Tessa Hadley: The London Train

She always turned her phone off while she was at work, but today she was checking it every so often. She had made friends with a woman called Valerie at choir practice, and Valerie was trying to get them tickets for the Welsh National Opera’s Orfeo . Valerie was active in the local Amnesty group and had tried to get Cora to come along to that too, assuring her they were a nice bunch of people. Cora thought she might join, but not yet. Sluggishly, her old conscientious discomfort had begun to prickle her, like something coming slowly awake after a long oblivion; she had been surviving as cautiously and unimaginatively as an animal in its burrow, husbanding her strength. Now, her mind sometimes ached to stretch and flex itself. Was working in the library enough, as the expression of her belonging in the world? There was always a gap between the urge to do something useful and the actuality of what was possible. She was wary of making some gesture of commitment, then having her faith in it collapse, so that she let people down. This distrust of herself, of her capacity to act, was a new element in her personality. Once, she hadn’t waited to ask herself what she believed.

She saw Frankie had left an urgent message for Cora to call her back. Cora went outside to make the call in the little garden outside the library entrance. It wasn’t raining, but the day was stuffy, dark under a woolly layer of cloud.

– Cora, he’s disappeared, said Frankie as soon as she answered. – Is he with you?

– Who’s disappeared?

There was a fraction of a second’s register of Cora’s insensibility, like a coin falling into a deep well: plink!

– Robert.

– Robert’s disappeared? How do you mean?

– He isn’t with you then?

– Of course not.

Frankie explained that Robert had had Sunday lunch with her and Drum, then apparently had been in work as usual on Monday. On Tuesday his PA – Elizabeth – had called Frankie to ask if she knew where he was. That morning he had been supposed to chair a meeting and hadn’t turned up. He never missed anything, even if he was at death’s door. Well, he never was at death’s door. No one had seen or heard anything from him since; he wasn’t responding to phone calls or emails. His office colleagues were cautiously and tactfully alarmed. Frankie had been round to the flat, she had let herself in (she had a key), but there was no sign of him. All his stuff seemed to be around; it looked as if the cleaner had come in as usual on Tuesday morning and nothing had been touched since. She was calling from there now.

Frankie’s voice had the elated breathlessness of crisis, although she was trying not to give way to that, to keep up her humorous, sane perspective. Anxious about her brother, she must be tempted to blame Cora for something: only Cora had ever disrupted Robert’s equanimity and imperviousness. She would also be squashing this impulse to blame anyone, because she was going to be a vicar and had to hold back from condemnation.

– And that was Tuesday?

It was now Thursday.

There was a horrible man, Frankie said, an Adviser or something, who wanted to borrow her phone in case Robert called her on it, so they could talk to him. And wanted to take his computer.

– A Special Adviser probably. A SPAD.

– I’m not letting him have it. It’s Robert’s business whether he wants to call anyone. But he came over pretty aggressively.

– Frank, would you like me to come up? I could be there in a couple of hours. Three hours. Perhaps I could help. I could wait there at the flat.

– I don’t know why everyone’s in such a flap. He could have just thought, you know: bugger this, decided he needed a break from it all. Well, I presume that’s what’s happened. What else could have happened? He’s not the suicidal type. Or the breakdown type. He was fine on Sunday. At least I think he was fine. He doesn’t make much noise. We’re so noisy collectively, did we drown him out? Will you try ringing him? I know it’s awkward.

– Of course I will. And I’ll come, Cora said. – It’ll be all right.

– It’s bedlam here. I’ve got all the kids with me, it’s half-term. I had to bring them on the Tube, Drum’s got the car, I’ve given mine up because of the carbon footprint. It’s only funny that Bobs hasn’t called us. Wouldn’t you have thought he’d call?

Cora told Annette she had to go, something had happened in London involving her husband.

– I expect we’ll hold the fort without you, Annette said. – What husband? I thought you were divorced.

In an emergency Cora had natural authority, seeing straight away the best course of action without making an unnecessary drama of it, or using it for any display of herself. She ordered a taxi to the station, asked the driver to wait outside the house while she threw a few things in an overnight bag. She tried ringing Robert’s mobile, but he didn’t answer.

The train was delayed, and then they were diverted to Waterloo. There was an incident on the line – someone said a suicide – beyond Reading. Cora hadn’t really been worried about Robert when Frankie phoned; her idea of him as the rational centre around which other people’s chaos whirled wasn’t easily dislodged. While they waited motionless in a siding, however, then had to transfer across the station platform into a new train, which trundled at walking pace in a detour past all the back gardens of Surrey, she began to experience the symptoms of panic: her heart raced, her thoughts circled round and round the same vacancy. Restlessly she stood up out of her seat, walking forwards along the train to a gap between compartments, deluding herself that she was getting somewhere, leaning to look out of the window, calling Frankie with updates. The other passengers, with nothing else to look at, looked at her: tall, commanding, handsome, with straight thick brows, curving cheekbones, clear grey eyes, a concentrated urgency in her face. Men hoped she was a doctor or a lawyer. They tried to draw her in to their resentful outbursts against the train staff; someone joked tastelessly about bodies on the line.

Cora couldn’t help thinking of Paul whenever she caught the train to London: although she was skilled now at shutting up the memories of him, as soon as they came, into their casket, turning the key. She imagined a casket like a part of some dangerous, obsolete game, like the gold and silver and lead caskets in A Merchant of Venice , with their folklorish trite messages about love. She had seen him once since they separated: not on the train, but driving down a road in Cardiff not far from her home. He hadn’t seen her, he wouldn’t have been looking for her; she knew that his friend lived nearby. That ordinary glimpse of Paul – sealed inside the completed fullness of his life on its parallel track apart from hers – had made her nauseous, helpless, desperate. She fantasised about meeting him on the train and simply walking past without acknowledging him; in the first year after they parted, it had seemed very possible that she would meet him in her travelling up and down from London. Now, taking in the hundreds of strangers who made that journey, day after day, she had understood that their meeting was improbable – which was a relief and also a flattening loss.

No one watched her paying off the taxi outside her old home, although she felt conspicuous returning: the street had its usual air of privileged absence, withdrawn and clean behind its railings, flights of worn stone steps, broad Regency front doors. Out of habit she checked for the beloved glimpse of park trees at the road’s end: she had seen those trees thrash, but today they stood motionless under the muffling cloud. Their flat – Robert’s flat – was on the first, best floor, with a balcony they had never used, because its publicity was too theatrical for the deep discretion of the street. Cora had sometimes imagined the Prince and Charlotte sitting out on it in The Golden Bowl , watching Maggie bringing her baby from the park, although she knew their house didn’t even begin to be grand enough for those characters. She hadn’t been back for months. It was odd to ring the bell: there was a door key somewhere in Cardiff, but she hadn’t stopped to look for it. Frankie was at first suspicious over the intercom.