhere. I'm staying here.'

  'You have a flat here?'

  'No, but Dino doesn't mind.' Mo stubs out her cigarette, gets up and empties the ashtray. 'Actually, Dino doesn't know. He just thinks I'm really conscientious. The last to leave every evening. "Why can't the others be more like you?"' She jerks a thumb behind her. 'I have a sleeping-bag in my locker and I set my alarm for five thirty. Little bit of a housing issue at the moment. As in, I can't afford any.'

  Liv stares.

  'Don't look so shocked. That banquette is more comfortable than some of the rental accommodation I've been in, I promise you.'

  Afterwards she isn't sure what makes her say it. Liv rarely lets anyone into the house, let alone people she hasn't seen for years. But almost before she knows what she's doing, her mouth is opening and the words 'You can stay at mine,' are emerging. 'Just for tonight,' she adds, when she realizes what she has said. 'But I have a spare room. With a power shower.' Conscious that this may have sounded patronizing, she adds, 'We can catch up. It'll be fun.'

  Mo's face is blank. Then she grimaces, as if it is she who is doing Liv the favour. 'If you say so,' she says, and goes to get her coat.

  She can see her house long before she gets there: its pale blue glass walls stand out above the old sugar warehouse as if something extra-terrestrial has landed on the roof. David liked this; he liked to be able to point it out if they were walking home with friends or potential clients. He liked its incongruity against the dark brown brick of the Victorian warehouses, the way it caught the light, or carried the reflection of the water below. He liked the fact that the structure had become a feature of London's riverside landscape. It was, he said, a constant advertisement for his work.

  When it was built, almost ten years ago, glass had been his construction material of choice, its components made sophisticated with thermal abilities, eco-friendliness. His work is distinctive across London; transparency is the key, he would say. Buildings should reveal their purpose, and their structure. The only rooms that are obscured are bathrooms, and even then he often had to be persuaded not to fit one-way glass. It was typical of David that he didn't believe it was unnerving to see out when you were on the loo, even if you were assured that nobody else could see in.

  Her friends had envied her this house, its location, and its occasional appearances in the better sort of interiors magazine - but she knew they added, privately, to each other, that such minimalism would have driven them mad. It was in David's bones, the drive to purify, to clear out what was not needed. Everything in the house had to withstand his William Morris test: is it functional, and is it beautiful? And then: is it absolutely necessary? When they had first got together, she had found it exhausting. David had bitten his lip as she left trails of clothes across the bedroom floor, filled the kitchen with bunches of cheap flowers, trinkets from the market. Now, she is grateful for her home's blankness; its spare asceticism.

  'So. Freaking. Cool.' They emerge from the rickety lift into the Glass House, and Mo's face is uncharacteristically animated. 'This is your house? Seriously? How the hell did you get to live somewhere like this?'

  'My husband built it.' She walks through the atrium, hanging her keys carefully on the single silver peg, flicking on the internal lights as she passes.

  'Your ex? Jeez. And he let you keep it?'

  'Not exactly.' Liv presses a button and watches as the roof shutters ease back silently, exposing the kitchen to the starlit sky. 'He died.' She stands there, her face turned firmly upwards, bracing herself for the flurry of awkward sympathy. It never gets any easier, the explanation. Four years on, and the words still cause a reflexive twinge, as if David's absence is a wound still located deep within her body.

  But Mo is silent. When she finally speaks she says simply, 'Bummer.' Her face is pale, impassive.

  'Yup,' Liv says, and lets out a small breath. 'Yup, it really is.'

  Liv listens to the one o'clock news on the radio, distantly aware of the sounds from the guest bathroom, the vague prickle of disquiet that she feels whenever someone else is in the house. She wipes the granite work surfaces and buffs them with a soft cloth. She sweeps non-existent crumbs from the floor. Finally she walks through the glass and wood hallway, then up the suspended wood and Perspex stairs to her bedroom. The stretch of unmarked cupboard doors gleams, giving no clue to the few clothes behind it. The bed sits vast and empty in the middle of the room, two Final Reminders on the covers, where she left them this morning. She sits down, folding them neatly back into their envelopes, and she stares straight ahead of her at the portrait of The Girl You Left Behind, vivid in its gilded frame among the muted eau de Nil and grey of the rest of the room, and allows herself to drift.

  She looks like you.

  She looks nothing like me.

  She had laughed at him giddily, still flush with new love. Still prepared to believe in his vision of her.

  You look just like that when you -

  The Girl You Left Behind smiles.

  Liv begins to undress, folding her clothes before she places them, neatly, on the chair near the end of the bed. She closes her eyes before she turns off the light so that she does not have to look at the painting again.

  12

  Some lives work better with routines, and Liv Halston's is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty a.m., pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she is doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half-hour run along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud of her feet hitting the pavements. Most importantly, she has steered herself away again from a time she still fears: those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that loss can still strike her, unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black fug. She had begun running after she had realized that she could use the world outside, the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector. Now it has become habit, an insurance policy. I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not have to think.

  Especially today.

  She slows to a brisk walk, buys a coffee, and rides the lift back up to the Glass House, her eyes stinging with sweat, unsightly damp patches on her T-shirt. She showers, dresses, drinks her coffee and eats two slices of toast with marmalade. She keeps almost no food in the house, having concluded that the sight of a full fridge is oddly overwhelming; a reminder that she should be cooking and eating, not living on crackers and cheese. A fridge full of food is a silent rebuke to her solitary state.

  Then she sits at her desk and checks her email for whatever work has come in overnight from copywritersperhour.com. Or, as seems to have been the case recently, not.

  'Mo? I'm leaving a coffee outside your door.' She stands, her head cocked, waiting for some sound suggesting life within. It's a quarter past eight: too early to wake a guest? It has been so long since she had anyone to stay that she no longer knows the right things to do. She waits awkwardly, half expecting some bleary response, an irrit
able grunt, even, then decides that Mo is asleep. She had worked all evening, after all. Liv places the polystyrene cup silently outside the door, just in case, and heads off to her shower.

  There are four messages in her inbox.

  Dear Ms Halston

  I got your email from copywritersperhour.com. I run a personalized stationery business and have a brochure that needs rewriting. I notice your rates are PS100 per 1000 words. Would you consider dropping that price at all? We are working on a very tight budget. The brochure copy currently stands at around 1250 words.

  Yours sincerely

  Mr Terence Blank

  Livvy darling

  This is your father. Caroline has left me. I am bereft. I have decided to have nothing more to do with women. Call me if you can spare the time.

  Hi Liv

  Everything okay for Thursday? The kids are really looking forward to it. We're looking at around 20 at the moment, but as you know this figure is always fluid. Let me know if you need anything.

  Best regards

  Abiola

  Dear Ms Halston

  We've tried several times to reach you by phone without success. Please could you contact us to arrange a time whereby we can discuss your overdraft situation. If you fail to make contact we will have to impose additional charges.

  Please can you also ensure that we have your up-to-date contact details.

  Yours sincerely

  Damian Watts,

  Personal accounts manager, NatWest Bank

  She types a response to the first.

  Dear Mr Blank. I would love to drop my prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological make-up means I also have to eat. Good luck with your brochure.

  She knows there will be somebody out there who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesn't care too much about grammar or punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains 'their' for 'there' twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meagre rates pushed down further.

  Dad, I will call round later. If Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are dressed. Mrs Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last week and you know what the police said about that.

  Liv x

  The last time she had arrived to comfort her father after one of Caroline's disappearances, he had opened the door wearing a woman's Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive hug before she could protest. 'I'm your father, for goodness' sake,' he would mutter, when she scolded him afterwards. Although he hadn't had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his childlike lack of inhibition, or his irritation with what he called 'wrappings'. In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr Worthing walked around 'with all his bits swinging'. (She had also told everyone at school that Liv's dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled by that one.)

  Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to walk around semi-naked herself. Liv sometimes thought she was more familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her own.

  Caroline was his great passion, and would walk out in a giant strop every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv could never quite imagine.

  'Lust for life, my darling!' he would exclaim. 'Passion! If you have none you're a dead thing.' Liv, she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.

  She swigs the last of her coffee, and pens an email to Abiola.

  Hi Abiola

  I'll meet you outside the Conaghy building at 2 p.m. All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up for it. Hope all good with you.

  Regards

  Liv

  She sends it then stares at the one from her bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses delete.

  She knows, with some sensible part of her, that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamour of the neatly folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. At some point she will no longer be able to contain them, to fob them off, to slide, unnoticed, away from them. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still it is not enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit themselves back at her from cashpoints. The council had arrived at her door last year, part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could barely blame her: since David's death she has felt a fraud living here. She's like a curator, protecting David's memory, keeping the place as he would have wanted it.

  Liv now pays the maximum council tax chargeable, the same rate as the bankers with their million-pound wage packets, the financiers with their swollen bonuses. It eats up more than half of what she earns in some months.

  She no longer opens bank statements. There is no point. She knows exactly what they will say.

  'It's my own fault.' Her father drops his head to his hands theatrically. From between his fingers, sparse grey hair sticks up in tufts. Around him the kitchen is scattered with pots and pans that tell of an evening meal interrupted: half a lump of Parmesan, a bowl of congealed pasta, a Mary Celeste of domestic disharmony. 'I knew I shouldn't go anywhere near her. But, oh! I was like a moth to a flame. And what a flame! The heat! The heat!' He sounds bewildered.

  Liv nods understandingly. She is attempting, privately, to reconcile this tale of epic sexual misadventure with Jean, the fifty-something woman who runs the local flower shop, smokes forty a day and whose grey ankles emerge from too-short trousers like slices of tripe.

  'We knew it was wrong. And I tried, oh, God, I tried to be good. But I was in there one afternoon, looking for spring bulbs, and she came up behind me smelling of freesias, and before I knew it there I was, as tumescent as a new bud ...'

  'Okay, Dad. Too much information.' Liv puts the kettle on. As she begins clearing up the work surfaces, her father downs the rest of his glass. 'It's too early for wine.'

  'It's never too early for wine. Nectar of the gods. My one consolation.'

  'Your life is one long consolation.'

  'How did I raise a woman of such will, such fearsome boundaries?'

  'Because you didn't raise me. Mum did.'

  He shakes his head with some melancholy, apparently forgetting the times he had cursed her for leaving him when Liv was a child, or called down the wrath of the gods upon her disloyal head. Liv thought sometimes that the day her mother had died, six years ago, her parents' short, fractured marriage had somehow been redrawn in her father's mind so that this intolerant woman, this hussy, this harridan who had poisoned his only child against him now resembled a kind of virgin Madonna. She didn't mind. She did it herself. When you lost your mother, she gradually recast herself in the imagination as perfect. A series of soft kisses, loving words, a comforting embrace. A few years back she had listened to her friends' litany of irritation about their own interfering mothers with the same lack of comprehension as if they had been speaking Korean.

  'Loss has hardened you.'

  'I just don't fall in love with every person of the opposite sex who happens to sell me a pot of tomato food.'

  She had opened the drawers, searching for coffee filters. Her father's house was as cluttered and chaotic as hers was tidy.

  'I saw Jasmine in the Pig's Foot the other night.' He brightens. 'What a gorgeous girl she is. She asked after you.'

  Liv finds the filter papers, deftly opens one and scoops in coffee.

  'Really?'

  'She's marrying a Spaniard. He looks like Errol Flynn. Couldn't take his
eyes off her. Mind you, neither could I. She has a sway to her walk that is positively hypnotic. He's taking on her and the baby. Some other chap's, I believe. They're going to live in Madrid.'

  Liv pours a mug of coffee, hands it to her father.

  'Why don't you see her any more? You two were such good friends?' he wonders.

  She shrugs. 'People grow apart.' She cannot tell him this is only half of the reason. These are the things that they do not tell you about losing your husband: that as well as the exhaustion you will sleep and sleep, and some days even the act of waking up will force your eyelids back down and that merely getting through each day will feel like a Herculean effort - you will hate your friends, irrationally: each time someone arrives at your door or crosses the street and hugs you and tells you they are so, so desperately sorry, you look at her, her husband and their tiny children and are shocked at the ferocity of your envy. How did they get to live and David to die? How did boring, lumpen Richard with his City friends and his weekend golfing trips and his total lack of interest in anything outside his tiny complacent world get to live, when David, brilliant, loving, generous, passionate David, had to die? How did hangdog Tim get to reproduce, to bring further generations of little unimaginative Tims into this world, when David's unexpected mind, his kindness, his kisses, had been extinguished for ever?

  Liv can remember screaming silently in bathrooms, bolting without explanation from crowded rooms, conscious of her own apparent rudeness but unable to stop herself. It had been years before she could view anybody else's happiness without mourning the loss of her own.

  These days, the anger has gone, but she prefers to view domestic satisfaction at a distance, and in people she doesn't know well, as if happiness were a scientific concept that she is merely pleased to see proven.

  She no longer sees the friends she had back then, the Cherrys, the Jasmines. The women who would remember the girl she had been. It was too complicated to explain. And she didn't particularly like what it said about her.

  'Well, I think you should meet her before she goes. I used to love watching the two of you head out together, pair of young goddesses that you were.'