Tessa Hadley - The London Train

– Some reading, he said. – Better keep it on a high shelf. Do you know where it’s from? It’s a quotation.

The Wyatt poem had been a favourite since she was a girl. – Of course I do.

– Of course you do. You’re the English teacher.

In another life, she might have judged his dedication cloying, somehow preening. It fixed her. His power over her sometimes made him clumsy. The rest of the poem fast-forwarded past her awareness – didn’t Anne Boleyn belong to Caesar, and it all end badly?

But I have had this, she thought. No matter how it ends.

She already knew that she was pregnant.

Paul went away for a week to Scotland, on holiday with his family (including the teenage daughter from his first marriage). While it rained in the south, they were lucky up there with the weather. Cora flew to Paris for a long weekend with Robert, but afterwards could hardly remember what they did, as if she only existed in connection with Paul. When he came back she held his hands in hers, burying her face in them: felt his calluses from rowing, seemed to taste salt, smell suncream, babies (his smallest girl was only three). She couldn’t tell him yet about her pregnancy.

That evening she said that she would like to spend time with him somewhere else apart from in her half-made house. Sitting up against the pillows, drinking coffee, the sheet pulled across his chest, he calculated how he could plausibly get away for a whole night. He would tell his wife he was on a research trip for his new book, about zoos. As he got more used to Cora he relaxed, tolerant and benign, while she stiffened as if a wire was pulling tight around her. She talked less, she shrank from making mistakes that would disgust him intellectually. It was difficult to believe that when she first met Paul on the train she had half-disliked him, thought him pretentious, been ready with her contempt in return if he’d despised her; those judgements only seemed flaws now in her own understanding. She was aware how anyone else would see her abjection, if they looked at it from outside; how she handed him his dangerous power over her. In her life before she met Paul, she had not known about this capacity in herself. When she had heard or read about other women desperate or abased for love, she had passed over the descriptions with puzzlement or pitying distaste, along with a vague sense that she might have missed out on something.

At the end of August Paul drove her to west Somerset, and they stayed one night in a bed-and-breakfast place, a tall grey house on the main street in a little town on the Bristol Channel that had a marina and a paper mill. She was enthusiastic about the house precisely because it wasn’t too pretty: it was clean, but the furniture and decor were utilitarian, relics from the 1950s, brown linoleum on the floors and up the spindly high staircase. In the windows the glass was ancient and distorting. Their bedroom at the top, where the bed was made up with cellular blankets and a candlewick bedspread, overlooked a wet cobbled back yard and a high black wall sprouting ferns and buddleia. The weather was cold and it rained. When they went out she had to wait on the esplanade while Paul walked away from her, crouching over his phone in the wind, pulling his jacket up round his head, talking to his wife; the sailboats’ rigging clanged and rattled. They ate fish and chips in a corner café, squalls of rain blowing against the windows, which steamed up on the inside. Cora hardly thought ahead, beyond the end of the night. When they got back to their room the heating didn’t seem to be on, though they fiddled with the knobs on the radiator.

– It’s dismal as fuck, he apologised gloomily. – I’m sorry. I thought it was a nice little town when I came before. I expect the sun was shining or something unlikely.

– Don’t worry, I love it.

She actually did love the bad weather that seemed to wrap them up together in the room; she had a moment’s intense consciousness of the scene, as if it was revealed by a lightning flash, or in a painting. Paul stood at the dark window with his hands in his pockets, irritated, water sluicing down the glass, while she arranged her wet outer clothes along the cold radiator. In the strange surroundings it was as if they had passed through into a different country, might step out next day into the unknown. Cora’s new state of pregnancy made her feel unknown to herself. She hadn’t had any real morning sickness, but she had been sure she was pregnant even before she did the test: she felt a faint perpetual nausea, not unpleasant, and a floating sensation in her full tender breasts. Her secret hadn’t had time yet to accumulate responsibilities or consequences: she couldn’t tell anybody about it, only shielded it and tended to it, like a flame lit inside her.

When Paul turned from the window, she was afraid she would see in his expression that he regretted coming there with her, but to her relief he had collected himself finally after his phone call. She should have trusted him to know how to seize their opportunity. He was ambitious: not in his career like Robert, but for himself, his experiences. He wouldn’t waste this night by spoiling it. In the veiled light from the beside lamp – chrome, with a little upright press-switch, parchment shade, ancient twisted flex – his tapered male silhouette melted her, wasting from the shoulders to its centre of gravity in the lean hips. She had not known what it was like to make love to a man whose body she worshipped; this had to do fatally with his arrogance, and some cold core of his freedom. Taking his hands out of his pockets, he admired her – she’d bought new underwear in Paris. His look on her skin was like a force, and in it she felt the ends and limits of herself. Their relations were asymmetrical. She was the completed thing he wanted, and had got – he had seen her whole that very first time on the train, her strong particular stamp of personality written for him to read, clear as a hieroglyph; whereas she was absorbed in his life as it streamed forward, lost in him, not able to know everything he was. She couldn’t have imagined, in her old self, the pleasure to be had in such abandonment.

– You’re so lovely, he reassured her.

Sex each time had its different flavour and character. In the pink cave under the candlewick spread (they were cold, they kept it wrapped around them) it was muddled for Cora, because of the funny room and the rain, with imaginings of austerity, as if their bodies here were thinner and sharper, their sensations acute and poignant. They were the sensational expurgated passages from a black and white Fifties love-affair, in cheap boarding houses, on wrinkled sheets.

She woke in the night from a dream of her mother. It was something trivial – some anxious muddle of arrangements, an appointment to meet Rhian that Cora had missed, or was trying to keep, prevented by the usual stalling sequence of diversions, a bus straining to climb a high hill, students waiting for her in a classroom. Her mind ached with the effort to keep fixed on this goal of a meeting, which moved ahead of her, dissolving; there was not any grief in the dream, only panic and pointless indignation.

Waking and remembering was as terrible as tearing through some restraining membrane; she flooded with sorrow and came to herself bunched up against Paul’s curved back, nose and mouth pressed up against the knobs of his vertebrae, his skin wet with her breathing, her knees crooked inside the bend of his. Excising carefully, she separated herself without waking him, pulled his shirt over her head and crept to the bathroom, which was not en suite, but across the top-floor landing, shared with another room. They had been confident this second room was empty, but now she saw a light under the door, and was ashamed they might have made the bed creak, or rocked it against the wall. The house was still cocooned in the hurrying noise of the rain.