Just like that, he introduced her to all his new flatmates, all five of them in their late twenties and early thirties, as if this were just another routine and reasonably considered move in a life of steady progress. There was talk of handy shops. Talk of the local. Talk of a dinner party so that he could get to know their various “other halves.” Talk of bills and a few house rules. Talk of a cleaning rota. Talk of the garden’s being lovely in the summer. Excited talk of a New Year’s party they were planning. He was all agreement, regularity, and straight, easy charm. She couldn’t believe he was fooling them. A good actor—she had forgotten that—a very good actor. Because he meant it. While he was saying it, he meant it. And he made her feel discomfited and deceitful for not going along with it. As though she would be letting down not only him but these great new flatmates too: Claire, Chris, Sean, Louis, and Taz. So she just had to stand there and nod and smile and listen.
Stunned, anxious, panicked, she climbed into the moving van at eight the next morning, the Sunday sky raw as pale flesh before the flogging starts. He had not answered his phone all night. She had left three or four messages. And a part of her was plain relieved that he was here, alive, staring dead ahead from behind the blue plastic wheel, dressed in paint-stained green overalls that she could not imagine her brother wearing, let alone owning, in a million years of trying. She took one look at his face and knew that he had not slept for a moment, nor bothered to try. She said nothing. He would speak or not, as he wished. The radio told of yet another leadership crisis. They set off, brother and sister.
After a while he began to talk—brusque and broken sentences, which she did not question. She understood that Lina had last night cried such terrible silent tears that in the end Gabriel had carried her across the threshold in his arms and driven her, wrapped in a blanket, to her mother’s in the van. The bitter opposite of marriage, he muttered. Then he himself had gone to his friend Larry’s, at one or two. Beyond that, more or less all he would say was that it was not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, over and over again.
He was no longer pretending to be normal, at least. Instead, for the rest of the morning he was mostly silent or blank. She had not known a more suffocating day—the very air seemed to be shrinking and shriveling from the evolving pain.
And the day did not relent. At one, still feeling helpless, anxious, and now hungry, Isabella stood alone in the cream-colored bedroom that her brother had shared with Lina for the past four years, packing a torn English translation of War and Peace into the final box of this trip and wondering if she would make it down to the car with all the remaining plastic bags and the holdall in one go. She did not want to come back up. Gabriel had set off again in the van. Adam was in the car waiting for her. He had been roped in (by Susan) to help. Poor, poor Lina was at her mother’s.
Staring at the book, she allowed herself to access the secret cargo of guilt she had been carrying since Gabriel’s call for help: perhaps… perhaps indirectly she had been the cause. Had she not in some way prompted him to this decision in the pub? Had she been too forthright about leaving Sasha? By showing off about her decisiveness (and that, she knew, was what she had been doing), had she not thrown his indecision into relief, made him feel his inaction as a fault? And now he had gone and done this. Taken a cheap room in a shared house in Chalk Farm on what looked like the rashest impulse of his life.
She opened the book, knowing well that the inscription would be in her mother’s hand.
Dear Gabriel, I hope one day you will read this book and find in it all the life that I do! Life is all there is—it seems obvious enough, but you will be amazed at how many people forget. And for Tolstoy, as for his Pierre Bezukhov, the only duty is to life itself: “Life is everything. Life is God.” Even in the fever of our wars and the squandering of our peace. Happy Birthday! Again!
Isabella had the same edition herself, also a birthday present from her mother. Though, as she recalled, her inscription was to do with Tolstoy saying that “the one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.”
Oh Mum, Mum, Mum.
The doorbell rang, startling her. Or rather, the doorbell chimed. She put the book in the holdall with the rest, swung it over her shoulder, and then bent to pick up the box and various plastic bags. She remembered (with a bite of her lip) that it had once been one of those nerve-shredding London buzzers, before Lina took action. Now it was a Serenity Chime.
And Isabella had to let it chime serenely all the way to the final chord as she struggled into the hall, the holdall creeping forward and refusing to stay properly over her shoulder, the plastic bags straining at her fingers, the box weighing her down.
Jesus. I’m coming. Persistent bastard. Surely not Gabriel? No, he would come straight up. For a horrible moment she thought that maybe it was Lina, returning impromptu from her mother’s, and that there would now be more tears and that terrible slow-motion anguish. And what in Christ’s name was she, Isabella, going to say? But then she realized with relief that Lina, of course, had keys to her own flat. And Lina would not come back now the decision had been made, however unconvincingly, however madly. Because in her own way, Lina was far stronger than Gabriel knew. And though he was the emotional vandal now, in the long run it would be her brother whose suffering was greater. Dear God. Ten percent more or less of a bastard and Gabs would have been fine.
The chime built toward its final chord again. She managed to put down the box on Lina’s little telephone table without everything underneath sliding to the floor. It must be Adam. He had been waiting with his car and partially blocking the narrow road—maybe there was a warden. Desperate to prevent the whole cycle from beginning again, Isabella grabbed the entryphone, one hand still balancing the box, fingers now white and taut from the heavy handles of the bags.
“Hello. I’m just coming down.”
But it wasn’t Adam. The accent was East European. “Hello—this is Gabriel Glover?”
“Nope.”
“This is Gabriel Glover’s house?”
“Yes… No. Yes. For about another two minutes, anyway.”
“I am sorry. May I speak with Gabriel Glover, please?”
“I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment.” Some strange friend of her brother’s, she guessed. “But I’m coming out. Hang on a second.”
For heaven’s sake. She hung the thing back on the wall, placed the key in her teeth, hoisted box, bags, and holdall, pulled the door shut behind her with her trailing foot. Probably some Sunday thing her brother had forgotten about. Not surprisingly. She put everything down on the stairs, locked the door, jiggling the key against the stiffness, picked everything up again, cursed her brother, and set off for the front door.
She did not regret offering to help Gabriel move, of course—she would gladly have offered to fetch his things from hell itself—but she was conscious that innocent Adam had been volunteered as a supplementary driver without being present at the discussion. And having carried out the best part of a trunk’s worth himself, he was no doubt anxious to return to his own (much better) life. She reached the front door in a hurry, therefore, as well as a fluster.