“You know, my child for yours—but you didn’t, you were better than that, so I should lose to you this time.”
It was hard to keep a straight face, but Harriet didn’t laugh. Everybody around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived. Laughing at this didn’t create too much of a problem when the differences seemed slighter, but Tamar’s take was so markedly different . . . well. Harriet didn’t wish to see someone this passionate become a walking Druhástrana, cut off from the rest of the world. Harriet told Tamar to get up. She said, “I’d hold out my hand to you but I don’t think you’d take it. I don’t know how much attention you’re going to pay to this but I’m not plotting against you or your son. Me, Margot, Perdita—we did march up to your gates like an unholy triumvirate, but we’re not plotting; we just can’t let you keep on being like this to us. You just fucking can’t, Tamar. You said you lost this once, but, Tamar, even in the middle of all this hating us, don’t you ever get a feeling that if you don’t stop this, you’re going to end up losing every fight?”
Harriet also said she wished Tamar would go back to liking the Lees again because she was so much better at that than she was at hating them. Harriet wasn’t sure she actually believed that, but some flattery seemed called for.
Tamar still didn’t move. “Hold out your hand to me, then,” she said.
Harriet did, and Tamar took it, and stood up. “But if you ever cross me . . . ,” Tamar said, a statement Harriet tested by laughing whilst looking to see if Tamar was laughing too. She was, but what if it was fake laughter . . . no, Harriet, no. Thinking like that is part of the problem.
* * *
—
A FEW OTHER THINGS happened that visit:
The first was that Harriet spoke to Gabriel Kercheval again. The reunion was entirely impromptu and probably would have gone badly if it hadn’t been. Upon entering the house and catching a glimpse of her scratched and rain-soaked self in a mirror, Harriet’s first instinct was to hide so that Rémy (ugh, it had always been Rémy for her, hadn’t it) wouldn’t see her like this. Tamar pointed out a bathroom she could use, but either there was still malevolence drifting around or the doorway was misidentified or Harriet simply misunderstood which one . . . the door Harriet opened led into the kitchen where both iterations of the 3:00 A.M. crew had whiled away the small hours years before. Mr. Bianchi and Ms. Danilenko had moved on to other posts years ago—Ari had told Margot: It’s just me and Tamar now. The boys visit when they have time, and they hardly ever have time. Harriet went into the kitchen to see any trace of it remained, the huddle she and Margot and Rémy and Gabriel drew one another into whenever they thought the angry cook or the angrier housekeeper might be about to burst into the room. She traversed the tiled countertop widdershins, took a wooden spoon in hand, and struck a couple of the brass pans that hung above the kitchen range; they still caroled like bells. She thought of the time there was a power cut and for five, ten, fifteen minutes, the 3:00 A.M. crew were convinced that Mr. Bianchi had gone down to the fuse box and turned off the electricity so as to ruin the gingerbread that was baking in the oven. Bianchi can never stop us, Rémy had whispered into the huddle. We’re as indivisible as gingerbread dough. Shhh, don’t ask me what that means! And of course just a few months later, Mr. Bianchi had taken Rémy’s place in the huddle and Ms. Danilenko had taken Gabriel’s, as they all kept an ear out for Tamar. Yes, it was the same kitchen, the same 3:00 A.M. crew clubhouse. And now? Tamar could be in the huddle too, if she liked; but what would the gingerbread conspiracy be in aid of now?
There was a laptop open on the kitchen counter, and beside that an open spectacle case and a glass of juice. Harriet walked past the laptop, making one last round of the counter before leaving the room, and she caught a blur of movement across the laptop screen. A voice, also from the screen, said: “Hello?! Stop. Come back!”
It was Gabriel, half-frowning at her out of a Skype window, broad-chested and bearded now—the shepherd boy had ascended Mount Olympus. After greeting Harriet politely, he asked her to charge the laptop: “I have a feeling it’s going to conk out any minute.” He was right—the battery was down to 5 percent—she did as he asked.
“Where are you?” Somewhere relentlessly vertical—behind him, through gauzy curtains, she saw rooftops, golden, pink, and white, rising up out of an avenue of trees. Off-screen somebody spoke to him in Cantonese, and it was good to see the way his face changed as he switched languages to answer, slightly tongue-tied, as is inevitable with new words and new lovers. It seemed possible that he didn’t need things to be easy anymore. In English, he said to her: “Hong Kong. And you’re . . . there.”
“Were you talking to Ari?”
“Yup. He said he’d be back in a minute.”
“Ah. And how long ago was that?”
He shrugged.
“I’ll get him.”
Before she went, Gabriel said he had to tell her something. He said he would honestly never have hurt her. The inclusion of the “honestly” jarred for some reason, but she said OK.
“I don’t know what it was, but I immediately felt like you were better than me, in some way you were truer, or something like that . . . you just kept trying to be truer. It was just really strange having to act like some kind of sponsor when really I was the one who’d have to work at being your equal. And I did want to do, I did, but there was other stuff that meant I didn’t have time, and trying to do it all was . . . scratch that, this is coming out wrong . . . Harriet. Harriet! Are you seriously just walking off? Wait. Please. You might not remember this, but I didn’t used to like gingerbread. At all. Then you came and you wanted to give me gingerbread, and I took it because you were the one offering it to me. I could eat it, but I still didn’t like it.”
“Ha ha—I actually don’t remember this at all.”
“Hated the stuff, actually. Hated it. One day when you gave me another box of the stuff I think I actually said ‘Urgh’ aloud—or I made a face, or something, and you looked at me and said I should just keep it for later. You might like it later, you said.”
“I said that?”
“Yes. You just don’t remember. Anyway, you said that, and you looked so hopeful that I think you must have done something to me, because . . .”
“Later you started to like it?” Harriet wasn’t sure what Gabriel is saying; obviously he was saying what he was saying and she didn’t think he meant anything bad by it, but this recollection of his reinforced a feeling she had (a feeling that she’d always had?) that this is the impression she made, that of being a person who can be saved up for later.
“Yes, I started to like the gingerbread, Harriet. Really, really, and a lot.”
“OK.”
Gabriel unhelpfully told her she looks the way he felt the day Ari told him, Stop following me around with those clipboard eyes; it’s as if you’re taking notes on everything I say and do so as to quote it all back to me . . . and worst of all, sometimes you do bring out the quotations! Gabriel said this in a low voice, in case Ari suddenly interrupted them, shouting, QUOTING AGAIN! This wasn’t a review of Harriet’s facial expression but the state she and her clothes were in after the umbrella fight she’d just been in with his mum. To all this Harriet could only say OK again, and ah, frail ego, why should Ari say things that made Gabriel feel the way Harriet looked just then—and why should some attempt at kindness on Gabriel’s part also make her feel the way she looked just then . . . Harriet was about to cry, and then she was crying, but she also kept saying OK, OK, and strangely Gabriel cried too; they sniffled until the friend he was with came up to Gabriel’s laptop camera, raised a fist at Harriet, and said something along the lines of, What do you mean, OK, OK? What’s OK about this?
* * *