The Moment You Were Gone (22 page)

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 forgive 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.

She looked round the kitchen. She could remember where and when they'd bought almost every object, from the large teapot (Devon, when Ethan was a toddler in a buggy and Connor a young doctor) to the green glasses (Prague, two years ago). A door led to the long strip of garden outside; she unbolted it and stepped out on to a carpet of soggy, mottled leaves and damp grass. She registered the signs of her neglect: the grass was long and the last of the roses were turning brown on their stems. Most of the apples had fallen from their branches and lay in a russet circle on the ground. Very different from Nancy's impeccable plot, she thought sourly, sitting down on the wet bench and pulling out the packet of cigarettes she had bought on her way home. Briefly, she worried about Connor discovering her smoking, which made her give a bark of grumpy laughter. That was the least of her concerns. She struck a match and pulled the smoke deep into her lungs, then let it out and watched it drift towards the empty sky. Her mind was curiously blank. She was waiting to find out what she would do.

Events decided for her. Going back into the kitchen, she noticed that the answering-machine was flashing, and when she pressed ‘play' the first voice she heard was Connor's. It made her jump. For a moment, she thought he was going to confess.

‘Hi, it's me. I've just come back from my run and I wanted to remind you that your brothers are all coming round tonight so there'll be seven of us. I'll try to get back before they arrive. Do you want me to pick anything
up to eat, or have you got it sorted? I'll get some good cheese, anyway, so you don't have to worry about pudding. Hope you've had a good day. See you later. Oh, and by the way, the car's ready to collect from the garage in Exeter. But we can discuss that later.'

No, she hadn't got it sorted because she had forgotten. After an initial spasm of panic – Connor and Stefan at her table together, today of all days – she found that she was bizarrely relieved, even elated. Now she didn't need to make a decision; she could put it off until tomorrow and spend what was left of the day buying food, having a bath, pottering round the house in her dressing-gown before they arrived. She could avoid Connor without appearing to do so, and comfort Stefan without him knowing he was being comforted. One more evening of pretending that everything was normal. She would drink, laugh, swap ancient family anecdotes, lure them into staying too late. Her spirits rose; she could feel a bubble of excitement in her chest.

She realized she was starving and couldn't remember when she had last eaten a proper meal. Not today and not yesterday. Maybe she'd become gaunt and tragically glamorous, every cloud has a silver … She pulled open the fridge door and took out a half-full carton of semi-skimmed milk, which she gulped without bothering about a glass. Milk splashed over her coat, and she wiped her lips on her sleeve when she'd finished. She peeled clingfilm off a small bowl on the shelf, picked a meatball that had seen better days out of its tomato sauce and popped it into her mouth. She crunched her way through a carrot that had gone bendy with age. That was better. She peered
deeper into the fridge to see what else was in there. Parmesan, the remainder of the rabbit casserole Connor had cooked on Saturday, an egg box with no eggs inside, several yoghurts long past their sell-by date. She peeled the lid off one, dipped in her finger and sucked it thoughtfully. Strawberry-flavoured – horrible. What could she cook? A simple meal for a Tuesday night. A chicken; she was good at chicken. But she'd done chicken last time her brothers and their wives had come, and probably the time before. Fish, then. Did they have fish? She yanked open the door of the small freezer: two salmon fillets, some smoked eel that Connor had put there when he came back from Amsterdam, a bag of peas, ice and various bottles of spirits. That wouldn't stretch very far. She'd have to go to the shops.