The London Train Part 15

So you're a painter, then.

Puzzling, Barbara peered at her more closely, finishing her toast. If you're not sure, what are you doing here?

I'm Robert's wife. I'm looking for him.

How disappointing. I thought you were going to buy a picture. My agent had mentioned she was sending someone, I a.s.sumed you were them. Robert who? You're not a wronged wife, are you? She gave a shout of laughter. I haven't had one of those come calling for a long time. I warn you, Gummo bites, if anything turns nasty. We've had a whole succession of dogs, named after the Marx Brothers. The name's got nothing to do with her missing any teeth.

I'm not wronged, Cora said.

She explained which Robert she meant.

G.o.d almighty: that Robert! But I haven't seen him in years. So you're Cora! But didn't you b.u.g.g.e.r off? Someone told me you had.

We're separated, Cora said. The word seemed carping and finicky, as she used it. But because he's gone missing, I've got involved in trying to find him. I don't know why I thought he might be here.

Nor do I. What do you mean, 'missing'?

Cora explained. A copy of the Telegraph was still in its polythene packet on the breakfast table. Barbara tore it open while Cora was talking, laid it flat while she spread another piece of cold toast, turned through the pages noisily.

Oh look, here it is, she said. Poor old Bingo.

Bingo?

Robert, Bobby, Bobby Bingo. There's even a picture of him. Calls for his resignation. 'Lax regime,' it says. What nonsense. It's a miracle these places don't go up in flames more often, if they're so full of terrorists. Nothing about him having done a runner.

There was also the usual picture of the dead man. Robert in his photograph was on his way into the inquiry, so it must have been taken within the last few weeks. Cora searched the picture for any signs of distress; but he was remote from her, competent, locked up inside his public role, only glancing accidentally and obliquely towards the camera. Smiling, he was pa.s.sing some remark to a colleague it made him look blithely insensible to the seriousness of the case.

He's kept more hair than some of my old boyfriends, Barbara said. I used to think he'd get awfully stuffy, if he stayed on in the Service too long. Has he got stuffy? Is that why you're separated?

No, said Cora stiffly, nothing like that. Robert's got a very independent mind. I can't imagine why he's disappeared. It's not like him: even if this inquiry's blown things out of all proportion. He takes everything in his stride. What would he be afraid of? He would face things out.

Anyway, he isn't here.

I made a stupid mistake.

Bar suggested that Cora might as well see her pictures, now she'd come. Perhaps she hoped she could still make a sale. She was completely stony broke, she said they were in danger of having the house repossessed. Her husband was a landscape artist, away at present working on a commission on Fair Isle, building a causeway. Photographs of a row of stakes in shallow water, a path of white stones winding round a hill, must be his work. Bar's studio was in a long attic conversion, cleaner and brighter than the rest of the house. Cora was ready to dislike the pictures, but they weren't what she had expected, less forthright, more fantastic: skirts and petticoats of real cloth were dipped in pinkish-yellow plaster and then embedded in a dark paint surface where they dried to caked stiffness. Touches of over-painting added what might have been embroidery, or rusty bloodstains. How surprising that this brusque, barking woman was making art about femininity, which Cora thought of as her prerogative. Bar seemed to forget Cora had only come to the house to look for Robert, and talked about processes as if she must be fascinated.

Cora said she hadn't known Bar was an artist, Robert had never mentioned it.

For years I mucked around, not doing anything seriously. Then, would you believe, the same month I was signed by Hyman's, I discovered I was up the duff. h.e.l.l! Talk about a late developer.

Cora was suffering, she was crushed. This was the world Robert really belonged to; where they all had nicknames for one another Bingo and Bobs and Bar. Everything they did came to have importance somehow, even if they started out in life caring only for horses and hunt b.a.l.l.s. Bar was vague about prices, but found a list from an old exhibition, where they were way out of Cora's reach. If Bar asked her what she did, she thought she wouldn't mention the library, she would say that she taught literature.

With a yelp Barbara remembered Noggin.

Do I smell of brandy? They think I'm the mother from h.e.l.l. Also, that I'm old enough to be his grandmother. They've probably already got their eye on a suitable foster family.

She offered to take Cora to the station, if she didn't mind going via the school, which was in the next village. Cora was grateful, wanting only to escape. Gummo curled up behind the front pa.s.senger seat, diffusing a bad smell like old cooked vegetables into the close quarters of the car. Bar drove fast, braking violently in the single-lane roads when she met anything coming the other way, cursing and reversing expertly. Cora had to open her window. Then after all they were early, and had to sit waiting outside the school in a queue of parked cars, because Bar couldn't face the playground.

It's a ghastly microcosm, isn't it?

Cora said she wouldn't know, she didn't have children.

Well out of it. Other parents look to see if you're using the wrong washing powder, or giving your children laudanum to make them sleep. If only I could get my hands on some. Nog's out of control because his dad's not here. He rampages. I'm lucky if he's in bed before midnight. And I can't get started on my work till he's out of the way.

The school was Victorian, with twin doorways for Boys and Girls, behind a venerable church; those were the days, Bar said. Then she sat slumped behind the steering wheel with her eyes closed, suggesting the performance of her personality was exhausting. Opening them, she talked about Robert as if they'd never left the subject.

His cutting out like this isn't so untypical, actually. From what I remember. He's rather an Olympian, you know. Well, I expect you know. High-handed. Like when after he left school he was so absolutely set on going into the army which I thought lunacy then something or other happened in the early stages of training to make him change his mind, and he just walked away.

Stonily Cora stared forward through the windscreen, jealous of Bar's claim to prior knowledge of Robert. She hadn't known any story about him wanting to be in the army.

Literally walked away. Set out on the road, and came home. Well, I expect he caught a bus or something. But straight home. Except they didn't really have a home, of course, after their parents smashed. So to my parents' house in Devon actually, of which he used to be very fond. He was in all kinds of trouble for absconding; people had to run around after him, pulling strings so that he got away with it. I don't remember the details. When he's finished with something, he just drops it, tramples it on his way to the next thing. I should know. Bingo was my dearest, bestest friend when we were kids. It's a shame. We should never have got in the sack together. f.u.c.ks everything up, always. Avoid the sack. Too late of course for you. But good advice. And not much of a lover anyway. You won't mind me saying that, as you're separated.

Noggin when he appeared, borne on a tide of children, was small and pale, with swags of shadow under his eyes to match his mother's. Shoving a couple of drawings indifferently at her ('Nog, these are utterly splendid'), he slung his bag across the back seat and announced like a gloomy little prince that he would get car-sick if he wasn't in the front. Cora didn't offer to change places. It was difficult to imagine him rampaging.

Gummo stinks the place out, he complained.

Barbara dropped Cora off at the station.

Did you think of looking for him at our old place near Ilfracombe? she suggested at the last minute, leaning out of the car window. As I said, he used to be fond of it. They stayed there, even before their parents died. My brother and I still keep it up can't afford it, but you know, it's our childhood. Bing had lots of happy holidays there.

Where is that?

Bar explained to her how to find it, and then Cora remembered having spent a few days in the house once, when she and Robert were first together. I hadn't realised it belonged to you.

It's just like him not to tell you.

But Cora decided not to go to Ilfracombe. If Robert was there, it must mean he didn't want her to find him.

On the train, when Cora opened the Guardian supplement, she found a piece by Paul: a double spread about his childhood reading. Trapped in her window seat a woman beside her tapped her keyboard inexorably Cora gasped for a moment for air, crumpling the pages down in her lap, drinking in help from the landscape that was still and cooling beyond the window gla.s.s; a green hill, a little stand of birch trees. His picture come upon so unexpectedly was a blow. She'd never had any photograph of him apart from the out-of-date one on the back flap of his books. She looked again. He was in quarter-profile, staring sombrely in black and white, outlined against bookshelves. Painfully, Cora had to begin to supply him with a study in his house somewhere in the Monnow Valley. She couldn't read the blurry t.i.tles on the spines of the books. Paul's hair was untidy and she thought that his air of spiritual, troubled absorption was contrived for the camera. He had become already not quite the man she'd known, changed by whatever had happened to him since they parted: the set of the full, pale lips was more definite, the grain of the complexion thicker, the jaw fleshed more heavily. He had never belonged to her.

There was a childhood picture too, which was almost more wounding the socks pulled tightly up, the skinny chest thrust forward as if at attention, the too-beaming offer of himself to his mother or whoever pointed the camera. Cora didn't know if she could bear to read the article and then she read it. Paul remembered borrowing books about nature from the Birmingham central library when he was a boy. His idea of nature at that time, he wrote, had been as a Platonic intimation of a more real reality outside the built-up cave of his city present: the lists of bird names and diagrams of animal spoor were symbols of a transcendent elsewhere. That library building had replaced the Victorian reference library, demolished in the Sixties, and had itself been replaced since. He said that since his mother had died, the last link to his past in the old city had been broken.

So his mother had died.

And his oldest daughter must have had a baby; he was a grandfather, which seemed extraordinary. This daughter must be living with them now, or near them, because he implied that he saw his granddaughter every day.

It was as if Cora read these things about a stranger.

Once, Cora had believed that living built a c.u.mulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you against emptiness. She had used to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it pa.s.sed, as if they were holy. Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.

Robert felt the afternoon outside without looking at it: mildly grey, unimportant. A flossy indefinite light made everything seem to keep still, out of indifference; summer was over, foliage wasn't miraculous any longer, only a plain fact. Footsteps approaching in the street, and pa.s.sing, didn't rouse him. He was in Cora's house in Cardiff, sitting with his back to the window, at the wooden table in the front room she used as a desk (but didn't use much), writing a letter on her laptop, painstakingly picking out the letters with his right hand because his left (he was left-handed) was bandaged, and in a sling. The air of the house was vaguely stale around him he had been there now for two days, waiting for her, and he hadn't opened any windows, or got round to washing any of the dishes he'd used, which were piled in the kitchen sink, though he fully intended to attack them sometime soon (his excuse to himself was that the bandage made ch.o.r.es bothersome). He hadn't gone out once since he arrived, in case he missed Cora, but there had been food in her freezer, home-cooked and meticulously labelled in her big clear hand. Defrosting and heating soup and shepherd's pie in her microwave, he had felt himself in a kind of comical, tenuous connection with her, though only through his theft; eating her food alone, the illusion of their connection failed him. He did not know what she would think of his invading here, making himself at home among her things. He had run out of milk this morning and was drinking his tea and coffee black.

Deliberately, Robert hadn't once turned the television on. He didn't want to know whether they were making any fuss about him or not, as was more likely (he didn't flatter himself on the subject of his importance). He had not opened up the computer either, before he sat down to write this letter; nor had he spoken on the telephone until twenty minutes ago, when Frankie called him on his mobile. He hardly knew what he had done with all the hours that had pa.s.sed since he got here. At first, of course, he had expected Cora back at any moment. When he'd arrived yesterday he hadn't had any idea of entering the house without her permission; however, when he turned into the little concreted area in front of the house, he'd seen at once that her keys were hanging from the lock in the closed door. Robert rang the bell and knocked, but no one came; Cora must have opened the door in a hurry and then gone out again later, not noticing that she hadn't retrieved her keys. From her key ring there dangled as well as an ornamental knot of beads and ribbon, tarnished from being tumbled around in the bottom of her bag other keys beside the Yale stuck into the lock, including a mortise Robert guessed was for their London flat. It was lucky he had come along before anyone else saw them. He had hesitated before letting himself in. But it would have been too ostentatiously tactful to hover outside, waiting to present the keys when Cora appeared, so that she could open her own door. He hoped she wouldn't imagine that in rescuing them he meant to be reproachful, or gloating.

At first he had wandered round her rooms, picking up sections of newspapers that were out of date, and then not finishing reading anything in them. He had made a conscious effort, to begin with, not to take anything in: he was not supposed to be inside here, so he mustn't take advantage of it by studying the shape of how Cora lived, or interpreting any traces she had left, as if he was spying. In any case, there were no traces; it was remarkable, he thought, how little mark the tumult of inward experience leaves on the external sh.e.l.ls we inhabit. He couldn't tell whether the clean, tidy place, with all its bright, hopeful decoration, meant that Cora was happy in her new life without him, or unhappy. He only allowed himself to notice, because it was relevant to his mission here, that there were no signs of any man living in the house with her, or even visiting it. Anyway, being so acutely attuned to her sensibility and because she was so conspicuous, incapable of concealment, whatever efforts she made he had felt sure from their few meetings and conversations recently that there was not another man now; just as he had felt sure when there was. As the hours pa.s.sed and she did not return, he was less certain. After all, anything could be happening to her, in this very moment. Nothing could be worse, he supposed, than for Cora to come back from the embraces of some new lover and find him waiting.

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

It was even oddly a relief, inhabiting Cora's s.p.a.ce, 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, rea.s.suring 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-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sers-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 quant.i.ty 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 st.i.tched him up and X-rayed his wrist and given him a teta.n.u.s 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 rea.s.sure 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.

Before he began writing, as a token of his re-establishing connection with a world outside, Robert had turned on his phone without checking it. When he was halfway through his letter, Frankie called. He cleared his throat, and talk was easy after all.

Bobs! I can't believe it's actually you. Where on earth are you? Everybody's going mad here!

Don't worry about me, I'm absolutely fine. Didn't you get my text?

Didn't you get ours? Cora sent you one just after we got yours.

I haven't checked my in-box. Where is Cora?

Well, that's the strange thing. She came up here, because you were missing and I was sort of holding the fort at your flat. Damon took your laptop, by the way.

Who is Damon? I don't care about the laptop.

A ghastly SPAD. Is it all about the inquiry?

I'm just rethinking my work-life balance.

I can't believe you've actually said that. That's the kind of thing I'm supposed to say, and you laugh.

So Cora's at the flat?

No, that's just it. She slept there last night, in case you came back, but she was supposed to go home to Cardiff today, that's what she said she was going to do. But I've just had the most extraordinary call from Bar, of all people.

Bar?

Exactly. And how did she get my number? I can only think she got in touch with Elizabeth, and she gave it to Bar. Anyway, I'm sure she was drunk, in the middle of the afternoon. Not Elizabeth. Did you know she had a son and exhibits at a gallery in Savile Row?

I knew about the paintings. They're rather good.

Frankie explained that apparently Cora had turned up at Bar's house, somewhere in deepest Devon; she had got the address out of Robert's book, and seemed to think Bar might have him stashed away somewhere.

Probably I shouldn't be telling you this, Frankie said. But it's all kind of extraordinary.

Are you sure Bar didn't just get the wrong end of the stick?

She was definitely p.i.s.sed.

Cora, outside on the street, was searching in her bag for her keys. It was an awful moment: the street turned its stony face to her, implacable in the hard, dull afternoon light. She was supposed to leave spare keys with her neighbours, but they were often out. Anyway, she had a feeling she hadn't returned those keys since last she'd borrowed them back they might still be in the pocket of her other coat. She was dog-tired and felt like crying. But what was the point? St.u.r.dily she brought herself around to her new perspective, facing forward. She had better go down to the locksmith.

Then the door swung back, as if under the force of her will, which had pressed at its resistance without hope and Robert was there, utterly unexpectedly. He looked awful, unshaven and in his socks.

You left your keys in the door.

Irrationally she was angry, or her anguish sounded like it.

Where have you been? she protested. I've been looking for you everywhere.

In the shower an hour later, Cora thought she would confess to him. She would confess everything that her heart had been fastened by heavy chains for a long miserable time to another man, and now it wasn't. She would confess all this before they consummated their reunion in bed. She would show him Paul's article she had almost left it on the train, and then at the last moment she had put it in her bag and brought it with her and she would get out all Paul's books and show them to Robert and then she would throw them all away. Cora was remembering her old, candid, self: unafraid, flinging open all the doors to the rooms of her life. She had put out fresh towels on the heated rail and the pelting hot water streaming off her was a glory. She had forgotten this exulting happiness was possible. In the garden beyond the open bathroom window a blackbird sang out in the intensifying late-afternoon light; the day was lovelier for hiding behind its grey veil. Robert had gone to buy shaving gear and clean underwear and clothes G.o.d only knew what he'd come back with. She had laughed to think he'd have to go to the local Peac.o.c.ks because there was no time to get into town before the shops shut.

What's Peac.o.c.ks?

Don't you know anything? she'd teased him. Don't you know how ordinary people live? Then you'll have to learn. Peac.o.c.ks is very, very cheap.

They had no idea what they were going to do next.

They weren't going back not to London, not to Robert's job. For the moment they needn't decide. They had no ties and they could do anything, go anywhere. They had money; they could sell her house, or the flat, or both. They could go to India or America or Scotland. All that was certain was dinner that evening; they were both ravenous. She booked a table at the Italian where she used to go with her parents, warning him it was nothing very wonderful. After her shower she dressed quickly and dried her hair in front of the mirror in her bedroom, sprayed her wrists and behind her ears with Tresor. Then there was a change in the light, tipping between afternoon and evening air that had been ba.n.a.l and transparent refined to blue, and a bar of dark lying along the floor crossed like a touch over her skin: sobering, admonitory. Cora stood breathing carefully under the spell of the moment.

She wasn't afraid of Robert, only of herself in case she spoiled anything.

What words were there for what had happened while they were apart?

She wouldn't say anything, unless Robert asked. She would watch and see what he wanted. The night ahead was a br.i.m.m.i.n.g dish she had to carry without spilling it.

Acknowledgements.

Thanks to Richard Kerridge, whose judgement mattered, and to Alice Bradley and Liz Porter, whose help with certain details was invaluable. The library building is based on a real library in Cardiff, but the staff are entirely imaginary. Thanks to Bath Spa University for teaching relief, and to Academi for a writer's bursary; these gave me precious time and freedom to work on the novel. Thanks of course, for everything, to Dan Franklin and Caroline Dawnay.

Also by Tessa Hadley.

ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME.

EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT.

SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES.