The Moment You Were Gone (21 page)

At last she gave a small sigh. ‘Is she?' she said. ‘Is she really?'

So I'm right, thought Gaby. I thought I knew, but now I know that I know. Not even a hairline crack for hope. I'm right, and my husband and my best friend were lovers. Under my nose, in my house, while I was suffering and they were looking after me and saving me from harm, and of course I never suspected because I loved them, and I knew they both loved me; even now, I can remember them loving me and I know it's not a lie. They were my safety. They were my home.

‘Oh, yes,' she said to Nancy, smiling. ‘She's thin and dark and spare like him. She might have your jaw, but the
shape of her face is his, and although she's got your eyes, she's got his brows and his long dark lashes. She even –' Gaby gave a tiny laugh that turned into the start of a sob, which she bit down, ‘–she even pulls at her ear-lobe the way he does. When I saw that … Anyway, it's more than that – it's like she's shot through with Connorness. Once I knew for sure, I could almost feel him in her. The thing that made me fall for Connor, as if I was falling down a sheer cliff, his prickly vulnerability that made me want to hold him in my arms and make him better – she's like that, I'm sure she is. Wait one moment. Hold on.'

She rummaged in her capacious bag and pulled out a new packet of cigarettes, put one into her mouth and lit it, dragging the smoke deep into her lungs, then letting it out slowly. ‘I've recently taken up smoking again. Maybe it makes me feel that I might be someone else, a stranger I've only just met. I don't know why on earth that should be so comforting but it is. Anyway, I've really only got two more things to say. Or ask, really. Then I've done. All talked out. Was Connor going to leave me?'

‘Gaby, if you had any idea how –'

‘
Was Connor going to leave me?
'

‘These are the things you have to ask Connor, not me.'

‘Don't worry, I will. I just thought I'd ask my ex-best friend first. Was he?'

‘No.
No
. You're the one he always loved. He never stopped loving you.'

‘Don't tell me about love right now. The other thing I want to ask is: does he know about Sonia?'

‘No. I promise you.'

‘He doesn't know he's got another child?'

‘No. When I left, I hadn't even told him I was pregnant. I never told him.'

Gaby started to giggle, though it hurt her throat and her eyes stung. ‘Then he's in for a big surprise. Oh dear.'

‘Gaby.'

‘Shut up.'

‘Please, darling Gaby. It was a long time ago.'

‘I know it was – does that make it better or worse? What's the point in saying that? Don't say anything. Don't talk to me.'

‘I don't have the words –'

‘Then don't speak. What use are words anyway?'

There were other questions, of course. Even as Gaby sat and stared across the table at Nancy, they crowded into her mind. What would she say to Connor, and what would she do? What would she say to Stefan? Would Sonia want to meet Connor too, and would he want to meet her? And what about Ethan? Should he know? Her heart contracted at the thought of her son. Did he have to know? He had a half-sister now: of course he had to know. What would he say? What would he think? Her old life, which had once troubled her because it was so straightforward and predictable, now seemed sweet. Sweet and false; simple and untrue; happy only because it was complacent and bathed in ignorance.

What else was there to discover? she wondered queasily. For, after all, this was what all life must be, in the end: an elaborate charade in which everyone hides their true feelings and their secret actions beneath the acceptable surface of their public selves. It's all a necessary fake: we survive by pretending to feel what we don't feel,
like whom we don't like, desire what we don't want, be who we aren't. It's not just about showing different sides of oneself, depending on whom you're with. It goes further than that. Gaby thought of the friends she had whom she didn't particularly like or even wish well; she thought of the times she'd lied to Connor, out of kindness – or, at least, the wish not to be unkind; she thought of the way in which she tried to court the world with her act of spontaneity. All deceit, she thought – and we don't only pretend to others, but to ourselves, so that we come to believe in the lies and the self-justifications we're peddling. As she sat at the table, watching a fat pigeon lurch across the concourse outside, the world seemed to drip with hypocrisy and cruelty that most of the time we have to choose not to see, because to see it would be unbearable.

Her best friend had slept with her husband. It was a cliché, a monstrous stereotype of betrayal. Her best friend had borne her husband's daughter. This happened to other people; you read this story in women's magazines and it's a grotty little tragedy, a grim little farce.

‘Gaby –' Nancy was saying.

Gaby forced Nancy's stunned face back into focus, wincing. ‘How could you? You were always the moral one. We looked up to you. You were so sure what was right and what was wrong – a bit like Connor, I guess. I was a bit flaky. You could never be sure that I wouldn't go and do something stupid, but not you. You were the rock, the one we trusted to behave properly. When you left, I thought it must be something I'd done. It had to be my fault. I adored you. Then this, this –' She choked
and stopped, then lifted her eyes to Nancy's. ‘How could you do it?'

Nancy cleared her throat. Her face was working and a small blue vein throbbed in her neck. When she spoke, her voice was dry and husky. ‘I'm not going to ask you to forgive me. What I did was unforgivable. I know that. I'm not going to try to make excuses for what happened or in any way reduce the pain you must be feeling now –'

‘Oh, please get on with it, Nancy. You're not in a court of law, you know. You don't have to give a speech on abstract things like forgiveness and guilt, and I'm not a tribunal or a judge or anything. I'm me. Gaby. Remember? We shared toothbrushes.'

‘OK. OK. You're right. Maybe I sound like that because I've been making speeches to you in my head ever since it happened, although I hoped I'd never have to do it in real life. I wanted you never to know. I thought at least I could do that.'

Gaby broke in abruptly: ‘I don't think I want to talk about all this now. I can't. I've kind of had enough. I need to get away to think.'

‘Of course.'

‘I don't know, Nancy.'

‘You don't know what?'

‘I just don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Anything at all. I don't know what this means. I don't know what'll happen. I don't know who I am any more, or what my life is. I'm tired. I want to go home.'

But the word ‘home' brought tears to her eyes. It didn't have the same meaning now, but fell with a soft,
drab thump in her heart. Home had always been where Connor and Ethan were. But Ethan had gone – and Connor had changed for her. In her mind's eye, she saw her husband's pale, attentive face; the way he looked as he sat at his desk, frowning into the distance; the way he was with a person in pain – expert, but solicitous too. He might be prickly and difficult, but he was kind, he was honourable, he cared about other people, he was
true
. She'd always felt proud that it was her he had chosen to love.

‘I'll be in touch,' she said, struggling to her feet, feeling ungainly and skew-footed. The ground seemed to shift under her weight. The walls of the room leant towards her; the ugly yellow lights throbbed in her skull.

Nancy stood too. ‘I'm going to see Sonia soon.'

‘I said I'll be in touch.'

‘Shall I give you my email? That might be easiest.'

‘OK, then.'

They swapped email addresses, Gaby stuffing the scrap of paper into her coat pocket, next to her train ticket.

‘So,' said Nancy. She buttoned up her coat and picked up her briefcase.

‘So,' said Gaby.

‘Will you be all right?'

‘Will I be all right?' she repeated.

‘Getting home, I mean.'

‘Yes – I'll be fine getting home.'

She turned on her heel and walked out of the café, into the station's dark and vaulted cave where sound bounced off the walls and voices were a babble around her. She could hear her heels clipping sharply beneath her and in
the window she caught her reflection: her swinging coat and her tidy hair. She was surprised by how strong and in control she looked as she smiled and raised an arm to herself in salutation and farewell.

Connor ran. He started at the door of the hospital and ran up the road towards King's Cross, jogging on the spot at the lights, then weaving his way through the pedestrians. Past the shop selling chess sets, over the arterial road thick with cars and loud with blaring horns. An icy drizzle fell on his bare forearms.

He ran four times a week, without fail. In blizzards and heatwaves, on holiday and during sickness, he ran, up hills, along canals, round training grounds, through fields and parks, by the sea and along the edge of a mountain. He had run since he was sixteen and sometimes he would think about the distances he had gone and the gradients he had pressed into his bones. He had the impossible sensation that all of his journeys were still inside him somewhere. If he ever missed a session, he would feel itchy and full of a restless, peevish rage that he knew was ridiculous but which gripped him nevertheless. On Tuesdays he had an hour free at lunchtime and always did a six-mile circuit of Regent's Park, coming back in time to shower quickly and be at his desk, clean and virtuous, by two.

The first mile was always the worst. There was a stiffness in his muscles and a tightness in his thoughts. But gradually he relaxed. His stride lengthened and loosened; his mind, which had been full of neurotic lists and snagging
anxieties, expanded and breathed; images sailed through him and the ideas with which he had been struggling flowed more easily, as if they had been silted up but were now unblocked. He dodged a cyclist and made his way through the gates and into the park. He found his rhythm. Some days, he would feel sluggish and heavy-footed, but today was good for running: he was light, quick; energy ran in a clear channel through him. He thought of the patients he would see that afternoon, and the lecture he had to give tomorrow; he would have to write it tonight, at home. He thought about Ethan and wondered why he had hardly talked to his son since he left home. Gaby had, of course, and she was always topping up communications with emails, texts and postcards with two illegible words scrawled on them. She hadn't let go properly, and she missed him through details – the shut bedroom door, the emptier supermarket trolley, the napkin ring on the side, the evenings she now spent alone when once she'd often spent them with Ethan. Her energy had turned to a kind of restlessness, and Connor had noticed that she was more than usually distracted. Sometimes he would say something to her and she would stare at him with a wild vagueness, as if she didn't know who he was or what he was doing sitting opposite her.

He felt a pang of guilt and tenderness when he thought of his wife, as if his heart was bruised. It had been more than twenty years since they had met. Her generosity and sweetness then had been a gift that redeemed him and he had not thought he could repay her, or realized that she, too, needed nurturing. Perhaps the mystery of those early
days had gone, rubbed away by years of use, and in its place was intimacy. He had slept next to her night after night and seen her body split open by childbirth. He knew each fold in her flesh, each blemish on her skin. He'd seen her with greasy hair and puffy eyes, witnessed her moods of elation and weepiness, suffered her untidiness, her repetitions and exaggerations, forgetfulness, indolence, and the bursts of excitement that seemed to him, in his painstaking precision, to be random. When she spoke, he heard the subtext; he could see her wince or flinch when it was invisible to anyone else. Years of history were piled up in each word.

But she'd lightened his life. She'd mocked him when he took himself too seriously. She'd charmed his friends and colleagues. She'd made him laugh. She'd been fun. They both had: his son and his wife. There had been times when they had been like a double-act put on the earth to torment and delight him. He remembered a supper when the pair had sat solemnly with dishcloths on their head, or another when Gaby had put on the radio and Ethan had stood on the table and danced with a theatrical intensity that had embarrassed and moved Connor. He should have taken Gaby away when Ethan left, he thought, or at the very least done something dramatic and emotional. She had always cherished rituals and he had come to understand that she needed them in her life.

The drizzle thinned to nothing; the sky was clearing ahead of him and now there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. He ran past a pair of men jogging slowly along the path, then a greyhound sniffing at an upturned
poodle who was waving its short legs in submission. He could feel his heart beating fast but steadily.

Connor believed that most people judged everyone else too harshly and forgave themselves too easily. There was a great deal written by armies of therapists and pseudo-therapists, philosophers and journalists about guilt, but not enough about its absence. He and Ethan had often discussed the capacity of humans to justify themselves to themselves – to push the blame on to others and to feel misunderstood, however terrible their actions. We all have strong defence mechanisms to prevent us seeing our own wrongs too clearly. Studying twentieth-century history, Ethan had become impassioned with the zeal of a teenager who wanted to change the world about atrocities committed with unflagging self-righteousness. Closer to home, Connor recalled the case that had occupied him and Gaby recently. One of their near-neighbours had been an old woman, Mary, who lived alone and had no family. Over the years, she had become increasingly forgetful, wandering the streets swaddled in dirty clothes that were voluminous on her shrinking frame, wearing a vague, baffled smile. It was clear that she was no longer able to look after herself, but she had a horror of going into a home and would get agitated whenever it was suggested. The street had rallied round, and arranged a rota, cooking and cleaning for her, taking her for slow walks, from lamp-post to lamp-post, and making sure her bills were paid. Every Thursday, Gaby had spent the early evening there, toasting crumpets and listening to Mary play the piano with her arthritic fingers. Then she had died, leaving no will, and it had
taken weeks to track down her nearest relatives, a well-off couple from Reading who, as far as Connor knew, had never met Mary or even known she existed. The house, although it hadn't been renovated since the fifties, had fetched a fair amount of money when it was put on the market, but when residents had written to ask the couple to donate money towards Mary's headstone (she had left detailed instructions as to her funeral and burial) they had replied that it was not ‘appropriate' for them to give anything. Gaby had been so outraged at their pompous selfishness (‘appropriate' was the word that chafed her into action) that she had gone to their house the following weekend to confront them. She had come home spluttering indignantly, saying that they had been unwavering in their pursed-lipped belief that they were doing nothing wrong; they believed themselves to be moral and decent citizens who would always do their duty. Indeed, by the end of the encounter, they had seemed to think they were the victims of this flush-faced madwoman who'd broken into the peace of their Sunday with her accusations, and threatened to call out the police.

But there were things that Connor himself had done that he did not allow himself to think about. He consciously did not think, for instance, about Nancy. The memory was like a shadow on an X-ray that, although he was aware of it, he chose not to examine. He saw but would not look. He did not remember but he had not forgotten. Every so often, a kind of breathlessness would come upon him, and he understood that he was remembering what had happened between them all those years ago, but the memory and the guilt were surfacing without
his consent, like a subterranean event that works its damage invisibly.

Now he was by the boating pond. Ducks flew above him on heavily beating wings. A beautiful young man with a wispy beard hanging from his chin stood by the path crouching low and stretching out his hands in some Oriental exercise. Connor lengthened his stride and pushed out, wanting to exhaust himself. He thought about the afternoon and evening ahead. He reminded himself to take home the papers he needed for his lecture. Maybe he
should
take Gaby away somewhere. Morocco. Iceland. Somewhere far off and strange. Somewhere just for the two of them, and they could sit over a table and he could relax in her smile and tell her everything that was in his mind, however strange and however small. Except that.