Tessa Hadley - The London Train

– Don’t go. I can’t part with you yet.

– I’m only going downstairs, I’ll come back.

– But not the same. You won’t be exactly the same as you are now.

– Don’t be ridiculous, she laughed, settling down under his arm, tasting cigarette on his skin, in his mouth, wet sweat in the fine tangle of hair on his breast.

– You’re grieving for your mother. Of course you are. Good girl.

– Is your mother alive?

– She’s frail, lives in a flat where there’s a warden on call. But she’s beginning to be confused. She may need full-time care.

– Are you close to her?

– We’re friendly, Paul said. – We get on well. We were very close, once, but I changed. I grew away from her.

– I don’t know how people go on walking around, after their mother dies. I don’t know how they keep getting up in the morning.

– But you’re walking around.

– No. Not really, she said. – Really, I’m not.

He only nodded, taking her seriously. Pushing the duvet off onto the floor, he knelt beside her on the bed, taking her in intently where she lay naked on her back on the sheet, as if the grief she had confided in him was dispersed around her body, not her mind. She succumbed, experiencing herself opened out and pressed flat, against the white background, liberated from possession of herself.

Cora kept the scrap of paper with Paul’s name and telephone number scribbled on it, though she soon knew it off by heart. The paper grew soft with folding and unfolding. She left it in her address book where Robert could easily have found it, and might have asked whose name it was, although he might not.

– You’re wearing more make-up, Robert once commented, and she thought for a moment that he knew.

– Am I? Don’t you like it?

He considered carefully. – I think it means you’re feeling stronger, which is good.

– But you don’t like it.

– I like your real face.

She couldn’t answer. She carried these words round with her like a hot coal, hardly knowing how to take hold of them. Did he know about Paul? Had he guessed? He never gave any other sign. How dared he think he knew her, that he could judge what her real face was? She felt contempt for his schoolboy puritanism, disapproving of women wearing make-up. Treasuring them up, she thought of the words Paul used to her, shamelessly, for parts of her body and for what they did together. Robert never used those words, he never even used them for cursing. But then what Robert said about her make-up surprised her again. It wasn’t like him. Ordinarily it was in his nature to be vigilant against just such a loaded remark, with its knife-twist of appearing-love. Did that mean he knew? Was he striking at her, to hurt her? But there was never any other sign.

When Cora did her face in her bathroom in the flat – she and Robert had a bathroom each, hers was all mirror glass and white tiles – she painted her eyes elaborately in defiance of him, put on blusher and lipstick. Then she scrubbed it all off and began again. She put together a separate make-up bag to keep in Cardiff, but often didn’t bother with it. Paul didn’t care what make-up she wore. She asked – calculating carefully so that she didn’t sound needy – whether he liked her better with make-up or without, and he said both.

The scrap of paper where Paul had written his number was a compliments slip from the London Review of Books . Cora began to buy the Review , looking out for articles by him, but never found any. When she asked him about it, he told her some long, complicated story about how he had offered to review something for them, then got stuck and couldn’t do it, and now they were offended with him and wouldn’t give him anything else to write about. There were a number of such stories about his relationship with various kinds of authorities, fraught with offence and resentment; she wasn’t able to judge yet whether his account of them was to be trusted, or whether the feuds were in his imagination. He was relentlessly critical of power. His explanations of politics – of the war in Iraq, for instance, or of the credit boom – were illuminating, he sliced away the slack of lazy language, and always seemed to have access to facts and insights that weren’t common knowledge. She found it difficult to argue with him. Sometimes, thinking of the difficulties of Robert’s daily work, Cora wanted to ask him: but how would you do it better, if you were them?

– It isn’t so easy, she said, – to put everything right.

He said any ambition to put things right was subject to the doom of unintended consequences; she experienced his pessimism as a force, clean of the contaminations of privilege and duty. He came from a working-class family and had studied hard to get into Cambridge, and then been unhappy there; he got away to London to do his PhD, and then spent years in France. He let slip to her once that his wife – his second wife, mother of the little girls – had been to boarding school, and although Cora pretended to hardly notice this, she seized on the information as if it set the two of them apart, connected through their modest backgrounds. When she told him about her grandfather working in a coal mine and going to fight in Spain, she could see it moved him, even though the episode in Spain wasn’t particularly edifying: her grandfather had become sick with dysentery as soon as he arrived, then injured his hand in an incident while training, and had to come home. Cora’s dad had used to tell it as a funny story.

She never, ever searched for Paul’s name on the Internet; it was a superstition with her that everything would be spoiled if she unleashed into their secret intimacy the world’s promiscuous noise, its casual judgement of him. Or it might have been worse if she’d not found anything, apart from the listings for his books. He insisted he was no one, he had no public profile, no one cared what he thought: but surely that was disingenuous, as he had a publisher, and readers? She heard him once giving an interval talk on Radio 3: completely by chance, because he hadn’t mentioned it, and she never looked at the radio listings. At home in the Regent’s Park flat, she had been half-listening to a concert of piano music, half-reading the paper: then suddenly Paul’s voice was loud in the room, uninhibited, talking about Georges Sand and Chopin, blasting her with dismay and joy. The traces of his Birmingham accent came over more distinctively in his recorded voice. All the time it was on, Robert was working at his desk, with the door to his study open, so that from the sitting room Cora could see his back bent over his papers, hear the occasional percussion of his biro, jotting notes. If he had only turned around, she thought, he must read the truth in her excruciated stillness. She couldn’t move from her chair to turn the radio down, or off, or shut the study door, until Paul’s talk was over.

She bought his books, the most recent first, having it sent to her address in Cardiff; she devoured it eagerly, full of admiration and interest. It was difficult, but her knowledge of him was like a light held up to each page, so that she leaped ahead and understood where he was going even before he explained it. At unexpected moments his ideas went stealing through her like a secret power. That summer, she often stayed over in Cardiff for days at a time during the week, supervising the building work in the house, getting on with the decorating, driving to fetch whatever was needed from Ikea or the DIY store. When Robert asked her when she was putting the house on the market, she explained that it wouldn’t be ready for a while yet. Paul came over every evening that he could. He said he told his wife he was visiting a friend who lived nearby, across the park.