The Girl You Left Behind

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 theopposite 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 anythingoutside his tiny complacent world get to live,