The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  It had cleared up anyway later in the morning, the sun had blazed on the grass in the park pearled with little drops as she walked on her father’s arm, white dress dragging in the dirt of the Cardiff city pavement, from the front door of their house to the little church on the corner. They normally only came to this church when it was used for concerts; Cora had performed on the clarinet in here, on occasions organised by her music teacher. Her mother had been agonised, wanting to pick up the dress out of the wet dirt, afraid to countermand her headstrong daughter. Cora had loved the weight of the skirts kicking against her limbs; she had loved the passers-by, dog-walkers in the park, stopping to watch; she had laughed at her mother.

  She thought of these scenes now with derision. They made her sick.

  Now she couldn’t even live with Robert. She was living in her parents’ house again, sleeping in her old room, although she had changed everything.

  Robert waited for her to come home from her work at the library. He didn’t have a key to this house, so he waited in the park. The weather was hot for spring; taking off his pullover, he knotted it round his waist, feeling he must be even more conspicuous than usual (he was six foot four, fifteen years older than Cora, big and loosely put together, clumsy), among the few dog-walkers and mothers with pushchairs and small children. He hadn’t brought a bag, only a slim briefcase, supposing he would be going back again by train to London later. He hadn’t spoken to Cora for weeks. She wouldn’t answer his calls, and he only knew about the job at the library because his sister had told him.

  Cora wasn’t expecting him. The kind of work Robert did – he was fairly senior in the Home Office – made him think calmly about the interview he needed to have with her, certain things it was time to ask her straight, arrangements they ought to put on an established footing. He was used to grasping bleak necessity firmly. He was only agitated, anticipating the first moments that she saw him, in case she hated it that he was lying in wait for her. What would he see in her face, before she put up the guard he had got used to: disgust? An instinct for flight? Cora was tall – not as tall as he was, but as a couple they had occupied an exaggerated space – with long legs and a narrow high waist, shapely hips. He remembered that she didn’t run badly, as a girl apparently she had even got to a certain level in county championships as a sprinter – but her trainers had said her technique was too eccentric to go farther, with her big feet flying out at an angle, hands raised at the wrists. She hadn’t minded, she had been bored already with the hours of training; she had preferred poetry.

  In the end Robert need not have worried: he was expecting her from the wrong direction. Cora must have had minutes to observe him and adjust her expression behind her sunglasses before she decided to come up behind him and touch him on the arm.

  – Hello. What are you doing here?

  That flat brightness was in place, deflecting him as if it was a light in his eyes. In his confusion he hardly recognised her; she was wearing clothes he didn’t seem to remember, a skirt and a short-sleeved white linen blouse. She looked good, but surprisingly much older than he ever imagined her. He saw how completely she filled out this latest performance, as if she had lived like this for ever – single, resourceful, bravely dedicated to her modest job, perhaps with sources of secret suffering. Her hand looked naked without its wedding and engagement rings. She still wore her hair long: thick, clean light-brown hair, chopped off crisply below her shoulders. His arm ached in hyper-awareness where she had touched him.

  – Sorry. I hate springing myself on you like this, without warning. But as you didn’t want to talk on the phone, it seemed the only…

  – All right. Never mind. D’you want to come in? It’s lucky I noticed you standing over here. How long would you have waited if I hadn’t seen you? I’m hot, I need to get a cold drink.

  On the doorstep, fishing in her straw basket for the key, for a moment she couldn’t find it. She had lost innumerable keys over their years together; she’d be humiliated if she’d lost this one now. He was as relieved as she was when she dug it out from among the rest of the female apparatus in there: purse, apple, sunscreen, mobile, make-up bag, book, tissues.

  The house inside was blessedly cool, shadowy because before she left at midday (her job at the library was only part-time) Cora had pulled down the blinds at the windows. Without asking, she made Robert a gin and tonic – what he always drank. She poured herself tonic, put ice and lemon in it, then, after hesitating, splashed gin in it too. They stood in the kitchen.

  – So…

  – I haven’t come to pester you, he said. – It’s just a few practical arrangements, about the flat and so on. Of course, half of it’s yours.

  – I don’t want half the flat.

  – All that’s settled with the lawyers. But I ought to have your name taken off the mortgage, in case anything happened to me and you were liable. And we ought to take your name off the bank account too, I suppose. If you think that’s best.

  He suffered, seeing her name beside his on the cheque book and bank statements.

  – I’ve brought instructions you need to sign.

  On the kitchen table, he began unzipping the briefcase.

  – I don’t want anything.

  She turned and went pacing with her long stride around the ground floor of the house, carrying her drink. He followed her. Self-conscious about her height, she always wore flat shoes; today they were brown brogues, decorated on the toe with a flower cut out of the same-coloured leather.

  – I can’t talk about this now, Robert.

  – You’ve done things up very nicely here.

  – Oh God!

  It was an undistinguished late-Victorian terrace at the thin end of a long park, smaller inside than it looked from the front; her parents had bought it shortly after they were married, in the late Sixties. Robert had trouble making out his in-laws’ old house now, underneath what Cora had done to it since she inherited: knocking the two reception rooms into one, extending the kitchen into a new conservatory, sanding the floors, painting everything white, getting rid of most of the old furniture. She had had the building work done while she was still living with him in London; they had talked at first as if she would sell the house when it was finished. He spotted some of her father’s framed geological maps still on the walls, kept presumably for their aesthetic appeal. This question troubled him: whether it was still the same place as it had been when Alan and Rhian lived here, or whether a house was a succession of places, blooming one after another inside the same frame of stones and brick and timber.

  Cora was experiencing Robert’s presence in here as a shock to her whole system, her breathing felt smothered and irregular, her voice seemed to her shriller and more childish, sounding inside her head. When he wasn’t present, her idea of him dwindled to something small and convenient as a toy; she forgot how he crowded her perceptions. Her rooms – which were her new life – seemed smaller with Robert in them; and he wasn’t properly interested in the nuances of her taste, the lovely mugs she’d chosen for instance, one by one, with such delight in each, for the kitchen. Habitually Robert ducked when he came through doors, even if he didn’t need to, and he smelled, not a bad smell – sweat and wool and soap and something else, oaky with a high note of lemon – but intrusively masculine and overpowering. He had on an awful shirt: she knew he would have bought it in a cellophane packet, on his way home from work, from one of those shops for tourists. His hair – like very dark old tobacco, threaded with grey – hung in lank locks over his collar; he needed a haircut. She couldn’t look properly into his complicated ravaged face, strong beard-growth speckled over shaven jowly folds, because its familiarity filled her with shame. It was unbearable to imagine now her earliest intimacies and confessions with Robert.

  Without asking, he put on the news on the television in her bare white sitting room, stood watching it while swallowing his gin, swishing the ice cubes round in his glass, grunting ironically at something politica
l, which of course he would know all about from the inside. Was she supposed to stand around waiting in her own house, while he caught up on the latest scandal? She snapped up the blinds at the front windows, and bold squares of light sprung onto the bare boards. Nothing could shake his hierarchy of importance, where work was a fixed outer form, inside which personal things must find their place. Once, she had gloried in cutting herself to the right shape to fit it.

  – I’m surprised you managed to make the time to come down, she said.

  Innocently, he said he thought they could manage without him for an afternoon.

  Just an afternoon.

  – I don’t want anything, she said, to attract his attention. – If you leave me anything and then you die, I’ll just give it to Frankie.

  – That will be your choice, of course, he said reasonably. – Anyway, I’m not planning on dying any time soon. But I wish you’d let me give you some money now, until you’re settled. You’d have a right to it, in any court of law. You put your share into the flat. He turned the television off. – Nice set.

  – You want to control me by paying for me.

  Funnily enough, he clearly remembered her saying the same thing to her mother when they were arguing years ago over the wedding. It had been nonsense then; afterwards she and Rhian had cried and made up, as they always did. Was there any truth in it now? Very likely he did wish he could control her, but he had surely given up, out of realism, any belief in the possibility. Bruised as he was, he believed he truly didn’t want her, in her brave new venture of living here, to fall flat on her face or want for anything. And he had no use for the money himself. But in case she was right he didn’t press her, he only asked her to sign the papers relating to their joint bank account.

  – They’ve started the inquiry into the detention-centre fire, he said. – I’m giving evidence next week.

  This was momentous, but neither gave away their reactions to it.

  – Frankie told me. Oh, that reminds me: she’s coming to stay this weekend, bringing the children.

  Frankie was Robert’s sister, Cora’s close friend, Cora’s age. It was through Frankie that they had met in the first place. Cora and Frankie had done English together at Leeds; Frankie’s much older brother had taken time out of his already busy life to come to her graduation.

  – I know. She told me. She’s looking forward to it. Will you mind the invasion?

  Cora flinched as if he’d caught her out: these rooms weren’t well designed for children, with white walls, rugs on the polished floors to skid on, treasures displayed on low shelves.

  – I’m not lonely, you know, she said angrily, writing with the usual flourish her boldly legible signature.

  In the library Cora sometimes felt as if she had fallen to the bottom of a deep well. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She hadn’t known that there could be a job like this, pressing so weightlessly on the inner self, allowing so much space for daydreaming. At first she had thought it might be her duty to encourage the borrowers, talking to them about the books they were choosing, but she quickly learned that they looked at her with shocked faces if she tried, as if their reading was a private place she’d intruded into. The whole point of her role was to be neutral, she realised, not engaged or committed. The hand-to-hand exchange at the issue desk – taking the books, opening them, date-stamping them, handing them back – was a soothing ritual of community. Even when she was helping the asylum seekers who came in to research information on the Internet in support of their appeals, she never discussed the content of what they were looking for; they only strove together through the process of finding it. This exemption from the effort of relationship seemed to her to be a relief to them both. In London, for eighteen months, she had visited a failed asylum seeker awaiting deportation (the problem was not at this end, but with the Zimbabwean authorities, where the crumbling bureaucracy made obtaining the necessary paperwork impossible). The memory still produced guilt and confusion: she had not liked him, she had let him down.

  If she was on a morning shift, her first task of the day was to do the health-and-safety checks, making sure the place had been cleaned, the shelves were securely bolted in place, and no one could trip over the carpets; she was also supposed to go outside into the little garden between the library building and the street, checking for needles left by drug users. (She had never yet found any; perhaps they had them at the libraries closer in to the city centre.) The library was at a junction on a busy road carrying traffic in and out of the city from the valleys. It was a Carnegie endowment from the early twentieth century, built like an odd-shaped church with two naves at right angles and high windows of greenish glass, mournfully aloof from the squat, bustling shopping street of fast-food joints, quirky cafés, cheap mini-markets, hairdressers. Inscribed in stone above the entrance were the words ‘Free To The Public’, which moved Cora and made her nostalgic for the idealism of another era, although many more things were in fact free now. The staffroom looked over the Victorian city cemetery, a conservation area for wildlife. Sometimes she ate her lunch in there.

  Cora told her fellow library workers she was divorced, which wasn’t true, yet. Annette, the librarian in charge – long, dramatically ugly face, red hair, resilient jutting bosom – was divorced with grown-up children. At first Cora had been wary of her slicing ironies and touchy proneness to take offence. It was always Annette, scathing and jollying in an outbreak of noise, who tackled the occasional unruly drunk wandering in. Cora found herself imitating some of Annette’s patterns, although Annette must be twenty years older. She began making her own brown bread for sandwiches, and joined the choir that Annette sang with, which met one evening a week and would try anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to a Beatles medley. One weekend they had sung for charity in a shopping centre in town.

  Inside the library the noise from the roads was muffled, like the light through the wavering greenish glass of the windows. If it was raining outside, or if the sky grew dark, then the intimate atmosphere intensified around the clacking of the computer keyboards, the bleeping of the scanner. Strip-lights were suspended from the ceiling by chains. After stamping and putting out the newspapers in English and Urdu and Arabic, Cora would print off the ‘holds’ list of books requested by other libraries all over the county, then begin to work through it, locating these books on the shelves, scanning them and fastening labels to them with elastic bands, ready for collection; she would be interrupted every so often by borrowers wanting something at the issue desk. The librarians conferred together in murmured voices.

  In her teaching job at a further-education college in London, Cora had been active and forceful; she had worn herself out preparing classes and marking, standing up for her students, fighting threats from bureaucracy. Yet she’d always felt that this work, which in anyone’s eyes could have amounted to a real career, was provisional, while she waited to do something real with her life. In her job in the library, which paid less than half as much and hardly began to use her capacities, she could imagine herself growing old. But she tried not to let her imagination run away with her. She knew how you could deceive yourself, falling into one of those pockets of stasis, where you could not see change building up behind its dam.

  The weather stayed fine for Frankie’s visit. Making up extra beds in the spare room on Saturday morning, Cora heard their car draw up outside and the familial tide spilling out, Frankie’s chivvying and encouragement, whimpers from the baby. Cora dawdled downstairs through the house’s last held breath of emptiness and quiet, waiting on the bottom stair until one of them actually rang the bell – ‘Let me do it’ – pushing open the letter box in a scuffle of excitement, peering through – ‘Is she in?’ – then poking in small hands and turning them to and fro in the hall’s dimness, as if it was water. When she did open the door, they were suddenly shy on the doorstep, both of them stripped down to their shorts in the heat, skinny torsos pale: Johnny the eldest, her godson, red-headed, shuffling behind his
dark-haired sister, shoving her forward as if she was an exhibit.

  – Cora, look! he said.

  Lulu held up her arm to show off pink plastic bracelets, making them fall one way, then the other.

  – Hello, you two.

  Hugging and exclaiming over them, it was as if she pushed herself with an effort out of her adult solitude; this had not happened when she saw the children all the time in London and must be another aspect of her new life. Frankie struggled in last, laden with bags, the baby on her hip. She had given up trying to keep her shape, after this last birth, and wore whatever loose clothes she pulled first out of the high-piled ironing basket – sometimes her husband Drum’s shirts – over tracksuit bottoms. Cora was self-consciously aware of the summer dress she’d chosen, after trying on other things in front of the mirror.

  – Shit, it’s hot! Frankie said. – The motorway was a nightmare. I’ve been dreaming of your nice bathroom. Hold him, will you, while I use it?

  Magnus had been woken up out of his sleep. Red-cheeked, strands of auburn hair darkened with sweat and pasted to his head, smelling of regurgitated milk, he squirmed in Cora’s arms, opening his mouth to bawl. She walked into the kitchen and then on into the garden to distract him, kissing the top of his head and talking encouraging nonsense. The linen dress had been the wrong choice; it would soon be crumpled and look like a rag. The other two were getting drinks from the tap, standing on a chair, spraying water everywhere because they had turned it on too hard. The baby was transfixed by the sight of next door’s cat on the wall; then he screwed his head round to stare with serious scrutiny at Cora’s face, taking her in. She seemed to see for a moment that he looked like Robert: surrounded by her husband’s family, she was ambushed.

  In their time at university together, it had been Cora and not Frankie who was sure she wanted children. Frankie was clever, she had got a First, she had been set on a career as an academic; this was a surprise to people when they first met her, because her looks were sporty and unsubtle: round, pink, handsome face, messy chestnut curls, calves that in those days didn’t have any spare fat on them, but were as substantial as young tree trunks. She had dyed her hair black, painted kohl round her eyes, taken drugs, but all her efforts couldn’t eradicate the glow of sanity and good health. When Cora fell in love with Robert, she thought she might lose her friendship with Frankie: it had been one of the elements of her old life that she had been calmly ready to trample underfoot in order to have him. But the friendship had only grown gnarled and tangled, woven around all the complications and surprise developments in their lives since. There were so many sensitive spots to beware of that they hardly bothered to try.