The Channel, the day after Anna dies
The ramp clatters as the car moves onto the ferry. Once parked up, they head into the stairwell, following signs to the main deck, Harry following behind at a respectful distance. He watches as Sadie tucks herself onto Tom’s lap, Gabriela’s face pulling away, her daughter withdrawing in a foetal position, as if trying to make herself as small as possible, to make herself disappear.
‘You guys stay here,’ Harry says, though he is not here as their guardian and he knows that even if that was his job, there would be only so much he could do to keep them safe.
Finally, the motion of the boat lulls the older children to sleep, the two of them curled up on the floor, their heads resting against their bags, Tom seated beside them, his eyes fixed on the grey sea outside. Rain spatters against the windows once more as England disappears behind them for the final time.
Harry leans against the bar at the far side of the room, ordering a beer and sipping at it slowly as the boat makes headway. Finishing his drink sometime later, he orders another. When he glances over again at the family, Tom and the older children are just as he left them an hour or so earlier, but Gabriela is nowhere to be seen. Standing straighter, he keeps his cool – she has probably just gone to the bathroom or to change Layla’s nappy. There could be any number of reasons why she isn’t here, but something urges him to step away from the bar, to follow the path through from the centre of the boat towards the rain-spattered windows and the darkness beyond.
Part of Harry expects the door out to the deck to be closed at this late hour. But as he pushes against it, the mechanism gives way and he feels the wet sea air sting his cheeks. He spots her instantly, as he turns towards the nose of the boat, her silhouette framed by night sky. The surface of the deck is wet. Harry focuses on maintaining his balance as he moves carefully along the side of the ship, towards Gabriela. She is standing dead centre at the back of the boat, looking over the water so that her back is facing him. Leaning forward, one hand on Layla’s head, the other gripped around the ice-cold handrail, she watches the waves churning in the motor.
‘Hey,’ Harry says, once he is close enough that he could feasibly reach out and touch her.
When she turns to face him, Harry’s eyes move to the baby who is pressed against her mother’s chest.
If Gabriela is surprised to see him, she doesn’t show it.
‘How do you know Madeleine?’ she asks, as if continuing a conversation they were already having.
‘We met at an event. I was a reporter.’
Gabriela seems uninterested rather than placated by his answer.
‘She and I worked together at the Foreign Office. She was my work wife. She was better at it than I was … the work bit, not the wife bit – although she probably would have been better at that too.’ Gabriela laughs sardonically. ‘Our old boss, Guy Emsworth, hated us. It was mutual, although I didn’t hate him as much as Madeleine did, not at first – apparently she is much better at reading people than I am. Anyway, Madeleine left the FCO and went to the NCA, didn’t she? I was just thinking, if I had left then, too, that none of this would have happened.’
Gabriela’s voice trails off.
‘You know, what’s done is done. I don’t think there’s much point thinking about what ifs,’ Harry says. ‘We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.’
‘Yeah, well it’s one thing telling yourself that and it’s another stopping your mind from going where it wants to go,’ Gabriela replies, jiggling slightly as the baby stirs, before lowering her voice. ‘The point is, when I was replaying it all in my head, trying to pinpoint the moment at which it really started, I realised the connection between Ivan and me was Emsworth, my old boss. When I was at the FCO, he always used to take me to this little Italian bistro on Crown Passage, behind Pall Mall. He called it his “second office”. Once I left the FCO, I went back there one day and that’s where I met Ivan. I always assumed it was random, Ivan and I meeting like that, but what if the reason Ivan was there was that this was where he, too, met Emsworth, to hand over information?
‘I’m not saying Emsworth meant for Ivan and me to meet. In fact, I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted or anticipated that at all, but inadvertently, I suppose, this whole thing – this whole situation – is Emsworth’s fault, right?’
Harry bites his tongue.
‘That was what I was thinking, and then I realised, as you’re probably thinking right now, that I’m a fucking idiot. There was no grand conspiracy for me to meet Ivan, no one made this happen, no one is to blame, apart from me. I used to tell myself that this was Tom’s fault for not noticing or for not asking the right questions when I claimed to be spending weeks, sometimes months, abroad for work after Layla was born. But that was bullshit. The truth is, I was bored and I had an affair, that’s how basic it is. And now I’m taking my whole family on a boat to I don’t even fucking know where because our lives are under threat and—’
‘Hey,’ Harry says. ‘Let’s go inside … The baby will be getting cold. You should try to get some sleep. You must be tired.’
He felt her body tense as he touched her. ‘Come on, it’s a long drive tomorrow.’
They leave the ferry at Santander at five o’clock the following afternoon. According to the route he had plotted before he left home, the journey will take just over six and a half hours, leading them back into a pocket of France that is closer to the Spanish border than it is to Caen or Calais.
By the time the car pulls past San Sebastian, the city lights twinkling in the distance, all three children are asleep. Harry sits in the front, navigating from his phone, aware that his role now is as much a diplomatic presence, a neutralising force, as it is a chaperone.
There is nothing to mark their crossing the border from Spain to France as they make their way inland but for a small road sign, which flashes by in the dark so quickly that he almost misses it. Obediently, Tom follows the motorway signs for Carcassonne and Gabriela drifts off leaving just Harry and Tom awake in the front.
‘Are you OK? I can take over for a while if you want to grab some kip,’ Harry says after a while and Tom shakes his head.
‘Do you mind if I try the radio?’ Harry asks.
‘Be my guest.’
There is a blast of Euro-pop as Harry presses the power button, flicking through the channels before settling on a gentler song he vaguely recognises.
Allowing the music to fill the silence, Harry looks out of the window and after a moment, Tom starts to sing along quietly.
‘You know this one?’ Harry says and Tom almost smiles, speaking more than three words for the first time since their trip began.
‘You don’t?’ His face is incredulous, almost animated. ‘Eartha Kitt, man – it’s one of her most famous songs – it’s a classic.’
He starts to hum along again, a half-smile forming on his lips, as if he is suddenly lost in memory. Harry considers him for a moment before turning back towards the windscreen.
‘I don’t really listen to music.’
‘You don’t listen to music?’ Tom turns to look at him, before returning his attention to the road.
Harry shrugs. ‘Not really.’
‘That’s fucked up.’
There is a beat’s pause and then Harry laughs wistfully, looking out the window. ‘You’re not the first person to say so.’ His mind momentarily retreats to Meg, in the flat in Bethnal Green, several years earlier, not long before she left.
Abruptly, he changes the subject, pushing away the image of her face, a curl of red hair falling across her eye. ‘Where you from, then? That’s not a London accent.’
‘You really are a detective,’ Tom replies. ‘Edinburgh. Left when I was in my early twenties but some things you can’t shake. You?’
‘Irish.’
‘I guessed that much,’ Tom said. ‘Where in Ireland?’
‘Galway.’
‘Nice.’
‘It’s all right. Like you, got out as soon as I could. What did you do in London?’ He didn’t really care about the answer so much as he was grateful for the conversation, any distraction from the memories that threatened to smother him, the image of Anna that still lingered, just out of shot.
‘I was an architect, until the kids were born …’ His voice hardened. ‘One of us needed to stay at home and …’
The sound of the baby stirring cuts him off and when Harry turns, he sees Gabriela coming to, sitting up and reaching forward to comfort her.
‘I think she might need a change. How far away are we?’
‘Not far,’ Harry replies. ‘It’s just past midnight now. We’ll stay the night at a guesthouse in Béziers then drive on in the morning. The house is only a few minutes from there but it’s quite remote and the road can apparently be treacherous, so I don’t think we want to arrive in the dark.’
They leave the guesthouse early the next morning, Harry producing a bag of croissants as they pile into the car, like the teacher on a school trip.
No one speaks; the only sound is the occasional ping from the game Callum is playing on the iPad. Soon, long, featureless roads turn into smaller lanes, twisting and turning around the side of the mountain, folding into a series of pretty roundabouts and footbridges, before closing in on the village. The main boulevard is drenched in light; the forecourt of the Mairie brims with scooters.
Harry signals to Tom to pull over in front of a small café with an adjoining tabac.
‘You speak French, don’t you?’ he says, turning to Gabriela, without waiting for a reply. ‘We’re all going to go inside and order coffees. Strike up a conversation with someone there and explain that you’re moving here to renovate an old house. The plan is to live in it long-term, once it’s complete. You will be home-schooling the kids, if anyone asks.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we want people to know why you’re here before anyone starts asking questions. You want to assimilate without getting too involved. If it comes up, I’m here to help you with the move. OK? Right, let’s do this.’