It was four now and she was back on the Northern Line, on her way to see a cluster of places near Susan’s in Kentish Town, the last of the day. The rest of the passengers looked nervous, overvigilant, tensed and ready, their heads jerking involuntarily to the maddened old tune of the centenarian track, but the racket and clatter were to her a lifelong balm. When she and her brother were young, they used to joke that happiness was a sign that read HIGH BARNET I MIN. The Northern Line was theirs. And the High Barnet branch was as good as home.
She wasn’t upset, or unduly depressed, or indeed angry about what had happened that morning—or not near the surface. Rather she felt as if she were on some kind of clumsy emotional painkiller, the sort of thing they handed out to people who could not take too much reality; she felt vaguely irritated, but she also felt cosseted from the rampage of what she knew must be the truth of her feelings. Yes, they stalked her. And she knew they would catch up with her. But not here and not yet. Not yet.
This weird fuzzy numbness had begun almost immediately after her brother had left the café. She had not been that worried. Instead she simply assumed—her spirit simply assumed, regardless of her mind—that somehow—and she had absolutely no idea how—they would find a way back. She really could not imagine what this way would be. For they had said far too much, they had said the unsayable, and she knew that she and her brother were fearsomely (and disastrously) equal in the ferocity with which neither would now yield an emotional millimeter without evidence first of a capitulation on the part of the other. Of all the people she had ever met, with the sole exception of her mother, only her brother had a focused will that equaled her own.
Everything was fucked, of course. That much was obvious. She couldn’t go on staying with Susan, though Susan had made it very clear that she was to remain as long as she liked. On the other hand, she was now no longer sure she wanted to remain in London at all. Hence the half-assed way in which she had been seeing the flats. She realized that she’d been banking on staying with Gabriel and Lina until… until she’d sorted herself out. But that too was out of the question.
At Warren Street, she experienced her first real pang for Sasha, for New York, for the East Village, for her life before. At least the old mess was properly understood: Mum—Russia; Dad—who cares?; Gabs—London; Sasha—annoying but good-hearted and actually a nice guy to hang out with. Oh God. She forced herself back into the present.
At the opposite pole from her fuzziness regarding her brother was her lucidity regarding her father. The dilemma was over. Gabriel knew. Fine. Now the way was open for her to have a clear run at Nicholas. All roads led back to him. She had enough money to see her through Christmas and a little beyond, after which she would absolutely have to work. So she must use the time between then and now to deal with the things that had brought her back to London in the first place. She had to talk to her father about her mother. And yet the thought of actually going to see him still repulsed her.
She fished her printed copy of his last e-mail out of her bag as the tube came to a standstill outside Camden.
Insidious. That was the only word for it.
My dear Isabella, I write with a proposal. Why don’t you come here for Christmas? You don’t have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it.
His charm, as ever, was so false and so real at the same time… It crawled under her skin, squirmed, hatched there. And all that stuff about ice creams and when they were all a little family. Yuck. Drawing on her sense of him as a father, of course, niftily leading her back into the role of little one, daughter, dependant. Then all that assumed mutuality—“you know what I mean, I think,” “yours whenever”—as if they had been the closest of families through every hour of her childhood and the very best of friends every day since. As if they had spent the past ten years popping around to borrow jam from each other. Next the rant about America, disguised in that faux-humble outside-observer tone (“I’d love to have your impressions”) but really yet another covert attack: an attack on her for going there and, by implication, on her judgment, on her taste, on her very personality, her life. The disguise reinstated at the end: “I am going on.” And so back to him again. (Nothing new there— always back to him.) Followed by the offer of payment, the closing terms, the arrangements—ostensibly offering her choices but actually choices that were all alike under his control. Thus, finally, to the blackmaiclass="underline" I’m not going to play your e-mail game; come and see me or you learn nothing.
Part of her felt cruel. Her father had suffered a stroke, and a stranger unaware of his menace would, she knew, have been appalled at her interpretation of the poor man’s kindly invitation and evident generosity. And yet that was precisely the point with her father. Both things were simultaneously true: he was a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time. The one did not cancel out the other. Besides, there was much new in this e-mail. There was loquacity, there was sentimentality, there was even, lurking back there, fear, panic, and loneliness…
She had forgotten about the weather. When she surfaced at Kentish Town it came at her again, as if she had returned to the deck of some desperate storm-pitched boat in the North Atlantic instead of stepping up onto the high street. The rain was almost evil, bending down in the wind to come up and under umbrellas, hoods. The cell phone she had borrowed from Susan beeped. There was a message. She stepped back inside the station’s shelter and huddled with all the other refugees. It was the guy from Petersburg, confirming their arrangement for that evening.
She had forgotten. And of course she hadn’t reminded Gabriel. Shit. Now her brother would not hear whatever the Russian had to say. She bit her lip hard. Well, fuck him.
She had already spoken to Arkady Artamenkov earlier in the week—this was how she knew Gabriel had not been at work, because the Russian had told her so. Anxious, Arkady had explained that he had been calling Gabriel, leaving messages, increasingly apprehensive as they were ignored, until eventually one of her brother’s colleagues had picked up the phone and explained that Gabriel was ill and not expected in before the weekend. Given the fiascos thus far, the Russian was clearly very worried about the reliability of Glovers in general. And so during that call she had reassured him and promised to confirm again on Friday. Yet again, therefore, she had failed to keep her word.
She listened to the Russian’s voice a second time. The message was short. She guessed that he was on a pay phone. “Hello, this is Arkady again. We are meeting tonight at Kentish Town tube station. Please call me on…” He read out the number slowly, and then again. And suddenly she was looking forward to talking with this man more than any other thing in her life that she could remember. What did he know of her mother? Please God he was still going to come.
“Hello, Pat’s Place.” A hard voice, of Northern Irish extraction.
“Hi. Can I leave a message for someone?”
“You can try.”
She was caught out a moment. “Oh. Can I—”
“There’s seventy people in and out of here every day, and half of them don’t speak a word of English, and none of them give their right and proper names. But go on—your fellow just might be the one exception. Who’s it for?”