Tessa Hadley: The London Train

It had occurred to her naturally to wonder whether Robert could be reacting because he’d found out somehow about Paul; but the idea shamed her as soon as it presented itself. Robert wouldn’t be overthrown by sex, any more than he cried in restaurants. Anyway, when she thought about it now, she believed that Robert had always known: not all the details, but that there had been something. He might even have worked it out, about the miscarriage. It was part of her character, she thought, grinding upon herself in condemnation, to think of whatever had happened to Robert now as if it must have to do with her. Of course it didn’t. She shouldn’t even be here, inside his privacy, poking around in it.

Her phone rang and she answered eagerly, but it was only Frankie, checking she was OK. – You could still come over.

– No, I’m really fine here, I’m thinking.

– That’s what worries me.

– Constructively. But I haven’t found anything.

Cora said she thought she’d go back to Cardiff in the morning, if nothing had happened, and Frankie agreed that now they knew he was all right, there was no point in Cora hanging round. As she talked to Frankie, standing at the dining table, Cora was flicking through Robert’s bulging ancient leather address book, which was losing its pages and so fragile it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t taken it with him wherever he’d gone. If he’d wanted addresses from it he’d have copied them out – he used to do that. Idly she turned the pages over and found Bar: Barbara. An original Norfolk address had been crossed out, who knew when, replaced with one in Tiverton, Devon. Cora said goodbye to Frankie and put Bar’s address and number into her own phone, hardly knowing why she did it. Then she poured herself some of Robert’s whisky and curled up in his chair to watch the news, smelling his hair on the upholstery.

An item on the report on the removal-centre fire came low down the programme running order; someone from the Refugee Council was asked to comment. Was there any embarrassment for the government in the contents of the report? There ought to be, the woman said, if people read between the lines of the report, if they went inside these places, to see for themselves how men and women had to live, in the midst of plenty in a rich country, deprived of their hope. There ought to be embarrassment for all of us. She spoke about the Iranian who died, and they showed a blurry black and white photograph of someone surely too young: handsome, bearded, the photograph flattening black hair and white flesh into stark contrast, making the eyes black smudges. Cora had remembered that the man was middle-aged; according to Robert, in the last years he had drunk too much and suffered from ill health, he had let himself go. Which could have happened anywhere. Everywhere people grew old, if they didn’t die.

Checking to see if there were sheets on the bed in the spare room, Cora saw the same photograph, reproduced on the back cover of a paperback pressed open on the bedside table. The bed was made up; under the cover roughly pulled across, the sheets were rumpled and the pillow dented. Glancing in this room earlier, in her search around the flat, she hadn’t taken in that it had been used; it was always the space least stamped with their occupation, carved off the end of the sitting room running across the front of the house, furnished merely for use when they had guests, neutral as a nice hotel. Robert must have been sleeping in here, and he had been reading the Iranian’s collection of stories. He could have found the book on AbeBooks, where Cora hadn’t thought of looking for it; for the first time she got hold of the writer’s name properly, seeing it spelled out. No wonder he had looked too young in his picture on television; weren’t these stories published in the Eighties? Picking the book up, she sank down onto the side of the bed, starting in on the page where Robert had left off. Beginning in the middle of the story, it was impossible to pick up what was at stake, except that it wasn’t what Cora had expected: not passionate protests over life under tyranny (which tyranny anyway? she had for a moment to mentally run over dates), but a man who seemed to be quarrelling with his wife, about her mother. The writing was on an intimate scale: deadpan and absurd, comic. It was rather dry, in a sparse terse style, without atmospherics, or much description of people or places. Cora was relieved; she had expected the stories to accuse her of her privilege, living in the indifferent west. After reading a couple of pages she put the book down again for later, when she went to bed.

Could she sleep in Robert’s sheets, or should she change them? She put her head down experimentally, from her sitting position, on the pillow he had used. From her new position she could see through the window out to where the branches of a lime tree agitated, seemingly without sound, against a street lamp diffusing its cold light mistily. Robert might have watched this; like her, he had preferred to sleep with curtains and blinds not drawn, windows open. It would be comforting to sleep inside his shape, in the untidy bed, and he need never know she’d done it. He must have taken refuge in this room, from their old lives crowding the rest of the flat; he had not wanted to sleep in their marriage bed. Cora understood all that. Her phone bleeped, and she started up to answer it: but it was only a text from her friend Valerie, saying she had got them tickets for Orfeo .

Cora hadn’t ever met Bar. When first she had fixated on Robert all those years ago, she had interrogated Frankie about her brother and found out that there was a girlfriend, off and on, but that she was not – in his siblings’ opinion – satisfactory. Frankie said this before she ever knew Cora wanted him. Bar was a bit of a family joke, she had explained: the daughter of friends of their parents, very county. She rode in point-to-point, drank with the men though she couldn’t stand feminists, and sometimes wore a flat cap like a jockey. When they were children, Robert and Bar had apparently always been paired up together, like head boy and head girl, because they were strong and sane and knew how machinery worked.

– I’m afraid of him settling with Bar eventually, Frankie had said, – out of sheer kindness.

Robert at Frankie’s graduation had been patiently bored, and at first Cora had watched him because he was unexpected, with his clumsy bear-shamble and courteous, impenetrable reserve. Frankie and her sister Oona were a noisy, clever show, by contrast. Robert was remote, yet a light flared from inside a dark cave when something amused him. He wouldn’t even have seen that Cora noticed him: his nature wasn’t put on for anyone to watch. When he took the two girls out to dinner after graduation with a few of their friends, and paid for it all, he was the gravitational centre of their shrilling and planning and tearful parting, without saying much himself, except that he had talked at some point to Cora about his own degree in anthropology, and how he couldn’t think of a better preparation for politics.

Cora asked what Bar looked like, and Frankie tried to explain how she wasn’t pretty, but sexy nonetheless. – You can see why people like her.

– The flat cap.

– Horsey. No, not horsey, that’s cheap. Staggy. Stag at bay: bony head, and rolling eyes, backing off if you get too near her, treading sideways. Not that I’ve ever seen a stag at bay, except in paintings. She looks like one of those paintings.

Cora had written to Robert the day after she met him at graduation, asking if she could visit him in Whitehall, pretending she was interested in the Civil Service. He had written back helpfully, offering to take her out for lunch. Later, she had seen photographs of Bar, though not many: Robert wasn’t the photograph type. He hadn’t bothered to get rid of Bar’s photos either, only put them away out of decency in the drawers of his desk once he had broken with her: including an old studio portrait of her in a frame, which she must have given him. Cora wasn’t exactly jealous of these pictures, but she had searched for them and studied them when Robert wasn’t around, to work out what their relationship had been. If she interrogated Robert about it, he wouldn’t give her anything to go on (‘she was an old friend of the family’). Bar in the photographs was blurry, blonde, lean-jawed, urgent: on a yacht, on a horse, on Robert’s arm in an improbably glittering ball gown, slit to the thigh, in which she was somehow more sporting than tarty. If Frankie hadn’t suggested it, Cora would never have thought of a stag, but it was true Bar was nervy and leggy, and with a slight cast in one eye, not unattractive. Only in the portrait – done when she was very young – was she revealed as her mythic self, in ardently dreamy profile, gazing into the black of the studio background. Cora had felt about this picture as poignantly as if Bar had been dead.