She claimed she was taking the first ten days after Sadie’s school broke up as holiday leave from the job Tom still believed she had, and the four of them went on day trips to Margate and Brighton, courtesy of the generous allowance Ivan placed into her account each month.
‘I just travel so much for work, it would feel like a busman’s holiday to go abroad,’ she’d reasoned, when Tom broached the possibility of heading somewhere more exotic, knowing that she couldn’t leave England with Layla as young as she was.
‘That was nice,’ Tom said as they settled on the train back from Brighton to Victoria, laying out an M&S picnic on the table in front of them, Callum already asleep.
Sadie’s hairline was smudged with sun-cream, and she absent-mindedly swung her feet as she tucked into an egg and cress sandwich.
‘She seems happy,’ Gabriela said, only then realising how long it was since she’d seen her daughter so content. She reached across the table and squeezed her.
‘She likes us spending time together,’ Tom replied and Gabriela felt his words bristle against her.
On the way home from Victoria station, taking the tube straight through to Highbury before jumping in a cab, she felt a prickling sensation at the nape of her neck. Every so often she felt herself turn, her eyes scouring the crowds for something she felt but could not see.
For the unimaginably elongated stretch of Sadie and Callum’s school holidays, she had to revive the charade that she had a working life, leaving the house early in the morning and killing time wandering the more obscure streets of London, terrified she would bump into her children.
While she’d fleetingly wondered whether now was the time to tell Tom she had packed it in, she instantly remembered the cover the job gave her for the stints she spent with Ivan. She managed weeks here and there, telling Tom that she had work trips abroad. Did he wonder where she was, those nights holed up in another city or country? Did he try to picture the bed in which she slept?
She tried to push this thought out of mind as she took the bus to Aldgate and walked along Commercial Road, turning off onto the canal somewhere near Limehouse. Making her way along the path, the Thames stretching out on her right, the towers of Canary Wharf looming over the water in the distance, she felt the same fluttering sensation she’d experienced on the way back from that day trip to Brighton brush over her skin, and when she turned, she imagined a figure pulling back into the shadows.
Moving forward more quickly, listening out for footsteps, she took a deep breath and turned suddenly, ready to confront whoever was following her. But as she turned, there was just a single jogger making his way along the path behind her. The pounding of his trainers, the unexpectedness of his pace caused her to take a step back and hold onto the railing, the only thing standing between her and the river below.
Catching her breath, she watched the man disappear around the corner before closing her eyes and leaning down. When her phone rang a moment later, it was Polina, calling to update her on Layla while Ivan was away on another one of his increasingly frequent work trips; trips that suited Gabriela because the less he was around the less likely he was to question her own periods of absence.
‘I’m putting the phone to her ear so she can hear you speak,’ Polina said and Gabriela felt a pulling in her chest.
‘Layla? It’s Mummy. Can you hear me? Hello, darling …’
As a cyclist spun past, she felt herself withdraw slightly. Though she couldn’t pinpoint how and why, she understood on some level that the unravelling had already begun.
‘Can’t you come out with us today, Mummy?’ Callum asked the following morning as she ran fingers through her uncombed hair in the kitchen, her bag already on her arm.
‘You know, why not?’ she said, overcome by a sudden sense of duty to her second-born.
‘You’ll come?’ he said, his face joyful and disbelieving in equal measure.
‘Really?’ Tom queried. ‘But I thought you had that big meeting to prepare for, I thought you couldn’t—’
‘That’s not until next week,’ Gabriela interrupted him, sensing a thought she didn’t like taking shape in his mind.
‘But I’m sure you said—’
‘Oh look, forget it, if you don’t want me to come …’
‘Gabriela …’ Tom followed her through the house. She moved away from him quickly, fearful of the prospect of a conversation.
‘Don’t be like that, of course I want you to come,’ Tom said, attempting to overtake her in the narrow hallway, past the disorderly row of shoes stretching from the front door to the kitchen. ‘I’m just saying I thought you had to …’
She didn’t answer, moving more briskly towards the door. As he stepped in front of her, he kicked several pairs of shoes out of his path and held out his arms to prevent her from leaving. ‘You can’t do this, not again. Talk to me! Why are you always walking out on us?’
‘Get out of my way!’ she shouted back at him, her voice echoing through the house as she wrenched open the door, slamming it behind her. She could hear Tom’s voice yelling back at her from inside, and she clamped her hands over her ears, running as fast as she could until her feet could run no more.
Ivan was away again. As the demands of his work became greater, it became so rare that their diaries overlapped that on the occasions when they were together, it was an ongoing process of re-assimilation.
For the most part in those moments of familial adjustment, they talked about Layla, and Polina – Ivan reassuring her that she had no reason to worry on the occasions when she confided – in order to explain away the sudden rush of emotion that would consume her at times – her fears that Polina was a better mother-figure than she was.
Though Gabriela knew it frustrated him, she was too shattered and scared of being spotted to visit the high-end restaurants or cultural events he booked them into. Mainly, they would eat at home and watch films; she was too tired even to read the books Ivan bought her in airport bookshops when he was on his way back from wherever it was he had been, foreign texts mimicking the type of highbrow reading she’d impressed him with in the early days of their relationship.
When the conversation ran out, they sat on the sofa in silence, watching the mouths of the characters on the enormous state-of-the-art television move as she wondered what it was that they had ever talked about.
As autumn took hold, and with it the imminent prospect of days spent walking the streets in the cold, Gabriela was so tired from nights flitting in and out of consciousness, plunging in and out of dreams in which her two worlds would finally collide, that she longed to curl up in a state of hibernation and never get up. She could almost picture the various strings of her life coming loose, tying themselves around her neck in endless knots.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen Madeleine. Their lunches had become fewer and farther between with Madeleine so often working abroad, and then they’d stopped. Sometimes when she looked back on that part of her life, it was as if she had dreamt it.
At home she had stopped talking to Tom altogether about her work, besides the brief, passing details of the destinations he believed she was moving between, sometimes for just a few days at a time, sometimes more, as part of her role working government-to-government – and he had stopped asking. With every unasked question, Gabriela felt another of the sparks that had once flickered between them die out.
She told Tom she was off to Amsterdam for a few days, though it could have been the Congo or Bermuda for all that he seemed to notice. She was bored and frustrated to the extent that she had to resist the urge to make her stories more and more outlandish, just to see if there was ever a point at which he would start to question anything.
Ivan had arrived home that afternoon, heading straight upstairs after the briefest of hellos. Gabriela waited for him in the living room, nervous of what had triggered his obvious mood.
The older Layla got, the harder the separation became, with Gabriela’s anxiety so strong that she could still hear her child screaming by the time she was halfway down the street. Layla had started waking in the night again after a period of sleeping through and had just drifted off on her mother’s lap when Ivan breezed into the room.
‘I’m taking Layla to Moscow,’ he announced, presenting this fact as a fait accompli.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘On Monday, we’ll be gone for a week.’
‘What are you talking about? You can’t—’
He looked at her from where he was standing by the fireplace, slipping off the cufflinks from his shirt and placing them on the coffee table.
Feeling her heart beat faster in her chest, Gabriela lifted Layla from her lap, careful not to wake her, and settled her sleeping body on the sofa beside her, before standing.
‘You can’t do that.’
‘I can’t do what? Take our daughter to see her grandmother?’ He sounded genuinely bemused. ‘Why would you care where she is if you’re not going to be here anyway? If you’re so much more committed to your … What would you call them, these “causes” of yours?’
‘Ivan, that is not fair, and you know it.’
He looked at her, tilting his head as if working hard to recognise her.
Avoiding his gaze, she continued, ‘What if something happened, if there was an accident?’
‘Oh, come on, accidents can happen anywhere, and it’s hardly as if you haven’t spent a week away from your daughter before. Besides, Polina will be with us, she is more than capable.’
More capable than you are, he didn’t have to say.
Ignoring the implication, she shook her head. ‘I don’t like it.’
But Ivan simply stood, laughing dismissively. ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not up to you, Gabriela. You can’t have it both ways. Either you’re here or you’re not.’
She watched him as he moved out of the room, trying to discern the real meaning rattling through his words.