Cora, three years ago, on the train from Cardiff to Paddington.
It was a few weeks since she’d run away from the fertility clinic, almost six months since her mother died. Her teaching had more or less finished for the summer, and she was throwing herself furiously into the transformation of the Cardiff house, telling Robert she wanted to do it up to sell it. No matter what difficulties came up, how the builders found dry rot, or messed up the French windows in the extension, she encouraged herself: bite the bitter pill. She had got her force back, even if she didn’t know what to do with it, and was only pressing mightily up against an invisible resistance. She had chosen a wood-burning stove, she had scoured the reclamation yards for antique tiles for the bathroom, for lovely old pink bricks. Now, outside the train windows, the afternoon landscape fumed with rain, the green fields and woods were secretive, withdrawn around their own dense history, pressed under a lead-coloured lid of sky. The train wasn’t full; she sat at a table by herself. Dark drops rolled sideways along the window glass. For no reason, her heart was beating thickly, as if she was expecting something, though she wasn’t, she mustn’t look forward, because there was nothing ahead, nothing.
A man stopped beside her, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee from the buffet, a briefcase slung on a strap across his shoulder.
– Do you mind if I sit here? I’m escaping from an idiot with a mobile phone.
– How do you know I’m not one?
He glanced at her, taking her in quickly. – You don’t look like an idiot.
– You’re safe, she said. – Mine’s turned off.
– Good girl.
Half-heartedly she was offended by his calling her a girl. Sitting down in the window seat opposite her, he got out a book from his briefcase and started to read. It was a book of poetry, by someone Cora hadn’t heard of. She was embarrassed that she was reading Vogue – she knew the man had taken this in, in his quick survey, as a mark against her. She never used to buy magazines, but on her journeys backwards and forwards from Cardiff, not wanting to think too much, she tried to fill her head with ideas for things she might get for the house, or plans for new clothes.
He scowled into his book, gripping it as if he might tear it apart at the spine. Cora always looked at people’s hands when she met them (Robert’s were huge, with soft hollows in the palms and unexpectedly delicate finger ends). This man’s hands were long and tanned and tense, slim as a woman’s though he wasn’t effeminate, one finger nicotine-stained, the nails naturally almond-shaped; when he took a mouthful of coffee she noticed that they shook. He wore a wedding ring. She thought he might be precious, or pretentious; there was something dissatisfied in his ripe, full mouth, although he was attractive, subtle-looking, only just beginning to lose his hair – which was the colour of silvery washed-out straw – at the temples. Under the hooding curved lids, she seemed to see the quick movements of his eyes as he read; he was a hawk, jabbing into his book for its meanings with an unforgiving beak. Determined not to care what he thought, she returned to her magazine. After a while he dropped the book down on the table. Cora looked up from serious contemplation of a winter coat.
– You didn’t like the poems, she said.
She expected his vanity to be gratified by her taking an interest in his opinion, but he only looked surprised that she had spoken, as if they existed in different worlds.
– Do you read poetry?
She supposed he meant: as well as magazines.
– I do. I’m an English teacher.
He wasn’t enthusiastic. – Oh, good for you.
– Well, actually, I love what I do. But I don’t get to teach much poetry.
– Have you read this?
– No, I’ve never heard of him. I don’t think I’ll bother now. You looked violent. I thought you might have thrown it out of the window, if these windows opened.
– As a matter of fact, I did quite like it, he said. – But not enough.
– Enough for what?
After a pause he added that he wished the windows did open, because he would have enjoyed throwing books out of them, from time to time.
Cora had read that when someone is attracted to you they begin unconsciously imitating your own movements: she noticed that when she sat back in her seat now, he was drawn forward towards her, leaning his elbows on the table, frowning. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk with her about poetry, dreading the conventional and gushing opinions she might try to impress him with, reluctant to unpack his own ideas for anyone not likely to appreciate them. He had a high opinion of himself, she thought: his surface as it met the world was obviously touchy, ready with disdain. He asked where she’d got on the train and whether she lived in Cardiff; she replied that she was born there, but lived in London.
– Visiting your parents?
Cora explained that both her parents had died, and how she was doing up their house to sell. She expected him to say something sympathetic, but he only asked her what she felt about Welsh nationalism. She replied that her father had taught her to be suspicious of all nationalisms as parochial.
– Sounds like a good old Trotskyite.
– He made up his own mind about everything.
– You’re very Welsh.
She said she hated having any set of qualities foisted on her.
– That’s what I mean, he said. – If you accuse anyone of being very English, they accept it apologetically.
His accent was English, neutral rather than distinctly ruling class.
The train drew into the station at Swindon, new passengers got on, someone hesitated in the aisle at their table. They made no effort to move their bags from the seats beside them; both looked studiedly out at the platform, where those who wanted a different train seemed to wait in suspension, in a vague dusty light, cut off from the rain that poured in streams from the ends of the roofs. The person moved on: there were plenty of other places to sit. Neither acknowledged that anything had happened, but by the time the train started up again the atmosphere between them was altered, they were cut off together in their corner.
It turned out he had a house in the Welsh countryside somewhere – her geography was approximate; Robert would have known where it was. He had three daughters, two small ones, one from a first marriage, who didn’t live with him and must be about fifteen, maybe sixteen.
– How often do you see her?
– Not often enough. We don’t have anything to talk about when we do meet. I find her thoughts impenetrable. No doubt the feeling’s mutual. My other girls are darlings, they’re my heart’s delight. And do you have children?
He looked at her ring.
Something impelled her not to answer him ‘not yet’ or simply ‘no’.
– I can’t have them. We tried, but I can’t.
– I’m sorry. Should I be sorry? Are you?
She shrugged. – I would have liked it. But there it is.
– Might you think of adopting?
– No.
– OK.
It was a relief, to state the thing with such finality – as if she made it exist as an object to contemplate, stony, with clean lines and hard edges. With the loss of her parents behind her, and the loss of the babies she might have had ahead, she was withdrawn out of the past and future into this moment of herself, like a barren island, or a sealed box. It was easier to lay out this truth for the stranger’s penetrating scrutiny, and not in expectation of any kindness. The hawk beak of his interest jabbed at her, as it had at the poetry book.
They could lose one another at Paddington.
She was sitting forward at the table now, and he had fallen back into his seat. He was studying her, half-closing his eyes, as if to get her at a distance, in perspective.
– So you’re an English teacher. And what does your partner do? he asked.
– He’s a civil servant. Quite a high-up one.
– Oh dear.
– He’s an intensely moral, conscientious man, and I love him dearly.
– I can read it in your face, he said.
For a moment, ready to be enraged, she thought he intended a cheap irony; but no, he meant what he said, quite straight.
– Really?
– Yes, he’s there in your expression, something settled and steadied.
– That’s nonsense. You wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t told you, you might have thought I was involved with an unstable drunk. Or someone who taught juggling skills. You can never guess other people’s partners, they’re almost always unexpected.
– I’d never, ever, have believed you were involved with anyone with juggling skills, he promised her solemnly.
– But an unstable drunk . . .
– An unstable drunk, at a stretch. Though you wouldn’t put up with him for long. You’re not the martyred kind.
Cora didn’t ask him about his wife, mother of the little girls, his heart’s delight. That corrected the imbalance between them, where he was freighted down on his side with children.
He went to the buffet to get them both coffee. She commented that this was his second cup, and he agreed it probably wasn’t good for him – and he smoked too, he confessed, he ought to give that up. To her relief he didn’t show much interest in these subjects; some of her colleagues could talk for hours about their diet regimes and health.
– So, are you a poet? she asked him.
– Do I look like one?
– What is this physiognomy thing with you? There’s no art, you know, to read the mind’s construction in the face.
– Shit! I forgot, you’re an English teacher.
– What have you got against English teachers?
– Nothing, he said with exaggerated gloom. – Someone has to do it. A quotation for every occasion.
– Don’t you think it’s a wonderful thing: opening up young minds to the possibilities of literature?
– Oh, that. Do you really do any of that?
– Not much, she admitted. – I work with young adults with literacy problems. But I do like it. And I do read to them sometimes, good difficult things. You’d be surprised how much they can take in. You see, they’re made to stumble, because their reading is stumbling. So everyone gets the wrong idea, that they’re not interested in what’s in books. But just because they can’t read for themselves doesn’t necessarily mean their minds aren’t capable of following a sophisticated text. Some of them. I mean, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate. I wouldn’t want to claim I was reading them Henry James.
– No one reads Henry James these days, he said. – Do they? Not after they’ve been made to at university. The shelves in the bookshops are full of them, people buy them because of the titles and the nice pictures on the covers, they think it’s going to be fun like a costume drama on telly, but they don’t actually read them, not to the bitter end, surely they don’t?
– The Golden Bowl is my favourite novel. I reread it every couple of years.
– Well, you’re one, he said. – You’re the one. You’re a rarity. You’re the rare, exceptional reader that the book was looking for. It found you, across the years. Rather you than me. I’m not sure I’d want to be found by The Golden Bowl.
He wasn’t really listening to what she said, he was watching her: or, he saw what she said as if it was an attribute, part of her quality, not an idea separate from herself. She felt herself laid open in the bleaching light of his attention. What he liked, she understood, weren’t her liberal ideas on education, but her hardness, which was personal and – newly, after the last two years – had something finished and ruthless in it. He was not taking advantage of her desperation; it met something in him, he reciprocated it. And also, of course, he was drawn by how she looked; he couldn’t help it and she couldn’t help drawing him after her. She began to feel herself enveloped in that rich oil of sex attraction, so that she moved more fluently, knew there was something gleaming and iridescent in how she turned her head away or smiled at him. The sensation of his physical closeness mingled with her awareness of herself, as if there’d been brandy in the coffee they drank: the ripe blend in his face of softness – cheeks and skin and mouth – and hard hooded eyes, the deliberate slow changes in his expression, as if each thought she offered dropped into a cave inside him, lit up with ironies. She would not have wanted to belong to any mere club of desperate people, if there hadn’t been sex and beauty in it.
In the past, she had always tried to deflect any attention to her looks onto something else, as if in itself it wasn’t worthy of her. She had insisted on being loved for her qualities or her ideas; but she might put those aside, for this moment. Dizzy, she was confused about what she was supposed to be arguing for; somehow they had got onto the subject of class. He was insisting that Marx was sentimental, deluded with hope on the subject of the proletariat. When Cora had to get up to use the toilet she looked around dazedly at the other occupants of the carriage, suddenly returned inside herself and self-conscious about their conversation – how loud had they been? – as if instead of coffee they really had been drinking alcohol. Making her way back to him, balancing between the seat ends, after the unnerving swaying toilet and its complicated locking, she saw the cooling towers of Didcot power station float past the windows, the squat, fat pillows of their steam half-quenched in drizzle. The sight lifted her back into the surrounding routines of her life – they would be in London in less than an hour, she needed to shop before she got back to the flat – as if she was surfacing from somewhere underwater. When she reached their seats, he had picked up his book again and was reading as if he was reconciled with it. They had lost their momentum and sat in silence, restored to their separate existences. Cora thought coldly that their little exaltation had all been nothing, a false flurry.
I don’t even like him very much, she thought, embracing emptiness with relief. If I saw him talking to someone else, I’d think he was opinionated, and preoccupied with his own inner life, blind to other people. Physically, he’s not my type, with that face that will grow into pouches and folds as he ages, like an actor in a Bergman film. I prefer someone with sharper bones, leaner. Not that Robert has sharp bones exactly.
She looked out of the window, repudiating Vogue, taking in the pleasure boats disoriented on the flooded upper reaches of the Thames, then the outer sprawl of the capital, its usual intricate mica-glitter extinguished in the rain, stretching out in its flat plain in every direction like a plan of itself, punctuated with green, with the poignant ruins of the old factories. They were swallowed between the backs of office blocks. As they stood up to leave the train at Paddington, they said goodbye.
– It was nice talking to you, he said.
– Yes, wasn’t it? she idiotically replied, and then blushed furiously at her mistake, which he obviously noticed and took – so unfairly – for the last word on her vanity and self-satisfaction.
In the crowd hurrying along the platform he was ahead of her, taking long oblivious strides. They were borne forward, apart, in the tide of the combined purposes of so many anonymous others, all moving in uncanny swift unison without speech, only to the sound of their steps. The great station gave out its roaring exhalation of echo. She hadn’t even asked him what he was coming up to London for. Dirty pigeons flapped like derision under the vast arch of the roof. Following, faced with his back, Cora was suddenly desperate at the idea of letting this unknown man go into the crowd where she would never find him again; she convinced herself that she might not be the whole of what she could be, without his knowing her. Hurrying behind, she willed him to turn round. And beyond the automatic barrier where they fed in their tickets, he did. He stopped in his tracks.
He was wearing – she noticed properly for the first time – a slightly ridiculous blazer, grey linen with a light stripe, like something a woman might have bought for him but had meant him to wear in the sunshine.
Cora almost fell into him.
– Oh, hello, he said. – It seems a shame, not to see you again. After we got on so well. Didn’t we? When are you next in Cardiff?
That was Paul: Paul, although she didn’t know his name yet – he forgot to tell her, forgot to ask hers. Or perhaps didn’t forget. They didn’t exchange phone numbers either. They were bound together, for the moment, only by the slenderest thread of an arrangement, an hour, a place (not her parents’ house, but a café near the park).
When the day and the hour came round, Cora was almost too busy putting on white undercoat in the upstairs bathroom. By the time she got all round the window frame she was already late, and then when she changed out of her decorating clothes she realised that she smelled of white spirit and there was paint in her hair and under her nails. This seemed a doomed and desperate condition in which to seek out a love-affair. In the mirror she saw a caricature of herself, lips bloated, eyes bloodshot, charcoal eyeliner smudged. Fatalistically she almost changed her mind again and didn’t go, only she couldn’t bear the idea of the hours passing after she hadn’t. Crossing the park under her resisting, buffeted umbrella, she felt the louring sky and sodden, thrashing trees were her own blemish, a weight she had to carry on her shoulders.
As soon as she came into the busy, noisy, steamy place, putting down the umbrella and shaking it out of the door behind her, he stood up from the table where he’d been waiting and came over and put his hands on her, holding her while she unbuttoned her wet mac, kissing her – right cheek, left – as if they knew each other well. Her mind was still in the chaos of wind and rain in the park. They were both breathing hard. There might be people in the café who recognised her, had known her parents: she didn’t care. All the shops and cafés in Cardiff were poignant to her in that moment, suffused with a fond idea of home and the past.
– Oh, he said into her neck, – I thought you wouldn’t come.
He smelled of cigarettes.
– I’m sorry I was late. I was painting.
– Pictures?
– No, the bathroom window.
When they had got coffee and were sitting down he brought out a notebook and pen. His hands shook, but she remembered they had shaken on the train, even before he noticed her. – Listen, he said. – I can’t ever let you go again, English teacher, Henry James lover. Married to the senior civil servant. What’s your name? What’s your number?
She had forgotten everything about this man; it was like meeting a stranger all over again. He seemed more compact than she had remembered, more sleek, he might have had his hair cut in between their meetings, he was less like her idea of a poet. His eyes were grey-blue – she hadn’t remembered that – and slightly prominent, the sleepy lids lifted as if he were shocked awake. She could hear traces of a Midlands accent now in his voice, which was deliberate, strong, lazy. He contemplated her steadily, drinking her in, swallowing her, so that she had to look away, down into her coffee. Sometimes she thought afterwards of the man on the train as if he had been someone else, whom she’d never seen again after that first time.
Cora had no notebook with her. Paul wrote down his name and mobile number on a scrap of paper he found screwed up in his pocket, and she put it in her purse, still thinking she could throw it away later, or put it through the shredder when she got back to London. He took her hand, hot from nursing her coffee cup, in both of his, unfurled her palm and kissed it, pressed his knees hard against hers under the table. She thought: this works, it’s his system, he’s done this with women before. It’s not a trick or anything, but he’s worked out that if you prevaricate too long, you pass a point where you can’t get back to the truth of what you really want from the other person, and you wind round and round each other in tedious games, which are for children. So if you want sex, you might as well be plain about it, seize the possibility that’s flowering at once, before it passes. That’s all this is.
– Cora. I made up names for you. But none of them was as good as that.
– This is ridiculous. We don’t know one another.
– I don’t want to know you. Not so that you’re familiar, filmed with familiarity, so that I forget the shock of you.
– You might not like me if you knew me.
– I like you. But that’s the least of it.
What would she think of him, she wondered, if she was watching this from a cold distance, if she wasn’t herself? Her nostrils tightened for a moment in disgust. She didn’t want to be one of those women with hardened faces, joking about sex, lighting up at the idea of sex like an old, tired torch when the contacts are pressed, expert in techniques and devices.
But then, Paul – Paul, she savoured the name, as though she had always kept it ready, empty, as a mansion prepared for him – Paul wouldn’t have wanted one of those women.
She thought: isn’t it what I came for? Aren’t I glad, that he is shameless? She didn’t pull her knees away.
– Where can we go? Paul said.
The house smelled of paint and damp plaster, it was coldly unfriendly. The men had gone home: Mark the plasterer who had been finishing the walls in the new front room, Terry the builder who had been putting in the units in the kitchen. Ladders were propped along the hall, cloths were spread out across the floors, the empty rooms resonated as Paul and Cora walked around them, stepping over the mess. If Terry or Mark had still been in the house, she would have made Paul tea and then sent him away, and she would have shredded his note. Everything they touched was thick with plaster dust; she seemed to feel it coating her tongue.
– I’m an idiot, bringing you home with me like this. Like one of those desperate women who get murdered. I don’t know anything about you.
– Cora, he said. – It’s all right.
But he must be thinking the same thing, anxious suddenly that she would bore him, or cling to him. Now they were alone together, they must both be full of doubt. She was coldly ready to let him go, and at the same time frantic at the idea of it. After he went, what would she have left?
– Here, there were two poky rooms, she was explaining. – I’ve knocked through.
He was bored, desperately bored, his eyes slid away from what she showed him. She took him upstairs, but only to show him the paintwork in the bathroom. He must be imagining that under the veneer of her caring for poetry, this was her secret self, devoured by the cult of home improvement.
– There was an awful old suite in here. You know, face-powder pink? Anyway, I ripped that out.
She could not help herself processing round the rooms, explaining the plan of the old house, which was disappearing under the emerging shape of the new. She even showed him the airing cupboard and the new boiler, hearing herself mention constant hot water, knowing she sounded quite mad. They opened the door and went into her parents’ bedroom. She had had the fitted wardrobes taken out and the floor sanded, got rid of most of the furniture. The room was a light, white box, rain washing down the curtainless window.
– My mother died in here, Cora said, surprising herself. – In this bed.
When she had opened the door, the whole scene had been laid out in front of her for a moment like a tableau, shaking her violently: she had seen it in a new perspective from the doorway, herself at a distance standing bent over her mother, the nurse on the other side of the bed, perhaps preparing a syringe, with her back turned. At a certain moment, without warning, something like thick black blood had gushed from her mother’s mouth, choking her, flooding over her nightdress and the bedclothes. She had met her mother’s eyes, seemed to read full awareness in them, protest and shame and terror. The next moment the nurse had turned round and cried out in surprise. ‘Oh, she’s gone.’
Cora had run downstairs and out into the garden in the dark, unbelieving.
– How long ago was this? Paul asked. – Were you with her?
He looked where she was looking, as if he might see something.
The room was empty.
In Cora’s room, he closed the door behind them.
In here too it was almost empty, there was just her bed and a chair, no curtains at the windows, a few books. She slept in here when she stayed over.
– At last, I’ve shut up, she said, lifting her face to be kissed.
– At last, you’ve shut up.
– It was funny, when I insisted on showing you the boiler.
– Sssh.
She remembered his hands holding the book on the train, as if he might tear it in half. Those same hands, hard and precise, now took possession of her – the hands first. They were determined, he knew what he was doing, he didn’t fumble over her buttons or her zip. She gave herself up to them, to the dangerous sensation of being possessed. When it came to her skirt, he told her to step out of it, and laid it on the chair. Her skin as he uncovered it goosefleshed in the unheated room; her nakedness was changed, because this stranger saw it with new eyes. He reached round with both hands behind her to unhook her bra, without looking; did it easily, and pulled it free. Her breasts spilled out against his shirt front.
– Oh, he said, and staggered, losing his poise.
She staggered too, they fell onto the bed together, then he had to scramble out of his clothes, pushing trousers and boxers down and kicking them off his feet, tearing his half-unbuttoned shirt off over his head. Their love-making was clumsy, this first time, because they didn’t know one another yet, they were too desperate for one another. He actually still had his socks on the whole time, which was something people joked about as unromantic. The violence of Cora’s sensations – afterwards she lay unsatisfied against him, too shy to ask, with her wet thigh over his, and then had to finish her climax alone in the bathroom, avoiding the wet paint – was something new. She had only made love with one boyfriend before she married Robert. Both her lovers, before Paul, had been deferential, grateful, careful, eager to please her; she had never shaken off knowing that they found her lovely. She had not known whether to believe in this grabbing, grunting, flaunting, heedless sex, when she had seen it on television and in films.
– I like this rain, Paul said, after the storm of sex had passed.
He didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere; she didn’t know how long he was able to stay. They lay listening to it: spilling over the rim of the gutter, drizzling into the street, bringing the exterior acoustic suggestively inside the room. The tyres of passing cars pressed, hissing, through surface water on the tarmac, footsteps smacked in pools collected in the hollows of the old pavings. This bedroom seemed somewhere Cora had never existed in before, as if she’d gone through the mirror into the reflection of the place she’d known. The veiled grey light, the pearly shadows blooming and moving on the walls, made her think it must be about seven o’clock, evening: but evening as an infinite sea to sink into, not the couple of short hours between afternoon and night. Back from the bathroom, she had not known how to lie down beside Paul, because she didn’t know yet what their intimacy was. She arranged herself on her side, not touching him, looking at him lying on his back, smoking a cigarette; she’d brought him a paint-pot lid to use as an ashtray. From where he lay hieratic, thoughtful, outward-borne, he skewed down his glance to take her in, his eyes sliding over her – naked shoulders, breasts slipped sideways, mound of her hip under the duvet – in a slow retrospective satisfaction, which ran like oil over her skin.
– Cora, Paul said, relishing her name. – Cora. Was this your bedroom when you were a child?
She said it was, but hardly believed it as she said it.
– Then where are all your things?
Before she started decorating, she explained, she had put all her old toys and children’s books in a skip. She had given away the desk at which she used to do her homework, and her clarinet.
– I’m doing the place up to sell, I had to get rid of all the old junk.
– Commendably unsentimental.
– I’m not sentimental.
– Good, for an English teacher.
She thought that he saw through and through her: to the filthy stricken sessions she had spent clearing the house of her parents’ things, dreadful as scrabbling in a mausoleum. Robert had tried to help, and Frankie; they had tried to persuade her to keep stuff, when she had wanted to throw everything out or give it away.
– Are you an only child? Paul asked her.
– How can you tell?
– Me too. That’s why we understand one another. Two onlys. We want too much.
She hardly knew how he earned a living, she didn’t know where he was born. As they talked, she seemed to perceive the outlines of his character as if they were drawn in ink, in clean lines on the air. He was interested in his own ideas, not very interested in hers, though he wasn’t oblivious of her: he addressed himself to her intelligence, so that she moved ahead of him, agile, to meet him. He was anxiously gloomy, disappointed with what he’d done in his life (he wrote critical books, he taught, he had once hoped to write a novel, he had tried and failed). And yet he was springing with energy, much of it negative. He tried to explain a book he was reading, which was filling him up: on commodity and singularity, and the control of knowledge in commerce between the rich and poor nations. She didn’t dare tell him that Robert worked in immigration; she could guess what he would think of that. She liked his thick strong chest, not muscled, but not soft with fat. When she put her hand over his heart, on his hot skin, she seemed to feel his personality bounding and burning there.
– I can’t leave my little girls, he said. – Can you forgive me for that? I have to tell you right away.
This moment wasn’t really right away. But Cora only shook her head as if an insect buzzed; she had not even been sure he would want to see her again, let alone imagining a future in which she might make any claim on him. They agreed they were desperate for a pot of tea. Cora hadn’t got any food in the house, only biscuits and bread. Paul said he was ravenous, he would like toast, but then when she made a move to get up from the bed, he put his arm around her and kept her.
– Don’t go. I can’t part with you yet.
– I’m only going downstairs, I’ll come back.
– But not the same. You won’t be exactly the same as you are now.
– Don’t be ridiculous, she laughed, settling down under his arm, tasting cigarette on his skin, in his mouth, wet sweat in the fine tangle of hair on his breast.
– You’re grieving for your mother. Of course you are. Good girl.
– Is your mother alive?
– She’s frail, lives in a flat where there’s a warden on call. But she’s beginning to be confused. She may need full-time care.
– Are you close to her?
– We’re friendly, Paul said. – We get on well. We were very close, once, but I changed. I grew away from her.
– I don’t know how people go on walking around, after their mother dies. I don’t know how they keep getting up in the morning.
– But you’re walking around.
– No. Not really, she said. – Really, I’m not.
He only nodded, taking her seriously. Pushing the duvet off onto the floor, he knelt beside her on the bed, taking her in intently where she lay naked on her back on the sheet, as if the grief she had confided in him was dispersed around her body, not her mind. She succumbed, experiencing herself opened out and pressed flat, against the white background, liberated from possession of herself.
Cora kept the scrap of paper with Paul’s name and telephone number scribbled on it, though she soon knew it off by heart. The paper grew soft with folding and unfolding. She left it in her address book where Robert could easily have found it, and might have asked whose name it was, although he might not.
– You’re wearing more make-up, Robert once commented, and she thought for a moment that he knew.
– Am I? Don’t you like it?
He considered carefully. – I think it means you’re feeling stronger, which is good.
– But you don’t like it.
– I like your real face.
She couldn’t answer. She carried these words round with her like a hot coal, hardly knowing how to take hold of them. Did he know about Paul? Had he guessed? He never gave any other sign. How dared he think he knew her, that he could judge what her real face was? She felt contempt for his schoolboy puritanism, disapproving of women wearing make-up. Treasuring them up, she thought of the words Paul used to her, shamelessly, for parts of her body and for what they did together. Robert never used those words, he never even used them for cursing. But then what Robert said about her make-up surprised her again. It wasn’t like him. Ordinarily it was in his nature to be vigilant against just such a loaded remark, with its knife-twist of appearing-love. Did that mean he knew? Was he striking at her, to hurt her? But there was never any other sign.
When Cora did her face in her bathroom in the flat – she and Robert had a bathroom each, hers was all mirror glass and white tiles – she painted her eyes elaborately in defiance of him, put on blusher and lipstick. Then she scrubbed it all off and began again. She put together a separate make-up bag to keep in Cardiff, but often didn’t bother with it. Paul didn’t care what make-up she wore. She asked – calculating carefully so that she didn’t sound needy – whether he liked her better with make-up or without, and he said both.
The scrap of paper where Paul had written his number was a compliments slip from the London Review of Books. Cora began to buy the Review, looking out for articles by him, but never found any. When she asked him about it, he told her some long, complicated story about how he had offered to review something for them, then got stuck and couldn’t do it, and now they were offended with him and wouldn’t give him anything else to write about. There were a number of such stories about his relationship with various kinds of authorities, fraught with offence and resentment; she wasn’t able to judge yet whether his account of them was to be trusted, or whether the feuds were in his imagination. He was relentlessly critical of power. His explanations of politics – of the war in Iraq, for instance, or of the credit boom – were illuminating, he sliced away the slack of lazy language, and always seemed to have access to facts and insights that weren’t common knowledge. She found it difficult to argue with him. Sometimes, thinking of the difficulties of Robert’s daily work, Cora wanted to ask him: but how would you do it better, if you were them?
– It isn’t so easy, she said, – to put everything right.
He said any ambition to put things right was subject to the doom of unintended consequences; she experienced his pessimism as a force, clean of the contaminations of privilege and duty. He came from a working-class family and had studied hard to get into Cambridge, and then been unhappy there; he got away to London to do his PhD, and then spent years in France. He let slip to her once that his wife – his second wife, mother of the little girls – had been to boarding school, and although Cora pretended to hardly notice this, she seized on the information as if it set the two of them apart, connected through their modest backgrounds. When she told him about her grandfather working in a coal mine and going to fight in Spain, she could see it moved him, even though the episode in Spain wasn’t particularly edifying: her grandfather had become sick with dysentery as soon as he arrived, then injured his hand in an incident while training, and had to come home. Cora’s dad had used to tell it as a funny story.
She never, ever searched for Paul’s name on the Internet; it was a superstition with her that everything would be spoiled if she unleashed into their secret intimacy the world’s promiscuous noise, its casual judgement of him. Or it might have been worse if she’d not found anything, apart from the listings for his books. He insisted he was no one, he had no public profile, no one cared what he thought: but surely that was disingenuous, as he had a publisher, and readers? She heard him once giving an interval talk on Radio 3: completely by chance, because he hadn’t mentioned it, and she never looked at the radio listings. At home in the Regent’s Park flat, she had been half-listening to a concert of piano music, half-reading the paper: then suddenly Paul’s voice was loud in the room, uninhibited, talking about Georges Sand and Chopin, blasting her with dismay and joy. The traces of his Birmingham accent came over more distinctively in his recorded voice. All the time it was on, Robert was working at his desk, with the door to his study open, so that from the sitting room Cora could see his back bent over his papers, hear the occasional percussion of his biro, jotting notes. If he had only turned around, she thought, he must read the truth in her excruciated stillness. She couldn’t move from her chair to turn the radio down, or off, or shut the study door, until Paul’s talk was over.
She bought his books, the most recent first, having it sent to her address in Cardiff; she devoured it eagerly, full of admiration and interest. It was difficult, but her knowledge of him was like a light held up to each page, so that she leaped ahead and understood where he was going even before he explained it. At unexpected moments his ideas went stealing through her like a secret power. That summer, she often stayed over in Cardiff for days at a time during the week, supervising the building work in the house, getting on with the decorating, driving to fetch whatever was needed from Ikea or the DIY store. When Robert asked her when she was putting the house on the market, she explained that it wouldn’t be ready for a while yet. Paul came over every evening that he could. He said he told his wife he was visiting a friend who lived nearby, across the park.
– Does this friend know what you’re really doing?
– More or less. I haven’t spelled out the whole situation.
– What does he think? Does he mind?
– Don’t worry. He doesn’t mind. It’s not sleazy. He’s imaginative.
As if light flashed off some jagged glass-shard, Cora guessed: he’s covered up for you before. But she didn’t say anything, or allow herself to think about this properly. It was good to be busy all day. She got on well with Terry and the other men who came to work in the house. For as long as they were around, she was calm, could lose herself in her plans for each room. She was able to see clearly what effects she wanted: clean and open, unfussy, with bold touches of romance (the ironwork in the conservatory-dining room, the old French mirror she’d found to go above the front-room fireplace; at night in her dreams the little house was a crumbling, burdensome palace). Often she could prolong this calm into the early evening. She would take a bath after the others left. They hadn’t done the floor tiles yet in the bathroom, so she stepped out of the water onto gritty bare boards, then dried her hair in her room and made herself something to eat on her new cooker. Consumed in expectation of Paul’s arrival, she would hardly be thinking about him consciously. She had given him a key. Then, when she heard his key turn in the lock, for a split second she could even feel panicked; the serene hours of waiting for him drained out of the air, replaced by his complicated real presence, which was almost too much.
Once or twice when she was expecting him Paul phoned at the last minute – sometimes using the flat, subdued voice that meant he was talking where he could be overheard – to say that for some reason he couldn’t come. Although she was clever enough to keep her voice steady on the phone – ‘OK, I’ll miss you’ – her reaction afterwards, in the privacy of the empty house, was extreme; she frightened herself. She never told Paul about these times – when they were over, she didn’t even like to think about what they meant. She reached inside herself and found nothing there without him, only a void. Once, she stayed crouched for what felt like hours in the dark, downstairs on the floor by the phone where she’d taken the call; when finally she tried to move, she was too cold and stiff to stand up straight, and had to crawl upstairs on her hands and knees. There was no television in the house, and she couldn’t read. She would get into bed with the radio on, and try to fall asleep to the sound of voices, so that time would pass, bringing the morning.
He would bang the door behind him, his shoes were loud on the uncarpeted stairs. Then he was in the room with her, already throwing off his coat, which was sometimes a green country waterproof, dripping wet. She’d never seen again the grey-striped blazer of their first meeting on the train. Even while he was still talking, explaining, he would come over to look into her face intently, framing it in his hands. Sitting on the side of the bed to undo the laces in his trainers, he grumbled to her about his journey into the city, or how he was stuck with his writing. She too would be undressing, because she never quite wanted to be waiting for him in her pyjamas, or naked: how terrible, if she was eagerly undressed and he for some reason didn’t want to make love to her. Sometimes, depending on how much time they had, they didn’t undress right away, but huddled together in their clothes, talking and kissing; or she made him coffee in the kitchen, or got them drinks. She made Manhattans, which he said he’d never had before, although she couldn’t believe it; he swore that every Manhattan he drank, for the rest of his life, would be dedicated to her. Although it was their joke that Cora had tried on their first day to put him off by taking him round her home improvements, nonetheless she sometimes showed him the latest alterations in the house, and he tried to pretend to take an interest. If she made food, she felt as if she was playing at keeping house, and enjoyed having him watch her. Once, they were overtaken by sex in the kitchen, in the middle of cooking tagliatelle, which was spoiled; afterwards they had to shower, because the newly laid slate floor was still thick with dust, however many times Cora washed it. They were comically concerned together, brushing out his clothes, that he shouldn’t be in trouble with his wife for getting his trousers filthy.
Paul reminded her sometimes, carefully, courteously, that he would never leave his little girls; once, when she sat on the side of the bed, and he was kissing her knees. She saw herself at that moment as a tiny figure at a great distance, like an illumination in a manuscript: a naked female with little white, forked, vegetable legs, emblematic of the vanity of earthly delights. Pushing her hands into his hair, bending over him, she felt the cup of his skull under her palms, as if she held his thoughts there.
– I know, I know, she said soothingly into his hair.
As if it was all right.
Sometimes the phone rang downstairs while they were in bed together. Cora never answered it, but they had to wait suspended, not moving or speaking, while it went on ringing, sometimes for a long time, because she didn’t have any messaging service set up. Once, she forgot to turn her mobile off and it rang in her handbag, in the bedroom with them. Once, Terry the builder came in to get on with the kitchen on a Saturday morning, when Cora was not expecting him (he’d been going away with his wife for the weekend, but they’d cancelled because of the weather). She had to run down to negotiate with him, in her sweater pulled over her pyjamas, elaborately regretful, making up some unconvincing story about friends coming to lunch. She was sure that Terry guessed something; she shouldn’t have pulled the bedroom door so carefully shut behind her. Their friendship afterwards, working together in the house, felt strained.
It was the rhythm of this love – love, she named it to herself in the mirror, not to him – that every hour she and Paul spent together existed in a perpetual present, which when they parted would recede in an instant without warning, becoming the irrecoverable past, sealed in itself, not to recur. She longed to have back his pursuit, his desperation for her in the café, when his hands had trembled, writing down her name.
– I read your book, she said to him shyly.
– No, really? Which one? Did you buy it? I could have given you a copy.
Even though it was August, it was cold in the room. He pulled the duvet up around her shoulders; she had begun to notice every sign of his attentiveness outside of the love-making itself, because she had flashes of fear that he was losing concentration, was over the first flush of his passion for her. Trying to give him her responses to the book, about the representation of nature in children’s stories, Cora was nervous, not wanting to betray some gross error of understanding, even though while she was reading she had followed his argument confidently enough.
– I can’t explain, she said, stumbling. – But you know what I mean.
Animated, Paul pointed out the gaps in how he’d covered his theme, saying he would do everything differently if he could write it again. Cora had hidden away her copy of the book in her bag; she had been afraid – naively, she saw now – that he would be embarrassed by her having sought it out, as if she was smothering him with her devotion. Paul suggested he should sign it. She hesitated before she handed it over, fearing the finality of whatever words he chose.
– What if your husband finds it?
– I’ll tell him I queued up for you to sign it at a reading.
Paul laughed, and showed her what he’d written. ‘For Cora, wild for to touch’.
– Some reading, he said. – Better keep it on a high shelf. Do you know where it’s from? It’s a quotation.
The Wyatt poem had been a favourite since she was a girl. – Of course I do.
– Of course you do. You’re the English teacher.
In another life, she might have judged his dedication cloying, somehow preening. It fixed her. His power over her sometimes made him clumsy. The rest of the poem fast-forwarded past her awareness – didn’t Anne Boleyn belong to Caesar, and it all end badly?
But I have had this, she thought. No matter how it ends.
She already knew that she was pregnant.
Paul went away for a week to Scotland, on holiday with his family (including the teenage daughter from his first marriage). While it rained in the south, they were lucky up there with the weather. Cora flew to Paris for a long weekend with Robert, but afterwards could hardly remember what they did, as if she only existed in connection with Paul. When he came back she held his hands in hers, burying her face in them: felt his calluses from rowing, seemed to taste salt, smell suncream, babies (his smallest girl was only three). She couldn’t tell him yet about her pregnancy.
That evening she said that she would like to spend time with him somewhere else apart from in her half-made house. Sitting up against the pillows, drinking coffee, the sheet pulled across his chest, he calculated how he could plausibly get away for a whole night. He would tell his wife he was on a research trip for his new book, about zoos. As he got more used to Cora he relaxed, tolerant and benign, while she stiffened as if a wire was pulling tight around her. She talked less, she shrank from making mistakes that would disgust him intellectually. It was difficult to believe that when she first met Paul on the train she had half-disliked him, thought him pretentious, been ready with her contempt in return if he’d despised her; those judgements only seemed flaws now in her own understanding. She was aware how anyone else would see her abjection, if they looked at it from outside; how she handed him his dangerous power over her. In her life before she met Paul, she had not known about this capacity in herself. When she had heard or read about other women desperate or abased for love, she had passed over the descriptions with puzzlement or pitying distaste, along with a vague sense that she might have missed out on something.
At the end of August Paul drove her to west Somerset, and they stayed one night in a bed-and-breakfast place, a tall grey house on the main street in a little town on the Bristol Channel that had a marina and a paper mill. She was enthusiastic about the house precisely because it wasn’t too pretty: it was clean, but the furniture and decor were utilitarian, relics from the 1950s, brown linoleum on the floors and up the spindly high staircase. In the windows the glass was ancient and distorting. Their bedroom at the top, where the bed was made up with cellular blankets and a candlewick bedspread, overlooked a wet cobbled back yard and a high black wall sprouting ferns and buddleia. The weather was cold and it rained. When they went out she had to wait on the esplanade while Paul walked away from her, crouching over his phone in the wind, pulling his jacket up round his head, talking to his wife; the sailboats’ rigging clanged and rattled. They ate fish and chips in a corner café, squalls of rain blowing against the windows, which steamed up on the inside. Cora hardly thought ahead, beyond the end of the night. When they got back to their room the heating didn’t seem to be on, though they fiddled with the knobs on the radiator.
– It’s dismal as fuck, he apologised gloomily. – I’m sorry. I thought it was a nice little town when I came before. I expect the sun was shining or something unlikely.
– Don’t worry, I love it.
She actually did love the bad weather that seemed to wrap them up together in the room; she had a moment’s intense consciousness of the scene, as if it was revealed by a lightning flash, or in a painting. Paul stood at the dark window with his hands in his pockets, irritated, water sluicing down the glass, while she arranged her wet outer clothes along the cold radiator. In the strange surroundings it was as if they had passed through into a different country, might step out next day into the unknown. Cora’s new state of pregnancy made her feel unknown to herself. She hadn’t had any real morning sickness, but she had been sure she was pregnant even before she did the test: she felt a faint perpetual nausea, not unpleasant, and a floating sensation in her full tender breasts. Her secret hadn’t had time yet to accumulate responsibilities or consequences: she couldn’t tell anybody about it, only shielded it and tended to it, like a flame lit inside her.
When Paul turned from the window, she was afraid she would see in his expression that he regretted coming there with her, but to her relief he had collected himself finally after his phone call. She should have trusted him to know how to seize their opportunity. He was ambitious: not in his career like Robert, but for himself, his experiences. He wouldn’t waste this night by spoiling it. In the veiled light from the beside lamp – chrome, with a little upright press-switch, parchment shade, ancient twisted flex – his tapered male silhouette melted her, wasting from the shoulders to its centre of gravity in the lean hips. She had not known what it was like to make love to a man whose body she worshipped; this had to do fatally with his arrogance, and some cold core of his freedom. Taking his hands out of his pockets, he admired her – she’d bought new underwear in Paris. His look on her skin was like a force, and in it she felt the ends and limits of herself. Their relations were asymmetrical. She was the completed thing he wanted, and had got – he had seen her whole that very first time on the train, her strong particular stamp of personality written for him to read, clear as a hieroglyph; whereas she was absorbed in his life as it streamed forward, lost in him, not able to know everything he was. She couldn’t have imagined, in her old self, the pleasure to be had in such abandonment.
– You’re so lovely, he reassured her.
Sex each time had its different flavour and character. In the pink cave under the candlewick spread (they were cold, they kept it wrapped around them) it was muddled for Cora, because of the funny room and the rain, with imaginings of austerity, as if their bodies here were thinner and sharper, their sensations acute and poignant. They were the sensational expurgated passages from a black and white Fifties love-affair, in cheap boarding houses, on wrinkled sheets.
She woke in the night from a dream of her mother. It was something trivial – some anxious muddle of arrangements, an appointment to meet Rhian that Cora had missed, or was trying to keep, prevented by the usual stalling sequence of diversions, a bus straining to climb a high hill, students waiting for her in a classroom. Her mind ached with the effort to keep fixed on this goal of a meeting, which moved ahead of her, dissolving; there was not any grief in the dream, only panic and pointless indignation.
Waking and remembering was as terrible as tearing through some restraining membrane; she flooded with sorrow and came to herself bunched up against Paul’s curved back, nose and mouth pressed up against the knobs of his vertebrae, his skin wet with her breathing, her knees crooked inside the bend of his. Excising carefully, she separated herself without waking him, pulled his shirt over her head and crept to the bathroom, which was not en suite, but across the top-floor landing, shared with another room. They had been confident this second room was empty, but now she saw a light under the door, and was ashamed they might have made the bed creak, or rocked it against the wall. The house was still cocooned in the hurrying noise of the rain.
The bathroom was crammed into what must have once been a boxroom under the slope of the roof; there was a slanting skylight, more lino, a shower with black mould growing in its corners. Cora stepped squeamishly in her bare feet. Around the toilet pedestal was a pink mat that matched the bedspread; when she tried the cold tap, wanting to wash her face, all the piping in the house shuddered loudly in sympathy, and she turned it off quickly. In the middle of the night the old-fashioned austerity didn’t seem quaint but hostile, the setting for a disaster. Doubled up on the loo, she sat hugging her knees, wanting to cry with pity for herself, but rigid with shame and dread. Her parents had adored her, she had been spoiled, their treasured princess, their little star. How hideous this now seemed, what dust and rotten falsity. The pain of missing them was so severe that she expected to see blood when she dabbed at herself with the toilet paper, but there wasn’t anything, it was all in her mind.
The door handle rattled, someone was trying to get in: Paul? Surely he would have called her name. Then Cora heard some peremptory and disapproving noise, unmistakably male and close at hand. She kept very still, although it would have made more sense to flush the toilet, or to call out that she was almost finished. Whoever it was waited longer, then padded off across the landing, pulling his door shut: not quite banging it, but loud enough in the middle of the night to convey righteous grievance and reproach. No doubt it wasn’t only the locked bathroom she was being reproached for, but also the bed springs earlier. Cora cowered in the bathroom, gambling like a child that, so long as she wasn’t seen or heard, she might get away with her invisibility.
What if I was really ill? she justified herself. I’d have a right to stay in here. Anyway, there must be another bathroom the man could use, on the floor below.
Eventually whoever it was came out and tried the door again, rattling hard; then he hung about on the landing until Cora was forced to flush the toilet and open up. Luckily the landing light wasn’t on, because she realised that Paul’s shirt hardly covered her bottom. Seeing her, the stranger made something like the same subterranean noise of disgust as before – phlegmy and guttural. Their interaction at that hour and under the circumstances seemed stripped of all requirement for courtesy, or even mutual acknowledgement. Cora didn’t look towards him or mumble any apology, only fled across to her room; in the light from his door open behind him she took in a tall white-haired man, very upright, with a big choleric face, jowly as a mask. He was wearing pyjamas and one of those striped towelling bathrobes that seemed of a piece with the period effects of the whole place, knotted with a cord around his high, hard stomach.
In the morning she asked Paul if they could go out for breakfast, and he agreed, thinking she was only afraid that the food might be awful. He paid, and they got out of the house without encountering any of their fellow guests. They had a happy day together. He had brought his car; she had never been driven by him before. She didn’t know this part of the country well. After the rain the late-summer sunshine was chastened and tentative, and had the first frisson of autumn in it. They walked on a single-track road so little used that dark moss grew down its middle, and their passing roused washed-pale frail butterflies like dust out of the high hedgerows, which Paul said were ancient field boundaries. He said the soil was red because the rock beneath was red sandstone. The beech hedges were a revelation to Cora. Paul explained how in winter these hedges didn’t drop their leaves like the other trees, although they were deciduous; the dead leaves stayed in place until the next spring when the new ones grew, making the hedges an especially effective windbreak. The beech leaves were by now a heavy metallic green, almost bronze. At regular intervals a tree was left to grow whole above the height of the laid hedge, standing up eloquently in the slanting light, grey limbs thick and smooth in the spacious crown, casting its shadow on the dense wheat in the fields.
The following week in an explosion of drama it was all over.
Paul’s wife – Elise – found out what had been going on. One morning when Cora was at work in London, in the middle of enrolments for the year’s new courses, her mobile rang and a woman’s voice asked, ‘Who is this, please?’
Cora knew immediately what this meant, and turned the phone off without answering. She finished dealing with a student’s query. That was it then. Her whole consciousness quaked, blacked out for one moment imperceptible on the surface – but it was also almost a relief, the onrush of this anticipated smash. Endowed with super-sensory intuition, she seemed to have learned everything about Elise from that momentary snatch of her voice – husky, flattening, contemptuous, capable. She was not fine-grained or clever, but she was powerful. She made fine-grained seem mucky, sickening. Cora believed she could even see from her voice what Elise looked like: stocky, attractive, pugnacious, with sandy fair hair; or had Paul let these details slip? On the way home from work Cora dropped her phone into a waste bin in the street and pretended afterwards that she’d lost it. Everything she did in those last days was worse than cowardly, it was craven and inchoate; she was ashamed to recognise herself. She ought to have had something to say to Elise, if only to concede everything. But instead she fled ahead of trouble.
She called Paul on her landline, fingers so clumsy that she misdialled twice. The story was that Elise had suspected something, found Cora’s number on Paul’s phone, confronted him. Cora never quite believed that this was really the whole thing: something in the way Paul told it sounded incomplete. There was something else, another story he was keeping from her, involving much, much more confession and concession and preference for Elise and the children on his part; but she would never be able to find out about that, because a door was squeezing shut on her, closing her out from everything in his life. Paul reassured Cora that Elise didn’t know her name, or anything about her. This must mean she didn’t care to know, because Paul had convinced her Cora didn’t really count for much.
He had always warned her that this was what he would choose if he had to.
She didn’t tell him about the baby. She held this back, thinking that the right moment might come for spilling out with it. They spent one dreadful final hour together at the Cardiff house, rather decorous. Cora had dreamed that they might make love for the last time, and that she would tell him then that she was pregnant, but knew this was out of the question as soon as Paul came in. He was distracted and embarrassed and after a while, sitting apart at the table in the kitchen, they ran out of things to say. Cora wished she had the strength to send him away; but she was weak, clinging on to her last minutes in his actual presence, however humiliating. All her desire in the world was used up in this one particular body, in his hunched posture at the table, in the frowning way he smoked two cigarettes and ground them out passionately into the saucer she gave him. Even his suffering was exceptional and illuminating, because it belonged to him.
Elise had said: one hour!
When it was time for him to go, Cora clung to his coat sleeve and cried into it, pleading with him for some reprieve. He bent over her head, stroking her hair.
– It’s my fault, he said, – it’s really all my fault. I didn’t know that it would be this bad.
– You’ll be relieved to be free of me, I’m sure you will.
– Is that what you think? I won’t be free of you. That’s the whole trouble. Not so easily.
He was truly unhappy, he pressed her to his heart. She knew he meant it, and it would have to do. If he’d wanted her, he could have asked for her, she would have broken up everything for him. But he didn’t ask.
How could something that had filled your life up completely, to the brim, be withdrawn and leave no trace? Sometimes in the days that followed Cora felt as if the huge percussion of an explosion had left her deaf, sucking the noise out of the tranquil, ordinary-seeming days. If she died now, she thought, it would be exactly as if the whole thing had never existed. A body sank into a lake or a quicksand and the lake closed over again behind it, the broken ice healed.
She had not told anyone about him. Perhaps if Frankie hadn’t been Robert’s sister as well as her best friend she might have confided in her; in the circumstances this had been out of the question. There were no ordinary connections between her life and Paul’s, there was no way his name or news of him was going to crop up in conversation among her friends. Only Paul knew what had happened – and Elise, his wife, in whatever travestied version she had it – but he was locked away from her irretrievably now, he might as well not exist in her present. It was true that to begin with she hallucinated meeting with him everywhere. Every step she took, dressing in the morning or teaching her classes, she got through in the delusion that she was performing for him to witness. The hardest thing was the jolting on-off alternation between the delusion of his witnessing presence and the knowledge of his real absence. With some last-ditch instinct for preserving her sanity, she continued her superstitious interdict against searching for his name on the Internet. She bought a notebook to write down what had happened, so that it was real outside her own mind; but when she sat down to begin, she realised she couldn’t possibly find the words.
Anyway, a notebook would be too dangerous, it could have consequences: if she was killed, for example, and Robert found it. It seemed quite possible to her, during those first weeks, that she might be killed, or die, at any moment. Infantile, she thought she wanted to die, she wanted to be reunited with her parents, even in nothingness. What kept her afloat, unexpectedly, was the lack of any consequences from her crisis in her daily life. This might have been partly cowardice (she was ready to believe anything low or shameful about herself). She might have simply dreaded too much seeing Robert’s face change if he found out about her, feeling his kindness drop to nothing in an instant. In her weakness she depended on his kindness, took advantage of it. She didn’t allow herself to think any longer, as she had at the beginning when she was strong, that Robert might have some idea of what she’d done; if he’d ever had any idea, then he must have buried it. Burying was best. The friendly, decent surface of daily intercourse was best. Cora submitted to it, with the remote pale gratitude she could imagine someone feeling who lived with a debilitating illness. Though it was wicked to make comparisons between her suffering and any real illness. Nothing had happened to her that weighed a feather in the world outside. It was nothing but the clamour and simulated agonies of selfishness.
The baby was the only vivid focus in her present. She clung to the idea of it as the key to another life, growing up out of this collapse; not believing in anything else, she felt this hope inside her body. Although it was the product of what she and Paul had done, it existed now beyond the end of that, and would exact love and responsibility from her on its own new terms, in the time ahead; she could already begin to feel this. If when it was born it looked like Paul, that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except her. There was no one else who could have any reason to recognise him in her child. Her child and Robert’s, everyone would think. When it was born she would throw away the scrap of paper with Paul’s telephone number, and all his books, including the book with the dedication, so that no clue was left to lead anyone back to him. She hoped it would be a boy, because Paul had only had daughters. She saw those little girls in her mind’s eye often, small as if through the wrong end of a telescope, so that she couldn’t make out their faces clearly: one was dark, one blonde.
Once in a spasm of longing she rang Paul’s number, and got a recorded message saying it was unobtainable: he must have changed his phone, Elise must have made him change it. It seemed extraordinary now that Cora had never asked him for his home address, or his email; she supposed she would have been able to find these out, if she’d really wanted them. Paul did write her one letter, after the end of their affair, which he posted to the Cardiff house: the builder must have picked it up, it was propped waiting for her on the radiator in the hall when she arrived one weekend to show the estate agent round. She had half-expected there might be a letter, and had held off the expectation. Tearing it open with blind fumbling urgency, her heart striking like blows against the cage of her ribs, she felt her fate was in it. It was a wonderful letter. He said extraordinary things about her, in words that were not too smooth or coaxing or clever; he struggled to tell her truthfully how he felt. He said they all had been ill with flu, that family life had not been glamorous, that in his fever he had dreamed horrible dreams of her, in which her skin was hard and cold, or they met in a polluted ruined factory, or she mocked him in a foreign language he didn’t recognise (was he dreaming now in Welsh, he asked?). He told her what he was reading, and that his writing was stuck and dead. Cora couldn’t forgive him for that letter. Sobbing, she tore it into tiny pieces and then lit them with a match in the sink, washing the soggy cinders down the plughole. She never answered it. She had nowhere to send an answer.
The estate agent thought she would sell the Cardiff house easily, for a good price, but Cora decided that she wasn’t ready to part with it, not yet. She didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, not even a doctor. Until one day when at about fifteen weeks (by her estimate) bleeding began while she was at work, and wouldn’t stop; her colleagues called an ambulance, and kept the students out of the car park when the paramedics carried Cora out wrapped in a red blanket. She took in for the first time why it needed to be red.
– It’s an encouraging sign, Robert said in the hospital when it was all over and she’d come round from her routine dilation and curettage. He sat heavily in his work suit on the plastic chair beside her bed, tie loosened, hands clasped between his knees, weighed down and made inept, inarticulate, by the degree of his upset and pity for her. – It shows something could happen.