Tessa Hadley - The London Train

– Does this friend know what you’re really doing?

– More or less. I haven’t spelled out the whole situation.

– What does he think? Does he mind?

– Don’t worry. He doesn’t mind. It’s not sleazy. He’s imaginative.

As if light flashed off some jagged glass-shard, Cora guessed: he’s covered up for you before. But she didn’t say anything, or allow herself to think about this properly. It was good to be busy all day. She got on well with Terry and the other men who came to work in the house. For as long as they were around, she was calm, could lose herself in her plans for each room. She was able to see clearly what effects she wanted: clean and open, unfussy, with bold touches of romance (the ironwork in the conservatory-dining room, the old French mirror she’d found to go above the front-room fireplace; at night in her dreams the little house was a crumbling, burdensome palace). Often she could prolong this calm into the early evening. She would take a bath after the others left. They hadn’t done the floor tiles yet in the bathroom, so she stepped out of the water onto gritty bare boards, then dried her hair in her room and made herself something to eat on her new cooker. Consumed in expectation of Paul’s arrival, she would hardly be thinking about him consciously. She had given him a key. Then, when she heard his key turn in the lock, for a split second she could even feel panicked; the serene hours of waiting for him drained out of the air, replaced by his complicated real presence, which was almost too much.

Once or twice when she was expecting him Paul phoned at the last minute – sometimes using the flat, subdued voice that meant he was talking where he could be overheard – to say that for some reason he couldn’t come. Although she was clever enough to keep her voice steady on the phone – ‘OK, I’ll miss you’ – her reaction afterwards, in the privacy of the empty house, was extreme; she frightened herself. She never told Paul about these times – when they were over, she didn’t even like to think about what they meant. She reached inside herself and found nothing there without him, only a void. Once, she stayed crouched for what felt like hours in the dark, downstairs on the floor by the phone where she’d taken the call; when finally she tried to move, she was too cold and stiff to stand up straight, and had to crawl upstairs on her hands and knees. There was no television in the house, and she couldn’t read. She would get into bed with the radio on, and try to fall asleep to the sound of voices, so that time would pass, bringing the morning.

He would bang the door behind him, his shoes were loud on the uncarpeted stairs. Then he was in the room with her, already throwing off his coat, which was sometimes a green country waterproof, dripping wet. She’d never seen again the grey-striped blazer of their first meeting on the train. Even while he was still talking, explaining, he would come over to look into her face intently, framing it in his hands. Sitting on the side of the bed to undo the laces in his trainers, he grumbled to her about his journey into the city, or how he was stuck with his writing. She too would be undressing, because she never quite wanted to be waiting for him in her pyjamas, or naked: how terrible, if she was eagerly undressed and he for some reason didn’t want to make love to her. Sometimes, depending on how much time they had, they didn’t undress right away, but huddled together in their clothes, talking and kissing; or she made him coffee in the kitchen, or got them drinks. She made Manhattans, which he said he’d never had before, although she couldn’t believe it; he swore that every Manhattan he drank, for the rest of his life, would be dedicated to her. Although it was their joke that Cora had tried on their first day to put him off by taking him round her home improvements, nonetheless she sometimes showed him the latest alterations in the house, and he tried to pretend to take an interest. If she made food, she felt as if she was playing at keeping house, and enjoyed having him watch her. Once, they were overtaken by sex in the kitchen, in the middle of cooking tagliatelle, which was spoiled; afterwards they had to shower, because the newly laid slate floor was still thick with dust, however many times Cora washed it. They were comically concerned together, brushing out his clothes, that he shouldn’t be in trouble with his wife for getting his trousers filthy.

Paul reminded her sometimes, carefully, courteously, that he would never leave his little girls; once, when she sat on the side of the bed, and he was kissing her knees. She saw herself at that moment as a tiny figure at a great distance, like an illumination in a manuscript: a naked female with little white, forked, vegetable legs, emblematic of the vanity of earthly delights. Pushing her hands into his hair, bending over him, she felt the cup of his skull under her palms, as if she held his thoughts there.

– I know, I know, she said soothingly into his hair.

As if it was all right.

Sometimes the phone rang downstairs while they were in bed together. Cora never answered it, but they had to wait suspended, not moving or speaking, while it went on ringing, sometimes for a long time, because she didn’t have any messaging service set up. Once, she forgot to turn her mobile off and it rang in her handbag, in the bedroom with them. Once, Terry the builder came in to get on with the kitchen on a Saturday morning, when Cora was not expecting him (he’d been going away with his wife for the weekend, but they’d cancelled because of the weather). She had to run down to negotiate with him, in her sweater pulled over her pyjamas, elaborately regretful, making up some unconvincing story about friends coming to lunch. She was sure that Terry guessed something; she shouldn’t have pulled the bedroom door so carefully shut behind her. Their friendship afterwards, working together in the house, felt strained.

It was the rhythm of this love – love, she named it to herself in the mirror, not to him – that every hour she and Paul spent together existed in a perpetual present, which when they parted would recede in an instant without warning, becoming the irrecoverable past, sealed in itself, not to recur. She longed to have back his pursuit, his desperation for her in the café, when his hands had trembled, writing down her name.

– I read your book, she said to him shyly.

– No, really? Which one? Did you buy it? I could have given you a copy.

Even though it was August, it was cold in the room. He pulled the duvet up around her shoulders; she had begun to notice every sign of his attentiveness outside of the love-making itself, because she had flashes of fear that he was losing concentration, was over the first flush of his passion for her. Trying to give him her responses to the book, about the representation of nature in children’s stories, Cora was nervous, not wanting to betray some gross error of understanding, even though while she was reading she had followed his argument confidently enough.

– I can’t explain, she said, stumbling. – But you know what I mean.

Animated, Paul pointed out the gaps in how he’d covered his theme, saying he would do everything differently if he could write it again. Cora had hidden away her copy of the book in her bag; she had been afraid – naively, she saw now – that he would be embarrassed by her having sought it out, as if she was smothering him with her devotion. Paul suggested he should sign it. She hesitated before she handed it over, fearing the finality of whatever words he chose.

– What if your husband finds it?

– I’ll tell him I queued up for you to sign it at a reading.

Paul laughed, and showed her what he’d written. ‘For Cora, wild for to touch’.