The Moment You Were Gone (23 page)

It had turned into one of those flawless late-autumn afternoons, crisp and bright. Gaby walked slowly down the road, relishing the warmth of the sun and the jostle of children who'd come out of school and were now making their way home in noisy groups. She went into the local butcher's and asked him what she should buy. ‘You know me,' she said, ‘something simple and foolproof – but not chicken.'

‘Lamb fillets,' he instructed her. ‘Already marinated. They need half an hour or so in the oven. And here's some mint sauce to go with them.'

‘Perfect.'

Next door, she bought salad and a bag of limes; at the baker's, three baguettes. She made her way to the florist and stood in the moist green interior, breathing in the fragrance. There were buckets of roses, chrysanthemums,
freesias, dahlias, lilies, irises; green fronds and purple-stemmed foliage. She picked out two bunches of freesias, and another of yellow roses.

‘Is that everything?' asked the florist.

‘Yes. No. No, it isn't. I'll take some bronze chrysanthemums as well. That's it.'

‘Shall I put them all together.'

‘Oh – and those floppy pink flowers, I never remember their name.'

‘Lisianthus.'

‘That's it. I love them. Two bunches.'

‘Are you celebrating something?'

‘Not exactly.'

She meandered home, the shopping-bags in one hand and the vast bunch of flowers held in triumph. Every so often, she stopped to change hands and to bury her face in their smell. A curious smile curled round her mouth. She was thinking of the evening ahead; her heart skipped a beat.

First, she lit the fire that Connor had already laid in the grate. Even so, it took several goes to get it alight, and by then the room was full of smoke and she had to open windows to get rid of it.

In the kitchen, Gaby swept the papers and letters on the table into a pile, which she deposited in a cardboard box, then set seven places – three couples and Stefan, the onesome of every group. She put the flowers in vases and jugs and placed them around the kitchen and living room, then rummaged in various drawers for candles.

A long, hot bath, till her fingertips shrivelled and her head swam. She washed her hair, towelled it dry, scrunching it to make it curl more, then stood at the window in
her dressing-gown, gazing out at the fading light; there was a violet streak along the horizon. A full moon, so pale it was scarcely visible, floated in the sky. What to wear? Pulling clothes from her wardrobe, she held them against her in front of the mirror and dropped them to the floor one after another until she was standing ankle-deep in a puddle of garments. She ended up choosing a brightly striped long skirt and a wraparound top with flared sleeves and velvet hem, then festooned herself with bangles and beads that resembled boiled sweets. She looked, she thought, with satisfaction, like a fortune-teller in a circus tent. Nancy would never wear anything like this: she was stern and lean and tasteful. Leaning into the mirror, she drew lines round her eyes, smeared blusher along her cheekbones, squirted perfume behind her ears, on her wrists, down her cleavage, into her damp hair. Lip gloss; she pressed her mouth on to a tissue and saw its red shape blotted into a bold kiss.

She poured herself half a glass of red wine while she prepared the meal. But half a glass wasn't enough. It only lasted long enough for her to slice the cucumber and shred the lettuce into the salad bowl. She needed more while she crushed the garlic and made the salad dressing. Either she was moving very slowly, or time had speeded up, because now it was half past seven and there was a knock at the door. She knew it was Stefan, because he always rapped out the same rhythm: slow-quick-quick-slow. Was that a fox-trot? He stood on the doorstep with a bemused smile on his face, as if he wasn't quite sure that he'd come to the right place.

‘Stefan!' she cried, drawing him out of the cool night
into the warmth of her hug. ‘Come and sit by the fire and I'll get you a drink. Here, give me that coat. What lovely flowers.'

‘You seem to have got rather a lot already,' he said. ‘And you're – um – rather festive. I haven't forgotten someone's birthday, have I?'

‘Yours is next week.'

‘That doesn't count.'

‘I thought I could make us a
caipirinha
.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's this drink they have in Brazil, with lime and rum and crushed ice. I had it the other week and it was so wonderful I went and bought a bottle of the special rum, but I forgot about it until now.'

‘It is Tuesday today, isn't it?'

‘Yes. Why?'

‘It's just … That sounds a bit Fridayish to me.'

‘Live a little.'

‘All right,' he said doubtfully. ‘Just a little one. I'm in my car.'

‘Leave it here and take a cab. Or get a lift from Max. You squeeze the limes. They're over there and the lemon-squeezer's on the side. I'll do the ice.'

Gaby snapped the cubes out of their containers and wrapped them in a dishcloth, then took the hammer from the tool drawer and started smashing them vigorously. Tiny dents appeared in the wooden work surface and shards of ice scattered over the floor.

‘Maybe it would be better with a rolling-pin.'

‘This is fine. There's the door again. Will you get it for me?'

Max and Antony with their wives, Paula and Yvette, gathered round her in the kitchen, taking off their jackets and exclaiming at the flowers and candles. They stood in their sober, weekday clothes and watched as Gaby applied herself to the ice like a blacksmith at his anvil. Her long sleeves dangled on to the wet surface and her hair fell over her flushed face. ‘There,' she said at last. ‘That'll do. Bring me those glasses. I think it's just a handful of ice, like so. Then you share out that lime juice, Stefan. Stir in some sugar – you can add more if you want. And finally,' she took a slim bottle from the freezer, ‘the rum.' It was viscous with cold and she glooped it into each glass. ‘Cheers,' she said. She clinked her glass against the others and held it up.

‘What are we celebrating?'

It was Connor, smiling in the doorway. He was still wearing his overcoat and his cheeks were bright with cold. Gaby thought he looked more handsome the older he got, his hair silvering at his temples, his face thin and mobile. There had been something callow about him when he was a young man but now he was easier in himself and carried himself with a certain authority. She watched as he shook hands with his brothers-in-law and kissed Yvette and Paula.

‘You're just in time,' she said, as he bent to kiss her. His lips missed hers and grazed her cheek. She smelt his aftershave, felt the fine stubble on his jaw. ‘Here, take your drink. What are we celebrating? Anything. Everything. Do we need a reason? Why don't you choose something?'

‘Give me a moment,' he said, putting the bag of cheese on the side and unbuttoning his coat. ‘There.' He
remembered how he had been thinking of Ethan on his run, and raised his glass. ‘To absent loved ones,' he said, with a half-ironic solemnity, trying to meet Gaby's eye.

‘Perfect!' Gaby chinked her glass against his, eyes on his chin, the knot of the tie she'd given him several years ago. ‘To absent loved ones. Wherever they may be. Whoever they may be.' She felt on fire already, and shouldn't drink any more. Not tonight. She put the tumbler down carefully out of her reach.

‘Absent loved ones,' everyone else echoed dutifully.

For the rest of the evening, Gaby tuned in and out like a mobile phone going through dead zones. Later, there were patches of it she could scarcely recall. They'd talked about their mother, of course – they always did nowadays, for Samantha Graham was sliding into forgetfulness. What had seemed for several years like a benevolent vagueness, inevitable in old age, had become an act of disappearance. She was losing parts of herself – whole sections of memory were gone, chunks of vocabulary, all sense of future purpose. Their father insisted that he could look after her, but although he didn't complain it was evidently becoming more difficult. Gaby didn't attend to the discussion, but she knew what would have been said, what she herself would have said, because it was the same every time they met. Max thought their mother should, sooner or later, go into a home because before long their father would no longer be able to cope; they should plan ahead rather than react instinctively and chaotically to events. Antony responded heatedly that they couldn't decide for their parents what was best for them. Stefan listened perplexedly to what each person
said and often rephrased it to clarify each position. Gaby insisted they should live with her and Connor whenever it became necessary. She would not hear of her beloved mother going into a home, even if one day she no longer knew where or even who she was. She became angrily emotional and even rude when Max turned over care options, or when Antony pointed out that perhaps their parents wouldn't want to live with Gaby and, after all, it was up to them. Their partners were on the sidelines, throwing the ball back into play every so often when it was booted out. Everyone knew in advance what would be said, and also that nothing would be settled, but the discussion had to run its course. Connor was always the referee, so Gaby supposed that he was that evening as well. She couldn't remember. She only knew that he kept trying to catch her eye, but she refused to respond. She served the lamb and watched as Connor poured red wine into everyone's glass. It was impossible for her to eat: the meat tasted of leather, the baguettes of cardboard, the salad of nothing at all.

It was strange to be there and yet not there, in her body and floating outside it. She knew something that nobody else knew and which, once it was discovered, would change their lives. She could almost feel the secret lodged inside her, ticking away. Every so often she imagined opening her mouth and saying, in a conversational tone, ‘By the way, Connor, I met your daughter the other day.' What would people say if she did? What would happen to the expressions on their faces? She thought of Stefan's habitual beam fading and her heart constricted. As the evening progressed she became increasingly terrified
that she would actually speak the words; she could taste them in her mouth, and sometimes she almost fancied she was saying them out loud. At last, she was reduced to a paranoid silence, even putting her hand across her mouth to prevent herself blurting out the truth. She sat hunched and still, as feelings strobed through her: fear, rage, misery, guilt, panic, love.

‘Are you all right?' murmured Connor at one point, as he leant across her to take her plate.

‘Fine,' she replied loudly and brightly. ‘Just fine. Why do you ask?'

Maybe she should take herself off to bed, she thought, looking at the untouched slabs of cheese on her plate. Maybe she should crumple up and cry and let someone else take care of the sorry mess of it all. She prodded the goat's cheese with the tip of her knife and felt the words rise once more until they were at the back of her throat, like an unconquerable nausea.

The many candles guttered and threw strange shadows across the faces, making them mysterious. Wax puddled and hardened on surfaces. Then – after the clink of coffee cups and something about when they would all meet again and something about a lovely meal but tomorrow was a working day, and something about the evenings getting even darker, colder, longer than they are now – they were going, gathering up jackets and coats, kissing Gaby, hugging her hard so that for a few moments she felt solid and real again, opening the door.

The night was cold and clear; the moon was high in the sky and nearly full. The world was silver and black. Gaby waved them out, her flared sleeve like a flag and
her painted smile wide; Connor came and stood behind her, putting his arms round her waist and his chin on the top of her head as he had done so many times before. She could look back across the years of their marriage and see them standing at the threshold, saying goodbye to guests, then turning to go inside together. Her eyes stung. Fear slithered under her skin. Now. Any minute.

The door shut. They were alone in a house that was too big for them. She took a deep breath and waited to hear what she would say next.

‘You go upstairs.' Connor put his hand fondly on her shoulder. ‘I'll clear up. You seem tired.'

‘Do I?'

She still didn't know what the words would be. For a frantic second, she imagined never saying anything, just hiding this away inside her for ever. Would that be saintly in its self-negating forgiveness, or simply odious in its moral sanctimony and fraudulent virtue? She'd never do it, though. For better or worse, she knew she was about to take the pin out of the grenade.

‘Nobody else would have noticed. But I did. Are you feeling OK?'

‘I – I do feel a bit odd, it's true.'

They stood at the foot of the stairs and he felt her forehead with his warm hand. His concerned smile wrinkled the crow's feet round his eyes.

‘You're a bit hot. Maybe you're coming down with something.'

‘No.'

‘Shall I bring you tea in bed?'

‘No.'

‘Gaby?'

‘Yes.'

‘I know you're missing Ethan. I know that we haven't talked about it enough and I've been too busy, but that's no excuse. I should have been with you. I should have been more attentive. I was thinking about it today when I was out running.'

He loves me, she thought. I've never doubted it and still I don't. He's always loved me and always looked after me. Whatever else has happened, that remains true.

‘No. I mean – no, that's not it. Connor –'

‘We should go away together. Just you and me. No Stefan, no Ethan, no broken-hearted friends and lonely acquaintances.'

‘I – I've got to –'

‘I know – up to bed with you. We can talk about it tomorrow. I won't be long. Don't wait up.'

‘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?