After that first night at home, the week of her return, she struggled to sleep. While Tom lay beside her, dead to the world, she stared at the ceiling, clinging to the duvet, imagining Layla on the other side of London, without her. Less than two months ago she was still inside her body; how would she cope now? Where would she think her mother had gone?
There were things she had prepared for, knowing as she had that she would not always be able to be there. She had mixed breast and bottle-feeding from the start for fear she would be unable to wean her baby off in time for her to leave, though it pulled against her every instinct to lure her away from her body, to stop her latching on when she went for the nipple. She had been ready for that, along with the tales she had been prepared to tell to explain away the abdominal scar if for any reason the birth had ended up needing a C-section. Though in the end she hadn’t.
The birth itself had passed with relative ease, in the corporate environs of the private hospital Ivan had paid for, but there were things she hadn’t anticipated, things so fundamental that she had not let herself so much as imagine them. At the forefront of it all was the sense of all-consuming loss: the intangible but unavoidable fact that everything about this was completely wrong.
There were smaller things, too, that caught her off-guard. Her inability to remember any of the milestones of early motherhood meant that though she had already done it twice before, Gabriela seemed to have no recollection of the stages at which anything was supposed to happen. The unknowing of it, the constant cycle of surprises, amazed and terrified her.
In the immediate days after she arrived back in Dartmouth Park, she feigned a list of errands that would allow her to get out, to breathe, to scream into her own hands.
The GP’s waiting room seemed smaller than she remembered and she struggled to focus on the out-of-date magazines, finding herself standing and pacing the room while she waited for her name to be called.
‘It says here you have struggled with insomnia before,’ the locum GP said as she scanned through her medical history.
‘Yes, but I’ve never taken medication. Usually I’ve tried other things and they’ve eventually helped.’
‘What sort of things?’
She thought of the late-night glasses of wine, the over-the-counter antihistamines that had in the short term done a job of sorts in numbing her mind.
‘You know, cutting down on screen-time in the evenings, less coffee …’ she said, her voice fading out.
‘OK. What do you think is different now from last time?’
Briefly she pictured her previous trip to this same surgery, the conversation with yet another locum doctor who didn’t know her from Adam, in the weeks after she’d walked out of the FCO, when the churning of her own thoughts had first started to keep her awake at night. In another snapshot, she saw her baby, screaming for her mother on the other side of the city.
‘I don’t know, really. I suppose things got better. But recently things have become … stressful again.’
‘Stressful how?’
‘Family things. I’ve done everything I can. I just really think I would benefit from a few good nights’ sleep. I don’t want to take medicine long-term, really … I understand the dangers. But if I could just have something to help me get over this phase, then once I’m back into the rhythm I can continue the lifestyle adjustments you recommended …’
The doctor held her eye for a moment before conceding. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
Her belly, which had been so protruded for the first three weeks after Layla was born that she worried it would never return to normal, had flattened so that she was not much bigger than she had been when she left. Still, as a defensive move, she wore loose-fitting shirt-dresses and made passing comments about the immense portion sizes in Russia, and the lack of exercise. If Tom noticed the extra flesh, he thought better than to mention it.
Gabriela felt her cheeks burn, though she knew the question was nothing more than protocol. This was not a test. Even if the doctor had noticed her recent pregnancy with Layla registered on her notes, there was no reason for her to believe anything was out of the ordinary. There was no way of her knowing who the father was, and she had no reason to ask, or to care.
Gabriela had to restrain herself from biting the doctor’s hand off as she handed her the prescription for a batch of eszopiclone, reeling out the suggested dosage with the final warning, ‘Pills are only a short-term solution. Behavioural therapy is the best approach, in the long term.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, smiling gratefully, slipping the prescription into her pocket.
As she crossed the road towards home, she felt herself looking over her shoulder, unable to shake the sense that she was not alone. By the time she reached Chester Road, her feet were moving so fast that she felt she would trip. As she made her way up the path towards her front door, she thought of Emsworth before shaking the image away. Whatever it was he had been embroiled in, he’d been caught out. No one was watching her anymore. She was paranoid, justifiably perhaps, but the fear she was experiencing now was misplaced. The thought of Emsworth, the man responsible for sending her entire life into disarray, being caught out should have filled her with some sense of satisfaction and renewed purpose, even if he hadn’t been hung out to dry in quite the way she might have hoped.
It might even have been possible to get her job back, to contact the FCO and explain what had happened, at least to get a reference. But the thought brought not even the slightest sliver of pleasure. When she looked back on those days, it was like looking at a different person, a hologram that might or might not have ever existed at all.
That night she took one of the pills she’d procured from the GP and sat on the sofa. With Tom out playing a gig at a local pub and the children already asleep, the house felt too quiet. Flicking on the television, she sat on the sofa and felt suddenly aware of the pitch-black sky through the terraced doors. It had never occurred to her before that they needed curtains, but suddenly she felt so exposed it was though she was on stage.
Standing, running to the doorway, imagining a cross marked on her forehead as she made her way across the room, a gun pointed at her head from the shadows of their tiny garden, she switched off the light. In the darkness, her heartbeat slowed, and instinctively she knew she had to talk. The voices that rang in her head would not be silenced. Tell Madeleine. There was no reason not to; she was no longer in a state of denial about how deep in she was. Madeleine would know what to do, or at least she would know what to say.
Pulling her phone out of her bag, she dialled the number and cursed as the voicemail kicked in. Retrieving her laptop from her bag, she composed an email, headed Lunch?, keeping the tone light in the text.
The bounce-back was immediate: I’m out of the country on business …
‘Fuck!’ The sound of her own voice made her jump and for a moment she imagined herself running out of the front door. Instead, she walked upstairs, the house in darkness, and lay on the bed waiting for the sleeping pills to pull her under.
Around 3 a.m., unconsciousness finally enveloped and held her there, deep in its embrace until just past 9 when, stirring in bed, she heard the key in the lock telling her Tom was home after dropping the kids at school.
He didn’t come upstairs and when she heard the door clicking closed again ten minutes later, she ventured down and found the kitchen immaculate, only then recalling Tom saying something about having a job to quote on this morning. She looked around the room; the house felt strangely like a stage set, all the correct props in their rightful place but something about them artificial. Sitting at the kitchen table, she felt as though her limbs had been severed and her body was floating along on a stream, unable to pull herself back as the sea opened up ahead.