Tessa Hadley: The London Train

He was truly unhappy, he pressed her to his heart. She knew he meant it, and it would have to do. If he’d wanted her, he could have asked for her, she would have broken up everything for him. But he didn’t ask.

How could something that had filled your life up completely, to the brim, be withdrawn and leave no trace? Sometimes in the days that followed Cora felt as if the huge percussion of an explosion had left her deaf, sucking the noise out of the tranquil, ordinary-seeming days. If she died now, she thought, it would be exactly as if the whole thing had never existed. A body sank into a lake or a quicksand and the lake closed over again behind it, the broken ice healed.

She had not told anyone about him. Perhaps if Frankie hadn’t been Robert’s sister as well as her best friend she might have confided in her; in the circumstances this had been out of the question. There were no ordinary connections between her life and Paul’s, there was no way his name or news of him was going to crop up in conversation among her friends. Only Paul knew what had happened – and Elise, his wife, in whatever travestied version she had it – but he was locked away from her irretrievably now, he might as well not exist in her present. It was true that to begin with she hallucinated meeting with him everywhere. Every step she took, dressing in the morning or teaching her classes, she got through in the delusion that she was performing for him to witness. The hardest thing was the jolting on-off alternation between the delusion of his witnessing presence and the knowledge of his real absence. With some last-ditch instinct for preserving her sanity, she continued her superstitious interdict against searching for his name on the Internet. She bought a notebook to write down what had happened, so that it was real outside her own mind; but when she sat down to begin, she realised she couldn’t possibly find the words.

Anyway, a notebook would be too dangerous, it could have consequences: if she was killed, for example, and Robert found it. It seemed quite possible to her, during those first weeks, that she might be killed, or die, at any moment. Infantile, she thought she wanted to die, she wanted to be reunited with her parents, even in nothingness. What kept her afloat, unexpectedly, was the lack of any consequences from her crisis in her daily life. This might have been partly cowardice (she was ready to believe anything low or shameful about herself). She might have simply dreaded too much seeing Robert’s face change if he found out about her, feeling his kindness drop to nothing in an instant. In her weakness she depended on his kindness, took advantage of it. She didn’t allow herself to think any longer, as she had at the beginning when she was strong, that Robert might have some idea of what she’d done; if he’d ever had any idea, then he must have buried it. Burying was best. The friendly, decent surface of daily intercourse was best. Cora submitted to it, with the remote pale gratitude she could imagine someone feeling who lived with a debilitating illness. Though it was wicked to make comparisons between her suffering and any real illness. Nothing had happened to her that weighed a feather in the world outside. It was nothing but the clamour and simulated agonies of selfishness.

The baby was the only vivid focus in her present. She clung to the idea of it as the key to another life, growing up out of this collapse; not believing in anything else, she felt this hope inside her body. Although it was the product of what she and Paul had done, it existed now beyond the end of that, and would exact love and responsibility from her on its own new terms, in the time ahead; she could already begin to feel this. If when it was born it looked like Paul, that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except her. There was no one else who could have any reason to recognise him in her child. Her child and Robert’s, everyone would think. When it was born she would throw away the scrap of paper with Paul’s telephone number, and all his books, including the book with the dedication, so that no clue was left to lead anyone back to him. She hoped it would be a boy, because Paul had only had daughters. She saw those little girls in her mind’s eye often, small as if through the wrong end of a telescope, so that she couldn’t make out their faces clearly: one was dark, one blonde.

Once in a spasm of longing she rang Paul’s number, and got a recorded message saying it was unobtainable: he must have changed his phone, Elise must have made him change it. It seemed extraordinary now that Cora had never asked him for his home address, or his email; she supposed she would have been able to find these out, if she’d really wanted them. Paul did write her one letter, after the end of their affair, which he posted to the Cardiff house: the builder must have picked it up, it was propped waiting for her on the radiator in the hall when she arrived one weekend to show the estate agent round. She had half-expected there might be a letter, and had held off the expectation. Tearing it open with blind fumbling urgency, her heart striking like blows against the cage of her ribs, she felt her fate was in it. It was a wonderful letter. He said extraordinary things about her, in words that were not too smooth or coaxing or clever; he struggled to tell her truthfully how he felt. He said they all had been ill with flu, that family life had not been glamorous, that in his fever he had dreamed horrible dreams of her, in which her skin was hard and cold, or they met in a polluted ruined factory, or she mocked him in a foreign language he didn’t recognise (was he dreaming now in Welsh, he asked?). He told her what he was reading, and that his writing was stuck and dead. Cora couldn’t forgive him for that letter. Sobbing, she tore it into tiny pieces and then lit them with a match in the sink, washing the soggy cinders down the plughole. She never answered it. She had nowhere to send an answer.

The estate agent thought she would sell the Cardiff house easily, for a good price, but Cora decided that she wasn’t ready to part with it, not yet. She didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, not even a doctor. Until one day when at about fifteen weeks (by her estimate) bleeding began while she was at work, and wouldn’t stop; her colleagues called an ambulance, and kept the students out of the car park when the paramedics carried Cora out wrapped in a red blanket. She took in for the first time why it needed to be red.

– It’s an encouraging sign, Robert said in the hospital when it was all over and she’d come round from her routine dilation and curettage. He sat heavily in his work suit on the plastic chair beside her bed, tie loosened, hands clasped between his knees, weighed down and made inept, inarticulate, by the degree of his upset and pity for her. – It shows something could happen.

C ora was weeding the books in the library. This meant she was going through the shelves, taking out any books more than seven years old, or any that had not been borrowed for a year or longer. When she had selected the books for withdrawal she had to scan them and make a note beside their entry on the computer; sometimes there was a flag beside the name of the book, warning that it was the last copy in any of the Cardiff libraries. Weeding was a job that waited for whenever there was nothing else more urgent to do. At first Cora had felt it was an outrage, she had argued indignantly with Annette and Brian that they mustn’t get rid of Penelope Fitzgerald, or Colm Toibin. But she had got used to the idea. Everything had its moment in the sun, then must give way. Anyone really interested in the back catalogue of these writers could buy what they wanted online. Books withdrawn from the system were offered for sale at 10p on a shelf beside the checkout, and Cora bought some of them herself. She had been ruthless when she brought her books from London, getting rid of more than half of them, but now her shelves were filling up again.