The Moment You Were Gone (28 page)

15 November

It's funny, but today I feel quite peaceful about it all – or if not peaceful exactly, something like steadfast (I love that word; my parents are steadfast). Steadfast about meeting you, I mean, and finding out about me. I know I'm loved; I don't need your love. So I'm kind of ready for you and somehow, after all the fretting and scrabbling around for meanings and torturing myself with imagined scenes and dramatic resolutions, I feel small and clean and simple, like a child who's been scrubbed in the bath, then wrapped in a big soft towel and put in front of the fire to get dry.

We'll see.

Connor stood in front of the long mirror and tried to fasten the blue and silver tie that Gaby had given him. His fingers trembled; he couldn't get the knot quite right and today it seemed important that it should be perfect, that his white shirt was ironed, his face smoothly shaven and dabbed with aftershave, his shoes polished, his hair brushed. For the past few days he'd been untypically shabby, but now he thought it was only the punctiliousness of his preparation that was holding him together – take away the sober suit and knotted tie and he'd fly apart into many fragments. He looked up briefly to meet his own eyes, then glanced rapidly away. He did not want to see his thin, tense face, the face that had acquired so many lines and wrinkles over the years and that she would be seeing in less than an hour. What did she look like now? He hadn't asked Gaby, and Gaby hadn't told him. He tried to imagine the young woman he had known – the blazing eyes in the sculpted face – and superimpose two decades on to its youth, the way they can do on a computer program to mark the passing of years: carve brackets round her mouth, furrows between her eyebrows, add a slackness to that stubborn jaw, put weight on the slim, hard body, turn her hair grey. Maybe she'd be matronly, with wide hips and a soft shelf where her shallow breasts had been, or perhaps skinny, all bones
and loose flesh, with a knuckly grip. For a moment he thought of his long-dead mother and shuddered.

And what would she see? He lifted his eyes once more and this time made himself examine the self that gazed back from the mirror. He was thin, as if time had pared him back. The skull beneath the skin. There were frown marks corrugating his forehead and fine smile lines round his eyes, which were bloodshot after days of little sleep. He leant closer, pressing his fingers against the tiny wrinkles in his cheeks, trying to smooth them. His dark eyebrows were turning silver, his hair had grey in it and was starting to recede. His teeth had fillings in them. His sight was fading and he needed glasses to read or write. For a moment, he saw with perfect clarity the young man he had been when he first met Gaby and Nancy – a coiled spring of energy, anxiety and burning hope. And he saw them: two beautiful young women, arm in arm and laughing at him in the sunshine that poured from the imagined sky on to their soft hair and smooth skin. He felt their bright eyes on him, and even now, so many years and so many regrets later, he felt himself blush with delight under the teasing kindness of their regard.

Connor groaned and pressed his forehead to the mirror. Then he straightened and went slowly down the stairs. Gaby had already left to meet Ethan and collect the car, so the house was still. Usually he treasured the rare times when he was alone in the house but today it filled him with a premonitory dread. This was what it would be like if she were gone for good – silent, the air pressing round him, his footfall loud on the stairs, rooms empty and lifeless, and all the routines they'd built up
together over their marriage meaningless, serving only to remind him of what he'd lost. He prepared the breakfast he had every morning: two oranges, freshly squeezed (with which he swilled down the omega 3 and vitamin E he took religiously, though he had little faith in their power to hold off age and decay), brown bread toasted, with marmalade (made by himself last year), a large cup of coffee with heated milk. He turned on the radio for company but, after hearing a few words from an unctuous politician spouting clichés, quickly switched it off again. Then he sat at the table with his breakfast in front of him. He looked at it for several minutes, then lifted the cup to his lips and took a cautious sip of coffee. He put it down and wiped his lips with a napkin, then sat perfectly still, his hands lying on either side of the plate, the amber capsules just above his left thumb. Finally he stood up, swept the toast and pills into the bin, put the glass of juice into the fridge and poured the coffee down the sink.

He and Nancy had arranged to meet outside Tate Modern; if it was fine, they could walk along the river, and if wet, take shelter in the café. It was important to Connor that they were meeting in a place that held no memories for either of them. He left the house early to walk there, for he could not bear to be pressed up against a crowd in the Underground on this particular morning. Anyway, he wanted to steady himself before the encounter. It had rained in the night, but now the day was fresh and bright. The sun shone on the wet road and turned it into a stream of light. Birds swayed in the branches of the bare plane trees, sending down tiny silver drops of water that burst on the pavement. Connor walked at a
brisk pace – through Camden towards King's Cross, then down to Blackfriars and the river. Though the traffic was thick, the river was calm and golden. The people crossing the bridge were dark silhouettes against the sky, and small waves thwacked against the bank.

Now – glancing at his watch to make sure he was in good time – he slowed and forced himself to think about what lay ahead. Not just Nancy in a few minutes' time, but after that telling Ethan and then Stefan, as he and Gaby had agreed he should do. For years now Connor had been the one to receive the confessions and pleas of others. He had sat in his small room and heard his patients tell him the stories of their lives and bodies. He had given them news about what was going on inside themselves; looked into their eyes when he told them it wasn't good. He had watched them cry and, laying a hand on their shoulder or leaning towards them with a tissue or a glass of water, had offered them advice, consolation and help. He was the good doctor. Like a priest, he was there at the end. Now, though, instead of being the calm, dependable figure of authority, he had become a ragged, weeping supplicant, festering with the sins he'd hidden in the dark all his adult life. He had pretended to be blameless and wise, until he'd almost believed it himself, but the time had come at last for him to lay his misdeeds and his guilt at the feet of the people he loved and wait for their verdict. He tried to imagine looking into Ethan's face and telling him he had a half-sister somewhere. Or Stefan – what would Stefan say? He always insisted on thinking the best of everyone and had a guileless admiration for Connor. He would probably not be angry; his shy face
would sag with sadness instead, or defeat and retrospective humiliation. Connor knew that look. He knew that in the small hours his brother-in-law probably saw his life as a failure. He was not-a-husband, not-a-father. He was a lonely, dreamy academic in a small, untidy house, whose sister bought his shirts and whose students thought he was a ‘teddy bear' and ‘darling'. And maybe he, Connor, was the agent of Stefan's private wretchedness.

He slowed to a halt and stared out over the broad Thames, watching as a boat passed. A few weeks ago, he and Gaby had walked together over this bridge late at night. They'd stopped at its highest point and looked down to see a leisure boat crammed with dancing people and in its centre, raised on a circular dais, a woman in a low-cut dress singing into a microphone. The music had filtered up to them. They'd leant on the railings and gazed down at the party as it chugged slowly past, until it was a miniature bauble of light in the distance. He'd put his hand on the small of Gaby's back and she'd turned her head towards him and smiled, then straightened up and taken his hand. Connor, a single child from an unhappy home, was perpetually moved by the way a good marriage becomes filled with shared experiences, the same memories lodged in two minds. But that comradely moment on the bridge lay in a past from which he was now separated by a deep crevasse. He had not known at the time how precious it was.

Connor walked over the Millennium Bridge with a stream of other people. He narrowed his eyes and squinted at the entrance of the large building, where she would be
waiting, but could not make her out. He fiddled with the buttons on his coat to make sure they were done up properly, cleared his throat, made himself breathe steadily. Stepping off the bridge, he thought he saw her a few feet away, then realized that the woman he was looking at was in her early twenties, as Nancy had been the last time they'd met. She wasn't there yet; after all, he was a few minutes early. He put his hands into his pockets, bowed his head in the wind, and waited.

That was how she first saw him, standing absolutely still, face set in granite composure. She stood for a moment, watching, then walked up to him. He turned.

‘Hello, Connor.'

‘Nancy.' His voice choked. There was a pebble in his throat, a boulder in his chest, a mist in front of his eyes.

‘You've hardly changed,' she said.

‘Nor you,' he replied formally, wondering if they were meant to shake hands or kiss each other's cheek.

He had tried to imagine how she would look, but when he had pictured her, her face had taken on either a fierce beauty or a dramatic malevolence. He had made her firm jaw firmer, her eyes blaze like a blowtorch, her hair shine like a helmet. Now she stood before him and she was smaller than he had remembered, and less extraordinary. Her face was weathered, her hair short and neat, her eyes – which were looking at him – not as piercing as he'd drawn them in his mind. She was wearing a black coat, belted at the waist, and a scarf in muted greens and golds round her neck. He looked at her and Gaby's mobile, despairing, joyful face came into his mind. Relief surged through him, making him feel dizzy: he felt nothing for
this woman. Neither love nor hatred, desire nor disgust. She was a stranger, and it was hard to believe that he had lain sobbing in her arms.

‘Shall we walk?' she asked, and he nodded.

Neither knew how to begin, though both had rehearsed this moment. For several minutes, they walked in silence along the riverbank. Eventually Connor spoke: ‘You should have told me.'

‘Should I? Of course, now that it's discovered, it's easy to say that. But if it had never been discovered – if Gaby hadn't turned up on my doorstep the way she did, never mind rooting through my private papers – nobody would have known and perhaps it would have remained better that I didn't say.' She stopped and made an abrupt gesture. ‘Oh, shit, this is starting off wrong, Connor. I've lain awake night after night thinking how to deal with this meeting and the first thing I want to say is that I'm sorry.'

‘It's for me to –'

‘Listen. Let me talk first, then you.'

‘All right. Go on.'

‘I'm sorry in many ways. I'm sorry for what we did. I've always been sorry and I always will be. It was wrong. I'm not really saying sorry to you, of course. It wasn't you I wronged, nor me that you wronged. We have nothing to forgive each other. We're not the victims. Gaby and Stefan were – and still are. I'm just expressing my profound regret. And I'm sorry I got pregnant and you didn't know. Once I decided to keep the baby – actually, “decided” is not the right word, but leave that. Anyway, once I knew I was keeping it – her – you had a right to know. I see that. I just thought that other things
were more important than your right to know. Like Gaby, for instance. I didn't want – I couldn't bear to think –' She bit her lip, looked fixedly out at the river, steadying herself.

‘And I'm sorry, too, that it had to be found out. I thought the secret would stop with me and no one else would ever know. I made that decision and I was going to carry it through until the day I died. But one thing I've been thinking, Connor, is that the fact of Sonia doesn't make what we did any worse.'

‘I don't know.'

‘It just makes it more complicated.'

‘It reverberates,' said Connor.

Nancy glanced at him, her brow furrowed. ‘You really haven't changed,' she said, almost affectionately.

Connor winced at her tone. ‘It means the past can't be left behind,' he said. He was finding it hard to keep his voice even. His breath was coming in unsteady gasps, and he was reminded of how he used to feel before he gave a talk in public. ‘We can never be free of it. Perhaps that's always true of the past, however we try to hide from it. But in this case –'

‘In this case, it's visited on other people.'

‘Yes,' said Connor.

‘And then there's Sonia.'

‘Sonia,' repeated Connor. He couldn't look at Nancy. He had to stare straight ahead, at the winding river and the layers of bridges, the spires, towers and familiar landmarks of the city. He and Nancy had a daughter, theirs but not theirs. Mentally, he shook himself. ‘It seems to me,' he said, in a businesslike voice, ‘that what we need
to talk about is Sonia. How this affects Gaby, Stefan and Ethan, of course, is not for us to discuss. I've talked everything through with Gaby and we're agreed that soon I will have to tell them, but that's for me, not you.' His voice became harsh. ‘You're not in their lives, after all. They don't know you any more.'

‘True.'

‘But about Sonia we do need to talk.'

‘Do you want to see her photograph?'