Gabriel looked down at his father’s trembling hands for a second, then abruptly stood. His vision was suddenly blurred. And his heart was traveling too fast, ricocheting from fury to confusion to numbness to exhilaration and back again. He could not trust himself anymore. He had to leave. And no, he was not ready to agree to this last devious bargain: to accept his father as a brother was to absolve him as a father, and this he could not do. When in fact nothing was changed. Not a single cruelty was excused. Not to him, his sister, or his mother. No, there could be no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness.
“I am sorry, Dad. I do not know you as my brother. Only as a father. Only as my father. This is all I know.” The taste of bile was in his mouth. “It may not be true, it may be founded on this lifelong lie, but that lie became my life. And for now, what is true is of no consequence. I have to go.”
“The letter?”
“Isabella will take it. Don’t—I can see myself out.”
“Are you going to come back tomorrow?”
“Goodbye, Dad.”
He leaned over the water and heaved his stomach inside out. The convulsions ripped through him, sudden paroxysms that gripped his body and emptied his mind. The river carried the sickness slowly away.
52
On the Waterfront
The next day, Sunday, the fifty filthy shades of gray were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniformly blue. A sharp winter’s cold was on the lips, a soft winter’s light on the cheek; the river walks were busy again beneath the embankments with people in striped scarves and coats and gloves; the drunks were out beneath the bridges, their stocks of brittle bonhomie briefly replenished; children were running ahead of chatty mothers, fathers in responsible colloquy two steps back, joggers; a blue-fingered juggler, a dozen walkers of a dozen different dogs, an elderly couple renewing their lifelong domestic hostilities, a slouch of teenagers (stereo thumping), tourists taking and retaking the same shot with a digital camera, and a man with white hair having considerable difficulty walking beside a young woman in an elegant pale coat.
And there ahead Notre Dame, a great leviathan, she thought, turned to stone by some gorgon of even greater dominion.
“Who is Alessandro?” she asked as her father drew up alongside. The Italian had just left them on the riverside walk and was climbing back up the stone stairs to the quay.
“He is a friend, Isabella, whom I pay handsomely.”
“Strange friend.”
“The most reliable sort.”
They walked on. And she fell into something of a pattern: she would wait patiently for Nicholas until she sensed that his effort to make progress was crossing from authentic to performance. Then she would take two or three steps of her own, ignoring him awhile, before turning back to address him once more.
“Besides everything else, why didn’t you tell us you were gay?”
Nicholas did not pause or look up but continued to concentrate on walking.
“I strongly dislike that ridiculous little word. Do you really want to talk about my private life? Is that why you came?”
“No… no. I suppose I just want to… to understand.” She felt herself weakening and so repeated her pattern of going ahead for a while. “I want to understand why you treated Mum so badly.”
He stopped, looked up, and raised his voice, as if the distance were at least double the three strides. “You think, at this late stage, that if I declare that I am conveniently homosexual, this will be a satisfactory excuse.”
“No,” she said. He genuinely did not care what other people thought of him; she would give him that.
“Well, then.” Her father shook his head.
She did not know what else to say on this matter—suddenly there seemed to be nothing to say. Perhaps that was his skill. In any case, she had vowed to Gabriel, to herself, not to argue. So she fell silent, watched her father, waited, walked on, waited.
She had spent yesterday morning with Arkady. She had given him money for the train to the airport. And then she had caught a late-afternoon Eurostar. Gabriel had met her at the Gare du Nord, fresh from his ordeal. Blankets stolen off the beds and thus wrapped against the cold, they had stayed up most of the night, sitting on the tiny balcony of their small hotel room, looking down through iron railings on the Rue des Grands-Degrés, drinking red wine, water, hot tea. Talking.
“As far as the third bench up there.” Nicholas brandished his cane.
“Okay.”
They were side by side for a moment.
Softly he said, “I am very fond of you, Isabella. I admire your intelligence. And your pride.”
She resisted the urge to take his arm.
“The pills, Zeloxitav, that you gave Mum—I looked them up. They have been withdrawn in this country—I mean in England—because they are thought to have side effects.”
“Where? Where did you look them up?”
“On the Internet.”
“I see.” Nicholas dragged up his eyebrows in an expression of disdain.
She went ahead and turned her back on her father to look at the cathedral again. Gabriel had been right: every second was agony.
“It’s astonishing how sharp the flying buttresses look in this light, isn’t it?” he said from behind her. “So exactly defined against the sky.”
“Yes.” How did he know what she was thinking?
Another family was coming toward them. The parents, not much older than she, smiled as they passed, telling their children to take care, take care. Nicholas stood still until they had all gone by. Then on again he went, head down. There was something heroic in his effort, something almost ferocious. It occurred to her that he had taken on a similar air to the one she remembered Max having—that air of irreducibility. Although it was different, of course, with Nicholas, tinged with bitterness and anger—an irreducibility despite everything he was rather than because of everything. But the spirit had traveled—in the blood, in the manner. The genes passed on their codes, like it or not.
They walked on together for another ten minutes, stopping and starting in their odd fashion. They had covered less than fifty yards.
“Here, I have a handkerchief. You can wipe it dry.”
Isabella attended to the bench. She wished she had brought a hat. Her ears were cold.
Nicholas sat down.
She sat beside him, facing the river, her hands curling and uncurling in the slim pockets of her coat. Then, without turning her head, she said, “You probably killed her, you know. The pills were withdrawn because they caused strokes.”
“I loved your mother all my life.”
“You may even have done it deliberately.”