The Moment You Were Gone (24 page)

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.

Connor lit another cigarette. Blue smoke drifted above his head. He thought he heard a sound from Ethan's room, but when he listened, there was nothing.

Then there's the fact that apparently Nancy gave birth to Sonia and I am the biological father. Frankly, Gaby, I do not know what to do with this information. My mind quite literally goes blank with incomprehension when I think about it. When I was lying in bed, trying to understand its significance, I could only ask myself questions. Does it change what I did, nineteen years ago? Does it make my actions worse? And then, of course, there are other questions now, like does she want me to meet her? Should I meet her? Should I meet Nancy? I realize that in some sense these are not questions for you to answer, yet without talking to you about it I feel I don't know what I think. I am adrift. The idea of not having you there to turn to for advice and comfort terrifies me more than I can say.

Connor's hand was aching. He laid down his pen and read through what he had written. It seemed woefully inadequate, expressing only the perimeters of his thoughts not the dark vortex at the centre; barely beginning to describe his guilt. He saw that outside the sky was becoming lighter; there was a thin strip of grey on the horizon and the stars were going out. He picked up the pen once more.

It's nearly dawn now and I am going to go out for a while. I'm not sure where, but I don't want to be around when you wake up, in case you don't want me to be. I will come home before midday and I hope you will still be here and we can talk properly.

He wanted to write, ‘I can't live without your love,' but that would seem like an appeal for sympathy or pity. He
wanted to write ‘Don't leave me.' He hesitated, looking down at the densely covered pages in front of him.

You are the loveliest woman I have ever known.

He couldn't think what else to say, so he stopped on his name, put the letter in an envelope, wrote
‘GABY'
on the outside and slid it under the door of Ethan's room. Then he dressed hastily in his jogging trousers and long-sleeved running top, slid his wallet and keys into his deep side pocket and let himself out of the house.