Tom met her at Arrivals when she returned for Christmas, clearly regretting the homemade Welcome Home sign he held weakly at his chest.
When he saw her face, he let it drop a bit further, gritting his teeth, and she smiled, shaking her head.
‘Hi,’ she said as she kissed him, feeling her cheeks redden as she handed him one of the bags that hung from her arm.
He paused, taking her in, his eyes soft with love. ‘Look at you, you look even better than I remember.’
She nudged him self-consciously. ‘Ah, shut up, I’ve always looked this good.’
‘A lot can change in a year,’ he replied, taking her suitcase and pulling her arm as she moved instinctively towards the signs for the train.
‘For instance …’ He made a drumming sound as they made their way towards the short-stay car park.
‘Ta-da!’
It might have been the first Renault 5 ever to have fallen off the production line and the door almost took her out as she opened it to step into the passenger seat, but there was something about it that was so perfectly Tom that she couldn’t help but grin.
‘Yeah, sorry about that, I might have been a little over-zealous with the WD40,’ he said as she nursed her elbow.
‘Oh my God, it has an actual tape deck. This is amazing, I feel like it’s 1984,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you went for red. Boy-racer style. So you.’
‘I’m thinking of getting it lowered, maybe some strip-lights under the bumper,’ he said and she laughed.
‘Missed you, Gabs.’
‘I missed you, too. But I’m back for two weeks, so let’s make the most of it, OK?’
She watched his face focused on the road ahead as the motorway shuttled them towards the grey cityscape. Making their way back through familiar streets, the relative sluggishness of the London air straining in her lungs, she felt such fondness towards him that she pushed away the sensation that her internal organs were being compressed so intensely that she could barely breathe.
Tom had been in the midst of a freelance project when she moved to Moscow, working on a commercial development that conveniently would last about as long as her trip abroad. This was to be his first big job since he graduated; he couldn’t just disappear, he’d said, as if she’d invited him to go with her.
They were equals, of sorts, in that moment: him immersed in a new job, playing landlord in her house while she tried out life in foreign service with the same uncertainty with which one tries on a new coat, slipping her hands in and out of the pockets, taking discreet glances at the back and sides, checking if it fits.
The conclusion, for her, was that it fitted perfectly. There was a lot to be desired about some aspects of the trip, but the possibility of what this life represented: the potential for travel, for learning, the opportunity her role at the FCO afforded her to try out different lives under the guise of someone who knew what they were doing, of someone who was supposed to be there … Once she had a taste of that, she knew she could never give it up.
Tom recognised the change in her, the new-found grown-up self-assuredness, as she immersed herself in London life for the brief time that she was there. And he wasn’t the only one. On Christmas Eve Saoirse and her partner Jim came over for drinks and a blissfully unfestive kebab. They had recently exchanged Kentish Town for a battered two-bed on Wilton Way near London Fields, since rents were still relatively affordable in Hackney.
Like most of Gabriela’s friends who’d grown up in this now boujie pocket of North London – those whose parents hadn’t conveniently died when they were in their twenties – Saoirse had left the area not long after coming back from university, in her case in Leeds.
‘You seem different,’ Saoirse said as the four of them sat around the kitchen table, necking cheap wine. Jim was an old university friend of Tom’s and Gabriela had known within minutes of meeting him that he and Saoirse would either hate each other or fall head over heels in love. As she predicted, when they met there was an energy between them that was so alive she would find herself just watching them and feeling her jaw tense with envy.
‘Different how?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Saoirse smiled, as if trying to work something out. ‘Different in a good way. Grown up.’
Gabriela raised her eyebrows. ‘Fancy …’
‘Very fancy,’ Saoirse said and then she paused. ‘Speaking of which …’ She turned to Jim. ‘We’re getting married …’
Gabriela squealed with genuine delight, falling across the table to hug them both. ‘That’s amazing, and really weird, ’cause surely you’re still only twelve, so how could you be getting married?’
‘Great news, guys,’ Tom said, lifting his glass. He tried to meet Gabriela’s eye and she looked away.
When he tried to talk to her in bed later that night, she pretended to be asleep.
It was strange being back in London, for those couple of weeks.
Aside from occasional after-work drinks with colleagues from the embassy, in Moscow she had taken to spending weekends alone, relishing the visits to the market outside the city, flicking through old Soviet memorabilia, or trips to one of several new galleries which were opening across town. There, even just a walk around the old hotels or shopping malls felt like an exotic experience. Though the work itself, in Moscow, was less obviously rewarding.
For a while Tom seemed confused by her focus on the job, unsure how to deal with it. But, to his credit, he always encouraged her; his belief in his girlfriend was absolute. Other women complained that their male partners felt threatened by their successes, as if a woman’s progress outside of the home was an inherent form of emasculation, but Tom was nothing like that. Once he understood it was the job, not another man, that had piqued her interest, he basked unquestioningly in her rise through the ranks. Fundamentally, she thought, Tom understood that the more space he gave her, the less likely she was to bolt.