Chapter I

Cora on the eve of her wedding day, twelve years ago.

Before dawn she had woken in her parents’ house, her childhood bed, to the sound of rain pattering and rushing, intimate around her, on the roof, in the gutters. Net curtains, blowing out into the rain through the open window, were soaked at the hem. She got out of bed and knelt on the window seat, where some of her old dolls and teddy bears were still arranged, out of habit – she wasn’t infantile, but her childhood really wasn’t far behind. The house was in a terrace overlooking a narrow strip of park: she leaned out of the window, breathing in freshness from the saturated earth, the drenched, labouring trees. She didn’t care about the rain spoiling things, she didn’t care anything about the outer shell of the wedding, which so devoured her mother: flowers and guest list and caterers. Cora hadn’t been brought up as religious, and she’d never belonged to any church, but her religious instincts were strong; she was concentrated in the mystery of what she was undertaking. Also, she imagined herself in a continuum with the serious, passionate women whose weddings she’d read about in novels: Kitty in Anna Karenina, Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow. She was twenty-three. The rain seemed blessed to her, sitting alone in her washed-pale pyjamas at the window, thoughts reaching out into the night. She had a vision of herself as a figure outside her own self-knowledge, emblematic, almost sacrificial.

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 political, 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.

After lunch, Frankie fed the baby, the light gleaming on the skin of her breast where the tension tugged and puckered it. Cora wiped surreptitiously with a cloth around the sticky chair backs and edges of the table where the children had been sitting.

– Are you supposed to drink coffee? she asked.

– Hell, I don’t care, Frankie said. – I do everything. I shouldn’t eat this, for a start; look at the size of me.

As well as brown bread, Cora had made courgette cake, which was still warm. Johnny and Lulu carried slices into the garden on their palms. Johnny nibbled at his like a bird, dipping his head to it; Lulu tried to coax the cat to eat hers. Frankie sighed, relaxing, admiring the cake and her cake plate and her coffee mug, white china with a pattern of blue leaves.

– You’ve got everything so nice here. Don’t think I’ve changed my opinion about the awful mistake you’re making, leaving Bobs. But I’m jealous too. Everything here’s deliciously calm and organised. London’s vile.

– It isn’t exactly that I’ve left him. We both agreed to try living apart for a while.

– Rubbish, he’s desperate. You left him. Just because he’s an inhibited stick doesn’t mean he isn’t in torment.

– He keeps trying to give me money, Frankie. He turned up the other evening, waiting in the park to catch me on my way home, with a briefcase full of forms and papers. He wants to make over half the flat to me. That’s how he thinks about relationships. It’s horrible. As if the whole thing in the first place had been like arranging a contract or a piece of legislation. It didn’t occur to him to ask me how I was feeling.

– It shows how he’s suffering, that’s just what he would do. Don’t pretend you don’t know him.

– I told him I wouldn’t touch anything. I don’t want any of it.

Frankie groaned. – You think you’re so high-minded, but you’re both just as bad as each other.

Open-mouthed, the baby fell asleep, away from her nipple, milk trickling at the corner of his mouth; she lowered him cautiously into his car seat. – By the way, I’ve got a new life-plan too, she said. – You’re going to hate it. But you have to tolerate it, if I’m tolerating yours. At least mine’s virtuous. I’m going to train for the ministry.

– Which Ministry?

Cora was thinking politics.

– The ministry. You know, the jolly old C of E. To be a vicar. Can’t you just see me in a dog collar?

– You aren’t serious. You don’t even believe in God. You used to be a Marxist. You used to hate the establishment.

– The Church can be fusty, agreed. But behind the façade there’s all this anarchic stuff about truth and social justice. We need that.

Reasonably, Frankie explained that if she’d been born in Baghdad she’d be a Muslim, or a Baha’i or a Jew, but the revelation most naturally to hand was the one she was born into, however imperfect and incomplete, because it was woven into her history and culture.

– So I love Protestantism. I sort of love it, romantically. The whole strenuous wrestling-for-grace thing, inside the individual soul. That does it for me.

– But you don’t believe in the impossible bits, like Jesus dying and rising again?

Frankie’s face sometimes took on a certain expression of tactful patience if she thought Cora was showing her ignorance, or failing to understand a difficult idea. – Well, I do, though I’m not sure it’s helpful thinking about believing or not believing it, in that kind of either/or way. I don’t suppose I believe in the Resurrection literally. For me it’s a way of expressing the mystery of renewal, as a narrative.

Cora felt her own face stiffening in hostility, false sympathy. Apparently Frankie had been going to church off and on since Lulu was born. She had spoken to her parish priest, and then to a Vocations Adviser; they had told her she could do her training part-time, so she thought of beginning when Magnus started nursery. If Cora tried to imagine what Frankie meant by grace, a kind of ash seemed to settle inside her, sinking down through her chest like a blight. She didn’t feel any longer that she had a soul, and she thought then that she hardly knew her friend, they were only connected out of habit. Love is a kind of comfortable pretence, she thought, muffling everyone’s separation from one another, which is absolute. Probably she had more in common with embittered Annette at the library than with Frankie.

– What does Drum think about it?

Drum, Frankie’s husband, worked for the campaigns-and-policy division in a major charity.

– Well, of course he’s a militant atheist. But I think he thinks it’ll keep me happy. Or at least he thinks it’ll keep me off his back.

Cora offered to put suncream on the children playing in the small back garden. She had eradicated from inside the house every trace of her parents and their long lives here, almost zealously, as if she couldn’t bear to be reminded of it; and yet she had never dreamed of touching the garden, apart from where the new extension encroached into it. Otherwise it was still laid out just as her mother had it: low walls overgrown with roses; a crazy-paving path meandering in the grass; a dwarf pear tree, which was blossoming now. Only Cora didn’t have Rhian’s gift for gardening. Nothing grew quite as well as it used to: diseases rioted among the plants, slugs ate them, the roses were arthritic and blighted with black spot, the lawn was full of dandelions, she forgot to water things in pots. Sometimes she knew they needed watering, and obstinately put off doing it. Every time she stepped into the garden, even while it soothed her, she also suffered from her failure.

Later in the afternoon Cora and Frankie and the children processed across the road and along beside the iron railings to the park gate, bearing – as well as the baby – blankets and cushions, shrimping nets, picnic supper, plastic cricket ball and tennis ball, a bottle of rosé and glasses. Both women knew they must look like an idyll from the kind of old-fashioned children’s book they used to read. Other sections of the long park that ran through this eastern part of Cardiff for more than a mile were given over to cultivated beds, bowling greens, a rose garden; at its far end there was a lake with a clock tower built as a little lighthouse commemorating Scott’s expedition to the Pole, because the Endeavour had set out from Cardiff docks. Opposite Cora’s house the park’s ambitions were less strenuous: winding paths, grass worn thin under the spreading trees, dusty shrubbery. Older children were already in possession. Johnny eyed them warily: bikes dropped on their sides in the grass, a football game in progress, goals marked with T-shirts stripped off in the heat, girls paddling calf-deep in the brook. Cora had played in this park all through her childhood, felt as if it was yesterday the ooze of the stony brook between her toes, her mother’s dread of broken glass and lockjaw.

They had forgotten the corkscrew and she went back for it; the others watched her summer dress flickering past the far side of the railings, her unhurried long stride with head held high. She waved to them, but Frankie, throwing the ball at Johnny’s bat – he could hit it if she threw from about a yard away – was annoyed and alarmed at how unreachable Cora was these days. Always she had had a surface poise like a thick extra skin, which Frankie had admired and envied; she supposed you had to be beautiful to acquire it, as Cora was. It had something to do with being so much looked at, deflecting an excess of attention, to protect yourself. But in the past she had been passionately available to her friends, beyond the act of herself; in fact she had used to seem to Frankie uncomplicated, in the best sense – admirably not opaque. Now, her spontaneity was extinguished. You knew about disillusion, but you didn’t really believe in it as a tangible force, or anyway not in its coming on so soon – after all, they were only in their mid-thirties. In Cora’s expression, it was as if a shutter had dropped with a crash, one of those dismal metal ones that shopkeepers install in areas of high crime. Frankie felt disappointed in her brother and Cora; she thought they should have had more resilient imagination than to have let their relationship collapse. They shouldn’t have given up so easily on being happy, even if it was about not having children, which it might be, though Cora denied it.

Frankie crouched businesslike over the rosé when Cora brought back the corkscrew; both friends felt the strain at the idea of the weekend stretching out ahead of them to be filled. It was the first time Frankie had come to stay since Cora had moved to Cardiff ten months before; both had looked forward to it and now they were both thirsty for the first kick of alcohol, as if they might otherwise run out of things to talk about, which had never used to happen.

– Before you say anything, I know I’m not supposed to drink this, either, while I’m breastfeeding.

– He’s such a feeble baby, you can see it’s taken its toll.

Huge Magnus, on his back on a shaded corner of blanket, slept with clenched stout fists, reminding Cora of a pink plastic doll she’d had whose eyelids closed when you tipped it. They talked about the library, and although Frankie pretended to be sympathetic to what Cora described, the peaceful routines and absorption in administrative tasks, Cora was as defensive as if her friend had voiced the conventional pieties: that she was wasting herself, in a job where she wasn’t using her brains or her education. Cora wished she was alone; one of the girls in the choir had offered her a spare ticket for something at the theatre – it didn’t matter what. Yet the sunshine and the children’s noise and the playful scrap of breeze, riffling the pink candles in the horse chestnut, made out of the park an image of blissful leisure.

– Bobs thinks, Frankie said, drinking down fast, – that you can’t forgive him for the fire at the immigration removal place. But I said you couldn’t be that irrational. How could you think it was his fault? He has to take responsibility, in the chain of command, that’s how things work in government. But it’s not personal. It’s not morally his fault, in a way anyone could blame him for. You couldn’t think that.

– I thought you were the one going into the Church. Your idea of conscience seems pretty flexible.

– So you do blame him.

– Of course not, Cora said. – I know he’s an impeccably good man. Good in a way I’ll never be. But those centres are unspeakable, it’s a horror that they even exist. I can’t talk about it, it’s too awful.

– What do you mean, good in a way you’ll never be?

– Nothing. She added – I can’t imagine Robert saying that, about me blaming him for the fire. Whatever he thought, he wouldn’t actually say it.

– Perhaps not in so many words.

– You shouldn’t make the words up, Frank. They’re important.

– You’re right, I’m sorry.

– It’s OK.

– Only I did know what he was thinking. He is my big brother.

– You never could know, not for absolutely sure.

They shifted positions on the blanket, each dissatisfied with the other, Frankie unpacking hard-boiled eggs and yoghurts from a cool-bag, Cora stretching out on her back and pulling up the skirt of her dress in a semblance of sunbathing. Lulu wandered out from the shrubbery to sit astride her, showing her an earthworm in a seaside bucket.

– Look at my snake.

– Don’t bounce on your Auntie Cora.

– She’s not my auntie.

– I don’t mind, Cora said. – She isn’t bouncing very hard.

But Frankie lifted Lulu by the armpits and swung her away, protesting, skinny legs bicycling wildly. Only the memory of the contact with her heated little life remained across Cora’s pelvis and flat stomach for a few moments, vivid and distracting as when, the other week, Cora had had to pick up a starling that flew by mistake into the house and dazed itself, flashing round the ceilings and against the windows – its racing metabolism had seemed to leave its trace in her hands for hours afterwards.

There had been no loss of life during the fire at the immigration removal centre, but a detainee in his fifties, an Iranian, had died of a heart attack a day later, which was why the ombudsman had been asked to conduct a private inquiry. Recent inspections had reported a somewhat improved regime at the centre since the scandals of the early days, and the local fire chief had been paying regular visits. The usual decision had been made against installing sprinklers – too prone to being activated in the event of detainee protest – but Robert didn’t think this would constitute a significant criticism, the ground having been gone over so thoroughly in previous inquiries. It wasn’t clear that sprinklers would anyway have made a significant difference to the spread of the fire. Building design defects – a failure to plan for the need to isolate sections of the centre in an emergency – were much more likely to crop up, but blame for those could hardly be laid at his door, as the centre had been operative for two years before he came into his present role. The problem came back to the perpetual tension between allowing the detainees to associate – they weren’t supposed to be under prison discipline – and the difficulty of managing large-scale protest, or controlling them safely in any emergency.

It shouldn’t be too bad for us, Robert had reassured Frankie. He’ll say, of course, in the report that these aren’t very nice places. How could anyone imagine they might be nice? We can only be required to try to make them function as humanely as possible in the circumstances. It could have been so much worse. Staff followed procedures pretty well, the disturbances that started the whole thing were quelled rapidly, the individual who set the fires had a history of instability and had only been brought in the night before, there was a model evacuation, even the damage to the buildings had been limited. The couple of detainees who did abscond were picked up within hours.

This fire had happened a year ago, when Cora was still living with Robert in London, in Regent’s Park; he hadn’t told her right away that it had implications for him, not because he was hiding anything from her, but because she seemed at that point to have stopped taking an interest in his work. (She had stopped watching the news, as well, and reading the papers.) He thought she must still be grieving for her mother, but this didn’t reassure him, he felt himself helpless to put up any argument against the blind force of her feelings, where he couldn’t follow her. Also, he noticed that she had started avoiding undressing in front of him in the bedroom, turning her back so that he couldn’t see her nakedness when she stripped off her top or stepped out of her knickers, hurrying on her pyjama top before she’d even taken off her skirt. He turned his eyes away from her, he went into the bathroom and took his time cleaning his teeth, he became scrupulous to protect her privacy, took her inhibition inside himself. It began to be their routine that he stayed up late, working on papers, long after Cora had finished whatever marking and preparation she had to do. Almost always she would be asleep, or pretending to be asleep, by the time he turned in.

Eventually Cora had learned from Frankie about the fire. When Robert arrived home in the flat from work one evening, Cora was already in bed. She said she was ill, she couldn’t stop her legs trembling; she must have a fever or something.

He was still in his suit jacket and loosened tie, skin sticky and gritty from his Tube journey. – Why don’t you take a break from teaching? he said. – You’re putting yourself under too much strain.

– Is that what you think it is? she said bitterly from where she was huddled, clasping her knees in her pyjamas with her back to him, staring at the window. The late sunshine showed as shifting yellow rectangles on the thin muslin curtains.

– I don’t know. What is it?

– I told you, I’m ill.

He put a hand on her shoulder and it was true that she was burning hot, scorching him through the thin cotton.

– I saw Frankie, she said. – I went round there after my last class.

Frankie was pregnant at the time with Magnus, having some medical problems.

– How is she?

– She told me about the fire at the removal centre, and the inquiry.

He knew at once it had been a mistake to keep this from her. Nothing would convince her now that he hadn’t been hiding it.

– You don’t have to worry about that. I’m confident it’s going to be all right. Some effective work’s been done in those places since the early days.

He tried to reassure her that no one had been hurt, that the man who died had a pre-existing heart condition, which was in his records. The curtains at that moment were blowing into the room, lifted on a breeze from outside. Cora uncurled herself onto her back, gazing at him.

– Robert, you frighten me sometimes. What does it feel like, to say those things?

Under her scrutiny he felt himself transparent, hollowed out.

– Sorry: am I talking civil servant? It’s an occupational hazard.

– I don’t blame you for anything, she said. – Only you use this calm and steady language about things that aren’t steady.

– No, of course they’re not.

– Things that are horrors really. Filthy and bloody.

– I suppose it’s force of habit.

– Someone has to do it, I know that, she said heavily. – I know that, in comparison, I don’t do anything.

When for a while Cora had visited Thomas, the Zimbabwean detainee, he had been at a removal centre in an old building outside Brighton, converted from a private school, with a spreading cedar – left over from the past – still in the garden, where the detainees were not allowed. Even as a visitor, she had been body-searched and made to leave her fingerprints. The shaming details of the place – Thomas had told her that when they brought him in they used fabric leg-restraints, so he couldn’t run – still recurred, not in her dreams, but when she was defenceless, alone with herself, skewered by her guilt (she had been his only contact in the outside world, and after eighteen months she had stopped visiting). Robert’s fire, however, had been at one of the new purpose-built centres: brick buildings on brownfield sites, as blandly featureless from the outside as mail-order depots or units on an industrial estate. The brutality of Victorian prisons had a negative moral weight, pressing heavily on the earth; this modern apparatus for punishment stood lightly and provisionally in the landscape, like so many husks, or ugly litter. The appearance of the buildings, Cora thought, was part of the pretence that what was processed inside them was nothing so awful or contaminating as flesh and blood. The buildings made possible the dry husks of language in the reports that Robert read, and wrote.

Frankie was going to drive back to London on Monday morning when Cora went off to work. Saturday night was rather a flop. The two women had promised themselves hours of talk once the children were asleep, but by the time Cora came downstairs from reading Johnny his story, Frankie, who had put things in the dishwasher, was yawning and ready for bed.

– God, I’m so pathetic. It was the wine in the sunshine. It’s the bloody baby. Literally, I’m dozing on my feet: look!

She presented her moon-face for inspection – broad nose, big cheeks, thick dark brows – pegging her eyelids up with her fingertips; her girlish looks were gaining gravitas, personality stamping on them strongly as a mask. Cora began to believe in her as a vicar. As soon as Frankie had taken herself upstairs, Cora felt excessively wide awake; resentment dispersed like a fog lifting, and affectionately she tidied away her visitors’ mess, thinking she would have made a more organised mother than Frankie. Pouring herself another glass of rosé, she stalked round the ground floor of the house in her bare feet, thirsty for contact and explanation now there was no one to explain to. Her lovely rooms, unappreciated, wasted their charm on the warm evening air; the windows were open, and footsteps passing in the street sounded unexpectedly close. The dishwasher churned in the kitchen. The usual quiet of the house was thickened by the sleeping children in it, their restlessness and rustling and little cries: inexperienced, she stopped at each new noise, listening anxiously.

As it grew dark, she lit the candles meant to enchant Frankie, then met herself accidentally in the mirror above the fireplace in the front room, ghost in her own house, with a shocked hostile look, unlike the carefully prepared scrutiny she usually allowed herself. In the mornings, or before she went out, she put on her make-up and arranged her clothes satisfactorily, as if she existed as a mannequin outside herself, whose beauty must be served. Catching herself unawares now, she seemed to see something that she had squandered, and had to answer for, and couldn’t. Her face wasn’t broad and dreamy, suited to quiet work at the library, as she liked to feel it from inside: the weight had fallen off her jaw and cheek bones, she looked questing and thwarted. The mirror was old, foxed, an antique, divided in portions like a triptych, in a thin cracked gilt frame. In the empty grate beneath, a fan of folded gold paper was arranged with some pinecones sprayed gold.

She did not want to see herself, or think about herself. The appetite for communication, which Frankie had roused and then frustrated by going to bed, broke in dangerously on the steady rhythm that her days had fallen into. Tamping down her restlessness, Cora put on the television, with the sound turned low. She remembered watching a different television in the childhood room that had occupied this same space, where she had once known how to possess herself confidently. That sitting room had been poky and papered in her mother’s cautious stab at 1970s taste – stylised pink flowers on a mud-green background. Now that it was gone, Cora regretted that she had not kept even one scrap of this paper, which must have been one of the first things she opened her eyes on; although when she was a teenager, she had complained to her mother that it made her feel like a frog in a pond. But she had begun work on the house in a kind of frenzy, wanting to alter everything after her parents’ deaths, which she had not foreseen, and which had struck her terribly. She had always thought they would come into their own in old age, they would have a talent for it. Dad’s fatal heart attack, however, had come only two months after he took early retirement from teaching mining engineering at the University of Wales Institute; a year later, Mum was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. Cora had taken six months off work to nurse her.

Magnus cried several times in the night (poor Frankie, who was trying to get him to sleep through), and on Sunday morning Johnny and Lulu woke up early. Cora dozing in her own bed heard them, excited and tentative, testing the freedom of the downstairs emptied of adults, conferring in miniature voices, Johnny chiding and bossy: ‘You mustn’t touch, Lulu!’ She gambled that they wouldn’t break anything, and wondered idly what it would mean to have a sibling to explore with. They would be stepping with bare feet where the sun, on another fine day, crept its long, low, early light along the blond floorboards, warming them: Cora liked doing that too. If this long spell of lovely weather was unnatural, she could hardly make herself care. They would be entranced as well by the next-door cat, meowing through the glass from where it waited every morning on the sill outside, though she determinedly wasn’t feeding it.

Luxuriantly she turned over under the cotton sheet that was all she needed these warm nights, closing her eyes, floating at the edge of the dream she had woken from, of a long pillared hall like a temple, sloping down out of sight. Sometimes sleeping alone, after twelve years of marriage, was a huge relief; it was blissful to stretch her limbs across an empty space, weightless and free. In her memory, sometimes, Robert beside her in the bed had been a brooding and oppressive mass in those last months, weighing down the mattress on his side until she had to cling to her edge so as not to roll into him. She had lain tensed in the cramped margin, his sexual need gnawing at her (‘sexual need’ had been her mother’s ashamed phrase for it), though she obstinately ignored it, and he never tried to touch her if she didn’t want him to. At other times in her new life, however, Cora was so scalded by her solitary nights, sodden with dreams and longing, that she crawled downstairs to sleep sitting up in one of the armchairs. Then, her empty bed seemed ignominious, as if she was an old woman already, having lost everything.

After breakfast Frankie took the children to the little church along the road where Cora was married, while Magnus slept and Cora listened out for him. She made a picnic, thoughtfully putting in wet wipes and kitchen paper, bibs and nappies and changing kit. ‘You’re a genius,’ Frankie exclaimed, and Cora saw how she almost went on to say that Cora was gifted for motherhood, and would have taken to it naturally, but stopped herself in time. Returned from her immersion in spirit, or whatever it was, Frankie looked washed with some new shine that made her impermeable to Cora. She had actually put on eye make-up and lipstick, combed out her mop of hair. Church had made the children momentarily big-eyed and solemn. Lulu was sucking her fingers wrapped in the skirt of her dress; the three of them composed a picture of wholeness and grace. Some great-uncle or other of Robert and Frankie’s had been a bishop; Frankie’s Drum belonged to that world too, his family had a big house and land in Scotland somewhere. These patterns were remembered in the blood, Cora thought sceptically. It didn’t even spoil the picture of wholeness when Johnny flung a door open in Lulu’s face and there were howls, Frankie shouted that he was an ‘absolute bloody idiot’. Long ago, when they first met in Leeds, Cora had felt the difference of class background as an uneasy terrain dividing her from Frankie, in crossing which Frankie must somehow make the first move, propitiatory. Cora had been brought up a socialist. Her father’s father had been an electrician in a coal mine and had volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. She had used to burn with a sense of the wrongs done to her forefathers in history.

The friends got on more easily on this second day of their weekend together, because they’d stopped expecting too much. They drove up to the folk museum at St Fagans; almost carelessly, they let slip the old strenuous habits of their intimacy, and were nice to one another instead, even polite. Their lagging progress round the Welsh farmhouses and cottages done up in the styles of different periods, with smoking hearths or fumy gas-lamps, gave adequate shape to an aimless day; they bought flour from the water mill, rode in the horse-drawn cart. There were goats for Lulu to love and dread, and their picnic was blessedly wasp-free. Cora took them backwards down the row of tiny terraced houses from Merthyr Tydfil, furnished as a historical sequence: starting in the 1970s, they retreated to the early nineteenth century, because that was the only way she could bear to do it when she was a romantic girl, passionate against modern degradation, besotted with a purer past. Now, the past choked her, its tiny stuffiness, antimacassars and flat irons, rag rugs and faded photographs of dignified assemblies of Baptists, all men. Frankie peeked, when an attendant wasn’t looking, into a massive old Bible in Welsh, which Cora couldn’t read although her mother’s family had been Welsh-speakers. Discreetly, neither of them mentioned religion when they stepped into the Unitarian chapel, with its democratic pulpit in the midst of the congregation, its clear light from windows of plain glass.

The longed-for idea of children was always remote from the reality of hours that Cora actually spent with Johnny and Lulu and Magnus. Caught up for the day in their clamour and tangled joys and crises, her skin printed with the hot impress of little bodies, it hardly occurred to her to feel the old cruel twist of her own lack. She couldn’t want somebody else’s children. She would be relieved – however much she liked them – when somebody else’s were put to bed at the end of the day; she couldn’t yearn after these completed persons, who belonged to themselves. Frankie’s children only made her envious when they were absent, reduced to an idea; and in any case, the lack that had used to be savage pain was flattening into a duller wincing, in the more general ruin of her life. The great thing was to carry it off, so that no one pitied you. Cora knew that she was naturally good at this. Walking round with Lulu on her hip, explaining things to Johnny without overburdening him, she was aware she made a picture of a clever aunt, or a favourite school teacher. An uncompromised adulthood could make a clearer air for children, sometimes, than foggy mothering. Once, when Frankie had taken Johnny in search of toilets and Lulu tripped, Lulu was not inconsolable, accepting Cora’s comforting as second best. That would have to do. Other families, passing their little group burdened with pushchair and bags, would not be able to tell immediately which one was the mother.

Frankie found herself explaining, while the children were on the slide in the playground and Magnus slept, how our modern sensibility, deprived by scientific rationalism of a mythic dimension, was floundering in darkness. – We’ve subjected religious beliefs to the wrong kind of scrutiny, as if they needed to be true in a scientific sense. So we’re desolated by our cleverness, in an empty universe. We need the symbols and stories that embody the idea of another dimension, beyond the one we actually inhabit.

– But just because we need them, that doesn’t make them true. Maybe there isn’t any other dimension.

– No: the fact that we need them is what makes them true. We bring that dimension into existence, our imagination in creative collaboration with the life-forces outside us and the mysteries of physics, which otherwise have no outlet into being known. Those forces are incomplete without our faith as we’re incomplete without their existence beyond us.

Cora wasn’t interested, she was drawing with the toe of her sandal in the bark chippings of the playground.

– Have you left Bobs for somebody else? Frankie suddenly asked. – Is there anyone else?

Cora turned on her a look dishevelled, tragic. – Can’t you see there isn’t anyone else?

– You could have him bundled out of sight somewhere.

– Well, I haven’t. There isn’t anyone.

– OK. Don’t be mad with me for asking. I didn’t really think there was. I thought that if there was, I’d see the signs, and be able to tell.

– I’m not mad with you.

– Only I’m still so perplexed at what went wrong between you and Bobs. Because in spite of all the differences between you and what everyone said, I always believed you were one of those truly balanced couples, really good together.

– What did everyone say?

– Oh, you know, the usual: the gap in ages. The difference in sensibility: he was too sober for you, that sort of thing.

Cora saw a balanced couple, as in some idealising old painting: the wife’s hand, with her one glove off, held – almost as if they didn’t notice it – in the husband’s; he stood behind where she sat, they smiled out of the frame, not at each other.

– Was it because he refused to go for IVF or something?

– He didn’t.

– Oh, really? I didn’t know . . .

– It was nothing to do with that. Frank, I don’t want to talk about it. Even with you, I can’t, not yet. You were just wrong, about us being balanced together. That was just your wishful thinking, like the religious-dimensions thing. You weren’t wrong about Robert, but you were wrong about me.

Frankie put her arm around her friend, having to make a little effort at forgiveness and empathy, because Cora had always thought she was free to slash around destructively in her friend’s sacred places (‘wishful thinking’ she had called her faith), whereas Frankie knew she had to be more circumspect in Cora’s. Frankie thought this had to do with Cora’s having been the only child of devoted parents, used to them tiptoeing round her inner life, as if it was a perpetual wonder. Frankie and Robert’s parents (there were two more siblings between them), who had been often absent anyway, and had sent their children to boarding school, were killed in an accident in a private plane in Tunisia when Frankie was sixteen. Her father had been advising the government there. It had made an added complexity to Cora’s marrying Robert that, in the years after their parents’ death, her older brother had played the role for Frankie of something like a father. There had been an inward upheaval for her when she first began to guess what Cora wanted, as if at the broaching of a taboo: who knew what dangers would follow? She did not know whether Cora had ever registered the struggle it had been for Frankie to adjust to seeing the new shape of things – love, between her brother and her friend – cleanly, without prejudice. Now, she had to adjust all over again.

She thought she could remember having something like the same argument about religion with Cora when they were twenty-ish, except that they had adopted opposite positions to the ones they took now. Cora had been mysterious, Frankie had been the debunking rationalist. In those days, too, Cora had worn the same look of suffering sensibility, maddening and touching; only then, behind her look, she had been buoyant, expectant, full of appetite. Now, she submitted to Frankie’s hug, stiffly. Then someone shunted into Lulu on the slide and Frankie had to get up to go and rescue her.

After the disruption of Frankie’s visit, it was a relief to Cora to feel the atmosphere of the library close again over her head: its greenish light, high peeling pink walls and subdued hush, altered by little blares of different sound, reminders from outside, when anyone pushed open the outer door. At other moments, she wanted Frankie to come back, so that she could manage things better, be more kind to her friend; definitely, she hadn’t been kind about her plan to go into the Church. She lifted her eyes sometimes in the midst of whatever she was busy with, to where there were encouraging panes of stained glass – blue and yellow squares with red diamonds – above the issue desk, in a strip around the base of a glass dome, where dead wasps collected in dingy heaps. No doubt the architect had had in mind a library as it might have existed in a Burne-Jones painting: dreaming members of the public opening their minds in a jewelled light to Tennyson and Keats, rather than to Large Print Family Sagas and True Crime.

Cora had been afraid that seeing Frankie might spoil her time at the library; she had a horror of discovering that this new respite she had found, at the bottom of the deep place she had fallen into, was only another thin skin of self-deception. But as soon as she was making her usual round of checks on Monday morning, poking into the escallonia and Rose of Sharon bushes in the small wedge of garden for non-existent needles, she fell back into weightlessness, buoyed up by the unhurried current of routines outside herself. She had left Frankie behind at the house, packing the children’s clothes and toys chaotically into huge plastic Ikea bags. On Sunday evening they had put the children to bed and watched a detective series on television; Frankie was asleep, startling occasionally at her own soft snores, long before the murderer was exposed. In the morning, making their farewells, they had embraced exaggeratedly but almost perfunctorily, covering up something that hadn’t happened between them. ‘It’s been lovely.’ ‘It was lovely having you.’ They had smiled too much, eager to be rid of one another, feeling the strain in the present of their old closeness.

Because of the public coming and going, the library could never have the airless inwardness of an office workplace; there was always something desultory about their hours passing, not because they didn’t all work reasonably hard, but because in the end all their work was in the service of the mystery of reading, which was absorbed and private. Cora imagined herself in an outpost of culture, far removed from the hub, like a country doctor in a Chekhov story, ordering books from Moscow. One of their regulars, a petite sprightly woman with dyed black hair and a mask of thick make-up, brought in a painting done in an art class, wrapped in a black bin-liner, to show them: a clown juggling with stars against a purple background. Cora helped an Iraqi man search online for a news article on an American bombing raid on Fallujah, and when he had printed it off, he said emotionally that ‘This was what I came to your country for’, although she wasn’t sure whether he was grateful for the free access to accurate information, or incensed at British involvement in the massacre of his countrymen. She developed a benign fantasy about an elderly man who wore a silk scarf and had a suffering, distinguished face like Samuel Beckett’s; he borrowed European art films on DVD – Visconti and Chabrol and Fassbinder – and Cora imagined that he recognised a fellow spirit in her, although they never exchanged anything more than the change for his payments of £2.50.

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 library, 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 had 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.

Robert lifted his eyes from the plate set in front of him, only to look at her.

– Probably only a normal climatic variation, even if within a changing spectrum.

They both ate all three courses of the set lunch. It all seemed delicious to Cora – in Robert’s familiar orbit she recovered her old appetite. She had calves’ liver with creamed cauliflower and crispy bacon. Robert’s portions vanished as easily as if they were snacks, and he drank a couple of glasses of Bordeaux – he wasn’t a wine buff, he was bored by too much fuss, but he liked fruity reds. He had to eat, to fuel his big frame and his indefatigable stamina, and he could drink a lot without it having much effect on him, although he usually didn’t drink at lunchtime.

It was strangely ordinary, eating together.

– I suppose we ought to get a divorce, Cora said, towards the end of her salmon with hollandaise. Robert had been reaching with his knife and fork for an extra potato. He put the knife and fork back on his plate and for a moment rested his hands, clenched in fists, on the edge of the table, staring down into his food. Cora was appalled by the idea he was going to cry, and by her own tactlessness – although, when would have been the right moment? It would have been absurd to wait to discuss it with their coffee, like petits fours.

But of course he would never cry, probably not on any occasion – Cora had never seen him do so – and certainly not because of a woman, in a restaurant full of acquaintances. That was nonsense, it wasn’t how he was made. He was just taking in with the appropriate seriousness what she had said. What kind of man would have gone on to take the potato?

– I don’t know much about it, she went on quickly, covering up her confusion, explaining how she hadn’t yet fixed up the Internet at home. – Isn’t there something about irretrievable breakdown? We could go for that.

– Is it irretrievable?

She knew she flushed, and in her embarrassment was suddenly furious with him. – My God, yes, Robert. Have you no idea? Doesn’t it feel irretrievable to you?

– Then you’re right, we ought to go ahead with a divorce. There’s no reason not to.

– It would leave you free.

He made one more necessary effort. – Frankie tells me there isn’t anyone else.

The idiotic formula sounded incongruous, coming from him; she wanted to cover up his shame.

– You don’t need to worry about that, truly. Not on my side. All I want is my solitude. You probably think that’s nonsense. But I would like you to find someone and be happy. That’s why we should divorce.

After a moment’s thought, Robert helped himself to the potato after all, and cut it up carefully into pieces on his plate. Cutting up all his food before he started eating was one of the irritating habits Cora blamed on the form of education he’d been forced into.

– If it’s what you want, he said eventually.

They agreed that both of them would contact their solicitors. Cora would go to the same firm in Cardiff who had dealt with her parents’ mortgage, and then their wills, and then the transfer of the property into her name. Finishing her salmon, she had to dab her eyes once surreptitiously with her napkin, but she mainly felt relief at getting the painful discussion over with. Afterwards, however, it was difficult to start conversation up again. Casting around in her mind, she rashly asked Robert about his session at the inquiry; he replied that it hadn’t gone too badly. The day-to-day running of the centres was contracted out, and the primary remit of his team was contract letting and agreeing procedural guidelines; as far as that went, the questioning had been sympathetic. They had nothing to cover up; in fact, some of the work they were doing had been commended. He paused to take a mouthful of his wine; Cora guessed he was calculating how much more to say to her, weighing the chance of provoking one of their disputes against his desire, always, to give her the whole picture if she asked, which was his kind of truth-telling. Despite their relatively easy ride, however – he went on – he wasn’t sanguine about the outcome. She mustn’t repeat this, of course. But there was something in the air that made him think the press wouldn’t let it go. The Iranian who died turned out to have been someone, and the story was starting to make waves.

– What d’you mean, someone? Everyone’s someone, you know.

– I do know. All I meant was the kind of someone the press can attach a label to, if he comes to a sticky end.

The Iranian was a journalist, he’d been living in London for years, not bothering to renew his visa; some of his short stories had even been published in translation by a small press over here, in the Eighties. He’d been touted around the usual literary festivals and readings for a while. He should never have been refused asylum, it had clearly been an error, by their own criteria – the adjudicators could be idiots, that was often half the problem. It would have worked against him that he hadn’t done anything about the visa until he was picked up. The man had been depressed, he’d had a drink problem for years, everyone had forgotten who he was, probably he hadn’t even looked presentable when he came up in front of the tribunal. It seemed he’d managed to alienate his lawyer and ended up representing himself – he’d made a bit of a mess of it, ranting and not making a lot of sense.

– And then he died.

– He had a dodgy heart. It could have happened at any moment, anywhere.

– But it happened there. He had to die in one of those places.

– It was a bad way to go. There are worse ones.

Cora was determined not to row with him; she didn’t point out that a journalist and writer might have met one of those worse ones precisely in Iran, where Robert had been trying to send him. Sometimes she was tired of herself, pushing against his reasoning, chipping away at it, as if he was in her path like an immovable rock. It had been the same before he moved to immigration, when he was in prisons. She baulked at the detail of what he oversaw; he said that someone had to oversee it, so long as the government had an immigration policy, or wanted to lock people up. He said he’d rather do it himself than someone else, who would do it worse. Delivered with his authority, that sounded like an unassailable defence of what he did; but so were her qualms unassailable, they came from deep inside her nature, she couldn’t learn to suppress them, or want to, although she had tried when they were first together and she was very young.

– What were the things the inquiry commended? she asked.

Robert explained that his team was working on a new scheme, whereby within a few days of application each asylum seeker would be allocated a ‘case owner’, who would manage their case through every stage, from the initial interview through to integration into the UK. Or deportation, if necessary.

– Was this your idea?

– My recommendation, in a Review.

– It sounds like a good one. For them to have a continuous point of human contact.

He couldn’t let her plaster him with good intentions. – It should be more efficient. Speed things up, help move the backlog.

The waitress brought the pudding menu.

After her mother died, three years before, Cora had been in a bad way.

Through the last months of her mother’s illness, she had made a good nurse, resourceful and resilient. Robert had been moved to find that the wilful girl he married, with her strong gift for pleasure, had this patience in her. When, after a spell in hospital, Rhian had come home to die, Cora had risen to the occasion as if it were a test, like other tests she’d always passed with flying colours. She hid her own desperation from her mother; she worked as if she was part of the team of doctor and cancer nurses who came to the house, and they had praised her steady, unsqueamish caring. – Whatever happens, I will be with you, she had said to her mother calmly, and her calm had seemed to help. Rhian had been querulous in life, but was rather stoical at the conclusion of it. Near the end, Cora had seemed to know how to make the dying woman more comfortable on her pillows, lifting her so gently and exactly.

Carelessly, Robert had presumed – without thinking about it – that this new strength would be part of Cora permanently. However, as the months passed after Rhian’s death, she was hardly recognisable as that capable nurse, wise instinctively about entrances and exits. Her old energy seemed irrecoverably broken. She wouldn’t talk to him about her parents; wrung with pity for her, he wondered uncharacteristically if counselling would help, but she insisted she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Drooping from her usual straight height, she complained of period pains, nursed a hot-water bottle to her stomach, went to bed early, watched television in the day. If they made love, it forced tears out of her eyes, which she tried to hide from him. He imagined her collapse as though she had drawn too deeply upon subterranean reservoirs of her nature that, once tapped, couldn’t be replenished by any ordinary process of rest and recuperation. Her spirit seemed darkened and poisoned, and Robert suffered because he felt himself inadequate to clearing it.

Rhian had died in February; after Easter, Cora insisted on going back to teaching. At least it meant she had to get dressed in the mornings, and she had to prepare for her classes and mix with her colleagues and students. But he was afraid it was too soon. One evening when he came in late from work, he found her sitting on the side of their bed in her coat with her knees together and a grey face, as if she had dropped there when she came in and hadn’t moved since. Her heavy case, crammed full of books and marking, was at her feet.

– How long have you been sitting here?

– I don’t know. What time is it?

Unwisely, kneeling to take off her shoes and help her out of her coat, he reopened a suggestion he had made before, and which she had fiercely rebuffed. Why didn’t she give up teaching at the FE college? A friend of his had contacts at a private school, the conditions there would be so much easier, she could take on part-time hours to begin with, the kids were eager to learn.

Cora shrugged her arm out of her coat sleeve, pushing him away.

– Why can’t you get it into your head that I wouldn’t work for a place like that, if it was the only school left on earth? I actually happen to prefer the kids I teach. They don’t have much of a chance in life, I don’t pretend I can do much to alter that. But at least I’m more useful, teaching them basic literacy skills, than cramming pampered brats for Oxbridge. And I don’t have discipline problems. I’m an experienced teacher. Where do you get your ideas of what goes on in a place like ours: from the Daily Mail?

– But look at you. You’re desperate with fatigue. You owe it to yourself to take it easy. Just for a few months, till you’re feeling better.

– I suppose you’re blaming my principles now, for me not getting pregnant?

He was slow to rearrange his insights in the light of this new element; he must have shaken his head, he thought afterwards, like the bewildered ox he was.

– Getting pregnant? Is that what you want?

– Oh, Robert: how could you not know?

– But aren’t you having those injections?

She said she had stopped having the injections two years ago: he was astonished, but didn’t question that she hadn’t discussed this with him at the time, or ever told him. She said that she had ‘wanted it to be a surprise’. He accepted that in this area of experience women had a natural primacy, and must make up the rules according to their own mysterious intimations.

In two years, nothing had happened. This last week, she had been hopeful, but when she got home tonight, her period had come.

– I suppose that Rhian knew about it?

Not only Rhian, it turned out, but Alan too. Part of Cora’s grief was that they had been cut off without ever knowing their grandchildren.

Without having gone through the long build-up, with its slow cycles of anticipation and disappointment, Robert was plunged suddenly into the extreme end of the angst of childlessness. But he put himself entirely at Cora’s disposal. He would do whatever was necessary, if it would make her happy. Anyway, without thinking about it much, he had also always wanted to have children, at some indefinite future point. That seemed the right inevitable shape of their family, if they were a family: between the two of them, the vaguely sketched-in graduated sequence of their children, two or three – never babies when he imagined them, but sturdy children in shorts and sunhats, with fishing rods, and their own plans. His picture was made in the mould of himself and his own siblings, and from the phase of childhood he had enjoyed most (when he was at prep school, and had spent summer holidays with his parents and siblings – apart from Frankie, not born yet – in a house at the top of steeply wooded cliffs in Devon). He had believed too, without acknowledging it to himself, that children would seal the bond of his marriage with Cora, which otherwise, even after all this time, he thought of as provisional and precarious. She might, if there weren’t children, remove herself one day as arbitrarily as she had thrown herself at him in the first place.

So, three years ago, they had found themselves in the waiting room of a clinic in a handsome Georgian house in Wimpole Street, on the brink of their first appointment with the fertility doctor. Robert had made discreet enquiries of the right people, and found this was the place that got the best results. It was a close, wet June day, rain blowing in a warm mist in the streets, the pavements greasy with it. Cora, who had hardly noticed for months what clothes she put on in the morning, had dressed with feverish care for this appointment, as if she needed to seduce the doctor, not consult him. Now she was suffering because her Betty Jackson satin print blouse, with a bow at the neck, was stained with damp, and anyway was surely wildly inappropriate, making it appear that she wasn’t serious about the whole process. She couldn’t look at the other couples waiting with them. Afterwards, she wondered if she had hallucinated the fact that the walls of this room were covered, every square foot, with photographs of babies, of smiling mothers and couples with babies. It seemed too manic to be probable; and wouldn’t it be an insensitive message, anyway, to blare at those who might, after all efforts, still fail to conceive?

Robert beside her was a dark mass, in suit and tie because he’d come from work to meet her here. Chairs in any public place always seemed too small for him, and it was surprising to see him reduced to a client or a patient in a queue like everyone else, as if all his body language by this time involuntarily exuded authority and control. He didn’t give any sign, however, of minding waiting, or of wanting to be anywhere different. She wondered what he’d told Elizabeth about why he was leaving the office: nothing, she was sure, that would have given away Cora’s business here, or her failure, or her desperation. Nonetheless, she burned with those things, just as if Elizabeth knew about them – and everyone knew. She wished Robert had nothing to do with the whole process, and that she could have come by herself, in secret. Wasn’t he only consoling her, playing along with one of her whims? She couldn’t remember them ever discussing fertility treatments at a point before it would have been a subject charged with importance for her, but as they sat in silence she attributed to him a masculine disdain for them, a stoical preference for letting nature take its course, for the discipline of accepting whatever life sent. His views would be based on a long perspective, taking into account world population growth, viewing the cult of baby-making as a kind of sentimentality only available to those in the advanced economies.

She was in fact quite wrong about what Robert thought, but she seemed to hear these opinions uttered in his reasonable, reluctant, rather growling voice, which never ran on unnecessarily, but chopped and cut to minimise wasted words, always holding something back. The judgements she attributed to him threw her into an agitated dismay, so that she longed to get up and walk around the room, but didn’t want to give herself away to the others waiting. Robert fetched her a drink of water from the cooler. Cora had some idea of the humiliations that awaited them, after the doctor had turned his doubtless considerable charm on them, although she wasn’t sure whether they would happen today, or at a second appointment. It didn’t matter if she was pushed and pulled about like a doll, and probed, she didn’t care. But she scalded at the idea of the affront to Robert, shut in a little room, perhaps even a toilet, with magazines, to produce a sample. How could she allow it? This place and everything about it was a mistake, she was suddenly sure. There must be a way out from it, in which she was true to herself, didn’t betray her deepest instincts.

She cast around, remembering the last days of her mother’s illness. How had she summoned then that strength beyond herself, to act well? She remembered how at a certain point when she might have allowed herself to sink in suffering, the thought had come to her like an instruction: bite on the bitter pill. Bite hard. She had bitten hard, and the flood of strength that came had even had a savage joy in it. Now, too, she was carried away, in a suffering beyond her control. Cora stood up, the receptionist and the strangers in the waiting room looked at her, Robert looked.

– I’m just stepping outside, she said loudly, picking up her mac and her bag. – For a bit of fresh air.

In the street, the rain blowing at her was a balm; she lifted her face into it. Robert came hurrying after her, with the silk scarf she’d forgotten.

– No, she said definitively to him, gripping his forearms. – It isn’t what I want.

– Then that’s all right, he said. She imagined he was relieved, although this wasn’t in the least true, he was only trying to cover up his regret, so that she didn’t feel she’d failed at anything. He was disappointed that what had seemed a way out of Cora’s sorrows was a dead end.

– Let’s go somewhere and have lunch, he said.

– Do you want to go back and tell them?

He was indifferent to the administrative hiccups at the clinic when they discovered that one set of clients had fled. It must have happened before. – I’ll phone them later.

– Don’t you have to be back in the office?

– I told them I’d be away for a couple of hours. They won’t expect me back till two. We’ve got till then.

She had wanted him to say that the office didn’t matter.