The Moment You Were Gone (16 page)

There were several pictures of Gaby and Connor. How intense he was as a young man, thought Gaby, studying her thin, dark-haired husband; how full of angles and fierce desires. He rarely smiled in photos, but there was one in which he gazed at the younger, grinning Gaby with a look of agonized delight as if he thought that she would melt away; in others, he scowled at the camera as if it was threatening him. She recognized that expression still, although as he had got older Connor had learnt how to mask some of his feelings, present an acceptable face to the world. She came to a photograph that made her flinch: Ethan as a tiny baby, lying swaddled in her lap and fast asleep. But was that really her? She was like an effigy
who'd been propped up in an imitation of life. Her face was pasty and dull between the curtains of greasy hair, her expression fixed, her shoulders slumped. She had let herself forget the depths of her post-natal misery, but this picture brought it sharply back.

Then, abruptly, Gaby was no longer in the photographs, nor Connor, nor Stefan. They were out of Nancy's life as if they'd never been there and in their place were strangers. Gaby felt her eyes burning with unshed tears. How could it have happened? How could all those rapt, smiling faces, all that seriousness of passion, have disappeared? The photographs that followed were more spaced out and better composed, as if Nancy was creating an acceptable version of her life with the messy bits left out, until at last Gaby was looking at what were clearly carefully selected printouts from a digital camera, often in black-and-white, and often of landscapes empty of human life. But here – then here, and here and here again – was a young man. Nancy liked to photograph him unawares, even in one photograph from behind, simply the fall of his dark hair over his neck and his broad shoulders as he faced the rippling sea. She examined each image carefully, noting the thick brows, the open face, the smile that put a dimple in one cheek. Nancy's lover, then.

Certainly there had been a glass of wine after the photographs, probably drunk too quickly in cool, thirsty gulps, and another cigarette, with the window opened wide to let the smoke drift out into the autumn night. Gaby was ravenous to the point of faintness, so she made herself a thick and messy sandwich, stuffing as
much ham, cheese and tomato into the baguette as she could, then liberally smearing it with mustard that she found in the cupboard. She looked around the kitchen and living room and saw that she was creating her characteristic mess, but she couldn't deal with that at this moment. She'd clean up later. She ate standing up, pushing the bread into her mouth and chewing hungrily, washing it down with more wine.

When she had finished, she returned to the filing cabinet and the boxes, taking the wine with her. She was increasingly conscious of how badly she was behaving, but she was compelled by the urgent sense that she could find Nancy among the documents of her life, and make sense of the fugitive past. Then, at last, she would be released from it. For she had lost something when Nancy had abandoned her – not just that friendship, but with it a sense of certainty, a knowledge of being loved as she was, with nothing to prove. People can be felled by the death of a spouse, or by divorce, they talk about it endlessly, as if by putting it into words they can make the loss more bearable. But Gaby thought that being left by a best friend could be equally painful, yet there was no proper way to mourn or express it. Connor had never fully understood how she had felt about it – how could he? He didn't have best friends like that. He had dozens of colleagues and acquaintances, and with each one he expressed a different side of himself. But Gaby had always felt that Nancy saw her whole. She had been the only person in the world that Gaby didn't try to charm. The pledge they had made that they'd still know each other at ninety, and the loss of that relationship, which should
have stretched from childhood to old age and death, still haunted Gaby, but it was only now, riffling through Nancy's life like this, that she realized how much.

She didn't open the envelope that had the word ‘Will' printed on it, and she put to one side all the folders that contained the deeds of the house, the details of the mortgage, life insurance, car insurance. She barely glanced at the bank statements, only noting that they were – as she had expected – arranged in chronological order. One drawer of the cabinet was given over to Nancy's work and she didn't bother with that, but she did open a hard-backed notebook whose pages were unlined and thick. On the first page, there was a pen-and-ink drawing of Nancy's house, and on the second a half-completed watercolour of a church. Then there were several pages of sea birds, meticulously drawn. Gaby turned the pages slowly, stopping when she came to words, arranged like a poem but not really reading like one, although she spoke them out loud: ‘“It can be hard to get from day to day or, at least, it is never simple. I must have lost the knack somewhere along the way. I look at people and I wonder how they do it with such apparent ease. I wonder what is happening behind their cheerful faces. Are we all just pretending? Are we all made up of secrets and of lies? Or is it only me?”' Gaby read it again, to herself, then turned the page and saw a doodled portrait of a face she didn't recognize. Opposite it was another, more intricate, drawing, of a door with carved panels, and words scrawled underneath: ‘I close this door.' Then sea birds again, curved beaks and delicate long legs, and a final pencil sketch of a male body, sitting down but bowed over so
that only the back of the head, the serrated spine and the muscled, outstretched arms could be seen.

Gaby pushed away the book and poured more wine. She sat with her back against the bed and sipped it slowly, closing her eyes and feeling tiredness gather in her skull. Nancy had told her that she never dreamt, but surely that couldn't be true. Everyone had dreams. She turned her attention to Nancy's school reports. What a good student she had been – teachers who had called Gaby ‘indolent' and ‘irrational' and ‘messy' used words like ‘exemplary' for Nancy. But school reports rarely yield up a person's secrets. Gaby soon tired of flicking through the years, following her friend's sure progress up the school, her prizes and medals and positions of responsibility.

Then there were the letters, a great many, held in separate bundles by thick rubber bands. Gaby pulled one such bundle out and peered into the first envelope. The writing was spidery, and in faded blue ink, and she saw that it wasn't addressed to Nancy but to an Emily; the ‘E' was curled and the ‘y' trailed its tail back under the name. There was a date at the top: 19 April 1958. The signature at the bottom was hard to make out, but Gaby assumed that these must be letters from Nancy's father to her mother, well before Nancy was born. She slid the pack back into its place and randomly pulled out another, much slimmer one. The first letter was from a woman called Janet, writing from New York and describing a visit to the Frick Museum in too much detail. The next was from Mexico and this time was a mini-lecture on the murals of Diego Rivera. Gaby had never heard of Janet and she couldn't think why Nancy should keep such pompous
epistles. There were a few from Marcus – presumably an old flame, for between paragraphs of news there were endearments. He missed Nancy, he said; he thought of her face on the pillow. Gaby read only one of his letters. She found it strange that there had been men like Marcus in Nancy's life, and she hadn't known.

It was with a prickly sense of disquiet that she recognized her own handwriting when she was eleven, and pulled letters from herself out of the drawer. She couldn't remember writing so many, yet here they all were and she could follow herself from a child, letters round and unformed and smeared with ink, to a teenager and into her twenties. There were postcards from summer holidays in Wales and Brittany and, once, Spain, describing blue seas and yummy crêpes and gales that had blown down the whole camping site. There were airmail letters on flimsy paper, the sides gummed together, and there were letters from university. She told Nancy about things she could no longer remember – parties, grades, boys, holiday plans. About Connor. She made arrangements. And finally – on one side of cream-coloured notepaper, in a large and almost illegible hand – she had written: ‘Nancy, please please please please please get in touch. Please.' No name at the end. She had sent that letter to Nancy's mother to forward and never even known it had arrived. But here it was, and Nancy had never answered.

She didn't read Stefan's letters; couldn't bring herself to commit what seemed like a double betrayal. She only glanced at the dates to see if he had written since Nancy had left, and it was when she was replacing the bundle that she found a single letter that she almost didn't bother
to read, because it was typed and looked formal and, anyway, she was becoming queasy about her spying, and could feel the ominous first throbs of a migraine above her left eye. She could so easily have overlooked them – the words that, however much she stared at them, however much she shut her eyes, then opened them again, still read:

Dear Nancy Belmont,

As you must know, I turned eighteen a few days ago, and you have probably been wondering if you would hear from me. At least, you posted your details on the Adoption Contact Register and so did I. So, several days ago I was given your name and address, and it was up to me whether to use them. I think I would like to meet you. There are questions I want to know the answer to. Could you write to me at the above address to let me know if you will see me? I don't know when – we live a long way from each other and, anyway, I don't think I am quite ready yet. Please do not telephone or anything like that. It wouldn't feel right. And my parents do not know that I am contacting you.

I look forward to hearing from you.

   
Yours sincerely,

       
Sonia Hamilton

25 September

I used to have these two particular emotions when I was a child. The first was that I would feel guilty, really horribly guilty, but I didn't know what the guilt was for. It happened most often at night and it sometimes made me anxious about going to sleep. I would wake up and it would be dark outside and my heart would be pounding away as if it was going to burst through my chest, and I'd feel that I'd done something badly wrong. I thought if I could work out what it was – like being mean to someone or lying or stealing or cheating or bitching about a friend behind her back, anything, really – the feeling would go away, or at least it would get less, until it was a manageable little ball of worry and not a thick blanket of fog. And if I knew what it was, I could do something about it, like confess or apologize. Atone, that's the word. I could atone, like Catholics have to when they go to Confession. My friend Lorrie's a Catholic and even though she doesn't really believe in anything any more, she still likes going to Confession because she says she feels clean afterwards. When I was still quite small, I'd sometimes wake Mum and she'd come and sit on my bed, and put her hand on my forehead to see if I had a fever. I'd try to tell her what I was going through, but there wasn't really anything to say, except ‘I feel guilty.' Maybe lots of people feel like this. I don't know. I've never really talked about it to anyone. I still get it sometimes, although not quite
as often. It's like a sense of foreboding – but not foreboding about something that's about to happen, or that even has happened. Maybe it's a foreboding about myself. Perhaps it's because of who I am, or am not. Perhaps there's something monstrous about me that I don't know, something lurking inside me, and one day it will come hurtling out like a prisoner who's burst their chains.

The other feeling I've always had is that I'm waiting. Waiting for something to happen, as if life hasn't properly started yet or something. Recently I've wondered if what I've been waiting for is you. I tried talking about it to Alex and he said it was just existential
Angst
and a condition of being alive. Very helpful.

26 September

You're not my mother, you know. Don't you ever go thinking that. You can only have one of those and I've got mine. She might not be particularly beautiful or clever or well-off or anything, but she's my mother and I don't want anyone else, no matter who they are. But I'm your daughter. I'll always be your daughter.

PS I got your reply. It was very businesslike. What else did I ever expect?

The house was a mess, thought Connor, irritably, dropping his bag in the hall, stopping to pick up the mail, then stepping over a pile of laundry on the way into the kitchen. The sink was full of dishes, the ashtray was full of cigarette stubs, and the remains of a cooked breakfast were still on the table, along with Gaby's house keys. The air was thick and stale and he unlocked the door into the garden and pushed it open, noticing as he did so that Gaby had left washing hanging on the line. He had spoken to her earlier, as Stefan was driving him home. She'd been on her mobile, her voice crackling, and had said she was on a train. In fact, she said, she was in the dining car, eating porridge and looking out at green fields, where cows were lying down in the drizzle. Connor, bewildered, had started to ask where she was and where she'd been and when she'd be back – and why on earth, for that matter, was she on a train when she had his car? But she'd interrupted him to say that the line was breaking up and a few seconds later the call was disconnected. When Connor tried her again, the phone was turned off.

Clearly, in spite of her keys on the table, she had not been at home since she left on Saturday morning to take Ethan to university. There were signs of a hasty departure everywhere. Cupboard doors were open, surfaces littered with objects Ethan must have discarded at the last minute.
Upstairs, their bed was unmade and the wardrobe stood ajar, with a colourful pile of Gaby's clothes on the floor beside it. Connor frowned. He had imagined opening the door to a warm, tidy house and Gaby's smile, her hand on his shoulder as she asked him about his week and told him about hers. He ran the water in the kitchen and discovered it was cold, so he turned on the immersion heater and set about clearing up before Gaby returned; he needed everything to be in its proper place before tomorrow morning when he went back to work. Although he gave a heavy sigh as he set about the task, Connor enjoyed cleaning. He liked taking mess and turning it into order. He was very methodical. He put on a wash, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher and left the dirty pans beside the sink while the water heated, then took his bag upstairs and unpacked his own clothes before hanging Gaby's in the cupboard.

There was an empty chocolate box on Gaby's side of the bed and a hot-water bottle on the floor, and Connor saw her lying back, popping truffles into her mouth. Where was she, though? He shook out the duvet on their bed and plumped up the pillows. Wiping surfaces, vacuuming the floors, filling the sink with hot, soapy water to wash the pots and pans, returning Ethan's belongings to his room, putting CDs in their covers and books on the shelves: mess made him feel that he had lost control, but neatness restored it. The washing-machine hummed; the row of glasses gleamed beside the sink. Clean, empty surfaces, chairs pushed back under the table, old newspapers put into the recycling bag, the satsumas he'd bought yesterday arranged in a bowl. Soon he'd
reward himself with a cup of tea and then he would go down the road to buy a chicken for the supper he had planned. He would have a long bath and shave. But he did wish that Gaby would come home. He opened the fridge. A tub of goat's cheese shot out and hit him in the stomach.

He saw her first half-way up the magnolia tree by the side of the house. For a moment he said nothing, just stood and stared at her, feeling strangely happy. She lay across a branch like a cat, her ripped skirt twisted round her bare legs and her hair piled on top of her head. ‘I left the door open in the kitchen for you when I went to the shops, just in case.'

‘Connor, you're back!'

‘So it seems.'

‘I meant to be here when you arrived.'

‘You can come down now.'

‘I'm not sure I can. It's always easier to climb up than get back again. They say that in walking and climbing guides, don't they? Make sure that every step you take is reversible.'

‘Shall I give you a hand?'

‘Please.'

He put down his shopping bag, held out his arms and she slithered from her perch, scraping her calf. ‘This isn't quite what I expected,' he said, his arms still round her, his face in the fragrance of her hair. She smelt of woodsmoke and salt, and her face was pale and tired.

‘I know. I'm sorry. I didn't either. And the house must have been in a terrible mess when you got back; I meant
to clean everything up but it's all been so – well, let's go in and then we can talk. You look all tanned. Was it lovely? Did you miss me? I missed you.' She stopped suddenly and kissed him full on the mouth. ‘It's been odd,' she said. ‘Ethan, and then – well, anyway …'

‘Here, let's not stand outside. Yes, the house was dreadful. You and Ethan are as bad as each other. Is he all right, by the way? I've been thinking about him. I'm sorry I wasn't there.'

‘I'm sorry too.'

‘I should have been. And of course I missed you. What have you been up to?'

‘Up to?'

‘Where have you been?'

‘Oh, well, you see –'

‘And where's my car?'

‘Ah.'

‘Gaby?'

‘It's in the garage.'

‘But –'

‘In Exeter.'

‘In the garage in Exeter. What happened? Did you have an accident? Is that why you look so done in?'

‘Not an accident as such. Shall I make us tea?'

‘Gaby –'

‘It kind of blew up on our way.'

‘What d'you mean, blew up?'

‘I drove it in the wrong gear. The one for towing things.'

‘Oh, fuck.'

‘Sorry.'

‘How can you
do
things like this all the time?'

‘Sorry,' she repeated, her voice wobbly.

‘Time and time again.'

‘I know. I said to Ethan you'd be furious.'

‘Do you blame me?'

Gaby rubbed her face. ‘No,' she said wearily. ‘Of course I don't blame you. I drive myself mad as well. Listen, Connor, I'm really, really sorry. That's all I can say. We can hire another car on our insurance until it's mended, and I'll go and fetch it when it's ready, of course.'

‘If you'd only thought for a –'

‘It needs a new engine.'

‘Jesus.' He sat down at the table, squeezing his ear-lobe between thumb and forefinger and frowning at her. ‘Is that why you're home late?'

‘Well, not exactly. It's kind of a long story. I can't say it in a sentence. It's going round and round in my head and I need to – Look, why don't you have a bath and I'll make us tea. We can talk about it later. And you can tell me about your week. Yes?'

‘All right.'

‘Let's not ruin the first evening back. There are more important things than broken cars.'

‘Hm.'

‘Connor –'

‘What?'

‘Oh, nothing. You're filthy. Get into your bath and I'll bring you your tea.'

‘Thanks.'

‘I can't tell you how lovely it is to have you back.'

Sitting on the train, Gaby had worked out the dates. There was no way round it: Nancy had been pregnant when she had left. It must be that Stefan was a father –a father who didn't know he was a father; a father who wasn't a father. Or had he known? No, surely that was out of the question; it would make no sense. He had loved Nancy, adored her like a besotted fool. She had left him because she had discovered she did not love him enough to stay. Presumably the pregnancy had pushed her to go when she did. But why on earth had she not had an abortion? What had possessed her to have a baby in order to give it away? Nancy wasn't religious; more than that, she had always been a fierce advocate of women's right to choose. It didn't make sense at all. As Gaby sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the kettle to boil, she put her head in her hands and felt the thoughts churning in her brain, a seething froth of half-formed ideas and half-remembered words. What had Nancy said to her about Stefan, in that level voice and looking at her with her turquoise gaze: leaving Stefan had felt ‘like a crime'. I bet it did, she thought bitterly. You were carrying his child and you knew how much he longed to be a father.

The kettle boiled. She made tea and took a cup up to Connor, where he lay perfectly still in the bath, eyes closed, the water lapping at his sides. While she'd grown softer and rounder, he'd become more gaunt with the years, muscles in his legs and sharp ribs. Gaby looked down at his brown forearms, brown neck and ruddy face, his shocking white body with the fuse of hair running down his belly. His genitals bobbed gently in the water.
She put the cup down on the edge and his eyes opened. He looked at her and smiled and she leant forward through the steamy air and kissed his moist cheek. ‘What long eyelashes you have,' she said.

‘All the better for closing my eyes.'

And he did just that, and slid further into the water.

She should never have gone to Rashmoor in the first place. She should never have tracked down Nancy and thought that somehow it was her right to push and prod her for secrets. She most certainly should never have broken back into her house in secret, like the vain and foolish girl in Bluebeard's castle, and gone through her belongings like that, trying to winkle out some simple answer to the question that had dogged her through the years. Never, never, never. For now she knew and couldn't unknow, couldn't turn back the clock and not get on the train, not sneak into the house, not lift out that letter and read the few typed words. She knew, and the knowledge poisoned her. She could feel its toxic juices inside her, seeping through her body, oozing into every cavity of her brain, staining the past and corrupting the future. She knew what she had no right to know, and what should she do now? She had got so much more than she had bargained for that she was choked with it. She didn't know how to tell Connor, how to begin – because then she would have passed the secret on to him, like a virus that would infect him too. And what about Stefan? Didn't he have a right to know? The thought of it made her breathless with panic. For now, through her ignorance and folly, she had an unwanted power and
there was no way of not using it. To withhold the secret had it own consequences: she would be denying her brother insight into his own life, and if he was ever to find out, then discover she had known all along, how would he feel? Yet the idea of saying to him, ‘I think you have a daughter,' felt impossibly cruel. Anyway, he didn't have a daughter: Nancy had given her away.

So Gaby did not tell Connor, not that evening at least. She glossed over her delayed return – the car, she mumbled, and then complications with the trains on Sunday, you know how it can be, finding a little place not so far from Exeter; she didn't exactly lie, but her heart pounded with the deception and she was surprised that Connor didn't pick up on her anxiety. They ate Moroccan chicken and talked instead about Ethan, and about Connor's time away with Stefan, and what the week ahead held for both of them. They were tired out, and after supper and the news, they went to bed. Connor set the alarm clock for seven o'clock, then turned on to his side, laid a hand on Gaby's hip and went to sleep. But Gaby lay awake for some time, staring into the darkness.