Pravda

19 A Message

An eight-thirty wind was howling up and down the darkened canyons of New York and seemed to eddy and squall on the corners, rapacious for like dominion over the cross streets. November—month of storms: men and boat lost out on the Grand Banks, ashen newscasters (laconic veterans of murder, blood, Israel and Palestine) finally in earnest, satellite pictures of clashing fronts, colliding systems, circling depression.

She had made up her mind.

All the same, it was almost impossible to move forward: the wind flattened her trousers against her legs, her hair was flung this way and that, and her skin felt as though it were being stretched. The worst storm since the last one. Skies of bitumen and creosote. There could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry—the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once too often. You looked out of the grime-smeared office glass—what, once, twice, five times a year?—and sure, the Earth was still out there, but flooded and drowning, or frozen and blizzarding, or parched and burning up. She could smell the rain now, racing in on the wind.

What to say, though? What to write?

Never mind—see how it goes. Let’s just get this done. She could always store whatever she typed in Draft and come back to it tomorrow.

The first rope lashed at her face just as she ducked inside the store advertising free coffee, magazines, and Internet. Perhaps it was the thought of Sasha, the cramp and claustrophobia of the apartment, of his childish neediness; the lack of personal space. But she knew that she could not do this at home, and work was likewise out of the question. Whatever the question, she had noticed, work was always out of it.

“One.” She nodded in the direction of the back room. “Please.”

The guy behind the till was talking on his cell. She guessed he was from Yemen or Saudi Arabia. He made a note of the time in his book, held up five fingers, and pointed to the second bank of terminals. She wondered what he was making of the American Dream.

Ignoring the coffee stand, she went over and sat down at the computer. The place was busy and smelled of cheap damp carpet. She shoved her bulging bag under her feet, slipped off her shoes, double-clicked, and waited for the sluggish connection. The young Muslim guy to her left—beard barely grown—was surfing what looked like soft porn in a double agony of pseudo-jocularity and not wanting to be seen; she could feel the waves of his embarrassment. The woman to her right, desperately out of condition and with her asthma inhaler beside her keyboard, was playing online poker with melodramatic intensity. Isabella typed in her password and clicked.

The woman broke off suddenly and made as if to throttle an invisible neck just in front of her screen. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.” She looked over, shaking her head. “Another bad beat. How’s your luck holding up?”

Isabella screwed up her nose. “Luck’s okay. But my decisions suck.”

The woman nodded.

“Where you from?” “London.”

“Wanna play a hand for me? Can’t do any worse than I’m doing. My ass is being beaten all over the planet by people I don’t even know.”

“Sorry. Not today.” Isabella smiled sympathetically. “Gotta ask my dad if he killed my mum.”

The woman nodded slowly. “Yeah, well, I need a fried chicken cool-me-down.” She swiveled her chair around and looked directly at Isabella, taking a slow toke on her inhaler as if it were the last cigar before the shootout. “My advice: gets to the river and looks like there’s some shit might be going on, then walk away. Walk right away. First lesson of life: walk away.” And with that she stood up, put on a huge pair of sunglasses, and walked away.

Isabella’s in box asked her if she needed a bigger dick and then offered her a loan to finance it.

All day she had sat through meeting after meeting, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, and finally bored beyond the realization of boredom. There was nothing quite so depressing, she had thought, as the slow November darkening of the stale-aired office afternoon.

Media Therapy had been attempting to seduce new clients, and the achingly pedestrian attempts of the men from the client firm to show off were matched only by the tedious duplicity of Marissa and Jo (her immediate boss and junior, respectively) in hoping to be desired. And then, of course, when eventually the men finally read the signals and began to come on to them a little, Isabella had been forced to suffer her colleagues’ restroom pretense of being insulted and outraged, when in fact they were—Marissa and Jo both—very obviously brimming with satisfaction, affirmation, whatever it was they needed from men. Finally, at seven, concealing her indifference behind an expression of concern, she had closed the door behind her and taken the offered chair for the long-awaited one-to-one (conducted nonetheless for his part in the first-person plural, she noticed) with the head of the department, Timothy Robe—straight blond hair, expensive open-necked shirt, the smug manner of an exclusive tennis coach, ex-professional, ladies a specialty.

“We’ll come straight to it, Isabella—we’re worried about your attitude, especially in front of the clients. At the moment this is probably a perception problem. But maybe we also have aptitude issues to address in the short term and performance issues going forward. So, to be frank—I know you appreciate candor in…”

Robe was one of those people who found himself insightful because he considered the human emotions as if they were a range of competing brands, honesty being his proud brand of choice. And yet there was something about the word “frank,” she always thought, that vociferously signaled its opposite.

“…We just wanted to see if there’s maybe something we should be doing. That we are not doing. From our side. Maybe there is a way we can all work together to try and help you get your focus back… It is a focus thing, right?”

She hadn’t told them the whole story—i.e., death. She had left it at “ill” and come back without changing the news much beyond an upgrade (as Robe might say) to “seriously ill.” As far as she was concerned, her mother wasn’t the issue. Or rather, she was, but not in a way that could be unraveled for these people.

To the question of focus, therefore, Isabella bit her tongue and tried to think of something appropriate to say, some complaint that maybe Robe might have come across in one of his management “away days.” She settled on the word “unchallenged,” since she had heard Robe himself use it during some hideous life-insulting inanity of a presentation. And sure enough, “unchallenged” did the trick. Robe hit his stride almost immediately and talked thenceforward without the need for any further reciprocation.

Meanwhile she absented herself entirely from the situation and returned to the troubled Kremlin of her mind… remembering a phrase of her father’s that had not made sense to her before (delivered in a rare good mood after one of his innumerable firings from some magazine or other): “Watch out for the clichés, Izzy. They’re not lazy, they’re malicious—they’re out to get you.” Something to that effect. Only now did she realize he was talking about the clichés of life rather than those of speech. And how strange, she thought with a jolt, that so many apparently random things that her parents had said to her (and that she did not remember for years), how strange that they came back like this. Her mother too, in the midst of one of her ludicrous anti-West rants, delivered (she now recalled) with punctual timing on receipt of the news of Isabella’s acceptance to the Harvard MBA course: “One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel, Izzy, but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view. Remember that. Who would you rather be listening to on your deathbed, Bach or the chief executive?”

At first she had thought that nothing had changed, that the death of her mother was having next to no effect on her. Indeed, for the first few days she had entertained the view that maybe she was just one of those ascetics who didn’t (or couldn’t) respond to loss—or, for that matter, anything. Emotionally cauterized, to use one of her brother’s less glib phrases.

Not that she was entirely fooled by herself: she was wise enough to recognize shock for what it was, and she saw too that it must eventually wear off. So regardless of the temporarily blank screens, she had been monitoring herself with close attention ever since arriving back in New York. But it was the stealth with which shock slipped away and the disguise in which grief arrived that had caught her out. Because of all grief’s many masks, she had not expected anger.

It had begun as an almost friendly perplexity at her own numbness, which had increased somehow to impatience with herself, increased again to resentment against her mother—for the cryptic distancing, the idiotic, adolescent, unnecessary attempts to manipulate and pose with those bloody letters when, oh God, she must have known that she was seriously ill; until finally, yesterday, it had become the tumultuous fury from which she was now suffering. And yet only this lunchtime, during an e-mail exchange with Susan, her oldest friend back in London, had she realized—bang!—that this was it: that fury was the reaction. At last. And only later (while smoking on the fire escape to get away from the Jimmy Choo chat) had she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents, but in fact it’s the reverse. Life is a journey toward mother, father. Because as a child, though you live by their hands, you understand not a single one of their decisions, not a single action, not a single response. But each year that passes, through adolescence and beyond, you begin to grasp more and more, you grow a little closer, start to see what they see, think what they think, realize what they have realized, believe what they have believed. Am I right, Mum? Am I right, Dad? And don’t it make you sick.

The Internet café continued its very global and yet simultaneously very local existence. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she clicked on Compose—a button designed to flatter if ever there was one—and began to type, careful to avoid the greeting because she knew that she would not know how to start, deliberately trying not to think, aiming only to communicate the essence of what she wanted to say.

It was the work of less than two minutes. And it was all she could muster. Her face was burning with the thought of betraying her brother. And she could feel her heart beating against the unforgiving conscience of her sternum. An image of her father careened into her mind—his face livid with the drunken discovery of her and Gabriel trespassing in his office, trying his locked drawer.

She forced herself to return to the top of the screen. For five further minutes she typed one greeting after another, deleting the words as quickly as she entered them: “Dear Dad”; “Hey Dad”; “Dear Nicholas”; “Dad—”; “Hello Nicholas”; “Hello Dad”… Nothing felt right. But nothing had ever felt right. After all the years of silence, she simply did not know what to call the man. She remembered that once, when he had hit her so hard that she could not hear, she had called him a “shoevanist pig.”

In the end, fearful that she would lose her courage (or fury, or the need of a child to know, or whatever the hell it was that was driving this), she just left it blank. No greeting at all. Feverishly, she picked up her bag, rummaged until she found the e-mail address that Julian Avery had given her (and what a conversation that had been), and typed it in… And then, for a few seconds, she allowed herself the costly luxury of the truth—that it was actually communication itself that she wanted to establish. That the content was merely a means. And that in this subterfuge she was… She was just like her mother. And that her father, the cleverest man she had ever met, would see through it as surely as if she were made of glass. But—shallow breathing—maybe that didn’t matter anymore. Banish thought. Banish games. Banish play. (Another image—of her father swimming with Francis, his friend, in the men’s pond on Hampstead Heath while she and her brother stood by the railings, scared of dogs.) The point was to get the journey started. Take the bastard on. Do it. Send.

20 An Old Master

Why, in the name of heaven’s fat white rolling arse, is everything I attempt so utterly wretched? Were I one fraction less indolent, then I might improve. Were I one fraction less idealistic about my endeavors, then I might be content. Were I one fraction less intelligent, then I might fool myself into thinking I was better than I am. Instead, I am triply cursed. And still, after all this cursing, the fact remains: I am bloody awful at portraiture, Chloe. I stand before you as beside the point as a businessman in an orchestra pit.”

The pure white canvas had become a wretched oozing swamp. Nicholas had long ago lost sight of the painting itself, so cleanly sketched and proportioned in a deft burnt umber only two hours ago. But now even the local details on which he had fixated were disappearing; his representation of the nose, for example, had turned to sludge; whole patches of the picture were swimming in paint, and the only colors he could conjure were tertiary. He simply could not place his brush with any kind of precision; it was all too slippery and oily. And all the while, nature continued to mock him from where it lay, propped up on its little lilac pillow, feminine beauty indifferent as ever to the effort of man.

In the first few weeks he had felt anxious, dislocated, shaken, and saddened by turn, but these reactions had soon given way to an indistinct but abiding sense of annoyance with everything, and most of all with himself. As if he had been consistently putting off an important job or failing to give up smoking day after day. These feelings were familiar to him, of course—he had suffered from something similar for most of his life, but in recent years he had managed to block it out, to beguile time with such single-minded commitment to his own amusement and pleasure that the days had not been able to round on him. This was the peace deal he had negotiated with himself and he’d grown accustomed to living contentedly under its terms: in return for a program of unstinting indulgence, he had promised to stop the self-antagonizing. Now, though, even his most tested techniques (of which painting was one) were failing him: distraction, denial, diversion—nothing was working. Life had reneged. Death had interfered. And hostilities with himself were resumed. He saw now what a flimsy little sham of a deal it had been all along.

He suspected that his blood pressure was higher than normal today—whatever normal was. He turned to glance out of the great window behind. Even the light refused to be precise—the morning’s watery sun had given way to heavy, sullen cloud, as if Paris were about to enter one of its long winter sulks. The traffic on the opposite bank rushing on, endlessly urgent. But the heavy Seine between was a sluggish thing this afternoon, a sluggish thing of surliness and sullage.

He returned his eyes to the room—or rather, his studio-study (as he called it)—and they carried slowly across the ephemera therein: his stack of canvases in one corner, the desk he never used, magazines and papers, articles unread or unwritten, rags and paintbox, his easel; too small to be a studio, really, and the only thing he had ever studied in here was failure. He held up his brush and squinted. He wanted to scrape the whole head off with his knife, except that long experience had taught him that scraping never worked quite well enough and that at this stage the only thing to do was to wait until the paint stiffened and became compliant. Or start again.

Start again.

How many times must he start again? Blood and sand: surely it was possible to paint what he saw, at least. Those pretty toes pointed toward him, one leg up and bent, her arm above her head, the other arm loosely across her hips, a sort of lying-down contrapposto… The canvas should smell of her naked body. Instead, foreshortening had defeated him—even the basic proportions now seemed wrong, making her look freakish, steatopygous, when she was anything but. And then there was the big problem of the perspective of her face—totally counterintuitive, since her eyes in this pose were almost lower than her nose, itself an odd triangle of nostrils and nothing else. He had found himself transforming the never-ending wonder of animate human features into an ungainly and geometric thing in order to map it doggedly onto the slimy mulch of his canvas. He shut his eyes completely. All hope of capturing the intoxicating mingle of her expressions had now vanished.

If nothing more, Nicholas was honest with himself on the subject of art: he knew rubbish when he saw or heard it (as he did, often); he could recognize genuine talent even when it was confusing itself; and he saw mediocrity clearly for what it was. His own first and foremost. But like everything else he had done in the past forty years, Nicholas was doing this entirely for himself, so the success or failure of the work didn’t matter beyond his own struggle with it, and the fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except… Except that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. Except that he did possess artistic vision. And—here, today, again—it was the very fact of this vision that made his abiding lack of skill or talent or stamina (or whatever it was that was needed to render artistic vision into reality) so infuriating, so demeaning. Worse still: this problem was an old problem. Indeed, he sometimes thought it was the defining problem of his life. The artist’s vision without the accompanying artistry: the cruelest curse of the gods.

The only way forward was to stop. The only way to stop was to escape. And the only way to escape was to lose himself—physically lose himself—in the very body that was evading him artistically. There was one distraction left to him that never failed.

He addressed his model in French, which, curiously, still included the occasional suggestion of a Russian accent, an echo of the much heavier intonations of his private tutor during those long confined Moscow summers of his childhood.

“Chloe, I think we’ll leave it there for today. I am making a mess of it. The paint is too wet. I need to let it dry.” He stepped back from his easel, as much for effect as anything. “We can carry on next week. Or in another lifetime, when I have learned how to paint.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Okay, you are the artist.”

“I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I am merely yet another commonplace toiler in the mud.”

Then the old magic began to happen: as she sat up, she disappeared altogether as a model and became Chloe Martin once again—sometime actress, sometime real estate agent, once a little famous, twice divorced, an auburn-haired bob cut woman of a flat-chested forty-three, wide-wide mouth, all gum and marching molars when she smiled, freckles, crow’s feet, translucent skin (which she ill-advisedly exposed to sun whenever she could), and eyes as green as pale nephrite. And watching her rise, he felt desire surging back to reassert its hegemony over his emotions.

“I’m going to have a drink, Chloe. I think… something white and chilled. What would you like?”

“Apple juice first. I am thirsty. But bring me a glass of wine as well.” She smiled a smile that began sincerely but became false as she caught herself evincing impromptu sweetness and belatedly tried to capitalize—to witness that subtle transformation alone, Nicholas thought, worth the one thousand euros he paid her to be his model. Oh sweet Jesus, the hours he had spent covertly watching people as they so vigorously sought to disguise themselves, while their every expression and mannerism bellowed out the giveaways. It was almost funny. Just a shame there was nobody with whom to share the joke. Not anymore. He put down his brush and rag.

The drawing room was pleasingly Alessandro-less as he entered, and his irritation was further alleviated. The Italian was away in London, pursuing his ambitions in musicals: some audition for some piece of terrible shit based on the terrible shit of some terrible shit’s life in a shitty and terrible rock band. The evening’s rubber might even be enjoyable—untainted by moping, melodrama, or huff. Nicholas almost smiled as he entered the kitchen: Alessandro could not sing, could not dance, could not act, could not even mime… and yet, like more or less everyone under thirty-five he met these days, he firmly believed he had talent, a precious and precarious gift that needed sensitive nurturing in order to blossom into the hardy rose of genius. Dear God, who was telling the young all these lies about themselves? The poor fools had no chance. Their serfish heads so filled with false promise and misleading encouragement, their eyes wide with Hermès and Prada.

You are peasants, my friends, of peasant stock and loamy soul, only lately freed from your bonds—muck and ignorance cling to your every desperate venture. Desist. Relax. Go easy awhile. Ease into your emancipation. For I tell you this: the democracy you live by, this freedom, these rights, they are so many cruel jokes being played on you by your old rulers as they snigger and snort behind their latest disguises. They’re only pretending you are equal, for their amusement. They want to see you struggling with it all—too fat, too thin, crazed on exercise, crazed on junk food, bewildered and belittled, arms full of ghastly designer shopping (Cambodian tat, I’m afraid) from the pages of their ghastly magazines. It’s a cruel, cruel joke. And alas, those values you are so proud of, they’re no such thing; they’re but a confection of silly little sayings they smuggled in with primetime so that you could be mocked all the more for repeating them. They have you running in all the wrong directions again, my friends; they’ve set you off on the wrong track as surely as they ever did when they called themselves your bishops and your barons. You must hope for more insightful leaders or plan for another revolution. The world is yours awhile yet, if you would only seize it back. Oh yes—and you, my dear, dear, Alessandro, please try to understand: your gorgeous arse is your one and only card. You have nothing else. So be sure to use it well when Herr Direktor turns his gaze on you, my darling boy.

And yet, Nicholas reflected as he took out two clean glasses, who could blame Alessandro and the millions like him? What was the desire for celebrity but an age-old ache for some kind of externally verifiable significance? Testimony from somewhere other than the self—relief, reassurance, reinforcements—even if the testimony was a vapid and quick-vanishing lie. He bent for the Tokay, which he had been keeping in the fridge for the evening’s bridge but which now struck him as far too good to share with anyone but Chloe.

She had that particular female shape to her inner thighs which caused that certain little triangle of space to form between the tops of her legs when she stood up straight, as now, framed in the far doorway of the drawing room, shirt undone, naked otherwise; that certain space, just beneath.

Sexual chaos—that was the only way to describe it, the whole of Nicholas’s life from the age of sixteen. One long rolling, roiling, rollicking sea of sexual chaos; magnificent, frightening, awful, sickening, mettle-testing, perilous, heartbreaking, audacious, and glorious by turn. No, his was not the common journey. But, as he had always religiously maintained, who, on their deathbed, actually wished to say (with a satisfied sigh to ceiling and gathered loved ones), “Ah, mine was the common journey—excellent.”

The odyssey began in earnest in a grand but threadbare hotel room (that would never recover from the loss of the empire) when he was barely seventeen. He’d enjoyed a three o’clock lid-full of his mother’s secret scotch, and as ever, he was supposed to be studying quietly, waiting for the rest of his family to return, preparing himself to follow in his father’s footsteps straight into Cambridge (classics) and the Overseas Service. It was Easter, Max was back from Moscow and in London for the week (some reprimand or other), his mother was God knows where, and his little sister was out spending the money he had stolen from his father’s wallet precisely for the purpose of sending her out.

Antonia Grey, his little sister’s friend, however, was very much in… In his mother and father’s bed, to be dogmatically factual about it: freshly undressed, sixteen, and giving it the full actressy adolescent treatment. But not for Nicholas’s direct benefit. No no no: he’d already had quite enough of the straight stuff from Miss Grey, his first model. (“Toni, I think we should try something. You know we can’t paint it unless we see it, unless we experience it… so will you, if I promise to stay quiet?”) No. Instead, his sister’s friend was faking her way through her second orgasm of the session with Stephen or Jonathan or Benjamin or whatever his name was, captain of rugby or boats or some such. Young Nicholas Glover, meanwhile, captain of nothing but fucking, was stationed in the walk-in wardrobe, looking on from the darkness behind his mother’s favorite evening gown with the kind of unqualified attention more befitting a newly fledged heart surgeon taking final instruction from the senior consultant.

As he recalled later, he’d had thoughts even then that more conventional creatures might eschew. Thoughts along the lines of I like that she’s faking, I love that she’s faking, I like the way they look together, man and woman, woman and man, I love the way they look together, I like the geometry of their combining and recombining limbs, I love the movement, the struggle, the ache, the sound (ancient, ancient), their skin, the smell… the honest reality. I love the unequivocal reality of this.

And of course after a few minutes he’d had to slip out of the closet and join in… And Antino, to her credit, was almost okay with it. Almost. She caught sight of Nicholas from atop her charge as he tiptoed through her peripheral vision, and her wide eyes said, Oh. My. God. What are you doing? But they did not ask him to stop—not necessarily, not definitively, not so that he felt he should actually stop. On the other hand, as his fingers slid around her rocking torso and made their clever play with her girlish young breasts, and as the narrow eyes of Steve Jon Ben opened from their boyish pleasure to bear witness to this development, there occurred the most almighty eruption. A second for Ben Jon Steve to apprehend and process the undeniable evidence and then—you fucking bastard—the captain of boats, rugby, and so on exploded in a triple frenzy of orgasm, rage, and shame.

And it was this more than anything else, this precise moment, that Nicholas remembered forever. Because (over the folded angel’s wings of Antonia’s fragile shoulders) Benjamin Jonathan Stephen’s face was the most absorbing thing he had ever seen: anger, jealousy, belligerence, shock, righteous affront, guilty aggression, childish embarrassment, manly shame—all of them flying across his otherwise even features, one after another, like so many kamikazes. It was this precise moment that Nicholas remembered forever, because the involuntary movement of their nakedness was so powerfully enthralling: Ben Jon Steve’s beautiful young body bucking up (stomach muscles proud as Coldstream Guards) and shoving itself with such rude and sudden surprise into rearing Antonia, and she (half winded, half ecstasized) crying out involuntarily, her nails digging into a bare and blushing boyish chest. It was this precise moment that he remembered forever, because in those three astounding seconds, satirical Nicholas realized that he had seen more kinetic humanity than most people would manage in their entire lives.

For seven dedicated years after this it was flat-out sex—a game of volume and frequency in which he balanced his requirements for deviation with the overwhelming need to get as much as possible of any sort.

Then came the mercy of beautiful, dark, endlessly enchanting Masha and the only years of his respite. In the early thick of his marriage, he thought he might move on, he thought he might be past the worst, he thought he might be just as others were—the oats proverbially sown (wild, wild, wild) and the ensuing happy reconciliation to a life of monogamy and fulfillment in other areas. (What were they, these much-vaunted other areas?) And certainly Masha’s influence was strong. The more so perhaps when they had only each other, totally without money, two exiles in Paris, talking late into the night, stealing food, he painting, she writing her pamphlets, hurrying through the awakening streets together, fervently believing that no other man and woman in the whole history of men and women had ever made love with such pure intensity as they.

And then the deal was done. And with it came the children and London and Highgate and domestication in its truest sense. The change was shocking and absolute. Within a fortnight the man was no longer a man but a servant—at the beck and call of the infant-rearing righteousness of his wife and every cry or whim of the two helpless infants themselves. Desire’s flame began to sputter, the eye to cheat upon the heart.

Even so, Nicholas continued to steer through the gathering swell by the red star of his remarkable wife. And for a while longer he thought that perhaps he might make it, that what interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people’s inner selves, the architecture of their spirit. Perhaps Masha herself led him to this conclusion. Certainly they agreed that this was the nub of things. This was what fascinated them. Perhaps they could march together into their middle age with this in common. Man, woman, children: the old happiness formula. After all, it was true. A certain very particular form of honesty did obsess Nicholas—just as it did Masha. Not a person’s honesty in the prosaic sense of telling the truth about this or that, but rather that a person should inhabit his or her humanity truthfully, fully, with commitment. This was the quality that they both sought out and responded to in other people. As he moved into his mid-thirties, Nicholas found that what he wanted to do (more and more with each passing year) was duck beneath the usual farragoes of “I do this” or “I do that” and get as quickly as possible to the quick… Yes, but. Yes, but. Yes, but. What sort of human being are you? What do you really think, feel, want, fear, like? How is life for you? Any insight? Any new thoughts? Any new feelings? Any feelings at all?

And, curiously, he became very good at eliciting due response, charming some and offending others in roughly equal measure. But he found no name for this preoccupation. Neither medical nor social. Neither did he find an occupation—a job—that required such abilities. (That his bloody father must have been in counterintelligence struck him around this time with the renewed force of sudden certainty; what else could you do with this particular skill set? Oh, it was all in the genes—here was the proof; his own existence seemed to be entirely about counterintelligence.)

Such inquiries did not save him, though. They merely led him back to the same path by another, longer route. For sometime in his mid-thirties he realized that merely asking people these questions was not enough. Partly because they lied, but mostly because the revelation of this kind of detailed truth (had he not always secretly believed?) was to be found only… in bed.

Hitherto unformulated suspicions now crystallized into a firm conviction: that in order truly to understand the essence of another human being, it was necessary to make love. Because sex was the only vantage from which to view the whole truth, all at once. The central act of coition was the only time that body, mind, spirit came out and showed themselves all together.

The vows gave way.

And now he went at it as if in a frenzy. Men, women, husbands, wives. He had money. He had no job. He had time. Masha was at work on the paper all day long. Masha was on the night shift. Masha didn’t mind if he stayed away for the odd weekend with friends.

There were years of rush and flurry. There were years of danger and caution. And there were years of relative stability—a steady uncomplaining mistress for eighteen months, a fond youth up between university terms on whom to squander the money his father sent, a bored sub-Bovary of a wife desperate to feel the prickle and blush of romance again, a needy American dancer, a famous actor stuck in a bad run and a worse marriage. There were even one or two professionals with whom Nicholas struck up sexual friendships. A beautiful Chilean man whose dark eyes occasioned the only lines of poetry his soul ever permitted to the page. A plump little Estonian whom he visited for three years, taking her books and teaching her English via Russian between the epic mania of their lovemaking. But there was never any peace.

Indeed, since he had left the city more than three decades ago, these last few years, living on the river back here in Paris, were the closest to contentment that Nicholas had come. And, a little to his own surprise (aside from Alessandro), Chloe Martin was the only person Nicholas had slept with for the past eighteen months.

Thus his journey so far.

“Nearly, very nearly.” Chloe’s coy finger traveled the short distance between their sweating bodies, parted his lips, passed between his crooked teeth, and so was greeted warmly by the object of its target. “As close as it has ever been.”

And he let himself lie back, his heart calming beneath the white hairs of his narrow chest. Her intention was sincerely to pay him a compliment, but of course she could not be aware of the true grotesqueness of his complaint. Nicholas had heard this kind of thing many times before—the it’s-not-work-with-you assurances from all the professionals, the best-lover avowals from all the lovers, and the when-you-use-your-tongue declarations from all the wives of his friends that he had taken great care to satisfy well and truly by way of compensating them for the unforgivable ordinariness (sexual, mental, spiritual) of their variously defeated husbands—had heard it so many times, in so many beds, and in so many states of mind that he had long ago decided that he, and he alone, would be the judge of whether or not any of it was really, empirically true. An extra dimension of his madness, this: that he trusted nobody but himself as the true pleasure-level arbiter of any encounter—not only on his own account, but on behalf of his sexual partners as well. Not without reason, though, as always with madness, as always with Nicholas. Not without reason. For the fact was that he knew exactly how close she had been—knew it through every soft fingertip he had touched her with, could hear it trapped like stifled song in the deep well of her breathing, could smell it rising like rare musk in her pores, could taste it in the salt-shiver of her skin, could see it in the pleasure-ache of her face, the dig of her heels, the clench of her womanly fist.

And actually, she was not lying.

But not there.

Not quite there.

What a woman. He couldn’t paint her. And he couldn’t make her come. Someone to hang on to, for certain.

“Let’s drink more.” Irritation vanquished, mind at ease, he reached across and plucked the wine from the bucket of thinning ice.

“What are we listening to today?” she asked, stretching lazily for her glass.

“Mozart, Marriage of Figaro.”

He poured—the angles awkward, since neither of them could be bothered to sit up straight. “And this bit?”

“This is the duet between the Count and Susanna. Crudel! Perche finora farmi languir cosi?” “It’s beautiful.”

He replaced the bottle and settled himself. He liked to look at her every way—and sometimes, as now, her body changed back again into that of artist’s model: laid out beside him, propped on her elbow, face close and glowing, freckled shoulders and that hip jutting heavenward. Pure artistic provocation.

“Yes, it is beautiful.” He took a refreshing draft. “But it’s also a lie.”

“What do you mean? Why is it a lie?”

“Because despite all the glory of that angelic voice, I’m afraid that Susanna—she’s the one singing—has absolutely no intention of meeting the poor Count—that’s him—even though she is right now promising repeatedly that she will. The plan is for the Countess to disguise herself as Susanna and take her place at the rendezvous. So all Susanna is doing is luring the Count into their trap—and making sure that he pays off Figaro’s debts along the way. I’m afraid her part in the whole exquisite duet is a lie—from start to finish.”

Chloe shook her head. “The most beautiful music we have—a lie.”

“Yes. And all the honest toil in the world not worth a single bar.”

He noticed that Chloe sipped her wine like a fish—lips pursed in an unselfconscious pout. And he realized that in twenty minutes he would have to make love to her again as a direct result of this observation.

She narrowed her eyes, but playfully. “Have you always been a liar, Nicholas?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it is the only way to get myself into situations like this.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Honest men have very little fun in life. It’s a well-known fact.” His lips parted in a rare smile.

“And women like lies?”

“Men, women. Everyone wants to be seduced. Even the coldest blood will warm to a little solicitation.”

“And seduction is always lies?”

“Of course… it takes us away from the real world into something fantastical and compelling.”

“Maybe. But still, lies are not the only way.” She sucked her lips. “You could, for example, pay someone far too much to be your model.”

“True. But then she must believe, at least in part, that she is being paid genuinely to model. Or else she might lose her self-respect. Or demand much higher wages. So even here, lies come into it.”

She wrinkled her nose so that her freckles took up new lines of defense.

“And what’s it like being such a liar?”

“Interesting. Exhilarating. Amusing. Transcendent.”

“Like Mozart.”

“Yes, that little bastard told millions of them, you just know that he did.” He sat up in the bed, holding his glass high above his stomach as he rearranged the pillows. “Once you cross the line, you can’t go back. And why would you ever want to? Everything else seems gray, leaden, unimaginative, plodding, bound in. Did you not lie to your husbands?”

“No. I tortured them with the truth.”

“The worst form of torture there is.”

“But in those days I was acting all the time, so I suppose the rest of my life was a lie. Lies to get the parts, I mean. Lies to play the parts.” She held a sip in her mouth a moment and met his eye as she tasted. “And yet… and yet you are an honest man, M. Glover.”

He too allowed the wine to linger on his tongue, but said nothing.

She spoke cautiously into his silence. “You mean it—whatever you are doing, you mean it. You’re here because you mean to be here. You do not do things you do not mean. Every sip of your wine, you mean it. Or… or this.” She pointed with her little finger, glass now raised, indicating her nakedness, his nakedness, the bed itself. “You fuck me like you mean it. Always.”

“I do.”

“And then there is the fact that you know your painting is terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“I feel a lot better now than I did a few hours ago,” he said. “My painting doesn’t matter.”

“Then I am a success. A top-up, please.” She propped her chin on his chest, holding her glass out in the direction of the bottle.

For the first time, and with all the attendant surprise of a new idea, it occurred to him that he could remarry. There was a novel thought. Move Alessandro out, move Chloe Martin in. He could get by on a single piece of tight male arse a month, say. Or even pay Alessandro a fixed fee to visit. (The idea of turning that deluded little Roman into a whore certainly appealed.) Though would Chloe Martin actually say yes? He thought not. Except, perhaps, for the money.

“Did you lie to your wife when you were together?”

“Every day. Every hour. Every minute.”

“You have never said anything about her.”

“Ask—if you wish to know.”

“Where does she live?”

“My wife died a few weeks ago.” Nicholas drank more deeply. “I am sorry.”

“We were separated for the last ten years or so. We didn’t speak for most of that time. But—to answer your next question—I loved her dearly. I never said it, of course. But then you must hold something in reserve against the final reckoning, wouldn’t you say?”

“No.”

“Ah, but in reality you do… you hold many things back.” He scratched her back with gentle fingers.

“You never saw her again after you left?”

“Actually, I did—just before. I was lucky—I was able to spend a few good days with her. She lived in Russia. You can still buy the necessary pills there. They ease the pain. She had cancer. I bought her a whole stack. She was going into hospital. I had arranged for the best doctors.”

“She lived in Moscow?”

“St. Petersburg.”

“But you didn’t tell her that you loved her then—when you saw her, I mean.”

“No. I… I assumed I would see her again. We hardly said a word to each other while I was there, in fact. I regret that very much now. There was a great deal that I would have liked to talk to her about. I suppose I thought it was the start of… of our reconciliation. I tried to persuade her to come back to our old home in London—to be treated there. But she said she would not leave Russia again. She was the most stubborn woman I ever knew. Would die to prove her point. In a way, she did die to prove her point.” (Why? What perverse gene had made it thus all his life: so much easier to speak to friends than to family, to his lovers than to his wife?) “Anyway I booked my flight back two weeks later. I was going to surprise her—visit her in the hospital. She died a few days after I left.”

“What did you do while you were there?”

He found himself admiring the lack of melodrama in Chloe’s voice: that she did not become stagy or overcareful or otherwise false-toned around the subject of death. Odd, especially for an actress. Perhaps she had lost someone. Odd too how close to Masha he felt, just talking like this. He realized with some shock that he hadn’t spoken properly to anyone since. Since.

“We went to the Hermitage once, when she felt she could make the trip. She was in a lot of pain. Though the pills helped—helped enormously. The other days we just played these six-hour games of chess and listened to music. Sat together. Nothing much. I went to see the doctors to arrange things with the hospital.” He raised his glass but paused to speak before he drank. “They feel as if they were the best three days of my life. Just to be near her. She might have been going slowly mad all her life but, my God, that woman had so much raw courage.”

“Why didn’t you live together?”

“We did. For a long time. Until the 1990s. Until the children were gone.”

“And you were close?”

“Always.”

“Why? I mean, you say you were separated. So why do you feel you were always close?”

He had never asked himself this question, but now he was struck by its importance. And suddenly, at ease here in his soul’s only rest, he could see the answer quite clearly.

“Because my wife understood the geometry of things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She understood how people are—how people are really. She understood what lies hidden beneath… and how our falsities are more eloquent than our truths.”

“This was the reason you loved her?”

“This was the intellectual reason, I suppose.”

“And in your heart?”

“If you are asking me the emotional reason… I would say because… because the shape of our needs always seemed to tessellate. To fit together, wherever they met.”

“Like crazy paving.”

“Exactly so.”

“Did she lie to you?” Chloe kept her eyes on his, a frown of sincere concentration on her brow, her glass pressed down onto the bed in the space between them, her little finger free and circling his thigh. “Did she deceive you as you deceived her?”

“We deceived each other throughout—from the very beginning. Yes, in a way she deceived me as much as I her. She did not realize, for example, that I knew she had a child before we were married. I waited for her to say something… but she never did. And so I assumed that the child was dead or that she simply did not wish to talk about it. I felt no need to pry. There were a thousand things I did not tell her in return—many, many things about myself, about what I was doing, more and more as time went on. But the lies never mattered—they often don’t. That’s what these psychologists will never tell you. Indeed, that’s what the new world will never understand about the old. She recognized mine, and I hers. And we both subtracted them from what was really being said. We could never remark upon this recognition, though. It could never be explicit. Instead we lived out our complexities and our mutual understandings, as if they were continual tributes to each other’s love and at the same time continual tests.”

Her finger circled. “So why did you split up, then?”

“She had become too mad for me—there was no meaning left in any of our conversations. Not mad—that’s not quite right. I mean obsessive and compulsive—obsessive in her need to repeat and repeat these prejudices and opinions, these fantasies about what was happening in the wider world. And yet… and yet she knew well that she did not have any idea what she was talking about—and worse, that the opinions she pretended to were not real either. She didn’t believe a word of what she herself was saying, but she was compelled to go on saying it. It’s a strange thing, Chloe, it’s… it’s very Russian.” He shook his head. “And somehow we just lost our route back. I found that my own sense of sanity was going in her presence. I could not listen to her anymore. Marriage is a generosity contest, and she won. Perhaps I was going mad in a different way. And I was… I was—”

“Mad… physically.”

“If you like.”

“Were there many others?”

“Yes.”

“The reasons for your lies?”

“Not the reasons. The occasions.”

Her knee found his leg. “The occasions.”

“I always felt the need to be free.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps this is what drove her mad. I couldn’t live with her in the normal way, I suppose. I… When my father died, I had the money and… after a few years of trying… I… I took my freedom.”

“You needed these others?”

“I needed them.”

“Because…”

“DNA.”

“No.”

Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “No?”

She moved her knee softly up and down a fraction. “You needed them because… if you believe that you can still make love with other women, then it feels as though not every issue is settled—that your life isn’t bound in iron.”

“Something like that.”

“That you are still alive.”

“Perhaps.” He wanted to drink and fuck and talk and drink and fuck and talk forever. And why could he not paint this pretty, ugly, pretty, ugly, ugly-pretty, pretty-pretty face? He would bet that Chloe had passed the first thirty years of her life entirely innocent of the damage those pale dreamy green eyes could do; rather, she had grown into this look, this manner. All the same, it worked. He wanted her, wanted physically to be inside her, to go and fetch her consciousness and compel her into the moment with him. Share the endless present.

“And you did not love these others?”

“Very few.”

“How many?”

“There were some I did love. Never as I regarded… as I loved my wife, though. But there are as many kinds of love as there are people. You know that.”

She finished her wine and smiled. “Do I? Some people would say that love and sex are one and the same. You are not loving your wife while you are sleeping with another.”

“Only the ignorant or the childish.”

“Unfair.”

“I have nothing against the ignorant or the childish.”

“And that’s another lie.” Her knee moved over his leg all the way so that he could feel her warmth against his hip.

“No, they are not half so bad as the dinner-party vermin who believe they are sophisticated and who claim to think that sex and love are separate things.”

“And you, Nicholas, what do you think?”

“Really what do I think?”

“Yes, really. Tell me.”

She bent to kiss his stomach, the base of her empty glass now cool on his chest.

“I would say that sex and love are like… like the two principal dancers of the ballet: sometimes they are magnificently, beautifully, indissolubly together, through the great centerpieces of the pas de deux—and make no mistake, this is what the audience pays to see; but sometimes the one will dance while the other watches in the wings; or sometimes they will dance in parallel, on opposite sides of the stage, together yet apart, a curtsey for a bow, an arabesque for a tendu; sometimes one is alone while the other is forgotten for long acts at a time; sometimes the one dances with the chorus to make the other jealous; sometimes one leaps on moments after the other has left; sometimes one dies while the other lives; and of course sometimes they go on separate exhibition tours.”

She laughed.

He took her glass, half turned away, let it fall noiselessly to the floor. He held a last sip of his own and reached for the tiny pill that he had already popped and readied discreetly on the walnut side table.

When he turned back, her hand was on him, her eyes bewitching him. And his kiss was chaste as pure intention.

21 The Bastard of Everything

The crane outside the window had begun to sink into the mud below, or rather had begun to subside, so that the long skeleton finger no longer reached true to heaven but listed dangerously toward their tower block as if enacting some strange and terrible slow-motion death strike.

Everything was sinking.

Everything was always sinking.

Back into the Neva. Back into the sea. The people, the city, St. Petersburg itself, forever sinking. And Henry’s guilt was as raw and saturating as the sewage marsh into which everything sank.

In those few moments back from the football—that gaping and ragged hole in the wall, the taste of grime on his lips as he opened the front door, the corridor strewn with masonry and rubble, his bedroom trampled and destroyed, his money stolen, the semidarkness as he entered their main room, the smell of sawn wood, his eyes adjusting, the piano vanished, Arkady on his knees—in those few moments, Henry had known that he must give everything he had left to his friend. Complete divestiture. Because that heap of jagged shards and the Russian’s ghostly face were the last scene of his life in its current incarnation. Nothing worse could happen. It was over. Something else must now begin.

Though he continued to lean against the wall and look out at the docks and the sea beyond, there was therefore urgency in his voice as he addressed his flatmate: “How will we know if the passport and the visa look real enough?”

Arkady lay on the sofa, half dressed in jeans and open shirt. “We won’t,” he said.

“Can we order a passport without specifying where we want the visa for?”

“It does not work like that. It is not a pizza.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Anyway, forget Paris. The bitch divorced him. He divorced the bitch.”

“Not necessarily.”

Aware that it was pointless to do so, Henry had found himself repeatedly pushing Paris as Arkady’s putative destination. Partly because that was the only sure address they had been able to Google immediately—through an expatriate bridge club. Partly because any conversation with Arkady was better than the ever-expanding silence, whatever the price. And partly for mortal fear that the Russian’s resolve would slump, that somehow there would be born between them some whelpish failure of nerve.

“Not necessarily.” Henry turned. “And you know, it might be easier to get into France for… for a Russian.”

“She lived here.” Arkady began to button his shirt. “He lives there.”

“We don’t know why they split. We mustn’t judge. There are—”

“Divorced. Separate. Different lives. They don’t f—”

“Actually, many people who are divorced remain in amicable contact with each other.” Through the crack in Arkady’s bedroom door, Henry caught sight of the woman moving inside. Suntanned legs. Dark pubic hair. He looked away and began walking in irregular circles around the sofa, stepping carefully over the fallen disks. “You don’t know, Arkady. And we have to try everything.”

“He is not my father. I am his wife’s virgin-fuck child. He gets a letter from me. He does not even wipe shit with it. Why would he care?”

“There are a million good… good people out there.” Henry stopped and retraced his steps around the back of the sofa, wanting to stay out of Arkady’s line of sight. Somehow, with the centripetal pull of the piano gone, the room felt hollow. And even as he continued to speak, he could hear the priggishness of his old self recolonizing his voice. Pompous Henry, prudish Henry, prim Henry—these old Henrys, they were all openly pursuing him now. He began again. “We can at least try a letter.”

“I think he does not know I exist.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We don’t know anything.”

“We do.” Henry could smell her cigarette.

“And if he does know that I exist, he does not want to know it.” Arkady’s voice became pure cynicism. “‘Hello, Mr. Glover—I am the bastard you do not know, the bastard of your wife, the bastard of everything. Very nice to meet you, sir. Now, please, I want money. Immediately.’”

Arkady adjusted the buckle of his belt.

Henry forced himself forward and approached the window again. He wiped three fingers through the film of wood powder and grime to make a new square to see through. The sea was covered in something not quite fog, not exactly smog, just a nameless haze that would soon itself be smothered by night. Thirteen stories below, he could see the drunks and the vagrants hunkered around their afternoon fire. They were still burning the larger splinters of the piano. Black smoke rose.

On the day after their break-in, and after nearly six hours of passport verification and bureaucracy, Henry discovered that he had just over nine hundred pounds left in his English bank account. Shocked to his core (and frightened now), he had that same night given Grisha everything he owed. Grisha had taken the money with a cheery leer that all but celebrated culpability. And immediately advanced him more. Henry took the extra, paying for it there and then, peeling off the thinning notes.

Henry’s new and panic-stricken plan was to buy passport and tickets for Arkady as soon as possible, to give everything he had left, to see his friend gone, and then… to quit. He had therefore accepted enough heroin for another twenty-five days (longer if he rationed it), because he knew that he needed sufficient to see the Russian well on his way. Without a good stash, he was certain that he would enter the scoring trance, he’d be crazy again, and he would not be able to trust himself to stick to this plan. No chance. He absolutely required the security of having lots of the drug to help him get off the drug later. He must take the drug to quit the drug.

After he had left Grisha, Henry had gone straight back to Vasilevsky to wait for Arkady to return from Maria Glover’s apartment. But Arkady had not come home. So the following day, the Friday, Henry had spent a windy afternoon staking out the canal while the clouds raced overhead. But he had seen nobody come and nobody go.

On the Saturday he had at last tracked down Zoya and paid her for her Maria Glover “file”—an utter waste of time and money. Stuff on orphanages, pages and pages of notes, times and dates of searches, bribes dispensed, a list of children called Arkady at Veteranov, and almost nothing on Maria Glover’s ersatz English family save for half a page in Zoya’s bad Russian scribble confirming what Henry already knew from his own conversation with Maria Glover: names, no addresses.

Arkady eventually showed up on the Sunday but did not utter a single word. So Henry, biding his time, retreated to his room and counted out his remaining funds. The Zoya file and his angel both paid for, he had less than two hundred pounds left. He realized he would have to borrow to secure the passport and visa. But so be it, he thought. This is where his long flight had led him. In his right mind or not (he did not care), Arkady was his vocation, and it now no longer mattered how that vocation had begun, whether the vocation was real or imagined, or what purpose the vocation had beyond itself. If this duty hastened him to zero, all the better. He would meet himself there afterward, when Arkady was on his way. He would meet himself there and try his mettle in that clear and empty ring. So be it. But momentum was all. For both of them. Momentum. Keep going.

He left his peephole at the window and set off on his circling of the room again. The tight dance of love and guilt.

“In my experience,” Henry said, “children often become very curious about their parents after they die. It is part of their grief. Shock, denial, anger, guilt, anxiety, depression. And curiosity. If not—”

“You have no experience. You are a narkoman.”

The Englishman felt his blood freeze and a chill sweat seep into his palms. He could not look over and meet those eyes. He forced himself to keep moving along the wall. Never, not once, had Arkady called him a junkie. And he did not wish to know if this, at last, was it—the moment when Arkady’s scorn finally turned on him. He’d rather not be sure. He’d rather circle the room until the end of time. Keep moving. He squeezed his resolution all the harder to his threadbare breast.

“Either way, we need to get you this passport. And we need to be doing that as soon as possible.” His own voice was loathsome to him. “I am assuming you know the right people.”

Arkady said nothing.

Henry could hear her trying to open the window. He wondered if she could understand English. He passed Arkady’s bedroom door and came around in front of the sofa again. He had the sudden idea that he would shave his head. His hair was lank and ridiculous. Widow’s peak, bald patch. Penance.

“You do know people who can get us a fake passport?”

Still the Russian said nothing.

“We should have the documents they need ready—the photos and everything. For the passport. We’ll get the visa separately… when we know if it’s Britain or France. Now, the good news is that they didn’t get all my—”

“ Grisha did not get all your money.”

“We don’t know that it was Grisha. Okay, he’s… he’s a dealer. But he’s not a… not a psychopath.” Arkady swore in Russian.

Henry rushed on. “I have around a thousand pounds sterling left in another bank account,” he lied. “And we can use this to buy the passport.”

“Whatever you have, you need.”

“Please, Arkasha. Let me finish.” Henry drew shallow breath, coming past the window again. “I am not sure how much the passport will cost, but I assume this is enough. And I am not giving you the money. You can pay me back in a few years, when you are taking your huge concert fees. Or maybe right away—when you come back from meeting them! If it goes well. Who knows? Regardless. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to go now. And I can help you.”

“You need your money for your shit.”

Henry came to a halt at the top of his circuit. He said the words quietly, addressing the back of the Russian’s head. “I am stopping.”

Arkady laughed out loud.

“I am stopping.”

“You are never stopping. Nobody ever stops.”

Henry passed the bedroom door once more and stood at the foot of the sofa, meeting the other’s eyes for a second before taking off again along the far wall. He spoke quickly now, his bony arms jerking as if he might sheer off from his desperate orbit at any moment.

“Arkady, listen to me—I don’t want to have any money left. And I don’t want to have anything. I… I have a bet with myself. If I have nothing left and I can’t buy any more, then I will give up. Pull myself together. Yes, okay, yes… I will buy enough food and water to last until you are back. I will spend what I need to get that. Water—some food. And we will fix the hole. But that’s all. After that, I don’t want the money in the bank because I don’t want to burn it all—and that’s what will happen. I will burn it on the shit. Every penny. So this…“He indicated the room with a throw of his arm. “This is a blessing in disguise. Not the piano. But I mean all my money gone. Everything taken. Because I would only have spent it on shit… shit, shit, and more shit. And it would have gone on and on—until I ran out of money, anyway. So all that has happened is that I have the opportunity to stop sooner. To stop when you go to find your family. And I don’t want to have any more secret money in the bank. I don’t want it there. I don’t want it, because I tell you: I will go and I will spend it on shit. So you have to take my money. I want you to take it. I need you to take it. It’s a loan. That’s all. A loan until I am off. And then you can give it back to me.”

Arkady was watching Henry closely.

“Do you understand, Arkasha?”

At last the Russian sat up. “You say this now because you know there is so much more hidden in your room. But when the time comes, when you have no more, you will do anything. The money or the no-money is not the difference. When the time comes, you will do anything—you will sell your body, you will kill if you have to.”

“If it makes no difference, then take it. If the money is not the difference, then take it. Please. Let me try.”

She came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing nothing but one of Arkady’s T-shirts. Henry tried to nod a greeting, but her expression reflected only a sudden aversion back at him. He walked quickly past the sofa and entered the wreckage of his room.

The faster he used, the faster he ran out, the faster he would get to zero.

22 Self-Help

There comes a time in every man’s life when the fucking around just has to stop. Operating (as ever) in the murky, muddy, potholed, all-sides-fired-upon, no man’s land of modern secular ethics (which might, of course, be no ethics at all), Gabriel could not be certain whether it was his mother’s death, his life stage, or the quasi-religious ache of some ancient human gene that had brought him abruptly to this realization. But once beheld, this flinty truth, he realized, could no longer be avoided. And he knew for certain that he must now make some decisions about his life—ideally, good ones, though he recognized with stolid candor (as he faced down an unnecessarily confrontational lunchtime sandwich) that any decisions at all would likely be greeted with much emotional bunting as a sign of progress.

The telephone interrupted his thoughts.

“Hi, Gabriel. Francine.”

“Hello, Francine. I was about to call you. How are you?”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

He detected more than the usual vinegar in the various acid ratios of her voice.

“Hang on… I’m in the car.” There was the sound of an ill-timed and aggressive gear change. “You know, I’m not being funny, but I really don’t think that the… the Indians know how to drive.”

He twisted the proofs around so he could read them. No, she was not being funny. Francine O’Brien was never being funny.

“Gabriel, I wanted to say that I personally am really looking forward to ‘Toxic Parents.’ And that—get this—Randy himself is taking an interest in this one. His assistant called last night from Los Angeles. Have you met her? Caroline. Lovely girl. She’s had surgery, of course, and I think it’s affecting her skin, but she’s got such a great smile in her voice. Do you know if they’ve shut the M40?”

“Haven’t heard anything here, Francine. Are you off to somewhere exciting?” His eye fled to a quarter-page advertisement for one of Randy K. Norris’s herbal “rescue remedies.” “Fight Stress,” it screamed. But surely, he thought, that’s exactly what stress wanted—a fight.

“I’ve got this half-day of brand-new treatments. Sumatran Indulgence Therapy. It’s that seventies singer’s ex-wife—God, you know who I mean, she’s in all the mags at the moment—it’s her new place.”

“Can’t think who you mean, offhand.” Gabriel knew exactly whom Francine was referring to. He’d spoken to the woman in question on the phone. Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-faced into a guru of well-being and life balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously? At least Francine let the toxins flow.

“Davina Trench That’s her But anyway, they’re trialing in bloody Maidenhead. I mean—hello?—who ever wants to go to Maidenhead? It might as well be in…”

“Indonesia.”

“Wherever.”

“Be great when you arrive, though. You can really relax and pamper yourself.” He hated the word “pamper” almost as much as he hated the word “indulgence,” which in turn was almost as much as he loathed the word “treatment,” with its wretchedly inane pretension toward medicine. Even more dispiriting was that this kind of idiotic vocabulary had become his daily vernacular; most of the people he dealt with these days could not even imagine him employing such words sarcastically, never mind noticing any nuance in his voice. No more than they could imagine the seven solid years of round-the-clock blood-and-agony life-and-death slog that it actually took to become a doctor. “Are they just an indulgence outfit, or do they do other stuff too?”

“Yoga.”

“Expensive?”

“Very.”

“Well, three-sixty inner calm is priceless, I suppose.”

“Oh, you cow — that fat cow just cut me off.” There was the sound of a horn. “This is a freebie. Said I might do a write-up for them.”

And he hated the word “freebie.” And the thought of Francine never doing any of the write-ups for all the million “freebies” she accepted, and the thought of how excruciating it would be to have to run one of her pieces if ever she did.

“Anyway,” Francine said, “I just wanted to be sure that you are taking the feedback on board from the last issue. I know both of our teams agreed to move on—”

And “feedback.” And especially “team”; he never ever wanted to be on anyone’s team for anything, ever. But it was his own fault: clearly the rest of humanity was on a journey to some other place he did not understand.

“This is going to be a top-level-watched issue, Gabriel, and I need to be sure that the lessons we learned from ‘Depress Your Depression’ are going to be implemented for ‘Toxic Parents.’”

The engine note was climbing. “Francine, I’m looking at the proofs right now and I can tell you that all the design concerns have been dealt with. This is a much more readable edition. I think my team just got a little bit too… too creative—and maybe we left some of the readers behind. So, yes, we have made sure to… well, to row back with this one.”

“Great. Good. Excellent. Okay, we’ll speak again Friday. Have to dash.”

The line went dead. And with it, another fraction of his soul.

Without ever for a single minute intending to, Gabriel Glover worked for Roland Sheekey Ltd., a medium-sized contract publishing outfit operating in the nether regions of the Paddington sump, responsible for some thirty-five titles, ranging from in-flight and supermarket tie-in magazines to trade press via corporate brochures and cat-club newsletters—each unnecessary in its own way. But to all intents and purposes his immediate boss was Randy K. Norris, or rather the Randy K. Norris Organization. Gabriel was the editor of Self-Help!, a monthly spinoff from the embarrassingly successful series of Randy K. Norris self-help books, “translated into sixty languages and the first step on the road to recovery for millions.”

Francine O’Brien was the woman in charge at Norris HQ UK (South Kensington). Gabriel was pretty sure that even her own blood cells loathed her. All the same, it was now Tuesday afternoon, and it was to Francine O’Brien by Friday at 0900 hours that Gabriel had to deliver the twenty-four deliriously interesting pages of next month’s Self-Help! In Association with Randy K. Norris.

The job in hand: Self-Help! Number 29: The Toxic Parents Issue. As yet, all but eight pages of the two dozen were nowhere. Four were so badly written that they would have blushed to serve as toilet paper during the siege of Leningrad. Another four, likewise the work of ridge-browed illiterates, seemed to be about things entirely unrelated to the professed subject of the cover (itself in need of radical attention). The eight pages that were okay were all prepaid ads, mostly for variously lamentable Randy K. Norris products (as if every line of the whole magazine weren’t pushing his crap already). As to the remaining eight, they were as yet entirely and formidably blank.

He sat back from the layouts on his desk and once again considered running away. (Mexico? Skye? Shepherd’s Bush?) How did it happen this way every single time? Did he have the courage for the second sandwich? No.

Instead he opened up his e-mail screen: something from his friend Kolya, about a 1920s party (remember to grow a mustache); something from Larry about a new TV show (“Fuck and Run”? Surely not?) that Larry’s company had just commissioned for some TV channel he had never heard of and a celebratory drink being in order. An internal round-robin message, someone from one of the travel magazines advertising a room to let in a shared house in Chalk Farm. Some bulk mail inquiring as to whether he needed help maintaining an erection (no, it’s the getting rid of them that’s problematic). Something from Isabella about could she crash in a few weeks’ time? (Was she coming to London? She hadn’t mentioned this. Odd. Very odd.) And something from an address he did not recognize.

Jesus. Some friend of his mother’s… Now that was interesting. He typed an immediate reply. And for the thousandth time, he tried to imagine her life out there. What did you do all day, Ma? Where did you go? Why didn’t I come and see you more often? He blinked. She was gone, forever gone. And he missed her so very much.

Like his sister, from the moment he had returned home after the funeral, Gabriel had become sensible of the feeling that he had left the reserves, that he was suddenly frontline, and that it was all about to become a great deal uglier and more real. (How ugly could it get?) But he also knew (when the recollection of Isabella’s last half-hour of graveside intensity came to his mind) that he did not have his sister’s singular sense of psychological purpose, her focus, or her fury. Instead the war his mother had bequeathed him seemed vast and vague, fought across many fronts, stretched out across time zones, idiotic, agonizing, senseless, and terrible by turn, locally fatuous, everywhere critical.

Most immediately there were his conscious wars—sectarian, inane, and petty. There was the war against cigarettes, for example, a war of hard-won and commendable open-air victories overturned in seconds by cellar-sprung ambush and subsequent rout. Or there was the war against food—a trench-trapped grind through the calendar, the fat canons of greed facing the sniper rifles of fitness across the elaborate slop of a million senselessly expensive eating occasions. There was the war against booze—a game of false friends and alliances betrayed, in which he vowed over and over never again to trust the sleight hand of camaraderie (offered with a lopsided grin) and yet found himself somehow suckered like an ingénue three times a week. There was the chemical war on drugs, the war on terror—two or three episodes of utter annihilation every year and a lifetime of anxious vigilance and security checks the never-ending price to pay.

But these were only the conscious wars, the phony wars. Deeper down, closer to his heart, the real war was now pressing: the war against his father. And here hung the shadow of the mushroom cloud. For this was indeed a cold, cold war, all about areas of influence and control, posturing, troops massed, invisible borders drawn, crossed, and redrawn, blanket-smuggled exchanges on shivery bridges by night, years of watching, listening, propaganda, betrayals, chronic suspicion, and the endless, endless silence. A war that felt as though it too were now shifting toward some new point of crisis.

But deeper than even this, at the very bottom, never spoken, never admitted, was the loneliest war of all: the war against despair. This last a solitary staggering struggle that took place in the freezing darkness of the polar night, a struggle from which he could not rest but for which he must be forever on the lookout, perpetually exhausted and perpetually tensed, peering hard into the blizzard, ready for the shape of that hooded foe emerging, ready for the three furious minutes of nail, tooth, and blood that would decide it.

The worst of it was that these wars (and many more) were all being waged simultaneously. Had he been fighting any single campaign in isolation, he would have required all his available resources to prevail. But en masse, he had no chance. And so, like every other human being alive, Gabriel now found that his only free time was filled with craving for more free time so that he could gather the space and energy to engage his foes. Pick them off. (Deal with the cigarette problem at the very least.) Since he had returned from Petersburg, though, he had found that day-to-day distractions pressed in on him from all sides all the more. Considered thought, intelligent resolve, emotional balance—there was no chance. Weaknesses faced, dilemmas considered, relationships weighed—there was no time. No chance and no time for anything other than the blind and foolhardy living of it all.

And the nightmare scenario was already happening: since the death of his mother, his enemies had started talking. Smoking, for example, seemed to hijack his evenings under the casual pennants of his mother’s lung cancer (for that, he was sure, was what she had been suffering from), and then, just as he was raising his arms in surrender, some leering little corporal would swing the main banner around and he’d be looking at the insignia, not of his poor mother, but of his father. Yes, cigarettes now reminded him of his dad. Simple as that. A cigarette in itself—white, thin, blithely toxic—said “father” to him as noisily as if it were able to speak out loud. Worst of all—and irony’s perfectly curved scimitar this—his father had managed to give up. Easily.

Another thing: he had become curious about—no, fascinated by; no, preoccupied with—his mother’s life. Not her life with his father (though this too) but her life before that, her life around, behind, beneath the life he thought he already knew. (What did this Russian guy know?) Related to this was his panic that he would forget what she looked like, what she sounded like—hence his need for hourly mental checks. And related to this was his quest for pictures, for mementos, for anything at all that he might gather, hoard, treasure. And somehow—somehow—related to this was… was the strong sense that he had to sort his life out. Sort his bloody life out.

He dialed Lina’s cell phone. Her office phone was usually diverted, and he didn’t want to speak to her secretary.

“Hi, how’s it going?”

“Busy,” she said. “I’m supposed to have written a presentation and people keep coming in and asking me stuff. And the phone keeps going.”

“Shut your door.”

“I do. Then they knock and I can’t think of anything else to say except ‘Come in.’”

“How about a sign—’Fuck off unless you are giving me money or can do interesting tricks.’”

“Gabriel.”

“Sorry. Do you want me to check through the presentation?”

“Yes. That would be nice, thanks. It’s a pitch.”

“When’s it for?”

“Friday. Will you have time?”

“Yes… yes, if it’s important.” He paused. “Are you out tonight?”

“No. You?”

“I’m on the radio. It’s the late show again.”

“Okay. Don’t wake me up. I have to catch a train at eight-thirty.” She changed register. “Quality Kitchens just rang, by the way.”

“I love those guys.”

“They’re sending someone new to start next Monday.” She shuffled something. “Frank Delaney.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Okay—I have to go. I’ll put your pajamas in the lounge so you don’t have to turn on our light. See you later.”

“Bye.”

The afternoon arrived like an aggrieved trade unionist. Not a single one of his so-called writers had filed their so-called copy on time. And what he did have was universally shit. Unbelievably shit—even by the standards of modern journalism, even by the standards of contract publishing, even by the standards of Self-Help! Further, there was no single person among his staff to whom he could appeal for help. He looked out across the empty office floor. Ten to three, and they were all still out at lunch—probably drinking in the Alfred. Not that having them back would make things any better…

His chief (and only) picture editor, Pablo, was a pouting Portuguese prima donna who accused him of being antigay every time he ever so gently suggested that an additional effort of the imagination might be required on such and such a spread, or whenever he delicately pointed out that perhaps a cover picture of Charles and Diana circa 1986 was not the best idea for the “Toxic Parents” issue; his one (and only) copy editor, Craig, was now openly smoking cannabis during his many screen breaks and only last Friday had declared to all comers at the Alfred that he “couldn’t be arsed”; his features editor, Annabel (home counties, public school, Durham), had some sort of trouble with her thyroid and was as maniacally ambitious “to make a national” as she was utterly unsuited to her chosen career—completely unable to cope with any kind of decision-making or pressure and totally incapable as an editor, designer, or, he sometimes suspected, even as a reader; his deputy, Maureen, forty-seven (and forty-seven a day), was probably the single most bitter and poisonous woman ever to scratch a living in the miserable secondhand dirt of the profession—in an industry riddled with rancor, rashed with resentment, choked with bile, gall, and spleen, Maureen Wilson was head and shoulders above everyone else, by some distance the most noxious human being Gabriel had ever called colleague, she spent her days whispering on the phone to the National Union of Journalists or lying in wait for just the right moment to take him to an employment tribunal—a woman outdone only by Francine O’Brien in sheer pound-for-pound toxicity; Wendy, meanwhile, his one and only in-house staff writer—aside from the fact that she was Chinese and English was her fourth language, behind Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese—simply could not be made to understand that interviews with fashion gurus and Tokyo pop stars, however hard to get, had no place in the magazine unless there was a clear self-help angle and so continued (on her own initiative, at her own expense, and at the expense of the jobs she was supposed to be doing) to file three-thousand-word pieces on the latest glamour boy of Japanese death metal—only to break down in tears when he had to explain why they could not run her stuff before she sprinted off to the toilets to lock herself in for the rest of the day.

The job in hand.

He conjured the current cover onto his computer screen. There was the masthead with its familiar exclamation mark: Self-Help! (It was company policy that every title that belly-crawled out of the building did so under the distracting fire of that exclamation mark.) Beneath his own subtitle, “The Toxic Parents Issue,” a youngish Prince of Wales and a near-teenage Diana stared back at him, unhappiness drawn in clear lines across their faces. Both photographs had been tipped slightly sideways and were overlaid by the transparencies of two test tubes, as if about to pour and mingle their contents.

What the living fuck was Pablo trying to do? Gabriel sighed. He was going to have to go it alone. Again.

The cheerless reality was that twelve times a year, working night and day as each deadline approached, Gabriel commissioned, designed, wrote, copy-edited, illustrated, captioned, laid out, and proof-checked the entire magazine. In truth, Self-Help! was a one-man operation. Yes, the others—Pablo, Craig, and Annabel, at least—did their stuff eventually, however unprofessionally. But he had never once felt able to leave their work unchecked. And almost without fail, he found himself rewriting, revising, redesigning, reworking, later and later into the night as the deadline approached.

The problem was one of conscience. For even though he could not stand the Randy K. Norris Organization, even though he thought Randy K. Norris himself one of the greatest charlatans alive, Gabriel nonetheless felt a crushing sense of responsibility toward the people who read Self-Help! The people who might—Jesus Christ—actually turn to the magazine for succor and guidance in their genuine distress. Despite himself, he was trying to make a go of it.

He looked up. His colleagues were returning. Maureen—heels high, chin low—walked straight into her office opposite (far larger than his own), shut the door, sat down, and lit the cigarette that she had readied in the lift. Given the flurries of rain, she would soon be joined by various pinch-faced delegations of fellow smokers from other magazines in the building, whom she welcomed with sardonic zest throughout the day, and who had grown used to using her room as the only alternative to the stairwell or the street. Pablo, meanwhile, sat down at his desk opposite Craig, who did the same for the count of three before standing up again, wedging his armpit with newspapers, and heading in the direction of the men’s room. Ominously, there was still no sign of Wendy. For a foolish moment, Gabriel considered calling an editorial conference. But really, there was no point; it was way too late for that. No, his only chance was to try to pick them off one by one. (He must remember to phone Annabel at home, too; check if she was okay; maybe she was genuinely ill. The hours that he had spent counseling that girl… and oh man, what do you say, what can you say?) He drew breath and got to his feet.

“Hey, Pablo.”

“Hello. You seen the layouts?”

“Yes, I looked through them over lunch. And the new cover. I really like the two test tubes things—clever.”

Pablo sucked in his cheeks. “Yes, it’s very oh-my-God. Mum and Dad, like two poison test tubes, pouring down into one bottle”—he mimed the chemist’s concentrated decantation—“which is you.”

“I see that.” Gabriel had the sense that he was being personally compared to a newly mixed tube of poison. Perhaps it was paranoia.

Pablo clicked his mouse and made as if to return his attention to the screen. “Okay. So, great—send me through the copy when you have it. You got anything ready now?”

Gabriel was unsure whether to perch on the desk or ask Pablo to come over to the big table so that he could talk directly over each of the alterations he required. He glanced up. Craig and Wendy’s absence argued in favor of staying put. He perched.

“I’ve got some changes.” He put the mocked-up cover on the design desk adjacent to Pablo’s terminal. “First, I don’t think we can use the Prince of Wales and… and Princess Diana on the cover of the ‘Toxic Parents’ issue.”

Instantly Pablo contorted his face, as if Gabriel’s stupidity were beyond the merely unbelievable and on into something that might be medically interesting. “That’s everything. Just, like, the whole cover idea”

“No—not everything. As I say, I love the concept. We just need different people in the test tubes. What about some celebrities from… from one of the soaps. A famously toxic couple. There must be one.”

“And, like, you would know.”

This seemed unnecessarily aggressive. Though, perversely, Gabriel was flattered. Which only served to remind him how far apart they were as human beings. He feigned a measured hurt. But Pablo was now staring dead ahead at his screen, busily clicking on pages as if to suggest that some people around here had work to do.

“Come on, Pablo—change the cover. If you don’t, you know I will.”

“Diana sells.”

“She is also dead.”

“But her painful legacy lives on. That’s the whole point. Duh. Every single person who picks this up”—Pablo indicated the printout with his finger but without taking his eyes off the screen—“will know exactly what this issue is about. Instantly. In one visual hit. They’ll think parents. They’ll think toxic. They’ll think William and Harry’s struggle. What more can you ask from a cover?”

“Charles has remarried,” Gabriel returned. “This is cheap. Worse than that—it’s nasty, it’s lame, it’s offensive, it’s lazy, it participates in everything about our national life that we should dislike. Come on, Pablo—it’s also more than twenty years old, and hardly a scoop or a particularly new image.” He held the proof up, his tone still just about jocular. “It’s tired. It’s worse than tired—it’s unimaginative, it’s ill-judged, it’s childish, it’s without taste, it’s a slight on the dead and an insult to the living, it’s—”

“Iconic.”

Jesus. Argument was futile. Power was the only recourse. “And it’s never going to be approved by the client, or Hamish”—the group editor in chief still signed off on everything individually—“or anyone else who has to approve every single thing we do here.”

Pablo now turned in his chair so that he was facing his editor with folded arms. “Well, let’s fight for it.”

“Pablo, our readers do not think of Diana as toxic. They love her. They love her to death.”

“Fight for it.”

“For Christ’s sake, Pablo, I—we—we are not going to fight for this shit… We’re just going to get on with it and stop wasting fucking time.”

He had never cursed in anger at the office before. And for a moment Gabriel could not think of anything acceptable further to say. For the first time in his working life, he found himself wanting to lash out at one of his colleagues. He found himself wanting to say something truthful for once: Look, you utter penis of a man, we’re in contract publishing—there’s nothing to fight for. We’ve lost every claim to dignity already. Let alone art. We’re totally and utterly beaten. Christ, they’re all beaten, even the bastards on the nationals. Journalism is over. Art is over. Design is over. Publishing is over. Fact is fiction. And fiction is fucked. Money won. We’re here because we’re slaves. And the only claim we are permitted to make is to tug on the chains of our wages once a month. That’s the deal. I get to buy my girlfriends overpriced tapas every so often. You get your tight designer T-shirts and a night out at Cream or Lube or wherever you go on the weekend by way of forgetting. So shut the fuck up and get on with it. Or get out there and start your revolution.

Somehow, though, he controlled himself, ignored the echoes of his mother’s voice (you would say it, wouldn’t you, Ma—you’d just come right out and say it), and tried to take advantage of Pablo’s horrified attention.

He repeated himself slowly. “We are not going to fight for this, Pablo. And it’s not just the cover.”

Pablo straightened his back and set his jaw, as if to arrange himself against the moment of his life’s greatest indignity.

“Also, I can see what you’re trying to do with the center spread, but it’s… it is all image, Pablo. The copy just has to be bigger than this.” Gabriel ran his finger along the bottom of the page, where Pablo had reduced the point size of Annabel’s (wretched) interview with a celebrity famous for forgiving her parents to something that resembled a slapdash massacre of starving ants. “Nobody is going to be able to read it.”

Gabriel began to turn through each of the layouts at speed. “And—I’m sorry, but we have to have headlines at the top. So pages five and seven, can you redesign? On nine, you’ve got the body copy running sideways—I think it’s sideways. We can’t do it. Sorry. Hamish hates all that space. So do I. So does everyone. Okay? Right. Readers’ letters should be the same font size—at least the same font size for each individual letter. And Spirited Away has to go back around the right way… Our readers won’t guess that they have to turn the magazine upside down for those pages. They’re desperate, Pablo. Let’s not make it any worse.”

Pablo’s eyes were two slits.

But Gabriel had moved beyond care. “The neobrutalist stuff, or whatever it is, that you want to do on the back—well, okay, I’ll allow that on the inside back cover. But. But Inner Space can’t stay in this… this galaxy effect. Yeah, I know what you’re trying to do—I get it. It’s just totally unreadable. And not really that clever. Spiral text—it’s for kids’ mags.”

“I’m not doing it. I’m not changing anything.” Pablo was actually crying.

Tears. This was a first.

“I’m sick of… I’m sick… I’m sick of you squashing my creativity.”

Gabriel felt the surge of his furious blood. Beethoven was creative, Pablo—Mozart was creative, Dickens, Dante, Kant, D&udie;rer, Newton, Raphael, Aeschylus, Balzac. Yes, there have been a good few genuinely creative human beings. But you’re not one of them. You are not in the least bit creative. You are not even talented. You just have a computer. That’s all. The same as every other mediocre fucker whose terrible shit we all have to suffer every second of the day. So let’s leave that word “creative” alone for a few decades, shall we? Let’s all stop pretending. There are no creative departments in London. Creativity is not copywriting or art directing, creativity is not interior, graphic, or fashion design, creativity is not mimicry or doodle, is not gesture or token, is not a clever text message, a new and even sillier pair of trousers, or an unmade bed, it’s not your shitty computer music, or your shitty homemade films, or your shitty Web site with a flashing cock. Creativity is… creativity is a massive and serious lifetime’s endeavor to further humankind’s fundamental understanding of itself. Creativity is 154 perfect sonnets and 38 immortal plays, creativity is 1,126 masterworks of music, every note perfect, creativity is E = MC², the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the discovery of planets. What you do is total horseshit. Got that? Total and utter horseshit.

And suddenly it came at him like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog in which he was living: he wasn’t thinking like his mother at all, he was thinking like his father. The journey that he had feared in Petersburg was already under way. Thinking like a nasty, bullying, cowardly, small-time little bastard.

“Pablo—I’m sorry. No further argument about the changes. Just—”

“I really…” He was fighting through the tears. “I really do not respect you, Gabriel. You are a fucking fascist. A fucking homophobic fascist.”

“I’m neither of those things, Pablo. And you know that I am not.” Gabriel handed his colleague some tissues. The distress of others had always distressed him more than his own distress. He reached out his hand and put it on the other man’s shoulder as gently as he could manage. “I apologize, Pablo. You are a great designer. I mean it.” He spoke softly. “But please, can you make the changes? If not, if you still feel upset in half an hour, then let me know and I will do them.”

The fat taxi wallowed west on the Westway. All through the late afternoon he had been chasing so-called experts for quotes, opinion, insight… To no avail. Even down in the thickened sedimentary murk at the bottom of the journalistic swamp, the same rusty old rule applied: anyone worth speaking to was impossible to get hold of, and anyone free to talk or write wasn’t worth listening to or reading. He made a vow to go in even earlier tomorrow and track down at least one serious human being whom he might ask for information and guidance with his piece.

November nighttime London rolled by his window—white strip lights in the places of work, amber low lights in the bedrooms, the flickering blue of a thousand TVs.

His mind would permit him no rest.

Everyone said that it was unsustainable. Mother, sister, and the few friends who knew. But, Gabriel told himself, none of them could really understand it, or feel it, because none of them were inside the circumstances. None of them had the day-to-day experience. None of them lived it. No, Gabriel alone knew the truth: that it was utterly unsustainable. Because he alone had been sustaining it. For the past eighteen months.

Different parts of the heart—this was the way he explained it to himself. Indeed, this was the way he tried to explain it to everyone. You can love a sister and a mother, both entirely and at the same time, correct? But the love for them seems to come from different parts of the heart. One does not replace or override the other. Like the love parents evince for one child simultaneously with—yet separately from—the love for another, for son and for daughter. Or the love for closest friends. All of these loves—real, sincerely felt, ready to be tested—they all seem wholehearted in the individual case, and yet they all seem to come from a different space within the whole. I love my mother with all my heart and I love my sister with all my heart. These two statements are not mutually exclusive; one does not render the other nonsensical; rather, they are both meaningful, simultaneously. We all know this, intuitively.

But to take this a stage further, Ma, perhaps it has to be this way—necessarily, mathematically. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly human. Because, first, the human heart, where exercised, is found to have infinite capacity. (And if not exercised, then what is the point?) And second, because there are infinite infinities in just one infinity. This is the great paradox in the laws of our universe, and this is also the great paradox of the human heart. And these paradoxes are as necessary as the consistencies they defy. And that’s how it is for me with Lina and Connie, Ma: the love for one comes from a different place from the love for the other. And though I agree—of course, who wouldn’t?—that it may not be possible in practice to live like this, still, in terms of the heart, in terms of the reality of my feelings (the only terms that really count, Ma), I tell you it is possible. So please, consider deeply. We must all respect feelings. Do not say that it is not possible—a paradox, yes, a very human paradox, but not an impossibility. Quite the reverse. An affirmation of my humanity. Yes, believe me, it is possible. Different parts of the heart. I know—I live it: I am the proof. Every day of my life; every day of my life, Ma, I live it.

“Here we are, mate. This is it.”

Radio Rabbit was run from the basement of a converted Victorian school in a part of town that some people thought of as Lad-broke Grove and others Shepherd’s Bush—nobody was quite sure, least of all Gabriel. No other city that he knew of had quite so many half-secret but long-established side roads, each one of them a great tragicomic story all its own. The car came to a halt. He signed the chit and stepped out. The night was uncommonly dark; the street-lamps did not make it this far up the cul-de-sac, and the rain fell so finely that he felt it only as a gentle film.

He pressed the buzzer at the side of the shiny door. The lock sprang. He felt his heart lighten, then quicken. A security man, a stuffed bear that someone had thought amusing to dress in a suit, nodded him through. Or might not have moved at all. Gabriel was a regular, and after eleven the bear did not seem to bother to sign people in or out. Not that it mattered; they could always burn together live on air. Be fitting, in a way. He passed down the familiar corridor hung with the fifteen or so faces of Radio Rabbit, including, right at the far end, the one with which he was in love.

Honey-highlighted hair that fell straight in careless strands about her pretty brow; blue-green eyes that appeared a little melancholy and yet forever just about to wink; high cheekbones, but rounded rather than sharp, so that when she smiled (and a smile was the natural set of her lips) she had the cheekiest face of any woman he had ever met—a face full of friendship, mischief, passion, and vitality, collusive, playful, understanding, a face forever caught between laughter and a kiss… And yet there was also a distancing cool there—resolve and firmness in the rise of her chin, in the slight sideways angle of her head to the camera, most of all in the way those eyes came at you from somewhere deep and old as the pool of life itself.

He pushed open the familiar door and mouthed his hello to Wayne, the lone producer, assistant, researcher, screener of callers, or whatever it was that he titled himself. In the studio, behind the glass, cans on her head, eyes on her computer screen, Connie was absorbed in the technical business of her job. She did not see him arrive. He watched her a moment, thirsty as a hermit for her beauty and her being.

There was a song playing. Something by Tom Waits. Wayne motioned for him to wait. So he helped himself to some of the vending machine coffee (which always tasted of acorns and cinnamon) and stood sipping it—the spy about to board the plane that would drop him deep behind the iron curtain. Then the red “on air” light went out as they cut to some ads and Wayne waved him in.

Connie looked up as he opened the heavy padded door and greeted him with that smile that women reserve for men they love but cannot love, which of course makes men love them even more. He took his seat opposite hers.

“Hi, you. We have three minutes five,” she said. Then, a little softer, “Hmmm—you look tired, Gabriel Glover. Have you been sorting your life out?”

This was her perennial question—faux-comic Connie code for Have you either proposed to or left Lina? Can we therefore end the misery-exhilaration cycle of our relationship and either never see each other again or live happily ever after somewhere in the countryside?

“Of course not.”

“Well… no rush.” She was mocking him but not with her eyes.

“Are we still playing it cool?” he asked.

“Yes. We’re learning to become friends.” She nodded slowly, as if ticking off a wayward pupil. “As we should have done in the first place.”

“I think I am addicted to you. I’ve been missing you like… like… like something I am addicted to.”

She smiled. “Well, sort your life out and you won’t bloody have to.”

“I am doing.”

“Feels like it.”

“Connie.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t try to be cute. You know how much I hate all this mess. I really hate it.”

There was nothing he could say. There was never, ever anything he could say.

She relented. “Are you okay?”

And she meant it. She felt for him.

“Yes. I’m fine.” And her generosity and understanding and inexhaustible patience made it worse. “I brought the stuff—I’ve read it through and made some suggestions.” She was writing a script for some radio and awards thing she was hosting. He’d taken unbelievable pains to imagine her voice and edit accordingly.

She beamed her thanks. “Good job Wayne is watching or I’d have to kiss you. A lot.”

“Does Wayne ever fall asleep?”

“Gabriel.”

“Sorry. You started it.”

“Never. Wayne never sleeps.”

“That’s a shame.” He smoothed the piece of paper on which he would write the callers’ names. “I mean, that’s a shame, mate ”

“One minute, thirty seconds. No, mate, you started it—if you remember.”

“Mate, I remember everything.”

She said, “I keep thinking about when we went to Rome. I think about you all the time.”

He said, “I get scared when I am thinking about you that it’s getting in the way of thinking about you.”

“Soulmates.”

“Soulmates.”

Even though the red light was off, they were talking in hushed voices—partly because they were in a radio studio, partly because the excitement of being in each other’s presence again demanded it, and partly because they were lovers and here they were, somewhere half secret, and it was the dead of night and it felt like they were the last people awake in the middle of a great city and only hushed voices would do. The song played on.

“Fifty seconds.”

He said, “We could try breaking up completely—after this.”

“We’re not together, so how can we break up?”

“We’ve done it before.”

“Yeah… about a hundred times, and it’s never worked.”

“We could try extra-hard this time. No calls. No texts. Nothing.” He took out his favorite pen. “No sudden collapses. Not even any action.”

She made a suspicious face, then lightened. “Okay… Okay. Good. It’s a deal. We leave each other alone. You take some proper time to work out what it is you want and what it is you’re doing.”

“But I can’t stop wanting you, Connie, and I can’t imagine my life without you.”

“Nor mine without you. So.”

“So?”

“So sort your life out, Gabriel—for the love of Jesus, sort your life out.” She gave him an expression that mixed exasperation with desire. “I’m going to introduce you in the usual way, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Signal me if it gets too heavy and we’ll move on to someone else.”

“Okay.”

The song ended in applause. The red light came on. And her voice spoke softly to the hearts of three thousand sleepless Londoners: “You are listening to Radio Rabbit with me, Connie Carmichael, and that was ‘Strange Weather,’ by Tom Waits. Who I still haven’t met, despite the celebrity-stuffed life I lead. Well, it’s midweek and it’s midnight and that means it’s time for our self-help phone-in. With me in the studio is our regular guest, your friend and mine, the editor of the Randy K. Norris Self-Help! magazine, Gabriel Glover. How’s the week shaping up for you, Gabriel?”

“Terrific, so far.”

23 Comrade Masha

The river slunk and the city slept. Parisians dreamed in three million darkened rooms. But Nicholas was still awake, sitting alone in his high-backed leather chair.

The pipes groaned, and the wood seemed to creak in the beam. He had the window open a fraction for the night air, though the flames of the false fire were turned up as high as they would go. He set down his malt, took out the letter from its cheap Russian envelope again, and held it to the angled light. His eyesight was as good as it had ever been. And yet, although he was alone, it suited some indefinite part of him to act as if it were fading.

The English, he thought, was surprisingly lucid—though lucid in the old-fashioned elegant manner rather than merely plain in the modern way. The handwriting, however, was quite unable to stay within the confines of its institutional origins. He read the letter through again. The opening sentence began with the specific use of his name: “Dear Nicholas Glover…”

The writer was intelligent enough not to commit any specific threat to paper. He merely asked for a meeting. But it was there, Nicholas was sure, betrayed perhaps by the square hook of those gallows-shaped r’s—the grim Cyrillic Γin thin disguise.

He allowed the letter to dangle between finger and thumb and played the whisky through his crooked teeth.

My God, Masha, your bloody son is alive after all. You knew this all along, of course… Christ, why am I always so slow-witted compared to you? Only now do I begin to see what has been under my vain nose all along. You went back to find him. Didn’t you? This was the reason. Only now do I begin to see. It was not the call of your country at all, was it? It was the call of your blood. Alive all along. Known about. And yet… you did not tell me. Even when I came to you at the end. Even as we sat together. Your quid pro quo for all the things I did not tell you—was that it? Ah, but what a shame that we played chess with our secrets like this. A shame, dear Masha. A shame on our lives.

Somewhere down on the embankment a drunk had started sobbing like a child bereft. Nicholas rose to pull the window shut, the flames wavering a moment in his draft as he passed. He eased the frame up a millimeter or two on its old hinges so that it would close more easily and turned the handle through ninety careful degrees. Then he fetched his bottle and returned Bach’s harpsichord to its beginning so that he would not have to move again.

And what exactly am I supposed to do now that the bastard—sorry, but we are all bastards, Masha, except you—now that the bastard has tracked me down? What is he to me? Or I to him? And what kind of man are we dealing with? Is he our everyday comrade—brutal, avaricious, mercenary, desperate to get out? Or is there some of your nobility in his character—is it just a meeting he wants, friendship, a lifelong correspondence about Turgenev?

Or will it be money?

Wait, though. Wait… is this what you were doing in Petersburg, Masha, giving him money? After everything was said and resaid and asserted and defied, did it come down to money for you too? Oh no. Wait. I know you, my Mashenka!

He leaned forward in his chair, childishly enlivened by the rare excitement of a thought he had not had before.

My father’s money was stolen from Russia. It came to me. I gave it to you. You gave it back to Russia. That’s how you will have seen it! That’s exactly how you will have seen it! Oh Masha, did this become your life’s project? This son of yours and his birthright…

A young woman rising in the Party, you see this Englishman gallivanting through your cities: Maximilian Glover, whoremonger, embezzler, art thief, traitor… Or, my god, perhaps you were sent to him… Perhaps you were sent to my father.

Nicholas sat back, let the letter dangle again, and swallowed slowly, concentrating on the burn of the Talisker down his throat and into the pit of his stomach.

But you… you… you marry the son instead. You can serve your masters better that way. My God. Surely you weren’t spying after all? How many times did we talk about this? Laugh. Fantasize. Pretend. You loved to make things up, of course, and this I celebrate. But was the final joke on me? Was I distracted? Was I double-fooled? Oh, Masha, is this your little secret?

He drank again and this time held the spirit in the cradle of his tongue. (The chain of thought was long familiar to him. But he fingered the links now with a new concentration.) You study your ruffian English so very, very carefully. You take your terrible job as a lowly copy editor—a miserable checker of grammar and facts on the newspaper of record, as you liked to call it. You work the night shift. You work weekends. You work whenever you are told. And there are whispers, of course, in the canteen, up and down the editorial floor, there are whispers everywhere; more than this—there are tales and conversations and rows, all the hundred truths that cannot be printed are heard out loud, bandied back and forth across the desks every day; and then there is all that copy they cannot run; and you see it; you sift the in box while you’re waiting for the idiots to file their illiteracy; and you hear the political correspondents boasting in the lifts and the diplomatic editor confiding on his way to conference; foreign desk, crime, health, and defense—you hear them all; and there are politicians and there are artists and there are captains of industry, stars of this and experts in that, and they are all in and out of the editor’s office, day and night, like Japanese businessmen through a brothel. And you are there all the while, as decades pass, listening, reading, sitting quietly at your workstation, Maria Glover, the efficient copy editor.

And I wager you never took a penny There would be no trace of it. No money. Just love. You passed without being asked to do so. And I wager you never asked if any of it was useful, or appreciated, or even relevant. You simply passed information. Dutifully. Loyally. Even when they stopped acknowledging your drops. Because, yes, one day, just as you are sitting there, the Wall comes down. And it seems as though it has all been for nothing.

What then? Do you go on regardless? Or do you turn slowly from the great struggle to the personal? Is there one last thing, a private thing—though the bourgeois scum are teeming gleefully through—is there one last thing that you can still accomplish? You can return the money to your son. You can return what is owed to Russia. You would enjoy that last bitter little irony, wouldn’t you, my clever, clever Masha?

He weighed this new idea, pleased to have hauled it from the mirrored lake of his life, pleased that there was hidden treasure at the end of the chain after all.

If this is the way we must play, then play this way we will, you think. If it’s all about the money, then let it be so: let’s start again, but let’s start fair. Yes, let’s start again: oil, labor, and technology—the East will rise once more in a monstrous aping of the slobbering West. Harder, careless, and more ruthless yet. And this time the West will beg for mercy.

Or am I wrong? Am I wrong about all of this?

His eyes reflected the flames. The ice had melted in his glass.

24 Scorched Earth

Work was easy.

She asked for a sabbatical.

They refused.

She said that she was sorry but she was going back to the U.K. to deal with some family issues anyway. And that she would therefore be tendering her resignation.

They said, oh, they hoped it was nothing serious, they would be sad to lose her, but she should definitely drop in when she got back and they would see where they were then.

She said that, yes, it was serious, her mother had died.

They looked at her with faces of sudden concern and expressed their sympathy. They asked her when her mother passed away.

She took a private moment to dislike their choice of euphemism and then, as planned, said that her mother’s death had been yesterday rather than almost four weeks ago. This so that they could not stop her from leaving immediately, now, this very lunchtime.

They did not know whether to comfort her or become even more professional.

She could tell they were alarmed at her calmness. She wanted to say, Don’t worry, so was I; it passes.

They shook their heads and meant their platitudes.

She was sorry for them for having to deal with this. Death gave them focusing issues to address in the short term and mortality issues going forward.

They asked her if there was anything at all they could do to help.

She told them no, thanks, and that seeing as she would be dropping by in six months, and given the circumstances, she wouldn’t be working her notice and she had to go pretty much straightaway. They said, oh, and then, of course.

She didn’t gather her small collection of things at her desk. And she did not stop to consider whether it was she or they who had the perception problem on her way out.

Her father, though, was the hardest task she had faced in her life. The hardest task since the last e-mail. Her twenty-second draft read:

But having gone through the e-mail again, for the twenty-third time, she found it a cringing agony still. No matter what she did, she could not rid her words of their phony tone, their dishonest designs, their awkwardness. The plain truth was that she could not plainly ask her own father anything that she wished to ask him. She squeezed her eyes shut. What was it with some people—that the very idea of them prohibits certain questions from ever being asked? How does their power, their charisma—if that’s what it is—cast such shadows in other minds, even if they are halfway around the world?

Shitting hell.

She was back in the same Internet café. And this time, as well as the rotting carpet, she could smell the milk turning sour where someone had spilled it beside the help-yourself coffee stand.

Hey, Dad, are you gay? I’ve suspected it for years deep down. Francis is an old boyfriend, isn’t he? Well, good. Great, in fact! It’s fine. It really is. Nobody cares anymore. That’s one victory we have won. You can tell me. You can trust me. If trust is what you need. Anyway, it explains a good deal, and thank you for your honesty.

Oh yeah, and were you in Petersburg before Mum died? Your friend Mr. Avery nearly gave you away, you know. Did you go to see her die? That would suit you, wouldn’t it? The ultimate combination of pain followed by histrionic displays of affection, you sadistic bastard. See, she suffers almost to death! And see, I love her after all! All you who doubted my capacity for compassion. You were wrong. I held it back behind these castle walls of cold gray stone for dire moments such as this. So now… now see the iron man’s bleeding heart! See how I demonstrate my love. Hitler fondles his dogs. Stalin pats the children’s heads.

Well, understand this, you vainglorious little shit: I’m not fooled. Because I do see, I see it all clearly: because still, still, still, it’s all about you, isn’t it? Even your own wife’s, my mother’s, cancer is nothing more than a stage on which you can strut and preen your narcissism. Admire me, admire the drama of the strongman’s unexpected kindness. Admire his great reservoir of love released. Count yourselves lucky to see such a glimpse. Because you never ever forget how it plays, even if only to the rapturous audience in your head, do you, Dad?

Oh Christ. Christ. Christ. She felt the grief kraken rising from the deep, sending ripples through the underground lake of her tears.

Shitting hell.

She looked around. The Internet café was almost empty this afternoon. She bit her lip. This was going to be a long, painful process. She must ask her questions singly. She must win her father s trust. She must persuade the portcullis guard one ratchet at a time. Only then… With a tremendous effort, she gathered herself. And then, falsely calm, she deleted everything except the first paragraph (as she had always known she would) and let the phrase “I don’t want to interfere in your life” stand as the most oblique invitation to a father’s frankness that had ever been written.

Next, Sasha.

Though maybe she didn’t plan to end it forever. After all, she liked the guy. He was sweet. He was intelligent. He was on the same side. Lazy, immature—yes; but good-hearted beneath all the pretentious film-industry jargon he talked; and all he needed was some confidence, someone to take him seriously out there so that he could take himself seriously too.

When she had met him, he had just sold a scene from one of his screenplays—something to do with a dog being set on fire by accident—and he was riding high. He made her laugh—properly, wholeheartedly, like the young Woody Allen made her laugh. He had a nice line in existential incredulity. Since then, he had seemed to grow younger or more puerile. And either she’d begun to see the banality of the form for what it was or he had started to write more banal things. In any case, his work had foundered. And his mother, she knew, was now giving him money. Which wasn’t good for him. He was turning in on himself. She suspected he was spending hours online in chat rooms. He needed someone to draw him out again, to love him without secret reserve, to whisper reassurance to him in the night.

Their recent antagonism, which had started a good few months before her mother had died, was officially about space. Sasha worked at home, and he needed some undisturbed zone of his own: namely, the main table. This she duly ceded, accepting the piles of papers, the ostentatious laptop, the stacked books, the newspaper clippings, the printer on the floor with its wretchedly too-short cable stretched lethally taut from desk to socket at shin height. In return, the sofa was hers. She lived around his mess. She did not complain.

Beneath this, though, she had known that there was a second and more truthful level of the argument. Sasha thought that she did not believe in his efforts. Did not really believe in his talent. Did not believe in the persona he wanted her to believe in. Did not, in fact, believe in him. And the more he thought that she did not believe, the more the paper and the mess expanded, as he tried to seek her affirmation by subconsciously forcing his work again and again back under her retreating nose. Because in some furtive way, Sasha also knew that this was the real argument, and so he wanted to prize her out into the open to challenge her. And yet he was also a coward. So, having goaded her out with his mess from time to time, he would then devote all his energy to pretending that the argument was only about space after all and what the hell was she getting so crazy about when, sure, if it was a problem, he’d tidy up every night and she could use the goddamn table.

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.

As he came off a curb, plastic-covered parking permit in one hand, house keys in the other, the front wheel somehow jerked left and he hadn’t sufficient grip on the handlebars to correct it. He lost control and down he went, hard and sideways onto the pavement—clatter of bike, scrape of limbs, pain, and yet more disbelief. To counter the embarrassment, he had, of course, to jump back on as quickly as possible, though he was well aware that this was in many ways more ridiculous than falling off in the first place. Ladies, gents, I assure you that the accident you have just witnessed was all but planned… As if anyone cared.

They lived in Tufnell Park, North London, and not bad. They had four rooms: big bedroom, big bathroom, a small nameless room (that screamed in certain cartoonish nightmares for a child), and a decent lounge, down one side of which was their kitchen. Given that to live in the city was for the vast majority of Londoners to live in a dark, vole-sized hole, they were lucky. Ridiculously small and silly by any other standard, in London of the twenty-first century, their flat was modestly desirable.

Or rather, used to be, before they (Lina) had decided to get the kitchen “done.” Now, alas, all was dust, rubble, and dereliction. Week six, and everybody involved, including the flat itself, was showing signs of having had enough. In one sense, and as past participles go, having the kitchen “done” described the process well—though maybe not quite robustly enough to Gabriel’s mind. Rather, it seemed to him that under the pretense of “installing” the new kitchen, the fitters were actually serially abusing it: shoving it up against the walls and banging it every which way they knew how—as hard and as often as they could; ripping it apart, pushing it down, forcing it into places it did not want to go; hurting it, flipping it over this way and that for their brutal pleasure; breaking it, smacking it about, calling it all the filthy names they knew; scratching it, breaking off its knobs, dropping its drawers; fucking it forward, backward, side to side, good and proper, once and for all. And when one guy got tired, another took over and went at it again, as hard as he could for five days straight.

All of this, plus all of everything else, as well as the need to stop all of this and stop all of everything else, was on his mind as he came haring up his street, bike clanking unnaturally loudly. Haring up the street to find Lina looking every bit as fresh and pristine as the face on the North of Sweden Tourist Board’s 1992 press campaign (clear lakes, snow-white mountains, nature’s undiminished purity), which job she had in fact held when she was seventeen. Haring up the street to find Lina standing beneath an umbrella, giving instructions in her measured and sensible voice to Frank, who, unbelievably, was taking down notes as she spoke.

His brakes squealed him to a histrionic halt. There was pavement muck on his trousers, blood on the elbow of his jogging top, white skin-scrapes on his hands, and rainwater on his nose. He tried his best to smile. He was staggered by her… her competence. Nobody was angry or crying or about to die. Nobody was talking about Leonard Cohen or the appalling adolescence of the new world leaders or why they were still tearing down the Amazon or anything remotely like that; they were actually talking about the kitchen sink. And in the chaotic and unpredictable way these things happen to men, as she looked up at him, he was struck by desire. He wanted her there and then. He wanted her as he always wanted her—at the least appropriate moments life could conjure. To kiss those lips now. To hold her now. Shut the door against Frank and all his kind. Fall on each other in the hall. Cast off clothes as best they could. Raise her skirt. Go at it like Olympian gods made mortal for half an hour only.

Their relationship had begun with the best taxi ride of his life. He had just flown back from New York. She was standing at the baggage counter. He had always found it easy to talk to women, his unconscious secret being that, unlike so many men, he naturally talked to them as human beings and not as women. Even so, looking back, he realized that it was probably some magical and unrepeatable combination of his tiredness, his mind’s emptiness, his confession of fear, his unfakeably relaxed I’m-not-after-anything manner (which a man gets when he’s had attention from another woman recently), his genuine feeling of camaraderie with her after the turbulent flight, and maybe even his sincere desire to get a cab at half price that made her feel comfortable enough to let him continue asking questions, carry her vodka through customs, share the ride.

They sat quietly side by side as they drove in, watching that gentle miracle of the dawn: steadfast old London emerging from a quiet rain, gray and wet, street by street—prewar terraces of solid brick, modern low-rise offices, the high white stucco of West London’s prosperity, newsagents on corners just opening up, the Victorian railway lines, the Georgian canals, the early-shifters already afoot, making for the nearest tube with umbrellas, headphones, privately preoccupied. The drizzle zigzagged down their windows. The car’s heater hummed intermittently, as though a tiny piece of paper had been caught somewhere. She sat with her shoulder-length dark hair tied to one side at the back in a mini-ponytail that wisped sideways, long legs twisted around each other in her heavy black tights, buried otherwise in her coat; he sat, also looking out but thinking thoughts that mingled the history of his city with a tingling awareness that he was slipping under the encounter’s gathering spell. That somehow there was a fragile affinity between them that may or may not come to anything, something intimately shared beyond the immediate ride—something, he thought, to do with that mysterious old alchemy that happens when a man and a woman find that their journeys coincide for a while.

When they turned from their windows, they met each other’s eyes. And he eased the moment’s silence by asking for her number, saying it would be fun to meet up again and discuss customs regulations. And she gave it to him. And the next day he called her.

In the weeks and months that followed, he probably fell in love. Lina was twenty-six, two years younger than he at that time. She was half Sami, half Swedish. Her limbs were all long and thin, so she had the occasional gawkiness of a slightly taller woman. She had ice-blue eyes, snow-sunned skin, sleek, dark, silky black-brown hair, which she was forever tying up this way or that. Her lips were almost colorless, though shaped and full, as though designed by some high seraphim of kissing. And the soft light of the midnight sun was in her smile.

Indeed, hers was a sorcery of the genes that no other combination on earth could hope to conjure. When he sat down to think about it, which, in those early days, he did more often than sanity might require, he calculated that there could be fewer than a thousand like combinations alive—how many pure Sami people were left in the north of Sweden, and of those, how many had married the southerners, and of those, how many had produced female children who turned out like Lina? She was one in six billion. And yet it was impossible to place her without knowing where she was from, for her eyes had only the faintest rise of the far north, her dark hair and skin suggested the south, while her smile was as wide and white-toothed as the west itself, and her manner was almost oriental.

Her mother—now married to her stepfather (her “plastic dad”) and living in London for the past two decades—looked as though she had just stepped out of a 1970s holiday brochure advertising happiness and free love in Sweden: the cheekbones, the head-to-one-side smile, the true blond hair, the ever-honest self-reliant Scandinavian eyes of steady azure. And it was from her mother that Lina had received the gift of living in her body with ease and openness—not so much the tawdry modern “confidence,” more a deep and unconscious surety in the authority of womanhood—and the gift of competence, a steady practicality and equilibrium that found life for the most part exactly as it should be.

Her father had abandoned an existence of fur trapping with his father to go the long way south to Gothenburg at nineteen. Lina’s grandfather, meanwhile, had lived his entire life bound in ice and liquor. She had a picture of the old man, grinning broken-toothed from inside the layers of his furs, standing on the edge of a white forest, white mountains behind, white sky, surrounded by dead animals neatly fanned out in the red-stained snow before him. And so it was from her father’s side that Lina had received the gift of tranquility—or, more accurately, the gift of silence. For Gabriel knew that she was without doubt the most silent human being he would ever meet—not silent as in “a bit quiet” or “sometimes shy” but silent, when the mood took her (twice, three times a year), as in utterly wordless for days at a time. He had known her to say nothing for entire weekends, wrinkling her nose, smiling, and blinking after they made love and then wandering off, towel loosely held like an afterthought, to find a drink, her bath, her music. And it wasn’t erotic primarily, or even sexy (though both these things), but it was somehow ancient and intense.

The relationship deepened. Lina was kind, unbelievably generous, and supportive. She gave him all the freedom he wanted. She was as honest as Archean rock, and almost weirdly straight—quite without artifice or any sort of emotional deviousness. For a while Gabriel wasn’t sure if this was a side effect of her being forever in her second language, but her English was perfect, better than her Swedish, she said, and the only errors that she made—“tempting faith,” “a leap of fate”—were too few and far between to bear any wider significance. So next he wondered if it might be that in fact she was entirely normal and it was just his own background that caused him to consider everything short of fabled espionage, intrafamilial hostility, and deceit as “straight.” But eventually he came to see that she was indeed wholly guileless. She was clever, but logically so, clever in straight lines, clever at recognizing the trail; she was quick-witted, but not witty; she was insightful, wise, socially observant, but somehow tone-blind, or rather blind to the effect she was having on the people around her. Then again, she didn’t actually care, which he found more and more attractive.

Except, perhaps, when this blindness translated itself into the Lina who would notice (and comment upon) the shabbiness of a pianist’s shoes after he’d just finished playing the last three Beethoven sonatas from memory. Or the Lina who would be talking about the lack of good customer service at the petrol station they had just left as they drove north for their holiday into the purple-peaked Pyrenees with Elvis playing on the radio and the sun sinking in the west like Cleopatra’s barge burning for the beauty of its love-struck queen.

True, the correlative of this was that she was the most capable woman he had ever met—a facilitator. There was nothing she could not sort out. (After college, she’d joined the same advertising agency that had previously made her the face of Swedish Lapland and sorted that campaign out too.) Indeed, so much of his life did she ease and improve (as the first three years disappeared) that he sometimes felt as though he were being corralled, trained, domesticated according to some grand plan that he could never know. And now and then he did resent being managed as if he were an awkward account. He suspected that if he were to allow her to do so, she would get up an hour early every morning to wash, dress, groom, and perfume him. Her man-doll. But then, not one of her requests was in the slightest bit unreasonable: dry his feet before he left the bathroom, stop eating everything at three hundred miles an hour, be on time when he said he was going to meet her, replace the garbage bags when he carried out the trash. And so on. She was never, ever unreasonable.

They walked together now, beneath November skies of pond-sodden bread. The rain had stopped since he had been out for the permit, and London seemed to be prepared to make a go of it again. It was not yet eight-fifteen. Already Frank was assiduously under way with the plumbing and Gabriel was feeling a little better. He knew Lina well enough not to try anything when he was covered in mud and bleeding. So instead he had merely told her how pretty she looked, then dutifully taken a shower, dressed in his favorite shirt, and asked her about her trip as they moved around the bedroom, before telling her that he had transferred all her music to her new MP3 player, which won him a kiss.

Lina took his arm and he crooked it for her, as he always did. They crossed Tufnell Park Road, solid at this hour with precious mothers off-roading precious children to precious schools, and began to make their way toward the main junction. Traffic wardens were swarming on the corner. In the middle distance, the sirens sounded like eight-year-old girls making fun of their friends’ boy stories. Gabriel could scarcely believe that he was the same person who only an hour ago had been cycling, bleeding, having a breakdown. And it wasn’t anything Lina had said—it never was; they seldom talked about feelings, his or hers—but now, for the first time, he smiled rather than flinched as a memory of his mother entered his head: a policeman parking illegally to nip in and get a pizza in Highgate village, his mother remonstrating, he embarrassedly waiting so that they could hurry up and buy the promised tennis racket, policeman catching schoolboy’s eye, mutual sympathy. Yes, though light on his arm, Lina felt steadfast and certain. He was glad to be with her this morning. Glad the world contained her. Glad that she was here with him. Maybe it was because she had been away for a couple of days, but he was struck again by how calm and together and resourceful he felt in her presence. There was nothing he could not do with this woman at his side. Oh God.

Breakfast was already well under way in Martha’s Café. His hangover was hungry. They were greeted by the welcoming aroma of fresh-ground coffee as they opened the door, which gave way to a delicious smell of bacon toward the kitchen at the back. They sat at one of the miniature tables under the blackboard on which the menu was scrawled. They had been coming here most days since the work on the kitchen had started.

She ordered some inscrutable confection of muesli and he went for the half English, which, after all, was what he was. Conversations of football crises, of such and such a figure in the news getting exactly what he deserved, of so and so needing to get her act together, of problems, rumors, plans, and hopes reached his ears. To Gabriel, the whole experience already felt as though it would be something that they would look back on and remember… Someday, twenty or so years from now, when visiting one of their children at university perhaps: breakfast at the local college café, newly independent child assuming parents had never dreamed of eating such a thing, mute parental complicity as child talked through the menu as though it were the most recent thing on earth.

Lina reached up to remove a stray eyelash from his cheek and took the opportunity to hastily rearrange his hair more to her liking, a habit that he vehemently disliked.

“Lina. Pack it in.”

“What have you been up to, then—apart from throwing yourself at the local pavements?”

He grimaced. They had only talked about her trip so far—her real dad’s birthday.

“Larry came up last night,” he said. “It was terrible. He’s an alcoholic. He’s definitely an alcoholic.”

She smiled. “What did you do?”

“We went to the pub for a quiet one and then into Camden… Ended up drinking in some pig-packed shit hole until Christ knows when.”

“Fun?”

“At the time.”

“Sounds it.”

“Actually, it wasn’t.”

“When did you get in?”

“Two.”

“Larry meet anyone?”

“No, he just got a cab home.”

“At least none of your friends can stay over when they’re drunk at the moment, so you don’t have to go through all the rigmarole with the futon.”

What she really meant was not all the rigmarole of turning the futon into a bed but the secondary rigmarole of putting a sheet down —one of her pet insistences. She was the most hygienic woman in the world. She would physically cringe at the thought of a man falling asleep on their furniture without the prophylactic of a clean sheet, duvet, pillowcase. And yet there was never a word of censure about what he was doing until two in the morning. He could have turned up three days later without his trousers and said that he had been in Rio judging the Miss Porniverse Pussy-Pumping Pageant and she would have been just as calm. And he loved her for that.

Her coffee (decaffeinated) appeared, his tea hot on its trail with a jug of milk. There was a sudden sizzle of sausages arriving for the workmen on the next table. She spoke over the top of her raised mug. “You should get him a girlfriend. Then you could both go out and do something you actually enjoy.”

“What do we enjoy? I’ve lost track.”

“Swimming on the Heath.”

“Lins, it’s absolutely freezing at this time of year.”

“Joke.” She eyed his hand, gauging his minor thumb injury as he gingerly removed the teabag.

“He wants you to get him a girlfriend.”

“Me?” She raised her eyebrows.

“He thinks you know loads of beautiful Swedish women.”

“What? From ten years ago?” She affected consideration. “Well, there’s Anya—she’s thirty-one and about to have a cesarean any day. She’s my oldest friend and happily married, but I could ask if she’d like to give it all up for an overweight TV producer.”

“No. Forget it. She goes out clubbing. Larry only goes out eating.”

Someone swore at a bottle of ketchup that could not be bullied into dispensing its chemical treasure.

“I could have a look at the office. What type does he like?”

He also loved it that Lina wasn’t on some phony high horse about womankind; he loved it that she could talk about other girls—minds, bodies, behavior—without all the invidious ancillary crap that so many women had to shovel into such conversations all the time.

“Medieval barmaid type.”

“Blond?”

“Yes. Blond, big baby eyes, breasts…”

She wrinkled her nose. “It’s such an easy look.”

“…comely, honest but saucy, daughter of local miller, weaver, wainwright. You get the idea.”

“I’ll do a round-robin e-mail.”

“You still want me to order your mum music for Christmas?”

“Yes. Thanks for doing that, Gabe. Choose things she would like, though. Nothing too weird. Maybe those cello pieces you listen to.”

“Nothing too weird.”

“I’ll give you the money.”

Their breakfast danced into view. He was starving. Having poured her milk—she always swamped her cereal, causing Gabriel to think that what she really wanted was muesli-flavored shake—Lina did not start eating but instead began to watch him with mild disapproval (which she never could hide) at the sheer speed with which he was devouring his food.

“Try not to eat so quickly, honey—it’s really bad for you.”

“I know.”

Maybe that was it: the fact that she couldn’t hide a single thought that came into her head… This relentless compulsion for honesty, transparency, as if the epitome of human goodness was merely the willing ability to broadcast every last waking thought, no matter how trivial. Was it actually possible to resent someone for being so honest? What kind of a monster was he becoming? Anyway, why was he attacking her all of a sudden? Her request was perfectly reasonable. Slow down, Gabriel. Slow the fuck down.

“I’ve got an easy couple of days,” he said.

She made a start on her muesli. “What’s the next issue again?”

“‘Inner Voices.’” He forced himself to stop eating. “I should try to make this one better. I think… I think I lost it a bit with the last one. I’m already struggling with the whole idea, though—I mean, how can anybody trust their inner voice when inner voices are universally famous for coming and going at random? And when they tell you all kinds of contra—”

“What you should do is take a break from living and thinking on behalf of the rest of the world.” There was concern as well as humor in her tone. “Leave it to someone else for a while—the pope or the president or someone.”

“People in power can’t think on behalf of anyone else. They get cut off. That’s the problem, Lina. Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates.” He raised a fist to his chest in a gesture of mock heroism. “That’s why everything is up to you and me.”

She smiled but shook her head. “We should go on holiday and you should not be allowed to think about anything except pizza toppings and ice cream flavors. Have you thought any more about doing the play?”

“No. I need to call the man in Highgate again.”

“You should do it.”

Care, consideration, and total, unquestioning support.

“I know.”

“I think May is perfect,” she said. “And I was working it out on the plane this morning… If you can start everything at the beginning of your working month, like now—just after an issue is out—then you can probably get loads done from your office and sneak out for rehearsals. Then take your holiday for the next fortnight, while the issue is actually coming out—let your deputy do some work for once—and then put on the play the week after, when you are back at work but when it’s easy again. That way you get a six-week run. Have you thought any more about which play you want to put on?”

“Steven Berkoff.” He picked up his fork.

“You’ve gone off the Shakespeare idea?”

“No. Just… not the first one.”

“Shakespeare is not necessarily very commercial anyway.” She nodded. “You want something that the audience can get to grips with easily.”

Maybe that was it. Something lurking behind that “not very commercial” or that “get to grips with”—that attitude. Which, again, was fair enough.

“And if you have to take a month off unpaid, then you should do that. You know the money is not an issue. I’ll support you.”

Or maybe that was it: maybe the money was an issue—though not in the way Lina thought. He had never borrowed; the house and the holidays were strictly fifty-fifty, his expenses were his own, but she paid more restaurant bills than he did, paid for more tickets, furniture, food. He finished his breakfast as slowly as he could manage.

“You need a new coat,” she said.

“I know.”

“How come Frank managed to persuade you to go and fetch the permit?”

“It just kind of happened. The buzzer went and he let on as if I was supposed to have organized it all… and I… I said I would go. I don’t exactly know how it happened.”

She laughed lightly. “Well, don’t bother becoming friends with him like you did with Bernie. It doesn’t seem to help. You don’t have to be friends with everyone in the world. Let’s keep Frank at arm’s length. I have given him pretty strict instructions, so we’ll see… He’s doing the new sink, then he’s going to sort out the dishwasher, and I’ve told him not to fit the new surfaces until he has properly sealed them.”

“What time is it?”

“Eight forty-five. I’d better get going. I’m going shopping with Frank at lunchtime for at least two hours. I’ll keep an eye out for coats you might like.”

Or maybe there was no reason. Maybe there was no reason at all. Maybe he just did not like safe harbors. Maybe he was the sort of idiot who enjoyed throwing away the best things that he had found. Nothing would surprise him these days. They finished their breakfast and he put down money enough to cover their food.

Their lines parted at King’s Cross. She continued south. He had to go west. He kissed her and jumped off. He put on his headphones—Martha Argerich playing Bach’s Toccata 911. The Hammersmith and City train was first to arrive. He stepped inside, eyed the other madmen a second or two, dropped into his favorite seat at the end of the carriage, and closed his eyes.

Marriage, commitment, clever wife, pretty wife, dependable wife, capable wife, children, one, two, three, love and money coming in, love and money going out, security, the family breakfast table, homework help sessions, holidays, hobbies, barbecues with friends at the weekends, picnics in the summer, occasional reflections on politics, television, exhibitions, mortgage paid off, holiday home, grandparents, contentment… How had Lina come to represent these things, and why did he alone in all the world think that this wasn’t what life was all about? Why did he alone find it so nauseating and depressing and escapist a proposal? What disfigured gene of contrariety was he carrying? Why was he furious with her for noticing that pianist’s scruffy shoes? Why was he miserable because she bought him a sweater that matched his socks? And what were these minor, minor things beside his own persistent deception and monumental cruelty, which had now been going on for ages? Oh, Ma. All he had to do… all he had to do was get it together. And there it was ahead of him, the motorway through the mountains, the best of the Western human being’s life—laid out, smooth as freshly smeared tarmac in all its satisfying, fulfilling, familial glory, and yet… And yet here he sat, knuckles white, looking desperately this way and that for another route, determined to assert the other, eager and willing as a fool for love, chaos, pain, any kind of feeling that would lead him away, off this main road; here he sat, implacably ready to oppose whatever was asserted and to assert whatever was opposed, steadfastly determined to champion the antagonist, the great adversaries, the counterlifers, to ask the same questions again and again despite knowing that they were probably meaningless, despite knowing that such questions were the wrong questions to ask; here he sat, searching the rain-smothered crags, hoping for that moment when the sun might slice its brief light between the heavy clouds and show him some other way. Some steep and shining path.

26 Club Voltage

The old pipes must have cracked or backed up somewhere. The stink was foul. And the sound of their squelching made him want to retch. Someone appeared to have laid a makeshift pathway of plastic carrier bags across the rancid courtyard; but, torn and thin, they were of no use at all, and the slime simply engulfed them with every footfall. Henry cursed the hole in his sole. The freeze, when it came, would be welcome here. Hard ground. A filthy gull barked as it circled in the cold gruel of the sky.

They passed into a stairwell opposite—a door banged high up above them, there were drunken shouts and then the sound of two or three coming down. Then they were out in the daylight again, into a second, smaller courtyard beyond. This one was muddy too, but not so bad underfoot, mostly broken cobbles, miniature steppingstones. The smell here, if anything, was worse. Fate seemed to have shackled them together, as if two prison friends escaped Sakhalin and slogged these three years three-legged all the way across Siberia in ever-deepening silence, all but abandoning any hope of severance.

They entered the dimness of the building on the far side, crunched on broken glass, and turned down the dark and crumbling stairs below ground level. They walked along a scarred brick corridor, under a low beam, around a corner, past a bare bulb; stepped over bags of damp cement; went past a second light, around wires that stuck out sharp and bent and crazy from the wall, like the severed tendrils of some grotesque creature whose body was trapped on the other side—wherever that was. They went further into the gloom, a jink right, a correcting jink left, and three final steps as far as the third bulb, which illuminated a Lenin-red rusty iron door square across the passageway.

Arkady pressed a half-hidden button to one side, then stood in the glare of the bulb. There was no sound from the buzzer itself and no sound from within. Henry leaned against the wall. Neither spoke.

There had been nothing back from Paris. But London—London was good. London was hope. London was their chance. All Henry had to do was hand over the down payment and there would be no turning back. Arkady would be on his way.

Henry prayed. And he didn’t care that prayer was as big a joke as communism. He prayed with fervor and dutiful urgency, as if he were thirteen again and trying not to touch himself and come top of the class in Latin and not be punched in the arm by Mark Rolke on the bus. He prayed without a second’s counterthought, prayed to God’s only son, somehow both fully human and fully divine, somehow born of a virgin, died (definitely died), and somehow resurrected for our sins—he prayed that they would have enough money, that there would be no problem with Arkady’s friend of a friend of a friend, that the passport and visa would be ordered and collected safely, that Arkady would go, would not delay or stall, that the Russian would make it unhindered to London, and that his family would treat him kindly.

And so far it was damn well working: his prayers had been answered. Okay, so Paris was a nothing. Perhaps Arkady was right—what man wants to hear from his wife’s long-forgotten love child? Perhaps the address was wrong. But Henry’s assiduous Internet fishing for Gabriel and Isabella had finally produced results: too many Isabella Glovers, and no matches at all for Isabella plus Maria, but a single match for Gabriel and Maria Glover—an article from a local newspaper. A godsend. From this Henry had learned that son had “followed mother’s footsteps into journalism.” So, a search for journalists called Gabriel Glover. Disregarding the Americans and subtracting those listings attributable to the same person, three possibles. Next, some very expensive calls to receptionists at the companies most recently served by these Gabriels to “confirm the e-mail because I have to send something…”

Then nothing for five days.

So more calls.

No, Gabriel Glover did not work here anymore, try the Camden Journal. Passed about like a pedantic reader. Until someone on the news desk said, Oh yes, that Gabriel Glover used to work here, on features—God, that must have been about five years ago now. Ask Jim. But Jim was off on holiday.

One week later he had found his lead again: try the contract-publishing firm Roland Sheekey Ltd., Jim advised. Another call to another receptionist, another e-mail pretending to be from Arkady. This time, despite the cost, Henry waited at his desk in the cheap-Internet-and-foreign-calls café near Primoskaya, hoping. Three hours later, he had his man.

Sure, by all means, get in touch when you arrive, look forward to talking very much.

It was enough. It was hope. Arkady was going to London.

The red door remained shut. Henry dared not suggest they press the buzzer again, and Arkady seemed content to wait. The bulb hissed periodically. Three minutes must have passed before, with a shock, Henry realized that Arkady was standing in the middle of the passageway because a camera was set up high in the lintel. He wondered who might be looking at them and what they were looking for. He noticed afresh that his friend was growing more ragged. That greatcoat, those tattered jeans, those boots, the frayed collar on that favorite shirt, fake Armani. When the time came, Henry knew, he would not have the courage to suggest that Arkady clean himself up: cut his hair, shave, find a new shirt at least. And yet it was his duty to do so. To improve Arkady’s chances. Simply, there was nobody else to say these things. No other person who could see beyond the struggle of their own circumstances as to what goodness or salvation the wider world might yet bestow if only they could keep on believing. He must say something. What did it matter if Arkady came to despise him, as long as he made the best possible impression when he found his family? The danger was that on the streets of London, Arkady would simply look insane or worse—frightening. Besides everything else, the Russian had his right index finger wrapped and bound in a fat bandage, which he had recently taken to wearing all the time, even though he had not been near the conservatory this week or last, as far as Henry knew. And the injury looked gruesome. Violent. Henry understood—up to a point—that Arkady had to live his lies religiously once asserted, had to actually believe in them himself, had to perform them. (There was something especially Russian in this, he thought.) But all the same, Henry hoped that the grimy bandage would come off as soon as they had the passport.

Without warning, the door started to move. There was a whirring, as though the hinges were motorized. The corridor within was better illuminated; a series of doors—some shut, some half open—led off, right and left. They passed a filthy toilet, a bedroom of sorts with the floor covered in mattresses, a decrepit shower with its head dangling loose, and, last of all, on the left, a big kitchen—gas rings, saucepans. Ten more paces beneath weak multicolored light and they emerged into the wide cavernous low-lit room—the spider’s den: Club Voltage.

The place was almost empty and there was no music, but then, it was only eleven in the morning. They were in a vast cellar. Like the passageways, the walls were all bare brick; a glowing row of yellow, orange, and red light bulbs set in two plastic bulb racks was wedged up by a series of nails hammered irregularly into the mortar behind the makeshift bar, the cables looping down like ossified tapeworms. There were no drinks on display save sample cans or bottles of the range available—one Russian beer, one Polish beer, vodka, vodka, vodka, cheap, cheaper, cheapest—standing strangely spaced across the solitary shelf. Aside from a few other bulb racks and one or two random strip lights, the decoration was limited to a series of poster portraits that had been lacquered like fliers for forthcoming gigs to the bricks of the far wall—poster portraits of famous Soviet athletes in various attitudes of exertion, muscular repose, or medal-winning triumph. In English, across the face of each, someone had sprayed the words “Drugs are for winners” with scarlet paint. High up, behind the bar, there was a second series, these much smaller, pages cut from magazines rather than posters: presumably the bartender’s true love, some model never quite dressed.

Sitting just inside the door to the right on the threadbare sofa and chairs were four or five youngsters—couples, friends, strangers, it was hard to be sure—all as thin as coat hangers, their faces oddly blue beneath the fizzing of one of the strip lights. One girl sat forward, her banknotes ready, clutched thick and tight in her scrawny fist.

Someone came through the door behind them, sped past at an incongruous jog, and circled back behind the bar. Arkady moved forward and spoke in Russian.

“Hello, Genna.”

“Piano.” Offering a raised fist (held sideways for Arkady to knock with his own), Gennady, the teenage tender, greeted Arkady from behind the makeshift bar with a grin.

He could be no more than fourteen years old, Henry thought. Eyes like flattened lead shot, flared nostrils, skin like congealed lava.

Arkady declined the fist, enveloping it in the mighty palm of his left hand instead.

“How you doing, Genna? Still running. Next Olympics is your Olympics, I just know it.”

“If I can get the invisible drugs that the pussy-boy Americans use, then I’ll be the fastest man on the planet.” Gennady sucked in a sharp breath. “Whoa, shit, you bust your finger.”

“Yeah—stupid. Should have known. Never try to fuck two fat girls at the same time. Some shit is just too dangerous.”

Gennady’s laugh caused him to screw up his face.

Arkady raised an introductory thumb. “Henry.”

Gennady paused, self-consciously rehearsing the look that he had laboriously formulated from the hundred films that informed his every expression, then raised his fist again.

Henry had no choice. Embarrassed, he raised his own bony knuckles, his long sleeves hanging lankly from his scrawny bones.

“We will take two vodkas. And you can pour them,” Arkady said.

“Sure.”

All customers had to order a drink—one of the rules. This was a bar, after all. Some just paid the money and Gennady knew not to bother opening the bottle. Henry rubbed his hands together, agitated. He was suddenly anxious that Arkady was actually going to drink. He’d never seen the Russian have so much as a sip of beer. And yet he dared not speak. So he pretended to stare into space instead, careful not to glance up at Tatiana. He sensed that Gennady would die rather than allow anyone even to touch these posters. But he felt stupid and panicky watching the teenager pour the vodka, so he turned away to face the room, hoping to appear casual.

The main wooden tables were all empty save for one over in the corner beneath a barred and blacked-out window, where two men sat: the one with a hollow face, a decorator by the look of his paint-streaked overalls, who seemed straight enough; the other a fat man with a black beard, dressed (without irony) in sports shoes and track-suit, who was slouching sideways on the bench, his head nodding back and forth. This was the cheapest shit you could buy in Petersburg; God knows what they mixed it with, but it was supposed to be safer than the street. They sold clean needles too. And people came back. The place was busy nights, Arkady had said, passing itself off as a normal club. Part of Henry, the sickest part, was actually grateful to Arkady for the inadvertent introduction. If he needed to, he could now return alone.

Henry paid. And Arkady picked up the drinks.

“So, Genna, when your uncle is free, tell him I am here to speak with him.”

Gennady made two guns with his fingers and thumbs. “I’ll tell him.”

They sat down at the table nearest the bar, the Russian leaning back with his arms stretched out in front as if he were about to play, the Englishman with his shoulders folded, hunched in, sharp as vultures’ wings.

Gennady passed them again at speed.

Arkady swilled his vodka around, looked at it a moment as if another—maybe better—life was therein contained, then sloshed it out onto the sawdust floor.

Voice low, Henry asked, “Has this guy done a passport for you before?”

“I have never left Russia.”

Henry felt himself recoil involuntarily. Idiot. Keeping his sallow face blank but suffering cringes within, he cast his glance away as if to reassess the room.

The fat man suddenly came to life and began snapping his fingers, his upper body bobbing about to music only he could hear, chant-sing-talk-murmuring some kind of maddened song that sounded to Henry’s ears as though it were memorized word for word without the speaker understanding the language, the subject, the meaning, anything. The man kept up for a minute or two, then collapsed forward; his friend, the decorator, helped himself once more to the other’s drink with a scowl.

“The guy’s name is Kostya,” Arkady said quietly. “He is Gennady’s uncle. He is from Kyrgyzstan. He can get anything. He is the man who let us in. Speak only if he speaks to you. Then be nice. No fucking English.”

Silently grateful that Arkady appeared not to have taken any offense, Henry turned back and gingerly tipped his own vodka out onto the floor. Stop being such a fool. He watched his vodka soak away. Stop saying such stupid things. Of course of course of course Arkady had not left Russia: Arkady was fucking Russia.

The smell of spirits mingled with chemicals was overpowering. You had to be an addict or an alcoholic simply to breathe in here. Henry widened his nostrils a moment and then began patting his leg involuntarily.

Arkady stared with narrowing eyes at his finger.

Henry spoke again. “Do I hand over the money in here—at the bar?”

“No. And wait until we know the exact price. You have it in separate hundreds, yes? If we don’t have enough, then fuck it. No promises you cannot keep. It does not matter.”

“Okay. But it does matter. You need to go to London.”

Arkady said nothing.

A happy thought was occurring to Henry… He had started to wonder again whether he might be able to buy a hit. Try it out. It looked to be working for the fat man. (And, dear Lord, he needed one—cutting down was hard.) He shut his eyes a moment. Even thinking about his boy gave him strength. He leaned his head forward onto his fingertips and felt the bones of his skull. Then he faced Arkady directly, whispering.

“Is there anyone else who can do it, if—if Kostya says no?”

Arkady grinned his hollow-cheeked grin. “Leary.”

“No.”

“Yes, Leary can do it easy.”

“Not now.”

“Yes, now.”

“Not—”

“Yes, more now.” Arkady shook his head and kept his voice low. “You do not see the plans all the way, Henry. You do not see anything.”

“Why… why would Leary help us? So far he has sent Grisha to smash up the piano, stolen all my money, and left us with nothing but an arse-shaped hole in our wall.”

“Because he doesn’t give a fuck about me.” Arkady’s face was scornful. “Because he wants you to owe him. For the sake of Jesus. How many times? He does not do these things because you are a few days late to pay him. He does not give a piss about a few days late. He does everything to bring you to nothing. And if he thinks you are spending whatever you have left on a passport, then he is happy to help. The sooner you are desperate, the sooner you work for him.”

Henry patted at his knee. “I’m not—”

“Listen, Leary will buy you a brand-new suit if it helps. He’ll rent you a big apartment on the Nevsky. He’ll get you a fucking Russian passport. And if he is bored with waiting or you don’t do as you’re told, he can just tell the police about you. And then you are really in the big shit, my friend.”

“I’m quitting.” Even here, even now, Henry loved to talk about it: the subject warmed him, made him tingle, killed the remaining wheedle. They were leaning close together now. “I’m not a dealer, Arkady.”

“You will do anything when the time comes.”

“No. I told you, I’m going to stop.” He meant it. But the strange thing was, he could say it with any kind of strength or conviction only when he was thinking about his next hit. “When what’s left runs out, that’s the end. You will be gone by then.”

“So you hope.”

“I believe it.”

“Great. We hope and we believe. We are impossible to defeat.” Arkady curled his lip. “Here he comes. No English.”

Eyes red, nose streaming, face like a suppurating pumice stone, Kostya looked as if he had been at the baths all his life—beaten with the birch, then steamed, frozen, steamed, plunged, and steamed again. His gray-white overwashed Doors T-shirt was loose and clung damply here and there about his massive frame where the sweat slicked most copiously. He wore long, loose shorts and sandals, and the flesh on his feet, like the skin of his nose and ears, was cooked red and cracked.

They spoke in Russian.

“Kostya.”

“Piano.” He embraced Arkady and then took a seat.

“This is Henry.”

“Hello.” Henry nodded. No hand was offered. Kostya’s attention left him almost immediately and came to rest on Arkady’s finger.

“You fucked your finger.”

“Yes.”

“Bitch motherfucker bullshit.”

“I know.”

“What you going to do?”

“It’s okay. I can play most things with my cock.” Kostya laughed out loud. Gennady too, from where he was hovering behind the bar.

Arkady said, “We have money. We need a passport. How much?” The humor in Kostya’s face disappeared like water into volcanic ash.

“Good. I thought it might be about the shit.” He waved about his head, indicating his surroundings, his customers, his life. “And that would have made me sad. Where you going?” Kostya looked at Henry.

“Not him, me,” Arkady said. “London.”

“Do you have a passport already?”

“No.” Arkady shook his head. “Not an external one.”

“Okay. Well, you’re better off with a false identity anyway. Otherwise they can always check who you are. Better to be safe—be nice and rich so you are good to go.” He shook his head. “But it’s difficult these days, Arkasha. They have bar codes now. Computers are fucking everything up for everyone. It has to be right or you get yourself in a lot of shit. Only the…” He plucked at his T-shirt, separating it from his skin. “Only the networks get in and out easy.”

“Fuck.” Arkady ran his hand back and forth across the beginnings of his beard, keeping the bandaged finger extended out of the way. “Maybe it’s a stupid idea anyway.”

Henry cut in, speaking in Russian. “But can you do it?”

Kostya turned to face him.

Henry felt Arkady’s eyes on him too. Searing. Henry’s right hand was tapping rapidly over the knuckles of his left.

“We can pay now,” Henry said. “If you can do it.”

Kostya continued to scrutinize Henry for a long moment. Henry knew that the Kyrgyzstani would already have him down for a user, but he was counting on the fact that money counted. He knew that much about Russia.

Kostya turned his heavy head slowly away and addressed Arkady. “The honest truth is that I cannot do it myself anymore and be sure. Not with the computers and not to Britain. If it was for someone we did not give a shit about, to some butt-fuck country, then yes, maybe. But it’s you. So… I myself cannot do it.” He raised his finger and thumb to his red nose. “But if you are serious, then I know people who can do it—properly, I mean. But of course you have to pay their price—expensive.”

“How long will it take?” Henry interjected again. He wanted this done and no escaping from it; then he wanted to leave, to fly home to his ruined bedroom. His flesh was itching and crawling and cold.

“A few weeks.” Kostya only half turned this time. “My contact is coming here today—I can ask him to start immediately. Do you have the photographs with you?”

“Yes. How much?” Now Henry had him.

“Four hundred dollars today. Four hundred when you collect. Identity. Passport. Visa. Safe.”

“Okay.” Henry reached inside his pocket.

Arkady hissed, “Not in here. Sorry, Kostya. Can we go somewhere…”

“Yes. Come.” He pushed back his chair. “You are serious.”

“We are serious,” Henry echoed.

The fat man was singing again.

Once outside, Henry went ahead, desperate to return to his room and walking as fast as he could. A little way through the larger courtyard, the sound of the gulls began again. He glanced up. A short, squat figure in a hood was coming toward him, walking squarely on the plastic-bag path.

Henry stepped aside, ankle-deep in the filth.

Grisha grinned. “Hello, cunt,” he said.

27 Grandpa Max

It was the November weekend of the twins’ sixteenth birthday. The family was gathered at the Highgate house. Nicholas was back from his latest business venture in Edinburgh (an art magazine that he was setting up, editing, publishing, sort of). Masha had taken a few days off and resynced herself to the daytime hours. Most exciting of all, Grandpa Max was over from Moscow—partly for the occasion, partly for some meeting with a select cabal (chaired by the lady herself) about perestroika and the implications thereof.

Unusually, Max was also staying the night in the master bedroom, which was always kept ready for him in case he so wished, but which he rarely occupied, more often preferring residency in one of the old London hotels. He was traveling with his secretary, Zhanna, a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman with the carefully tended comportment of a wronged princess and a limitless silence to match—a silence that seemed to harbor disapproval until directly examined, at which point it was always found to be entirely neutral and somehow pristine.

“Probably Armenian or Azerbaijani,” Nicholas had conjectured, in answer to Gabriel’s question.

“No more than thirty-five,” Masha had added, in answer to nothing that anyone else had heard.

Zhanna was in the spare room. They never discovered if she spoke English, as Max addressed her only in Russian.

The twins’ main party was, of course, elsewhere—guest-listed later that night in a place called K-Rad, a filthily cool nightclub near South Kensington, famous most of all for the queues outside. But five of the twins’ closest friends had also been invited over for a birthday lunch that Masha had spent three days assembling: some delicious blini topped with mushrooms, cheese, and herbs unknown, followed by kulebyaka, a salmon pie with more mushrooms, spinach, rice, kasha, all topped with smetana and fresh tomato sauce—a challenge that only Gabriel, his friend Pete, and Grandpa Max himself had really engaged with in any meaningful way. Nicholas had left his untouched, pushed back his chair, and started smoking almost immediately. Isabella had refused more than a single slice, her plate deliberately full of lettuce and spinach from the salad bowl to frustrate her mother’s vigilant generosity. Susan, Isabella’s best friend, was allergic to fish and so was having another course of blini—a route through the meal of which Zhanna (cutting the kulebyaka with much concentration into smaller and smaller pieces) was quietly jealous.

In the way of sixteenth-birthday gatherings, the entire day had been excruciating, and then absolutely fine (fun, almost), and then excruciating again, the whole party sweeping slowly from exhilaration to tension and back again in the manner of an emotional sine curve. On the up, Gabriel and Isabella were both excited by the occasion, the general busyness of the house, and, in particular, their collusion (and that of their five friends) in the knowledge that the hideously out-of-touch parents had no idea where they were really going for the night or what they were really going to be doing there. (Weed outside. Cocktails inside. Cigarettes throughout.) On the down, both twins were in a state of residual agitation, if not rebellion, as a result of the various confrontations of the week just past, during which they were met with an ongoing and bilateral refusal of permission to allow them to stay out until the club shut at four. They were to be back by one-thirty, latest, no negotiation. The reason given by both Nicholas and Masha—in rare accord—was that it was not often they saw their Grandpa Max, and if they stayed out, they would not be seen out of bed this side of Sunday lunch and there would be no chance of a family walk in the morning.

In addition to these two amplitudes of euphoria and seething, they were both suffering, despite themselves, from the generic difficulties attendant on turning sixteen: adult, not adult; precocious, trying, but supersensitive to precocity and trying; cringing with embarrassment at everything, knowing everything; knowing nothing, knowing that there was nothing more embarrassing than cringing itself, still cringing.

Thus the day so far.

Now they were all gathered in the lounge at the front of the house. Max, Nicholas, Masha, Zhanna (all smoking or between cigarettes), Gabriel, Isabella, and Samantha, the last of the lunchtime five to leave, since she was not going to be coming to the club and would not therefore be seeing them later.

Max sat in the deepest chair with his back to the windows, the smoke of his cigar so thick that Isabella was aware that she could really see him clearly only now and then, when the many house drafts conspired. Masha was handing out cake, though with napkins rather than plates, which somehow infuriated Zhanna, which in turn might have been the reason for Masha’s refusal to make the trip back to the kitchen for crockery. Zhanna was beside Max but on an upright chair, dressed in strict secretarial two-piece, twenty-dernier pantyhose, shoulder pads, serious heels, and wearing eyeliner and big hair as if she might be called upon at any moment to represent the very distillation of fashion. Gabriel too found the lack of plates unreasonably annoying, but more on behalf of Samantha, toward whom he had adopted a self-consciously chivalrous air throughout the last hour. Like most of their friends, Samantha was seventeen, a year older. (To Masha’s eternal satisfaction, both Gabriel and Isabella had been moved up a year at infant school.) And she was waiting for her boyfriend, Steve (eighteen, soft-top MG), to pick her up. Steve was late. He was a dental technician and (for reasons undisclosed) dental technicians seldom ran on time on Saturdays. But it was somehow clear—to the Glovers, at least—that the next phase of the day, whatever that was, could not begin until Steve had been and gone.

It was perhaps for this reason, and as if to apply the broom a little harder, that Nicholas now brought the conversation to Samantha directly.

“So when is the baby due? Have you thought about a name?”

“Not really, Nicholas. I mean, I have had some thoughts, but I dunno if it’s a boy or a girl yet. Got a feeling it’s a boy.”

For what felt like the thousandth time that day, the twins flinched mentally—they knew their father hated their friends’ calling him by his Christian name. And yet they loved Samantha all the more for doing so.

“Must be exciting.” Nicholas seemed curiously untroubled, though—polite, interested even. “We are biased, of course. We like the Russian names. How about… how about Tatiana if it’s a girl, Eugene if it’s a boy?”

Masha got up and began rather noisily to pour the tea from the samovar on the side.

“I was thinking more like Dominic or Stephen… or maybe Alison. Dunno.” Samantha smoothed her stomach, enjoying the attention. “It’s going to be a surprise.”

“Wonderful.” Nicholas sighed. “A little tiresome, isn’t it, though? That it’s always one or the other—boy or girl, girl or boy. You’d think just once we’d come up with something new. Shame, really. Pregnancy is never that surprising in the end.”

“Nobody takes milk, do they?” Masha addressed the room by addressing the wall loudly.

“Yes, Mum, I still do. As I always have. Since I was two,” Gabriel answered. He turned to his friend. “Sam?”

“Erm… Not sure if I’ve got time, Gabe. Steve will be here any minute.”

“Have some and just leave it if he comes,” Gabriel said quietly, before directing his voice to where his mother stood waiting quizzically for the outcome of his consultation. “One for Samantha too, please, Mum. With milk.”

“Okay.” Without saying or doing anything at all, Masha somehow transmitted to the room her disapproval of milk-takers (a class of person quite beyond hope) and began to hand out those cups already poured to Max, Zhanna, Isabella, and Nicholas, the worthy ones.

“I think it’s refreshing, anyway—having children young.” Nicholas reached up for his and sipped immediately. He took some strange pride in being able to drink his tea at boiling point. “Good for you.”

“Samantha doesn’t need your approval, Dad.” This from Gabriel.

Masha left the room, presumably to fetch some milk.

“Oh God, no. Lucky thing too. Because I don’t approve of anything, Gabriel, as you know.” Nicholas winked at Samantha.

Gabriel shook his head in adolescent disbelief.

On the sofa, Isabella was torn between wishing that her brother would stop behaving so painfully and wishing that her father would shut up. And all of a sudden she was dying for a cigarette. Ideally, one of the thin Russian ones that her grandfather smoked when he wasn’t on cigars. Perversely, the more the birthday normalized (and normalized all the people in the room), the more she wanted to escape, to feel and to be exotic. Indeed, from within the prism of her sixteen-year-old sensibility, it seemed to her a waste that her grandfather should be forced to witness such domestic tedium. She imagined that Zhanna felt the same and found herself empathizing with the secretary’s scornful silence. Presents, parochial friends, cars, new computer, clothes, tea, cake, this dumb conversation, sixteen itself. She was embarrassed on Grandpa’s behalf. And this new embarrassment lay uneasily, like a wriggling blanket, over all the other embarrassments she was feeling. A cigarette would help. It was strange, though: Grandpa Max could sit so still that he almost disappeared.

“I’m sure yours will be a fine child whatever you name it.” This at last was Max himself, his voice deep, like sand in hot wax from the years of smoking. “You are young and you are fit. That’s the main thing.”

Zhanna pursed.

Masha reentered the room just in time to see her do so.

“It’s Sikhism tea,” said Nicholas as Masha came over with the last two cups, “scientifically proven to help in nine out of ten pregnancies. We all drink it religiously—just in case.”

Gabriel reached up to take charge of Samantha’s cup.

Masha did not sit down but returned to the samovar and began to cut secondary slices of the cake.

And Isabella was now certain that her mother was drawing out her tasks to avoid any serious interaction. But whether something in particular was causing this newfound domestication, she could not determine. Certainly it was unlike her mother not to come into the heart of the conversation, especially when her father was rehearsing his prejudices or behaving like an idiot. Perhaps it was Grandpa’s presence. Perhaps it was the subject matter. Whatever, her mother’s evasion aroused her curiosity. And so, believing her initiative to be a further example of mature social skill, she spoke up.

“Mum, nobody wants any more cake. Leave it. Come and sit down. You’ve done enough.”

Of course Masha was unable to ignore her daughter’s specific appeal, and so, balancing a few more slices on yet another napkin, she came over with a thin smile.

“I know you all like the marzipan and you’re just pretending to like the rest of it, so here are some marzipan bits.” She laid them out on the little table. “Samantha?”

But Samantha did not answer and Masha did not manage to sit down, because just then the doorbell chimed.

“That, we must assume, will be Steve,” Nicholas observed, lighting yet another cigarette.

“Oh shit,” Samantha said. “Oh, sorry. Excuse the French. I’d love some more cake, Maria. But I’m going to have hit the road… Thanks for the tea, though. In fact, thanks for everything.”

“It’s been a pleasure having you.” Masha continued to stand. “Here, take this.” She reached down and gave Samantha a huge slice. “They don’t appreciate it anyway. They just pretend.”

Isabella noticed the deeply disguised relief in her mother’s voice that their pregnant young friend was finally going. Samantha rose. And there followed a chorus of byes and pleased-to-meet-yous as Gabriel escorted her to the door.

Masha sat down beside Isabella

It was obvious that Gabriel was angry from the instant he reappeared in the doorway. It was also clear that he did not wish to confront any one individual—and was feeling the weakness of this—and so he addressed the room at large, raising his voice to compensate.

“I can’t believe you lot. I can’t believe you were all smoking. I just can’t believe it. My friend is pregnant and you’re all sitting there smoking in her face.”

He remained for a moment on the threshold. But his self-consciousness as he stood there—sixteen, acne, too much wet-look gel in his hair, a face of aggrieved incredulity—his self-consciousness undermined the vehemence with which he spoke. Worse, he sensed this and felt compelled to raise the stakes.

“My God, you people are… are… bloody unbelievable.” He wanted to risk saying “fucking,” but something held him back; it felt like a cliché to do so on his sixteenth birthday. “I mean, at the very least you could have shown me some respect, even if you are too rude to give a toss about my friends.”

“Gabriel, please.” Masha returned to her tea, which, in contrast to Nicholas, or by way of obscure counterstrike, she prided herself on drinking when almost cold. “You sound like something off the television,” she added. “Sit down.”

“And asking her all those rancid questions and treating her like she is some kind of a freak. God, it’s disgusting. Just because she is an unmarried mother. Wake up, people, it happens.”

“Climb down off your cross for a few minutes, Gabriel, and have some more birthday cake.” This from Nicholas, who was actually smirking. “Seriously. Take a break. It must be agony up there all year. You can pop back up this evening. Don’t worry, we’ll get you some fresh nails.”

“Dad… just… just…” Gabriel held his hands to his ears and shook his head as though trying to rid himself of some terrible pain. “Just shut up.”

But as ever, Nicholas’s needle was exacting and precise as well as cruel. “It’s fairly obvious that the only person who thinks your friend is a freak, Gabriel, is you. You’d imagine she was about to give birth to some new child of Zeus the way you’re fidgeting around her. The rest of us couldn’t care less if she was married, crippled, half Kazakh, or half pig. Look at us—your mother is a romantic old Marxist, I’m a lazy anarchist, your sister is a spiky little revolutionary, and your grandfather won’t admit to anything. We don’t give a damn. For God’s sake, sit down. Have something to drink if you want. You are allowed.”

“You’re a bloody fascist,” Gabriel muttered.

Gabriel was in the mood to have an individual fight with his father now. And these could be truly horrific. And above all else, Isabella did not wish to jeopardize the evening. She could restrain herself no longer. It was the first time ever that she had asked: “Dad, now that Samantha is gone, can I have a cigarette? And can you give one to Gabriel too? If you haven’t guessed, we both smoke. And he’s got really bad withdrawal.”

Masha laughed out loud.

Max began to shake silently. “Now that is an interesting question.”

Even Zhanna’s face betrayed amusement.

Gabriel slumped back down, shooting his sister a dark look.

Isabella continued, a sarcastic smile hovering on her lips. “And don’t give us all the not-in-my-house crap, please, Dad, because it really is pointless. We can just go down to the shops and buy them and smoke them all over the rest of the world if we want. It’s legal. And you can’t seriously be worried about the damage to the curtains. It’s like a bloody diesel convention in here as it is.”

For once Nicholas did not know what to say.

Instead Masha spoke, her voice hesitant and kindly. “No, Is, no… not just because it’s this house; but because they are so bad for you and I don’t want to encourage it. I’d feel awful.”

“Hypocrisy reigns supreme.” This from Isabella with raised brows and a look, which invited her brother to join in.

As always, Gabriel accepted his sister’s olive branch and stepped back into the ring, though this time without real anger. “Apparently nine out of ten of the anarchists who were”—Gabriel made a sneering face—“on the barricades in Paris, on the barricades burning tires—nine out of ten anarchists are firmly against smoking.”

Though as precocious as brand-new sixth-formers (which is what they were), the twins were a fearsome team when they got going. Which also made Masha secretly proud. She was smiling.

It was Nicholas’s turn to shake his head. “Jesus, two minutes ago you were bawling at us to stop smoking. Now all you want to do is join in.”

“We learn our consistency off you, Dad,” Isabella said. “You are our beacon.”

But Gabriel was still sore with his father. “That was different,” he said. “We all have a choice.”

“Oh yes, sorry, I’d forgotten. The little baby Zeus.” Max cut in. “How about this?”

All eyes turned to him except Nicholas’s. Even when Grandpa Max moved his head, Isabella thought, it was as if something of incredible importance were happening.

Max let the silence hang in the air with his cigar smoke. “You are both allowed to have a cigarette—one of my special ones—if you agree to spend half an hour talking to your Grandpa Max while you have it. But”—he lowered his head while keeping his eyes on both the twins—“this is a one-off occasion, because it’s your birthday, and as such does not represent a precedent.”

Isabella had the sense that her grandfather had been enjoying the entire day for reasons that she could not work out. Less to do with what was being said, and more to do with some obscure and fragile agency between all the people in the room that he alone understood.

A few minutes later Masha left, taking with her the tea and her ferocious, convoluted demands on existence. Nicholas followed, bound for his study with his packet of cigarettes and a compact disk of harpsichord music that he had been carrying around with him all weekend, as if hoping someone somewhere would buy him a CD player. Max addressed Zhanna in Russian too fast for either twin to understand. She nodded and rose silently. Isabella watched her brother watching Zhanna as she walked. There was silence as the room realigned itself. The rest of the house retreated—their father’s step on the creaking stairs, the kitchen door closing downstairs on their mother’s incessant radio. And for a moment or two, now they were alone with him, Isabella experienced a strange feeling toward her grandfather: a feeling of closeness and yet a simultaneous feeling of the impossibility of closeness; calmness descending, decks clearing, silence, and yet still no clear sense of him as real, present; the calmness of a dense fog on a motionless sea. She wondered if her brother felt it too.

“Zhanna will bring us my very best cigarettes,” Max said, and his eyes told them both to relax, as if he could stretch half an hour into years if he wished, or shrink a year into a minute and still have twenty-nine left over.

Gabriel stopped the last of his sulk and sat back in the chair across the fireplace previously occupied by Sam. Isabella kicked off her shoes, folded her legs, and perched on the sofa, her fingers kneading at the thick socks on her feet.

Like the bluish smoke from his Cohiba Especiales (“Fidel’s favorite,” as their mother had explained three dozen times), all the stuff they both knew and half knew continued to wreath about him—the myths, truths, legends, told to them mostly by Masha, of Max’s life and work, of his membership in the Cambridge Apostles at university (“a serious secret society at a serious university, not this silly business you get now”). And all these stories that they knew and half knew, believed and half believed, mingled with all the other things that they had seen and half seen over their years: the endless winter-dark coldness between their father and their grandfather (Isabella had never once witnessed them alone together); the intense formality between Max and their mother (Gabriel could feel his mother recalibrating her tone even before she spoke to him, always of “the situation in Moscow,” and never in Russian); the time, when they were very little, he had left the dinner table to take a telephone call and then run, physically run, straight out of the house with the keys to their father’s car—Andropov dead, they learned the next day.

Isabella tried to copy her grandfather’s trick of seeming not to be looking while she studied his face. He was watching the fire. She wondered if she could write an accurate report in ten minutes, as all good agents were trained so to do. Gabriel picked up a log and began to rebuild the fallen pyramid that Nicholas had constructed earlier in the day.

Maximilian Glover was a thin and craggy old man—his sun-accustomed skin lined deep, scored, crosshatched, but papery soft when he kissed them, as he always did on leaving, on arrival. His hair, which was white-brown-gray, he wore at an almost untidy length, and it kinked and curled and everywhere stood up, so that his silhouette might look like a cockatoo’s. His lower teeth were a little crooked, like his occasional smile, but his back was as straight as a cold steel sleeper, lending him the bearing of a taller man. Close up, he could come across as either much older or much younger than he looked from a distance—a question of emphasis, since his eyebrows were wiry, white, and insane while his eyes danced a dark dance of playfulness, wit, and collusion. Until they stopped. Then his gaze, when it fell, felled everything. In these moments he gave the impression that if you engaged him in anything—argument, business, love, chess, a wager, or a race—you would lose. And always in his bearing there was some quiet but indissoluble attitude that seemed to say, Whatever you have thought and done with your life, I could have thought and done with mine, easily, and I chose not to; but you could not do or think what I have done and thought if I gave you ten more centuries of trying. More and more, as they were becoming adults, the twins felt this strength about him. They had begun to notice how other people, old and young, responded to him. They had seen him, when he chose, be the magnetic north of a room—at parties in London and more recently on their permitted yearly visits to Leningrad; and yet they were also beginning to notice (as remaining at the family table became more interesting than running off) that he could turn this force field up or down at will. As if his spirit had done some secret trade and ceded all foreign policy decisions to his mind. And this skill, though as yet only glimpsed intuitively, they found glamorous and unconsciously copied when they were out with their friends. He was also, plain and simple, their grandpa. Their only grandparent. Grandpa Max. Kindly, wise, their greatest ally, their greatest supporter; patron, correspondent, friend, and comrade.

Zhanna returned bearing a gold cigarette case and a small leather bag.

Max thanked her in Russian, said something else neither of the twins understood, and then sat forward. He opened the case. Zhanna left quietly. Isabella and then Gabriel came forward and picked out their treats. The cigarettes were thinner than the standard English ones they had started smoking, ivory-white with gold filters, as decadent as the Winter Palace itself. Both had the same thought: that they wished they could take an extra one to bring out that evening at the club.

He spoke as they used his lighter. “Well, now, you two are a ferocious pair, aren’t you?”

Isabella smiled.

Gabriel said, “You would be too, Grandpa, if you had to live in a fascist regime.” He had heard the stand-up comics use the phrase on TV and enjoyed deploying it ambiguously whenever he could, to mean both home and the nation at large.

Max laughed silently. “Masha has been telling me that you are both obsessed with politics. She’s worried that you will end up fighting each other to become prime minister.”

“Gabs has no views of his own. He just hates Margaret Thatcher.”

“So do you.”

“That’s not personal,” Isabella said. “It’s political.”

Gabriel abandoned an attempt at a smoke ring a fraction too late. “The problem is that all the parties are a joke at the moment.”

Max nodded. “Well, that is always true, I’m afraid. I shall be sure to let the prime minister know your feelings.”

Isabella felt her head go light from the cigarette. She loved it that her grandfather was who he was. And wished that she could go and live with him in Leningrad and learn Russian properly and be his secretary and stop pissing about in London with all these trivial people.

“Let me tell you both something that I have learned since I was young and cross. A little secret, which very few people know, and which will help you both become prime minister.” He held up his cigar hand to prevent them from jumping in, but perhaps also so that they could see him as he spoke. “All the conservatives that you will ever meet… Deep down, guess what? They all turn out to be secret liberals. That’s their core.” He inclined his head slightly. “And all the liberals—guess what? Deep down, they all turn out to be conservatives. Yes. It’s true. And the more liberal they want you to think they are, the more conservative you can be certain they are inside.” He smiled his crooked smile. “You might, for example, find yourself in the most anything-goes liberal-left house imaginable”—his cigar made a tight circle—"all art, all sexualities, all genders, races, and religions insistently equal, but look closely at the teacups and taste the cake. Or wait for the minute your liberal friends have children and just watch them scramble and scrape to get their little ones away from the rabble and into the very best schools they can find. Observe how slyly sensitive they are to accent and background. And give them a homosexual son or an illegitimate child and, my God, the whole family will barely be able to breathe for shame and panic.”

Isabella laughed as she blew out her smoke.

“The same is true the other way around.” The cigar went counterclockwise this time. “All those conservatives you both complain of—the family-values task force—flog the criminals, stop immigration, go to church, know your place, the worshippers of the class system, the rules and traditions… Do you know what they want to do most of all in here?” He indicated his heart. “Cut loose. Be free. Escape the prisons of their own ridiculous rhetoric. More than anything else, deep down, they would like to forget their place, forget their wretched families, spend their Sundays in silk beds with beautiful Indian women, Ethiopian princes, Arabian concubines, high on Afghani opium, with a wasteful feast awaiting their merest whim.”

“Have you ever taken opium?” This from Gabriel.

“The reason ninety percent of conservatives are conservative is not because they are conservative but because they cannot allow themselves to admit how much they want to be otherwise. They are afraid the world will end if they so much as loosen a finger’s grip on their ideology. Meanwhile all your liberal-left ringleaders… well, secretly of course, they ache for the big house, the car, those sons who become good straight citizens and of whom they can be proud—they ache for the security of money and the security of property, security and status, status and security.”

Max nodded slowly. “No. Very, very few people have their inner and their outer selves aligned in any kind of meaningful way. We are all self-deceivers. We have to be to survive. Not just in the Soviet Union but in America and Europe too. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is the defining human trait. A clever chimpanzee or dolphin might have a sense of humor, mischief, or maybe mourn his dead fellow, he might use tools, language, and even fall in love, but he will no more grasp the concept of hypocrisy than a stone will understand Schubert. So don’t judge anyone, not even Maria and Nicholas, too harshly by what they say, because what they say—in fact what almost anybody says—is most often what they need to hear themselves say. Not what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves. And if you want to make people love you or fear you or admire you, then the simplest trick is to let them know that you see their most private inner hypocrisy in all its contradictory tangle and guile and you do not think less of them for it. That’s the secret, and that’s what all great leaders do. They somehow let their people know that they understand the inner as well as the outer human life and that it’s all right by them. And what power they have then, if they choose to use it… Lesson over. No.” He held up both his hands to stop them from coming at him with a million questions and arguments. “I have something I want to give you both. Then you can ask me anything you like, even about opium, Gabriel.”

He picked up the bag that Zhanna had brought down. Isabella leaned toward the table to tap her ash. Gabriel flicked his into the fire. Max took out three parcels neatly wrapped in brown paper and handed two to Isabella and the other to Gabriel.

“The big one is a VHS video of the Kirov Ballet from the sixties and seventies, which I wanted you both to have. Keep it, Isabella. You can remember our trip when you watch it. The others are rings—one for you, Isabella, Siberian gold, and one for you, Gabriel, which you must give to the woman you eventually choose to be your wife. Keep them safe.”

“God. Thank you.” Isabella held the little package in her hand.

“Thank you.” Gabriel took his, a little confused and embarrassed but aware that he was probably taking charge of something very valuable and that the fact that Grandpa Max had given it to him was all that really mattered.

“And here”—Max opened up his jacket and took out a slim wallet—“is fifty pounds each for the nightclub tonight. Don’t tell a soul.”

28 Molly Weeks

“No, it’s the least I can do. This is what being a friend is all about,” Molly Weeks said, and meant it, shuffling another of Isabella’s boxes into a tiny gap on the highest shelf in the crowded living room.

They were in Molly’s apartment amid pretty much everything Isabella owned—her clothes, her music, her books, crockery, pictures, and papers. Viewed from one vantage, depressingly little; from another, far too much for one woman to expect a friend to store indefinitely.

“But thanks, though,” Isabella said again.

Molly spoke without looking down from the chair on which she was standing. “When everything starts going dodgy—that’s when friends should step up. So stop stressing. I’m fine with it. Things are bound to be crazy and fierce for you for a while.” She passed down three of her own shoeboxes full of music. “Stick those on the floor and pass me up one more of yours. I mean, leaving Sasha out of it for a moment… well… you know—you lost your mother, and that changes everyone—at the fundamental level. It’s bound to. Right now you have to deal with the underlying stuff, the real stuff.”

Isabella offered her last box.

“You leave these bits and bobs here as long as you need to. You get on that plane and you stop worrying about the insignificant things.” Molly began shoving and easing into the space created. “If you come back and live upstairs again, then easy. If you come back to live somewhere else, then we’ll move all this to your new place together. If you don’t come back at all, then you just tell me where the hell you want them shipped and I’ll ship them there.”

“Of course I’ll come back.”

“You do what you have to do.”

“Molly, I’m going to miss you like—”

“I have a big apartment is all.” Molly twisted on the chair and looked behind. “Is that it, small box–wise?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Your books and kitchen stuff I will just mingle in with mine. So what have we got left?”

“Just those.” Isabella indicated her clothes draped over the back of the sofa.

“We put that lot in my closet.”

“But what about all your CDs?” They had pulled down about a dozen or so of Molly’s neatly labeled shoeboxes to make room for Isabella’s things.

Molly stepped carefully off the chair. “Well, I have got five thousands dollars’ worth of stuff to go out before Christmas, so this will encourage me to get it done a bit faster. There’ll be plenty of room. There’s at least fifty orders that have to go to the U.K. by Friday.”

On the spur of the moment, and because she felt uncomfortable whenever someone was being kind or genuine, Isabella said, “Well, listen, if you want to send all the British orders straightaway in bulk—in one go, I mean—then I’ll give you the address of my mum and dad’s old place in London. It’s huge and more or less empty. You can store everything there for now. Then I can sort them and post them off individually from inside the U.K. next week.”

“Thanks. But I should be fine.” Molly had crossed to the table by the window. She walked back toward Isabella now, smiling mischievously. “I got you this—for the plane.” She held up a CD.

“Molly.”

“It just came in—it’s nothing. Accept a little present with good grace, girl.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just alternative versions—outtakes—from the Street Legal sessions. You said it was your favorite album.”

“It is.” Isabella felt guilty and grateful and deeply touched all at the same time. “And my brother’s. He’ll be jealous.”

Molly stood in front of her friend a moment. “I want to be hearing from you, though. I want news. And next time you can tell me the whole story top to bottom. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“Okay, let’s hang this lot up.” She picked up an armful of Isabella’s clothes from the back of the sofa. “Is this a gold miniskirt?”

29 The Fell Hand

The night lay heavy in its final hour. But his dreams were alive and restless, slipping back and forth across the borders of his consciousness, smuggling terror one to the other. One moment he was swimming against the Seine’s current, desperate, lurching and gasping for breath, the side of his mouth somehow paralyzed, and the next he was beached in his bed, swaddled but immobile, head pulsing with a stretched and swollen pain that he could not relate back to his distress in the water. Then, suddenly, asleep and yet terrified of falling asleep. Then needing to drag himself up physically; the smell of Vaseline and excrement. Then back in the water, the numbness spreading, the whole right side of his body like the weight of some lifeless other, some dead thing. And then child-scared and thrashing… And suddenly he was lying wide awake on his back in the swarming darkness, kicking and convulsing with his left arm and leg, adult-terrified and dizzy and his breath coming short. Except it was not like any waking he had ever known, and his brain seemed as if it too were a separate being—seemed to swell and labor in a strange sort of stupefied horror even as he thought that the nightmare must surely pass. And yet now, as he opened his eyes, it went on—no nightmare but something else, something worse, something real. The shadows of the room shifted and blurred, and he could neither raise himself to sit up properly nor clear his eyesight so as to see anything save these dark, indistinct shapes. He was wet with fear. And the fear and shock were already giving way to panic—panic that he could not move his right side, panic that he could not see, panic that the pain in his head seemed to be billowing outward, shadowing even the retreating area of his mind that was able to panic. He was drooling onto his nightshirt, and he realized that his lip was sagging. And now he stopped thinking about anything but saving his own life. He began to call out for Alessandro, hoping that he was asleep in the guestroom but not knowing, not knowing, unable to remember anything. But trying to call out the boy’s name over and over. (A stranger, a prayer, a piece of ass.) His own voice, though, sounded mad to him, sounded like the cry of a wild animal caught in some excruciating trap, dying in the night. He couldn’t say the boy’s name right. But he kept calling out. Any noise would do. As much noise as he could make. And if not… if not, if Alessandro was away somewhere else, then he had to reach the telephone. (The pain in his head everywhere now, so that he had to think like a man seizing acrid breaths in quick pockets of air amid the rolling smoke.) His cleaner had the keys. (Cleaners, pieces of ass, whores.) All his strength and all his monumental will to live focused on the single objective: to reach the cell phone by his bed and communicate that he needed immediate help. He called out again. But the sound was a hideous distortion—vowels only, yowled and croaked. He was Quasimodo reborn, howling out—Paris deaf. And if he could not speak, if spoken words were gone, then he would have to send a message, thumb it in. Send for help. Come on, move, you bastard. Move. Even his name did not matter. Move, you bastard. Move. The will to live.