by Tessa Hadley
After school, as well as a rush of mothers with younger children, a group of teenage girls in blue uniform shirts and trousers and headscarves came in from the local comprehensive, ostensibly to do their homework together, putting their mobiles out on the table in front of them and texting frequently, conferring and confiding in strained whispers that never grew raucous, although Brian occasionally hushed them. Brian was meticulous and waspish, he did the cryptic crosswords and read French and German novels in the original; he was Senior Library Assistant and added up the cash at the end of the day. Brian and Annette, the full-timers, had been in libraries for years, and displaced a lot of their frustrations into the arcane politics of the library service; they were haunted by the threatened introduction of RFID machines, which would check out books automatically. The other library assistants were more like Cora, they had fallen into the job for one reason or another, and might not stay: a boy who was involved in amateur dramatics, a woman who’d given up her teaching job while her children were small, a shy girl with a shaved head and piercings, who took out all her nose- and lip-rings whenever she came to work, though no one had ever asked her to. Cora had realised at some point – she always realised it too late – that she had roused the resentment of the other assistants because she was too friendly with Annette, or because of things in her manner that she couldn’t help; they thought she was bossy, or high-handed. Annette said not to worry what anyone thought, she never worried.
– People have to put up with me, she said. – They have to like me or lump me.
Cora took her lunch into the cemetery next door, strolling between the scuffed trunks of the pines that lined the avenues, stopping to read the inscriptions on the gravestones: Protestants, Catholics, Welsh, Poles, Irish, Italians. Sometimes she had to make way for the white van of the cemetery workers, but she had the place pretty much to herself; there were hardly any new burials here and not many people visited the old ones. ‘Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Mary Hanrahan.’ A sub-lieutenant ‘ mort pour la France ’. An amusement caterer, whatever that was, with a monument as ornate as a fairground organ, including Jesus and a lost sheep; dock pilots; a tobacconist. She calculated how old they were when they died; how many children were lost; how long the wife outlasted her husband. Herbert William Alexander lived only thirteen days. Twin brothers both drowned, one aged seven, one aged twenty. William Tillet died in 1896 aged seventy-six, ‘for over forty years with Messrs George Elliot and Co. of the Wire Rope Works, West Bute Dock, Cardiff’. Magpies and floppy crows, whose feathers fitted like old mackintoshes, picked around in the turf. Notices explained that for conservation purposes an area of the cemetery was left to grow like an old-fashioned hay meadow, and was only cut once in autumn, encouraging a variety of wildflower species and of wildlife. Green woodpeckers fed on the warty mounds of ants’ nests. The grey squirrels, whose skittishness was startling in the heavy quiet, were so fearless she got close enough to see their quick panting: one pounded intently with both front paws, digging to bury a pine cone, chucking up dead leaves and earth behind him in a frenzy.
On a bench, with her face lifted to the sunshine, Cora felt like a convalescent put outside to build up her strength from day to day; only she didn’t like to ask herself what she was building it for. There was a circularity in her recovery: if she was happy she was bound to look to the future – but she could only be happy in the present. Saving herself from having to think, she took her book into the cemetery to read while she ate her sandwiches. She wasn’t reading anything strenuous these days: women’s novels, commercial novels, some of which, she and Annette agreed, were remarkably well written, better than much so-called literary fiction, more true to life. She hardly ever thought now about what she had learned when she did her English degree. Her imagination was crammed with women’s stories, most of which began with a collapse like hers, some loss of faith or love, losses more catastrophic than anything she had endured. She devoured them, one after another, turning the pages with hasty hands, impatient for the resolution. As soon as she’d finished one, she would start in upon the next.
When she wasn’t reading novels, she was working slowly through a book setting out the fundamentals of geology, which Brian had recommended when she told him about her father’s maps. She planned to enrol in a geology evening class in the autumn. At first she had only hung the maps on her walls because they comforted her obscurely; they were so familiar she hardly looked at them. In the old days she and Mum had used to tease Dad for preferring diagrams of rocks to paintings and literature. Recently, Cora had begun to take an interest in what the different colours meant, even though it was the sort of exact scientific subject that was alien to her, and she found it difficult. She had taken the meaning of the maps for granted when her dad was alive, but it became strange, after his death, to think of the layers hidden beneath her feet, beneath the city pavement and the park – mudstone and sandstone, overlaid with glacial sediment. Dad had been tolerant and patient, charming, good with his hands. He had been in Militant Tendency – Trotskyites inside the Labour Party – when he was young, but left because he didn’t like the way they talked about ordinary people. He had approved of Robert, even in the time when her mother was set against the marriage, before she came round. Between Cora and her father, relations had always been painfully tender, each trying to shield the other from whatever they discovered that was ugly or disheartening. When he died she had felt a kind of shame, as if his decent and cheerful life had been maliciously blotted out.
Cora changed her mind, and decided that Robert was right in his desire to put their relationship – or the end of it – on a more formal footing. Perhaps here too she was influenced by Annette, as with the brown bread: a divorce was a clean, businesslike thing, better than this current mess between them, impossible to explain when people asked. Anyway, mightn’t Robert be better off if they were properly divorced? She ought to cut him free of her, so that he could find someone else. Perhaps he would get back in touch with his old girlfriend, whom Cora had displaced. She rang him at work to arrange a meeting – somehow she didn’t like to speak to him on the telephone that would ring in the Regent’s Park flat where they had had their lives together. Before she rang she thought carefully about what to say and in what tone of voice, so as not to raise his hopes in the wrong way; and then after all that she only got through to his PA.
– Elizabeth? It’s Cora.
In the old days, Elizabeth had thought she was scatty; Cora would have been ringing because she had locked herself out, or because she’d forgotten to buy something for supper and was asking Robert to get it on his way home. Robert had met all her requests or difficulties with the same calm seriousness with which he would have attended to a message from the Home Secretary’s office, but Elizabeth had felt their affront to the importance of a senior civil servant, although she had had to be polite. Now, she must enjoy being flatly, casually indifferent. The world had got on without Cora.
– I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.
– Would you ask him to call me?
There was a moment’s hesitation, which was almost personal. Elizabeth wouldn’t use her name. – On which number should he call?
Robert wouldn’t have given her any detail of the collapse in his home life, except what was functionally necessary.
– Tell him I’m in Cardiff. Well, he knows that.
– I’ll let him know. He’s very busy this afternoon.
Putting down the receiver, Cora was flooded for an unexpected instant – before she quashed the weakness – with nostalgia for the old-fashioned wife-identity she had forfeited. She had hardly cared for it while she had it, had scarcely used the word ‘wife’ about herself, or thought of Robert as her husband. In the first years of her marriage, the conventional category had seemed somewhere below what she aspired to be to him; more lately, it had seemed above her range. She made up her mind not to wait around for Robert’s call. It was her day off from the libra
ry, she had plans to go into town to buy fish at the market. Determinedly, she was feeding herself properly, cooking from her recipe books with fresh ingredients, although sometimes, sitting to eat alone at the place set with her heavy silver knives and forks (a wedding present to her grandmother, on her mother’s side), on the soft old wood of the dining table in the conservatory, with the doors open to the evening light in the garden, she could hardly finish what was on her plate and had to scrape into the bin what she had so scrupulously prepared. She daren’t stand on the scales to see what weight she’d lost.
Robert called her back almost right away; they arranged to meet for lunch in London the following week. She suggested the National Portrait Gallery restaurant, because although they had both liked it, they had not gone there much together. He discussed her days off at the library as respectfully as if they existed in the same category as the time he contrived to squeeze between his appointments in the diary Elizabeth kept for him; he was so cavalier with his importance that Cora was anxious he must not get the wrong idea about why she wanted to see him.
– You were right, she said abruptly. – We ought to sort things out more sensibly.
– Sort them out?
– For your sake. It isn’t fair.
There was a short pause, while he puzzled over what lay behind her words. – When you say, ‘sort things out’…?
– I mean, financial and practical things.
– It’s all right, I thought you must mean those.
When he’d rung off, she stood with the receiver pressed to her chest, pulling at the coiling wire of the phone, doubting whether she had done the right thing. Was there any truth in the possibility that she was manipulating him, or playing with his feelings? Could anybody think that of her plan for lunch – or that she was meddling with him, planning trips to London, because she was bored? Horrified, she almost rang Robert back to cancel, but realised that would only seem worse, she would only be digging herself in deeper and deeper. She burned with how far she didn’t trust herself.
By the time the day came for her London journey, these qualms had lapsed; on the train she thought only about how best to arrange things with Robert. She didn’t know anything about divorce law, except that these days it wasn’t necessary to prove that anyone had committed adultery, or been violent or mentally cruel. It would have been sensible to research it on the Internet before their meeting, but she hadn’t had a connection set up yet at home, and couldn’t have looked up anything so private at the library. Anyway, she recoiled from typing the word casually into a search engine, as if it was only a topic like any other. She found herself picturing Robert calmly as an old friend. Divorce seemed an exaggerated and crude instrument for prising them apart when they were already so remote.
She had allowed herself an hour or so to look around the gallery before lunch. After the assault of heat and crowds in the Tube and on the street, her consciousness sank into the cool interior like dropping gratefully underwater, then bloomed towards the otherness of the portraits. Concentrating on the twentieth century, she shivered in her sleeveless dress, pulled on her cardigan, drank stories in unguardedly; when it was time to meet Robert, she was borne up in the lift by an elegiac vision of lives piled high, one after another, full of colour and incident, involuntarily expressive of their era. She arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early, and ordered a prosecco while she waited. The particular present – cacophonous acoustic, well-dressed people (no doubt she’d forgotten already how not to look provincial), celebrated view of the mauve-grey roofscape – lost its power for a moment, dislodged by the weight of the long past.
Robert saw Cora before she saw him: exceptionally attuned to her, he even saw her mood of grave generalised regret, and didn’t want to spoil it. He had no idea about clothes, but did see that she looked less like London than she had when she lived with him: it must be the blue cardigan with its small buttons, which suited her, but made him think of a school teacher (he didn’t have any up-to-date idea of what librarians looked like). Reflectively she was eating the cherry from the top of her drink. Attractive women usually made him feel tall and too bulky; although Cora was slim, she had always seemed to be made to his scale. She had a narrow waist, but her hips were shapely, as wasn’t fashionable now. Making his way towards her between the tables, he ignored at least two parties of people he recognised; when Cora caught sight of him she half-stood up, knocking over her glass, which fortunately was almost empty. By standing she meant to convey, Robert understood, that she was his host and had convened their meeting: he must not try on any air of entertaining her. He tried to think how he could defer to this respectfully, without letting her pay.
– I shouldn’t have had that prosecco, she said, blushing. – It’s gone straight to my head.
– D’you want another one?
He hoped that didn’t sound as if he wanted to make her drunk.
– No, thank you. Thank you for coming. I suppose you’re very busy.
Hanging his jacket over the back of his chair, loosening his tie, he admitted that the reorganisation was a bit of a nightmare.
– What reorganisation?
Robert looked sharply at her: could she really have missed it? Inside the Westminster village, it was easy to forget with what little interest the public outside followed the earthquakes that consumed them. He explained that part of the Home Office was being separated off as a Justice Ministry.
– Oh, yes, of course, Cora said vaguely.
The procedural aftershock, he said, had disturbed even the farthest reaches: he was helping to make sense of the creation of the new Borders and Immigration Agency.
– Is that a good thing?
He was never exasperated with her, but he wouldn’t set out his serious interest in the issue for her benefit, either, if she wasn’t really interested. – Well, I’ve been spending rather more time than is pleasurable in Croydon.
– Croydon?
– Where the Agency is based. I’m still at Marsham Street, but I’ve wanted to see what they’re doing on the ground. I suppose Croydon’s the ground, or part of it. Though sometimes there one seems to be in some kind of middle air – it doesn’t remind one much of earth. What shall we eat?
Neither of them, looking at their menus, could read them at first. The effort of their conversation, that appeared so easily offhand, actually dazzled them, blanking out everything else. In the moment of catching sight of Robert and knocking over her glass, Cora had thought that he was impossible, ‘just impossible’; but she didn’t try yet to disentangle what the thought meant. He wasn’t handsome, she had never thought that, though she had liked his looks, and other women liked them. His nose was good, straight; his eyes were in deep hollows under brows that, without her supervision, were growing bushy. His shoulders and hands and feet were generous and his movements rather shambling. He hadn’t looked much younger in his late thirties, when she first met him. Some men altered exaggeratedly in form from the child they had been, more than women ever had to; and yet sometimes in Robert’s guarded look you saw what he was as a boy – shut up in those horrible schools his parents had paid a fortune for – more plainly than in a more boyish man. Over the years this glimpse of his childlikeness had come to pain her more than the more obvious thing people thought: that she had chosen a father figure.
When they’d managed to pick something from the menu and order it, Cora told him she’d been looking round the gallery. – As I came into the restaurant I had the weirdest sensation, as though our present had turned into the past already, and we were all over with too. Doesn’t it seem strange to you sometimes, how we only live in this one moment of the present? Like a light moving along a thread which stretches out behind us and ahead. I mean, why is it this moment, and no other?
Her metaphysics always went somewhere under Robert’s radar, which was tuned to practical effects. – We’re not over with, though, he said.
Did he mean their relationship? She was alarmed: he ha
d never protested at her going to live apart from him, accepting her decree fatalistically. But she realised he only meant that they weren’t dead. They were stuck with themselves, with their ongoing lives. To distract him, she brought out her suggestion about his old girlfriend.
– Robert, you ought to get in touch with Bar.
He didn’t know straight away who she was talking about.
– With Bar? What an extraordinary idea. Why would she want to see me? Why would I want to see her, for that matter? Bar’s probably married with five kids, on a farm somewhere.
She saw he didn’t even notice what he said about the five kids.
– I don’t really want to discuss this now, but perhaps everything would have been better if you’d stuck with her in the first place. There are people smiling over at you. Do you know everyone?
– I hardly know anyone, he said, not turning round to see. – How extraordinary of you to bring up Bar, all of a sudden.
– What do you think about this weather? Cora said brightly, as their food arrived. – Is it global warming?
Outside the window, which ran the whole length of the restaurant, the delicately nuanced monochrome of the top of the capital – lost in its secret quiet above the seething busyness below – was bathed in a transforming sunlight. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; glass and metal surfaces on the rooftops flashed like signals.
