He said, almost sheepishly, ‘But I do want something.’
‘Ah. Something you think I’m going to find hard to give you?’
He turned away slightly. He said, ‘Don’t see why it should be.’
‘Try me.’
Tom looked up at the ceiling. He said, loudly, ‘I want to change my name.’
‘Change it? From Thomas?’
‘From Hathaway,’ Tom said.
There was a small, stunned silence. Then Melissa said, ‘Oh, Tom.’
His head whipped down and round to look at her. ‘I don’t mean get rid of Hathaway.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean add to it. Add Dad’s name to it, too. I’ll always be Tom. I just want to be Tom Hathaway Gibbs.’
He put a hand out towards Melissa, as if trying to reaffirm a connection.
‘That’s all,’ he said again.
——
The office, down its mews, was, apart from the perpetual distant city rumble, almost silent. It was the end of a long and productive day – meetings all morning, an exhaustive interview with a significant American financial journal in the afternoon – and now Melissa was alone at her desk, Donna having left early for her six-monthly dental check-up. Melissa had finished her notes on the morning’s meetings – interviews with the board of a major insurance company – and was now staring at her screen and the website of the UK Deed Poll Office, which promised that a legal change of name only cost the applicant fifteen pounds sterling.
The doorbell rang. As Donna was usually there to answer the door, Melissa initially took no notice. It rang again, for longer. It was, doubtless, either someone selling something Melissa didn’t want, or more likely, a neighbour agitating about the way cars had been parked in the mews to whom Melissa would have to explain, patiently, that as she never brought her car to work, she couldn’t really help. She spoke indifferently into the front-door intercom system,
‘Hello?’
There was a pause. And then a voice said, ‘It’s Gaby.’
Melissa pressed the button that illuminated the small screen beside the intercom, which revealed Gaby, in her parka and running shoes, standing gazing up at the front of Melissa’s office.
‘Wait there,’ Melissa said.
She ran down the stairs and across the carpeted space to the front door, which Donna insisted was kept double locked at all times. Gaby was standing four or five feet away, her bag on her shoulder and her hands in her pockets.
‘Gaby.’
‘Surprise, surprise,’ Gaby said.
‘Come in.’
‘I’m on my way home.’
‘I guessed that.’
‘And I didn’t ring because I knew Donna would tell you and I wanted to be sure you didn’t scarper.’
‘Donna’s gone to the dentist.’
‘And when I came down the mews,’ Gaby said, ‘I saw your lights were still on, so I knew you’d be here. That I’d find you.’
‘Yes,’ Melissa said. ‘Well.’
Gaby stepped into the office and dropped her bag on the floor. She looked at Melissa.
‘I’ve got some explaining to do, haven’t I?’ she said.
Melissa waited. Her mind, still trying to absorb the fact that for fifteen pounds only, Tom could take this first, giant step away from her into his own independent life, was not focusing on having Gaby standing in her office and taking her battered old parka off to reveal a neat work trouser suit underneath.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t anything to offer you, except tea or coffee,’ she said automatically.
‘Lissa, I don’t want tea or coffee. I want, if you must know, to feel less awful and guilty.’
‘About Sarah Parker?’
‘About you, and Sarah Parker. I’ve been wondering how to say it, how to find you to say it to. I got my fingers burned with Stacey, so I don’t really want them burned a second time with you, so if you want me just to go, now, or you are so angry you don’t ever want to speak to me again, could you just say so at once and get it over with?’
Melissa said tiredly, ‘I’m not angry.’
‘What a relief.’
‘I’m – I’m a bit miserable. About several things, of which you are one. But I’m not angry.’
Gaby reached up to hang her parka on the coat stand.
‘I’m very pleased – and grateful – that you’re not angry.’
Melissa took a step back. ‘D’you want to come upstairs, to the sofa?’
‘Only if you want to talk to me.’
‘To be truthful,’ Melissa said, ‘I don’t really want to talk to anyone.’
Gaby clasped her hands in front of her. In her trainers, she was almost a foot shorter than Melissa. ‘Fair enough.’
Melissa said nothing. She was standing at a distance from Gaby, her arms folded, seeming more cold than antagonistic.
Gaby went on, ‘The thing is, Lissa, that there isn’t really an explanation. There was no scheming, there wasn’t even a reason except that I didn’t want to tell you, because it was difficult. When I hired Sarah, I had no idea she lived with Will Gibbs, and when I did discover the connection I thought I’d wait, and then I waited for it to be the right time to tell you, or easier or something, and that time never came, and anyway I’d begun to tell myself that I wouldn’t need to tell you because yours and Sarah’s and Tom’s paths would never cross, and then they did, and I just – funked it. I just funked saying anything, and now I’ve made it all worse because I was such a wuss. I am so sorry, Lissa; I am really, really sorry. But I haven’t got any excuse or explanation or anything, except saying to you that telling you that Will’s partner was working for me was just in the mental file marked Too Difficult.’
Melissa was looking away while Gaby was speaking, not at anything in particular, just not at Gaby. When Gaby fell silent, Melissa left a little pause and then she said, in a low voice, ‘That’s OK.’
‘You don’t sound as if it is.’
‘It is. It really is.’ Melissa sighed. ‘Water under the bridge, anyway.’
‘Lissa, I never meant to hurt you. I may be, as Quin is constantly telling me, unable to live in the fruit bowl without bruising my fellow apples all the time, but you are very dear to me and I really hate causing you pain.’
Melissa looked directly at her. ‘I know.’
‘Good. As long as you are in no doubt.’
‘No.’
‘Lissa . . .’
‘In the great scheme of things,’ Melissa said, ‘what you did or didn’t do falls into the category of puzzling rather than painful, anyway.’
Gaby looked enquiring. ‘Meaning?’
Melissa held out a hand. ‘Come upstairs with me. Come and look at what’s on my screen. And I’ll tell you what it signifies.’
In her pocket, Melissa’s phone began to ring. She said, ‘I’m ignoring that.’
‘Don’t,’ Gaby said. ‘Answer it.’
‘No.’
‘Answer it, Lissa!’
Melissa pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket, glanced briefly and uncomprehendingly at the number on the screen, and put it to her ear.
‘Hello?’ Then she swung round to look at Gaby again, eyes wide. ‘Will!’ she said.
——
Melissa demurred at the idea of lunch. Or a drink. She would, she said, meet Will for coffee, or something else anodyne like tea, or breakfast. Privately, she also added, in a very public venue, and when she asked herself exactly why she was making all these extremely specific conditions about meeting her son’s father, found that she had no reasons to give, only instincts. Which were, she told herself, fastening her earrings that morning, borderline hysterical and not to be admitted to anyone. She was to meet Will for coffee in the lobby of a smart hotel off Whitehall, which suited her schedule that day, and which he had seemed most anxious to oblige her over.
The hotel lobby had a huge central flower arrangement in it, circled by a deeply padded bench, with small tables form
ing yet another ring beyond it. Will was already there, traditionally accessorized by a newspaper, but alert enough to her punctual arrival to be on his feet by the time she reached him. He was smiling.
‘Melissa!’ He put the newspaper down, stepped away from the padded seat and took her shoulders in his hands. Then he kissed her cheek. Firmly.
‘Hello,’ she said.
He dropped his hands. ‘You look wonderful.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And before we go any further, can I say what a really fantastic job you have done with Tom.’
‘Please,’ Melissa said. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘In that sort of stagey barrister way. Tom is great because Tom is great.’
Will gestured as if to an audience. ‘Shall I go out and come in again?’
She laughed. ‘Maybe.’
‘I’m nervous,’ Will said. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, start by sitting down.’
She sat. He lowered himself back to where he’d been sitting. He said, ‘Coffee?’
‘Tea, please.’
‘Earl Grey, if I remember? Or is that irritating too?’
‘No,’ Melissa said. ‘It’s accurate.’
‘You’re so successful,’ Will said. ‘I’m a bit daunted.’
‘A lot of the men I deal with professionally say that. I think it’s a kind of flirting. To try and disarm me.’
Will said, ‘I’m not up for that.’
‘No.’
‘I just wanted us to be able to talk about Tom. Now he’s beginning to know – or to think he knows – his own mind.’
‘Yes.’
Will looked at her. He was greyer, certainly, than sixteen years ago, but not visibly stouter, and his gaze was as merry and curious as when she had first encountered it across a huge candlelit dinner table in an anglicized villa in Provence. He said, ‘I don’t think you want to help me make conversation, do you?’
She said truthfully, ‘I don’t know what I feel.’
‘About me?’
‘About seeing you again. But mostly, about Tom.’
‘This name change thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you hate the idea?’
She began to shrug herself out of her coat. ‘Not hate . . .’
He leaned forward to help her. Nice hands. She had forgotten he had such nice hands. Tom had inherited them, but she had stopped thinking of them as being attributable to anyone but Tom.
‘But it’s thrown you?’
‘Yes.’
Will deftly extracted Melissa’s coat from behind her and laid it on the bench beside him, on top of his own coat. Then he summoned a nearby waitress and ordered Earl Grey tea for both of them.
‘Tea for you, too?’ Melissa said.
‘I’m trying to drink less coffee.’ He leaned forward. He said, ‘I don’t think Tom should be allowed to do anything that makes you unhappy. He can at least be told to wait.’
She looked at her hands. ‘I’m not unhappy, exactly. I’m just thrown. First Marnie comes to Tom’s school, then you and Tom get together, then there’s Tom’s sleepovers and now this. I know, intellectually, that what’s happening is all inevitable and natural and organic, but I can’t seem to get my heart where my head is. I feel – I feel, kind of jolted.’
Will was regarding her. Being looked at like this, with distinct interest and approval, was definitely not disagreeable. After a pause, he said, ‘Tom is very anxious not to hurt you.’
‘I suppose you’ve talked about me.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m not hurt,’ Melissa said. ‘Or, if I am, it’s by the situation. Not by Tom.’
‘Or me.’
The waitress arrived and began the ponderous process of unloading teapots and cups and strainers from her tray. As if she wasn’t there, Will said, ‘And before you say, how typically male and solipsistic to put myself in the equation, I am in it, because I’m Tom’s father.’
‘And I probably had too many years of not having to take account of that.’
‘And now you do.’
The waitress put down a saucer of lemon slices and a pot of sugar sachets. She straightened up. ‘Enjoy your tea.’
Melissa glanced up at her. In her twenties, neatly groomed in her hotel uniform, East European probably.
‘Thank you,’ Melissa said. ‘Where are you from?’
The girl smiled. She had corrective braces on her upper teeth. ‘Riga.’
Will said, ‘I went to a legal conference in Riga once. Lovely place.’
‘Thank you,’ the girl said politely. She stepped back. ‘Have you everything you need?’
‘Yes thanks,’ Will said. He looked at Melissa again. ‘Are you saying you need more time?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Because what I think,’ Will said, ‘what I think will help us all, is to normalize things as much as we can, to have more contact, be mundane, get used to each other. I don’t think apportioning blame is particularly helpful, but I should have been more present, more active in Tom’s life when he was little, and then all this now wouldn’t be such a big deal for any of us.’
Melissa picked up the teapot and began to pour. ‘Perhaps.’
‘I’ve got a suggestion.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. Could you stop messing about with the tea and concentrate?’
‘I can pour and listen,’ Melissa said. ‘I’m female after all.’
‘You’re telling me. But I want you to look at me while I make this suggestion.’
Melissa put the teapot down and folded her hands in her lap with exaggerated obedience. ‘Well?’
‘I think,’ Will said, looking at her in a way that demanded she look straight back at him, ‘I think that you should meet Sarah.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GABY
‘The office, you’ll be glad to know,’ Gaby had said to Quin the night before, ‘is a happy place. Martin has done surprisingly well in Grenoble and has enrolled himself on a ten-week course of French classes on Tuesday evenings two minutes from the office. Ellie has done her first week working from home and the arrangement has wrinkles but it’s certainly going to be possible. And Melissa and I are going to celebrate our reconciliation next Friday in a manner that most definitely won’t include you, but will, equally definitely, include dressing up and not being in our kitchen.’
Quin said he was glad to hear all that. He’d been cooking at the time, making one of his famous frittatas that involved ingeniously using up all manner of ill-assorted leftovers in the fridge, which he would then, mysteriously and miraculously, manage to cajole all the children into eating. He had always cooked, and equally, had always been able to make the children eat – even Liam, who regarded anything not out of a packet that he could examine first as part of a plot to poison him. Liam liked pale food, pale, soft food. But even Liam would somehow eat his father’s frittata.
Gaby had bent over to inhale what was in the wide frying pan. ‘Yum.’
‘It will be. And I’m pleased that you’re pleased because then you’ll be easier to live with.’
Gaby kissed his cheek. ‘I may not be easy,’ she’d said. ‘But then I am never, ever dull.’
The sky outside the window of her office the next morning was unquestionably dull. There was nearly always a wind in Canary Wharf, but when the sun was out, the wind seemed only to polish up the glass and steel and burnished stone, so that it all shone to the point of glittering. But on other days, like today, a low grey sky made the wind feel nothing but bad-tempered, whipping up savage little swirls of litter and dust, disarranging hair and umbrellas, blowing impudently up skirts. Gaby stood at her office window and looked at the familiar view with affection, the square dotted with purposeful people, the soulless planting, the gleaming facades of global capitalism opposite. It might all be ethically questionable, or at the very least up f
or vigorous debate, but at that moment, even under such a sky, it looked to Gaby both nicely familiar and satisfying. It was one of those rare and fleeting moments when she felt comfortably slightly ahead of the game rather than battling breathlessly to keep up with it.
It was early still, not yet eight thirty in the morning. Gaby was usually in soon after eight in any case, but this morning, Morag had informed her, Sarah Parker had asked for a quick meeting before the big divisional meeting at nine o’clock that was regularly scheduled for the first Wednesday of each month. Sarah wanted, of course, to talk about Martin and Grenoble, and Martin’s future because of Grenoble, and the possibility of his being put on another case of equal importance. Gaby was going to explain to Sarah that she wanted to see further consolidation of Martin’s capabilities before he was given anything more significant, but she was in complete agreement with Sarah that he looked as if he really was at last beginning to fulfil his potential. The meeting was scheduled for eight thirty and would, Gaby reckoned, take ten minutes, fifteen at the outside, which would allow her ten more minutes to refresh her memory of the meeting papers before she went up in the lift, to the penthouse level at the top of the building, and the immense company boardroom with its limitless views across London.
‘Gaby,’ Sarah said from the doorway.
Gaby turned round. Sarah looked as collected as usual, and was also, as usual, holding a file of papers against her chest, with a pen in her hand. She was smiling.
‘Good morning,’ Gaby said. She gestured to the chair reserved for visitors. ‘Sit down and tell me about Martin.’
Sarah sat. She put her file and her pen on Gaby’s desk, in front of her. ‘He’s done great,’ she said, still smiling.
‘I’m glad to hear it. And about the French lessons.’
‘But,’ Sarah said, ‘I think that we need to see him build a bit more on what he’s done before we hand him anything else.’
Gaby put both hands on the back of her desk chair, but did not sit down.
‘Then this is going to be a very brief meeting, I’m glad to say,’ she said, smiling herself. ‘I agree completely.’
Sarah looked unnaturally composed. ‘Martin isn’t why I asked to see you,’ she said.
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