The Moment You Were Gone (37 page)

But she couldn't just lie there and let the last of the battery be used up. In her imagination, she was getting out of bed, wrapping her dressing-gown round herself, hurrying down the stairs and sliding her feet into her boots. It would only take a minute, less, to get up and close the car door. She could have been back in bed by now if she had done it at once. She would count to ten and then she would force herself out of the lovely nest she had made. Now she would count another five. One, two, three … Thick with sleep. Heavy limbs. Eyes deep
in her skull. A forest of dreams just ahead. What a strange land sleep was. The wind tapped at the window and the rain made a staccato rhythm against the pane. Just a little longer. One deep breath, in, out, longer. Then she would go. If Connor were here he'd do it for her. But Connor wasn't here. Nobody was here. She wasn't here either, not really, she was billowing through the air, turning through the dark water. Too late now. Gone.

Her throat ached, her eyes ached, her glands, ears, sinuses, chest, head. Every bone in her body felt sore. Her skin prickled. She stumbled out of bed, down the stairs and outside into the drizzle to shut the car door, though she knew it wouldn't start now – even the light above the mirror had gone out. What was more, it occurred to her, as she went back to bed, she couldn't phone the AA to come and rescue her because her mobile didn't work here. Never mind. She'd think about all of that later. For now, she felt thick with illness, and all she wanted to do was roll herself up in her duvet and close her eyes once more. Connor had told her enough times that you couldn't catch a cold or flu by getting wet, they were airborne viruses, yet it seemed to Gaby that her march through the elements yesterday evening had brought this on.

She slept all morning, wrapped in thick, feverish images, then got up to go to the bathroom, refill the hot-water bottle and put a blanket over the duvet. She slept intermittently through the afternoon, surfacing every so often from fretful dreams of things going wrong. In one she was in the vast, hot, dimly lit Top Shop on Oxford Street where Connor seemed to have his office, but she couldn't find him. In another, she was at home, but a stream had burst outside the front door and was
rushing in a torrent through the kitchen. Then there was something about a cupful of ants she was supposed to drink but every time she lifted the cup they crawled over her face and into her ears and nostrils. She woke up coughing and spluttering. Her throat was full of glass; her glands throbbed; jets of pain shot through her eardrums; when she sat up, pain sloshed through her skull.

She made herself a mug of green tea and crawled back to bed. Sometimes she was hot and clammy and sometimes she was cold and clammy. The duvet got twisted up and she found that she was lying under the scratchy blanket, which made her skin itch. She wished she was a child and that her mother was there with clean sheets, cool flannels, soft towels, mugs of broth. Connor was good at looking after her when she was ill. He didn't make a big fuss of her, the way she did of him, but he tended her. I'm married to a vigilant man, she thought, and hot tears started in her eyes. For a few minutes she cried, in a snuffly, wretched way, then blew her nose hard on the wadge of loo paper she'd fetched from the bathroom.

Now it was getting dark outside. The grey day had ended and night was beginning once more. She closed her eyes again and drifted into a half-sleep, where images surged through her mind. She saw Ethan, Connor, Stefan, Nancy. They were watching her, waiting for her. She saw herself, as if she was watching a film of her life. She let herself remember meeting Nancy – such a fierce, clever child with her jutting jaw and pale eyes. Like a lynx. They used to play a game, dividing people into cats and dogs. She and Ethan were definitely dogs – a bit undignified,
unconditional, clumsy, emotional, vulnerable, trusting and foolish. But Connor and Nancy were more like cats, self-possessed, rational and remote, holding themselves back from the world, assessing it through narrowed gazes. Except, thought Gaby, turning over in bed and finding a cool spot on the pillow, the last few weeks seemed to have turned Connor into a dog, with spaniel eyes following her.

When she looked at her watch again it was ten o'clock. When she sat up her head pounded, and when she swallowed the glass still stuck in her throat. Her mouth was dry and tasted awful. She made her way into the dark, cold kitchen and drank three glasses of water, which was so full of iron it tasted like blood. The rain had stopped, but she could still hear water dripping from the trees outside. Apart from that, there was silence.

It was three o'clock when she woke again in her narrow bed. She lay very still, breathing softly, and could almost feel the darkness pressing on her. Her limbs ached and her chest hurt. Her skin crawled with an obscene discomfort. Nobody could get to her here, and the car was an inert lump of metal in front of the house. She turned over to face the dark square of window and went back to sleep.

At nine o'clock the next morning she swung her legs out of bed and stood up warily, feeling the iron ball swing inside her head and smash against her right temple. The light made her eyes ache. She took a few groggy steps to the bathroom and leant against the wash-basin, trying not to see her face in the mirror, but she couldn't avoid it.
Her hair was lank and her face was waxy and rearranged. One eye looked lower than the other, and there were huge circles round them as if she had just removed swimming goggles. Her lips were pale and cracked.

‘Blimey,' she said – tried to say. Her voice was thick and hoarse; she didn't sound anything like herself. She started to cry again, but stopped because she didn't have the strength for tears.

She crept down the stairs. Her breath smoked in the kitchen, and there were flowers of frost inside the window-panes. The sight of the greasy plate from two nights ago made her feel nauseous. In the sitting room a dull pile of papery ash lay at the bottom of the woodburning stove, but Gaby couldn't summon the energy to fetch Connor's matches and build a fire. She would do it later. For now, she boiled the kettle for another mug of green tea.

At four o'clock she made it downstairs again, and this time she got herself another hot-water bottle, and took a biscuit back to bed with her tea, although she only ate one bite.

At one in the morning, she woke hollow with hunger and thought about Connor's vegetable lasagne in the fridge. Eventually she went downstairs, turned on the oven, heated it, put a small amount on to a plate and took it back to bed. She sat against her pillows, wrapped in blankets and looked at it. The smell of melted cheese made her feel weak with desire. She ate only a few mouthfuls, feeling them settle heavily in her stomach, but the simple act of swallowing good food made her contented. Out of the window she saw that the sky was clear; stars
glittered and a gibbous moon hung low and large above the hill. Tomorrow would be a beautiful day.

The days that followed would seem later like a dream, separated from past and future. Gaby was as weak as a kitten from her illness, and she behaved as if she had been snowed in. She made no attempt to call the AA to fix her car. Indeed, she rarely left the house, and when she did it was only to go to the wood store or to stand in the garden, contemplating the landscape that spread out under the cold blue sky. She lived on baguettes and marmalade, porridge – made with water once the milk was finished – sprinkled with golden sugar, and green apples, all eaten at whatever time of day she felt hungry. She didn't open the wine but drank ferrous water and green tea. She spent her time either in the sitting room, where the stove burnt day and night, or in bed with a hot-water bottle. She stopped putting on clothes and took to wearing her dressing-gown over a T-shirt and knickers, with thick socks on her feet. The water never ran hot enough for a bath, so she washed in the basin every now and then. She rather liked the wild, gaunt face that confronted her in the mirror, denuded of all artifice. This was who she really was.

She started drawing and painting – something she hadn't done for years, even though she had recently enrolled at the evening art class. She did watercolours of the scene outside her window, with the pale sun and the hill that, once she looked at it properly, was violet and brown and blue and yellow as well as hues of green. And she sketched the winter birds that came to the windowsill
to peck at the pieces of stale baguette she left there. There were long-tailed tits, blue-tits, chaffinches, robins, wrens and, once, a green woodpecker that stared at her beadily through the glass. At the end of each day, she burnt what she had done. Sometimes she read
David Copperfield
, although she often found that she hadn't taken in the words, and would have to go back and read them again; or poems from an anthology she found in the living room that contained many of her old favourites. She learnt one by heart, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden' by Louis MacNeice, and recited it to herself as she stirred her porridge or tended the fire. And sometimes she wrote in her notebook, trying to work out what she really felt about the events that had turned her life upside down.

But for many hours of each unstructured day she simply sat and let thoughts come into her mind, then pass quietly out again. She could not remember a time in her adult life that she had been alone with herself like this. She had spent so many years trying to please and charm other people – her husband, her son, her friends, her boss, strangers she met in the street. A lot of her thoughts then were more like plans and strategies for the day. Now, she could wear a dressing-gown and socks all day long, get up at three in the afternoon, eat dinner at five in the morning, watch winter birds at the window, think.

What did she think?

She thought of all the reasons why she should stay with Connor: because she loved him, because she liked him, because she knew him so well that he had almost become invisible to her, because he knew her, and in spite of her recklessness, folly and greed, he liked her and
loved her too, because Ethan was his son, because of all the memories they had together, because of the future they planned, because he was patient, because of the way he smiled at her, because of the way he frowned when he was working, because he was clever and dry and sardonic, because he had cried in her arms, because he danced so badly, because he put his tongue on his lip when he concentrated, because he knew old songs from musicals and sang them in the shower, because he was kind, because he got up early to make her tea in bed, because he accepted her for what she was and didn't try to change her, because he needed her, because the thought of being without him made her feel cold and lonely and scared.

Yet for all this, their old life together now seemed unreal to her, like a well-edited film that she was watching from a distance. She lay in her narrow bed, darkness outside, pictured scenes from their marriage and thought: Was that really me? Was that him? Was that us? Was that the life we led together for so many years?

And then she thought: Where have those years gone? She had always imagined she would escape the sadness of time passing, but it had mugged her all the same, thwacked her round the head and kicked her in the shins when she was least expecting it, like a hooligan charging out of a dark alleyway with a crowbar. Just a memory ago she had been young and vibrant, chockful of energy and hope. You're supposed to gain things as you grow older in return for the things that you lose. But what had she gained? Dignity? She hadn't got that. Peace? No. Wisdom? It seemed unlikely. And what had she lost?
Beauty, youth, innocence, possibility. Your past grows longer and your future shrinks. And you lose your parents and your children – often at the same time so that you go from being daughter and mother to being neither. What are you then? What was she then?

So she thought: How much of this whole brouhaha is to do with Ethan leaving home? A great deal. Perhaps almost everything. Of course, hadn't she known that all along? Goodbye is the hardest word.

Gaby threw off the blanket that was wrapped round her shoulders and stood up from the slovenly mess of her bed. How many days was it since she had spoken to anyone? Maybe she didn't have a voice any more. She picked up all the dirty plates and mugs from the floor and the windowsill and took them downstairs, dumping them in the sink. She put two more logs on to the fire, then opened the fridge. There was nothing inside it except three eggs, the bag of ground coffee and the mango, which was now overripe and oozing nastily out of its skin. She opened the cupboard and there was nothing there either, except tea, marmalade, golden sugar and porridge oats. In the larder there was a jar of stem ginger in syrup, half a bag of basmati rice, years past its sell-by date, a dented tin of octopus chunks and a packet of chicken stock cubes. She put on the kettle and, when it had boiled, poured the water over a stock cube. It would be better if she had bread to dunk into it, but she had put out the last of the baguette for the birds. She contemplated rescuing the pecked remains from the windowsill, but decided she wasn't that desperate. She sipped the
stock thoughtfully, then ate two spoonfuls of marmalade. She looked at her watch. It was half past six and she was suddenly ravenous. She would be sad to leave this house, but she would have to quite soon, if only to find something to eat.

But she didn't know how she could return to her old life. She didn't know the way.