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  All that was left was hedonism and acquisitiveness; all that was left was the self. For the first time in history, it seemed to him (watching the rain drop as the family departed) that for the thinking man, absolutely nothing credible existed; or rather, as he had said to Connie, nothing that could not be readily discredited. And he just wasn't sure the self was up to it. The self much preferred to be selfish.

  Worst of all, though, with a third part of himself, he suspected that he was thinking about all this as a deliberate distraction—a means whereby he might cloak his inability to sort anything out in the secular-holy robes of some spurious and self-deceiving faux humanitarianism. Unbelievable: yet more horseshit. Which in turn made him feel guilty. To add to the plain and simple guilt that he already felt—and here the cycle began again—about how he was treating the women in his life whom he sincerely loved...Both of them. Yes, both, Ma: two at the same time. Which was the immediate point. And stop dodging it, Gabriel...

  The veil of rain thickened.

  He put down his chopsticks.

  Oh Ma, I am the torturer in chief. I am the double traitor with two lives hollow. I am the counterfeiter. I am the simulacrum. I am the one with a shard of ice in his heart. They throw open the secret chapels of their hearts, I walk in, plant my monitoring devices, and leave; they come to me with open eyes, I tweak out their tears. Or else I am hidden, Ma, I am closed off and locked away. Where am I, Ma, where am I, your son? In what lead-lined bunker did you leave me? For what reason? And who ... who am I? This director of propaganda. This creature never present. This looking-glass man.

  But for something like seven seconds a month, the power failed, the burning spotlights were all extinguished at the same time, the noise was roundly silenced, his heart slowed its battering, his breathing deepened, and he glimpsed the naked truth stealing across the darkened stage of his mind between costume changes.

  And now at last the decision came, not like a butterfly or a ray of celestial light but in the shape of a fat pigeon beaking its way through the daily jamboree of the fallen Chinese.

  Leave her. Leave everyone. Do it now. Start it now. Give yourself no choice.

  And he set off at a run through the rain like a man chasing a thief that only he could see.

  40 A Raw Day

  When the call came, she did not recognize his voice. She stood in Susan's hall with the children running this way and that and tried to make sense of what Gabriel was telling her. But she could not process the words—she felt instead as though listening to a stranger describing the actions of a supposedly mutual friend that she wasn't actually sure she knew. "I've left Lina."

  "What?"

  "I've taken a room. In Chalk Farm."

  "What?"

  "I'm there now."

  "Gabs?"

  "In a shared house. There's a guy from work—they were looking for someone. I've given them a deposit. I had to do it straightaway, Is. I've been..."

  She clutched the receiver closer, hoping that might help her understand. "Gabs—what—what are you talking about? What have you done?"

  "I keep on feeling it all from—" He interrupted himself. "It makes me so angry for every ... About me, I mean. And sad."

  "What—what have you done?"

  "Sorry. I have made a decision, Is. No idea if it is the right one. But I couldn't carry on. The whole thing was killing me. Trying to think my way through it all. Seeing it from all the different angles. I just got sick of thinking. It's like the way Mum used to say that Kasparov would beat his opponents: he would complicate it and complicate it until they just got sick of thinking about the problem. Then, eventually, their stamina went. Well, I'm beaten. That's it. I'm moving out."

  "Jesus, Gabriel, you're moving out of your flat? You're splitting up with Lina? Are you ... Where are you?"

  "And—and I need you to help me. I have to go back and talk to her now—she'll be worried about me, she keeps calling my mobile—but I ... I need you to help me move my stuff out. I've hired a van. I'm picking it up in King's Cross at eight. I'll do the first run tonight—as soon as—or it will be too late. Sort the rest tomorrow."

  "Gabriel, where the hell are you?"

  "Grafton Terrace."

  "Where's that?"

  "Chalk Farm."

  "That's just around the corner."

  "I know."

  "I'm coming ... I'm coming now. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell me where exactly."

  When she arrived, his behavior was the most unnerving she had ever known, odder even than when she had discovered him earnestly playing charades with total strangers on the heath during one of his boyhood disappearances. He was being grotesquely normal. And yet only she seemed to be able to see through the threadbare ordinariness of his manner. His dark eyes danced with his intelligence and yet they were ringed with tiredness as if with tar; his hair was straggled dry from the rain and smelled of smoke; his jeans were still soaking at the bottom where he'd obviously drenched himself in puddles. And he would not shut up.

  Just like that, he introduced her to all his new flatmates, all five of them in their late twenties and early thirties, as if this were just another routine and reasonably considered move in a life of steady progress. There was talk of handy shops. Talk of the local. Talk of a dinner party so that he could get to know their various "other halves." Talk of bills and a few house rules. Talk of a cleaning rota. Talk of the garden's being lovely in the summer. Excited talk of a New Year's party they were planning. He was all agreement, regularity, and straight, easy charm. She couldn't believe he was fooling them. A good actor—she had forgotten that—a very good actor. Because he meant it. While he was saying it, he meant it. And he made her feel discomfited and deceitful for not going along with it. As though she would be letting down not only him but these great new flatmates too: Claire, Chris, Sean, Louis, and Taz. So she just had to stand there and nod and smile and listen.

  Stunned, anxious, panicked, she climbed into the moving van at eight the next morning, the Sunday sky raw as pale flesh before the flogging starts. He had not answered his phone all night. She had left three or four messages. And a part of her was plain relieved that he was here, alive, staring dead ahead from behind the blue plastic wheel, dressed in paint-stained green overalls that she could not imagine her brother wearing, let alone owning, in a million years of trying. She took one look at his face and knew that he had not slept for a moment, nor bothered to try. She said nothing. He would speak or not, as he wished. The radio told of yet another leadership crisis. They set off, brother and sister.

  After a while he began to talk—brusque and broken sentences, which she did not question. She understood that Lina had last night cried such terrible silent tears that in the end Gabriel had carried her across the threshold in his arms and driven her, wrapped in a blanket, to her mother's in the van. The bitter opposite of marriage, he muttered. Then he himself had gone to his friend Larry's, at one or two. Beyond that, more or less all he would say was that it was not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, over and over again.

  He was no longer pretending to be normal, at least. Instead, for the rest of the morning he was mostly silent or blank. She had not known a more suffocating day—the very air seemed to be shrinking and shriveling from the evolving pain.

  And the day did not relent. At one, still feeling helpless, anxious, and now hungry, Isabella stood alone in the cream-colored bedroom that her brother had shared with Lina for the past four years, packing a torn English translation of War and Peace into the final box of this trip and wondering if she would make it down to the car with all the remaining plastic bags and the holdall in one go. She did not want to come back up. Gabriel had set off again in the van. Adam was in the car waiting for her. He had been roped in (by Susan) to help. Poor, poor Lina was at her mother's.

  Staring at the book, she allowed herself to access the secret cargo of guilt she had been carrying since Gabriel's call for help: perhaps ...perhaps indirectly s
he had been the cause. Had she not in some way prompted him to this decision in the pub? Had she been too forthright about leaving Sasha? By showing off about her decisiveness (and that, she knew, was what she had been doing), had she not thrown his indecision into relief, made him feel his inaction as a fault? And now he had gone and done this. Taken a cheap room in a shared house in Chalk Farm on what looked like the rashest impulse of his life.

  She opened the book, knowing well that the inscription would be in her mother's hand.

  Dear Gabriel, I hope one day you will read this book and find in it all the life that I do! Life is all there is—it seems obvious enough, but you will be amazed at how many people forget. And for Tolstoy, as for his Pierre Bezukhov, the only duty is to life itself: "Life is everything. Life is God." Even in the fever of our wars and the squandering of our peace. Happy Birthday! Again!

  Love,

  Mum

  Isabella had the same edition herself, also a birthday present from her mother. Though, as she recalled, her inscription was to do with Tolstoy saying that "the one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth."

  Oh Mum, Mum, Mum.

  The doorbell rang, startling her. Or rather, the doorbell chimed. She put the book in the holdall with the rest, swung it over her shoulder, and then bent to pick up the box and various plastic bags. She remembered (with a bite of her lip) that it had once been one of those nerve-shredding London buzzers, before Lina took action. Now it was a Serenity Chime.

  And Isabella had to let it chime serenely all the way to the final chord as she struggled into the hall, the holdall creeping forward and refusing to stay properly over her shoulder, the plastic bags straining at her fingers, the box weighing her down.

  Jesus. I'm coming. Persistent bastard. Surely not Gabriel? No, he would come straight up. For a horrible moment she thought that maybe it was Lina, returning impromptu from her mother's, and that there would now be more tears and that terrible slow-motion anguish. And what in Christ's name was she, Isabella, going to say? But then she realized with relief that Lina, of course, had keys to her own flat. And Lina would not come back now the decision had been made, however unconvincingly, however madly. Because in her own way, Lina was far stronger than Gabriel knew. And though he was the emotional vandal now, in the long run it would be her brother whose suffering was greater. Dear God. Ten percent more or less of a bastard and Gabs would have been fine.

  The chime built toward its final chord again. She managed to put down the box on Lina's little telephone table without everything underneath sliding to the floor. It must be Adam. He had been waiting with his car and partially blocking the narrow road—maybe there was a warden. Desperate to prevent the whole cycle from beginning again, Isabella grabbed the entryphone, one hand still balancing the box, fingers now white and taut from the heavy handles of the bags.

  "Hello. I'm just coming down."

  But it wasn't Adam. The accent was East European. "Hello—this is Gabriel Glover?"

  "Nope."

  "This is Gabriel Glover's house?"

  "Yes ... No. Yes. For about another two minutes, anyway."

  "I am sorry. May I speak with Gabriel Glover, please?"

  "I'm afraid he's not here at the moment." Some strange friend of her brother's, she guessed. "But I'm coming out. Hang on a second."

  For heaven's sake. She hung the thing back on the wall, placed the key in her teeth, hoisted box, bags, and holdall, pulled the door shut behind her with her trailing foot. Probably some Sunday thing her brother had forgotten about. Not surprisingly. She put everything down on the stairs, locked the door, jiggling the key against the stiffness, picked everything up again, cursed her brother, and set off for the front door.

  She did not regret offering to help Gabriel move, of course—she would gladly have offered to fetch his things from hell itself—but she was conscious that innocent Adam had been volunteered as a supplementary driver without being present at the discussion. And having carried out the best part of a trunk's worth himself, he was no doubt anxious to return to his own (much better) life. She reached the front door in a hurry, therefore, as well as a fluster.

  A tall, gaunt-looking man in a dreadful dark brown suit was waiting just outside as she stepped into the colorless light with the box underneath her chin, threatening to spill. She was aware of Adam double-parked and leaning across so he could see out of the passenger window. And the books were heavy.

  Before she could say anything, though, and just as the main door swung shut behind her, the man spoke.

  "Hello. I am here to see Gabriel Glover, please. He said to me to meet him here at one. Is he inside this house?"

  She tried to nod over the box as she paused in her stride. She recognized the accent now—Russian. Of course. But it was hard to tell if the formality of his manner was a function of his speaking English or the purpose of his visit. Obviously her brother had some strange friends—either that or gambling debts.

  "I'm afraid he's not here at the moment. Now is not a good time. What is it about? I'll tell him that you ca—oh, shitting hell." The holdall had swung around again, off her shoulder, and she was in danger of losing some books from beneath her chin.

  The man stepped forward, and before she had time to wonder what he was going to do, or for that matter to be afraid, he had taken the box.

  "Thanks. Thanks..."He remained motionless while she sorted out all the bags. She looked up and met his eyes—sunken, turquoise, arresting. "Thank you."

  "Are you Isabella?"

  The question took her completely aback. They stood on the doorstep facing each other for a second.

  "Yeah—yes. I'm Gabriel's sister." The books clearly weren't half so heavy for him, though he held the box oddly, she noticed, resting it on his arms, which he stretched out in front of him as if he were a forklift, hands free at the end. The guy must know her brother quite well after all. She relaxed a few fractions.

  "Sorry." She indicated the car. "We're in a rush. You're lucky you came today. Gabriel is moving out. This is all his stuff. Or unlucky, I suppose. There's been a bit of an upheaval. You're—"

  "My name is Arkady Artamenkov. I am here from St. Petersburg. Your brother told me to come to this house to talk to him ... to talk to both of you. This is how I know your name."

  And only now it occurred to her that it was something to do with her mother. Her curiosity sparked. The bags were murdering her fingers again.

  "Hang on." She started toward the car. Adam reached over his shoulder and opened the back door, and she placed the bags and holdall on the floor.

  "Sorry," she said to Adam, "just one sec "

  The man was now standing behind her, holding the box. She turned, took it from him, and dumped it flat on the back seat.

  "Thank God for that." She stood up straight as he took a step back. "Is it something to do with the flat?"

  "No, no." The other's face changed, as if he realized that she was mistaking him completely. "No, I am sorry. I am a friend of your mother from Petersburg. I know your mother very well. Today I was going to speak with your brother about this, about her. He said you would both be here."

  "Oh. Oh God, sorry." She wanted to send Adam home alone. She considered a second. No, it simply wasn't fair. Her curiosity was burning her up now, though, and she felt her neck going red. She must get his number and organize another time. Gabriel should be there too. The guy's English was better than she had first thought. She softened her tone. "Oh, I see...Sorry. What a balls-up." She put her hand through her hair. "It's just a very bad day today. My brother is—Gabriel is—moving out because he and his girlfriend, Lina, are splitting up. For a while."

  "I used to practice on your mother's piano at her apartment on the Griboedova in St. Petersburg."

  "You are a musician?" Why hadn't Gabriel told her anything about this?

  "Yes. I play the piano. She ... she said to me many things about you. We were supposed to talk together today."

  "Ri
ght, right, right. Oh, well, we have to arrange another time." She glanced at the car. A scaffolding truck was turning into the road. It would not be able to get past. "I—we—would love to meet up. We really would. Is there a number I can call you on? I'm so sorry about this."

  "No. I—I—I do not have a phone."

  "Okay. Is there a way of getting in touch with you?"

  His head fell and he seemed to be looking at his feet.

  "How about ... how about this Friday?" Give Gabriel some time, she thought; yes, he would want to be there. "Erm ... whereabouts are you based?"

  "I do not understand." He looked up again.

  "Where are you staying?"

  "Oh, near Harrow Road."

  "Well, to be honest, the simplest thing to do is say ... seven-thirty on Friday evening ... at Kentish Town tube. I will definitely be there. Hang on a sec." She opened the passenger door, reached pen and paper out of her bag, apologized to Adam again, and scribbled down her cell phone number on a piece of paper. The scaffolding truck pulled up behind the car. "This is my number. Call me anytime to confirm. I promise I will be there. Friday, Kentish Town at seven-thirty. What's your e-mail?"

  He told her an address.

  "Write it down." She handed him the pen.

  The driver leaned out of the window of the truck. "Oy, love, how long you gonna be? We've got houses to rob."