The Moment You Were Gone

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘But –’

  ‘Away with you!’

  He put his hand at the base of her back and gave her a push. Gaby started to trail up the stairs, her hand clutching the banister. The hectic euphoria of the early evening had gone and in its place was a dazed sense of unreality. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, rubbed anti-ageing cream that she knew didn’t work under her eyes, unhooked her earrings, unwound her beads, peeled off her flamboyant clothes. Usually she slept naked, but tonight she pulled on an old flannel nightshirt, tied her hair loosely back, then sat heavily on the bed. She was cold and her hands were shaking. She stared at herself in the wardrobe’s long mirror. She looked like a woman on stage, she thought, waiting for the curtain to rise and the drama to begin. She locked her hands together and listened to Connor downstairs. Of course she couldn’t scream, howl, break windows, scratch his face or cry. She must simply tell him what she knew.

  Then she listened to Connor coming up the stairs, light on his feet. She knew when he opened the door that he would be smiling at her and tugging at the knot of his tie.

  He thought, entering the room, that Gaby was beautiful. No makeup, no finery, sitting at the base of the bed in an old striped nightshirt, her tumbling hair tied back like a schoolgirl’s. One bare leg was curled under her, her hands were pressed together as if in prayer, and he could see the swell of her breasts under the flannel. She looked at rest and he was filled with a sense of happiness and gratitude.

  She turned her face to him. It was grave.

  ‘You should be in bed,’ he said. ‘It’s past midnight.’

  ‘No. Not for this.’

  ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

  ‘No, Connor. I’m not ill.’

  Now the moment had come, Gaby was perfectly tranquil.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We have to talk. You may want to sit down.’

  He sat on the bed beside her and took her hand. ‘You’re alarming me,’ he joked.

  But she took away her hand.

  ‘I have to tell you something. I don’t know how to do it and I know I should have said something before, when I had only discovered a few things, fragments and moments and not the full story.’

  ‘What full story? What are you talking about?’

  ‘When I took Ethan to Exeter and wrecked the car, I didn’t just come home late the way I said. I still don’t understand what came over me, but on the spur of the moment I got on a train to Liskeard.’

  ‘Liskeard?’

  ‘Yes. In Cornwall. I went there because a few months ago I was watching the television news and there was an item about the floods in a village near Liskeard. Rash-moor it’s called. And I saw Nancy. She was wading along the road, which had become a river. I recognized her at once.’

  She looked at Connor and he looked steadily back. In the silence that was so thick she could almost touch it, she could hear her own heart beating.

  ‘I’ve never got over Nancy,’ she said. ‘I never knew what I’d done wrong. It’s haunted me. Well, you know all that. You told me I had to let her go, didn’t you? Maybe you were right, although maybe for the wrong reasons. But I don’t let go, do I? I never leave well alone. It’s my curse. Our curse. The curse of everyone who has ever known me. So I went to see her and it was quite painful. I felt – what are the words? I felt bereft all over again. Lonely and abandoned and foolish all at once. Well, if that was all, I would have told you, of course, and you could have comforted me. That would have been one ending to this story. But I didn’t leave it at that. I stayed the night, and then the next morning she kind of chucked me out because she was leaving to go somewhere or other and I – well, I went back. It was over so abruptly and I wanted to have some kind of last word, I think. You know. So I went back, but she wasn’t there. I did something really terrible. Unforgivable. I let myself in. I missed the train. I stayed there for another day and night. I rode her bike. I borrowed her swimsuit. I poked around in her wardrobe. I lay down on her bed. I –’ She sighed heavily. ‘You think you know what I’m going to say, anyway, don’t you? I don’t know why I have to go through this just to get to the point of the tale. I snooped. Read letters and stuff. I read a letter from a girl called Sonia.’

  Connor’s face was blank. She said in a deadpan tone, ‘Sonia is Nancy’s daughter.’

  The two of them gazed at each other. Not a muscle of Connor’s face moved.

  ‘She is eighteen now, so she could track Nancy down. I thought about Stefan, of course. It seemed to me then that he was at the centre of the story, and perhaps he almost is, but not in the way I had imagined. I can’t explain why I didn’t tell you about it when you came back from sailing. It was too big, somehow – like a shape that’s so vast and so close up you can’t make out what it is. But the fact is, I thought I would tell you and then I simply couldn’t. Maybe my blood and bones and buried memories knew what my brain didn’t. Instead I went and saw Sonia. She’s got Nancy’s amazing eyes, turquoise. But in other ways she’s the spitting image of you.’

  A hoarse sound came from Connor. He held out both hands, palms up, as if he was offering something to her.

  ‘Today I met Nancy again. We talked.’

  ‘Gaby,’ he managed, in a gasp.

  ‘I understand things now. I look back and I see things more clearly. Everything means something different. I know you had an affair with Nancy when I was sick. And you need to know that she had a child. A daughter.’

  She stopped. They sat a while and she felt a strange urge to put her head on his lap and sleep. Connor said nothing; his face was still inscrutable and his body stiff. Gaby thought that if he were to be given a prod, he would topple like an unrooted tree. Pity surged through her; she wanted to wrap her arms round his shrunken body, cradle him to her and comfort him for the suffering that lay ahead.

  ‘That’s all,’ she said at last. ‘But I’m not sure what we do now. What do we do, Connor? Where do we go from here?’ She waited, then said, ‘But if you say that it was all a long time ago, I promise you I will walk out of the door and never come back.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  But he couldn’t say any more. She stood up and looked at him, frozen and wretched on the bed. ‘I’m going to sleep in Ethan’s room,’ she said softly. ‘You should try to sleep too. We can’t talk now. Did you hear me, Connor? Connor? Oh, this is stupid.’

  She knelt down and undid the laces of his lovely polished brogues, then tugged them off his feet. When she touched his skin he jolted in shock. She pulled off his cotton socks and threw them into the corner of the room. Slipped off the loosened tie and let it glide through her fingers on to the floor where it curled like a snake. Very delicately, she undid the buttons on his shirt and eased it off, turning the sleeves inside out as she did so. He looked thinner and whiter than he had the night before. She undid the fastening and zip of his trousers.

  ‘Stand up,’ she said, and he did so.

  She took off his trousers, lifting each foot in turn. He stood before her, his whole body trembling, as if electricity was shimmering through him. Their eyes met and held and she knew they were both remembering other occasions when she had undressed him like this, then pulled down his boxers, taken him in her mouth and he’d groaned like a man in pain.

  ‘Lie down,’ she said, and steered him towards the bed, turning down the duvet, then covering him. His hair was black on the pillow and his face stared up at her.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said again.

  ‘Sleep, Connor,’ she ordered. ‘We’ll try to talk tomorrow, when it’s sunk in a bit.’

  She turned off the bedside light, left him there and padded into Ethan’s room. The bed wasn’t made up, so she rolled herself in a blanket and lay on the mattress. Her feet were cold, though the rest of her was warm. She pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms round them, holding herself tight. The curtains were open so she could see the clear, glittering sky, the stars that pulsed over the chimneys
and even the faint gauze of the Milky Way. This was the first night in the whole of their marriage when they’d slept together under one roof, but apart. Other couples she knew went to separate beds when their children crawled between them, or when one of them was ill, or snored too loudly, or had to get up early. They’d never done that. They’d lain side by side in fever, insomnia and discomfort. Now Connor was just a few feet away and he wouldn’t be sleeping either. She could picture his wide-open eyes staring glassily into the dark room. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

  Twenty-two

  Connor gazed at the strip of paler darkness between the curtains. Words from Emily Dickinson, which he had written out and stuck up on his noticeboard in his study to aid him as he worked, ran through his mind: ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.’

  ‘A formal feeling,’ he whispered to himself. Did that describe the dark, shapeless dread that had seized him?

  When Connor taught students about the treatment of pain, he would talk to them first about pain’s immeasurability, inexpressibility, invisibility. As a subjective sensation that cannot be shared, it isolates its sufferers, and it often robs them of language. People in great pain are returned to their animal self – they cry and howl and whimper but they don’t speak. Now Connor heard himself whimper, like a wounded dog. He heard a moan escape from him and he was reminded of all the men, women and children who had come to him making exactly that sound.

  Like most doctors, he used a questionnaire with his patients that had been developed a few decades previously, to give an internal event an external reality and to put inarticulate agony into words, usually by finding comparisons and metaphors. He told his students that this was the first step towards rescuing their patients from that agony. The McGill Pain Questionnaire was quite simple; by now he knew it practically off by heart. It divided pain into categories, then divided each category into ascending levels of pain. For ‘temporal pain’ a patient can choose between ‘flickering’, ‘quivering’, ‘pulsing’, ‘throbbing’, ‘beating’ and finally ‘pounding’. Or for ‘constrictive pain’, the options run from the mild ‘pinching’ to the extreme ‘crushing’. The familiar words went through his mind: ‘searing’, ‘lacerating’, ‘sickening’…

  What terms might best describe the sensation that now gripped him like physical torment? Throbbing. Pressing. Gnawing. Penetrating. Aching. Heavy. Suffocating. It was like a hungry, sharp-toothed, stinking animal inside him, taking all the oxygen, chewing at his innards and scraping at his sorry heart. He tried to breathe steadily, as he often told his patients to do, but still his breath came raggedly. He tried to step outside the gobbling pain and look at it calmly, but it clawed him back and he was filled with a fresh sense of horror and shame.

  You tell those in pain to place it on a scale of one to ten. Most people, even those who are howling, would say seven. Seven for a flashing migraine, seven for a lancinating toothache and seven for cancer that had got deep into the bone, where the drugs couldn’t follow. That wasn’t because they were being brave, but because they could always imagine worse. They were never at the end.

  Seven, he thought. This feeling rates a seven, which means there could be an eight, a nine, a ten. What would ten be? Would ten be Gaby leaving him, Ethan hating him, Stefan suffering all over again? Or was that just an eight? Could anything be worse than losing everything he loved, or was there always something more?

  The riptide of emotion that surged through him made Connor feel physically sick. It was as if he was being turned inside out, and he pulled the pillow to him and curled round it for comfort. He wanted to cry but the tears were frozen inside him. He closed his eyes and lay quite still, listening to the sounds of the night outside the window; he opened them again and looked at the green digits on his alarm clock clicking round. At 2.29 he sat up, knowing he would not sleep and unable to lie in bed any longer. He turned on the bedside lamp and blinked in the sudden dazzle, then swung his legs out of bed. It was chilly, and he felt an eerie sense of emptiness around him. He looked out of the window; below the flawless moon, the houses stood in darkness. A cat stalked along the road beneath him, its tail held high, and Connor could see its yellow eyes.

  He put on the dressing-gown Gaby had given him last spring, not for a birthday or Christmas but because she’d fallen in love with it and bought it on impulse. It was long and sumptuously scarlet, and she said it made him look like a medieval knight. He pulled it tight round him and thrust his feet into the slippers at the foot of the bed, then made his way softly out of the room. For a few seconds, he stood outside Ethan’s door and held his breath, listening, but hearing no sound. Maybe she was asleep, or maybe she was simply lying in bed with her eyes open waiting for morning. He went downstairs, leaning on the banister to lighten his weight and listening for the creak of floorboards underfoot.

  The embers still glowed in the grate and he paused to warm his hands, then went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. He turned on the boiler for hot water, in case Gaby got up early and wanted a bath, then ground some coffee beans (putting two tea-towels over the grinder to muffle the noise). While he was waiting for the water to boil, he emptied the dishwasher he’d put on a few hours previously, and cleared away the pots and pans from the draining-board. He didn’t want Gaby to do it in the morning. He kept out one of the tumblers and poured himself a generous slug of whisky. The coffee was strong enough to make him wince, and the whisky burnt his throat. He took both drinks upstairs into his study and closed the door. There was a large black-and-white photograph of Gaby on the wall facing him, taken several years ago by a photographer friend of theirs. It was summer, and she was sitting cross-legged on the lawn outside wearing old jeans and a white T-shirt; her feet were bare; there was a chain round one of her ankles. One tendril of hair snaked down her cheek. He’d caught her unawares; she wasn’t looking at the camera but at someone out of shot, and smiling delightedly. Her left hand was held out in an exuberant gesture of welcome that Connor recognized. He sat at his desk, cupped his chin in his hands and gazed up at his wife. He had forgotten how gorgeous she could be, how warm and generous, with her mess of tawny hair and her wide, wholehearted smile.

  He didn’t know how long he sat like that, but when he glanced at the clock on the wall it was past three o’clock. He finished his coffee, now cold, tipped the last of the whisky down his throat, turned on his computer, put on his reading-glasses. He cleared his throat as if he were about to give a lecture, then started to type.

  ‘Darling Gaby,’ he wrote, and deleted it.

  ‘Dear heart,’ he wrote. No. Delete.

  Or: ‘I can’t sleep, so I thought I should put down some of the –’ Delete.

  ‘I have lived for eighteen years with this terrible thing and now that you know –’ Delete.

  ‘Are you asleep now, or are you awake like me, my most precious Gaby …’

  He turned off his computer and pulled out a sheet of paper. He took his fountain pen – which Ethan had given him when he turned forty and which he rarely used – out of the desk drawer. In his small neat handwriting, he began.

  It’s three in the morning and I’m writing this letter because I have to talk to you. Perhaps you’re lying awake at this moment, and I should go and sit beside you and speak the words instead. But I’m not very good at expressing myself. Besides, I’m scared. I’m scared of hurting you more, and of losing you if I haven’t done so already – and just plain scared. I know that I have behaved terribly and that I have hurt you (the person in the world I least want to hurt). I don’t want this letter to make that worse, but I am going to try to be clear and honest.

  There are two things, and I’m trying to hold them separately in my mind, for the moment at least. First, there’s the fact of my affair with Nancy, nearly nineteen years ago. Then, there’s the fact that I suddenly discover I have a daughter. Or, rather, that I am the biological father of a young woman who you say is called Sonia. I did not know this before tonight. I
have not spoken to Nancy or been in any kind of contact with her since she left. And before anything else, I should tell you that I have not had an affair of any kind before or since this one. I have not even been tempted. You are my first and only great love. The great ambition of my life is to make you happy and to deserve you.

  Connor rubbed his eyes. He went back down to the kitchen with his tumbler and refilled it with whisky. He rummaged in Gaby’s voluminous leather bag and found the cigarette packet he knew she’d been hiding in there, and shook out a couple of cigarettes. Back in his study, he lit one and took a sip of whisky. Then he resumed writing.

  The affair with Nancy – if you can call something that lasted a few days and I have regretted for the rest of my life an affair – took place when you were ill after Ethan was born. This is not an excuse, rather the opposite. At the time you most needed me, I betrayed you. I simply want to describe what happened. When I first met Nancy, I liked her because you loved her. Soon, I liked her even more because I could see that she loved you. Then, I simply liked her. It was only when you were ill and she was at the house so much, looking after you and helping me look after Ethan, that I thought of her sexually.

  Connor scribbled out the world ‘sexually’ until it was illegible, and put in its place ‘in any other way’. He dragged the smoke deep into his aching lungs and gulped some whisky.

  I was exhausted, emotional, confused and scared by what was happening to you. I think Nancy was as well, although of course she must speak for herself. We had sex three times, over a period of two weeks. I knew immediately what a terrible thing I was doing, and so did she. It wasn’t about pleasure or desire or love. I don’t know if you will understand when I say that our guilt, which should have prevented us, actually and paradoxically drew us together. We were partners in crime. I was filled with self-hatred and self-disgust and the only person with whom I could share this was her, because she was feeling the same. I don’t know if that makes sense to you. I don’t even know if it makes sense to me any more or if it is just a foolish self-justification. It was quickly over and I was relieved when a few weeks later she left the way she did, although I knew that you would be upset – as of course you were. I know that by sleeping with Nancy I not only deceived you and endangered our marriage, I doubly betrayed you because I also took away your dearest friend and damaged your brother’s chance of happiness. I never told you because I could not tolerate the anguish I would cause on both these counts. I still do not know if that was the right or wrong thing to do. There have been many times over the years when I have nearly spoken about it; moments when I felt particularly close to you and suddenly realized there was a large part of myself that I was withholding. I felt at such moments that I’d poisoned the source of myself. In part, I wanted to tell you because I wanted you to forgive me (I cannot forgive myself). But that seemed a selfish reason. I have tried since then to be a good husband – it is an absurdly old-fashioned phrase but I can’t think of a better one. I never for one moment stopped loving you.