by Tessa Hadley
Cora couldn’t help thinking of Paul whenever she caught the train to London: although she was skilled now at shutting up the memories of him, as soon as they came, into their casket, turning the key. She imagined a casket like a part of some dangerous, obsolete game, like the gold and silver and lead caskets in A Merchant of Venice , with their folklorish trite messages about love. She had seen him once since they separated: not on the train, but driving down a road in Cardiff not far from her home. He hadn’t seen her, he wouldn’t have been looking for her; she knew that his friend lived nearby. That ordinary glimpse of Paul – sealed inside the completed fullness of his life on its parallel track apart from hers – had made her nauseous, helpless, desperate. She fantasised about meeting him on the train and simply walking past without acknowledging him; in the first year after they parted, it had seemed very possible that she would meet him in her travelling up and down from London. Now, taking in the hundreds of strangers who made that journey, day after day, she had understood that their meeting was improbable – which was a relief and also a flattening loss.
No one watched her paying off the taxi outside her old home, although she felt conspicuous returning: the street had its usual air of privileged absence, withdrawn and clean behind its railings, flights of worn stone steps, broad Regency front doors. Out of habit she checked for the beloved glimpse of park trees at the road’s end: she had seen those trees thrash, but today they stood motionless under the muffling cloud. Their flat – Robert’s flat – was on the first, best floor, with a balcony they had never used, because its publicity was too theatrical for the deep discretion of the street. Cora had sometimes imagined the Prince and Charlotte sitting out on it in The Golden Bowl , watching Maggie bringing her baby from the park, although she knew their house didn’t even begin to be grand enough for those characters. She hadn’t been back for months. It was odd to ring the bell: there was a door key somewhere in Cardiff, but she hadn’t stopped to look for it. Frankie was at first suspicious over the intercom.
– Thank goodness it’s you. That SPAD’s threatening to come round, he wants to look at Robert’s computer. I’ve said he can’t, it’s private.
The two women embraced, with more feeling than when they’d last parted in Cardiff: separating, both were faintly tearful, relieved; each had feared that the other might hold out against her.
– Frankie, don’t think it’s my fault, will you?
– Don’t be an idiot. Bobs is a grown-up. He’d never forgive me if I blamed you. It’s just awful not knowing whether there’s anything to worry about or not.
Frankie was satisfied that Cora was stricken, which was all she needed to see. Walking round, Cora took in how the flat had altered since she had lived in it. Robert hadn’t actually changed any of the furniture, but everything was in a subtly altered and less attractive arrangement, probably not moved deliberately, but only having drifted. He must never have shared her vision of how it all worked together – or he hadn’t cared about it after she’d gone. She hadn’t cared much either, in the months before she left. Cora had found the place before they were married, in the first strange flush of having money (not only Robert’s salary, but money he’d inherited – not enough to buy the flat outright, but enough to make mortgage repayments possible); inside its old shell, it had been smart and bright and modern. Twelve years on, it looked used up and dated. Chairs, pulled away from around the table, or from the sociable huddles Cora had used to arrange them into, were piled up with newspapers and papers from work, which the cleaner hadn’t touched. Cushions were ranked in straight lines along the sofa back, and everything ornamental on the white marble mantelpiece was pushed to one end for easy dusting: photographs, yellow feathers from the Adirondacks and striped stones from a beach in Angus, a Dresdenware flautist that had been Robert’s mother’s, a Bangladeshi silver teapot Cora had bought in a junk shop. A suit still in its bag from the dry cleaner’s was hung on the open kitchen door. A laptop was open, but switched off, on the glass-topped dining table, where Johnny and Lulu were colouring. The toothbrush and shaving gear weren’t gone from Robert’s bathroom. Magnus was asleep in the bedroom in his pushchair.
– I tried to ring him, but he didn’t answer, Cora said. – I’m glad you’re all here. It would seem very empty. Perhaps it seems this empty when he’s here on his own.
– Don’t let’s get soppy, said Frankie. – I’m making soup.
– Soup?
– We’ll need to eat. Children are just engines really, running on the fuel parents put in at one end. So I bought vegetables and butter and bread on my way here – at that little organic shop round the corner. He’s such a lovely man, and the bread’s good, but did you know everything in there costs at least three times as much as it does in the supermarket?
– This is that part of the world. Everybody has three times as much money.
– Ten times as much.
– Probably a hundred times as much, some of them.
– Some of them bathe in asses’ milk. The shop probably sells it.
Johnny and Lulu were colouring fanatically, and only glanced up for a moment to recognise Cora. Frankie said she’d set them a competition: to stop them running round the rooms, in case there was a clause against it in Robert’s lease. She would have to choose between their pictures eventually, which would be tactically difficult. Lulu, as she chose felt pens, sucked one lock of chestnut hair in absorbed meditation; Johnny, filled with the burden of being better because he was older, stood nervously to work, shifting from foot to foot, grimacing grotesquely at what he’d made.
They touched the keys of the laptop warily.
– Should we turn it on? Cora said. – There might be clues, but we wouldn’t know what to look for.
– Anyway, it’s none of our business. And we don’t have his password.
– We have to trust him.
– He might come in at any moment. He might ring.
Frankie said she’d phoned their sister Oona and was keeping her updated, but they’d decided not to tell their brother in Toronto anything yet. Soup simmered in a pan on the spotless hob. When Cora looked for it, the liquidiser was still in its place in the cupboard where she had left it. The two women sat down in the kitchen at the breakfast bar – the estate agent’s awful name had stuck; Cora had never known what else to call it. All the kitchen surfaces were solid oak. Frankie poured them wine out of a bottle from Robert’s rack; between them her phone loomed portentously silent. She said she had wanted to call in the police yesterday, Wednesday, but Robert’s office said they had already spoken to a Met senior and didn’t think the matter needed escalating further. So she hadn’t known what else to do. She’d rung everybody she could think of.
– They really, really don’t want the press to know. I’ve picked up that much. I suppose it’s embarrassing, losing a senior civil servant.
– You don’t think that he could have gone to Bar? Cora said.
– Bar? God, no. To be honest, the idea of her never crossed my mind. Why ever would you imagine…?
– Probably nothing. Only that we mentioned her the last time we met.
– Bar was fearsome. Not the sort of person you’re involved with twice. Anyway, surely she’s married to somebody else by now?
– That’s what he thought, Cora said. – If he’s just taken off by himself on an impulse, then I’m glad.
– Me too.
– Who couldn’t want him to get out – as a human being – from under all this? It’s as if he didn’t belong to himself.
– Though we have to remember that mostly he likes it. It suits him.
The Special Adviser when he turned up was improbably good-looking, a youth from a Caravaggio painting, long-faced, long-bodied, dead-pale, black hair curling on his collar, thumb-print smudges under fatigued eyes, hollow belly under shirt half-untucked from his jeans, double-jointed fingers. He was carelessly charming, bestowing the favour of himself, wishing he was at a more interesting part
y. Cora felt with a shock that she was growing old, and would be shut out from beauty. He told them, when they insisted, that his name was Damon.
– Shepherd boy, Frankie said.
Damon agreed without interest. Briskly his observation roved the flat behind them. – Any news?
– I’m Robert’s wife, Cora explained.
He took her in. – D’you have any idea where the auld fella’s got to?
For a moment she thought he was really Irish, then realised he was putting on an accent. Damon gave off impatient contempt for the nuisance this middle-aged senior was making of himself. This is how it is when someone falls from power, Cora thought, though it was too soon to know if Robert had fallen anywhere. There’s a shudder when they hit the ground, then everyone steps over them, humiliating what they were, resentful of their own past subservience.
Frankie said they hadn’t heard anything. – We’re starting to panic. What’s going on? Is it to do with the inquiry about the fire?
– What do you know about that?
– Nothing.
– Is he going to make a scene or something? It doesn’t look good for him: he should have stayed to take the flak.
– What flak? What scene?
But he wouldn’t tell them. Magnus cried in his pushchair and Frankie brought him into the kitchen to feed him; uneasily Damon ignored her bringing out her breast, which in the same room as him seemed voluminous. Frankie altogether – the curvaceous untidy bulk of her – seemed made on a different scale to Damon’s. He asked Cora if she could think of anywhere Robert might have gone, and she said she couldn’t; he asked if she’d tried calling him and she said she had, but he wouldn’t pick up. She was aware how she stood around awkwardly in Robert’s rooms, not wanting to pretend she belonged to them; the SPAD probably knew all about the break-up of her marriage. Frankie was much more at home in the flat. Her brood brought into it the noisy solidity it had needed. When Cora lived there with Robert they had both worked late, they had often hurried out again in the evenings – the place had worn thin and dissolved in their absence. Lulu and Johnny ran into the kitchen with their pictures; Damon graciously adjudicated, knowing how nice it made him look, preferring Lulu’s.
– Take it like a man, hey… He ruffled Johnny’s red hair. Frankie privately thanked God Lulu wasn’t sixteen. Lulu draped herself in an attitude anyway against Damon, adoring him.
– Mind if I look around?
– We do rather.
– You can’t have the laptop, Cora said.
– I can, he said regretfully. – I’m afraid it’s one of ours.
Frankie’s phone was beside her on the table where she sat, pulling her blouse across to hide the baby’s working head; every so often Magnus twisted round to stare at the interesting intruder, tugging away from the nipple, which sprayed a fine thread of milk after him. When the phone bleeped, she glanced quickly at it, but said it was only Drum calling to see where they were. Damon packed up the laptop into its case and carried it off with him, after a cursory look around the rooms, which Cora begrudged him, following him everywhere. He eyed the second computer in the study, but couldn’t have carried it, even if she’d let him have it. – It really isn’t a big deal, he said, not reassuring but diminishing the women. – We aren’t really that bothered.
– It was Robert, Frankie said excitedly as soon as he was gone. – The text was from Robert.
– What does he say?
– He says he’s all right, that’s all. But at least we know he hasn’t been kidnapped or knocked down or lost his memory or anything. Text him now on your phone, ask him where he is.
After Cora had texted, they waited for more communication, but none came. They were subdued, as well as relieved, by the assurance that Robert was all right, wherever he was; their crisis had subsided. They ate Frankie’s soup with the expensive bread from the organic shop. Cora found coffee, and boiled the kettle. Apart from the coffee, and the milk and butter Frankie had bought, there wasn’t much else in Robert’s fridge: a tube of tomato purée and a square of Cheddar drying out, ancient jars of mustard and pickle that dated surely from when it was her kitchen. Frankie said she would take the children home in a taxi after supper, there didn’t seem much point in staying on any longer; Cora said she would sleep over in the flat, just in case.
– Just in case what? Come back with us. I don’t like the idea of you all on your own in here. Although you’ll probably get a better night’s sleep.
Once she had imagined it, Cora wanted to have time to herself in the flat: alone, she might be able to find any signs Robert had left behind him. She could sleep in the spare room. Frankie was spooning soup into Magnus in his pushchair; Cora, on her hands and knees under the table, was sweeping breadcrumbs into the dustpan.
– Were you praying that Robert was all right? she asked Frankie, sitting back on her haunches with the brush in her hand. – I mean really praying to God, not just the usual phrase that people use.
Opening her mouth wide and making baby noises to encourage Magnus, Frankie was wary. – Do you hate that idea?
– No, I don’t hate it. I’d hate it if I did it, because it would be fake. But I suppose if you believe in it, praying is what you’re bound to do.
– Not in the sense of asking for favours, like asking for a bike for Christmas. Otherwise the believers would win all the football matches. Believing would just be a kind of cheating.
These comic-book illustrations – bikes and football matches – made Cora think Frankie sounded like a vicar already, evasive and jollying.
– So you’re not allowed to ask God to bring Robert back?
– You can ask God to keep him safe. That’s not the same. You know he might not.
– Then what’s the point? Johnny demanded reasonably.
– Believing doesn’t make everything all right, you know. It just fills out the way things are, it expresses our longings.
Frankie was thinking there was something newly intransigent in Cora’s expression as she knelt there with the dustpan, tickling Magnus’s feet with the brush so that he lifted them delightedly, distracting him from his soup. She was losing her old resplendence – she was restless and too thin. She was wearing more make-up than she ever used to. Cora said that she just didn’t feel what Frankie felt. She had used to feel it sometimes, but now when she reached for it, nothing was there. Although she said this as though she regretted it, Frankie could also hear a kind of triumph: who could want false consolations, once you had seen past them?
Then unexpectedly Cora put her head in Frankie’s lap for an awkward, odd moment. The gesture was enigmatic – afterwards, Frankie blamed herself terribly that she hadn’t responded to it, and she searched in herself for hidden reasons. She had been taken by surprise; but she should have stroked Cora’s hair at least. Of course she had been feeding Magnus, holding the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other. But she could easily have put the bowl down. She had only laughed, disconcerted. It didn’t matter how much you thought about charity, and thought you were prepared for the way the requirement for charity would present itself, you missed the occasion when it actually flowered in your own lap, you even recoiled from it. In the next moment, as though it had only been a joke, Cora picked herself up and got on with the sweeping.
She went downstairs to see them off in their taxi. As soon as it turned a corner and she was left alone in the street, Cora regretted staying, and was reluctant to go back inside. The flat was full with Robert’s absence. She took off her shoes so as not to make any sound, walking from room to room as if she might surprise something; for a long time she didn’t switch on the lights. From the window of the bedroom they used to sleep in, looking along the gardens to the park, she watched a last brooding storm-light, mauve and silver, drain from behind a magisterial horse chestnut. The night outside completed, she turned back to the interior darkness, asking herself what she was doing here. She had no business trying to find where Robert was, now that they
knew he wasn’t hurt, or dead. He and she were no longer connected. It was wholly understandable that he had called Frankie, but hadn’t wanted to respond to the text that Cora sent. Reluctantly she went round putting on the lamps, hands remembering where to find each switch as easily as if she still lived here. The place flared into visibility. She tidied the mantelpiece, put back the chairs. In the last months of her living here, disenchanted, these remnants of an elegant older London hadn’t seemed gentle or nostalgic to her, more like the command centre of an ageing imperium, sclerotic and corrupt. Yet Robert wasn’t corrupt.
She turned on the computer in his study and googled his name, but got only the routine link to the department. Letters, opened and unopened, lay around everywhere, but there was nothing personal or even interesting that she could see, only bills and bank statements and junk mail. There were no messages on the answerphone except a couple from Elizabeth, and one from Frankie. Slipping her hands inside Robert’s jacket pockets in the wardrobe, she didn’t even know what she was looking for; finding nothing, she opened drawers and went through them. He must have been taking his clothes to a laundry, the shirts were beautifully ironed. She couldn’t tell whether anything was missing. At the bottom of one drawer, underneath his socks, was the little black-bordered packet of his dead father’s rings, and a supermarket bag with her letters inside – the ones she had written from Leeds so many years ago, out of such childish certainty. Even the sight of her own handwriting on the envelopes repelled her, and she shoved them back in their bag and out of sight. She would have liked to throw them away or shred them, but they didn’t seem hers to dispose of, she hardly felt connected to the girl who wrote them.
