All this changed in the weeks after Petersburg. After Russia—dear God, the endless false floors—after Russia, a new and even deeper level had gradually revealed itself to Isabella: that Sasha was beside the point. Simply, she didn’t care. She didn’t care about the space. She didn’t care about his work. Not really. Not in the way you are supposed to care about the people you love. All of it was… was irrelevant. Because really this argument was with herself: where she was, who she was, what she was doing. And she was determined now to fight her way clear of the emotional wreckage of her parents (and their whole spineless generation), and Sasha would never understand this. She could neither count on nor confide in him. Either go in repetitious circles or break free: this was the choice. Fondness but not love.
Having left work in the morning and despite the hours at the Internet café, she was home early—it was only just three. She climbed the narrow stairwell with no plan of what to say but knowing that she must say it.
Her keys caught him out. She put her bag down by the sink. She did not look over again, to save him that indignity at least. Instead, leaning against the doorjamb, she bent awkwardly, her skirt restrictive, and removed her wretched shoes as slowly as she could, while he did himself up.
Fifteen bad seconds passed. The apartment smelled close, fetid.
“Hi, baby,” he said.
He was crimson. Torn between candor and dissembling. Uncertain of her reaction. Trying to click screens shut surreptitiously now.
“Sasha, I resigned from work today and I’m going back to London as soon as I can. I’m not sure for how long.” She did not advance but remained on the threshold. “I don’t want you to wait for me, though. I don’t want you to wait for me to come back, I mean.”
His face was blank, then bewildered. His attention divided. He was still trying to shut down whatever it was he had been looking at. And she could see that he was not sure what exactly she was saying. Understandable. So she had better just say it.
“Sasha.” She had him now. She had never said his name like that before. “Sasha, this is over for me.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to say…” Clean break, cruel to be kind: she felt the clichés gathering like a circle of bitchy teenage girls. So she stood her ground. “I don’t want to say that this is about me and not you, because it isn’t. This is about our relationship together… coming to an end.” She almost said “for now”—anything to make this easier. “But it is true, I have so many things I have to get straightened out—on my own. Partly about my mother and father and all that, but I think also about me. My life has been on pause for too long. I feel like I can’t move on until I have… okay, until I have sorted out who I am. And until then, I can’t be anything to anybody. I can’t be anything to you. I’m sorry.”
Though it was true enough, she hated herself for the way it was coming out.
The poor man was visibly reeling. “Is… Is… Izzy, where did all this come from? You resigned? What are you saying—what’s happened? I mean, come on, baby, you can’t just walk in and do this, just say all this out of nowhere. Out of totally nowhere. Jesus. Baby.”
He sat back, shaking his head, white-faced, his hand still on his mouse. But even in this moment she thought she detected a hint of melodramatic self-indulgence in his aspect. And already he was trying to make out that she was mad, an irrational woman. That old, old male gambit. And yes, it was all gambits with Sasha. She let this feed her determination.
“What I have just said is a little bit bullshitty, Sash, I know. I’m sorry. I do have a lot of stuff to sort… but that’s not the reason I’m saying that I want to bring this to an end. I—”
“We have to talk. Like, we have to talk right now.” He was up, reaching for his jacket. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go somewhere. Right now.”
He was coming toward her. She had to say it. She had to stop him before he tried to hold her.
“I want to end it because I am not in love with you. That is the truth. Sasha. I am sorry.”
He was very close now—suddenly handsome again, suddenly sweet, suddenly a man she could learn to love after all. But she met his gaze directly. Ordered the ducts of her eyes dry even as she felt her tears rising. Continued to hold his eyes with hers for a moment. Let her words find their way in. Let him hear. Let him know. There was no way back from that sentence.
Then she was passing him, heading by the sofa, carrying her shoes, exhausted. And in that moment, their bedroom was the saddest thing she had ever seen. Their shallow closet, their clothes mixed up on the chair, the cartoons that they had bought together, their photos, Sasha and Isabella swapping cocktails, Sasha and Isabella arm in arm on the cable car in San Francisco, Sasha and Isabella kissing for the camera she was holding at arm’s length, Sasha and Isabella dancing together, this duvet they shared, these pillows, this bed, this life.
Over.
25
The Kitchen Sink
“Hello.”
“Hello. Gabriel Glover?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Frank. From Quality Kitchens.”
“Hi.”
“Erm… can you come out? Don’t want to leave the van… Have you got the parking permit?”
A minute later, in jogging top and shorts, he was face to face with Frank Delaney himself: fifty-five, swept-back, dyed black hair, string vest, and hand-rolled cigarette; six-two, big hands, big shoulders, potbelly, long, fridge-carrying arms, wearing the default smirk of a man who has seen it all before, knows a thing or two (especially about women, so he’d have you believe)—a maverick, but still the best in the business, and already right at home in Gabriel’s entrance hall.
Without really thinking (he couldn’t think), Gabriel confessed that he did not have a parking permit. He must have looked blank or panicked or in need of leadership or something, because Frank nodded slowly and then said, “Oh, bollocks. Well, you’d better go and get one, mate. I suppose I’ll have to wait here in the van.”
“Right. Where do you get ’em?”
“Kentish Town. Spring Place. You know it?”
“No.”
Three minutes later, knees creaking to the off-beat of the never-oiled chain, he was cycling crazily across, through, between the furious morning traffic—rigid arms, rigid knuckles, rigid handlebars, rigid face set against the rigid city’s petrol rush.
Fifteen minutes after that (head like a sack of sickened Moscow rats), he was queuing with fat sassy gasmen, stick-thin chippies, wiry sparkies, bum-wielding builders. He was the only private citizen in the city, he noticed, to be collecting a parking permit on behalf of his workman.
Twenty minutes more were lost (and forty much-lamented quid) before he had filled in all the forms, signed everything, survived the looks, the jibes, the scorn, and was back on his bike pedaling furiously home, fearful both that Frank would have departed in disgust at the delay and that Lina would have arrived off her dawn flight back from a weekend in Stockholm. And perhaps these thoughts or the sudden rain (or the memory of his mother’s war on cars) distracted him.