Tessa Hadley - The London Train

– Thank goodness it’s you. That SPAD’s threatening to come round, he wants to look at Robert’s computer. I’ve said he can’t, it’s private.

The two women embraced, with more feeling than when they’d last parted in Cardiff: separating, both were faintly tearful, relieved; each had feared that the other might hold out against her.

– Frankie, don’t think it’s my fault, will you?

– Don’t be an idiot. Bobs is a grown-up. He’d never forgive me if I blamed you. It’s just awful not knowing whether there’s anything to worry about or not.

Frankie was satisfied that Cora was stricken, which was all she needed to see. Walking round, Cora took in how the flat had altered since she had lived in it. Robert hadn’t actually changed any of the furniture, but everything was in a subtly altered and less attractive arrangement, probably not moved deliberately, but only having drifted. He must never have shared her vision of how it all worked together – or he hadn’t cared about it after she’d gone. She hadn’t cared much either, in the months before she left. Cora had found the place before they were married, in the first strange flush of having money (not only Robert’s salary, but money he’d inherited – not enough to buy the flat outright, but enough to make mortgage repayments possible); inside its old shell, it had been smart and bright and modern. Twelve years on, it looked used up and dated. Chairs, pulled away from around the table, or from the sociable huddles Cora had used to arrange them into, were piled up with newspapers and papers from work, which the cleaner hadn’t touched. Cushions were ranked in straight lines along the sofa back, and everything ornamental on the white marble mantelpiece was pushed to one end for easy dusting: photographs, yellow feathers from the Adirondacks and striped stones from a beach in Angus, a Dresdenware flautist that had been Robert’s mother’s, a Bangladeshi silver teapot Cora had bought in a junk shop. A suit still in its bag from the dry cleaner’s was hung on the open kitchen door. A laptop was open, but switched off, on the glass-topped dining table, where Johnny and Lulu were colouring. The toothbrush and shaving gear weren’t gone from Robert’s bathroom. Magnus was asleep in the bedroom in his pushchair.

– I tried to ring him, but he didn’t answer, Cora said. – I’m glad you’re all here. It would seem very empty. Perhaps it seems this empty when he’s here on his own.

– Don’t let’s get soppy, said Frankie. – I’m making soup.

– Soup?

– We’ll need to eat. Children are just engines really, running on the fuel parents put in at one end. So I bought vegetables and butter and bread on my way here – at that little organic shop round the corner. He’s such a lovely man, and the bread’s good, but did you know everything in there costs at least three times as much as it does in the supermarket?

– This is that part of the world. Everybody has three times as much money.

– Ten times as much.

– Probably a hundred times as much, some of them.

– Some of them bathe in asses’ milk. The shop probably sells it.

Johnny and Lulu were colouring fanatically, and only glanced up for a moment to recognise Cora. Frankie said she’d set them a competition: to stop them running round the rooms, in case there was a clause against it in Robert’s lease. She would have to choose between their pictures eventually, which would be tactically difficult. Lulu, as she chose felt pens, sucked one lock of chestnut hair in absorbed meditation; Johnny, filled with the burden of being better because he was older, stood nervously to work, shifting from foot to foot, grimacing grotesquely at what he’d made.

They touched the keys of the laptop warily.

– Should we turn it on? Cora said. – There might be clues, but we wouldn’t know what to look for.

– Anyway, it’s none of our business. And we don’t have his password.

– We have to trust him.

– He might come in at any moment. He might ring.

Frankie said she’d phoned their sister Oona and was keeping her updated, but they’d decided not to tell their brother in Toronto anything yet. Soup simmered in a pan on the spotless hob. When Cora looked for it, the liquidiser was still in its place in the cupboard where she had left it. The two women sat down in the kitchen at the breakfast bar – the estate agent’s awful name had stuck; Cora had never known what else to call it. All the kitchen surfaces were solid oak. Frankie poured them wine out of a bottle from Robert’s rack; between them her phone loomed portentously silent. She said she had wanted to call in the police yesterday, Wednesday, but Robert’s office said they had already spoken to a Met senior and didn’t think the matter needed escalating further. So she hadn’t known what else to do. She’d rung everybody she could think of.

– They really, really don’t want the press to know. I’ve picked up that much. I suppose it’s embarrassing, losing a senior civil servant.

– You don’t think that he could have gone to Bar? Cora said.

– Bar? God, no. To be honest, the idea of her never crossed my mind. Why ever would you imagine…?

– Probably nothing. Only that we mentioned her the last time we met.

– Bar was fearsome. Not the sort of person you’re involved with twice. Anyway, surely she’s married to somebody else by now?

– That’s what he thought, Cora said. – If he’s just taken off by himself on an impulse, then I’m glad.

– Me too.

– Who couldn’t want him to get out – as a human being – from under all this? It’s as if he didn’t belong to himself.

– Though we have to remember that mostly he likes it. It suits him.

The Special Adviser when he turned up was improbably good-looking, a youth from a Caravaggio painting, long-faced, long-bodied, dead-pale, black hair curling on his collar, thumb-print smudges under fatigued eyes, hollow belly under shirt half-untucked from his jeans, double-jointed fingers. He was carelessly charming, bestowing the favour of himself, wishing he was at a more interesting party. Cora felt with a shock that she was growing old, and would be shut out from beauty. He told them, when they insisted, that his name was Damon.

– Shepherd boy, Frankie said.

Damon agreed without interest. Briskly his observation roved the flat behind them. – Any news?

– I’m Robert’s wife, Cora explained.

He took her in. – D’you have any idea where the auld fella’s got to?

For a moment she thought he was really Irish, then realised he was putting on an accent. Damon gave off impatient contempt for the nuisance this middle-aged senior was making of himself. This is how it is when someone falls from power, Cora thought, though it was too soon to know if Robert had fallen anywhere. There’s a shudder when they hit the ground, then everyone steps over them, humiliating what they were, resentful of their own past subservience.

Frankie said they hadn’t heard anything. – We’re starting to panic. What’s going on? Is it to do with the inquiry about the fire?

– What do you know about that?

– Nothing.

– Is he going to make a scene or something? It doesn’t look good for him: he should have stayed to take the flak.

– What flak? What scene?

But he wouldn’t tell them. Magnus cried in his pushchair and Frankie brought him into the kitchen to feed him; uneasily Damon ignored her bringing out her breast, which in the same room as him seemed voluminous. Frankie altogether – the curvaceous untidy bulk of her – seemed made on a different scale to Damon’s. He asked Cora if she could think of anywhere Robert might have gone, and she said she couldn’t; he asked if she’d tried calling him and she said she had, but he wouldn’t pick up. She was aware how she stood around awkwardly in Robert’s rooms, not wanting to pretend she belonged to them; the SPAD probably knew all about the break-up of her marriage. Frankie was much more at home in the flat. Her brood brought into it the noisy solidity it had needed. When Cora lived there with Robert they had both worked late, they had often hurried out again in the evenings – the place had worn thin and dissolved in their absence. Lulu and Johnny ran into the kitchen with their pictures; Damon graciously adjudicated, knowing how nice it made him look, preferring Lulu’s.