It was a perfect spring morning, the sunlight reflecting along the tops of the buildings that stretched up King Charles Street as she approached the office, early enough that the tourists who flocked to this part of Westminster had not yet clogged the streets. The sky glistened, as if in anticipation, and she felt a rush of pride as she moved in synch with the conveyor belt of civil servants and politicians, their shoes clipping the pavement as they made their way purposefully towards their respective offices.
Looking up, she could almost feel the power bouncing off the buildings: the decisions being made, deals thrashed out, the phone lines fizzing with the dynamics of cause and effect, reaching from one continent to another.
At four months pregnant, the sickness had finally subsided and with it the fatigue that had taken hold in those early weeks. The pallid colour of her cheeks, which colleagues had joked was the result of her time spent in Russia, gorging on dumplings and vodka in a serotonin-deprived purgatory, had lifted in the second trimester so that she felt brighter than she had in a long time as she sashayed through the doors at KCS.
Tom had been brought on to a project in Shoreditch a couple of weeks earlier, which could last until just before Gabriela was due to give birth. They had spent the previous evenings ironing out the details: she would stay at work until a week before her due date, and then take a few months off before returning to her job full-time, when Tom would step in as the primary carer.
She had felt a rush of confidence about her plan to inform the office of her pregnancy that morning as she headed off towards the tube station, Tom squeezing her arm lightly as he saw her off with the words, ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’
‘Morning, Lauren,’ she greeted Emsworth’s secretary as she approached her desk, her eyes surreptitiously casting around for signs of her boss in his office.
‘Good morning.’ Lauren smiled, looking up from her computer screen.
‘Is he in?’
‘Not yet. He’s in meetings all morning, let me check … OK, he has a lunch later but it looks like he’ll be back by three …’
She managed a smile, pushing down her disappointment at being made to wait. Already the buoyancy she’d felt on her way in, her belief that everything would turn out well, that all she needed to do was to be upfront and give plenty of notice as to her situation, had started to wane. As if attuned to impending disaster, the minute hand crept ever more slowly around the clock over the course of the morning, towards the end of days.
‘Gabriela, Lauren tells me you wanted to see me?’
It was quarter to four by the time Emsworth arrived at her desk, his eyes shining with drink.
Glancing around the open-plan room, noticing the heads pretending not to be listening, she stood. ‘Do you mind if we speak somewhere more private?’
Emsworth paused before holding out a hand in the direction of his office.
‘I’ve just been having lunch with a few colleagues, one of whom you met in Moscow – Peter Bradford, you remember him? He was very impressed, speaks highly of you … Do take a seat,’ he said, holding the door open for her.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, picturing Bradford’s face at one of the long dinners held by the embassy, his hand holding onto hers a moment too long as they were introduced. He and Emsworth were clearly cut from the same cloth.
‘It sounds like you settled in extremely well over there …’
‘I loved it,’ she nodded, feeling a tug of emotion.
‘Good. Excellent. Well, we’re delighted with your work. Now, what did you want to tell me? Does this have anything to do with Madeleine?’
Gabriela paused, confused for a moment before remembering Emsworth’s request, which had not so much slipped her mind as been shoved aside. Of course she wouldn’t spy on Madeleine, she didn’t need to. Whomever the source of the leak was, Madeleine had nothing to do with it.
‘No, I’ve been struggling to get hold of her,’ Gabriela lied.
There was no easy way to deliver her real news, and so with a sharp inhalation of breath, she said it, keeping her face as bright as she could: ‘I’m pregnant.’
There was a moment’s hesitation as Emsworth kept his gaze steady, the carefully arranged smile at his mouth barely flickering, and then he replied, ‘Gosh, congratulations.’
‘It’s due in October,’ she added, trying her best to keep the conversation businesslike, to keep control of negotiations, as if this was nothing but another event in the timeline of her career.
‘So I’ll be off for six months and then back in April next year. I was thinking I could start to take on a bit more responsibility over the next few months, in preparation for—’
He cut her off. ‘Oh, there’s no need to be worrying about that. Not now.’ His tone had shifted, in a way that would be barely perceptible if she hadn’t worked with him for so long.
‘OK, I just want to make sure that you know that my commitment to this job hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s stronger. I still very much want to move up the ranks, and—’
Once again, he silenced her, this time with a slightly raised hand. ‘Gabriela, think no more of it.’ He stood, indicating that it was time for her to do the same.
The day she went on maternity leave, Emsworth was not in the office.
‘He went on annual leave yesterday,’ Lauren confirmed when Gabriela asked, having already packed up a pathetically small box of possessions from her desk, a ‘good luck’ card awkwardly signed by a few of her colleagues (All the best with it!) balanced precariously on the top.
‘Really? But he didn’t say—’ Her cheeks reddened as Lauren looked back at her impassively, her expression a simple shrug conveying the words Gabriela knew she was thinking: And?
Emsworth had hardly spoken to her since that meeting in his office. He had certainly never asked about Madeleine again, even after her return from Krakow a few weeks later. At this point, Gabriela simply assumed he had forgotten that he’d ever suggested she probe her colleague for information, or that perhaps he had found an alternative explanation. Whatever his reasons were, if he could forget the incident then so could she.
She had almost blurted it out in a moment of heightened emotion at the farewell drinks Madeleine had arranged in Gabriela’s honour the week before she went on leave, dragging her along to a pub on Derby Place. But as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, she felt herself pull back.
There would be no point warning Madeleine; it wasn’t like she had anything to hide. And Gabriela knew that if she did tell, Madeleine’s temper would mean she would be unable to resist confronting Emsworth, and that would backfire on both of them. Especially with Gabriela about to bugger off on maternity leave, she couldn’t afford to give him a single reason not to support her.
Pushing the words back in before they could form on her tongue, Gabriela had winced as she took a sip of red wine which tasted like paint stripper, lifting her glass to toast impending motherhood.
No. The easiest thing would be to forget he ever asked.
‘How was your day?’ Tom said when she got home, having walked along the river before boarding the train at Embankment, making the most of her last weeks of freedom as she instinctively saw them, before the baby arrived.
‘Good,’ she managed a smile as he swung his legs onto the sofa next to her.
‘Glad to hear it. And the best thing is, now you’re on leave you won’t have to think about that place for months. And when you go back, you’ve got the promotion to look forward to. It’s all happening, babe.’
She leaned back, nodding along, not willing to tell him that the prospect of the job Emsworth had as good as told her was hers had been snatched away so violently that the palm of her hands stung. Because to tell him would mean to face it, to think about something that was easier to ignore than confront. So she didn’t, telling herself that everything would be fine, imagining away the feeling of the unspoken lie swelling in her throat.