Chapter 25
Gordon
In the quiet hum of the office, Gordon eats lunch at his desk and considers the day’s Wordle between bites of his sandwich.
“What’s your starting word?” Amy asks.
“EARTH,” Gordon says. He offers up a new five-letter word every time Amy asks, but really his word is always SOBER. “What about yours?”
“AUDIO,” Amy replies, not looking up from her screen. “Someone said it’s a good one, but what are you meant to do with all those vowels if you get anything from it.”
Gordon puts the lid back on his empty lunchbox. “Hope you figure it out. You’ve three to beat,” he says, sharing his own score. “See you in a bit.”
He walks over to the main wing and, as he does every day, enjoys the moment of emerging from the staff-only door and crossing from one world into another.
The cold echo of a concrete stairwell, out onto the polish and hush of the gallery, ruffled only by the shuffle of a school party or a gaggle of noisy tourists.
Sometimes he takes a pair of headphones and listens to an audio guide as he walks through the rooms; other times, he sits on one of the benches dotted throughout the gallery, eyes traveling around the painting in front of him.
He knows it’s illogical—he’s read The Goldfinch—but he feels as though nothing bad could happen while he’s held within the quiet of these rooms.
His sponsor got him the job here. One day—when Gordon was starting to feel able to return to work, but not quite sure he was ready for the adrenaline rush of the City—Rob had phoned and mentioned a gallery was looking for someone to manage the digital team and its website.
It doesn’t engage Gordon’s brain in the way masterminding trading algorithms once did, but he enjoys being part of this world and knowing that, in some small and hidden way, he is bringing art to people.
Not like Rob with his paintings—or the curators—but still. It’s enough.
Gordon met Comfort in the summer of 2019 on a broken-down train stuck somewhere just outside London Victoria. She was sitting opposite, fanning herself with an exhibition program from the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
“What did you think of it?” he asked, and she’d looked confused for a moment, before telling him it had been left behind by another passenger. But they carried on talking and when the carriage finally juddered to life again, she looked disappointed.
As the train pulled into the station, she typed her number into his phone and said, “You seem nice. Please don’t be one of those guys who doesn’t call.”
Comfort is a few years older than Gordon and has a teenage daughter, Ida, from a previous relationship.
Ida looks like a miniature version of her mum, with the same thick, dark curls and the same habit of widening her eyes when someone is talking, as though listening through the whites of them.
Ida calls him “Gord,” which she manages to make sound both derisory and vaguely affectionate.
“Oh, you’re here, are you, Gord?” she’ll say, adopting the censorious tone she reserves for adults.
At first, it needled—a reminder of who he’d been at school—but gradually he’s come to associate it only with Ida and the person he is now.
Ida is funny and more interesting than Gordon remembers himself being at fourteen.
She likes Manga comics and watching YouTube videos of people doing odd things.
One day she shows him a car being shrink-wrapped in vinyl until its whole body is a brilliant reflective gold.
It’s mesmerizing and he has a sense he is learning the world anew.
When the pandemic hit, Gordon had been seeing Comfort for less than a year, but it was Ida who’d raised the possibility of him staying with them. “Is Gord going to try to muscle in on our ark to see out whatever this thing is? Or will he be staying home all alone?”
He’d smiled at the way she made it sound like it was his own exhausting idea that she should endure his company through lockdown. Weeks into their confinement, she would delight in walking into a room and saying, “Oh my God. Are you still here?!”
“I can see I’ve totally outstayed my welcome, but if you could just see your way to a few more days, I think Boris is on the verge of lifting things,” he’d say, wearing a pained expression and raising his hands in feigned helplessness.
They enjoy this even now, nearly three years on, when he has given up the lease on his own place and pays half the rent on their garden flat.
“Oh my God! Are you still here?”
“I know, I know. I only dropped round for a cup of tea, and here I am still stewing away.”
Ida’s presence meant things moved from the headiness of the first few dates straight to old married couple, but Gordon’s happy with that.
Films made it seem as though love was hidden in the petals of red roses and a view of the Eiffel Tower, but he’s relieved to find it sitting side by side in the trapped warmth of a glass potting shed in Willesden, nestled in the steeped scent of compost and the first green globes of fruit on the vine.
He’d told Comfort about his breakdown early on. And she’d listened, eyes wider than usual, as he described the situation he’d grown up in.
“I was an awful child. Horrible to my mother, but I couldn’t see how I was being manipulated. It’s no excuse…but—”
“When Ida was little, she believed in the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas. She wrote letters to them because I encouraged her to. Do you think she should have known better?”
“But Maia understood what was going on.”
“And one kid in every hundred doesn’t believe in Santa; Maia was that child.”
This had always been his stumbling block—the reason he’d found his childhood self so hard to forgive—but somehow Comfort’s logic seemed simple. It didn’t excuse the person he was in those middle years, but it helped him to understand how he’d ended up in that place.
Cora sits in the darkness of the Royal Opera House alone, as Swan Lake nears the end of Act Two.
It is “Dance of the Cygnets,” four women moving as one in perfect synchronicity, hand in hand, arms overlapping in flawless Xs.
Cora watches, her own calves and thighs held taut, as on stage they execute shimmering bursts of entrechat quatre, relevé passé.
Their footwork is clean, precise. Their movements light.
Cora feels a lift in her chest; she knows this soaring feeling, of being the one performing the magic.
The dancers look this way, then that, curious, serene, while beneath the plumage of their tutus, their legs beat imagined water.
She recognizes the choreography. It is a chorus part, but one with the potential to earn bigger roles.
The quartet must move in relation to one another to avoid upsetting the spacing.
They must share the same musicality, the same tempo; a count for every step, until finally, in the last moments, they break apart and attempt to fly, before falling to the floor.
She looks at the women’s faces, trying to pinpoint who is the star, who has the determination needed to set themselves apart from the rest. They are so young!
Cora likes to imagine them off-duty, gossiping, stretching, discussing the male dancers.
She wonders if they still smoke between practice.
If they still subsist on cigarettes and coffee as so many of her peers once had.
Echoes of that time reverberate unbidden across the stage with the pit-a-pat of feet she can hear beneath the music.
You’ll fly higher if it’s from the heart; the voice of her teacher, rising above the plink-plonk of a piano.
The ritual softening of new pointe shoes.
Trapping the toe box in the hinge of a door; slow rises through demi-pointe to break in the arch.
And then, looking at the clock, as she pushed through pain, feet already bleeding, another six hours to go.
Her marriage, Cora realizes, was like a magnified, more awful version of her ballet career.
Hopes. Dreams. Then agony and disappointment.
Sacrificing herself for an ultimately unattainable thing.
She’s sixty-eight now, and although she knows the idea of being put out to pasture is a phrase others associate with obsolescence and redundancy, for her it conjures lush green fields filled with buttercups where she’s free to roam.
She lives in a small Victorian terrace in West London, not far from Maia and Gordon.
Her house has window boxes that she changes with the seasons.
There is a small walled garden. She has planted pots with shrubs and standard trees and is gradually learning their names: Salix integra, bay, dwarf Korean lilac, hebe, broom, hibiscus, hypericum.
This year, she’s introduced fresh herbs and salad leaves shielded by a cold frame.
Watching them peep out as small shoots and grow to harvestable food seems like the real joy, and as she produces too much to eat herself, she leaves string-tied bundles on her front wall with a handwritten note encouraging passersby to help themselves.
The first time, she’d worried people might not want them, but felt a silent rush of love from the empty street when she opened her door and found them all gone.