the terrible dress sense. The nights he was around, and she wasn’t working at the pub on Arlington Road where she did four shifts a week behind the bar, they spent at his place, her skimming through textbooks for the final year of her degree. He cooked and washed up, helping her sort through the endless paperwork relating to her mother’s estate, finding ways to care for her when she was incapable of caring for herself.
Unable to deal with it personally, Gabriela had handed the task of clearing her mother’s house to a company in the West Country which Tom had found – recommended through a friend of a friend. She had visited just once, refusing his offer to accompany her, and collected a single box of photo albums and books before renting the place out through a local estate agent. She had always hated that house – or rather what it represented: the choice her mother had made to move out of London; her decision to abandon her only child wrapped up in the guise of selflessness, a refusal to uproot her at such a pivotal time in her life. I couldn’t do that to her, she would overhear her mother tell her friends. Not that she’d ever asked Gabriela if she’d wanted to stay.
‘So you were abroad when your mum …’ Tom mustered the courage to ask one night as they sat at his table, poring over papers.
‘How do you know that?’ Gabriela asked.
‘Saoirse mentioned it. Sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it—’
‘It’s fine,’ she cut in. ‘I was in Paris, finishing off my placement.’ She swallowed as she formed the words, her gaze held steadfast to the page.
Paris had pulled her in like the warm embrace she longed for, that year at the Sorbonne. Arriving in the July and staying until the following summer, with intermittent trips back to London, wafting between her tiny apartment above the bric-a-brac store on the Rue Galande and the university. With every step, she felt herself becoming someone new: the sort of person who sat in the grounds of the Greek church overlooking Notre Dame, sketching the spires that rose above the scaffolding; the sort of person who would go to the cinema at the end of her street, alone, to watch art-house films; the sort of person she and Saoirse would have called a cunt. But Saoirse wasn’t there and she was, and for as long as her sojourn lasted, London, and everything that it entailed, simply didn’t exist. And for that, she could not have been more grateful.
Within a couple of weeks in the city, Gabriela found a job at one of the cafés on the Place de la Sorbonne, serving overpriced coffee and stale croissants to tourists and overworked professors; the convenience of the location made up for the pitiful wage and the wandering hands of the maître d’. It was here that she met Pierre, as genuinely pretentious as the version of herself she had created, but so good-looking and so French, his opinion of himself so robust that it was difficult not to believe he was the god his body language told you he was.
He was sitting on one of the chairs in the square at the end of summer, smoking a cigarette, the first time she noticed him watching her as she moved between tables so that her skin tingled with the unnerving thrill of it. When she went over to ask him what he wanted, he dipped his eyebrows and pulled on his Gauloise in a way that told her exactly what, or who, he wanted. And she was in the mood to give it to him. Intermittently, from then on, she spent nights at Pierre’s flat overlooking the Seine, one of a number of properties his father owned along this stretch, not far from the Hôtel de Ville. They were in the bar next door, eating breakfast, his leather jacket slung over the back of her chair, his helmet held on his lap like a baby, the day death came.
To her credit, Valentina had never pushed for Gabriela to stay in England; she never so much as attempted to make her feel guilty for wanting to go even once it was confirmed that the cancer had returned. If anything, it might have been a relief, not to have to make room to deal with her daughter’s feelings alongside her own.
Since going home for Christmas, spending two weeks by her mother’s bedside at the house in Somerset, unwilling or unable to believe that she was as ill as the doctors said she was, Gabriela’s attitude towards Pierre had cooled, and the less she wanted him, the more he hounded her.
‘Come back to the apartment,’ he’d said as he scooped up his change, and she shook her head, leaning in to accept his kiss.
‘I have work. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
He made an expression that suggested she was the one who was missing out, and she watched his bike disappear over the bridge before making her way towards the canal.
During her time in Paris, her French had come on so well that she was close to fluent, but there were still things she didn’t know, cultural references she had little reason to encounter in everyday conversation. In a bid to widen her vocabulary, she took to browsing the titles of the books stacked on market stalls along the banks of the river, reading voraciously: historical texts, biographies of French footballers, devouring whatever she could get her hands on. This particular morning a bright sky had opened up, luring her into a false sense of security as she took a few moments to stop and peruse the selection, choosing almost at random a battered old book on the economy from the Seventies, and another on the evolution of insects, her eyes skimming over the words dimorphisme sexuel as she flicked through the illustrations, ignoring the sounds of the traffic on the intersection behind.
Even though it was nearly spring, a cold wind sliced the top of the river as she made her way down the walkway at the Port de la Tournelle, looking up at the statue of St Genevieve, her arms resting protectively over her child. For a moment she thought it was someone else’s phone ringing, but when she felt in her pocket she saw her father’s name flashing on the screen. He rarely called her mobile, suspicious of the concept of a phone that could be taken out of the house, not least in a foreign country, and instinctively she stopped walking.
‘Hello?’
‘Gabriela, it’s your father.’
‘Hi Dad, how are you?’
There was a pause and she heard him stifling a cry. ‘Gabriela, your mother died.’
She stayed very still, preserving that moment before stepping forward into the abyss.
‘Are you there?’
‘Yes, Dad, I’m here.’
She breathed in as deeply as she could, her hand feeling for a wall, the coldness of the stone, the tangibility of it, soothing. It was relief, she realised later, that stung her eyes. Relief that this was the worst thing that could happen and it had already happened, and she was still here. Relief, too, that Valentina was gone, and Gabriela would no longer be plagued by her expectations. Though in hindsight, any expectations had been self-imposed; her mother had always been far too busy thinking about herself.
Tom coughed self-consciously, and Gabriela looked up, blinking. ‘I was away and she died, so I came back. There’s not much else to say. Listen, I have to get to the pub, my shift starts at six.’
Her father’s house stood on the corner of one of the streets that ladder behind Highgate Road, a Sixties new-build a stone’s throw from the Heath. It still baffled her how he had been able to afford a place in this prohibitively desirable enclave of Dartmouth Park, however poky it might have been, with his share of the sale of the ramshackle Victorian terrace off Camden Road that had been their family home. Sometimes she wondered if her parents had made a secret pact when they divorced, whether her mother had agreed to take a lesser share of the proceeds on the condition that she didn’t have to take her daughter with her.
The day Tom came over for the first time, Michael combed his hair neatly to the side and pulled on his best clothes, a chequered M&S shirt he’d worn every
