Tessa Hadley: The London Train

Nonetheless, stubbornly, against all his best calculations, he waited.

It was even oddly a relief, inhabiting Cora’s space, as if it meant he could stop thinking about her. He had a lot of other things to think about. He had to make plans. On Thursday evening his mood was buoyant, exhilarated, amidst this comical blow-up in his career. Its tone was definitely farce as opposed to tragedy. He even began to be glad that Cora hadn’t turned up yet. Where else in his life would he ever come across such a pocket of free time as this one he had stumbled into accidentally: empty hours upon hours, with no external constraints, nothing required of him? Losing his inhibitions, poking round in Cora’s cupboards, he found her whisky first, then decided to help himself to food. He turned on his phone, only for long enough to glimpse a backlog of messages and missed calls he didn’t check through, and to send one text to his sister, reassuring her he was all right, but not telling her where he was. Then he looked on Cora’s shelves for something to read, and took down Vanity Fair , which he had loved when he was fifteen for the Battle of Waterloo.

Long past the middle of the night, when he felt sure that Cora wasn’t going to come now until morning, he went upstairs to sleep. The spare beds weren’t made up, and he didn’t know where to find sheets, so he slept in hers, only stalled momentarily by the sight of her pretty white-embroidered pillow cases and duvet. Really, he was suddenly too tired to care whether he desecrated anything. He hadn’t bathed for a couple of days; he was still in the crumpled suit he’d dressed in on Monday morning, although he had at least bought clean underwear and shirt on his way to Paddington. He had changed into these – more farce – in the toilets in the first-class lounge. He undressed down to this underwear now, climbed into Cora’s bed – only cold at the first shock – and slept that night more deeply than he had for weeks, or months or years, dropping down so far that if he had dreams at all, he carried nothing back from them when he surfaced, only seemed to have dredged some deeply silted ocean-bottom. Waking on Friday, he had no idea what time it was. He’d slept with the blinds up: the stuffy, unsecret daylight outside the window gave no clue whether it was morning or afternoon. Cars droned every so often in the street, the footsteps of passers-by were dawdling and indefinite after London. He heard their dogs’ scuffing, or the dogs’ nails tip-tapping on the pavement.

By the kitchen clock, it was past one in the afternoon. He hadn’t slept as late as that since he was a teenager, even when he’d been ill (he was hardly ever ill), or jet-lagged after a long-haul flight. Some tight-coiled spring wound up in him for years was winding down dramatically. He ran a bath and washed his hair, a strange indulgence in the afternoon; found a new toothbrush in its packet in a cupboard. His bruises hurt less, and he unbound the bandage to check on his sprained wrist, and the gash on his hand. After his bath he had to dress again in the same clothes, and he couldn’t shave. Still Cora didn’t come. There was no reason to think she would be back today, Robert decided: probably she had gone away for the weekend. But he would wait. His wait had transformed into something beyond its ostensible purpose, weighing him down like the silt from his dreams.

A tabby cat persisted in its efforts to make eye contact through the kitchen window; he let it in, fed it the end of the shepherd’s pie. Then he played music. Cora had taken most of the music when they separated, and some of the CDs he recognised as his, from before he knew her: the Amadeus playing Beethoven late quartets, Solomon playing Mozart. These had been his mother’s favourites, he liked them for her sake, even though he hadn’t been close to her. He had used to dread the scenes she made. Probably he’d been horribly priggish, he thought now. His mother must have thought he was trying to imitate his father’s detachment. She must have seen through the stubborn, principled stands that Robert made when he was a boy and a young man, pretending he was the only sane and reasonable one, conforming to some inflexible standard of decency and decorum, while all the time he was burning with a rage like hers, only turned inwards. In Robert’s dreamy, sluggish state now, the music penetrated him purely, without distraction.

The letter he wrote late Friday afternoon, on Cora’s laptop, wasn’t to her. The things he wanted to say to Cora – ask her – couldn’t be written, they could only be communicated face to face. That was what he was waiting for. In the meantime, he was writing a letter of resignation. He explained to the Permanent Secretary the whole sequence of events that had led to his absence from work on Tuesday, and in the days following: that on his way to work as usual on Tuesday he had been involved in an accident on the wet steps leading down to the Underground station, sustaining significant bruising down his right side and a sprained wrist, also a deep cut on his hand that had produced a quantity of blood that was not really significant, but alarming enough for someone to call an ambulance. The paramedics had insisted on taking him to UCH, where they had stitched him up and X-rayed his wrist and given him a tetanus injection, keeping him in for observation, because he seemed to be exhibiting some symptoms of mild amnesia, not remembering where he lived or worked. Because of this temporary amnesia he had failed to let the office know where he was, and he apologised for any inconvenience this may have caused. In the meantime, as he recovered, the unexpected interruption to his routines had given him an opportunity to reflect on his deep dissatisfaction with his present work-life balance – entirely his own fault – and he had decided to terminate his relationship with the Civil Service from this point.

It all sounded magnificently unconvincing, although apart from the amnesia it was more or less true. It had not been amnesia, it had been something stranger – a dark tide of malaise, a conviction of disaster – that washed over him as he lay on the filthy floor, where he had been thrown quite accidentally by a boy who’d tripped over an elderly woman’s umbrella and then fallen into Robert with all his weight. Everyone had been most concerned, and kind. He had wanted to reassure them, but he had lain silent, as if speech had been knocked out of him, or some ancient rusting machinery in his chest had locked on impact and refused to function. Probably his silence had frightened them more than the blood. He hadn’t spoken at the hospital, either – he had only written on a pad whatever they needed to know, and in the end after two nights of broken thin hallucination that was not quite sleep, he had discharged himself, simply walked out. Probably he had not spoken to anyone since his fall (except perhaps the cat). At Paddington he had bought his ticket from a machine.

There were other aspects of the story that had no place in his letter: for instance, that the Underground station where he fell was King’s Cross and not his usual one, and that he was there because he hadn’t slept at home on Monday night, but had slept alone in a Travelodge in Gray’s Inn Road, after an evening with a nice woman, an old friend from work, which probably both of them had meant to end in something more, but which had not. He had never intended, of course, to take this woman friend with him to the Travelodge – he might not be romantic, but he wasn’t quite that bad. He had meant to go home with her, after they finished dinner, to where she had a nice little place off Upper Street: he had gone home with her a couple of times before, since Cora left. But when he did not – even though the friend made it clear that he was welcome – then he didn’t want to sleep in his own flat, either. He was developing quite a horror of that flat, for a rational man. He’d already moved out of the bedroom he’d shared with Cora into the spare room, because it was less haunted.