‘Fine. Thanks.’
‘Do you want sandwiches for the journey?’
‘It’s OK. I can get something on the train.’
‘I’ll pick a couple of apples for you, then, shall I?’
Without waiting for an answer, Nancy went out into the garden. Gaby sat down on the sofa, next to the fire. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at the embers. This was it, then. Nothing had changed. She had found Nancy; she had cried in front of her and squeezed a few grudging truths from her – but that was it. She had imagined their reunion many times, and thought she had played through every variation – hatred, grief, rage, contrition, confession, some kind of blinding revelation. But always, in these scenarios, something would happen: their meeting would be like a hinge. A door would open; a world would change. Now she realized that in a few minutes she would leave and return to London, pick up her old life, and this strange interregnum would gradually come to seem like a dream, with no context and no apparent meaning,
‘Here,’ said Nancy, handing over two russet apples.
Gaby pushed them into her bag. She saw Nancy glance surreptitiously at her watch. ‘I hope your camp goes well.’
‘And I hope your journey back is all right. Did you say that Connor was home tonight?’
‘Tomorrow, middayish. I’ll have a chance to clear up a bit before he arrives. He hates coming home to chaos and I’ve a feeling I left things in a bit of disarray.’ She thought of the unwashed breakfast things still on the kitchen table and the litter of objects that Ethan had discarded at the last minute and now lay in a trail round the house.
There was the sound of a car drawing up in the lane.
‘That’ll be your cab.’
‘Right.’ Gaby stood up and ran her hands uselessly down her crumpled skirt. ‘I’ll say goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Nancy. She held open the front door for Gaby.
‘But will we see each other again?’ Her voice was small and plaintive.
‘Take care of yourself.’ Nancy behaved as if she hadn’t heard Gaby’s words.
‘I’ve got a friend who hates it when I say that. He always says, “Take risks,” instead.’
‘Gaby, the driver’s –’
‘And I agree with him. Take risks. That’s going to be my motto. Or maybe, now I come to think of it, wake up those sleeping dogs. Yes. Don’t let them lie.’
Nancy gave a small laugh, with no trace of irony or bitterness in it. ‘How I’ve missed you, after all,’ she said, as if she couldn’t stop herself. Then her face closed once more; her expression became polite and distant.
‘Listen, Nancy, we could –’
‘You don’t want to miss your train.’
‘I don’t care about my train.’
‘Give my regards to Connor and Stefan.’
‘Regards? Your regards?’
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘But we haven’t even –’
Nancy kissed Gaby quickly on both cheeks, pushed her firmly over the threshold and shut the door on her. Gaby heard the lock click behind her, and she stumbled forward towards the cab waiting on the lane. She climbed inside, trapping her skirt in the door, and pressed her face to the window, gazing back at the house. But there was no face looking at her and no hand waving. Nancy had gone.
‘The station, is it?’
‘Hmm?’
Was that it, then? Was that all?
‘Is it the station you’re wanting?’
‘The station? Oh, yes. That’s it.’
She hadn’t even given Nancy her address or exdirectory phone number. They had parted on a polite, nasty full stop.
‘Going somewhere nice?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I said, are you going somewhere nice?’
‘I don’t know.’
She stared at the driver’s fat white neck, flubbery beneath his thinning grey hair.
‘You don’t know where you’re going?’
‘Yes, I know that. I’m going to London.’
‘Is that where you live, then, or are you spending a few days there?’
‘What’s that?’
‘I was asking, do you live in London?’ The driver shouted the words slowly and crossly, as if to a deaf foreigner.
‘Yes. I’m sorry, but I think I’ve changed my mind.’
‘I couldn’t live in London myself. It’s all right for visiting, but not for living in.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Changed your mind?’
‘Please stop. I’m not going after all. I can’t do it. I can’t. Let me out here.’
He screeched to a halt and twisted round in the seat. ‘Now, look –’
‘I’ll pay you what it would have cost. Here, take this.’ Gaby pushed several notes at him, not knowing or caring how much she was handing over.
‘Are you all right, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I’m fine. I just need to get out.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
Gaby half ran, half stumbled back to the house. She estimated that Nancy would probably be there for maybe fifteen minutes longer, and although she had no idea of what she would say, she couldn’t bear to part on that cool, well-mannered note: Give my regards …! Better to shout and spit at each other. Thank you for coming! No. It just wasn’t possible to leave it like that.
She hurtled round the corner and down the lane. Small birds flew up from the hedgerow, in a fluttering crowd, and disappeared. Her breath was coming in uneven gasps and a nasty stitch made her press her hand into her side. At the gate, she took a few deep breaths, pushed her tangle of hair behind her ears and marched up to the house. She rapped on the door and stood back, waiting. She rapped once more, then a third time. She bent down and peered through the letterbox, but could only make out a strip of empty wooden floor. She walked through the flower-bed, her boots becoming claggy with thick, wet soil, and pressed her face to each window in turn but could see nobody.
‘Nancy!’ she shouted to the upstairs rooms. Then louder: ‘Nancy.’
She walked round the house, wondering where Nancy kept her car. There was no garage, but beyond the house, where the lane petered out into a footpath, there was a lay-by with the marks of car tyres in it.
‘She must have left already,’ Gaby said, out loud. ‘Bugger. And now I’ve gone and missed my train.’ She kicked at a stone with her sandalled foot and winced at the jab of pain. ‘Again,’ she added. ‘You idiot. You stupid, stupid fool.’
She made her way back to the house and stood looking at its empty windows, and at the chimney from which a few curls of smoke still seeped. It had all been for nothing, she thought, and didn’t know what to do with herself – with her tired body and her heavy heart, and with all the memories that she would now have to press back inside her. She rubbed her face, feeling ungainly with sadness. Then – without knowing what she was doing – she opened the gate and bent down to lift the small boulder lying just inside. The key she had seen Nancy retrieve earlier in the morning was there, and she picked it up, wiped it on her skirt, then walked up the path and opened the front door. It swung in with a small creak and Gaby held her breath, in case Nancy was still there after all. But the house was unmistakably empty, all the lights off and the fire dwindling in the grate. Their breakfast things were washed and placed on the draining-board, the two chairs pushed neatly against the table; the dog-roses had been thrown into the bowl for compost, along with the earthy ends of the stalks from the parasol mushrooms.
For a few minutes, Gaby stood in the middle of the room, at a loss. Then she sat down on the sofa and took off her jacket and sandals, wriggling her toes and letting a small thrill of illicit pleasure run through her: she was in Nancy’s house, alone and uninvited, like a burglar. She noticed that she’d left muddy footprints on the floor, which she must make sure to clean up before she left.
‘Now what?’ She leant back and rested her head on the cushion
. ‘Coffee, I think.’
After the coffee, with milk heated in a small pan and the pan scrubbed, dried and put back in its exact place, Gaby allowed herself to scrutinize the objects in the room as she had not been able to do when Nancy had been there. First she stood in front of the bookshelf, her eyes going from title to title. Poems by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Hardy, John Donne – all writers Nancy had loved as a teenager. Several books on trees, birds, butterflies and wildflowers. Three shelves of alphabetically arranged novels, from Chinua Achebe to Edith Wharton. A large dictionary, a thesaurus, an atlas of the world and a road atlas of Great Britain; a miscellany of reference books; half a shelf of cookery books, all well thumbed. Further down there were biographies and history books, and as she looked, Gaby felt a shiver of surprise pass through her: The Anabaptists, by Stefan Graham, and The Life of John Dee, Stefan’s first book. She pulled them off the shelf and leafed through their pages. So Nancy had been out and bought books by Stefan. She thought about him still, all these years later, though whether with idle curiosity or nostalgia or even regret she didn’t know. She pushed the books back, lining them up with the others, and leant down to the bottom shelf, which was tightly stacked with Ordnance Survey maps. She tugged at a couple randomly – one of south Suffolk, one of the west of Sicily. They were torn at the folds and Gaby remembered the worn walkingboots in the spare bedroom.
After she had looked properly at the photograph of the seascape, she paused by another, much smaller one half hidden in the alcove near the fire. Gaby recognized it at once, because Nancy had always had it, ever since she could remember. It was black-and-white, and showed a young man on a beach, wearing a shirt with its sleeves rolled up and a pair of baggy trousers, holding the hand of a tiny little girl in a frilly swimsuit, whose legs were twisted round each other, feet digging into the sand. Gaby knew that the man was Nancy’s father, who had died shortly after the photograph had been taken, and the child was Nancy. There had never been a matching photograph of Nancy and her mother, who had lived on for decades and was probably still alive. Nancy had once told her that she chose to think of herself as her father’s daughter, although of course she had never really known her father, only invented him for herself to copy.
Her mother, on the other hand, she had chosen adamantly not to become: thin and glossy and sweetly pretty, with a perky, frantic kind of charm, she had had affairs or flings with almost all of the men she knew. Each man was going to be the one who would save her, love her, protect her from harm. She had a terrifying resilience: experience did not teach her to expect disappointment. Gaby had always thought that Nancy’s moral sternness, her unyielding sense of who she was, stemmed from her mother’s humiliating pliancy. She leant in to examine the faces more closely. The man was smiling at the camera but his daughter was looking up at him, her face shiny with pride. It was an expression that Gaby had never seen on Nancy’s face in all the years she had known her.
Next, she examined the fridge. She always loved looking in people’s fridges and she wasn’t disappointed by Nancy’s, which, although orderly, was also slightly unexpected. There were the obvious things, like strong Cheddar, rashers of dry-cured bacon, tubs of crème fraîche and Greek yoghurt, semi-skimmed milk, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, spring onions, grapes, eggs (free range, of course), a few red chillies, a bottle of vegetable stock, a Cellophane-covered pack of field mushrooms, unsalted butter, a bottle of white wine. There were also several film canisters stacked on one of the shelves, making Gaby think that the seascape had probably been taken by Nancy. There was a squishy yellow packet, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a kind of bath jelly that was required to be kept refrigerated. And inside the egg carton there were three eggs and a little lump of shrink-wrapped cannabis.
So: Gaby knew that Nancy took photographs, went walking, read, or at least bought, books by Stefan and smoked dope.
She went over to the noticeboard by the door, on which Nancy had pinned invitations, reminders, newspaper articles, a couple of postcards. She knew that her prying was becoming more and more unacceptable. To look inside a fridge is one thing, to unpin a postcard and read it something else, especially, of course, when she had broken back into the house. But that was exactly what she did now, first the one with a painting by Caravaggio on the front and on the back a few scrawled words: ‘Thinking of you; I hope you’re thinking of me.’ The postmark was Rome. Then the one from Edinburgh, in the same handwriting: ‘Thank you for telling me. See you on Friday.’ There was a signature this time but it was illegible.
A school photo pinned near the top of the board – several hundred children, arranged in descending size, and in their middle, among the other teachers and gazing straight ahead, Nancy. By the side of it, there was a passport photograph of a girl of about sixteen: she had dark hair and a firm mouth, and the defiant, fugitive look so often seen in passports. School timetables, a flyer for a classical concert in Newquay and a craft fair, an invitation to a party, a shopping list in Nancy’s handwriting with items neatly crossed off, an obituary of a woman called Fenella Stock, furniture-maker, who had died aged eighty, and below it a newspaper clipping running over two columns and half folded in on itself. The headline read ‘The Gateways of Pain’.
Gaby pulled out the drawing-pin and took the article to the window. Even in her confusion, she remembered that the following week she was due for an eye test. Soon she would be wearing reading-glasses, losing them everywhere she went. She squinted at the dense lettering, her gaze jumping through paragraphs. It was a piece about a newly diagnosed medical condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a type of intense, chronic, incurable pain. Half-way down, Dr Connor Myers of the London Pain Clinic was quoted as saying that ‘Pain has been neglected by doctors and researchers. It’s frustrating, a kind of medical failure that we don’t like. What’s more, pain is subjective: everyone has their own pain threshold, and usually it is not measurable. Until a few years ago, it didn’t even have its own speciality. Now, however, we’re beginning to find out more about the biology of pain. RSD, which is a kind of maladaptive pain, may give us a window into understanding some of the fundamental aspects of the nervous system.’
Her hands were trembling, shaking the paper so that it was hard to make out the words. Very carefully, she replaced the cutting in its original position, pushing the drawing-pin back into place. So, now she knew that Nancy walked and took photographs and smoked dope; that she read Stefan’s books and cut out articles about Connor, which she put on the noticeboard. Gaby felt a quiver, like an electric buzz, down her spine, but she couldn’t identify the feeling behind the sensation. Excitement? Happiness? Apprehension? Pity? Nancy hadn’t forgotten about them, after all. She’d ruthlessly burnt her bridges, yet she’d looked back across the impassable river to the land she’d left behind, and was still doing so two decades later.
Gaby hadn’t meant to go upstairs, just as she hadn’t meant to get out of the taxi and return to the house, pick up the key, let herself in. She was watching herself behave in a way that disquieted her – no, that appalled her. Later, she could tell herself that it had all happened as if in a dream she was powerless to halt, and it was true that she moved slowly, in a hallucinatory drift, into Nancy’s bedroom. It was large and light and the air was tangy with cleanliness, woodsmoke, lemon and pine. There was a spacious chest of drawers, a wooden wardrobe with a mirror on its door, a desk under one of the windows. The floor was uncarpeted, but a thick cream rug lay across most of it, and Gaby curled her toes into it as she stood, looking around. The large bed lay under the window; its white duvet was folded back and Gaby thought she could still see the shape where Nancy had lain. She pulled open the wardrobe door, so that her own image swung past her, and then she riffled her hand through the clothes hanging inside – dresses, skirts sensible and chic, shirts, the flash of colour interleaved between more sober greys and browns. She brought out a blue summer dress, held it up against herse
lf, then pulled the door to examine her reflection in the mirror. If she put it on, would she look more like its owner? But where Nancy was slim and neat and structured, she was always messy and without real edges. Even in her thin phases, she looked plump. Even when she was trying to look elegant, she couldn’t quite manage the sculpted chic she saw on other women. She tended to cover herself with overlapping layers – like now; she was wearing a camisole under a strappy top under a shirt. The first time Connor had undressed her, unbuttoning one blouse to find another, he’d compared it to peeling an onion and never quite getting to its centre. She hung the dress back in the wardrobe and closed the door, then faced the room again.
The four pillows were stacked at the head of the bed invitingly. She moved over and sat on the edge, looking out of the window at the grass still steaming in the bright morning. She shifted her weight, then found she was lying down, her head sinking into the softness of the pillow. The sheet was cool against her raw feet, and she felt her heavy limbs relax. From this position, she could see another large black-and-white photograph on the opposite wall, this time of a V-shaped flock of birds against the sky. It was as if she was staring up into space. She closed her eyes against the dizziness, and for a few seconds still saw the skein of birds imprinted on the lids, amid circles of light. She told herself she would lie there for a few seconds, then leave discreetly, and no harm would have been done to anyone. She turned on to her side, drew up her legs, pressed her face into the pillow and fell asleep.
Ten
They always had a cooked breakfast on their last morning aboard. It had started out as bacon and eggs but over the years Stefan had added to his repertoire and now, sweaty, red in the face and triumphant, he produced grilled tomatoes, sausages, mushrooms, black pudding and baked beans as well, leaving in his wake a mess that was second only to that which Gaby made when she cooked. Connor used to tell Gaby that if you clean up any existing mess before you begin, then clear up as you go along, it was easier in the long run, but he had long since given up and resigned himself to the havoc she could create in an astonishingly short period of time. Stefan obviously had the same cooking gene as Gaby, using a large amount of energy, making a drama out of a boiled egg or a salad.
The Moment You Were Gone Page 12
