The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  Eventually whoever it was came out and tried the door again, rattling hard; then he hung about on the landing until Cora was forced to flush the toilet and open up. Luckily the landing light wasn’t on, because she realised that Paul’s shirt hardly covered her bottom. Seeing her, the stranger made something like the same subterranean noise of disgust as before – phlegmy and guttural. Their interaction at that hour and under the circumstances seemed stripped of all requirement for courtesy, or even mutual acknowledgement. Cora didn’t look towards him or mumble any apology, only fled across to her room; in the light from his door open behind him she took in a tall white-haired man, very upright, with a big choleric face, jowly as a mask. He was wearing pyjamas and one of those striped towelling bathrobes that seemed of a piece with the period effects of the whole place, knotted with a cord around his high, hard stomach.

  In the morning she asked Paul if they could go out for breakfast, and he agreed, thinking she was only afraid that the food might be awful. He paid, and they got out of the house without encountering any of their fellow guests. They had a happy day together. He had brought his car; she had never been driven by him before. She didn’t know this part of the country well. After the rain the late-summer sunshine was chastened and tentative, and had the first frisson of autumn in it. They walked on a single-track road so little used that dark moss grew down its middle, and their passing roused washed-pale frail butterflies like dust out of the high hedgerows, which Paul said were ancient field boundaries. He said the soil was red because the rock beneath was red sandstone. The beech hedges were a revelation to Cora. Paul explained how in winter these hedges didn’t drop their leaves like the other trees, although they were deciduous; the dead leaves stayed in place until the next spring when the new ones grew, making the hedges an especially effective windbreak. The beech leaves were by now a heavy metallic green, almost bronze. At regular intervals a tree was left to grow whole above the height of the laid hedge, standing up eloquently in the slanting light, grey limbs thick and smooth in the spacious crown, casting its shadow on the dense wheat in the fields.

  The following week in an explosion of drama it was all over.

  Paul’s wife – Elise – found out what had been going on. One morning when Cora was at work in London, in the middle of enrolments for the year’s new courses, her mobile rang and a woman’s voice asked, ‘Who is this, please?’

  Cora knew immediately what this meant, and turned the phone off without answering. She finished dealing with a student’s query. That was it then. Her whole consciousness quaked, blacked out for one moment imperceptible on the surface – but it was also almost a relief, the onrush of this anticipated smash. Endowed with super-sensory intuition, she seemed to have learned everything about Elise from that momentary snatch of her voice – husky, flattening, contemptuous, capable. She was not fine-grained or clever, but she was powerful. She made fine-grained seem mucky, sickening. Cora believed she could even see from her voice what Elise looked like: stocky, attractive, pugnacious, with sandy fair hair; or had Paul let these details slip? On the way home from work Cora dropped her phone into a waste bin in the street and pretended afterwards that she’d lost it. Everything she did in those last days was worse than cowardly, it was craven and inchoate; she was ashamed to recognise herself. She ought to have had something to say to Elise, if only to concede everything. But instead she fled ahead of trouble.

  She called Paul on her landline, fingers so clumsy that she misdialled twice. The story was that Elise had suspected something, found Cora’s number on Paul’s phone, confronted him. Cora never quite believed that this was really the whole thing: something in the way Paul told it sounded incomplete. There was something else, another story he was keeping from her, involving much, much more confession and concession and preference for Elise and the children on his part; but she would never be able to find out about that, because a door was squeezing shut on her, closing her out from everything in his life. Paul reassured Cora that Elise didn’t know her name, or anything about her. This must mean she didn’t care to know, because Paul had convinced her Cora didn’t really count for much.

  He had always warned her that this was what he would choose if he had to.

  She didn’t tell him about the baby. She held this back, thinking that the right moment might come for spilling out with it. They spent one dreadful final hour together at the Cardiff house, rather decorous. Cora had dreamed that they might make love for the last time, and that she would tell him then that she was pregnant, but knew this was out of the question as soon as Paul came in. He was distracted and embarrassed and after a while, sitting apart at the table in the kitchen, they ran out of things to say. Cora wished she had the strength to send him away; but she was weak, clinging on to her last minutes in his actual presence, however humiliating. All her desire in the world was used up in this one particular body, in his hunched posture at the table, in the frowning way he smoked two cigarettes and ground them out passionately into the saucer she gave him. Even his suffering was exceptional and illuminating, because it belonged to him.

  Elise had said: one hour!

  When it was time for him to go, Cora clung to his coat sleeve and cried into it, pleading with him for some reprieve. He bent over her head, stroking her hair.

  – It’s my fault, he said, – it’s really all my fault. I didn’t know that it would be this bad.

  – You’ll be relieved to be free of me, I’m sure you will.

  – Is that what you think? I won’t be free of you. That’s the whole trouble. Not so easily.

  He was truly unhappy, he pressed her to his heart. She knew he meant it, and it would have to do. If he’d wanted her, he could have asked for her, she would have broken up everything for him. But he didn’t ask.

  How could something that had filled your life up completely, to the brim, be withdrawn and leave no trace? Sometimes in the days that followed Cora felt as if the huge percussion of an explosion had left her deaf, sucking the noise out of the tranquil, ordinary-seeming days. If she died now, she thought, it would be exactly as if the whole thing had never existed. A body sank into a lake or a quicksand and the lake closed over again behind it, the broken ice healed.

  She had not told anyone about him. Perhaps if Frankie hadn’t been Robert’s sister as well as her best friend she might have confided in her; in the circumstances this had been out of the question. There were no ordinary connections between her life and Paul’s, there was no way his name or news of him was going to crop up in conversation among her friends. Only Paul knew what had happened – and Elise, his wife, in whatever travestied version she had it – but he was locked away from her irretrievably now, he might as well not exist in her present. It was true that to begin with she hallucinated meeting with him everywhere. Every step she took, dressing in the morning or teaching her classes, she got through in the delusion that she was performing for him to witness. The hardest thing was the jolting on-off alternation between the delusion of his witnessing presence and the knowledge of his real absence. With some last-ditch instinct for preserving her sanity, she continued her superstitious interdict against searching for his name on the Internet. She bought a notebook to write down what had happened, so that it was real outside her own mind; but when she sat down to begin, she realised she couldn’t possibly find the words.

  Anyway, a notebook would be too dangerous, it could have consequences: if she was killed, for example, and Robert found it. It seemed quite possible to her, during those first weeks, that she might be killed, or die, at any moment. Infantile, she thought she wanted to die, she wanted to be reunited with her parents, even in nothingness. What kept her afloat, unexpectedly, was the lack of any consequences from her crisis in her daily life. This might have been partly cowardice (she was ready to believe anything low or shameful about herself). She might have simply dreaded too much seeing Robert’s face change if he found out about her, feeling his kindness drop to nothing in an instant. In her weak
ness she depended on his kindness, took advantage of it. She didn’t allow herself to think any longer, as she had at the beginning when she was strong, that Robert might have some idea of what she’d done; if he’d ever had any idea, then he must have buried it. Burying was best. The friendly, decent surface of daily intercourse was best. Cora submitted to it, with the remote pale gratitude she could imagine someone feeling who lived with a debilitating illness. Though it was wicked to make comparisons between her suffering and any real illness. Nothing had happened to her that weighed a feather in the world outside. It was nothing but the clamour and simulated agonies of selfishness.

  The baby was the only vivid focus in her present. She clung to the idea of it as the key to another life, growing up out of this collapse; not believing in anything else, she felt this hope inside her body. Although it was the product of what she and Paul had done, it existed now beyond the end of that, and would exact love and responsibility from her on its own new terms, in the time ahead; she could already begin to feel this. If when it was born it looked like Paul, that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except her. There was no one else who could have any reason to recognise him in her child. Her child and Robert’s, everyone would think. When it was born she would throw away the scrap of paper with Paul’s telephone number, and all his books, including the book with the dedication, so that no clue was left to lead anyone back to him. She hoped it would be a boy, because Paul had only had daughters. She saw those little girls in her mind’s eye often, small as if through the wrong end of a telescope, so that she couldn’t make out their faces clearly: one was dark, one blonde.

  Once in a spasm of longing she rang Paul’s number, and got a recorded message saying it was unobtainable: he must have changed his phone, Elise must have made him change it. It seemed extraordinary now that Cora had never asked him for his home address, or his email; she supposed she would have been able to find these out, if she’d really wanted them. Paul did write her one letter, after the end of their affair, which he posted to the Cardiff house: the builder must have picked it up, it was propped waiting for her on the radiator in the hall when she arrived one weekend to show the estate agent round. She had half-expected there might be a letter, and had held off the expectation. Tearing it open with blind fumbling urgency, her heart striking like blows against the cage of her ribs, she felt her fate was in it. It was a wonderful letter. He said extraordinary things about her, in words that were not too smooth or coaxing or clever; he struggled to tell her truthfully how he felt. He said they all had been ill with flu, that family life had not been glamorous, that in his fever he had dreamed horrible dreams of her, in which her skin was hard and cold, or they met in a polluted ruined factory, or she mocked him in a foreign language he didn’t recognise (was he dreaming now in Welsh, he asked?). He told her what he was reading, and that his writing was stuck and dead. Cora couldn’t forgive him for that letter. Sobbing, she tore it into tiny pieces and then lit them with a match in the sink, washing the soggy cinders down the plughole. She never answered it. She had nowhere to send an answer.

  The estate agent thought she would sell the Cardiff house easily, for a good price, but Cora decided that she wasn’t ready to part with it, not yet. She didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, not even a doctor. Until one day when at about fifteen weeks (by her estimate) bleeding began while she was at work, and wouldn’t stop; her colleagues called an ambulance, and kept the students out of the car park when the paramedics carried Cora out wrapped in a red blanket. She took in for the first time why it needed to be red.

  – It’s an encouraging sign, Robert said in the hospital when it was all over and she’d come round from her routine dilation and curettage. He sat heavily in his work suit on the plastic chair beside her bed, tie loosened, hands clasped between his knees, weighed down and made inept, inarticulate, by the degree of his upset and pity for her. – It shows something could happen.

  III

  C ora was weeding the books in the library. This meant she was going through the shelves, taking out any books more than seven years old, or any that had not been borrowed for a year or longer. When she had selected the books for withdrawal she had to scan them and make a note beside their entry on the computer; sometimes there was a flag beside the name of the book, warning that it was the last copy in any of the Cardiff libraries. Weeding was a job that waited for whenever there was nothing else more urgent to do. At first Cora had felt it was an outrage, she had argued indignantly with Annette and Brian that they mustn’t get rid of Penelope Fitzgerald, or Colm Toibin. But she had got used to the idea. Everything had its moment in the sun, then must give way. Anyone really interested in the back catalogue of these writers could buy what they wanted online. Books withdrawn from the system were offered for sale at 10p on a shelf beside the checkout, and Cora bought some of them herself. She had been ruthless when she brought her books from London, getting rid of more than half of them, but now her shelves were filling up again.

  She always turned her phone off while she was at work, but today she was checking it every so often. She had made friends with a woman called Valerie at choir practice, and Valerie was trying to get them tickets for the Welsh National Opera’s Orfeo . Valerie was active in the local Amnesty group and had tried to get Cora to come along to that too, assuring her they were a nice bunch of people. Cora thought she might join, but not yet. Sluggishly, her old conscientious discomfort had begun to prickle her, like something coming slowly awake after a long oblivion; she had been surviving as cautiously and unimaginatively as an animal in its burrow, husbanding her strength. Now, her mind sometimes ached to stretch and flex itself. Was working in the library enough, as the expression of her belonging in the world? There was always a gap between the urge to do something useful and the actuality of what was possible. She was wary of making some gesture of commitment, then having her faith in it collapse, so that she let people down. This distrust of herself, of her capacity to act, was a new element in her personality. Once, she hadn’t waited to ask herself what she believed.

  She saw Frankie had left an urgent message for Cora to call her back. Cora went outside to make the call in the little garden outside the library entrance. It wasn’t raining, but the day was stuffy, dark under a woolly layer of cloud.

  – Cora, he’s disappeared, said Frankie as soon as she answered. – Is he with you?

  – Who’s disappeared?

  There was a fraction of a second’s register of Cora’s insensibility, like a coin falling into a deep well: plink!

  – Robert.

  – Robert’s disappeared? How do you mean?

  – He isn’t with you then?

  – Of course not.

  Frankie explained that Robert had had Sunday lunch with her and Drum, then apparently had been in work as usual on Monday. On Tuesday his PA – Elizabeth – had called Frankie to ask if she knew where he was. That morning he had been supposed to chair a meeting and hadn’t turned up. He never missed anything, even if he was at death’s door. Well, he never was at death’s door. No one had seen or heard anything from him since; he wasn’t responding to phone calls or emails. His office colleagues were cautiously and tactfully alarmed. Frankie had been round to the flat, she had let herself in (she had a key), but there was no sign of him. All his stuff seemed to be around; it looked as if the cleaner had come in as usual on Tuesday morning and nothing had been touched since. She was calling from there now.

  Frankie’s voice had the elated breathlessness of crisis, although she was trying not to give way to that, to keep up her humorous, sane perspective. Anxious about her brother, she must be tempted to blame Cora for something: only Cora had ever disrupted Robert’s equanimity and imperviousness. She would also be squashing this impulse to blame anyone, because she was going to be a vicar and had to hold back from condemnation.

  – And that was Tuesday?

  It was now Thursday.

  There was a horrible man, Frankie said, an Adviser or some
thing, who wanted to borrow her phone in case Robert called her on it, so they could talk to him. And wanted to take his computer.

  – A Special Adviser probably. A SPAD.

  – I’m not letting him have it. It’s Robert’s business whether he wants to call anyone. But he came over pretty aggressively.

  – Frank, would you like me to come up? I could be there in a couple of hours. Three hours. Perhaps I could help. I could wait there at the flat.

  – I don’t know why everyone’s in such a flap. He could have just thought, you know: bugger this, decided he needed a break from it all. Well, I presume that’s what’s happened. What else could have happened? He’s not the suicidal type. Or the breakdown type. He was fine on Sunday. At least I think he was fine. He doesn’t make much noise. We’re so noisy collectively, did we drown him out? Will you try ringing him? I know it’s awkward.

  – Of course I will. And I’ll come, Cora said. – It’ll be all right.

  – It’s bedlam here. I’ve got all the kids with me, it’s half-term. I had to bring them on the Tube, Drum’s got the car, I’ve given mine up because of the carbon footprint. It’s only funny that Bobs hasn’t called us. Wouldn’t you have thought he’d call?

  Cora told Annette she had to go, something had happened in London involving her husband.

  – I expect we’ll hold the fort without you, Annette said. – What husband? I thought you were divorced.

  In an emergency Cora had natural authority, seeing straight away the best course of action without making an unnecessary drama of it, or using it for any display of herself. She ordered a taxi to the station, asked the driver to wait outside the house while she threw a few things in an overnight bag. She tried ringing Robert’s mobile, but he didn’t answer.

  The train was delayed, and then they were diverted to Waterloo. There was an incident on the line – someone said a suicide – beyond Reading. Cora hadn’t really been worried about Robert when Frankie phoned; her idea of him as the rational centre around which other people’s chaos whirled wasn’t easily dislodged. While they waited motionless in a siding, however, then had to transfer across the station platform into a new train, which trundled at walking pace in a detour past all the back gardens of Surrey, she began to experience the symptoms of panic: her heart raced, her thoughts circled round and round the same vacancy. Restlessly she stood up out of her seat, walking forwards along the train to a gap between compartments, deluding herself that she was getting somewhere, leaning to look out of the window, calling Frankie with updates. The other passengers, with nothing else to look at, looked at her: tall, commanding, handsome, with straight thick brows, curving cheekbones, clear grey eyes, a concentrated urgency in her face. Men hoped she was a doctor or a lawyer. They tried to draw her in to their resentful outbursts against the train staff; someone joked tastelessly about bodies on the line.