She smothered these questions quickly with the thick blanket of her loyalty as Gabriel reappeared, and in doing so had one of those odd moments which come only infrequently when you have known someone forever—longer: she suddenly saw her brother clearly as a stranger might. Yes, he was handsome in what she always thought of as his famous-for-something-but-nobody-is-sure-what look, but now his slight scruffiness, his tousled hair, his loose shirt, his jeans, his battered boots—they somehow told against him. Where before there had been a casual confidence dressing down, she now saw anguish dressing up. His manner no longer said, “I don’t care to manage any better—take it or leave it,” but instead, “This is the best I can manage.”
“How you feeling?” she asked.
“Fantastic. All go.”
Isabella smiled. “I mean, can you take a drink or are you going to crash?”
“I’d love a drink. I would absolutely love a drink.” Gabriel eased into his seat and grimaced. “I didn’t sleep last night—in fact, I can’t remember when I last slept. I’m totally wasted. What you thinking?”
“I’m thinking vodka. It can only help.”
“Tonics separate?” Gabriel found a lopsided grin.
She smiled in return. Vodka that was worth tasting—it meant they were in Russia together again.
Gabriel put up his hand to catch the attention of the barman and unwrapped the new packet of cigarettes. “But if I burst into tears, get me to the lifts. I’m serious. It’s been happening all day.”
“You won’t. You’re too tired.” Isabella held out her palms. “Chuck the cigarettes, then.”
“You smoking again?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
After that, everything external slowly faded away until there was just the two of them talking to each other, moving slowly across the ice toward the discussion that they knew they must have. On any other subject they could be as frank and as open as it was possible for two human beings to be; but on the subject of their father—and on this subject alone—there was convention and even taboo between them.
“What are we doing here, by the way?” Isabella asked.
“Lina. Lina sorted it all out. She says not to worry about anything… and I was too… I was too battered to argue… so I just checked in.”
“Right.” Unlike everyone else, Isabella understood without judgment the exact nature of her brother’s situation. And above all her other concerns on the subject, she worried about the hidden damage it was doing to him. But all that was for another day. “Is Lina coming?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Probably not, now it’s looking like Friday.”
Isabella considered. “I’d better go to the flat tomorrow. I suppose we’re going to have to ship Mum’s stuff home. Maybe not the furniture. But all the rest—her private papers, her books and everything. We should start.”
Her brother smiled sadly. “We’ll spend the day. Go through it together.”
She watched him sip his vodka, then hold it on his tongue for a few seconds, tasting.
“She had begun to call quite a lot,” he said. “It was getting pretty mad. Every night.”
“Mad?”
“I didn’t mean that. Not mad. I mean she was becoming more roundabout—she was saying more and more roundabout stuff that always seemed to imply other things.” Gabriel raised an eyebrow ruefully. “As well as all the usual lectures on how to live your life and the state of the world.”
Isabella swallowed and felt the burn. “Hard to know whether or not to take all that stuff seriously.”
Her brother sucked his teeth. “She did,” he said.
“Yes.” Isabella nodded slowly. “You know, in the last few months she kept writing to me about Thomas Jefferson.” She affected a declamatory voice. “‘All attempts to influence the mind by temporal punishments, or burdens, or civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness…’You know the routine.”
Gabriel nodded slowly.
The vodka was working its magic on their willful blood. Isabella took another sip. “Do you ever think about those summers when she used to drive us around Europe—on her own in that old car?”
“All the time.” She saw the lines around her brother’s eyes as he spoke. “Nothing but concentration camps and art galleries for weeks on end.”
“And don’t forget every house that the great composers ever lived in,” Isabella added. “Mozart’s cradles and Beethoven’s death masks. Jesus, she must have driven us a thousand miles every summer.”
Her brother shut his eyes a moment and screwed up his face—against the vodka’s bite, perhaps. “You know she was ill?”
Isabella looked away, momentarily taken aback, though this was one of her suspicions. “Ill in what way?”
“She was coughing—coughing really badly on the phone. The last time she called she had this… this fit. I’m not joking—she was coughing for about five minutes.” Gabriel straightened and extended his arm before him, his cigarette between fingers. “You know what, Is? I think she had cancer and I think she knew it. I think that’s why she was ringing me. I think she found out recently. I think the stroke might have been a blessing.”
Isabella forced herself to relax her forehead.
“She smoked all her life. It happens, Is. It happens all the time.”
“Yes… yes, I know.” Isabella tipped tonic into what remained of her vodka. “Actually, I’ve been thinking the same.”
“You have?”
“Yes… I mean, not specifically cancer. But I’ve been thinking that she might have been ill.” And now Isabella saw what she had been looking for: a chance to take those last few steps. “It would explain something that she wrote in her last letter. She said that I should make sure that I visited her here, in Petersburg, before I… before I visited Dad.”
Her brother was silent.
Isabella asked, “Do you think he’s going to come?”
“Who, Dad?” As if she meant anyone else.
“Yes—Dad.”
But Gabriel, either too tired or past caring or vodka-quelled, surprised her again by speaking in a flat and emotionless voice. “He’s only been back here once since they got married. And that was to sell Grandpa Max s house and plunder all his stuff. He hates this place.”
“Yeah, you’re right… But this is slightly different, isn’t it? It’s not like they re divorced.”
“Is, Dad doesn’t give a fuck about Mum.” She watched him put out his cigarette. “All he will care about is recouping the money we made him give her. They haven’t spoken properly for ten years.”
Isabella wanted to ask her brother how he knew this. But she guessed that he didn’t, that it was a belief, a quasi-religious assertion. Gabriel loathed their father as much as he loved their mother, and to such an extent that he could not countenance the fact that the two of them had ever got on at all. Their marriage was opaque to him—an abomination he refused to consider. And now was not the time to dispute this or indeed any of the hundred credos of their family lore.
“Are you bothered about his paying for things?”
“Let him pay. Even if he is trying to make us feel guilty. It doesn’t matter. The result is that Mum gets buried where she wanted to and has a decent funeral.”