She could never have imagined she would feel shy around her children, but the day of her return, she felt more than nervous, she felt exposed. It wasn’t just the prospect of watching what she said, of only recalling those months away within the permissible limits of what her family was allowed to know, checking herself on every detail, every consonant and vowel – a habit to which she had become accustomed and yet which became no less cumbersome as time passed. It was the fear that they would look at her and see what had changed.
‘Mum? She’s here!’
She could hear her children’s voices at the top of the staircase as she turned the key in the lock, muscle memory reminding her to push a little further to the left than common sense would suggest.
As she stepped through the door, she looked up, and when they saw her, Sadie paused, as if with one look at her face she sensed her mother’s apprehension.
The familiarity of the hallway felt like a blow to her solar plexus.
‘Darlings,’ she said as Callum ran towards her, hurling himself at her with a ferocity that made her wince.
‘Careful!’ Her voice was sharper than she had intended it to be and he took a step back, wounded, but then she bent her knees and scooped him into her chest.
Looking over his shoulder, she reached for Sadie with her other hand, the tears filling in her eyes as she joined them, the three of them contained like that until Tom moved into the hall behind them.
It was the sight of Tom that floored her. The way he hovered, the slight movement in his face as he looked at her, so familiar it was like curling up in front of a fire.
‘There she is,’ he said, the smile she knew so well creeping over his face, the lines deepening on his forehead. He was wearing an oven glove on one hand and as he stood there watching them. Slowly, Gabriela extricated herself from her children’s embrace, placing a hand against the wall and pulling herself straight.
She hadn’t expected the strength of emotion as he wrapped his arms around her, and she found herself instantly soothed by his touch.
‘Hey, it’s not that bad to be back, surely?’ he laughed, pulling away to wipe the tears streaming down her cheeks with the side of his finger.
‘I’ve missed you, so much,’ she said, her throat swelling, wanting to stop time; to pause the four of them, the smell of shop-bought lasagne drifting in from the kitchen. And yet, how could she think that? Instinctively, her breasts pricked as if scolding her, and she pictured Layla. How could she overlook her baby so easily? And then, before she could stop herself, she thought of Ivan, picturing him as a manifold: one body but two men. The Ivan she had met that day on Crown Passage, the bereaved father, the autonomous, decisive businessman, the person who had rushed her off her feet. And then who? What did she see next? Pushing the second image away before it could come fully into focus, she heard Tom speak again.
‘I’ve missed you too.’ There was almost a ferocity to his voice and she let herself fall into him again, her fingers clinging to his back, realising how tired she was. How utterly out of her depth.
‘I bought presents,’ she said in a bid to distract herself from the memory of what she’d left behind.
Hauling the suitcase into the kitchen, she felt winded as she reached into the side pocket of her suitcase.
‘Wine?’ Tom asked, and she nodded, grateful for anything to take the edge off. Anything to soften the claws tearing at her throat.
‘OK, so this is for you,’ she said, once she was settled on the sofa, the smell of it both familiar and unsettling; the same hot-rock burns – scars from the nights when Tom and she would lie here for hours in stoned silence in the early days.
This room had become an almost constant backdrop: her past and her present – and yet what of the future?
Sadie smiled politely as she lifted up the sticker book and the collectable plastic toy. Gabriela instantly regretted them as she saw her daughter’s face drop; it was the sort of present she would have loved once, but now the inappropriateness of the selection made her cheeks flare with embarrassment.
‘I’m sorry, there wasn’t much in Moscow. If I’m honest, I bought them at the airport on the way back. I didn’t think you’d fancy a matryoshka doll.’
As she said it, she realised Sadie probably would have.
Quickly, she added, ‘We’ll go shopping, an early birthday present, OK?’
Reaching back into her bag for the bars of chocolate and the bottle of whisky she had bought for Tom, she heard Callum, who was clutching the blue train she’d bought him, utter the words she had been dreading.
‘Where’s Otto?’
Without flinching she reached further into her bag. ‘Here he is.’
She pulled out the small, floppy-haired rabbit, the same baby blue fur, the same velveteen ears as the stuffed toy Saoirse and Jim had bought for him when he was a baby, and which had barely left Callum’s side before he gave it to her, to keep her warm on her trip.
Before he had even taken the toy in his hands, he said, ‘That’s not Otto.’
Blanching slightly, she laughed. ‘What are you on about, you funny thing? Of course it’s Otto, who else would it be?’
There was a note in her voice and she felt Sadie turn to look, interested now.
‘His hair is too blue and his eyes aren’t the same.’
She turned to Sadie, rolling her eyes affectionately, before turning back to Callum.
‘Oh, darling, you just don’t recognise him because it’s been so long … His fur just looks a little different because I gave him a wash. You should have seen him, after all our adventures … He was filthy!’
Gathering up the chocolate and the booze, she stood and held out her hands. ‘Now, I think Dad’s making dinner – are you going to help me give him these pressies, hmm?’
Letting Otto hang by his arm, Callum followed her to the counter.
It was only once the children had gone to bed that she realised how much she was dreading being left alone with Tom. Callum’s eyes had been drooping as bedtime approached, his head lolling against her arm as they watched the familiar Friday night TV, the canned laughter of the audience adding a hint of menace. She longed to hold him there, to keep this barrier between herself and Tom, and the inevitable questions, the closeness that she could not give him, not yet.
Sadie had curled her feet under her legs on the far side of the sofa, and whenever Gabriela tried to catch her eye, she felt Sadie’s gaze fix more firmly on the television set.
‘Well, I think it’s time you kids headed up,’ Tom said when the credits began to roll on a repeat of The Simpsons, signalling it was eight o’clock.
‘I don’t want to,’ Callum said, as Sadie picked herself up from the sofa, without a word.
‘Come on, son. Mummy’s knackered. We all need to go to sleep now, it’s late,’ Tom cajoled him.
‘I want a story,’ Callum persevered.
‘Not tonight, you’ve already stayed up past your bedtime …’
‘It’s fine,’ Gabriela interrupted, grateful for the extra time with the children, for the intimacy of those precious moments she’d wished away when they were tiny, curled up on the bed reading Goodnight Moon.
It was once she was back downstairs, the sound of the water she’d just turned on crashing against the bathtub above the living room, that she felt the sense of dread closing in.
‘So, are you going to tell me what it was like?’ he asked, once she emerged from the bathroom, the bedrooms upstairs having fallen silent.
What would the time be in Moscow? she wondered, looking up at the clock, which read 21.33. It would be past midnight. For a moment, she shuddered, stifling a yawn, and Tom lifted his head slightly to look at her.
‘It’s OK, we don’t need to talk now … you need to sleep. I’ve changed the sheets so it should be nice and cosy. Why don’t you head on up and I’ll turn off the lights down here?’
She nodded, smiling gratefully, and walked towards the door, turning briefly to watch him going through the usual evening routine, admitting to herself for the first time they were living on borrowed time.
The next morning was a Saturday. At some time around nine, Callum idled at the doorway to the bedroom before slipping in and climbing under the covers, as he had used to when he was tiny. Tom had already gone downstairs, believing Gabriela to still be asleep. When Sadie appeared in the doorway a while later, she beckoned her inside.
‘I missed you,’ Sadie said after a few moments, her voice so quiet Gabriela wasn’t sure whether she wanted her to hear it. Pressing her eyes together tightly, she ran her fingers gently over Sadie’s hair.
By the time they emerged in the kitchen, it was nearly ten. The back door was open, presumably to purge the smell of burnt toast.
She hadn’t slept so long or so deeply since before she’d left the children, despite all that should be keeping her awake, and there was something both disorientating and guilt-inducing about the experience.
‘I’ve made poached eggs,’ Tom announced, turning to her and smiling.
‘Sounds perfect,’ she replied, taking a seat at the table next to Sadie who immediately set to work, writing neatly in her school-book.
‘What topic are you doing this term?’ she asked, leaning in and inhaling deeply to soak up the smell of her, admiring the pale pink roses on her pyjamas. ‘Are those new?’ she continued before Sadie could answer her initial question, and Sadie nodded.
‘Dad bought them.’
For a moment she felt irrationally wounded. There was so much she didn’t know about the past few months, so many questions she had been unable – or unwilling – to ask, during their snatched phone calls.
‘One egg or two?’
She cleared a space on the table as Tom placed the plate in front of her, on which he had already served toast and two eggs.
‘This looks great, thank you.’
She thought of her breakfast the previous weekend. The typical Russian fare that was more about show than tradition: caviar, borscht, the champagne which had gone straight to her head, giving her the sort of frontal lobe headache she hadn’t experienced since Callum was a baby and she found herself temporarily struck by migraines, which the doctors dismissed as the result of dehydration (‘Very common in breastfeeding mothers’ – as if that fact alone should soothe the blinding pain).
Tom was working hard to keep everything as normal as possible as they pulled on their shoes and headed out for the family stroll across the Heath, which he’d suggested as he tidied away the plates after breakfast, indicating for her to stay seated as he did so.
That day, she was precious cargo, long-awaited and newly received from faraway lands; exotic and highly breakable.
There was a hint of summer in the air as they made their way towards the entrance by the tennis courts. It was a clear day and sprigs of colour lined the verge as the path led up and away from the tribes of dog-walkers and hungover parents wrestling with screaming toddlers gathered around the café, guiding them towards Kenwood.
‘Why don’t you run ahead and climb on the trees over there?’ she said to Callum, pointing towards the fallen trunks he had shuffled along as a toddler, bundled in a padded bodysuit, a look of terrified confusion gripping his features.
Callum tugged on her arm, gripping her hand more tightly with his own and shaking his head.
He did this when he was hurt or felt abandoned. She had forgotten it about him, the same behaviour he had displayed when she went away on shorter work trips when he was younger. His way of showing her he hadn’t forgiven her for leaving him was to hold on as tightly as he could.
Would Tom have received the same reaction had it been him who had gone away? Would friends and strangers have recoiled to hear that he was leaving his child for months on end, she wondered, if the tables were turned? It was a pointless question, of course: Tom was not going anywhere.
‘That’s OK, you don’t have to go, I just thought you might want to,’ she said to Callum, lightly squeezing his hand. ‘Once we get to Kenwood, we can have a hot chocolate.’ It was all she had in this moment. Simple offerings: food, drinks, nothing too cerebral.
And so it continued for the following week. Her adjusting back into family life, Tom accepting her self-imposed distance in a way that made her want to shake him.
And then finally, the following Saturday night, as they settled down with a bottle of wine on opposite sides of the sofa, he snapped.
‘Is this how it is now?’
She looked up, surprised by the timing of his offensive but also relieved.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You and me. We’re just going to cruise along like estranged housemates for the rest of eternity?’
She shifted in her seat.
‘I’m sorry, I know I’ve been …’ She let the words drift off, hoping he would step in to fill the silence. When he didn’t she continued hesitantly, ‘I just … It’s weird, being back. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t say that, but – well, that’s just how I feel.’
He nodded, grateful for her honesty.
‘I get that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But, Gabriela, it’s just me. It’s just Tom, you know you can talk to me …’
She shook her head. ‘I know. I know I can.’ She reached her hand to him. ‘I want to, it’s just there are so many things that I can’t …’
‘I don’t give a shit about that stuff, Gabriela.’ His voice suddenly rose. ‘I’m not interested in your work stuff. Whatever is going on with that, I don’t need to know. I just … I mean where did you stay? What did you eat?’ He was fumbling around for words. ‘Bloody hell, I don’t know. We don’t even have to talk about Moscow, I just want words, Gabriela. Anything.’ His voice fell quieter. ‘I just want you.’