Cora was weeding the books in the library. This meant she was going through the shelves, taking out any books more than seven years old, or any that had not been borrowed for a year or longer. When she had selected the books for withdrawal she had to scan them and make a note beside their entry on the computer; sometimes there was a flag beside the name of the book, warning that it was the last copy in any of the Cardiff libraries. Weeding was a job that waited for whenever there was nothing else more urgent to do. At first Cora had felt it was an outrage, she had argued indignantly with Annette and Brian that they mustn’t get rid of Penelope Fitzgerald, or Colm Toibin. But she had got used to the idea. Everything had its moment in the sun, then must give way. Anyone really interested in the back catalogue of these writers could buy what they wanted online. Books withdrawn from the system were offered for sale at 10p on a shelf beside the checkout, and Cora bought some of them herself. She had been ruthless when she brought her books from London, getting rid of more than half of them, but now her shelves were filling up again.
She always turned her phone off while she was at work, but today she was checking it every so often. She had made friends with a woman called Valerie at choir practice, and Valerie was trying to get them tickets for the Welsh National Opera’s Orfeo. Valerie was active in the local Amnesty group and had tried to get Cora to come along to that too, assuring her they were a nice bunch of people. Cora thought she might join, but not yet. Sluggishly, her old conscientious discomfort had begun to prickle her, like something coming slowly awake after a long oblivion; she had been surviving as cautiously and unimaginatively as an animal in its burrow, husbanding her strength. Now, her mind sometimes ached to stretch and flex itself. Was working in the library enough, as the expression of her belonging in the world? There was always a gap between the urge to do something useful and the actuality of what was possible. She was wary of making some gesture of commitment, then having her faith in it collapse, so that she let people down. This distrust of herself, of her capacity to act, was a new element in her personality. Once, she hadn’t waited to ask herself what she believed.
She saw Frankie had left an urgent message for Cora to call her back. Cora went outside to make the call in the little garden outside the library entrance. It wasn’t raining, but the day was stuffy, dark under a woolly layer of cloud.
– Cora, he’s disappeared, said Frankie as soon as she answered. – Is he with you?
– Who’s disappeared?
There was a fraction of a second’s register of Cora’s insensibility, like a coin falling into a deep well: plink!
– Robert.
– Robert’s disappeared? How do you mean?
– He isn’t with you then?
– Of course not.
Frankie explained that Robert had had Sunday lunch with her and Drum, then apparently had been in work as usual on Monday. On Tuesday his PA – Elizabeth – had called Frankie to ask if she knew where he was. That morning he had been supposed to chair a meeting and hadn’t turned up. He never missed anything, even if he was at death’s door. Well, he never was at death’s door. No one had seen or heard anything from him since; he wasn’t responding to phone calls or emails. His office colleagues were cautiously and tactfully alarmed. Frankie had been round to the flat, she had let herself in (she had a key), but there was no sign of him. All his stuff seemed to be around; it looked as if the cleaner had come in as usual on Tuesday morning and nothing had been touched since. She was calling from there now.
Frankie’s voice had the elated breathlessness of crisis, although she was trying not to give way to that, to keep up her humorous, sane perspective. Anxious about her brother, she must be tempted to blame Cora for something: only Cora had ever disrupted Robert’s equanimity and imperviousness. She would also be squashing this impulse to blame anyone, because she was going to be a vicar and had to hold back from condemnation.
– And that was Tuesday?
It was now Thursday.
There was a horrible man, Frankie said, an Adviser or something, who wanted to borrow her phone in case Robert called her on it, so they could talk to him. And wanted to take his computer.
– A Special Adviser probably. A SPAD.
– I’m not letting him have it. It’s Robert’s business whether he wants to call anyone. But he came over pretty aggressively.
– Frank, would you like me to come up? I could be there in a couple of hours. Three hours. Perhaps I could help. I could wait there at the flat.
– I don’t know why everyone’s in such a flap. He could have just thought, you know: bugger this, decided he needed a break from it all. Well, I presume that’s what’s happened. What else could have happened? He’s not the suicidal type. Or the breakdown type. He was fine on Sunday. At least I think he was fine. He doesn’t make much noise. We’re so noisy collectively, did we drown him out? Will you try ringing him? I know it’s awkward.
– Of course I will. And I’ll come, Cora said. – It’ll be all right.
– It’s bedlam here. I’ve got all the kids with me, it’s half-term. I had to bring them on the Tube, Drum’s got the car, I’ve given mine up because of the carbon footprint. It’s only funny that Bobs hasn’t called us. Wouldn’t you have thought he’d call?
Cora told Annette she had to go, something had happened in London involving her husband.
– I expect we’ll hold the fort without you, Annette said. – What husband? I thought you were divorced.
In an emergency Cora had natural authority, seeing straight away the best course of action without making an unnecessary drama of it, or using it for any display of herself. She ordered a taxi to the station, asked the driver to wait outside the house while she threw a few things in an overnight bag. She tried ringing Robert’s mobile, but he didn’t answer.
The train was delayed, and then they were diverted to Waterloo. There was an incident on the line – someone said a suicide – beyond Reading. Cora hadn’t really been worried about Robert when Frankie phoned; her idea of him as the rational centre around which other people’s chaos whirled wasn’t easily dislodged. While they waited motionless in a siding, however, then had to transfer across the station platform into a new train, which trundled at walking pace in a detour past all the back gardens of Surrey, she began to experience the symptoms of panic: her heart raced, her thoughts circled round and round the same vacancy. Restlessly she stood up out of her seat, walking forwards along the train to a gap between compartments, deluding herself that she was getting somewhere, leaning to look out of the window, calling Frankie with updates. The other passengers, with nothing else to look at, looked at her: tall, commanding, handsome, with straight thick brows, curving cheekbones, clear grey eyes, a concentrated urgency in her face. Men hoped she was a doctor or a lawyer. They tried to draw her in to their resentful outbursts against the train staff; someone joked tastelessly about bodies on the line.
Cora couldn’t help thinking of Paul whenever she caught the train to London: although she was skilled now at shutting up the memories of him, as soon as they came, into their casket, turning the key. She imagined a casket like a part of some dangerous, obsolete game, like the gold and silver and lead caskets in A Merchant of Venice, with their folklorish trite messages about love. She had seen him once since they separated: not on the train, but driving down a road in Cardiff not far from her home. He hadn’t seen her, he wouldn’t have been looking for her; she knew that his friend lived nearby. That ordinary glimpse of Paul – sealed inside the completed fullness of his life on its parallel track apart from hers – had made her nauseous, helpless, desperate. She fantasised about meeting him on the train and simply walking past without acknowledging him; in the first year after they parted, it had seemed very possible that she would meet him in her travelling up and down from London. Now, taking in the hundreds of strangers who made that journey, day after day, she had understood that their meeting was improbable – which was a relief and also a flattening loss.
No one watched her paying off the taxi outside her old home, although she felt conspicuous returning: the street had its usual air of privileged absence, withdrawn and clean behind its railings, flights of worn stone steps, broad Regency front doors. Out of habit she checked for the beloved glimpse of park trees at the road’s end: she had seen those trees thrash, but today they stood motionless under the muffling cloud. Their flat – Robert’s flat – was on the first, best floor, with a balcony they had never used, because its publicity was too theatrical for the deep discretion of the street. Cora had sometimes imagined the Prince and Charlotte sitting out on it in The Golden Bowl, watching Maggie bringing her baby from the park, although she knew their house didn’t even begin to be grand enough for those characters. She hadn’t been back for months. It was odd to ring the bell: there was a door key somewhere in Cardiff, but she hadn’t stopped to look for it. Frankie was at first suspicious over the intercom.
– Thank goodness it’s you. That SPAD’s threatening to come round, he wants to look at Robert’s computer. I’ve said he can’t, it’s private.
The two women embraced, with more feeling than when they’d last parted in Cardiff: separating, both were faintly tearful, relieved; each had feared that the other might hold out against her.
– Frankie, don’t think it’s my fault, will you?
– Don’t be an idiot. Bobs is a grown-up. He’d never forgive me if I blamed you. It’s just awful not knowing whether there’s anything to worry about or not.
Frankie was satisfied that Cora was stricken, which was all she needed to see. Walking round, Cora took in how the flat had altered since she had lived in it. Robert hadn’t actually changed any of the furniture, but everything was in a subtly altered and less attractive arrangement, probably not moved deliberately, but only having drifted. He must never have shared her vision of how it all worked together – or he hadn’t cared about it after she’d gone. She hadn’t cared much either, in the months before she left. Cora had found the place before they were married, in the first strange flush of having money (not only Robert’s salary, but money he’d inherited – not enough to buy the flat outright, but enough to make mortgage repayments possible); inside its old shell, it had been smart and bright and modern. Twelve years on, it looked used up and dated. Chairs, pulled away from around the table, or from the sociable huddles Cora had used to arrange them into, were piled up with newspapers and papers from work, which the cleaner hadn’t touched. Cushions were ranked in straight lines along the sofa back, and everything ornamental on the white marble mantelpiece was pushed to one end for easy dusting: photographs, yellow feathers from the Adirondacks and striped stones from a beach in Angus, a Dresdenware flautist that had been Robert’s mother’s, a Bangladeshi silver teapot Cora had bought in a junk shop. A suit still in its bag from the dry cleaner’s was hung on the open kitchen door. A laptop was open, but switched off, on the glass-topped dining table, where Johnny and Lulu were colouring. The toothbrush and shaving gear weren’t gone from Robert’s bathroom. Magnus was asleep in the bedroom in his pushchair.
– I tried to ring him, but he didn’t answer, Cora said. – I’m glad you’re all here. It would seem very empty. Perhaps it seems this empty when he’s here on his own.
– Don’t let’s get soppy, said Frankie. – I’m making soup.
– Soup?
– We’ll need to eat. Children are just engines really, running on the fuel parents put in at one end. So I bought vegetables and butter and bread on my way here – at that little organic shop round the corner. He’s such a lovely man, and the bread’s good, but did you know everything in there costs at least three times as much as it does in the supermarket?
– This is that part of the world. Everybody has three times as much money.
– Ten times as much.
– Probably a hundred times as much, some of them.
– Some of them bathe in asses’ milk. The shop probably sells it.
Johnny and Lulu were colouring fanatically, and only glanced up for a moment to recognise Cora. Frankie said she’d set them a competition: to stop them running round the rooms, in case there was a clause against it in Robert’s lease. She would have to choose between their pictures eventually, which would be tactically difficult. Lulu, as she chose felt pens, sucked one lock of chestnut hair in absorbed meditation; Johnny, filled with the burden of being better because he was older, stood nervously to work, shifting from foot to foot, grimacing grotesquely at what he’d made.
They touched the keys of the laptop warily.
– Should we turn it on? Cora said. – There might be clues, but we wouldn’t know what to look for.
– Anyway, it’s none of our business. And we don’t have his password.
– We have to trust him.
– He might come in at any moment. He might ring.
Frankie said she’d phoned their sister Oona and was keeping her updated, but they’d decided not to tell their brother in Toronto anything yet. Soup simmered in a pan on the spotless hob. When Cora looked for it, the liquidiser was still in its place in the cupboard where she had left it. The two women sat down in the kitchen at the breakfast bar – the estate agent’s awful name had stuck; Cora had never known what else to call it. All the kitchen surfaces were solid oak. Frankie poured them wine out of a bottle from Robert’s rack; between them her phone loomed portentously silent. She said she had wanted to call in the police yesterday, Wednesday, but Robert’s office said they had already spoken to a Met senior and didn’t think the matter needed escalating further. So she hadn’t known what else to do. She’d rung everybody she could think of.
– They really, really don’t want the press to know. I’ve picked up that much. I suppose it’s embarrassing, losing a senior civil servant.
– You don’t think that he could have gone to Bar? Cora said.
– Bar? God, no. To be honest, the idea of her never crossed my mind. Why ever would you imagine . . . ?
– Probably nothing. Only that we mentioned her the last time we met.
– Bar was fearsome. Not the sort of person you’re involved with twice. Anyway, surely she’s married to somebody else by now?
– That’s what he thought, Cora said. – If he’s just taken off by himself on an impulse, then I’m glad.
– Me too.
– Who couldn’t want him to get out – as a human being – from under all this? It’s as if he didn’t belong to himself.
– Though we have to remember that mostly he likes it. It suits him.
The Special Adviser when he turned up was improbably good-looking, a youth from a Caravaggio painting, long-faced, long-bodied, dead-pale, black hair curling on his collar, thumb-print smudges under fatigued eyes, hollow belly under shirt half-untucked from his jeans, double-jointed fingers. He was carelessly charming, bestowing the favour of himself, wishing he was at a more interesting party. Cora felt with a shock that she was growing old, and would be shut out from beauty. He told them, when they insisted, that his name was Damon.
– Shepherd boy, Frankie said.
Damon agreed without interest. Briskly his observation roved the flat behind them. – Any news?
– I’m Robert’s wife, Cora explained.
He took her in. – D’you have any idea where the auld fella’s got to?
For a moment she thought he was really Irish, then realised he was putting on an accent. Damon gave off impatient contempt for the nuisance this middle-aged senior was making of himself. This is how it is when someone falls from power, Cora thought, though it was too soon to know if Robert had fallen anywhere. There’s a shudder when they hit the ground, then everyone steps over them, humiliating what they were, resentful of their own past subservience.
Frankie said they hadn’t heard anything. – We’re starting to panic. What’s going on? Is it to do with the inquiry about the fire?
– What do you know about that?
– Nothing.
– Is he going to make a scene or something? It doesn’t look good for him: he should have stayed to take the flak.
– What flak? What scene?
But he wouldn’t tell them. Magnus cried in his pushchair and Frankie brought him into the kitchen to feed him; uneasily Damon ignored her bringing out her breast, which in the same room as him seemed voluminous. Frankie altogether – the curvaceous untidy bulk of her – seemed made on a different scale to Damon’s. He asked Cora if she could think of anywhere Robert might have gone, and she said she couldn’t; he asked if she’d tried calling him and she said she had, but he wouldn’t pick up. She was aware how she stood around awkwardly in Robert’s rooms, not wanting to pretend she belonged to them; the SPAD probably knew all about the break-up of her marriage. Frankie was much more at home in the flat. Her brood brought into it the noisy solidity it had needed. When Cora lived there with Robert they had both worked late, they had often hurried out again in the evenings – the place had worn thin and dissolved in their absence. Lulu and Johnny ran into the kitchen with their pictures; Damon graciously adjudicated, knowing how nice it made him look, preferring Lulu’s.
– Take it like a man, hey . . . He ruffled Johnny’s red hair. Frankie privately thanked God Lulu wasn’t sixteen. Lulu draped herself in an attitude anyway against Damon, adoring him.
– Mind if I look around?
– We do rather.
– You can’t have the laptop, Cora said.
– I can, he said regretfully. – I’m afraid it’s one of ours.
Frankie’s phone was beside her on the table where she sat, pulling her blouse across to hide the baby’s working head; every so often Magnus twisted round to stare at the interesting intruder, tugging away from the nipple, which sprayed a fine thread of milk after him. When the phone bleeped, she glanced quickly at it, but said it was only Drum calling to see where they were. Damon packed up the laptop into its case and carried it off with him, after a cursory look around the rooms, which Cora begrudged him, following him everywhere. He eyed the second computer in the study, but couldn’t have carried it, even if she’d let him have it. – It really isn’t a big deal, he said, not reassuring but diminishing the women. – We aren’t really that bothered.
– It was Robert, Frankie said excitedly as soon as he was gone. – The text was from Robert.
– What does he say?
– He says he’s all right, that’s all. But at least we know he hasn’t been kidnapped or knocked down or lost his memory or anything. Text him now on your phone, ask him where he is.
After Cora had texted, they waited for more communication, but none came. They were subdued, as well as relieved, by the assurance that Robert was all right, wherever he was; their crisis had subsided. They ate Frankie’s soup with the expensive bread from the organic shop. Cora found coffee, and boiled the kettle. Apart from the coffee, and the milk and butter Frankie had bought, there wasn’t much else in Robert’s fridge: a tube of tomato purée and a square of Cheddar drying out, ancient jars of mustard and pickle that dated surely from when it was her kitchen. Frankie said she would take the children home in a taxi after supper, there didn’t seem much point in staying on any longer; Cora said she would sleep over in the flat, just in case.
– Just in case what? Come back with us. I don’t like the idea of you all on your own in here. Although you’ll probably get a better night’s sleep.
Once she had imagined it, Cora wanted to have time to herself in the flat: alone, she might be able to find any signs Robert had left behind him. She could sleep in the spare room. Frankie was spooning soup into Magnus in his pushchair; Cora, on her hands and knees under the table, was sweeping breadcrumbs into the dustpan.
– Were you praying that Robert was all right? she asked Frankie, sitting back on her haunches with the brush in her hand. – I mean really praying to God, not just the usual phrase that people use.
Opening her mouth wide and making baby noises to encourage Magnus, Frankie was wary. – Do you hate that idea?
– No, I don’t hate it. I’d hate it if I did it, because it would be fake. But I suppose if you believe in it, praying is what you’re bound to do.
– Not in the sense of asking for favours, like asking for a bike for Christmas. Otherwise the believers would win all the football matches. Believing would just be a kind of cheating.
These comic-book illustrations – bikes and football matches – made Cora think Frankie sounded like a vicar already, evasive and jollying.
– So you’re not allowed to ask God to bring Robert back?
– You can ask God to keep him safe. That’s not the same. You know he might not.
– Then what’s the point? Johnny demanded reasonably.
– Believing doesn’t make everything all right, you know. It just fills out the way things are, it expresses our longings.
Frankie was thinking there was something newly intransigent in Cora’s expression as she knelt there with the dustpan, tickling Magnus’s feet with the brush so that he lifted them delightedly, distracting him from his soup. She was losing her old resplendence – she was restless and too thin. She was wearing more make-up than she ever used to. Cora said that she just didn’t feel what Frankie felt. She had used to feel it sometimes, but now when she reached for it, nothing was there. Although she said this as though she regretted it, Frankie could also hear a kind of triumph: who could want false consolations, once you had seen past them?
Then unexpectedly Cora put her head in Frankie’s lap for an awkward, odd moment. The gesture was enigmatic – afterwards, Frankie blamed herself terribly that she hadn’t responded to it, and she searched in herself for hidden reasons. She had been taken by surprise; but she should have stroked Cora’s hair at least. Of course she had been feeding Magnus, holding the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other. But she could easily have put the bowl down. She had only laughed, disconcerted. It didn’t matter how much you thought about charity, and thought you were prepared for the way the requirement for charity would present itself, you missed the occasion when it actually flowered in your own lap, you even recoiled from it. In the next moment, as though it had only been a joke, Cora picked herself up and got on with the sweeping.
She went downstairs to see them off in their taxi. As soon as it turned a corner and she was left alone in the street, Cora regretted staying, and was reluctant to go back inside. The flat was full with Robert’s absence. She took off her shoes so as not to make any sound, walking from room to room as if she might surprise something; for a long time she didn’t switch on the lights. From the window of the bedroom they used to sleep in, looking along the gardens to the park, she watched a last brooding storm-light, mauve and silver, drain from behind a magisterial horse chestnut. The night outside completed, she turned back to the interior darkness, asking herself what she was doing here. She had no business trying to find where Robert was, now that they knew he wasn’t hurt, or dead. He and she were no longer connected. It was wholly understandable that he had called Frankie, but hadn’t wanted to respond to the text that Cora sent. Reluctantly she went round putting on the lamps, hands remembering where to find each switch as easily as if she still lived here. The place flared into visibility. She tidied the mantelpiece, put back the chairs. In the last months of her living here, disenchanted, these remnants of an elegant older London hadn’t seemed gentle or nostalgic to her, more like the command centre of an ageing imperium, sclerotic and corrupt. Yet Robert wasn’t corrupt.
She turned on the computer in his study and googled his name, but got only the routine link to the department. Letters, opened and unopened, lay around everywhere, but there was nothing personal or even interesting that she could see, only bills and bank statements and junk mail. There were no messages on the answerphone except a couple from Elizabeth, and one from Frankie. Slipping her hands inside Robert’s jacket pockets in the wardrobe, she didn’t even know what she was looking for; finding nothing, she opened drawers and went through them. He must have been taking his clothes to a laundry, the shirts were beautifully ironed. She couldn’t tell whether anything was missing. At the bottom of one drawer, underneath his socks, was the little black-bordered packet of his dead father’s rings, and a supermarket bag with her letters inside – the ones she had written from Leeds so many years ago, out of such childish certainty. Even the sight of her own handwriting on the envelopes repelled her, and she shoved them back in their bag and out of sight. She would have liked to throw them away or shred them, but they didn’t seem hers to dispose of, she hardly felt connected to the girl who wrote them.
It had occurred to her naturally to wonder whether Robert could be reacting because he’d found out somehow about Paul; but the idea shamed her as soon as it presented itself. Robert wouldn’t be overthrown by sex, any more than he cried in restaurants. Anyway, when she thought about it now, she believed that Robert had always known: not all the details, but that there had been something. He might even have worked it out, about the miscarriage. It was part of her character, she thought, grinding upon herself in condemnation, to think of whatever had happened to Robert now as if it must have to do with her. Of course it didn’t. She shouldn’t even be here, inside his privacy, poking around in it.
Her phone rang and she answered eagerly, but it was only Frankie, checking she was OK. – You could still come over.
– No, I’m really fine here, I’m thinking.
– That’s what worries me.
– Constructively. But I haven’t found anything.
Cora said she thought she’d go back to Cardiff in the morning, if nothing had happened, and Frankie agreed that now they knew he was all right, there was no point in Cora hanging round. As she talked to Frankie, standing at the dining table, Cora was flicking through Robert’s bulging ancient leather address book, which was losing its pages and so fragile it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t taken it with him wherever he’d gone. If he’d wanted addresses from it he’d have copied them out – he used to do that. Idly she turned the pages over and found Bar: Barbara. An original Norfolk address had been crossed out, who knew when, replaced with one in Tiverton, Devon. Cora said goodbye to Frankie and put Bar’s address and number into her own phone, hardly knowing why she did it. Then she poured herself some of Robert’s whisky and curled up in his chair to watch the news, smelling his hair on the upholstery.
An item on the report on the removal-centre fire came low down the programme running order; someone from the Refugee Council was asked to comment. Was there any embarrassment for the government in the contents of the report? There ought to be, the woman said, if people read between the lines of the report, if they went inside these places, to see for themselves how men and women had to live, in the midst of plenty in a rich country, deprived of their hope. There ought to be embarrassment for all of us. She spoke about the Iranian who died, and they showed a blurry black and white photograph of someone surely too young: handsome, bearded, the photograph flattening black hair and white flesh into stark contrast, making the eyes black smudges. Cora had remembered that the man was middle-aged; according to Robert, in the last years he had drunk too much and suffered from ill health, he had let himself go. Which could have happened anywhere. Everywhere people grew old, if they didn’t die.
Checking to see if there were sheets on the bed in the spare room, Cora saw the same photograph, reproduced on the back cover of a paperback pressed open on the bedside table. The bed was made up; under the cover roughly pulled across, the sheets were rumpled and the pillow dented. Glancing in this room earlier, in her search around the flat, she hadn’t taken in that it had been used; it was always the space least stamped with their occupation, carved off the end of the sitting room running across the front of the house, furnished merely for use when they had guests, neutral as a nice hotel. Robert must have been sleeping in here, and he had been reading the Iranian’s collection of stories. He could have found the book on AbeBooks, where Cora hadn’t thought of looking for it; for the first time she got hold of the writer’s name properly, seeing it spelled out. No wonder he had looked too young in his picture on television; weren’t these stories published in the Eighties? Picking the book up, she sank down onto the side of the bed, starting in on the page where Robert had left off. Beginning in the middle of the story, it was impossible to pick up what was at stake, except that it wasn’t what Cora had expected: not passionate protests over life under tyranny (which tyranny anyway? she had for a moment to mentally run over dates), but a man who seemed to be quarrelling with his wife, about her mother. The writing was on an intimate scale: deadpan and absurd, comic. It was rather dry, in a sparse terse style, without atmospherics, or much description of people or places. Cora was relieved; she had expected the stories to accuse her of her privilege, living in the indifferent west. After reading a couple of pages she put the book down again for later, when she went to bed.
Could she sleep in Robert’s sheets, or should she change them? She put her head down experimentally, from her sitting position, on the pillow he had used. From her new position she could see through the window out to where the branches of a lime tree agitated, seemingly without sound, against a street lamp diffusing its cold light mistily. Robert might have watched this; like her, he had preferred to sleep with curtains and blinds not drawn, windows open. It would be comforting to sleep inside his shape, in the untidy bed, and he need never know she’d done it. He must have taken refuge in this room, from their old lives crowding the rest of the flat; he had not wanted to sleep in their marriage bed. Cora understood all that. Her phone bleeped, and she started up to answer it: but it was only a text from her friend Valerie, saying she had got them tickets for Orfeo.
Cora hadn’t ever met Bar. When first she had fixated on Robert all those years ago, she had interrogated Frankie about her brother and found out that there was a girlfriend, off and on, but that she was not – in his siblings’ opinion – satisfactory. Frankie said this before she ever knew Cora wanted him. Bar was a bit of a family joke, she had explained: the daughter of friends of their parents, very county. She rode in point-to-point, drank with the men though she couldn’t stand feminists, and sometimes wore a flat cap like a jockey. When they were children, Robert and Bar had apparently always been paired up together, like head boy and head girl, because they were strong and sane and knew how machinery worked.
– I’m afraid of him settling with Bar eventually, Frankie had said, – out of sheer kindness.
Robert at Frankie’s graduation had been patiently bored, and at first Cora had watched him because he was unexpected, with his clumsy bear-shamble and courteous, impenetrable reserve. Frankie and her sister Oona were a noisy, clever show, by contrast. Robert was remote, yet a light flared from inside a dark cave when something amused him. He wouldn’t even have seen that Cora noticed him: his nature wasn’t put on for anyone to watch. When he took the two girls out to dinner after graduation with a few of their friends, and paid for it all, he was the gravitational centre of their shrilling and planning and tearful parting, without saying much himself, except that he had talked at some point to Cora about his own degree in anthropology, and how he couldn’t think of a better preparation for politics.
Cora asked what Bar looked like, and Frankie tried to explain how she wasn’t pretty, but sexy nonetheless. – You can see why people like her.
– The flat cap.
– Horsey. No, not horsey, that’s cheap. Staggy. Stag at bay: bony head, and rolling eyes, backing off if you get too near her, treading sideways. Not that I’ve ever seen a stag at bay, except in paintings. She looks like one of those paintings.
Cora had written to Robert the day after she met him at graduation, asking if she could visit him in Whitehall, pretending she was interested in the Civil Service. He had written back helpfully, offering to take her out for lunch. Later, she had seen photographs of Bar, though not many: Robert wasn’t the photograph type. He hadn’t bothered to get rid of Bar’s photos either, only put them away out of decency in the drawers of his desk once he had broken with her: including an old studio portrait of her in a frame, which she must have given him. Cora wasn’t exactly jealous of these pictures, but she had searched for them and studied them when Robert wasn’t around, to work out what their relationship had been. If she interrogated Robert about it, he wouldn’t give her anything to go on (‘she was an old friend of the family’). Bar in the photographs was blurry, blonde, lean-jawed, urgent: on a yacht, on a horse, on Robert’s arm in an improbably glittering ball gown, slit to the thigh, in which she was somehow more sporting than tarty. If Frankie hadn’t suggested it, Cora would never have thought of a stag, but it was true Bar was nervy and leggy, and with a slight cast in one eye, not unattractive. Only in the portrait – done when she was very young – was she revealed as her mythic self, in ardently dreamy profile, gazing into the black of the studio background. Cora had felt about this picture as poignantly as if Bar had been dead.
She didn’t sleep well in the spare bed, although the mattress was expensive, better than the one in Cardiff. Her dreams were shallow, and she woke up several times to lights crawling across the ceiling as cars passed in the street. It was strange then to realise where she was, and why she was here. In the dark, Robert’s having gone missing seemed less explicable, more ominous; horrible possibilities unravelled in her thoughts until eventually they drifted into dreams again. She was relieved when it was morning and she could get up. After her shower, she poured the milk down the sink and tidied away any signs of her occupation of the flat, dropping rubbish in a bin outside. Then she bought breakfast in a steamy café in Paddington, ringing Annette to tell her she would be back at work on Monday morning.
She had no idea in her head except getting the next train back to Cardiff. Obediently she waited under the oracle of the departure boards, showed her ticket and found her seat when the time came. Rain blew against the train window, and Cora couldn’t concentrate on the Guardian she had bought. She had the book of Iranian stories with her too: she had put them in her bag at the last minute, thinking she didn’t want Damon to find them if he came back. But she couldn’t read those either, she couldn’t read anything. Travelling away from London on a Friday always had a gravitational inevitability, like machinery winding down into torpor for the weekend: every nerve in her seemed set against this. She imagined the book, with its significance beyond itself, smouldering in the dark, jumbled in among her pyjamas and sponge bag and yesterday’s underwear. Then she stood up abruptly when the train pulled into Bristol Parkway, pulling her bag and umbrella from the overhead rack, hurrying off, asking at Information when there was a train to Tiverton.
It matched her mood that Parkway was hardly a real place at all, hardly a building: bolted together out of steel at some point on a map, outside the city. Time wore away in the perfunctory waiting room, or stalking up and down the platform. For some reason she had fixated on the idea that Robert might be wherever Bar was; though it wasn’t any business of hers any longer, she told herself, whether he was or not. By the time she arrived in Tiverton it was afternoon and grey, though not actually raining. The station was outside the town. She thought about telephoning Bar to warn her she was coming, then changed her mind. A taxi driver looked at the address and explained that this wasn’t in Tiverton at all, but half an hour’s ride away; Cora said she didn’t care how much it cost, and took out more money from the cash point. En route she involved herself, with genuine sympathy, in the taxi driver’s feud with his son-in-law, the tussle over the grandchildren, their wronged mother, the son-in-law’s jealousy, indefensible after his own transgression. The taxi burrowed into a countryside thickly green, intricately settled, mostly wealthy. Big fields swept up to woods crowning round, wide hills. They had to stop on several occasions to consult a map, then to ask at a pub.
At the moment of paying and parting, pulled up on the gravel outside the house that was supposed to be Bar’s – a shabby early-Victorian box, dark under trees, distinctive in just how blank it was, with half its shutters closed, a muddy concrete forecourt piled with junk, an old bed frame, bikes, a rusting harrow – they were suddenly too intimate, and couldn’t look one another in the eye. Cora muddled her percentages, tipping what she thought was generously much, realising too late it was too little. In her flurry, she forgot to ask the driver to wait for her, in case there was no one at home. As the noise of the retreating car subsided, her mood sank and she felt herself absurd. The house was obviously empty. She had imagined finding a thriving stables, or a farm. Even if it wasn’t empty, she had no business here. She had penetrated to the heart of nothing. Robert and Bar had been out of touch for years, why had she ever thought he would have her up-to-date address?
Anyway, now that she had come, she might as well try the door: broad, black paint flaking, at the top of a couple of stone steps set with an iron boot scraper muddy with scrapings, flanked by damp pillars. A bell pull yanked on dead air, so she used the knocker. There was an old Vauxhall estate, she noticed then while she waited, parked beside an overgrown yew hedge, stained, spattered with needles and berries, but not derelict, though it was hardly the gleaming four-by-four she had prepared for. Just as she gave up – and prepared to face the idiotic consequences of her impulse, coming here – footsteps sounded beyond the door, and then it swung open. Behind the woman who peered out, hostile, a rectangle of daylight from the doorway was reflected in a gilt-framed mirror at the back of a dim hallway. A weakly lit energy-saving bulb dangled at the end of its flex, unshaded. An old dog plodded out of the dimness, dutifully roused from sleep.
– Barbara?
– Yes.
– It’s Cora. Robert’s wife. I’m so sorry. I know this is awful, turning up here without warning. Can I talk to you?
She couldn’t tell how Bar reacted to her announcing herself. Cora would not have recognised Bar if she hadn’t been braced to see her. She looked nothing like her old photographs: she had bulked out, which made her seem shorter, and her long hair, turning grey, had thickened and coarsened. Incongruously girlishly, it was pulled back from her face at the temples and tied on top of her head in a floppy ribbon, like Alice in Wonderland. Only the long nose and disdainful slight squint were traces of the old sporty urgency: around them her face had sagged into ambiguously expressive folds. Swags of flesh under her eyes were thunder-coloured – she looked older than fifty. She was wearing a filthy linen smock over jeans, and held up a piece of toast and marmalade out of the dog’s way. Cora had not calculated for her turning out eccentric: her hope wilted, and she wondered if she had energy for any struggle with Bar. She had imagined deflecting a will resilient and bright and impervious.
Bar persisted, planted stubbornly in the doorway. – I haven’t even started work yet. You know, I guard my work time very fiercely.
– I should have called from the station. I’m sorry, this was a stupid idea. It’s all my fault. And now I’ve let my taxi go. I’m a complete idiot. If you give me the number for a local firm, I’ll call another cab.
She thought that if she could get inside the house she’d know whether Robert was around. Bar sighed theatrically, frowning, taking a bite of toast. – Now you’re here, you might as well see the stuff, I suppose. D’you want coffee? I just made a pot. I like it strong, I warn you.
What stuff? Cora wondered.
Following through the house after Bar and the dog – several rooms, then a passage, then a cold kitchen – Cora could only take in that its neglect and chaos were gargantuan, and that it was furnished with wonders to match: a carved sideboard vast as a ship, a glass case of stuffed hummingbirds, a jukebox (‘my husband’s, it works’), baronial fireplace, stone angel, rotten Union Jack hanging in rags from a ceiling. There were bikes in better condition than the ones outside, a big telly, a PlayStation, child-drawings stuck up with Blu-tack. Walls and shelves were crammed with art, night-dark Victorian oils (cows in a river? horses?) alongside expressionism, collages, a ceramic torso in fetish gear. Cora’s own displays of art at home appeared to her at once as what they were, primly bourgeois. Everywhere smelled of dog. On the kitchen table there was an open bottle of brandy alongside a packet of sliced bread and a full cafetière.
– Not as bad as it looks, Barbara said. – Just a swig in my coffee, to get me started. Want some? I ought to work normal hours, but in the day I just stall miserably, I only get going when everybody else is in bed. Afternoons in the studio I tinker around, tidy up, decide whether to scrape off everything I’ve done the night before. Until my son gets home.
She was cranky and rather barking and abrupt, but her performance of her character was unapologetic as if it was often required of her to produce it, even exaggerate it. Cora said yes to the brandy. Barbara’s hands were bleached pink, thick-fingered, with naked nails. The coffee was thick and bitter, Cora spooned sugar into it. – You’ve got a son? That’s nice. How old is he? Do you have any other children?
– Only Noggin – who’s Noah really. He’s nine. Ten, ten of course. Christ, if you make those sort of mistakes at the school gate, they alert social services. That’s why I usually send my husband to pick him up.
– So you’re a painter, then.
Puzzling, Barbara peered at her more closely, finishing her toast. – If you’re not sure, what are you doing here?
– I’m Robert’s wife. I’m looking for him.
– How disappointing. I thought you were going to buy a picture. My agent had mentioned she was sending someone, I assumed you were them. Robert who? You’re not a wronged wife, are you? She gave a shout of laughter. – I haven’t had one of those come calling for a long time. I warn you, Gummo bites, if anything turns nasty. We’ve had a whole succession of dogs, named after the Marx Brothers. The name’s got nothing to do with her missing any teeth.
– I’m not wronged, Cora said.
She explained which Robert she meant.
– God almighty: that Robert! But I haven’t seen him in years. So you’re Cora! But didn’t you bugger off? Someone told me you had.
– We’re separated, Cora said. The word seemed carping and finicky, as she used it. – But because he’s gone missing, I’ve got involved in trying to find him. I don’t know why I thought he might be here.
– Nor do I. What do you mean, ‘missing’?
Cora explained. A copy of the Telegraph was still in its polythene packet on the breakfast table. Barbara tore it open while Cora was talking, laid it flat while she spread another piece of cold toast, turned through the pages noisily.
– Oh look, here it is, she said. – Poor old Bingo.
– Bingo?
– Robert, Bobby, Bobby Bingo. There’s even a picture of him. Calls for his resignation. ‘Lax regime,’ it says. What nonsense. It’s a miracle these places don’t go up in flames more often, if they’re so full of terrorists. Nothing about him having done a runner.
There was also the usual picture of the dead man. Robert in his photograph was on his way into the inquiry, so it must have been taken within the last few weeks. Cora searched the picture for any signs of distress; but he was remote from her, competent, locked up inside his public role, only glancing accidentally and obliquely towards the camera. Smiling, he was passing some remark to a colleague – it made him look blithely insensible to the seriousness of the case.
– He’s kept more hair than some of my old boyfriends, Barbara said. – I used to think he’d get awfully stuffy, if he stayed on in the Service too long. Has he got stuffy? Is that why you’re separated?
– No, said Cora stiffly, – nothing like that. Robert’s got a very independent mind. I can’t imagine why he’s disappeared. It’s not like him: even if this inquiry’s blown things out of all proportion. He takes everything in his stride. What would he be afraid of? He would face things out.
– Anyway, he isn’t here.
– I made a stupid mistake.
Bar suggested that Cora might as well see her pictures, now she’d come. Perhaps she hoped she could still make a sale. She was completely stony broke, she said – they were in danger of having the house repossessed. Her husband was a landscape artist, away at present working on a commission on Fair Isle, building a causeway. Photographs of a row of stakes in shallow water, a path of white stones winding round a hill, must be his work. Bar’s studio was in a long attic conversion, cleaner and brighter than the rest of the house. Cora was ready to dislike the pictures, but they weren’t what she had expected, less forthright, more fantastic: skirts and petticoats of real cloth were dipped in pinkish-yellow plaster and then embedded in a dark paint surface where they dried to caked stiffness. Touches of over-painting added what might have been embroidery, or rusty bloodstains. How surprising that this brusque, barking woman was making art about femininity, which Cora thought of as her prerogative. Bar seemed to forget Cora had only come to the house to look for Robert, and talked about processes as if she must be fascinated.
Cora said she hadn’t known Bar was an artist, Robert had never mentioned it.
– For years I mucked around, not doing anything seriously. Then, would you believe, the same month I was signed by Hyman’s, I discovered I was up the duff. Hell! Talk about a late developer.
Cora was suffering, she was crushed. This was the world Robert really belonged to; where they all had nicknames for one another – Bingo and Bobs and Bar. Everything they did came to have importance somehow, even if they started out in life caring only for horses and hunt balls. Bar was vague about prices, but found a list from an old exhibition, where they were way out of Cora’s reach. If Bar asked her what she did, she thought she wouldn’t mention the library, she would say that she taught literature.
With a yelp Barbara remembered Noggin.
– Do I smell of brandy? They think I’m the mother from hell. Also, that I’m old enough to be his grandmother. They’ve probably already got their eye on a suitable foster family.
She offered to take Cora to the station, if she didn’t mind going via the school, which was in the next village. Cora was grateful, wanting only to escape. Gummo curled up behind the front passenger seat, diffusing a bad smell like old cooked vegetables into the close quarters of the car. Bar drove fast, braking violently in the single-lane roads when she met anything coming the other way, cursing and reversing expertly. Cora had to open her window. Then after all they were early, and had to sit waiting outside the school in a queue of parked cars, because Bar couldn’t face the playground.
– It’s a ghastly microcosm, isn’t it?
Cora said she wouldn’t know, she didn’t have children.
– Well out of it. Other parents look to see if you’re using the wrong washing powder, or giving your children laudanum to make them sleep. If only I could get my hands on some. Nog’s out of control because his dad’s not here. He rampages. I’m lucky if he’s in bed before midnight. And I can’t get started on my work till he’s out of the way.
The school was Victorian, with twin doorways for Boys and Girls, behind a venerable church; those were the days, Bar said. Then she sat slumped behind the steering wheel with her eyes closed, suggesting the performance of her personality was exhausting. Opening them, she talked about Robert as if they’d never left the subject.
– His cutting out like this isn’t so untypical, actually. From what I remember. He’s rather an Olympian, you know. Well, I expect you know. High-handed. Like when after he left school he was so absolutely set on going into the army – which I thought lunacy – then something or other happened in the early stages of training to make him change his mind, and he just walked away.
Stonily Cora stared forward through the windscreen, jealous of Bar’s claim to prior knowledge of Robert. She hadn’t known any story about him wanting to be in the army.
– Literally walked away. Set out on the road, and came home. Well, I expect he caught a bus or something. But straight home. Except they didn’t really have a home, of course, after their parents smashed. So to my parents’ house in Devon actually, of which he used to be very fond. He was in all kinds of trouble for absconding; people had to run around after him, pulling strings so that he got away with it. I don’t remember the details. When he’s finished with something, he just drops it, tramples it on his way to the next thing. I should know. Bingo was my dearest, bestest friend when we were kids. It’s a shame. We should never have got in the sack together. Fucks everything up, always. Avoid the sack. Too late of course for you. But good advice. And not much of a lover anyway. You won’t mind me saying that, as you’re separated.
Noggin when he appeared, borne on a tide of children, was small and pale, with swags of shadow under his eyes to match his mother’s. Shoving a couple of drawings indifferently at her (‘Nog, these are utterly splendid’), he slung his bag across the back seat and announced like a gloomy little prince that he would get car-sick if he wasn’t in the front. Cora didn’t offer to change places. It was difficult to imagine him rampaging.
– Gummo stinks the place out, he complained.
Barbara dropped Cora off at the station.
– Did you think of looking for him at our old place near Ilfracombe? she suggested at the last minute, leaning out of the car window. – As I said, he used to be fond of it. They stayed there, even before their parents died. My brother and I still keep it up – can’t afford it, but you know, it’s our childhood. Bing had lots of happy holidays there.
– Where is that?
Bar explained to her how to find it, and then Cora remembered having spent a few days in the house once, when she and Robert were first together. – I hadn’t realised it belonged to you.
– It’s just like him not to tell you.
But Cora decided not to go to Ilfracombe. If Robert was there, it must mean he didn’t want her to find him.
On the train, when Cora opened the Guardian supplement, she found a piece by Paul: a double spread about his childhood reading. Trapped in her window seat – a woman beside her tapped her keyboard inexorably – Cora gasped for a moment for air, crumpling the pages down in her lap, drinking in help from the landscape that was still and cooling beyond the window glass; a green hill, a little stand of birch trees. His picture come upon so unexpectedly was a blow. She’d never had any photograph of him apart from the out-of-date one on the back flap of his books. She looked again. He was in quarter-profile, staring sombrely in black and white, outlined against bookshelves. Painfully, Cora had to begin to supply him with a study in his house somewhere in the Monnow Valley. She couldn’t read the blurry titles on the spines of the books. Paul’s hair was untidy and she thought that his air of spiritual, troubled absorption was contrived for the camera. He had become already not quite the man she’d known, changed by whatever had happened to him since they parted: the set of the full, pale lips was more definite, the grain of the complexion thicker, the jaw fleshed more heavily. He had never belonged to her.
There was a childhood picture too, which was almost more wounding – the socks pulled tightly up, the skinny chest thrust forward as if at attention, the too-beaming offer of himself to his mother or whoever pointed the camera. Cora didn’t know if she could bear to read the article – and then she read it. Paul remembered borrowing books about nature from the Birmingham central library when he was a boy. His idea of nature at that time, he wrote, had been as a Platonic intimation of a more real reality outside the built-up cave of his city present: the lists of bird names and diagrams of animal spoor were symbols of a transcendent elsewhere. That library building had replaced the Victorian reference library, demolished in the Sixties, and had itself been replaced since. He said that since his mother had died, the last link to his past in the old city had been broken.
So his mother had died.
And his oldest daughter must have had a baby; he was a grandfather, which seemed extraordinary. This daughter must be living with them now, or near them, because he implied that he saw his granddaughter every day.
It was as if Cora read these things about a stranger.
Once, Cora had believed that living built a cumulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you against emptiness. She had used to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it passed, as if they were holy. Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.
Robert felt the afternoon outside without looking at it: mildly grey, unimportant. A flossy indefinite light made everything seem to keep still, out of indifference; summer was over, foliage wasn’t miraculous any longer, only a plain fact. Footsteps approaching in the street, and passing, didn’t rouse him. He was in Cora’s house in Cardiff, sitting with his back to the window, at the wooden table in the front room she used as a desk (but didn’t use much), writing a letter on her laptop, painstakingly picking out the letters with his right hand because his left (he was left-handed) was bandaged, and in a sling. The air of the house was vaguely stale around him – he had been there now for two days, waiting for her, and he hadn’t opened any windows, or got round to washing any of the dishes he’d used, which were piled in the kitchen sink, though he fully intended to attack them sometime soon (his excuse to himself was that the bandage made chores bothersome). He hadn’t gone out once since he arrived, in case he missed Cora, but there had been food in her freezer, home-cooked and meticulously labelled in her big clear hand. Defrosting and heating soup and shepherd’s pie in her microwave, he had felt himself in a kind of comical, tenuous connection with her, though only through his theft; eating her food alone, the illusion of their connection failed him. He did not know what she would think of his invading here, making himself at home among her things. He had run out of milk this morning and was drinking his tea and coffee black.
Deliberately, Robert hadn’t once turned the television on. He didn’t want to know whether they were making any fuss about him – or not, as was more likely (he didn’t flatter himself on the subject of his importance). He had not opened up the computer either, before he sat down to write this letter; nor had he spoken on the telephone until twenty minutes ago, when Frankie called him on his mobile. He hardly knew what he had done with all the hours that had passed since he got here. At first, of course, he had expected Cora back at any moment. When he’d arrived yesterday he hadn’t had any idea of entering the house without her permission; however, when he turned into the little concreted area in front of the house, he’d seen at once that her keys were hanging from the lock in the closed door. Robert rang the bell and knocked, but no one came; Cora must have opened the door in a hurry and then gone out again later, not noticing that she hadn’t retrieved her keys. From her key ring there dangled – as well as an ornamental knot of beads and ribbon, tarnished from being tumbled around in the bottom of her bag – other keys beside the Yale stuck into the lock, including a mortise Robert guessed was for their London flat. It was lucky he had come along before anyone else saw them. He had hesitated before letting himself in. But it would have been too ostentatiously tactful to hover outside, waiting to present the keys when Cora appeared, so that she could open her own door. He hoped she wouldn’t imagine that in rescuing them he meant to be reproachful, or gloating.
At first he had wandered round her rooms, picking up sections of newspapers that were out of date, and then not finishing reading anything in them. He had made a conscious effort, to begin with, not to take anything in: he was not supposed to be inside here, so he mustn’t take advantage of it by studying the shape of how Cora lived, or interpreting any traces she had left, as if he was spying. In any case, there were no traces; it was remarkable, he thought, how little mark the tumult of inward experience leaves on the external shells we inhabit. He couldn’t tell whether the clean, tidy place, with all its bright, hopeful decoration, meant that Cora was happy in her new life without him, or unhappy. He only allowed himself to notice, because it was relevant to his mission here, that there were no signs of any man living in the house with her, or even visiting it. Anyway, being so acutely attuned to her sensibility – and because she was so conspicuous, incapable of concealment, whatever efforts she made – he had felt sure from their few meetings and conversations recently that there was not another man now; just as he had felt sure when there was. As the hours passed and she did not return, he was less certain. After all, anything could be happening to her, in this very moment. Nothing could be worse, he supposed, than for Cora to come back from the embraces of some new lover and find him waiting.
Nonetheless, stubbornly, against all his best calculations, he waited.
It was even oddly a relief, inhabiting Cora’s space, as if it meant he could stop thinking about her. He had a lot of other things to think about. He had to make plans. On Thursday evening his mood was buoyant, exhilarated, amidst this comical blow-up in his career. Its tone was definitely farce as opposed to tragedy. He even began to be glad that Cora hadn’t turned up yet. Where else in his life would he ever come across such a pocket of free time as this one he had stumbled into accidentally: empty hours upon hours, with no external constraints, nothing required of him? Losing his inhibitions, poking round in Cora’s cupboards, he found her whisky first, then decided to help himself to food. He turned on his phone, only for long enough to glimpse a backlog of messages and missed calls he didn’t check through, and to send one text to his sister, reassuring her he was all right, but not telling her where he was. Then he looked on Cora’s shelves for something to read, and took down Vanity Fair, which he had loved when he was fifteen for the Battle of Waterloo.
Long past the middle of the night, when he felt sure that Cora wasn’t going to come now until morning, he went upstairs to sleep. The spare beds weren’t made up, and he didn’t know where to find sheets, so he slept in hers, only stalled momentarily by the sight of her pretty white-embroidered pillow cases and duvet. Really, he was suddenly too tired to care whether he desecrated anything. He hadn’t bathed for a couple of days; he was still in the crumpled suit he’d dressed in on Monday morning, although he had at least bought clean underwear and shirt on his way to Paddington. He had changed into these – more farce – in the toilets in the first-class lounge. He undressed down to this underwear now, climbed into Cora’s bed – only cold at the first shock – and slept that night more deeply than he had for weeks, or months or years, dropping down so far that if he had dreams at all, he carried nothing back from them when he surfaced, only seemed to have dredged some deeply silted ocean-bottom. Waking on Friday, he had no idea what time it was. He’d slept with the blinds up: the stuffy, unsecret daylight outside the window gave no clue whether it was morning or afternoon. Cars droned every so often in the street, the footsteps of passers-by were dawdling and indefinite after London. He heard their dogs’ scuffing, or the dogs’ nails tip-tapping on the pavement.
By the kitchen clock, it was past one in the afternoon. He hadn’t slept as late as that since he was a teenager, even when he’d been ill (he was hardly ever ill), or jet-lagged after a long-haul flight. Some tight-coiled spring wound up in him for years was winding down dramatically. He ran a bath and washed his hair, a strange indulgence in the afternoon; found a new toothbrush in its packet in a cupboard. His bruises hurt less, and he unbound the bandage to check on his sprained wrist, and the gash on his hand. After his bath he had to dress again in the same clothes, and he couldn’t shave. Still Cora didn’t come. There was no reason to think she would be back today, Robert decided: probably she had gone away for the weekend. But he would wait. His wait had transformed into something beyond its ostensible purpose, weighing him down like the silt from his dreams.
A tabby cat persisted in its efforts to make eye contact through the kitchen window; he let it in, fed it the end of the shepherd’s pie. Then he played music. Cora had taken most of the music when they separated, and some of the CDs he recognised as his, from before he knew her: the Amadeus playing Beethoven late quartets, Solomon playing Mozart. These had been his mother’s favourites, he liked them for her sake, even though he hadn’t been close to her. He had used to dread the scenes she made. Probably he’d been horribly priggish, he thought now. His mother must have thought he was trying to imitate his father’s detachment. She must have seen through the stubborn, principled stands that Robert made when he was a boy and a young man, pretending he was the only sane and reasonable one, conforming to some inflexible standard of decency and decorum, while all the time he was burning with a rage like hers, only turned inwards. In Robert’s dreamy, sluggish state now, the music penetrated him purely, without distraction.
The letter he wrote late Friday afternoon, on Cora’s laptop, wasn’t to her. The things he wanted to say to Cora – ask her – couldn’t be written, they could only be communicated face to face. That was what he was waiting for. In the meantime, he was writing a letter of resignation. He explained to the Permanent Secretary the whole sequence of events that had led to his absence from work on Tuesday, and in the days following: that on his way to work as usual on Tuesday he had been involved in an accident on the wet steps leading down to the Underground station, sustaining significant bruising down his right side and a sprained wrist, also a deep cut on his hand that had produced a quantity of blood that was not really significant, but alarming enough for someone to call an ambulance. The paramedics had insisted on taking him to UCH, where they had stitched him up and X-rayed his wrist and given him a tetanus injection, keeping him in for observation, because he seemed to be exhibiting some symptoms of mild amnesia, not remembering where he lived or worked. Because of this temporary amnesia he had failed to let the office know where he was, and he apologised for any inconvenience this may have caused. In the meantime, as he recovered, the unexpected interruption to his routines had given him an opportunity to reflect on his deep dissatisfaction with his present work-life balance – entirely his own fault – and he had decided to terminate his relationship with the Civil Service from this point.
It all sounded magnificently unconvincing, although apart from the amnesia it was more or less true. It had not been amnesia, it had been something stranger – a dark tide of malaise, a conviction of disaster – that washed over him as he lay on the filthy floor, where he had been thrown quite accidentally by a boy who’d tripped over an elderly woman’s umbrella and then fallen into Robert with all his weight. Everyone had been most concerned, and kind. He had wanted to reassure them, but he had lain silent, as if speech had been knocked out of him, or some ancient rusting machinery in his chest had locked on impact and refused to function. Probably his silence had frightened them more than the blood. He hadn’t spoken at the hospital, either – he had only written on a pad whatever they needed to know, and in the end after two nights of broken thin hallucination that was not quite sleep, he had discharged himself, simply walked out. Probably he had not spoken to anyone since his fall (except perhaps the cat). At Paddington he had bought his ticket from a machine.
There were other aspects of the story that had no place in his letter: for instance, that the Underground station where he fell was King’s Cross and not his usual one, and that he was there because he hadn’t slept at home on Monday night, but had slept alone in a Travelodge in Gray’s Inn Road, after an evening with a nice woman, an old friend from work, which probably both of them had meant to end in something more, but which had not. He had never intended, of course, to take this woman friend with him to the Travelodge – he might not be romantic, but he wasn’t quite that bad. He had meant to go home with her, after they finished dinner, to where she had a nice little place off Upper Street: he had gone home with her a couple of times before, since Cora left. But when he did not – even though the friend made it clear that he was welcome – then he didn’t want to sleep in his own flat, either. He was developing quite a horror of that flat, for a rational man. He’d already moved out of the bedroom he’d shared with Cora into the spare room, because it was less haunted.
Before he began writing, as a token of his re-establishing connection with a world outside, Robert had turned on his phone without checking it. When he was halfway through his letter, Frankie called. He cleared his throat, and talk was easy after all.
– Bobs! I can’t believe it’s actually you. Where on earth are you? Everybody’s going mad here!
– Don’t worry about me, I’m absolutely fine. Didn’t you get my text?
– Didn’t you get ours? Cora sent you one just after we got yours.
– I haven’t checked my in-box. Where is Cora?
– Well, that’s the strange thing. She came up here, because you were missing and I was sort of holding the fort at your flat. Damon took your laptop, by the way.
– Who is Damon? I don’t care about the laptop.
– A ghastly SPAD. Is it all about the inquiry?
– I’m just rethinking my work-life balance.
– I can’t believe you’ve actually said that. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to say, and you laugh.
– So Cora’s at the flat?
– No, that’s just it. She slept there last night, in case you came back, but she was supposed to go home to Cardiff today, that’s what she said she was going to do. But I’ve just had the most extraordinary call – from Bar, of all people.
– Bar?
– Exactly. And how did she get my number? I can only think she got in touch with Elizabeth, and she gave it to Bar. Anyway, I’m sure she was drunk, in the middle of the afternoon. Not Elizabeth. Did you know she had a son – and exhibits at a gallery in Savile Row?
– I knew about the paintings. They’re rather good.
Frankie explained that apparently Cora had turned up at Bar’s house, somewhere in deepest Devon; she had got the address out of Robert’s book, and seemed to think Bar might have him stashed away somewhere.
– Probably I shouldn’t be telling you this, Frankie said. – But it’s all kind of extraordinary.
– Are you sure Bar didn’t just get the wrong end of the stick?
– She was definitely pissed.
Cora, outside on the street, was searching in her bag for her keys. It was an awful moment: the street turned its stony face to her, implacable in the hard, dull afternoon light. She was supposed to leave spare keys with her neighbours, but they were often out. Anyway, she had a feeling she hadn’t returned those keys since last she’d borrowed them back – they might still be in the pocket of her other coat. She was dog-tired and felt like crying. But what was the point? Sturdily she brought herself around to her new perspective, facing forward. She had better go down to the locksmith.
Then the door swung back, as if under the force of her will, which had pressed at its resistance without hope – and Robert was there, utterly unexpectedly. He looked awful, unshaven and in his socks.
– You left your keys in the door.
Irrationally she was angry, or her anguish sounded like it.
– Where have you been? she protested. – I’ve been looking for you everywhere.
In the shower an hour later, Cora thought she would confess to him. She would confess everything – that her heart had been fastened by heavy chains for a long miserable time to another man, and now it wasn’t. She would confess all this before they consummated their reunion in bed. She would show him Paul’s article – she had almost left it on the train, and then at the last moment she had put it in her bag and brought it with her – and she would get out all Paul’s books and show them to Robert and then she would throw them all away. Cora was remembering her old, candid, self: unafraid, flinging open all the doors to the rooms of her life. She had put out fresh towels on the heated rail and the pelting hot water streaming off her was a glory. She had forgotten this exulting happiness was possible. In the garden beyond the open bathroom window a blackbird sang out in the intensifying late-afternoon light; the day was lovelier for hiding behind its grey veil. Robert had gone to buy shaving gear and clean underwear and clothes – God only knew what he’d come back with. She had laughed to think he’d have to go to the local Peacocks because there was no time to get into town before the shops shut.
– What’s Peacocks?
– Don’t you know anything? she’d teased him. – Don’t you know how ordinary people live? Then you’ll have to learn. Peacocks is very, very cheap.
They had no idea what they were going to do next.
They weren’t going back – not to London, not to Robert’s job. For the moment they needn’t decide. They had no ties and they could do anything, go anywhere. They had money; they could sell her house, or the flat, or both. They could go to India or America or Scotland. All that was certain was dinner that evening; they were both ravenous. She booked a table at the Italian where she used to go with her parents, warning him it was nothing very wonderful. After her shower she dressed quickly and dried her hair in front of the mirror in her bedroom, sprayed her wrists and behind her ears with Trésor. Then there was a change in the light, tipping between afternoon and evening – air that had been banal and transparent refined to blue, and a bar of dark lying along the floor crossed like a touch over her skin: sobering, admonitory. Cora stood breathing carefully under the spell of the moment.
She wasn’t afraid of Robert, only of herself – in case she spoiled anything.
What words were there for what had happened while they were apart?
She wouldn’t say anything, unless Robert asked. She would watch and see what he wanted. The night ahead was a brimming dish she had to carry without spilling it.