The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  It had occurred to her naturally to wonder whether Robert could be reacting because he’d found out somehow about Paul; but the idea shamed her as soon as it presented itself. Robert wouldn’t be overthrown by sex, any more than he cried in restaurants. Anyway, when she thought about it now, she believed that Robert had always known: not all the details, but that there had been something. He might even have worked it out, about the miscarriage. It was part of her character, she thought, grinding upon herself in condemnation, to think of whatever had happened to Robert now as if it must have to do with her. Of course it didn’t. She shouldn’t even be here, inside his privacy, poking around in it.

  Her phone rang and she answered eagerly, but it was only Frankie, checking she was OK. – You could still come over.

  – No, I’m really fine here, I’m thinking.

  – That’s what worries me.

  – Constructively. But I haven’t found anything.

  Cora said she thought she’d go back to Cardiff in the morning, if nothing had happened, and Frankie agreed that now they knew he was all right, there was no point in Cora hanging round. As she talked to Frankie, standing at the dining table, Cora was flicking through Robert’s bulging ancient leather address book, which was losing its pages and so fragile it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t taken it with him wherever he’d gone. If he’d wanted addresses from it he’d have copied them out – he used to do that. Idly she turned the pages over and found Bar: Barbara. An original Norfolk address had been crossed out, who knew when, replaced with one in Tiverton, Devon. Cora said goodbye to Frankie and put Bar’s address and number into her own phone, hardly knowing why she did it. Then she poured herself some of Robert’s whisky and curled up in his chair to watch the news, smelling his hair on the upholstery.

  An item on the report on the removal-centre fire came low down the programme running order; someone from the Refugee Council was asked to comment. Was there any embarrassment for the government in the contents of the report? There ought to be, the woman said, if people read between the lines of the report, if they went inside these places, to see for themselves how men and women had to live, in the midst of plenty in a rich country, deprived of their hope. There ought to be embarrassment for all of us. She spoke about the Iranian who died, and they showed a blurry black and white photograph of someone surely too young: handsome, bearded, the photograph flattening black hair and white flesh into stark contrast, making the eyes black smudges. Cora had remembered that the man was middle-aged; according to Robert, in the last years he had drunk too much and suffered from ill health, he had let himself go. Which could have happened anywhere. Everywhere people grew old, if they didn’t die.

  Checking to see if there were sheets on the bed in the spare room, Cora saw the same photograph, reproduced on the back cover of a paperback pressed open on the bedside table. The bed was made up; under the cover roughly pulled across, the sheets were rumpled and the pillow dented. Glancing in this room earlier, in her search around the flat, she hadn’t taken in that it had been used; it was always the space least stamped with their occupation, carved off the end of the sitting room running across the front of the house, furnished merely for use when they had guests, neutral as a nice hotel. Robert must have been sleeping in here, and he had been reading the Iranian’s collection of stories. He could have found the book on AbeBooks, where Cora hadn’t thought of looking for it; for the first time she got hold of the writer’s name properly, seeing it spelled out. No wonder he had looked too young in his picture on television; weren’t these stories published in the Eighties? Picking the book up, she sank down onto the side of the bed, starting in on the page where Robert had left off. Beginning in the middle of the story, it was impossible to pick up what was at stake, except that it wasn’t what Cora had expected: not passionate protests over life under tyranny (which tyranny anyway? she had for a moment to mentally run over dates), but a man who seemed to be quarrelling with his wife, about her mother. The writing was on an intimate scale: deadpan and absurd, comic. It was rather dry, in a sparse terse style, without atmospherics, or much description of people or places. Cora was relieved; she had expected the stories to accuse her of her privilege, living in the indifferent west. After reading a couple of pages she put the book down again for later, when she went to bed.

  Could she sleep in Robert’s sheets, or should she change them? She put her head down experimentally, from her sitting position, on the pillow he had used. From her new position she could see through the window out to where the branches of a lime tree agitated, seemingly without sound, against a street lamp diffusing its cold light mistily. Robert might have watched this; like her, he had preferred to sleep with curtains and blinds not drawn, windows open. It would be comforting to sleep inside his shape, in the untidy bed, and he need never know she’d done it. He must have taken refuge in this room, from their old lives crowding the rest of the flat; he had not wanted to sleep in their marriage bed. Cora understood all that. Her phone bleeped, and she started up to answer it: but it was only a text from her friend Valerie, saying she had got them tickets for Orfeo .

  Cora hadn’t ever met Bar. When first she had fixated on Robert all those years ago, she had interrogated Frankie about her brother and found out that there was a girlfriend, off and on, but that she was not – in his siblings’ opinion – satisfactory. Frankie said this before she ever knew Cora wanted him. Bar was a bit of a family joke, she had explained: the daughter of friends of their parents, very county. She rode in point-to-point, drank with the men though she couldn’t stand feminists, and sometimes wore a flat cap like a jockey. When they were children, Robert and Bar had apparently always been paired up together, like head boy and head girl, because they were strong and sane and knew how machinery worked.

  – I’m afraid of him settling with Bar eventually, Frankie had said, – out of sheer kindness.

  Robert at Frankie’s graduation had been patiently bored, and at first Cora had watched him because he was unexpected, with his clumsy bear-shamble and courteous, impenetrable reserve. Frankie and her sister Oona were a noisy, clever show, by contrast. Robert was remote, yet a light flared from inside a dark cave when something amused him. He wouldn’t even have seen that Cora noticed him: his nature wasn’t put on for anyone to watch. When he took the two girls out to dinner after graduation with a few of their friends, and paid for it all, he was the gravitational centre of their shrilling and planning and tearful parting, without saying much himself, except that he had talked at some point to Cora about his own degree in anthropology, and how he couldn’t think of a better preparation for politics.

  Cora asked what Bar looked like, and Frankie tried to explain how she wasn’t pretty, but sexy nonetheless. – You can see why people like her.

  – The flat cap.

  – Horsey. No, not horsey, that’s cheap. Staggy. Stag at bay: bony head, and rolling eyes, backing off if you get too near her, treading sideways. Not that I’ve ever seen a stag at bay, except in paintings. She looks like one of those paintings.

  Cora had written to Robert the day after she met him at graduation, asking if she could visit him in Whitehall, pretending she was interested in the Civil Service. He had written back helpfully, offering to take her out for lunch. Later, she had seen photographs of Bar, though not many: Robert wasn’t the photograph type. He hadn’t bothered to get rid of Bar’s photos either, only put them away out of decency in the drawers of his desk once he had broken with her: including an old studio portrait of her in a frame, which she must have given him. Cora wasn’t exactly jealous of these pictures, but she had searched for them and studied them when Robert wasn’t around, to work out what their relationship had been. If she interrogated Robert about it, he wouldn’t give her anything to go on (‘she was an old friend of the family’). Bar in the photographs was blurry, blonde, lean-jawed, urgent: on a yacht, on a horse, on Robert’s arm in an improbably glittering ball gown, slit to the thigh, in which she was somehow more sporti
ng than tarty. If Frankie hadn’t suggested it, Cora would never have thought of a stag, but it was true Bar was nervy and leggy, and with a slight cast in one eye, not unattractive. Only in the portrait – done when she was very young – was she revealed as her mythic self, in ardently dreamy profile, gazing into the black of the studio background. Cora had felt about this picture as poignantly as if Bar had been dead.

  She didn’t sleep well in the spare bed, although the mattress was expensive, better than the one in Cardiff. Her dreams were shallow, and she woke up several times to lights crawling across the ceiling as cars passed in the street. It was strange then to realise where she was, and why she was here. In the dark, Robert’s having gone missing seemed less explicable, more ominous; horrible possibilities unravelled in her thoughts until eventually they drifted into dreams again. She was relieved when it was morning and she could get up. After her shower, she poured the milk down the sink and tidied away any signs of her occupation of the flat, dropping rubbish in a bin outside. Then she bought breakfast in a steamy café in Paddington, ringing Annette to tell her she would be back at work on Monday morning.

  She had no idea in her head except getting the next train back to Cardiff. Obediently she waited under the oracle of the departure boards, showed her ticket and found her seat when the time came. Rain blew against the train window, and Cora couldn’t concentrate on the Guardian she had bought. She had the book of Iranian stories with her too: she had put them in her bag at the last minute, thinking she didn’t want Damon to find them if he came back. But she couldn’t read those either, she couldn’t read anything. Travelling away from London on a Friday always had a gravitational inevitability, like machinery winding down into torpor for the weekend: every nerve in her seemed set against this. She imagined the book, with its significance beyond itself, smouldering in the dark, jumbled in among her pyjamas and sponge bag and yesterday’s underwear. Then she stood up abruptly when the train pulled into Bristol Parkway, pulling her bag and umbrella from the overhead rack, hurrying off, asking at Information when there was a train to Tiverton.

  It matched her mood that Parkway was hardly a real place at all, hardly a building: bolted together out of steel at some point on a map, outside the city. Time wore away in the perfunctory waiting room, or stalking up and down the platform. For some reason she had fixated on the idea that Robert might be wherever Bar was; though it wasn’t any business of hers any longer, she told herself, whether he was or not. By the time she arrived in Tiverton it was afternoon and grey, though not actually raining. The station was outside the town. She thought about telephoning Bar to warn her she was coming, then changed her mind. A taxi driver looked at the address and explained that this wasn’t in Tiverton at all, but half an hour’s ride away; Cora said she didn’t care how much it cost, and took out more money from the cash point. En route she involved herself, with genuine sympathy, in the taxi driver’s feud with his son-in-law, the tussle over the grandchildren, their wronged mother, the son-in-law’s jealousy, indefensible after his own transgression. The taxi burrowed into a countryside thickly green, intricately settled, mostly wealthy. Big fields swept up to woods crowning round, wide hills. They had to stop on several occasions to consult a map, then to ask at a pub.

  At the moment of paying and parting, pulled up on the gravel outside the house that was supposed to be Bar’s – a shabby early-Victorian box, dark under trees, distinctive in just how blank it was, with half its shutters closed, a muddy concrete forecourt piled with junk, an old bed frame, bikes, a rusting harrow – they were suddenly too intimate, and couldn’t look one another in the eye. Cora muddled her percentages, tipping what she thought was generously much, realising too late it was too little. In her flurry, she forgot to ask the driver to wait for her, in case there was no one at home. As the noise of the retreating car subsided, her mood sank and she felt herself absurd. The house was obviously empty. She had imagined finding a thriving stables, or a farm. Even if it wasn’t empty, she had no business here. She had penetrated to the heart of nothing. Robert and Bar had been out of touch for years, why had she ever thought he would have her up-to-date address?

  Anyway, now that she had come, she might as well try the door: broad, black paint flaking, at the top of a couple of stone steps set with an iron boot scraper muddy with scrapings, flanked by damp pillars. A bell pull yanked on dead air, so she used the knocker. There was an old Vauxhall estate, she noticed then while she waited, parked beside an overgrown yew hedge, stained, spattered with needles and berries, but not derelict, though it was hardly the gleaming four-by-four she had prepared for. Just as she gave up – and prepared to face the idiotic consequences of her impulse, coming here – footsteps sounded beyond the door, and then it swung open. Behind the woman who peered out, hostile, a rectangle of daylight from the doorway was reflected in a gilt-framed mirror at the back of a dim hallway. A weakly lit energy-saving bulb dangled at the end of its flex, unshaded. An old dog plodded out of the dimness, dutifully roused from sleep.

  – Barbara?

  – Yes.

  – It’s Cora. Robert’s wife. I’m so sorry. I know this is awful, turning up here without warning. Can I talk to you?

  She couldn’t tell how Bar reacted to her announcing herself. Cora would not have recognised Bar if she hadn’t been braced to see her. She looked nothing like her old photographs: she had bulked out, which made her seem shorter, and her long hair, turning grey, had thickened and coarsened. Incongruously girlishly, it was pulled back from her face at the temples and tied on top of her head in a floppy ribbon, like Alice in Wonderland. Only the long nose and disdainful slight squint were traces of the old sporty urgency: around them her face had sagged into ambiguously expressive folds. Swags of flesh under her eyes were thunder-coloured – she looked older than fifty. She was wearing a filthy linen smock over jeans, and held up a piece of toast and marmalade out of the dog’s way. Cora had not calculated for her turning out eccentric: her hope wilted, and she wondered if she had energy for any struggle with Bar. She had imagined deflecting a will resilient and bright and impervious.

  Bar persisted, planted stubbornly in the doorway. – I haven’t even started work yet. You know, I guard my work time very fiercely.

  – I should have called from the station. I’m sorry, this was a stupid idea. It’s all my fault. And now I’ve let my taxi go. I’m a complete idiot. If you give me the number for a local firm, I’ll call another cab.

  She thought that if she could get inside the house she’d know whether Robert was around. Bar sighed theatrically, frowning, taking a bite of toast. – Now you’re here, you might as well see the stuff, I suppose. D’you want coffee? I just made a pot. I like it strong, I warn you.

  What stuff? Cora wondered.

  Following through the house after Bar and the dog – several rooms, then a passage, then a cold kitchen – Cora could only take in that its neglect and chaos were gargantuan, and that it was furnished with wonders to match: a carved sideboard vast as a ship, a glass case of stuffed hummingbirds, a jukebox (‘my husband’s, it works’), baronial fireplace, stone angel, rotten Union Jack hanging in rags from a ceiling. There were bikes in better condition than the ones outside, a big telly, a PlayStation, child-drawings stuck up with Blu-tack. Walls and shelves were crammed with art, night-dark Victorian oils (cows in a river? horses?) alongside expressionism, collages, a ceramic torso in fetish gear. Cora’s own displays of art at home appeared to her at once as what they were, primly bourgeois. Everywhere smelled of dog. On the kitchen table there was an open bottle of brandy alongside a packet of sliced bread and a full cafetière.

  – Not as bad as it looks, Barbara said. – Just a swig in my coffee, to get me started. Want some? I ought to work normal hours, but in the day I just stall miserably, I only get going when everybody else is in bed. Afternoons in the studio I tinker around, tidy up, decide whether to scrape off everything I’ve done the night before. Until my son gets home.

  She was
cranky and rather barking and abrupt, but her performance of her character was unapologetic as if it was often required of her to produce it, even exaggerate it. Cora said yes to the brandy. Barbara’s hands were bleached pink, thick-fingered, with naked nails. The coffee was thick and bitter, Cora spooned sugar into it. – You’ve got a son? That’s nice. How old is he? Do you have any other children?

  – Only Noggin – who’s Noah really. He’s nine. Ten, ten of course. Christ, if you make those sort of mistakes at the school gate, they alert social services. That’s why I usually send my husband to pick him up.

  – 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 assumed 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.