After that he had taken a bubble bath, listening to the news on BBC World—wars, famine, armies on the march, and then all of a sudden the bomb, and hell seemed loosed again, outside, inside, everywhere—and so he’d climbed out to see the pictures, and then, exhausted, distraught, appalled to the point of epilepsy, he’d turned everything off and tried once more to sleep. And that’s when he had fallen to thinking that perhaps his mother’s death had begun directing his only-just-subconscious in a new and unwanted direction… that each reluctant step he was being forced to take away from her as a living reality was in fact leading him back toward the shadow of his father. But not to sleep. Not to sleep. Rather, it was as though grief’s corrosion had somehow rusted over his eyes so that he couldn’t open them even had he so wished.
“Hey, Gabs, you awake?”
He started, catching his knee on the table.
“Is—Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”
He stood up, drowsy and confused.
And so they faced each other, standing in the selfsame square meter of the swarming planet at last, the selfsame genes, the selfsame history: Isabella with her hair longer than usual, curling a little against the pale cream of her scarf; Gabriel with his shorter than when they had been together last, clean-shaven and thinner too than he had been for a long time.
“I made it,” she said.
“Jesus, Is, I think I passed out… I thought you had… I thought something…” But he could not marshal words to sense.
“I’m sorry. Security stuff.” Isabella speaking softly, her usual hint of subversive humor banished entirely. “How you doing?”
“I’m actually okay—I’m just… I’m just really tired. I should have slept this afternoon. But…”
And for the first time in their adult lives, brother and sister embraced. There was no thinking; it was pure compulsion—too quick for the ruthless intellectual habits of their nature, their nurture. But when they parted, neither was visibly distressed—Gabriel’s dark eyes ever unguarded, Isabella’s slightly smiling—as if they had silently agreed that for tonight at least, process and organization would be their joint enterprise. As if tears were for people much less tired than they. As if all that might have to be said could wait.
Instead, Isabella smiled, openly and freely, as she did only in her brother’s company.
“Sorry, Gabs. My phone doesn’t work, or I would have called you again. There was a security nightmare in Berlin. Some complete wankers on a stag jerking around. And we lost another hour. But I couldn’t face going back to buy another phone card. I just wanted to get here.”
“You seen the news?” he asked.
“Yeah, it was on the TV while we were waiting to board. And Pulkovo was like an army barracks when we landed. It’s awful—weird.”
The nature of death itself, or death’s meaning, had somehow changed.
“The Russian TV has stopped showing it,” Gabriel said. “Nobody knows who is in charge or what is really going on.” He shrugged heavily, and Isabella saw how extraordinarily tired her brother was. There were broken blood vessels in his eyes. And his face was blank. He really was exhausted. She had wondered how she would behave when she arrived. Now she knew: a reaction to her brother’s evident wretchedness—she was going to be all competence and coping.
They were still standing. Isabella glanced around. “Okay, well, I think I’m going to grab a shower and then let’s get—”
“Julian Avery is coming over,” Gabriel interrupted, still a little frenetic but seemingly unable to moderate anything. “Now, in fact—in five minutes. We’re meeting him here. Sorry, but I wanted to—”
“The guy from the consulate?”
“Yes. They’ve been—they’ve been brilliant. I mean, Christ knows what would have—”
“Don’t.” Isabella bit her lip. “Shit. I think that’s him.”
Isabella looked behind her. A short, surreptitiously overweight man was crossing the lobby toward the bar. Julian Avery moved with surprising alacrity, his walk a double-time waddle. He had not seen them.
Isabella drew a deep breath. “Okay. Right. So…” She hooked her hair behind her ear. “Shall we all get some coffee, then?”
“Good idea.” Gabriel nodded. “I was wondering what to drink.”
“Hang on a sec.” She put down her bag on one of the chairs.
Gabriel spoke softly. “They are being very can-do. Because of Grandpa Max, I suppose. God knows how they have even heard of him. It must be fifteen years since he left.”
“They remember everything in the Foreign Office.” Isabella took off her scarf. “They will have known exactly who Mum was too, since she had a British passport. You know how it is. They always know everything, somehow. Okay, let’s go.”
Avery had begun flicking through his briefcase, which he had propped on a stool. Now he stood smartly to greet them. He wore a blue, round-necked, fine merino wool sweater and beige slacks, and Isabella guessed his age as late thirties, but he had one of those fair English faces that appear to change hardly at all between the loss of freckles and fifty-five. His features were genially unremarkable, she thought, save for his hair, which was wound in the tightest possible curls, and his unusually large ears.
She introduced herself, her name sounding strange as she said it out loud. She felt suddenly very British, the granddaughter of Maximilian Glover.
“Julian.” He took her offered hand with a demure nod. “I can’t say how sorry we all are. My condolences. It must be a very difficult time.”
“Thank you.”
Gabriel presented himself and said, “We thought coffee, but please, feel free to—”
“Coffee is fine.”
The barman nodded and they went back to Gabriel’s table and sat down, Isabella taking the chair opposite Avery.
“Thank you so much for coming over here tonight—it’s very kind of you,” she said.
“No, not at all.”
Almost businesslike, she opened her bag for pen and notebook. She was conscious that this was overdoing it but could not stop herself. Since she had taken Gabriel’s call outside the Angelika, a renegade part of her had been noticing the increase in unintentional words, involuntary actions. “We were only now saying how grateful we are for your help. Thank you so much for coming out.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
“I’ve only just arrived from the airport, I’m afraid, so we haven’t really had a chance to catch up. And we’re both pretty much at sea. With more or less everything we need to be doing…”
“Of course.” Perhaps taking his cue from Isabella’s pad, Avery adopted an air of quiet professional practicality, leaning forward a little, small hands joined, fingers loosely knitted, thumbs pointing toward the mirrored ceiling. “Okay. Well, first of all, the good news is that we have managed to jump the cemetery queue and short-cut some of the other bureaucracy—with the kind help of your father. Your mother can be buried at the Smolensky graveyard on Vasilevsky, which is, I understand, in accordance with her wishes. That’s official as of close of play today.”
Without needing to look over at him, Isabella felt the entire force field of her brother’s attention change direction. So now she spoke quickly, fearful of what he might say if she did not. “Sorry, I’m totally behind here. I live in New York.” This was also unnecessary, but she felt the need to invoke the strength somehow resident in the city’s name.
Avery had a way of moving his head from one side to the other every so often, as if he were required to hear things with each of his ears in turn in order to quite believe them.