The Moment You Were Gone (8 page)

He stubbed out his cigarette on the windowsill and chucked it outside. ‘It's been a nice childhood,' he said. ‘Don't cry.'

‘I'm not sad, just emotional. Anyway, you're crying too.'

‘Of course I am.' He put his arms round her and lifted her up so that her feet dangled above the ground and one shoe slipped and hung from her toe. Then he lowered her and let her go. ‘See you,' he said.

Gaby walked through Exeter in the drizzle, not sure where she was headed. The streets were full of young students, jostling and laughing, moving in clotted groups, and among them she felt muted, like a charcoal figure among all the vivid oil-painted ones. She had the sense that nobody could see her, and that if she opened her mouth to speak, nobody would hear the words. Her body was heavy and slow; her sinuses ached with unshed tears and her throat hurt. She wished she could speak to Connor. She wanted to hear his voice as a reminder of the world she was returning to.

The station was a few minutes away, and when she looked at her watch she saw that if she hurried she could still get the 15.01 express to London. But she didn't want to hurry – or, at least, she couldn't seem to make herself do anything more than dawdle along the crowded weekend streets. Each step seemed to take a long time; she heard her feet slap against the damp pavement, and she moved as in a dream past shops and cafés. Sometimes
she glimpsed her reflection, among all the other reflected figures, and was surprised how upright, energetic, full of purpose she looked.

Without knowing that she was going to, she turned up an alley and entered a dark little café. The humid warmth embraced her, the hiss of the espresso machine and the melodic chink of cups. She ordered a cappuccino and an almond pastry and sat at a table near the window, easing off her jacket and settling back. She almost felt that she could go to sleep right now – put her arms on the table, rest her face on them, close her eyes. She drank some frothy coffee, licking the foam off her lips; took a bite of the pastry and chewed it slowly. She wondered what Ethan was doing right now. She saw his face as he'd told her about Rosie, and wanted to race back and hug him tight and tell him she would make everything all right, knowing that those days were years in the past. He had said it had been a good childhood, but had it really? Had she been a good enough mother? She'd been chaotic, forgetful, volatile, haphazard. She remembered all those moments of fatigue and irritation, and the way she had longed for time to herself; she had that now but no longer wanted it. His present-day face – impatient and beautiful – was replaced in her mind by a younger one, red-eyed and beseeching. His hands used to be dimpled at the knuckles. His belly used to be plump, his body like a sack of flour, changing shape in her arms.

She drank more cappuccino to steady herself, took another bite of the pastry. People poured past the window, like figures in a home movie, grainy and slightly
out of focus. She wished she could go back to the beginning and do it properly, do it perfectly, do it again.

Ethan sat in his room, among the bin bags and boxes. He should put everything away, but he knew he wasn't going to. Probably they'd be piled up in the middle of his room for weeks. Why not? He could take clothes out of his cases, then put them into a bin bag when they were dirty; when the case was empty, he'd go to the laundrette, which he could see from the window. It seemed like an efficient arrangement. And he could pick out books and CDs as he wanted. He leant back against the bed, pulled his iPod out of his backpack, plugged in the earpieces and turned it on. ‘This is the first day of my life,' a light-timbred voice sang inside his head. ‘Remember the time you drove all night just to meet me …' H e winced and skipped to the next track, drank his tepid tea, then finished Gaby's. He put the two empty mugs on top of the tennis racket, beside the bag of shoes, and lit a cigarette.

If his father was here, he thought, tapping ash with a hiss into one of the mugs, he would be putting everything away at once, finding a place for all of Ethan's possessions, trying to turn the room into another home. He could imagine his frowning, concentrated face; the precision with which he organized things. He could be very purposeful, his father, like many of the adults Ethan knew. He strode through his days as if they were a road that led to a known destination and he mustn't turn aside or let himself be delayed. But Ethan liked the sense he had now of floating in the currents of this day, sitting in a heap in the warm room and having no idea of where
he should be heading and no particular desire to head anywhere. He could find a bar and stay there until it closed, nursing a beer and listening to other people's conversation; he could take a bath; he could knock on one of the doors in this corridor of identical rooms and make a gesture towards friendship; he could cook a meal at midnight, smoke a joint, cycle round the city with the map Gaby had pushed into the side pocket of his backpack, go to sleep in this small, warm space, sitting on the carpet with his knees up in a bridge, and only rise as it got dark. Anything was possible.

He lit another cigarette, drew the smoke into his lungs, let it out in a dissipating bluish cloud. He thought of his mother's face as she left, screwed up in an effort to be cheerful. Then he reached over and took the pack of playing cards out of his backpack. He dealt columns and started to play patience, as his father had taught him many years ago. He must have played it hundreds, thousands, of times. He'd played it incessantly through GCSEs and A levels – for luck, as an omen, a ritual of superstitious distraction. Before each exam, he'd have to get all his cards out. And then there were those grey Sunday afternoons; those rainy camping holidays in Scotland and Wales. Fish with flabby, salted chips, damp clothes, and inside the humid tent, the cards tipping on the rucked sleeping-bag. He laid out seven more cards, liking the plasticky snap they made. Once he'd got out in a game, he told himself, he would do something. He'd go and knock on doors, meet neighbours, phone friends in other halls of residence. When the cards told him.

At last Gaby stood up, paid for the coffee and pastry, pulled on her jacket and left the café. Outside, the sky had darkened and it was trying to rain. A few large drops landed on her cheek and hair. Turning back on to the main street, she quickened her pace and headed for the station. She'd have time before the 16.22 arrived to buy a magazine or book, and she'd settle down in a window seat, drink brown tea, go home. It made her feel dreary, the thought of returning to her old life, as if nothing had happened. She pictured Ethan's dark, stripped room, fluff balls in the corner and dead flies on the windowsill, bare spaces along the shelves, and silence thick in the room, like an odour. She had insisted that Connor should go on his long-planned sailing trip, yet now she knew that he should have been there to mark this event. After so many years they were a couple living on their own again. They should have said goodbye to their son together, then taken a wild walk or gone swimming in the sea, got drunk, been undignified, booked into a hotel for sex, got on to a plane that would take them away to an unknown destination. Anything, rather than a dutiful return, back in time for a glass of wine and an early night.

She bought a single ticket to London, Paddington. She gazed round her, but nothing made sense and the crowds and bright lights wavered in her vision. Putting her fingers to her cheeks, she found she was weeping. The tears slid down her face in sheets, her throat ached, her heart was heavy. And then, over the loudspeaker, she heard an announcement: the 16.18 was due to arrive on platform two, calling at Plymouth, Liskeard, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, St Erth and Penzance.

For a moment she stood, at a loss, while passengers flowed past her in both directions. Then, clutching her one-way second-class ticket to London, she went towards the train that would take her in the opposite direction, and sat down in the empty first-class carriage. She held her breath and pressed her nose to the window. Small rivulets ran down the glass; outside, figures wavered in the strengthening rain. She felt the engine vibrate and the people on the platform fell away as the train began to move towards Cornwall, slowly at first but soon picking up speed.

Sitting back in her capacious, illegal seat, she looked past her own fugitive reflection in the streaming window, out on to the sodden patchwork green of the countryside that flooded by under the leaking grey sky. In the incessant rain, it resembled an Impressionist painting, all smudged colour and light, like a landscape inside her head. A tremble ran through her, whether of happiness or sorrow she could not tell, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was her younger self she was looking at in the vague mirror of the window – the one she thought she had left behind, but who had been waiting for her to return. The train shuddered on, carrying her back into her past.

It was Connor's watch. Stefan slept down below, wrapped in an old tartan blanket with his feet sticking out and one large hand curled round the side of his face, as if he was comforting himself. Every so often he flinched, shifted, half woke. The sea was quite calm tonight, the moderate waves lifting and dropping the boat, up-up and down again in a lethargic waltz. Even in sleep, Stefan could feel how the boat tugged forward with the wind, then went slack before picking up momentum once more. It was a rhythm he loved and tried to store in his body: the asymmetrical rise and fall while the water slapped against the bows and vibrated almost imperceptibly under the keel. The old wooden boat creaked.

It was the eighth year running that the two men had made the trip together. In the summer, after the university term had ended and Stefan was free, they sailed his small yacht to France. Connor would then return home, and Stefan would spend his holiday there, sailing into small ports and harbours, or simply pottering about. Sometimes a friend would join him, more often he preferred to be alone with his books, his thoughts, the salty wind in his face and the spray stinging off the waves. Then, in the autumn when the academic term was about to begin, Connor would fly out and they would sail back across the Channel, to the berth near Southampton.

As he felt himself falling back into sleep, he heard, far off, the muffled boom of a foghorn – too distant to worry about. Anyway, Connor was on deck. Stefan could imagine him sitting at the stern in his oilskin, one hand resting on the tiller, his eyes narrowed as he watched the compass, the horizon and the taut belly of the sail. They'd be all right tonight. He turned on his back, laid a forearm against his eyes, was pulled down into his dreams.

The boat bucked up against a steep wave, then shuddered into its valley. Connor felt it tug against the tiller. The wind was strengthening. Without looking at what he was doing, he poured coffee from the flask into the pewter mug, then shook a cigarette out of its packet. He put it into his mouth and, with one practised hand, struck a match. Gaby thought he'd given up, but for the few days each year when he was at sea with Stefan, he liked to smoke. Especially when he was alone on deck at night and all around him, in every direction, its edges bleeding into the sky, was the sea. There were times on the watch when he felt as if he was hallucinating, the world topsy turvy and terrifying. The waves crested and tipped in a kaleidoscope of snow-capped mountains and craters, while the sky was a dark and watery ocean rushing above him. The liquid, shifting landscape seemed to flood into his brain, and his sense of who he was dissipated and dissolved. If he let himself go, it would be like dying. Then he had to blink, gulp the harsh coffee, light another cigarette and drag himself back to the precision and solidity of the present.

‘Connor Myers,' he said aloud. ‘Forty-four years old.
Doctor. Husband. Father.' Was that all? His life was an infinitesimal speck, tossed on the ocean.

But usually what he felt in these lonely stretches was the kind of clarity and contentment that he rarely achieved in his daily life. He lived so pressed up against the obligations of each day (seeing patients, hearing stories that made him feel helpless, all the increasing bureaucracy of the job, domestic chores, family crises). Only here, suspended between earth and sky with the cry of the terns and shearwaters rinsing through his mind, could he see himself whole and clear. He knew he was a taciturn man, often filled with a sudden, powerful anger, which he concealed under a tense impatience. He hated to lose control. He hated untidiness, disorder, things not going according to plan. He wasn't very good at taking pleasure in the small moments of life. He wasn't good, he admitted to himself, at being happy, although he could do grief exceptionally well. Ethan had once accused him of despising happiness, and although he'd denied it at the time, he knew it was partly true. Happiness often seemed to him to be a kind of laziness, a moral apathy or blindness. But maybe, he thought now, as he sat on the deck and watched the nose of the boat pushing into the water, then snouting up again, maybe what he really felt was that he had not earned the right to happiness and that he had not deserved his luck: not his beautiful, joyful wife, or his raw, romantic son who, even now, was leaving home.

If he had said such a thing to Gaby, she would have laughed and put her arms round him and told him he was a self-punishing, guilt-ridden, ridiculous Puritan and that it didn't work like that. He could imagine her so
clearly that, for a second or two, it was as if she were with him on the boat; he saw the way she'd stand to absorb the motion of the waves, her hands on her hips, legs apart, hair tangled in the wind. She was good at being happy. She treated small moments as gifts and was grateful.

Yet it was wrong to reduce Gaby to ‘happy', as if she was an unstained child who had not yet acquired all of the messy, furtive and ambivalent self-consciousness of an adult. She'd had her share of misery. After Ethan had been born – to Connor's shock and her own shame – she had plunged into a full-scale, weeping, catatonic post-natal depression that seemed bewilderingly out of character and had taken many months to lift. They rarely talked about it now. But for a moment her weeping, swollen face presented itself to him and he stared at it in the dark, full of tenderness.

Then, unbidden, another memory rose in him. It was so vivid that it was almost as if he were watching it on a screen. Ethan, who was eight or nine months old, was lying in his carry-cot in the living room, finally asleep after hours of struggle. They were sitting on either side of him, exhausted. There was a half-drunk bottle of wine on the table, and a fire in the grate, so it must have been winter-time. It was dark outside. Connor could see the reflection of the flames dancing in the window-panes. He watched himself get up and close the curtains. ‘He's out for the count,' he said. ‘Little bugger.'

‘Thank God for that,' she said, sighing and sinking back in the sofa. ‘I was about to suggest brandy in the milk. Sometimes I think I'm not cut out for motherhood.'

‘Don't you dare say that! Don't. After everything you've gone through – well, you're a hero.'

‘A hero?' A splutter of laughter came from her.

‘Heroine.'

‘Hero's better.'

He looked down at her, smiling. ‘Hero.'

They stared at each other, the smile fading from his face, replaced by confusion. ‘You look all in,' she said softly.

‘I am. Done in.'

As if the strength had run out of him, he sank to his knees in front of her and put his head in her lap. She ran her slender fingers through his hair. Neither spoke, and it was in silence that he lifted his head and kissed her blindly, pushing her back against the sofa and clambering after her; in silence that she undid the buckle of his belt and that he pulled up her skirt. They clung together like drowning people, each trying to save the other, pull the other under.

‘Oh, God,' he said, into the soft hollow of her neck.

‘Sssh. Quiet now. Don't you go and wake Ethan.'

But Ethan had been fast asleep, his hands curled into small fists and his breath deep and even. There had been a quivering behind his eyelids to show that he was dreaming.

Connor blinked and shook his head. The images receded; he was looking out at the moon, broken up in the choppy landscape of the sea once more, a tiller in his hand and the main sheet coiled neatly at his feet. The wind freshened and the boat leapt forward. Connor felt the wind cool against his face. It was still many hours
before dawn – that barely perceptible lightening on the horizon. Then he heard Stefan's old alarm clock give its tinny rattle, and Stefan's groan. Soon enough the sun would be up, and they would see other boats dotted around them. Soon he would be home.