‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, struggling to her feet, feeling ungainly and skew-footed. The ground seemed to shift under her weight. The walls of the room leant towards her; the ugly yellow lights throbbed in her skull.
Nancy stood too. ‘I’m going to see Sonia soon.’
‘I said I’ll be in touch.’
‘Shall I give you my email? That might be easiest.’
‘OK, then.’
They swapped email addresses, Gaby stuffing the scrap of paper into her coat pocket, next to her train ticket.
‘So,’ said Nancy. She buttoned up her coat and picked up her briefcase.
‘So,’ said Gaby.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘Will I be all right?’ she repeated.
‘Getting home, I mean.’
‘Yes – I’ll be fine getting home.’
She turned on her heel and walked out of the café, into the station’s dark and vaulted cave where sound bounced off the walls and voices were a babble around her. She could hear her heels clipping sharply beneath her and in the window she caught her reflection: her swinging coat and her tidy hair. She was surprised by how strong and in control she looked as she smiled and raised an arm to herself in salutation and farewell.
Nineteen
Connor ran. He started at the door of the hospital and ran up the road towards King’s Cross, jogging on the spot at the lights, then weaving his way through the pedestrians. Past the shop selling chess sets, over the arterial road thick with cars and loud with blaring horns. An icy drizzle fell on his bare forearms.
He ran four times a week, without fail. In blizzards and heatwaves, on holiday and during sickness, he ran, up hills, along canals, round training grounds, through fields and parks, by the sea and along the edge of a mountain. He had run since he was sixteen and sometimes he would think about the distances he had gone and the gradients he had pressed into his bones. He had the impossible sensation that all of his journeys were still inside him somewhere. If he ever missed a session, he would feel itchy and full of a restless, peevish rage that he knew was ridiculous but which gripped him nevertheless. On Tuesdays he had an hour free at lunchtime and always did a six-mile circuit of Regent’s Park, coming back in time to shower quickly and be at his desk, clean and virtuous, by two.
The first mile was always the worst. There was a stiffness in his muscles and a tightness in his thoughts. But gradually he relaxed. His stride lengthened and loosened; his mind, which had been full of neurotic lists and snagging anxieties, expanded and breathed; images sailed through him and the ideas with which he had been struggling flowed more easily, as if they had been silted up but were now unblocked. He dodged a cyclist and made his way through the gates and into the park. He found his rhythm. Some days, he would feel sluggish and heavy-footed, but today was good for running: he was light, quick; energy ran in a clear channel through him. He thought of the patients he would see that afternoon, and the lecture he had to give tomorrow; he would have to write it tonight, at home. He thought about Ethan and wondered why he had hardly talked to his son since he left home. Gaby had, of course, and she was always topping up communications with emails, texts and postcards with two illegible words scrawled on them. She hadn’t let go properly, and she missed him through details – the shut bedroom door, the emptier supermarket trolley, the napkin ring on the side, the evenings she now spent alone when once she’d often spent them with Ethan. Her energy had turned to a kind of restlessness, and Connor had noticed that she was more than usually distracted. Sometimes he would say something to her and she would stare at him with a wild vagueness, as if she didn’t know who he was or what he was doing sitting opposite her.
He felt a pang of guilt and tenderness when he thought of his wife, as if his heart was bruised. It had been more than twenty years since they had met. Her generosity and sweetness then had been a gift that redeemed him and he had not thought he could repay her, or realized that she, too, needed nurturing. Perhaps the mystery of those early days had gone, rubbed away by years of use, and in its place was intimacy. He had slept next to her night after night and seen her body split open by childbirth. He knew each fold in her flesh, each blemish on her skin. He’d seen her with greasy hair and puffy eyes, witnessed her moods of elation and weepiness, suffered her untidiness, her repetitions and exaggerations, forgetfulness, indolence, and the bursts of excitement that seemed to him, in his painstaking precision, to be random. When she spoke, he heard the subtext; he could see her wince or flinch when it was invisible to anyone else. Years of history were piled up in each word.
But she’d lightened his life. She’d mocked him when he took himself too seriously. She’d charmed his friends and colleagues. She’d made him laugh. She’d been fun. They both had: his son and his wife. There had been times when they had been like a double-act put on the earth to torment and delight him. He remembered a supper when the pair had sat solemnly with dishcloths on their head, or another when Gaby had put on the radio and Ethan had stood on the table and danced with a theatrical intensity that had embarrassed and moved Connor. He should have taken Gaby away when Ethan left, he thought, or at the very least done something dramatic and emotional. She had always cherished rituals and he had come to understand that she needed them in her life.
The drizzle thinned to nothing; the sky was clearing ahead of him and now there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. He ran past a pair of men jogging slowly along the path, then a greyhound sniffing at an upturned poodle who was waving its short legs in submission. He could feel his heart beating fast but steadily.
Connor believed that most people judged everyone else too harshly and forgave themselves too easily. There was a great deal written by armies of therapists and pseudo-therapists, philosophers and journalists about guilt, but not enough about its absence. He and Ethan had often discussed the capacity of humans to justify themselves to themselves – to push the blame on to others and to feel misunderstood, however terrible their actions. We all have strong defence mechanisms to prevent us seeing our own wrongs too clearly. Studying twentieth-century history, Ethan had become impassioned with the zeal of a teenager who wanted to change the world about atrocities committed with unflagging self-righteousness. Closer to home, Connor recalled the case that had occupied him and Gaby recently. One of their near-neighbours had been an old woman, Mary, who lived alone and had no family. Over the years, she had become increasingly forgetful, wandering the streets swaddled in dirty clothes that were voluminous on her shrinking frame, wearing a vague, baffled smile. It was clear that she was no longer able to look after herself, but she had a horror of going into a home and would get agitated whenever it was suggested. The street had rallied round, and arranged a rota, cooking and cleaning for her, taking her for slow walks, from lamp-post to lamp-post, and making sure her bills were paid. Every Thursday, Gaby had spent the early evening there, toasting crumpets and listening to Mary play the piano with her arthritic fingers. Then she had died, leaving no will, and it had taken weeks to track down her nearest relatives, a well-off couple from Reading who, as far as Connor knew, had never met Mary or even known she existed. The house, although it hadn’t been renovated since the fifties, had fetched a fair amount of money when it was put on the market, but when residents had written to ask the couple to donate money towards Mary’s headstone (she had left detailed instructions as to her funeral and burial) they had replied that it was not ‘appropriate’ for them to give anything. Gaby had been so outraged at their pompous selfishness (‘appropriate’ was the word that chafed her into action) that she had gone to their house the following weekend to confront them. She had come home spluttering indignantly, saying that they had been unwavering in their pursed-lipped belief that they were doing nothing wrong; they believed themselves to be moral and decent citizens who would always do their duty. Indeed, by the end of the encounter, they had seemed to think they were the victims of this flush-faced madwoman who’d broken into the peace of the
ir Sunday with her accusations, and threatened to call out the police.
But there were things that Connor himself had done that he did not allow himself to think about. He consciously did not think, for instance, about Nancy. The memory was like a shadow on an X-ray that, although he was aware of it, he chose not to examine. He saw but would not look. He did not remember but he had not forgotten. Every so often, a kind of breathlessness would come upon him, and he understood that he was remembering what had happened between them all those years ago, but the memory and the guilt were surfacing without his consent, like a subterranean event that works its damage invisibly.
Now he was by the boating pond. Ducks flew above him on heavily beating wings. A beautiful young man with a wispy beard hanging from his chin stood by the path crouching low and stretching out his hands in some Oriental exercise. Connor lengthened his stride and pushed out, wanting to exhaust himself. He thought about the afternoon and evening ahead. He reminded himself to take home the papers he needed for his lecture. Maybe he should take Gaby away somewhere. Morocco. Iceland. Somewhere far off and strange. Somewhere just for the two of them, and they could sit over a table and he could relax in her smile and tell her everything that was in his mind, however strange and however small. Except that.
Twenty
Gaby was always impressed by people who seemed to understand what their lives meant. She listened to television interviews with artists and writers in which they would fluently describe the trajectory of their development, in which the road they travelled and the choices they made led to the present moment. They pointed to watershed events, divided their experience into periods, paid tribute to their greatest influences, explained what impact suffering and triumph had had upon their ideas and their world-view, traced how they had changed and why. They had strong opinions and kept to them. They were able to stand back from the self in order to understand it, and to tell themselves as if they were a shaped story. Sometimes she thought that there was a fraudulent or complacent quality to their eloquent self-analysis, but most of the time she was just envious of it.
She didn’t know what her life meant and she had no idea of how she had changed or whom she had become. She didn’t have strong opinions so much as strong emotions, and when she tried to examine herself, what she saw was a not-unhappy mess. In her past, she didn’t see a pattern so much as a shifting kaleidoscope of memories; swirling darkly between these bright fragments were all the things that she had let herself forget and perhaps, she thought, the seas of forgetfulness had formed her just as much as the fenced and tended patches of memory. Certainly she often felt that she lived much of her life in a state of unarticulated emotion.
Maybe her helpless sense of not–knowing came from an excess of stability in her background. Her childhood had been undramatically contented. They say that you remember the sudden changes in your early life, the crises and bereavements, but for Gaby there hadn’t been any such change. She was middle-class, comfortably off, white, privileged. Her parents hadn’t divorced, and they were both still alive, living in the house in which she had been born. Her three brothers had been protective of her, the baby of the family and the only girl. She had never been bullied, never been abused, never been ostracized. She had never failed at anything, although neither had she triumphed. Her parents had cared for her, helped her, encouraged her and believed in her. Above all, they had loved her.
She had read stories about refugees of fourteen walking alone across continents to find a new home; of eleven-year-olds looking after an alcoholic mother and four siblings; of child soldiers in Angola. One of her best friends at primary school had grandparents who had survived Auschwitz. Another was very poor. Nancy’s father had died when she was very young and her mother had turned to sex and anger for comfort. Gaby’s immediate neighbours came from Macedonia and Brazil; they had chosen to begin again in another place. Ethan’s great friend Ari had come from the Congo aged thirteen, with nothing more than the clothes he had fled in and a Bible. One of Connor’s colleagues, who advised him on his work with victims of torture, was a young Iraqi doctor who had been tortured himself when he wasn’t even out of his teens, and who was blind in one eye because of it. These people, with their scars and their journeys, had a sense of themselves and of the life they had lived. Gaby, who had been brought up with a consciousness of her entitlement, felt that she did not. She had been too lucky and too untested for that. The one rupture in her life had been her post-natal depression, but even that seemed indistinct now, a dark blur rather than an event that had changed her: if she looked back at that time now, she could not recall episodes or images; she just remembered the dull weight of time, when the sky pressed down on her and it seemed impossible that she could get through an hour, a day. She had always thought that eventually she would arrive at a place where everything became clear but, if anything, the reverse had proved true. The older she became, the less she knew.
Connor was not like that, she thought, as she sat on the train that was taking her back to London, sipping coffee that was bitter, boiling and burnt her lips. He thought of his childhood as something he had escaped, wriggling free of poverty and misery into a world of his own making. You could see it even in the way he dressed – his soft, sober suits and plain, expensive shirts, the hand-tooled leather shoes that he buffed lovingly in the mornings – and in the way he cooked elaborate meals, warily following recipes as if one slip with the ginger or soy would result in catastrophe. He had hauled himself up, hand over hand, into his life of hard work and planned leisure. He made sure he was armed with information; his opinions were the product of thought and lacked the reckless, sometimes foolish, spontaneity of Gaby’s – she was illogical, impassioned and contradictory.
Well, she thought, pushing the paper cup under her seat, that was how it had seemed. Everything had changed now; the ground beneath her feet had shifted and she felt dizzily precarious. It reminded her of the times when she had had a fever as a child and her bed had seemed to tip underneath her, as if it would fling her on to the floor, which also appeared to writhe like the sea. The one thing she had known, in her world of unknowing, was Connor’s fidelity. As a young man, struggling towards his new self, he had chosen her. She had held out her hand and pulled him up the last few rungs of the ladder into her arms. She still remembered the way, during those first few months together, he had buried himself in her with a passion that was desperate and grateful.
Although the train carriage was warm and stuffy, Gaby felt chilly. She leant her forehead against the smeared window and felt its vibrations run though her like an electric current. In a short while she would arrive back home and she had no idea what she would do then. Every time she tried to think about it, her mind became sluggish and she would stare out at the green fields or houses flowing past outside and let her body be rocked by the train’s motion. She sat up straighter in her seat and tried to concentrate. Beside her, a very fat man lifted the last of his fried chicken out of its cardboard box and bit into it.
She imagined the scene ahead of her. She and Connor would sit at the table in the kitchen with their glasses of wine, and into the pool of domestic tranquillity she would drop her boulder and wait for the waves to spread out to every shore: ‘I think there’s something we need to talk about.’ No, impossible. Or: he would open the door and she would loom towards him out of the darkness and slap his face hard. No. She would lie in bed crying until he came to find her and, wrapped in his arms, she would sob out what she knew and ask him how he could have lived with what he’d done for so long and never breathed a word. She would hurl all the plates and glasses at his feet. She would attack him with a knife. She would make a phone call (‘By the way, I know you had an affair with Nancy …’), or write a letter (‘Dear Connor, you have a daughter …’) and leave it for him to open while she stalked the empty, lamplit streets. She would say nothing and wait – but for what? She would get blind drunk on warm neat gin and wreck the house. She would run away. She would fo
rgive him. She would never forgive him. She would leave him. She would stay. She’d be pious (impossible), understanding (ha!), insane (that was more like it). She would scratch his face, hurt him, make him weep, hold him, comfort him. She had absolutely no idea what she would do, and didn’t know what she wanted. She only knew what she didn’t want – to be here, to be now, rattling towards London with night falling over the past and the future dropping away precipitously in front of her.
When Gaby and Connor had first moved into their tall, narrow house in a street of tall, narrow houses in north London, they had knocked through all of the partition walls the previous owner had put up on the ground floor to create a long, airy space with facing windows, wooden floorboards, sagging sofas, low tables, piano and bright woven rugs. Gaby – who had grown up in a warren of dimly lit rooms cluttered with mysterious junk – had always loved the way the light fell peacefully across the floorboards and the white walls. However much mess she imported, it remained calm and uncluttered. She had often curled up in the sofa with a book, or half dozed contentedly, like a cat in a puddle of sunlight, while Ethan played the piano hour after hour. But now she was struck by the thought that it was a bit too much like a beautiful double-page spread from an interior decorator’s brochure, not like a home at all. For a moment, when she got home from the station, she stood in the bright space, looking around her. Things she had lived with for so many years were now unfamiliar, and she felt like a shabby stranger stranded among all the middle-class comfort and careful elegance. This wasn’t her, she thought: the paintings on the wall, the dahlias in a glass vase on the table, the framed photos on the mantelpiece of the three of them – and what a small family unit they were, as they stood side by side and smiled their public smiles. It was a fraudulent attempt at being someone she wasn’t, someone grown-up and classy, even intimidating. She picked up a translucent jade bowl that Connor had brought back from Japan some years ago and examined it closely. It was very beautiful, she thought; very delicate. She dropped it on the floor. It cracked and exploded into several shining fragments. She knelt down and picked them up one by one; they pricked in her palm as she carried them into the kitchen and put them into the bin. Nobody would notice.
The Moment You Were Gone Page 20