Tessa Hadley: The London Train

– Take it like a man, hey… He ruffled Johnny’s red hair. Frankie privately thanked God Lulu wasn’t sixteen. Lulu draped herself in an attitude anyway against Damon, adoring him.

– Mind if I look around?

– We do rather.

– You can’t have the laptop, Cora said.

– I can, he said regretfully. – I’m afraid it’s one of ours.

Frankie’s phone was beside her on the table where she sat, pulling her blouse across to hide the baby’s working head; every so often Magnus twisted round to stare at the interesting intruder, tugging away from the nipple, which sprayed a fine thread of milk after him. When the phone bleeped, she glanced quickly at it, but said it was only Drum calling to see where they were. Damon packed up the laptop into its case and carried it off with him, after a cursory look around the rooms, which Cora begrudged him, following him everywhere. He eyed the second computer in the study, but couldn’t have carried it, even if she’d let him have it. – It really isn’t a big deal, he said, not reassuring but diminishing the women. – We aren’t really that bothered.

– It was Robert, Frankie said excitedly as soon as he was gone. – The text was from Robert.

– What does he say?

– He says he’s all right, that’s all. But at least we know he hasn’t been kidnapped or knocked down or lost his memory or anything. Text him now on your phone, ask him where he is.

After Cora had texted, they waited for more communication, but none came. They were subdued, as well as relieved, by the assurance that Robert was all right, wherever he was; their crisis had subsided. They ate Frankie’s soup with the expensive bread from the organic shop. Cora found coffee, and boiled the kettle. Apart from the coffee, and the milk and butter Frankie had bought, there wasn’t much else in Robert’s fridge: a tube of tomato purée and a square of Cheddar drying out, ancient jars of mustard and pickle that dated surely from when it was her kitchen. Frankie said she would take the children home in a taxi after supper, there didn’t seem much point in staying on any longer; Cora said she would sleep over in the flat, just in case.

– Just in case what? Come back with us. I don’t like the idea of you all on your own in here. Although you’ll probably get a better night’s sleep.

Once she had imagined it, Cora wanted to have time to herself in the flat: alone, she might be able to find any signs Robert had left behind him. She could sleep in the spare room. Frankie was spooning soup into Magnus in his pushchair; Cora, on her hands and knees under the table, was sweeping breadcrumbs into the dustpan.

– Were you praying that Robert was all right? she asked Frankie, sitting back on her haunches with the brush in her hand. – I mean really praying to God, not just the usual phrase that people use.

Opening her mouth wide and making baby noises to encourage Magnus, Frankie was wary. – Do you hate that idea?

– No, I don’t hate it. I’d hate it if I did it, because it would be fake. But I suppose if you believe in it, praying is what you’re bound to do.

– Not in the sense of asking for favours, like asking for a bike for Christmas. Otherwise the believers would win all the football matches. Believing would just be a kind of cheating.

These comic-book illustrations – bikes and football matches – made Cora think Frankie sounded like a vicar already, evasive and jollying.

– So you’re not allowed to ask God to bring Robert back?

– You can ask God to keep him safe. That’s not the same. You know he might not.

– Then what’s the point? Johnny demanded reasonably.

– Believing doesn’t make everything all right, you know. It just fills out the way things are, it expresses our longings.

Frankie was thinking there was something newly intransigent in Cora’s expression as she knelt there with the dustpan, tickling Magnus’s feet with the brush so that he lifted them delightedly, distracting him from his soup. She was losing her old resplendence – she was restless and too thin. She was wearing more make-up than she ever used to. Cora said that she just didn’t feel what Frankie felt. She had used to feel it sometimes, but now when she reached for it, nothing was there. Although she said this as though she regretted it, Frankie could also hear a kind of triumph: who could want false consolations, once you had seen past them?

Then unexpectedly Cora put her head in Frankie’s lap for an awkward, odd moment. The gesture was enigmatic – afterwards, Frankie blamed herself terribly that she hadn’t responded to it, and she searched in herself for hidden reasons. She had been taken by surprise; but she should have stroked Cora’s hair at least. Of course she had been feeding Magnus, holding the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other. But she could easily have put the bowl down. She had only laughed, disconcerted. It didn’t matter how much you thought about charity, and thought you were prepared for the way the requirement for charity would present itself, you missed the occasion when it actually flowered in your own lap, you even recoiled from it. In the next moment, as though it had only been a joke, Cora picked herself up and got on with the sweeping.

She went downstairs to see them off in their taxi. As soon as it turned a corner and she was left alone in the street, Cora regretted staying, and was reluctant to go back inside. The flat was full with Robert’s absence. She took off her shoes so as not to make any sound, walking from room to room as if she might surprise something; for a long time she didn’t switch on the lights. From the window of the bedroom they used to sleep in, looking along the gardens to the park, she watched a last brooding storm-light, mauve and silver, drain from behind a magisterial horse chestnut. The night outside completed, she turned back to the interior darkness, asking herself what she was doing here. She had no business trying to find where Robert was, now that they knew he wasn’t hurt, or dead. He and she were no longer connected. It was wholly understandable that he had called Frankie, but hadn’t wanted to respond to the text that Cora sent. Reluctantly she went round putting on the lamps, hands remembering where to find each switch as easily as if she still lived here. The place flared into visibility. She tidied the mantelpiece, put back the chairs. In the last months of her living here, disenchanted, these remnants of an elegant older London hadn’t seemed gentle or nostalgic to her, more like the command centre of an ageing imperium, sclerotic and corrupt. Yet Robert wasn’t corrupt.

She turned on the computer in his study and googled his name, but got only the routine link to the department. Letters, opened and unopened, lay around everywhere, but there was nothing personal or even interesting that she could see, only bills and bank statements and junk mail. There were no messages on the answerphone except a couple from Elizabeth, and one from Frankie. Slipping her hands inside Robert’s jacket pockets in the wardrobe, she didn’t even know what she was looking for; finding nothing, she opened drawers and went through them. He must have been taking his clothes to a laundry, the shirts were beautifully ironed. She couldn’t tell whether anything was missing. At the bottom of one drawer, underneath his socks, was the little black-bordered packet of his dead father’s rings, and a supermarket bag with her letters inside – the ones she had written from Leeds so many years ago, out of such childish certainty. Even the sight of her own handwriting on the envelopes repelled her, and she shoved them back in their bag and out of sight. She would have liked to throw them away or shred them, but they didn’t seem hers to dispose of, she hardly felt connected to the girl who wrote them.