Winter emerged like a sheet of ice that year, wrapping itself around the city. The wind that whipped across the Heath battered at the back door of the house, begging to be let in.
Gabriela and Tom were settled in the living room with Callum, having spent the day dressing the Christmas tree all together before Sadie headed out to the cinema with friends.
‘Mummy and Daddy bought this decoration in Scotland, the year you were born,’ she heard Tom say to Callum as she reached for a third glass of wine, Nat King Cole crackling out from the record player, unwanted thoughts rising up inside her with every note. There was one emerging thought in particular that she was placing firmly out of mind as she picked up the bottle and topped up her glass. Not so much unwanted as unthinkable, for now. A thought that, once named, she knew would overshadow everything else.
She and Ivan had met up at least once a week over the past months, in and around the bars and hotels of St James’s Square, creating their own separate world away from the crowds that milled around them. It was astonishing that they were never caught, and yet every moment that their relationship went unchecked acted as quiet confirmation to Gabriela that what they were doing was predestined.
By December, she understood how tightly woven the web of lies had become. Yet for the moments when it was just the two of them, it was so uncomplicated that it was impossible to tally that aspect of her life with the complications that rose up as a consequence of it. That single thread of her existence felt clearer than anything else she had felt in years. He was the only one who asked nothing more of her than she was willing and able to give. There was a transactional clarity to their relationship that she lacked in every other aspect of her life, a straightforwardness to the emotion that ran between them. But the truth was, the complications were impossible to ignore, bleeding as they did into every other aspect of her life.
How long could she keep it up, the charade that had become her daily life? How long could she lie about where she was going each morning, before someone or something caught her out? How long could she distract herself from what she already knew was happening, refusing to acknowledge the sensations that swirled inside her?
Besides, there was the money to consider: how much longer could she pretend to be bringing in a salary each month? On paper, she thought, the options were straightforward: stay or leave. People had affairs all the time, and they either left their partners or stayed. You either did the right thing, or you didn’t. And there could hardly be any doubt about what the right thing to do would be. If she chose Ivan, she would have to tell him about her children. It would destroy everyone. The possibility made her feel physically sick. No, the only reasonable choice would be to stay with Tom, to save Sadie and Callum from the inevitable fallout if she left.
And yet on the days she spent apart from Ivan, she yearned for him; not just for her proximity to him but also for the escape that his existence – their life together – had come to represent. It was this respite from her other reality that enabled her to miss the children sufficiently in their absence that when she returned to them, she was able to be the mother they needed.
That was how she justified her life with him, when she looked back later, once it was too late: a life separate to, but not necessarily at odds with, her life with Tom. The word affair suggested some kind of hierarchy, but she could not think of her relationship with either man as more or less important. Both served a crucial, and complementary, purpose; so much so that it was impossible to think that she could survive one strand of her life without the other.
At home, she and Tom had settled not so much into a loveless arrangement as one devoid of touch. How could she let him close enough that she might give herself away?
‘Shit! I didn’t realise it was so late …’ Tom’s voice pulled her back into the present: the Christmas tree, the same songs that played year after year.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, disorientated as if she’d been awoken from a deep sleep.
‘Six thirty,’ Tom said. ‘Sadie will be out of the film in a minute.’
‘I’ll go,’ she replied, too loudly, desperate for an excuse to escape the confines of the house which seemed to grow smaller, more claustrophobic, by the day.
‘Really? Should you be driving—’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, collecting her keys from the table and walking towards the hallway. ‘I’ve only had a couple of glasses. It’s Camden Town, it will only take me a few minutes.’
‘I don’t mind going,’ he said, and she snapped at him.
‘Tom, I said I’m doing it, she is my daughter as well. I’m not completely incompetent.’
‘Fine,’ he raised his hands as if she was pointing a gun at him. ‘I’ll put some food on. Callum, you can help me.’
The night air against her cheeks came as a relief as she walked briskly towards the car, the same practical Estate they’d had since Tom traded in the Renault 5 for something more reliable, a few years earlier.
How long had it been since she and Sadie had last spent any time alone together? She longed for her suddenly, a visceral need for her daughter that yanked at her chest as she made her way down Highgate Road, the lamps reflecting against the ice on the road.
It was a Sunday evening and so she pulled up on the corner of Arlington Road, just along from the cinema. From here, she could see them gathered outside the cinema, directly opposite the Jazz Cafe, the very spot where Tom and she had met, in another lifetime, so disconnected from their current reality that the thought barely moved her.
For a moment, she watched them, her daughter and her friends, so far removed from the toddlers she had known vaguely from the local playgroups and parks where other mothers had looked on adoringly at their children while Gabriela distracted herself from the tedium of it all with imaginary emails. And yet now Sadie was seven, and all she wanted was to stop time, to hold her daughter in her arms and feel the need for her exuding from her daughter’s tiny body. Though of course by now it was too late.
‘Gabriela!’
Harriet’s expression was one of surprise as Gabriela moved towards the cinema where a small group of children were gathered outside and squatted in front of Sadie, pulling her into a hug that she quietly resisted, before doing up her coat.
‘Am I late?’ Gabriela asked in response, trying to put out of mind the suspicions she had had about Harriet and Tom, suspicions she had fabricated, no doubt, to make herself feel less guilty about her feelings for Ivan. Harriet shook her head, pushing her hair self-consciously behind her ears, her smile too bright.
‘Not at all. You’re perfectly on time. Sadie has been an angel, haven’t you, Sadie?’
Sadie nodded shyly, looking away.
‘Happy birthday,’ Gabriela called out to Millie, who was standing a metre away, whispering with another girl from their school whose name she couldn’t remember.
‘Well, thanks so much for having her,’ Gabriela said, wishing the light emanating from inside the cinema wasn’t quite so strong. ‘I’m double-parked so we’d better go. Bye, girls.’
‘Millie, Sadie’s going now – say goodbye,’ Harriet called out into the silence.
‘Bye, Sadie,’ the girls said in unison as they walked away.
‘Bye,’ Sadie said under her breath, moving slightly ahead of her mother towards the car.
‘So how was it?’ Gabriela asked, her attempt at sounding cheerful catching in her throat. Was this how it was to be from now on? Having to draw out words from her daughter like a fisherman, her hook repeatedly scratching at the flesh of her catch?
‘Good,’ Sadie said, looking out of the window from the back seat.
‘I missed you,’ Gabriela said, her voice barely audible, and Sadie continued to watch the streets of her childhood passing by, as if her mother wasn’t there.