Time stalled. He could neither go up nor turn around. He became apprehensive that at any minute someone might come out of one of the other doors on the staircase and wonder what the hell he was doing. So, madly, he took his telephone from his pocket and began thumbing through the names in his address book for no reason. He had the idea that he might call someone. Might, in fact, call Isabella.
Christ, today was the wrong day. Maybe it was the train ride. But there was nothing there. No fury and no flame. No injury, no hurt. He was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to remember what it was all about ever again, that he might go in there, go through with it all, and at no point do justice to whatever it was he had previously thought had been so traduced all his life. This was a new malaise altogether: standing in the shadows of his father’s stairway, scared to move in case anyone heard him.
The door opened.
“Okay… I have to go,” he said to nobody, into the receiver of his telephone, before making a show of pressing a button to end the call.
“Gabriel. I thought it must be you.”
The figure in the doorway looked nothing like his father. He was an old man, completely white-haired, with rheumy eyes, and thin, very thin; and now, as the door was pulled back, Gabriel could see that this old man moved with great difficulty and with a cane.
“Gabriel.”
The shock. “Hello, Dad.”
Nicholas smiled, a little lopsidedly, but abruptly Gabriel saw that it was there—the light, the old familiar animus. It was as if the stroke had left his father with a death mask as his default face; as if eerie blankness was where he must begin and must quickly subside; and it was only when he physically, consciously willed himself to move his muscles that expression returned, flooding into his features.
“Sorry.” Gabriel was conscious that he was already apologizing. “I just had to finish a call.”
“Come in. Come in.” Nicholas beckoned, his arm extended. “It’s freezing out there.”
Conscious too that he was apologizing for something that he hadn’t actually been doing at all, something that was not in fact true. So it began.
“It’s not too bad. I walked here.”
“From London?”
“From the twentieth.”
“Ah, shame—thought you might be able to teach me how to walk on water so that I can annoy my doctor. He’s a very difficult man to impress. Danish. But walking-on-water-and-bugger-the-cane would do it, I imagine.” Nicholas closed the door and turned. “It’s very good to see you, Gabriel.”
The charm was there yet. But for these two men, for whom physical contact and human touch meant so very much, there was no embrace. Instead Gabriel merely stood looking around at all the wood, the paintings on the walls, the elegance.
“How are you, Dad?”
“I’m fine. It’s taking me longer to recover than I had hoped, of course—it sort of goes in fits and starts. I was quick at first, but not so now. Still”—he dragged his lips into a smile—“I’m able to get out of the apartment as of this week, and my walking is improving. I’m aiming to go all the way to Notre Dame and back by the end of the month. A pilgrimage. I count myself lucky. Very lucky. My speech wasn’t really affected. The Dane says I’ll be passing myself off as normal soon enough.”
His face fell to nothing again and he shifted his weight onto his cane.
Gabriel remembered what his mother had once said about his father, about him being a man of so much energy, about that being what had attracted her to him. And now, a man of so much energy so reduced. He spoke to stop himself from sympathizing any further.
“These are beautiful rooms.” They were in a paneled antechamber with three double doors leading off, ahead and to either side. Everything smelled of rosewood and furniture wax. The walls were hung with paintings by artists Gabriel assumed to be famous but whom he had no hope of recognizing. He looked about self-consciously. He focused on the fabric of the building instead: the slight bulge between the wooden beams of the ceiling, the slight slope of the parquet floor.
“When was this place built?”
“Bourbons.” His father’s eyes actually twinkled. “As haute bourgeois as I could manage. Here, give me your coat and gloves. And you go on through.” He gestured to the door on the right. “We will sit in there—you can see the river. Though it’s miserable on a day like this, I like to keep an eye on it just the same.”
Gabriel took off his coat and handed it to his father and watched him turn slowly and half shuffle, half walk toward the stand. He didn’t know whether to wait or go, so he waited. Nicholas hung his coat on a wooden hanger, but it was awkward for him using only one hand, the other on his cane.
As if reading Gabriel’s mind, Nicholas spoke over his shoulder. “I have someone here to help every day.” He raised his voice. “Alessandro?”
Then, his cane like the center point of a mathematical compass, he turned, one quarter at a time. “He comes by twice every day, which is useful. I told him to wait for you, so he could make us some tea or something. Do you want tea? Or would you rather—”
“Tea is fine.” Though he said it lightly, Gabriel suddenly felt severe, like a puritan or an overearnest college sportsman. And he had forgotten his father’s extraordinary ability to make every gesture count, every word weigh, as if there were always some underlying contest to each encounter, an underlying score to be kept, advantages gained, points lost, positions suspected, held, or revealed as false—the results of which somehow showed exactly what sort of person you really were. He felt compelled to add, “Tea is fine. I had a heavy night last night.”
“Good French wine, I hope.”
“Couscous, mainly.”
“This is the age of the tureen.”
“I am staying with people obsessed with couscous.”
“These are the creatures of the twentieth?”
“Friends, Dad.”
A man about his own age but pretending to be younger appeared from the opposite door.
“Alessandro, we’re going to have tea. Could you bring it through and… and a jug of milk?”
The reminder of his father’s many pathological subversions allowed Gabriel to recover himself, fortify himself. Though he disliked the trait, he was, he knew, fearsomely equipped with a similar arsenal. Updated, though. The next generation.
“Of course, Nick. Hi.” The man waved as if to suggest that he was too busy or too discreet to come over. “I’m Alessandro. You must be Gabriel. I have heard so much about you.”
Lies, Gabriel thought as he said a polite hello.
Five minutes later Gabriel stood by the high river window of the drawing room, waiting for his father to make the unbearably incremental journey from the door. In his mind’s most secret eye (wherein he had foreseen that this time would eventually come), he had long imagined that they would sit down face to face, that he would mentally shuffle his papers, and that he would then begin—solemnly—to ask a series of questions, which Nicholas would—candidly—answer: the penitent former foreign secretary finally facing the nation’s great journalist; why did you really invade, you oleaginous bastard, and what in the name of the living fuck did you think was going to happen once you were in there? But he had no chance to marshal his teeming thoughts—half hostile, half appalled; half compassionate, half desperate; halving and halving again every time he managed to fix on any single one in particular—no time to recover from the simple shock of the past three months, of everything, no time before Nicholas preempted him.