‘Where are you taking me? I’m cold.’
It was 6.30p.m. and the streetlights cast reflections like puddles of liquid amber over the pavements leading across the bridge to Primrose Hill. The last time she had been here was five months earlier, a fleeting London visit for Saoirse and Jim’s wedding: a quick exchange of vows followed by pub-hopping through Camden, past the Princess of Wales, ending up at a lock-in at the Steeles in Belsize Park.
If it was anyone else, he might have felt hurt by her sulky tone as they made their way into the gates of the park, but Tom was built with an extra layer of resilience. Clearly, he had a plan in mind, a sweeping gesture, and already, as he guided her up the hill towards the bench looking out across London, she could hazard a guess as to what it was.
‘Cold? You came back from Moscow twenty-four hours ago, you’re supposed to be able to handle a British attempt at winter in a bikini by now,’ he goaded.
It was true, the weather had reached minus 26 degrees the day she’d left. On the drive to the airport, the snow stretched on for miles, an abandoned blanket, impossibly white, suffocating the endless pine forests which seemed would never end until, without warning, they disappeared and in their place sprawling industrial sites suddenly blighted the horizon, buildings like metal insects lying dead amidst the snow.
Moscow had grabbed her with a force she could never have expected, given the relentless cold and the mistrust that permeated every exchange: there were so many reasons why she should have found it inhospitable – but, like the most unlikely of lovers, the city had her gripped. The harder it pushed her away, the tighter she had held on. Now she was back in London with Tom, she didn’t know which aspect of her two lives felt more foreign, or which place less like home.
But there was a sense of relief too, at the prospect of returning to the office, of being back in the thick of it. Emsworth’s visits had been scarce in Russia, though he was in constant contact from London, checking in on any progress with an avid interest. Gabriela knew that for him to have chosen her to go out there at a time when tensions were so high, she must be regarded as a valuable member of the team. And yet, she had started to feel as if she was being wheeled out as a sort of PR representative rather than anything more meaningful. She had only seen Emsworth a couple of times since the episode in the bar – a meeting neither of them had mentioned since – and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being kept at arm’s length.
She shivered as she went to sit on the bench at the top of Primrose Hill, the city lights stretching out before them, punctuated by the tips of the cages at London Zoo. Tom stopped her from sitting, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a blanket, which he laid over the bench before directing her to sit.
Refraining from questioning the wisdom of laying a pale blue wool throw over a damp park bench, she watched him lean into the bag again and lift out a hot water bottle, giving it a squeeze. Satisfied, he placed it on her lap.
‘It’s still warm,’ he said triumphantly as he reached into the bag for the final time and retrieved a flask and a wedge of tin foil.
‘Ham or cheese?’ he asked, a look of self-satisfaction spreading across his face, and she smiled, hoping he wasn’t going to do what she already knew he would.
‘Either,’ she said, accepting a soggy triangle, taking a swig of coffee and brandy and appreciating the warmth of it moving through her body.
‘You’re not going to propose, are you?’ she asked, unable to stop herself, taking a bite and feeling immediately guilty as she watched his expression drop. So she had found his pain threshold, after all.
‘Oh Tom.’ She leaned forward and kissed him, before shifting closer.
‘Bloody hell, Gaby, talk about pissing on my bonfire.’
‘Babe, I’m sorry. You know I love you, I just … I don’t see the point.’
It was true, or maybe it wasn’t. She had seen the point as she watched Saoirse staring into Jim’s eyes at the registry office off Euston Road, the pair of them disappearing from the pub afterwards and returning with her hand locked in his, the top of Saoirse’s skirt tucked into her knickers. But for them?
‘It’s fine.’ He took the Thermos from her and drank, turning so that she couldn’t see his eyes shining with disappointment.
‘Look, one day I might feel differently, but right now I’m just not … It’s not that I’m not committed to you,’ she added, stumbling on her words, for a moment remembering the exhilarating freedom of Moscow, of being fully immersed in life as an autonomous unit.
It wasn’t as though she’d done anything to betray his confidence. Even when the thought crossed her mind, she had never been unfaithful.
‘Besides, I have to go back to work in a couple of weeks. It’s not practicable.’
‘Practicable? Sure,’ his voice was dismissive and she longed for his usual carefree tone.
‘Ask again, in a couple of years, I might feel differently.’
He didn’t tell her to go fuck herself, as she would have done if the tables had been turned. Instead, they sat there in silence and finished their sandwiches and then walked back to the house, had sex and fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed.
They didn’t speak of it again. Perhaps he couldn’t bear the possibility of another rejection, or the conversation such a setback might lead to in terms of where this was all going. Tom was never one to rock the boat.
The day she had returned to London for good, Gabriela felt like she had left a part of herself behind, that a piece of her soul was still roaming the streets of Moscow. Soon enough, though, they settled back into their usual routine, evenings lounging at the house with a book, Tom standing occasionally to select another record from the vinyl collection that took up half the living room.
‘It’s good to have you back,’ he said one night a few weeks after her return as they lay in easy silence, head-to-toe on the sofa. When she looked up and saw him there, splayed across a cushion in his characteristic state of repose, she smiled. In that moment she didn’t want to be anywhere else.
At King Charles Street, the pace of life provided the perfect contrast to time with Tom. In her absence, new faces had emerged as old ones moved on and out into different departments, pursuing other careers or scattering themselves in bureaus across the world.
Emsworth, on the rare occasions when he was actually in the office, seemed more distracted than usual, troubled by something, though she could hardly imagine who or what, given that he seemed to come and go as he pleased, apparently answerable to no one.
Still, it seemed that, as far as he was concerned, she could do no wrong. Finally, her earlier idea of gathering intelligence from social media surveillance was being implemented across various departments, and was fast becoming a technique instrumental in infiltrating terrorist cells as well as organised criminal gangs. Emsworth had not directly credited her for the idea yet, but he had made it plain that there would be something substantial coming her way as a reward for her commitment, a more permanent placement, he implied – maybe even Washington or Paris – something that would give her the option to start a new life, a life full of the excitement and adventure she craved.
Although perhaps she would be offered a role she’d never even considered, and she would be open to that too. After some of the cases she had seen evolving in Moscow, even if only from a distance, she had her sights set on Human Rights, which would mean making her way into the department of Multilateral Policy. But things might change and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing either. So long as there was enough progress that she could feel the movement towards where she needed to be, then she would be happy to work her way up. She was willing to do whatever it took. And he knew it as well as she did.
‘I’m expecting big things from you,’ Emsworth said one day. ‘Just as soon as the right opening comes up, I think you’re ready for the next step.’
She had blushed at that, and yet the praise felt deserved. If her role at the embassy in Moscow was a delicate balance of innovation, deference and being able to hold her drink (and her tongue) through an endless roll-call of dinner parties designed to test and ingratiate, on both sides, then in every sense she had excelled. The reports from her seniors at the embassy had been nothing but glowing. The Russians liked her was the overall feedback. They trusted her – and eliciting trust was the name of the game.
In response, over the coming weeks Emsworth amped up her responsibilities, at least unofficially. One afternoon when everyone but she and Johnny, the sharp-elbowed policy support officer who had come up on the same fast-streaming round as she had, were out at lunch, Emsworth came to her desk. She was in the middle of several tasks and struggling to keep pace but nevertheless she stopped what she was doing as he approached.
‘Are you busy?’ he asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘I need a couple of files pulled out. It’s a bit of a sensitive one, I need someone I can trust to do a good job.’
Subconsciously, she flashed a look towards Johnny who she knew was at a loose end, envisaging all that she had to do before she could get home and put her feet up. She was suddenly so tired, it was as though her body was surrendering already, and this made her want to push back harder against it. Besides, if she didn’t do it, Johnny would.
‘If you’re busy I can do it myself,’ he said, clocking her expression and making as if to walk away.
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Of course I can do it. What do you need?’
‘Just a couple of files pulling out, like I said. Some wonderfully tedious stuff about trade deals in Equatorial Guinea.’
She didn’t pause to ask her boss what he might need with such documents, given that they had no obvious link to any work being done in their department. In hindsight, she would justify it by telling herself she hadn’t believed it was her place to question him.
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I could probably clear some time this afternoon and email it across to you.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Well, the thing is, I really need a physical copy to look over on my flight to Moscow next week; it’s a time-saving exercise more than anything. I wondered whether you might download something and print it out for me? You know what a Luddite I am.’
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to …’
In Counter-Terrorism, middle-weight employees like Gabriela had access to three different levels of email service – open, confidential and top secret. But each of these, she knew as well as he did, was trackable. For anyone other than the digital bods with their access to a ‘dirty network’, there was only one option if you wanted to take a document out of the building: the printer.
He smiled. ‘As I say, I could do it myself, only I have so much to sort before I leave and you know how cack-handed I am with all that technical mumbo-jumbo.’ He made a self-deprecating hand gesture, tossing her a knowing smile. ‘Or I could ask someone else.’
She thought again of Johnny, of his constant attempts to upstage her in front of their boss, how he would revel in this opportunity to do Emsworth’s special bidding.
‘No,’ she said quickly, telling herself she was just being a jobsworth for her doubts; this was her boss after all. Besides, no one would ever know. Bags were only frisked coming into the building – never on the way out …
‘I can do it,’ Gabriela said. ‘Just tell me what you need.’
When he came to her a while later and asked that she probe Madeleine for details of work she was doing in Krakow, where she had unfathomably managed to bag herself a placement instead of Dubai within weeks of Gabriela leaving for Moscow, alarm bells finally started to ring with an urgency she couldn’t ignore. She knew from their intermittent emails while they were both away that Madeleine was immersed in a pre-existing operation there, working to infiltrate a human trafficking ring, which had little reason to concern Emsworth, removed as it was from his jurisdiction.
And yet that was no longer entirely true, was it? During Gabriela’s time in Moscow, the Counter-Terrorism department to which she was assigned had started to work with other units in the organisation on a case involving a highly complex and far-reaching network of criminals with links to human trafficking, VAT fraud and arms trading. Departments could not work wholly distinctly from one another, and the overlap in this case, which straddled various parts of the organisation, would go some way to explaining the files Emsworth had asked her to pull up, which concerned the movement of goods between the UK and parts of Central Africa. Although what it didn’t account for was his reticence to pull the files himself.
Gabriela and Emsworth were seated at his favourite table at the Italian bistro on Crown Passage, and she felt the pasta stick in her throat when he raised the Madeleine question.
‘Could you not ask her?’ Gabriela replied.
The look he gave her made her skin burn.
‘It’s just that I know we’re being encouraged to work together, but I didn’t think it was protocol for someone of my level to monitor another department’s work …’
He paused, lowering his voice, leaning in so that she could smell the red wine on his breath.
‘Be that as it may, it’s also in our interests to make sure we’re not being kept out of the loop with things that might serve our own investigations. You and I both know that we’re very willing to share our findings with other departments, but sometimes others aren’t so forthcoming. Egos get in the way, you know what it’s like. I just want to make sure we have all the information available to us, and I know you and Madeleine are close.’ He stopped, considering me before deciding to carry on. ‘Look, this is completely between us, but we have to be a bit careful about who we speak to. It would seem there’s a leak somewhere; information relating to this case has been flowing into the wrong hands.’
‘What do you mean?’ She sat straighter and he shrugged, as if in defeat.
‘I mean just that. We have a mole. And I’m not for a moment suggesting that your friend is tied up in it … All I know is that we have to be careful about who we say what to. Besides, if there is information available that could be useful to our work, I want to be sure we have access to it, without jeopardising anything else. You understand?’
She nodded.
He refilled their glasses. ‘I’m glad you challenged me on it, though. It’s admirable. I know you young ones like to follow the rules, but take it from me: that isn’t always the best way to get things done. You know? Sometimes you have to use your initiative. I mean, this is national security we’re talking about, not a school exam. You don’t get prefect points in the real world, not when lives are at stake.’
He was full of shit, but she knew she needed to help him – or rather, she needed him to believe she would. Rumours had started flying by that point about an opening for a long-term tenure in New York attached to the UN, and despite only having been on one posting, she reckoned she could feasibly apply, if she put in the hours, reminding her superiors of how keen and able she was.
She had no way of knowing how far in over her head she was being dragged.
When the exhaustion kicked in a few weeks later, she brushed it off as a natural reaction to an intense period of readjustment. It was a shock coming back to London from a culture so wildly different to her own. Going from that life to this, it was enough to explain away the sudden mid-morning slumps at her desk, the evenings she found herself passing out on the sofa before dinner, Tom reading a book or strumming endless bloody chords beside her when all she longed for was silence. And then the sickness started, the gassy, bloated sensation that made her both ravenous and unable to nibble more than a mouthful of anything with a more complex flavour than toasted cheese.
She had watched women at work, brilliant women, slide down the ladder after they had children; you could almost see it, the drive they once had draining out of them, like blood seeping from an open wound until there was no life left in them.
‘I take it this wasn’t planned?’ the doctor asked gently as she stared back, tears welling defiantly in her eyes, the words ringing in her ears: You’re pregnant.
‘No.’
‘So you’ll need some time to think through the options …’
‘I don’t want it,’ she said, her voice absolute.
The doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘I understand. But you might feel differently, given time … It’s a big decision and there is no harm in taking a couple of days to think it through …’
‘I don’t want it,’ she repeated.
The doctor paused, and then turned to her computer.
‘OK, well if you want to make an appointment with the sexual health clinic, they’ll explain everything that’s involved and then you can make an informed decision.’
Gabriela nodded curtly. ‘Thank you. I will.’
She didn’t tell Tom. She didn’t need to make an excuse to slip away to the women’s centre one morning before work. After all, she was barely showing, certainly no more than the sort of post-pizza distension which caused her to protrude with what Tom had endearingly labelled her recurring food baby (‘We could name her Margherita’), and certainly not significantly enough to provoke any sort of unwanted questioning, either at work or at home.
The nurse at the clinic shrugged this point away when she raised it at her appointment a few days after checking in with the GP, presenting her relatively unchanged body as possible evidence that they had got it wrong about how far gone she was. ‘Different women respond differently to pregnancy, physically and emotionally. Though to be honest not all women do show this early on – it’s mainly wind that makes the belly pop out at this stage … We can get a more accurate reading on dates once we’ve done the scan,’ the nurse said, making her quiet assessment with a glance that said she had seen women like her a thousand times before.
She led Gabriela back through the waiting room, past the faces pressed firmly into phones and magazines, avoiding eye contact.
‘Have you had a scan like this before?’
Gabriela shook her head.
‘OK, so I’ll need you to lie back on the bed there for me …’
She pulled the curtain around them so that the world they inhabited was suddenly very small.
Rubbing the cold gel against Gabriela’s abdomen, she pointed to the monitor with her other hand. ‘That’s where we’ll see the foetus, which I’ll measure in various points, to give us a better indication of where we’re at.’
Gabriela swallowed and instinctively turned away from the screen, averting her gaze as the shape took form. In hindsight, she couldn’t say what changed. She didn’t know what happened between pulling up her trousers, jolting at the sensation of the cold gel rubbing against her shirt and the short walk back to the consulting room, but less than ten minutes later, she knew in her bones that she couldn’t get rid of it.
‘So, the GP wasn’t far off with her calculations. It looks like you’re almost twelve weeks,’ the nurse said, consulting her notes. ‘That’s still well within the time when you can safely have a termination. If that’s what you want.’
Her mind was distracted, doing the maths. If she had become pregnant in January, not long after she got back from Russia, then she would be due in October.
‘Which date?’
The question caught the nurse off-guard. ‘Sorry?’
‘Which date in October would it be due?’
‘The twenty-sixth.’
Her mother’s birthday.
She never told Tom about her trip to the doctor. When she presented it to him a couple of days after the appointment, once she’d confirmed in her own mind there was no way she could get rid of the baby, the news of their imminent shift into parenthood was met with unadulterated joy.
His parents back in Edinburgh were also thrilled, they said, but quick to point out that what with their age and Elsie’s knees, they could not promise to be as hands-on as they might wish.
‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Tom had whistled as he got off the phone from sharing their news.
‘Stop it, I like your mum,’ Gabriela retorted dutifully. Though she couldn’t say she really felt much beyond a sort of anthropological curiosity towards her and Graham, with their outdated views on the world, their days structured around mealtimes and whether it would be appropriate to use the formal or informal cutlery sets. It was a wonder that Tom had turned out as well-adjusted as he was.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked a couple of days after the revelation, noting her muted smiles as he swelled with excitement at the prospect of a child, clucking around the living room, fetching her pillows she didn’t need and googling vitamins, like her pregnancy was a school science project for which he was determined to win first prize.
‘Course,’ she said.
He sat beside her, taking her wrist in his hand and squeezing it gently. ‘You seem worried.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s just a bit of a shock.’
‘You don’t need to worry, you know that. This doesn’t have to change anything, except for the better.’
She wanted so badly to share his enthusiasm, but already she felt herself depleted.
‘What if I can’t do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Be a mother,’ she said before she could think it through, adding quickly, ‘you know, with my job … things are already so full on.’
‘You’ll be an amazing mum,’ he replied, unfazed. ‘Why wouldn’t you be? Once the baby’s here, you’ll see. Besides, you have me. You’ll never be alone.’
The words, even then, felt like both a promise and a threat.