She had always been in motion, even when they were all together. Money moved her. First it was her father’s; later it belonged to her mother’s boyfriends. It took her to various places in which had existed various versions of herself, each furnished with a nanny and a school and an address to memorize and another set of little girls to invite to a birthday party in an expensive restaurant where there was always a clown and no one laughed. There was only one constant: sooner or later everyone and everything was left behind.
By the time she was sixteen her father was a man she met in hotels and her mother was thinking of marrying again, so on a whim she asked to go to boarding school. An English girls’ school like the ones in books. At the time everyone thought it was the perfect solution. After it didn’t work out there was Lausanne and Paris and her own modelling and a Brazilian photographer boyfriend and too many drugs, but weirdly it was her sister, the self-sufficient one who shouted at her mother about guilt and responsibility, who took the overdose. Caroline’s movement had mostly been across Asia. Beaches and ashrams. Jewellery-making. Towards the end it accelerated, took on the quality of flight. By then she was back in Europe and always part of a group, as if she needed people as ballast, numbers to hold her down. Political and religious groups. Self-actualization. Healing. There were retreats and communes. Fasting and chanting. Then sleeping pills on the bathroom floor of a farmhouse in, where was it, Andalusia? It had been hard to find out exactly why she had gone there. Like so many events in Gaby’s life, Caroline’s death made no particular sense. It was just a thing.
Her parents spent the funeral politely convincing each other the death was accidental, though Gaby knew how the money had hounded Caroline, how she hated it for making her life into a game. Watching the two of them edit the story to suit themselves made them so terrible in her eyes that she left Firenze that afternoon and for good measure left Paris and the photographer too and somehow London was where she ended up.
Sophie chattered, taking gulps of Chardonnay and rubbing her nose with her fingers. ‘I don’t know why you stay with him. Of course he’s rich and everything. Or at least he seems rich. You can’t tell with men these days. One minute they are, then you discover they’re not.’
Gaby looked at her with a twinge of distaste. Underneath its crown of expensively streaked hair her face was flushed with wine and cocaine. Pink patches mottled her neck and cheeks, giving her the appearance of a side of marbled beef. She had, Gaby reflected, got bigger since school. Now a size eighteen with a pure maths degree, she combined high earnings as a telecoms analyst with a bleak and hostile view of men. In her Fulham townhouse there was a walk-in closet filled with shoes, tiny pointy confections of silk and leather which cost hundreds of pounds a pair and made her feet hurt. Gaby looked at the twin plasters on her friend’s bare heels. Poor Sophie, with her dreams of daintiness.
She got up and slid the door open on to the balcony. Sophie followed, and they looked over the river, at the costume-drama ripple and glint of Chelsea reflected in the water.
‘It’s a good view,’ Sophie snorted. ‘But is that enough? I mean, what else is Mr Swift bringing to the table?’
So Gabriella sat in Sake-Souk listening to Guy chewing his main course and thinking about what he was bringing to the table and eventually found herself staring back at the man on the other side of the room. He looked familiar, an actor maybe.
Guy followed her eyeline. ‘Do you know him?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I don’t think so.’
Guy took a moment to revel in her voice, the way her beautiful mouth turned th into f, her bored elongated i. He heard in it the generic European female tone of techno records, a voice made to say, ‘Oh baby, you make me feel so good.’ The untapped erotics of Gaby’s accent diverted him from the problem of the man at the far end of the restaurant, and he forgot the icy look he was about to flash him and instead made an attempt to bridge the gap which had opened up during dinner.
‘Sweetie, I thought maybe we could try out Thailand this summer.’
‘Try it out? Why? Do you want to buy it?’
She was looking at him with an expression of unfathomable scorn. He began to think he had said something wrong. Gaby was a great girl but she did have her moods.
When Chris’s alarm went in the morning, she stumbled out of the bedroom to find the couch vacant and the spare quilt neatly folded up on top. A note was propped up on the coffee table thanking her without punctuation or capital letters for a nice evening, and as Nicolai groaned and called out plaintively for coffee a momentary stab of unease penetrated her nausea. Did she do something last night? Later, from her desk at Virugenix, she sent Arjun mail. He did not reply. That week she was swamped by work, and the silence lengthened into several days, a weekend. The following Monday she spotted him in the cafeteria and went over to say hi. He said hi back and carried on eating. She asked if he still wanted to go on with the lessons. She meant it as a joke. He nodded hesitantly but wouldn’t make eye contact, shuffling his feet under the Formica table as if he couldn’t wait for her to go away.
‘Arjun, did I piss you off the other day?’
‘Pardon? Oh, no, not at all.’
‘So why are you acting like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘You know what I mean.’
He grimaced and shrugged his shoulders petulantly. ‘I’m not pissed off; I’m very happy. Yes, let’s have a driving lesson. Email me, OK?’
‘Come on, don’t be an asshole. Was it Nicolai?’
‘Who?’
‘I told you I lived with someone.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ There was a long uneasy pause, as he struggled for words. ‘Well you did, but I thought you just meant — that is — you didn’t tell me you were married.’
‘Not married, Arjun, just living together. And we — well, it’s not like we’re exactly traditional — look, why am I even explaining this? All I’m saying is I’m sorry, OK, for whatever it is. I want us to be friends.’
‘So do I,’ he said.
This was Chris’s cue to say great absolutely see you some time and walk off. When they start to get weird on you, it’s a prelude to one thing only. Mr Arjun Mehta was turning into trouble. He would have to go somewhere else for driver ed. For some reason what came out of her mouth was ‘Good, so why don’t we act like friends and hang out for an evening? We could do something — I don’t know — we could catch one of your movies.’
Arjun looked confused. ‘My movies? You mean Indian movies? You want to see a Hindi movie?’
‘Sure.’
He looked surprised.
‘Great,’ he said uncertainly ‘I’m not sure you’ll like it.’
‘Why not let me try? How about tomorrow night?’
‘Uh, OK.’
Which is how they ended up driving to a mall in Kirkland to see a movie that involved two boys and two girls who took three and a half hours to persuade their parents to let them marry each other in the correct combination. Chris was bored. Was the guy in the see-through organdie shirt really supposed to be cool? He had a mullet, for chrissakes. And how precisely did they make it to the pyramids? Since it was shown without subtitles, Arjun had to whisper the important plot points to her, and while he sat entranced, she drifted in and out of the story, following trains of thought about the reality or otherwise of the older guy’s beard, the stones in the mother’s necklace, the vaguely Dynasty salmon-pink palace where much of the action took place. Finally the nuptials were completed, and the audience spilled out into the muted evening lighting-scheme of the mall. Chris looked around at the young Asian couples and single-sex clusters of teenagers and saw that everyone was animated, smiling. Arjun had the same look. Satisfied. Emotionally replete.